In Danger's Path (87 page)

“Halsey thinks MacArthur is right,” the President said. “Is that a unanimous feeling here, too?”

He looked at Donovan, who was the junior man present, for an answer.

“Mr. President, I don't think I should second-guess either Douglas MacArthur or Admiral Nimitz,” Donovan said.

“Go ahead, Bill, second-guess them.”

“It boils down to a choice between a chance to eliminate Admiral Yamamoto or possibly, I emphasize possibly, compromise
MAGIC
.”

“No, it doesn't,” the President said. “The choice is between sharing Fleming Pickering's belief that
MAGIC
has not been compromised by those people in Chungking, or not believing him. I don't think we're in a position to cavalierly dismiss the possibility that the Japanese at least suspect we're reading their mail. A deception like this would be entirely appropriate if they did.”

“We have no reason to believe we have given them any reason to be suspicious, except for the Chungking business,” Donovan said.

“Do you think Pickering's right, or don't you?” Roosevelt asked, a tone of impatience in his voice.

“I'll go with Pickering's judgment, Mr. President,” Donovan said after a perceptible pause.

Roosevelt nodded and looked at General Marshall.

“If we didn't take advantage of the opportunity, Mr. President—” General Marshall began.

“Even at the risk of confirming to the Japanese that we've broken their codes?” Roosevelt interrupted.

“Yes, Mr. President,” General Marshall said.

“Admiral?” Roosevelt asked, turning to Leahy.

“This seems to be one of those very rare instances, Mr. President, where Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur seem to be in complete agreement. I don't want to challenge their judgment.”

“But, truth to tell, out of school, everybody's more than a little nervous with this, right?” Roosevelt said.

There were nods, and Donovan said, “Yes, sir, I am.”

“And so am I,” Roosevelt said. His cigarette had burned down close to his ivory holder. He snatched it out, dropped it into an ashtray, and stuffed a fresh cigarette into the holder.

“Okay,” he said, as Donovan walked up to him with a cigarette lighter. “We'll do it. Admiral Leahy, send Douglas MacArthur the following: Direction of the President. Execute Operation Flyswatter.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Admiral Leahy said.

“If that offer of a drink is still open, Mr. President?” Donovan said.

“Of course it is, Bill,” the President said. “Now that we each can tell ourselves that when we made this decision we were stone sober.”

[ONE]
Somewhere in the Gobi Desert
Mongolia
1115 20 April 1943

The 32nd Military District supply column, sent to supply the patrols it was operating in the Gobi Desert, consisted of two jeeps (one at the head of the line of vehicles, the other bringing up the rear); two GMC six-by-six two-and-a-half-ton trucks, both towing five-hundred-gallon trailers; three Studebaker open-bodied trucks carrying, four to a truck, a dozen Mongolian ponies; and two Dodge three-quarter-ton weapons carriers.

All of the vehicles were grossly overloaded, and there had been frequent breakdowns during the six-day trip from Yümen, almost all of them due to blown tires. The repair technique was simple. The wheel with the blown tire was removed and replaced with a spare wheel from the half-dozen or so spares lashed to each vehicle. The wheel with the blown tire was then moved to one of the weapons carriers, now converted to a mobile tire-repair station. And the march was resumed. The blown tire was repaired, if possible, while on the march. But tires beyond repair were not without value in wartime China, and bad tires were lashed wherever space could be found.

The convoy stopped at nightfall. The Mongolian ponies were then encouraged—by the point of a bayonet—to jump from the Studebakers, and Chinese soldiers mounted four of them bareback and began a roving perimeter patrol. Other soldiers lit fires, and still others rigged pieces of canvas tarpaulin wherever they could, to provide shelter from the icy winds.

Breakfast in the morning was the same as dinner, rice with sweet peppers and onions and chunks of lamb and pork. After breakfast, bayonet jabs at their ribs—in the case of reluctant animals, at their genitals—encouraged the ponies to climb back on the Studebakers, and the march resumed.

The first day they met a Yümen-bound camel caravan. But after that, the convoy encountered no other travelers. After the second day, McCoy and the others in his party began to notice evidence of what they could expect to find farther into the Gobi. The desert all around them was windswept flat rock, huge sheets of it, with no landmarks at all. In some places large rocks were strewn about. But in most places the flat, indifferent landscape was broken by nothing at all but patches of snow where the wind had blown it.

There was, however—good news—very little ice. Probably, McCoy decided, because the snow would have to melt during the day and then freeze at night. But it was too cold during the day—and the wind was blowing so hard, keeping the snow moving—that the sun could not melt it.

The bad news was that the snow often covered the path they were following—it could not be called a road—making it frequently necessary for the convoy commander, a taciturn captain, riding in the lead jeep, to halt the convoy because he couldn't see the “road.” When that happened, the trailing jeep scouted ahead of the convoy, making wider and wider sweeps through the shallow snow, until he found the faint signs marking the “road.” Then the march resumed.

As they moved deeper into the desert—and this was also good news—McCoy and Zimmerman had both reached the conclusion that there was absolutely nothing suspicious about their ambulance and weapons carrier, which McCoy had put in the line of vehicles immediately behind the GMC trucks. They looked as if they were a perfectly ordinary part of the convoy.

When the convoy came to a halt on the morning of 20 April, McCoy expected that somebody had once again blown a tire or else that the “road” was again obscured by snow. But then Chinese soldiers started jumping down from the six-by-sixes and moving off to the side. When McCoy looked closer, he saw that they had stopped by fire-blackened rocks and were about to light fires.

