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At the last division chiefs’ conference he had shown up wearing a khaki shirt, a sheepskin flight jacket, olive-drab pants, sheepskin flight boots, and a leather-brimmed felt cap that, according to Colonel Stevens, looked to have just been rescued from five hours of being run over by traffic in Picadilly Circus.
“I have been shamed by Captain Fine,” Canidy said, “who is psychologically unable to deviate by so much as an unshined button from ‘What the Properly Dressed Officer Should Look Like.’” He paused, then went on:
“Actually, we have a little publicity problem, and I thought I should try to blend into the woodwork at SHAEF when I go over there.”
“Since we don’t go seeking publicity,” David Bruce asked dryly in his soft and cultured voice,“quite the opposite, how can we have a problem?”
“This one came looking for us,” Canidy said. “At 1115, some big shot, as yet unspecified, is going to pin the DFC on Ed Bitter. And from what I have been able to find out so far, it will be done before newsreel cameras and fifty or sixty reporters.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Colonel Stevens asked, a little impatiently.
“Bitter went to Dortmund yesterday,” Canidy said. “As a waist gunner on a B-17.”
“He did what?” Bruce demanded.
“He was sort of suckered into it, according to Dolan, which is where I am getting my information. Anyway, he went. They were hit. The pilot was killed, and the bombardier and the navigator, and the copilot wounded. Bitter, who had never been in a B-17 before, took it over—it was by then in a spin—and brought it home. The bomber group commander, a light bird name D’Angelo, decided to hang a DFC on him. Deserved, by the way, for it was really some distinguished flying. Then it got out of hand.”
“How out of hand, Dick?” Bruce asked softly. Canidy could sense that Bruce was angry.
“D’Angelo,” Canidy explained. “I talked to him about four this morning. He sent a routine TWX to High Wycombe asking routine permission to give him the medal. Some hotshot PIO guy—and I talked to him, too—got his hands on it. And he had some kind of notion that a Navy pilot flying an Air Corps bomber was more newsworthy than most DFCs, and decided to make a big deal of it. He talked to the Navy PIO and the Navy PIO talked to Colonel Stevens’s good pal, Admiral G. G. Foster, and Foster sent a full commander to Fersfield in the wee hours of the morning. He stood Bitter and Dolan tall, and carried Bitter here to London.”
“Where’s he now?” Stevens asked.
“I don’t know,” Canidy said dryly. “Admiral Foster is in conference, and has been since 0800. Between 0345, when I first called him, and 0800, he was ‘unavailable.’ If I were a cynical man, I would begin to suspect that the admiral has no intention of letting us keep the heroic saga of Commander Bitter under wraps.”
“I’ll fix his ass,” the chief of station said. Canidy raised his eyebrows. He was not used to either visible anger or any vulgarity from Bruce. “Have you called the Chief Censor?”
“That was my first thought,” Canidy said,“fixing the admiral’s ass, I mean. But sometime in the wee hours, it occurred to me that it’s lovely disinformation. All Bitter has to say to the press is that he has been sent here to— what the hell,‘coordinate Navy bombing with the Air Corps.’ That’s credible, and it would take attention away from Fersfield.”
The chief of station looked at him for a long moment without speaking, and then made a come-on movement with both his hands.
“The reason for all the secrecy with the sub pen project has nothing to do with the sub pens,” Canidy went on. “It has to do with using the drones to take out, probably, the German rocket-launching sites, and possibly the heavy-water facilities in Norway and the jet-engine factories in Germany,” Canidy said. “That’s the secret we want to keep.”
“I don’t follow you, Dick,” Bruce said impatiently.
“So we give them a secret we don’t care they have: We can presume the Germans will get very nosy about what Bitter’s doing at Fersfield and will send at least one Friendly Son of Saint Patrick down there to find out what he can.”
Bruce shook his head and smiled at the description of the IRA agents.
“I’m going to throw a little security around Fersfield,” Canidy said. “Not too much, but enough to make the IRA work a little to find out we plan to blow up the sub pens with drones. They’re liable to feel clever as hell when they find that out, and stop there.”
The chief of station thought that over for an even longer moment, then turned to Colonel Stevens.
“Ed?”
“We’ve got a turned agent in that area,” Stevens said. “A fellow who used to live on Prospect Park in Brooklyn, incidentally. We could feed that to the Abwehr through him. Rumors of an all-out, very secret operation to take out the sub pens.”
“I don’t think we can stop the public relations business,” Fine offered. “Once something like that starts—”
“I was about to say the same thing, Captain Fine, thank you,” the chief of station said, a little
stiffly. “And what do we do about Admiral G. G. Foster?”
“Leave him there,” Canidy said. “He thinks he’s won, and Dolan tells me Bitter has decided where his loyalty belongs.”
“You willing to trust Dolan about that?” Bruce asked.
"Absolutely,” Canidy said.
