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Now it was of value because one of the heavy, multi wheeled Tatra trucks that had carried bagged anthracite to Budapest (including, through the influence of Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz, some to Batthyany Palace) had returned to Pecs with Eric Fulmar and Professor Dyer and his daughter concealed in a box under a stack of coal bags.

Professor Dyer was a physicist. There was a tenuous connection between physics the science and physics as in laxative. Hence, "Ex-Lax." In the planning stages of the operation, when they were picking code names, David Bruce had reluctantly admitted that the Germans would probably be baffled by references to a laxative, although he privately thought Canidy's suggestion was one more indication that Canidy was not as serious as he should be.

"Yachtsman" was an OSS agent in Hungary. He was a first-generation American from Hamtramck, Michigan, who had learned Hungarian from his mother.

Equipped with the appropriate forged identity documents, he was employed with relatives as a deckhand on a Danube River barge. It permitted him to move around the country and when necessary to disappear from the barge for a couple of hours, or days.

Completely decoded, Yachtsman's message meant that Fulmar and the Dyers had made it from Budapest safely to Pecs, and were proceeding to V This leg of the route was by barge.

"Ex-Lax "would travel down the barge canal built under the auspices of Emperor Franz Josef of Austro-Hungary to transport coal from Pecs to the Danube.

The barge canal crossed the border between Hungary and Croatia (Yugoslavia) in a sparsely populated region near Ben Manastir, and joined the Danube at Batina. Shortly before reaching Backa Palanka, where the Danube turned east toward Belgrade in another desolate unpopulated area, there would be a signal--in response to lights arranged in a special way on the barge--from the western shore of the Danube.

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.