In Danger's Path (35 page)

“Colonel,” Brigadier General Fleming Pickering said, standing up. “I never look a gift horse in the mouth.” He turned to look at the others sitting around the table:

The Deputy Director (Operations) of the Office of Strategic Services; Brigadier General F. L. Rickabee, USMC; Captain David W. Haughton, USN; Colonel Jack (NMI) Stecker, USMCR; Major Jake Dillon, USMCR; 2nd Lieutenant George F. Hart, USMCR; and an Army Air Corps officer, whose identification badge identified him as Lt. Col. H. J. Hazeltine USAAC. Rickabee, Stecker, and Haughton were wearing VISITOR 5th Floor Only badges; the others had red-striped any area any time badges.

This told Pickering that Colonel Hazeltine was assigned to the OSS, and not as an Air Corps representative to the meeting.

Pickering went to Zimmerman and shook his hand, then put his arm around his shoulder.

“Gentlemen, there has been a good deal in the newspapers of late about ‘old-breed Marines.' Here's one in the flesh, Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman, whom I'm proud to say I know and consider my friend.”

Zimmerman looked very uncomfortable.

“I think everybody knows everybody else, except…Ken, do you know the OSS's weather expert, Colonel Hazeltine?”

“No, sir.”

Hazeltine stood up and walked to McCoy and gave him his hand.

“I've heard a lot about you, Captain,” he said.

“How do you do, sir?”

Hazeltine turned to Zimmerman.

“And you, too, Sergeant,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Zimmerman said.

Hazeltine restrained a smile. Pickering had warned everyone that all they were going to hear from Gunny Zimmerman was “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” or “Aye aye, sir,” unless it was pried—or dynamited—out of him.

“How do you want to handle this, Ed?” Pickering asked.

“Sir, I thought I would sort of conduct the briefing myself, with the understanding that Captain McCoy and Gunny Zimmerman will interrupt me if I leave anything out, or if—when—I get something wrong.”

“Sounds fine. Have at it.”

“Jake, I need the number-three China map on the screen,” Banning said.

Jake Dillon had once been a sergeant in the 4th Marines in Shanghai. To the surprise of many people—including himself—he'd been directly commissioned as a major, USMCR. At that time, he was Vice President, Public Relations, of Metro-Magnum Motion Picture Studios. It had been the belief of certain senior officers within the Marine Corps that he would be of great value performing similar duties for the Marine Corps.

In that capacity, he had led a team of still and motion picture cameramen onto the beach during the invasion of Guadalcanal. But then he had been pressed into service by General Pickering—they were friends before the war—when Pickering was staging a covert operation on the Japanese-occupied island of Buka. He proved as adept at covert operations as at placing the names of motion picture stars onto the front pages of newspapers. To the great annoyance of the Marine Corps publicity people Pickering had again pressed him into service, this time permanently, by having him transferred to the OSS shortly after Pickering's presidential appointment.

“Aye, aye, sir,” Dillon said, and went to the slide projector. In a moment a map of the northern area of China, from Peking (Beijing) north across Mongolia (including the Gobi Desert) to the Russian border, and west to the borders of Kazakhstan and Kyr.

“Captain McCoy, Gunny Zimmerman, and I,” Banning began, “have spent most of the past two days discussing this area, with emphasis on the Gobi Desert, which is where Howard thinks we need a weather station.”

“Right in the middle of it would be nice, Ed,” Colonel H. J. Hazeltine said.

“Gunny Zimmerman is personally familiar with the area,” Banning said. “Which means we can send the
National Geographic
magazines back to the library.”

There were appreciative chuckles.

“How well do you know the area, Sergeant?” the Deputy Director (Operations) asked.

There was a silence.

“Sir, Zimmerman has made two trips across the desert with camel caravans,” McCoy answered for him. “One to the Russian border, and one to the Indian border.”

“Yes, sir,” Zimmerman confirmed.

“How did that come to be, Sergeant?” the DDO asked.

“Sir, Gunny Zimmerman operated what you might call an import-export business,” Banning answered for Zimmerman.

The DDO looked at Zimmerman, who nodded his head.

“The details of which are not, in my judgment, important to us here,” Banning went on. Zimmerman looked relieved. “What is important is that Zimmerman is familiar with the workings of the cross-border import-export business and, probably more important, is personally acquainted with a number of people in the business.”

Banning waited for that to sink in, then added: “And so is his wife. Who, Zimmerman believes, may be in a small village, Paotow-Zi, which is twenty or thirty miles downriver from Baotou.”

He indicated the position on the map.

“I don't know if I should ask you, Ed, or Zimmerman, but why does he think his wife is in this village?” Rickabee asked.

“Sir,” McCoy said, “Zimmerman owns a farm there, and a sausage factory. When we pulled out of Shanghai, he told her to go there.”

“‘Pulled out of Shanghai'?” the DDO asked. “What do you mean by that, Captain?”

“When the Fourth Marines were sent to the Philippines, sir,” McCoy said.

“Did you know about Zimmerman's wife, Ed?” Rickabee asked.

“No, sir.”

“Pity. She might have been useful.”

“Zimmerman told his wife,” Banning said, “to try to make it into India when she thought it would be safe. She would then find an American consulate, or legation—some American agency—and give them the name of Zimmerman's mother here. The idea was to get Mrs. Zimmerman and their children to the United States.”

“That hasn't happened, I gather,” the DDO said. “I mean, there has been no word from Mrs. Zimmerman?”

“No, sir,” Banning said.

“Does that mean we can presume she's still in this village? Paotow-Zi, you said?”

“No, sir.”

