David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

Yet he’d foundered after enlisting. His ideas-fueled by “ educated insight”-were dismissed. He watched as colleagues championed ridiculous ideas that later turned out to be quite effective, and he watched those colleagues go on to greater rank and glory As the months wore on, Gurley was desperate to find the idea that would make him a star. A huge star: not for him invisible ink or a corncob pipe revolver.

He wanted something spectacular.

He brainstormed and came up blank, and then brainstormed with friends. Blank again. Then he found a memo in a stack of papers that had been left on his desk. A scrap of a confidential memo, actually stamped with a security classification beyond the level Gurley possessed. He should have stopped reading immediately and reported the security breach, but (he admitted) he did not. How could he? The memo referred to a piece of intriguing, if bizarre, research: the enemy- the Japanese-considered blue foxes a bad omen. (I thought, but didn’t ask: Who wouldn’t?)

Gurley took up the case. His first discovery was the existence of an actual animal- “Alopex lagopus” he took pleasure in informing me-a type of arctic fox whose coat turned bluish-gray in winter. “But it didn’t look the least bit frightening-or blue,” Gurley said. Rather, he decided to press ahead in secret with elaborate plans for a truly blue, truly scary fox of his own design, Vulpes livida.

He tested and discarded the idea of air-dropping blue fox leaflets or releasing live, paint-dipped foxes (via parachute? I wondered. Torpedo tubes? Rubber rafts?), and decided on something far more spectacular: projecting a blue fox in the sky above enemy troops. It was bold, theatrical-terrifying. The enemy would panic and throw down their weapons in fear.

It was also impractical, silly, and foolish-but so were dozens of other ideas that the OSS researched, and many of those (including a rotating gun that attached to a railroad car’s wheel) had gone forward.

“The fated day came,” Gurley said. “I was to present to the full committee. Now, word had spread of all the hours I had put in. And while most didn’t know the details, everyone knew that I was hoping to make my reputation. Some might have uncharitably said, repair my reputation.” Gurley looked at the ceiling a moment, as though he were being fed lines from above. I had a slight urge to look up myself.

“Project Hannibal,” he continued. “Foxtrot-the obvious, and therefore fatuous, choice. Hannibal: Sergeant?”

“Sir?”

“Why ‘ Hannibal ’?”

I had no idea. It rhymed with cannibal , which seemed a bit gruesome, even for Gurley. Then I remembered that Mark Twain had grown up in Hannibal, Missouri. I mentioned this.

“Who?” Gurley said. “No, Sergeant. This is a war. Not bedtime stories. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general. Takes his elephants over the Alps. Hannibal: the perfect code name for the deployment of an unusual animal to seek a military victory.” He studied my reaction. “No, no one got it. But I pressed on.”

He took his audience through the background first: why this would frighten the soldiers, why it would, in fact, be more deadly than any conventional weapons. American bombs were certainly decimating Japanese ranks-but it was hard to claim that they had caused fear. Indeed, the Japanese fought more tenaciously the more casualties they suffered.

“And I was winning, Belk. I guarantee you. One man at a time. I could see, I could look around the room and watch as their smiles faded into a kind of-not awe, no, not that, but a kind of respect. Maybe that’s even too strong a word. Interest, then. I saw them grow curious, despite themselves, one face at a time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything lovelier.”

Gurley said that he finished his presentation and sat. He wanted to look around the room-he could hear the murmurs of interest and appreciation on all sides-but kept his eyes on the colonel who had been chairing the meeting. The colonel should have been his staunch ally Gurley said: they were both Princeton men; the colonel had graduated some ten years before. But the colonel had rarely deigned to speak with him, nor even meet his eyes, and he did neither now.

Instead, the colonel looked around the room and smiled. “What’s Bob Hope say?” he asked. Gurley’s stomach began to turn, slowly. Everyone’s faces began to warm into smiles-not, Gurley was sure, in anticipation of the joke, but of his demise. Gurley held his breath. The colonel waited before going on. He was enjoying himself. Worse: he was playing to the crowd.

Quoting Bob Hope? What Gurley needed was a minute or two alone with the colonel. Man to man. One Princetonian to another. Some setting where the colonel wouldn’t feel a need to appeal to the base instincts of a base crowd.

Gurley paused his recounting now, as well. At first I thought it was for theatrical effect, an attempt to wring whatever more suspense he could out of his story, but he looked down at his hands for a moment-only for a moment-and I saw something else. He’d left his little stage. He’d been kicked off the stage, in fact, at that meeting, and try as he might, had never quite found his way back on, at least not before audiences larger than, say, a solitary, teenaged sergeant. When he started speaking again, his volume had dropped by half or more, and I would have sworn he was crying. But he wasn’t; I checked, his face was clear.

The colonel continued, Gurley said.

“What’s the most dangerous thing in war?” the colonel asked. The room was already laughing. Gurley wasn’t breathing. “A second lieutenant,” the colonel answered, “with a plan.”

With a map , Gurley told me now, seething. The colonel even screwed up the punch line, Gurley said. And everyone had to know it. Hope must have trotted that joke out every USO tour he ever made.

But if everyone knew it, they didn’t care. In fact, they acted like the colonel’s version was funnier. And you wouldn’t even have said they were acting, Gurley said. They were enjoying themselves. As much as the colonel, who looked-and Gurley worked at finding the right word-a bit relieved at all the laughter. Relieved that his joke had gone over, and even more relieved that he wasn’t alone in thinking Gurley’s plan was poppycock.

“Dismissed, Lieutenant,” the colonel said. Gurley rose and left the room while the laughter rose and followed him, and then shut the door behind him.

A friend-or someone who wanted to twist the knife a little deeper-told him how the rest of the meeting went. Gurley was almost flattered to learn he remained the subject of the meeting for several more minutes. The colonel said that Gurley had fallen into a clever trap, set by OSS internal security to catch people who had taken to reading materials that they didn’t have the proper classification for. A fictionalized, highly classified memo, designed to be outlandish enough to catch a wayward eye’s interest, had been introduced into the office’s paper stream. It was only a matter of time before the blue fox nabbed its prey, the colonel said, and he congratulated all those remaining in the room on their now-validated discretion.

“It was a trap?” I asked Gurley.

“A lie,” he said. “To be more precise. An elaborate and admittedly impressive spur-of-the-moment lie by the colonel himself.” The actor was returning. “For this self-proclaimed ‘friend’ of mine could not help but tell me something else. Something he found so funny and cruel, he could hardly bear not to share it. How could I not have known, he asked, that the blue fox was, in fact, quite real?” Gurley paused and looked at me. “My ‘friend’ went on: ‘Blue Fox’ was the nickname of the colonel’s mistress.” Gurley closed his eyes and leaned back.