The barge would then move close enough to the bank for Fulmar and the Dyers to jump off and pass into the hands of “Postman,” the senior of four OSS agents with the guerrilla forces of Colonel Draza Mihajlovic late of the Royal Yugoslav Army.
Canidy had a little trouble with the bland assurances by radio of Postman–an American of Yugoslavian parentage who had literally been a mail carrier in the States–that this leg of the trip could be safely and conveniently accomplished by truck. According to Postman, the trucks (and the diesel fuel to run them) had been captured by Mihajlovic from the Germans, and the Colonel’s warning system was so effective that he ran them up and down forest and mountain roads of Croatia and Bosnia and Hercegovina on regular supply and transport missions as if the Germans weren’t there and actively looking for him.
VI was the town ofMetkovic on the Neretva River, fifteen miles from Neretljanski Kanal, a sheltered, natural body of water that opened onto the Adriatic Sea. At Metkovic, Ex-Lax would be turned over to an agent of the British Special Operations Executive who would arrange for their transport by fishing boat to the island of Vis, VII. The SOE agent’s code name, “Saint Peter,” was another Canidy suggestion to which David Bruce had somewhat uneasily agreed.
Vis was entirely in British hands, though the Germans, who made periodic sweeps of the island, did not suspect it. There was a hidden wharf, onto which supplies could be off-loaded from submarines for transshipment to the mainland.
And, between two hills, there was a 4,900-foot runway. A stream flowing across the field seemed to entirely discount the notion that the long valley could be used as a landing strip. But the stream had been altered. There was a twenty-yard-wide stretch where the water was only a foot deep. To observers both on the ground and in the air, it looked for all intents and purposes to be just an area of turbulent water.
Exiax will be transported from VII to Cairo, Malta, or such other final destination as the circumstances at the time dictate by U.S. aircraft. In the event this is impossible, Exiax will be evacuated from VII by Royal Havy submarine on a space-available basis.
“You look deep in thought, Richard,” David Bruce said as he came into the office, trailed by It. Col. Edmund T. Stevens, his deputy. Bruce and Stevens
were tall and erect and well-tailored. There was a West Point ring on Stevens’s hand. He had resigned from the Army before the war and had been in England when the war broke out, running his wife’s food and wine import-export business.
“Either of you ever collect stamps when you were kids?” Canidy asked.
“Ever have any from BosniaHercegovina?”
“I don’t really recall,” Bruce said impatiently.
“They had some that were triangular,” Canidy said, “that intrigued me.”
“I remember those,” Col. Stevens said.
“Come on in, Richard,” Bruce said.
“I fear we are about to have another of our arguments.”
“What have I done now?” Canidy asked, folding the map and handing it to Capt. Dancy.
“I presume you have the Yachtsman message?” Bruce asked, after he’d taken a look at the folder.
“Captain Dancy gave it to me with great reluctance,” Canidy said, “only after I threatened to write her name and phone number in phone booths in pubs all over town.”
“Major Canidy,” Capt. Dancy said, “you’re impossible.” But she was smiling.
Bruce closed his office door after they were inside.
“It isn’t what you’ve done… unless, of course, there’s something I don’t know about yet… it’s what you are planning to do.”
“What would that be?”
“Go to Vis to pick up Ex-Lax yourself,” Bruce said.
“Have you made up your mind about that, or are you open to my reasoning?”
“I’m always willing to listen,” Bruce said with a smile, “even when you make it difficult. But this, you should be forewarned, is coloring my thinking.”
He took a sheet of yellow foolscap from his desk drawer and handed it to Canidy.
ROUTIME FROM OSS WASH DC FOR OS$ LOMDOM PERSONAL BRUCE
PLEASE RELAY CAMIDY QUOTE COMGRATULATIOKfS FROM DOUBLE KILL