“Fritz—excuse me,
General
—have you any assets in that area? Can we find out?” Haughton asked.

“You can call me Fritz in here, David,” Rickabee said. “We're among friends. But don't forget to kiss my stars when you leave the room.” He waited for the chuckles to die down, then went on: “Simple answer is ‘yes.' It would mean diverting them from other things…for what, ten days, two weeks? It would probably be three weeks before we had an answer. How important is finding out?”

“Let's come back to that in a minute,” Pickering said.

“Aye, aye, sir,” Rickabee said. “But, Gunny, as soon as possible, go to Management Analysis and tell Captain Sessions everything you can about your wife and children and this village.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Zimmerman said.

“I told Ed that, as I see it, our first priority is to establish contact with the people in the Gobi Desert,” General Pickering went on. “And to see what ideas Zimmerman had about how to do that.”

“McCoy,” Banning said.

“Sir,” McCoy began, “Zimmerman feels—with a lot of ifs, and a lot of money—that it may be possible to get radios into the people in the Gobi Desert.”

“Money's not a problem,” the DDO said. “What are the other ifs?”

“The first is a question, sir,” McCoy said. “What kind of radios do we send them? They'd have to be transported by camel. Weight would be a problem. We'd have to talk to some expert in Navy Communications—maybe, better, the Army's Signal Corps…”

“Collins Radio,” Captain Haughton said. “In Cedar Rapids, Iowa.”

“What about Collins Radio?” Pickering asked.

“You remember when Admiral Byrd went to the Antarctic a couple of years before the war?”

Grunts indicated everyone remembered Admiral Byrd's Antarctic expedition. Some of them were dubious:
What the hell does Admiral Byrd and the Antarctic have to do with this?

“Well, the Navy couldn't maintain radio communication with him. The communications experts were very embarrassed. But a radio amateur, a chap named Collins, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa,
could
talk to Byrd. And did. Just about all the time. That was even more embarrassing. But the point of this is that after this happened, the Navy has spent a lot of money with Collins. He's become the expert in difficult radio communications.”

“Wouldn't his equipment be heavy-duty stuff?” Colonel Jack (NMI) Stecker asked. “We're talking about moving this stuff on camels.”

“We won't know what he's got, will we, until we ask him?” Pickering said. “Specifically, until Banning asks him.” He looked at Banning and added, “As soon as possible.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Banning said.

“Jumping way ahead,” Colonel Hazeltine said. “Presuming we establish contact with these people and provide them with the necessary meteorological equipment, could we move their expendables in to them by camel caravan?”

“I don't think we'd better count on that,” Pickering said. “But let's get back to Zimmerman's plan to get the first radio in to these people?”

“
Radios
, sir,” McCoy said. “Zimmerman thinks the way to do this is to join up with caravans about to go back into Mongolia. Three, four different caravans, maybe as many as six. When they bring back evidence that they delivered the radios to Americans in the Gobi, we give them money—which means gold—enough to make them hungry for more.”

“But…I see what you mean, Captain, by ‘a lot of ifs'…but if we get the radios to these people, wouldn't they get on the air to us?” the DDO asked. “We would know if they had them. We'd be talking to them.”

“Yes, sir. But Zimmerman said if we pay them anyway, they would be available to carry other stuff in. I don't know what the Colonel meant by ‘expendables'…”

“Balloons, for example. To check the winds aloft,” Colonel Hazeltine explained.

“Okay,” Pickering said.

“Then there's the problem of cryptography,” Haughton said. “We don't dare send in a code book.”

“Sir, we figure the simple substitution code we used for Buka and Mindanao will work just fine here.”

“I don't understand what you're talking about,” the DDO said.

“Sir,” McCoy said, “we worked out a system to establish as secure as possible communication with a Coastwatcher team on Buka. And we used the same system to communicate with General Fertig on Mindanao. It worked twice, and there's no reason it wouldn't work here.”

“
How
does it work?” the DDO asked.

“Sir, it's a simple substitution code, using personal data of people we both know and the Japanese have no way of knowing—their mother's maiden name, the name of somebody, or something.”

“Any simple substitution code is easy to crack,” the DDO said.

“Yes, sir,” McCoy agreed. “But it enables us to establish initial contact. It would be enough for them to tell us where they are, and for us to tell them when the weather team is coming in.”

“Zimmerman,” Pickering asked, “you think we can get radios into these people?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where would you meet them?”

“Let me have China number two on the screen, Jake, please,” Banning said.

A moment later, a map of northern China appeared on the screen.

“Somewhere in here, sir,” Banning said, pointing to the map. “In the Gobi itself, on one of the caravan routes operating out of Ulaanbaatar.”

“That's assuming the caravans are still operating,” the DDO asked. “In wartime?”

“Yes, sir,” Banning said. “These caravans have been operating for centuries. A little thing like World War Two isn't going to stop them.”

There were chuckles.

“A main caravan route runs between Ulaanbaatar, in the Gobi, toward India. We believe the Americans will try to make it into India,” Banning said.

“Why not just head for Chungking?” the DDO asked.

Chungking was then the seat of the Chinese Nationalist government. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the Nationalist government since 1928 and the leader of the Nationalist Chinese during World War II, had retreated before the Japanese to Chungking, where they operated from bomb-shelter caves.

“They wouldn't be sure our Chinese would be there by the time they got there,” McCoy said. “And that's bandit country.”

“Bandit country?” the DDO asked.

“Warlords, sometimes aligned with Chiang Kai-shek, sometimes with the Communists, and always ready to steal whatever they can from anybody. They don't operate in the Gobi because there's not much to steal there, and also because they use the caravans to smuggle things into Russia and India.”