Page 12

“That is a real and distinct possibility,” he said. “There is no doubt more Tabun—both stockpiled and being manufactured—and there certainly has been time for more shipments to arrive.”

Canidy looke

d out across the Mediterranean Sea, in the direction of Sicily, and sighed audibly.

“Not fucking again!” he said.

[FOUR]

Almost two months earlier, on the moonless night of March 22, Canidy had smuggled Professor Arturo Rossi out of the Port of Palermo aboard a forty-foot wooden fishing boat, the Stefania. To suggest that Rossi—a metallurgist carrying a suitcase that contained no clothing but was instead packed with all his scientific papers from the university—was anxious to leave Sicily would have been akin to suggesting that the Pope might be a little bit devout.

Rossi was under no delusion as to what he could expect from the Nazis should he in some fashion disappoint them. He had seen one colleague executed by SS-Sturmbannführer Hans Müller of the SD and watched another die slowly and painfully in the SS’s yellow fever experiment that Müller oversaw.

Canidy, with the Stefania’s engine idling and her lines already let loose, then learned from Rossi that the rusty ninety-foot-long cargo ship tied up alongside at the dock had arrived that morning with nerve gas munitions in her hold. Canidy made the split-second decision to sink the ship at its mooring, and had quickly rigged it with C-2 plastic explosive and a time-delay fuse.

When Wild Bill Donovan had read Canidy’s after-action report, then met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to relay the information that the Nazis had sent nerve gas munitions to Sicily, FDR became furious. He wanted absolute proof. And so, nine days after seeing the moonless sky glow with the flames of the burning cargo ship, Dick Canidy, at the direct order of the President of the United States, was headed back to Sicily, this time leading a three-man team.

Aboard the submarine Casabianca, Canidy had briefed his team that their main mission was to find out if nerve gas had indeed been on the boat that he’d blown up at the dock and, if so, what damage had been caused by it.

“We’re supposed to get in, get the intel, and, if the place is nothing but rotting corpses, get the hell out.”

But it turned out that there had not been mass casualties. Canidy’s team found only two dead in the harbor area. Agents of the Sicherheitsdienst had tortured a pair of Sicilian fishermen—bashed out their teeth with the steel-plated butt of a Mauser Karabiner 98 and gouged out their eyes with its bayonet—and left them hanging from a yardarm.

The mission then became threefold: One, to find out what had happened to the nerve gas munitions. Two, to ensure that the villa with the yellow fever experiment had been destroyed. And three, to establish MERCURY STATION—a clandestine wireless telegraphy station—that would send intel to OSS Algiers for developing underground connections in Sicily and building a resistance that could rise up when the Allies arrived with OPERATION HUSKY.

It had been Stan Fine’s idea to use Roman mythology for the mission’s code names—“There’s so much of it here, who would think twice about it?” Thus, they code-named the radio station after the messenger god, Mercury, and the submarine Casabianca after the god of the sea, Neptune. Dick Canidy became Jupiter (the supreme god of Italy and Rome), Jim “Tubes” Fuller was Maximus (“the greatest”), and Franciso Nola was Optimus (“the best”).

Canidy had first met Franciso Nola—a solidly built thirty-five-year-old with an olive complexion, thick black hair cut close to the scalp, a rather large nose, and a black mustache—in New York City, where he’d fled with his family mostly because his wife was Jewish but also because his cousins had been imprisoned by Mussolini’s secret police. A commercial fisherman, he still owned boats in Palermo that worked the Mediterranean waters. He not only offered Canidy the use of these but volunteered to personally help fight the fascists in any way he could.

It had been through Nola that they learned what happened with the howitzer rounds with the Tabun in Palermo. The warehouses that Nola’s fishing boats used for his import-export business were overseen by a pair of dense longshoremen. When Canidy met the Brothers Buda—Giacomo and Antonio were in their early thirties, around five-five and two hundred pounds, with bad bowl haircuts and belly fat rolls that stretched tight their dirty overalls—he quietly nicknamed them Tweedle Fucking Dee and Dumb.

With some effort, the Budas explained that their crews had off-loaded wooden crates of what they called “buh-lets,” pallets of fuel, and field rations from the rusty ninety-foot-long cargo ship that Canidy had asked about—but of course had not said that he’d sunk with the plastic explosive.

Shortly thereafter, they said, two SS officers had arrived at the warehouse, had an argument with SS-Sturmbannführer Müller, and then Müller had ordered the Brothers Buda to make certain that the wooden crates of buh-lets with the painted stencil marking of SONDERKART.6LE.F.H.18 T83 10.5-CM would get loaded aboard another cargo ship that was en route.

When Canidy had read through his binoculars the stencil markings, he decided that the “10.5-CM” signified the crates contained 105mm howitzer rounds. He sent that information via wireless message to Professor Rossi at OSS Algiers. Rossi confirmed that they were howitzer rounds—and, more important, that the “T83” was the code for Tabun.

Having finally met the mission’s main objective—finding conclusively that the Germans did have ready munitions for chemical warfare—Canidy made plans to destroy them. Then he blew up the villa where the SS was conducting the yellow fever experiments. And he announced to Frank Nola and Tubes Fuller that they would be staying behind and manning the clandestine MERCURY STATION.

That night, Dick Canidy had been back aboard the Casabianca, awaiting the cargo ship now carrying the Tabun howitzers, when Captain Jean L’Herminier dialed it in and gave the command to fire the torpedo that sent the nerve gas to the bottom of the sea.

And the next day, back at OSS Algiers Station, the first of the message traffic from MERCURY STATION began coming in regularly. Including confirmation that the Germans were furious that the villa and cargo ship had been destroyed.

* * *

Stan Fine flipped through the taller stack of decrypted typewritten messages, found what he wanted, and handed it to Dick Canidy.

Canidy read it:

* * *

TOP SECRET

OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE

X STATION CHIEF

FILE