"Steer one nine zero."
[THREE]
Lieutenant Joseph P Kennedy, Jr." came into David Bruce's office. Kennedy looked, Colonel Wild Bill Donovan thought, not unlike his father as a young man.
"Hello, Joe," Donovan said.
"How are you?"
"Not very cheerful. Colonel," Kennedy said, raising a package in his hand.
"Dolan's personal items. I didn't know what to do with them."
"I'll take them, Mr. Kennedy," Chief Ellis said.
"I'll see that they get to his next of kin."
"Does he have any?" Kennedy asked.
"I never heard him talk about a family"
"I'm sure there's a brother or a sister or somebody," Donovan said.
"And what do I do about Darmstadter?" Kennedy said.
"Write the letter myself, or let his old outfit do it? He was on TDY to the composite squadron, officially."
He was, Donovan thought, approvingly, already assuming the responsibilities of command.
"You -write it, Joe," Donovan ordered.
"Be vague. But let them know he went in as a volunteer doing something important." He thought about saying something else, realized that he shouldn't, but said it anyway:"I wish we could report them KIA. Until we have positive word, of course, they'll have to be carried as MIA. But I don't think there's any real hope."
"Yes, Sir," Kennedy said.
Donovan had been avoiding making the decision what to do about taking the necessary action about Dick Canidy and Ferniany. At the very least, they were missing in action. It might even be better to hope that they were dead.
Just before it went off the air, interrupting a code block, the OSS radio station had sent the code for "Station discovered, in immediate danger of being captured."
It was reasonable to presume that Ferniany had been captured in Budapest.
If that was true, and he was lucky, he would be dead. If that was true, and he was unlucky, he was alive and in the hands of the SS; and it might be some time before they were through with him and shot him. Or hanged him with a length of piano wire.
If they had caught him alive, it had to be presumed that he had given them Canidy's location and told them what he knew. No matter how little that was, it was certain to be damaging to von Heurten-Mitnitz, the Countess Batthyany, and the whole Hungarian pipeline.
There seemed to be little doubt that Fulmar and Professor Dyer were dead.
The last B-17 had carried photographers, and there was proof beyond question that St. Gertrud's prison and three square blocks around it had been bombed into rubble.
Canidy, to be sure, might still be alive, on the run somewhere in the forests near Pecs. He had as many lives as a cat.
It was the particularly obscene nature of this business, Donovan thought,
that I am forced
to hope that he is dead. If he is dead, what he knows will not become known to the Germans.
He had decided that when he made up his mind to do it, he would personally write to the Reverend Doctor George Crater Canidy. He knew that it would be important, that Canidy would really want his father to believe he had died saving lives, not taking them. In a sense that was true, and maybe, Donovan decided, he would be able to make that point.