Thomas Greanias - The 34th Degree

“They’ll question, but your visa should keep you out of trouble with the Bupo,” Donovan said. “My guess is they’ll assume that after your arrival in Lisbon, you made it by Spanish plane to Madrid and then crossed France by train or whatnot, with the help of some friends in the French Resistance.”

“Ah, yes, I forgot about my friends in France.” Andros shook his head in amused wonder at the considerable depth of Donovan’s deception. It seemed second nature to the OSS chief.

Donovan glanced down at the papers on his desk. “Now, a few more things and we’re done.” He handed Andros a file. “Read this. It’s your operation order.”

The order outlined the operation code-named Trojan Horse and gave Andros the field name of Sinon. It concluded with the phrase NOW

“Understood?” asked Donovan, striking a match.

“Wait a minute. Sinon is the name of the defecting Greek captain in Virgil’s version of the Trojan-horse story.”

“Yes, he misleads the Trojans by telling them that the Greeks have sailed away and left the horse behind as an offering to please the gods. Now, please, the match is burning.”

Andros held on to the order. “Why not Menelaus, king of Sparta and Helen’s husband, who won her back from the Trojans?”

“Depends on your point of view,” said Prestwick. “After all, Helen may not have been all that eager to leave Troy or her lover Paris.”

Andros glared at him. “If that’s a thinly veiled allusion to Aphrodite and von Berg in Athens-”

“Really,” said Donovan as the flame descended down the matchstick, “now is not the time to question our nomenclature. Dammit, Andros, just burn the order.”

Andros sighed. He touched the paper to the flame and dropped it in the ashtray on Donovan’s desk.

Donovan let go of the matchstick and blew on his fingertips. “There,” he said, then slid a sheet of paper across his desk to Andros. “One more thing.”

It was an OSS employment contract: The employer shall pay the employee the sum of $150 in the currency of the United States of America each month while said contract is in force…This contract is a voluntary act of the employee undertaken without duress.

Included in the contract was a five-thousand-dollar life insurance policy, to be awarded to anyone Andros designated.

Andros looked up at Donovan. “What is this?”

“A mere technicality.” The OSS chief smiled and handed him a pen. “You know, red tape.”

Andros wrote the name of his beneficiary, signed the contract, and slid the document back to Donovan.

Donovan read it and smiled. “Aphrodite Vasilis. You’re a confident man, Andros.”

Andros looked at Donovan and then at Prestwick. “One of us has to be.”

P resident Franklin D. Roosevelt sat at his desk in the Oval Office of the White House, reaching for a fresh cigarette while he listened to Donovan on the phone. When he hung up, he placed the cigarette at the end of a long holder and looked across at Churchill. “They’ve just taken off, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“Andros should be in Bern by tomorrow night,” said Churchill, puffing away on his Havana. He offered the president a light.

Roosevelt inhaled and then released a stream of smoke. “Dulles is in for quite a shock when he gets the news that Andros is coming. So what happens now?”

“A lot depends on how things go in Bern, Mr. President. But I expect Andros to be in Athens by the time I arrive in Algiers next week to meet with General Eisenhower. At that point, things are wide open.”

Roosevelt nodded his understanding. “Our first American in Greece,” he noted. “I should have liked very much to have met him.”

Churchill grunted. “He has his own reasons for going. If we wrapped it up in the Stars and Stripes, he’d be more suspicious than ever.”

“Yes, I suppose.” Roosevelt swiveled his wheelchair around and wheeled himself to the window. “He suspects nothing, then?”

“About the Sicily invasion and why we really want the Maranatha text? No,” said Churchill. “If anything, he believes we’re about to invade Greece.”

“Which is what you want him to believe,” said Roosevelt at the window, staring out as he smoked.

“The important thing is to ensure the Germans still believe the target of the Allied invasion is Greece,” Churchill insisted. “If Andros can steal the Maranatha text before von Berg compares it to our fake, I will be delighted.”

“But if he can’t?” Roosevelt swiveled around in the chair. “If Andros is caught?”

“Then his attempt to steal the Maranatha text, together with Captain Whyte’s efforts to increase Greek partisan activity, can only reinforce Hitler’s fears that Greece is about to be invaded.”

“I see, Mr. Prime Minister,” said Roosevelt thoughtfully. “So you expect Andros to fail.”

“Counting on it, I’m sorry to say,” Churchill confessed. “That calculating know-it-all Prestwick even worked out the chances of Andros fulfilling his mission statistically. There are three chances in ten that Andros will be incapacitated before even arriving in Athens: His plane could be shot down in the Mediterranean, something screwy could happen in Switzerland, that sort of thing. If he does make it to Athens, there’s one chance in three that he’ll be found out and captured. If he’s captured, there’s one chance in two that he’ll be interrogated by the Gestapo.”

“But in his case, the rules don’t apply,” Roosevelt said. “The Nazis know he’s coming. So he really has no chance, does he?”

“Not really,” concluded Churchill as he put out his Havana. “But it’s better for one man to die than millions.”

T he landing lights of the Flying Fortress blinded Jack MacDonald for a moment before it touched down at Blida, the Allied air base outside Algiers. MacDonald watched the B-17 taxi to a corner of the field under the stars. The thirty-year-old red-haired Scot then stamped out his cigarette with his flying boot and zipped up his leather bomber jacket. The scarf at his throat blew in the desert wind as he crossed the runway toward the Pegasus. His black-painted B-24 bomber was awaiting takeoff behind a line of other Liberators ready to strike Wehrmacht supply lines in southern France.

Wing Commander Rainey, his copilot, was running down the checklist with the navigator when MacDonald clambered into the cockpit and clamped his earphones over his cap.

“Our package is here,” MacDonald said, angrily flicking the switches on his instrument panel. “Just once in this bloody war, I’d like to drop a real bomb on a real German target, preferably the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.”

As it was, Captain Jack MacDonald of RAF Squadron 624, one of Britain’s Special Operations squadrons, was too good a pilot for typical bombing runs and felt condemned to a career of flying secret supply missions to resistance forces in the Balkans and southern France. Tonight’s fantastic orders involved the delivery of an American OSS agent.

“So they’re serious?” Rainey asked. He was twenty-two, with a baby face. He looked at MacDonald in disbelief.

“Mission orders confirmed-it’s Switzerland,” MacDonald told his amazed copilot. “We’re going to risk our necks crossing France to drop some American Joe in a neutral country, no less. We’ll probably slam into the Matterhorn and burn before we get there.”

MacDonald wasn’t afraid of dying. He just wanted to take down with him as many Nazis as hell could hold.

He had never flown before he joined the RAF in 1940 and, as a child, had been afraid of heights. But after his wife and daughter were killed in the London Blitz by German bombers, he couldn’t get up in the air fast enough to pay back those Nazi bastards. And pay them back he did. Flying twin-engine Bristol Beaufighters in the night skies over the Channel, he engaged and destroyed eleven incoming German bombers during the Battle of Britain. Bombers were such easy, slow-moving targets in the air. He could soar past their operating altitude, fire from overhead, and blow them out of the sky in one pass. He could also outfly their Messerschmitt escorts.