That meant they had reached the point where they would rendezvous with the patrols out in the Gobi.

He got out from behind the wheel of the weapons carrier and went back to the ambulance. “I think we're here,” he said to Zimmerman. “You go see Captain Whatsisname, and remind him that our deal was full tanks of gas and good tires all around. I'll go see that sergeant who seems to know where we're going and take another look at the so-called map.”

“We're moving on now?” Captain Sampson asked.

“We can make five, six hours before dark,” McCoy said.

“I can have the radio on the air in forty-five minutes, if I can get help to string the antenna,” Sampson said.

“We're not going to do that,” McCoy said simply.

“But they'll be expecting to hear from us,” Sampson protested.

“Tonight, when we stop, you can set up the receiver,” McCoy said. “I gave you the SOI. You can listen when they're scheduled to contact us and see if they have anything for us.”

“They'll expect us to respond,” Sampson said.

“We don't have anything to say,” McCoy said reasonably. “And if we don't go on the air, nobody can hear us and wonder what's going on.”

“But you were ordered to maintain communication,” Sampson persisted.

“Easy, Killer,” Zimmerman said, recognizing the look in McCoy's eyes.

“What you're going to do, Captain,” McCoy said, “is wake up two Chinese. Station one in the back of the ambulance and one in the back of the weapons carrier. Tell them if they fall asleep while on duty, you will shoot them. Any questions?”

Sampson looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Then help Zimmerman make sure both gas tanks, and all the jerry cans, are full.”

“Yes, sir,” Sampson said. “Sir, may I ask a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Why does Sergeant Zimmerman call you ‘Killer'?”

“Because he kills people who give him trouble,” Zimmerman replied, very seriously.

“Fuck you, Ernie!” McCoy flared.

Zimmerman growled in his chest. When he saw him smiling broadly, Sampson realized that this was a laugh. And then McCoy laughed.

“It's a long story, Sampson,” McCoy said. “Maybe I'll tell you sometime.”

McCoy set off in search of the sergeant who was in effect the convoy's navigator.

Fifteen minutes later, the ambulance and the weapons carrier pulled out of the line of vehicles in the convoy and drove alongside it. McCoy stopped to exchange a handshake and a salute with the convoy commander, then got back in the weapons carrier, tapped “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits” on the horn, and drove farther into the Gobi Desert.

[TWO]
The Oval Office
The White House
Washington, D.C.
1645 24 April 1943

When Colonel William J. Donovan was shown in, the President was sitting in his wheelchair looking out the window into the garden. “Good afternoon, Mr. President,” Donovan said.

Roosevelt spun the wheelchair around. “You don't look as if you've just learned the world is about to come to an end,” he said. “So what's so important that you asked to see me right away?”

Donovan set his briefcase on a coffee table, unlocked it, took from it an unsealed white business-size envelope, and handed it to him. “Neither Admiral Leahy nor General Marshall was available to bring these to you, Mr. President, and I thought you would like to see them right away.”

“Well, that is good news,” Roosevelt said, “if it can ever be called good news to learn that my orders to have someone assassinated have been carried out successfully.”

“You probably saved thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of American lives, more than that, by ordering the elimination of Admiral Yamamoto, Mr. President,” Donovan said.

“It's a bit different, isn't it, Bill, when you know the name of the man you're having ‘eliminated'? When you know what he looks like? That ‘kill or be killed' seems a little remote from this office, doesn't it?”

“You saved lives, Mr. President,” Donovan repeated.

“Do you think Fleming Pickering knows about this?”

“I don't think so,” Donovan said. “I don't think either Admiral Leahy or General Marshall saw any need to bring Stillwell in on any of the Yamamoto business.”

“You don't think Stillwell is going to be told?”

“I think that he'll be informed by a hand-delivered message, sir.”

“Pickering's with Stillwell, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How's his weather station operation coming?”

“It could be going a little better, Mr. President,” Donovan said.

“In other words, something went wrong,” Roosevelt said. “What went wrong, Bill?”

“I don't mean to suggest, sir, that the mission will fail,” Donovan said. “But, unfortunately, it's looking more and more like something happened to the two men Pickering sent into the Gobi from Chungking.”

“Explain that, please?”

“Captain McCoy and Sergeant Zimmerman left a town called Yümen with a Nationalist Army supply truck convoy headed into the desert to rendezvous with a patrol—a camel patrol—the Chinese operate in the desert.”

“A
camel
patrol? Sounds like Lawrence of Arabia,” Roosevelt said.

“Yes, sir. Pickering's idea was for McCoy and the other to travel with the supply convoy as far as it was going, then head out by themselves, looking for the Americans Pickering apparently believes are out there somewhere, until, in Pickering's words, they either found them or ran out of gas, whichever comes first. At that point they would attempt to establish contact with Pearl Harbor. Once contact was established, the seaplanes would attempt a rendezvous with a submarine at sea, where they would take on fuel, as well as the meteorologists and their equipment, and then fly into the Gobi. They would then try to put themselves within a hundred miles or so of McCoy and the other Americans, and from there they hoped to find them by homing in on a radio signal.”

“Did you disapprove of this plan before Pickering put it into execution, or is this from the position of hindsight?” Roosevelt asked, not very pleasantly.

He knows and likes McCoy
, Donovan thought.
McCoy and Jimmy Roosevelt are pals. They made the Makin Island raid together. I can't forget that
.