easily frightened Luftwaffers. The whole thing turned on the Brens. The two Brens were the wanted nail that doomed the horse that lost the squad that let down the battalion that defeated the army that ruined the war.
“Great news, chum,” said Basil. “You have Brens!”
“What?”
“Hmm, it seems that Roger had a change of mind, or perhaps an order from higher HQ. In any event, even as we speak, Roger and his two Bren gun teams are setting up on the slope overlooking the road from Nantilles, three hundred yards beyond the bridge.”
“Do we know that for a fact?”
“Chum, if Roger says they’re there, then they’re there.”
“I wish I could actually see the guys.” But he looked at the Bulova he wore upside down on his wrist and saw that it was 0238 British War Time, so it was time to go.
“Okay,” he said, “then let’s blow this son of a bitch.”
“Good attitude. I’ll be with the other boys in the woodline. We’ll lay down fire from our end.”
“You can’t see well enough to do any good, and that goddamn little peashooter”—Leets indicated the Sten Machine Carbine hung around Basil by a sling, a tubular construction that looked as if it had been designed by a committee of very dull plumbers, a 9-millimeter burp gun that fired too fast when it fired at all, and then its bullets did little good when they got there if they got there at all—”won’t frighten anyone.”
“Beets, I can’t help it that their guns are so much better than ours. We make do with what is. We do our bit, that’s all.”
“Yeah, yeah. Well, let’s go then. Batter up!” Leets said bitterly. He stormed to the Citroen for his drive to battle. But then he remembered his manners.
“Sorry, captain. I’m a blowhard, I know. Just venting because I’m scared shitless. Anyhow, thanks, what you did was swell, it was, I don’t know—”
“Stop it, Beets. Just go blow up your silly bridge.”
“Captain, one last thing. Who the hell are you? Where are you from? How do you know so much? What are you doing here? Surely you’re too old, too advanced, too brilliant for all this running around. You should be a general or something. You look forty. Who
“Long, long story, chum. Blow the damned bridge and we’ll have a chat.”
Enter Millie Beeman. Millie, from Millicent, from the Beemans, you know,
By ‘43 she’d transferred to London station at 72 Grosvenor in Mayfair, under Colonel Bruce, one of whose assistants she’d become, and wore the uniform of a second lieutenant in the WACs. She was in charge of the colonel’s social calendar, important since one of the common jests of the time was that OSS actually stood for Oh So Social. She answered his phones or placed his calls, but it was more than that. She also knew the town, in the sense of “knew the town,” and so was able to prioritize. The colonel was hopeless and said yes to every invitation in the days before she arrived on station. She knew who was in, who out, which receptions it was important to be seen at, which could be safely ignored, which generals were in the ascension, which in the decline, which FFI liaison officers could be trusted, which should be avoided, which journalists were helpful, which were not, who could be blackmailed, ignored, betrayed, dumped, manipulated, or insulted and, by contrast, who could be trusted, used, counted on, confided in, who had access, represented the kind of people we like and need, and so forth and so on. She was indispensable, she was ruthless, she was efficient, she was beautiful and brilliant at once, and she was the third-ranking NKVD agent in OSS, the star of INO (Foreign Intelligence Section) who had been trained at SHON, Shkola Osobogo Naznacheniya, the Special Purposes School, in Balashikha, fifteen miles east of the Moscow Ring Road, when everybody thought she was rusticating in the Hamptons.
Millie sniffed something was up at six p.m. that evening, when Colonel Brace’s mood immediately brightened. The issue of the day had been Operation Jedburgh, by which three-man teams of OSS/SOE/FFI agents had parachuted behind the lines to wreak havoc on German communications and transportation lines in the immediate wake of the Normandy show. So far, no good. No teams had hit a target, many had drifted apart in the descent and failed to link up with maquis units whom they were supposed to lead, and several had never acknowledged arrival by radio and were considered combat-lost. It was looking like a washout, and Colonel Bruce knew he was meeting with Sir Colin Gubbins, head of SOE, and that Gubbins would blame the muck-up on the American third of the units. It was
But around six, an SOE liaison informed the colonel that radio intercepts strongly suggested one team was in position and would strike tonight at midnight against a bridge on Das Reich’s route to the beachhead.
“Millie, do you see? This is what we need.”
It was a great issue with OSS that it was considered immature, inferior, and amateur in comparison to the far savvier British intel outfits, and it drove General Donovan mad.
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, the boys,” said Colonel Bruce. “Those wonderful, wonderful boys, they make me so proud. Here’s to Casey’s turn at bat!”
Millie, of course, was not privy to code names and didn’t know which groups were operating where; she just scooped up all available information and turned it over to her KGB INO control, a fellow named Hedgepath who’d been big in WPA before the war and was now big in the Office of War Information, the propaganda unit, where he was some sort of chief of psychological operations or something like that, reporting directly to Mr. Sherwood. She adored Hedgepath, because of course he was one of the few men on earth who didn’t yield to and couldn’t be budged by her blandishments, charms, and beauty; she had no way of knowing he was a sexual deviate and therefore immune to such.
She called him from a phone in Accounting Section, feeling utterly secure, because no one monitored internal calls between American entities such as 72 Grosvenor and the London OWI headquarters nearby. It was Kate Jesse’s phone, and Kate thought she used it to speak to a secret lover, an RAF bomber pilot. Kate’s problem: She read
“Hullo,” said Hedgepath.
“Millie here.”
“Of course, my dear. Report, please.”
She reiterated what she had learned that day: the colonel’s schedule, his incoming calls, reports, office tidbits, expenditure, the nuts and bolts of it. Finally she mentioned some kind of show that was set for the evening and the colonel’s curious explosion of glee, “Casey’s turn at bat.”
“Oh, baseball,” said Mr. Hedgepath. “I loathe baseball. It’s mostly standing around, isn’t it? Awfully boring. Who’s this Casey?”
“It’s from a famous poem. ‘Mighty Casey’ they call him, a sort of Babe Ruth figure. All hopes are on him. It’s very dramatic.”
“Who knew there was drama in baseball?”
“At any rate, ‘Casey at the Bat’ is about a hero’s chance to win the big game. As I recall, he fails. In America, it’s regarded a tragedy. I think Casey has to do with something they’re calling Operation Jedburgh.”
Jedburgh?
“Hmm,” said Hedgepath. He knew from NKVD Moscow Center that the terrible Zyborny had sent a flash to GRU earlier, but Center wasn’t completely able to penetrate the GRU code and knew only that the subject of the message was a Brit-Yank-Frenchy thing called Operation Jedburgh, some silly blowing-up of structures that would have to be expensively rebuilt after the war. But Control did not want GRU operating with impunity anywhere, and
