The First Wave (22 page)
“BOYLE, WAKE UP.”
“Ummmm.”
“Now, Boyle!” Harding’s voice drifted into my dream and took it over. I was dreaming that I was lost in a city, unable to find the train station. Then Harry was there, trying to tell me something important, but I couldn’t understand him. He turned into Harding.My tough luck.
“Okay, Major. I’m up.” I felt the hard wooden slats of the cot digging into my ribs as I forced my eyelids apart.
“Lieutenant Kazimierz is on his way in from Headquarters,” Harding said. “We’ll meet in the Officer’s Mess at 0700.”
Harding didn’t wait to see if that fit in with my morning plans. I managed to keep one eye open long enough to observe the heels of his combat boots retreating to the door. I had to focus to figure out where I was. Oh yeah. Algiers. Back at the goddamn hospital. I looked around. There were half a dozen cots in the room, a flophouse for doctors and orderlies on duty. Light from the rising sun filtered into the room from the single window above me. The walls were stark white, still smelling of whitewash and lye, the army’s standard scheme for redecorating. There were lumps in two other cots and one of them snored.
It had been dark when the ambulance met us at the harbor.When we reached the hospital Harding met us at the entrance with a guard detail, guys from Headquarters Company, not from the General Hospital detachment. He had stationed men out front, by the Medical Supply Depot and the motor pool. After we got Diana to a room, he left a GI by her door too. I liked that. I also liked that my old pal, Doc Dunbar, was on his way to the front with the 1st Armored Division, posted to a Battalion Aid Station. Sergeant Willoughby, too, except now he was a private again. Dunbar’s replacement, Doctor Perrini, had shipped in straight from the States, and Diana was his patient. I liked that, too, since Perrini had no connection with anyone else at the hospital. He was from Chicago, and seemed like a regular guy. First thing he did was to have a couple of nurses clean Diana up, check her over, and give her a sedative. Then he examined Harry’s wound, changed the bandage, and approved of the job our Commando pals done to patch him up. I left before he could pull out a needle.
I had told Harding about the second shipment of penicillin coming through, got something to eat, found this cot, and claimed it. I think I remember taking my boots off, but that was it.
I was still dead tired, but I didn’t have time for any more shut-eye. I put on a fresh pair of socks from my pack and headed to the washroom. There was only cold water, but I dumped a helmet-f over my head, washed up, and managed to shave without massacring my face. I hoped I looked presentable. And that Diana would want to see me, would want to hold my hand, would let me sooth and reassure her. I wanted her to be the Diana with the sparkling eyes full of fun I had known and loved in England, all passion, temper, and tenderness. Not the Diana who had put a gun to her head. Not the Diana who had been . . . I didn’t even want to think about it. But it was all I could think about. I looked at myself in the cracked mirror above the sink. I smiled, and it was the same face that had always smiled back at me. Yet it wasn’t. It couldn’t be, not with everything that had happened. The smile didn’t last, and I looked away from the reflection. Villard’s face floated through my mind and he was smiling too, laughing at me. I wondered if I could ever think of Diana without remembering what he’d done to her.How could I hold her without thinking about where his hands had been? It didn’t make me proud, but there it was.
I stashed my gear under the cot and put on my web belt with the .45 in its holster. I took its grip in my hand and pressed with all my strength until I could feel the little cross-hatchings against my skin. It was some relief. I felt better. I still had ten minutes and decided to drop in on Diana to see if she was awake. As I walked down the hall, past everyone going on shift or off, I realized the real reason I wanted to see her now instead of later.To get it over with. But I didn’t like admitting it, even to myself.
The guard at the door to the ward checked my dogtags and found my name on a list.
“Okay, Lieutenant, knock and check with the nurse.”
I went up to the closed door and gave a little rap on the frosted glass. I thought for a second that no one was going to answer. I could just go away. The door was opened by Rita, the nurse who had taken a liking to Kaz.
“Billy, come in,” she whispered as she took me by the arm and pulled me into the room. There were four beds against the wall, empty except for the one by the window. Diana was asleep, her blonde hair framing her face. She looked better, now that she was cleaned up and in a fresh white room.
“She asked for you when she woke up an hour or so ago. Doctor Perrini gave her a sedative. She can’t stay awake long. Sit by the bed, I’ll let her know you’re here.”
“Wait,” I said in a low voice. “How is she? Did she have any injuries . . . internal injuries, or anything?”
“She was beaten, but not on the face. She’s badly bruised. She was a little confused and disoriented from the drugs she’d been injected with, but they’re almost all out of her system now.”
“Did she tell you what happened?”
Rita gave me a probing look, trying to figure out how much to tell me, and if I could take it. I didn’t know the answer to that myself.
“Yes. They gave her chloral hydrate to knock her out when they moved her. That was after she tried to escape.”
“Jesus.” I wondered when that was. When I was having breakfast at the St. George Hotel? Or maybe while I was having coffee with Casselli? I went over to the chair by the bed and sat down. I didn’t want to hear any more.
“Miss Seaton,” Rita said, taking hold of Diana’s hand. “You have a visitor. Can you wake up for me?”
Diana shook her head, as if she was dreaming, and mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I wondered if she was lost in a strange city, too. Then her eyes opened.
“Billy.”
“I’m here, Diana.”
“Don’t go . . .”
I was about to tell her I had to, when her eyelids drooped and she was asleep again. “I have to go,” I said anyway. I reached up and touched her forehead. It was cool, and she smiled, like a child hearing a lullaby as she drifts off to sleep.
“I do have to go,” I said to Rita as I got up. “Tell her . . . I was here.”
“I’ll tell her you’ll be back,” she said with determination.
“Yeah, I’ll be back. Later. I will.”
“And bring that nice Polish guy with you,” she said, the hardness in her eyes gone, the test passed.
I saw that nice Polish guy a few minutes later sitting with Harding at a corner table in the Officer’s Mess. They had a beat up coffee pot, burned black on the bottom, and a plate of doughnuts on the table. The enlisted men’s mess and kitchen were just across the hall, and the smell of army powdered eggs, burnt toast, and cigarettes drifting in almost killed what little appetite I had. They hadn’t gotten around to whitewashing this part of the hospital, but the floor was clean and the red brick walls gave the room a cool, pleasant feel.
“Okay, first things first,” said Harding as I poured coffee into a chipped mug. Pieces of eggshell floated on top and I dredged them out with my finger. “How’s Miss Seaton?”
“Pretty good, considering,” I said, trying to sound confident. “Bruised quite a bit, and still a little woozy.”
I didn’t tell them what I hadn’t told Rita either. That Diana had been pretty lively back in Bône until she almost blew her brains out. Maybe it had been shock, maybe the drugs, or both. I hoped.
“She will be all right?” asked Kaz, leaning in and speaking quietly.
“Yeah, I saw her a few minutes ago. Still groggy, but she’ll be fine.”
“Good,” declared Harding, closing the subject of personal relationships. I wondered how he and Gloria Morgan were doing. He didn’t give me a chance to ask.
“I notified HQ about the new penicillin shipment. It’s traveling by ship to Oran and then by train to Algiers. It’s coming by rail because the Luftwaffe has been targeting vessels entering Algiers harbor. It’s a big shipment, twenty cases, which is about eighty percent of the entire world supply at the moment.”
Kaz whistled.
“How much would it be worth?” I asked.
“It’s invaluable,” answered Harding. “Which means a lot of money.”
“And no one at this hospital thought it worth mentioning, after the first supply was stolen?” I asked.
“You find out about that, Boyle, when we’re done here.Who knew, and why didn’t they speak up?”
“Yes, sir. I assume you’ve added security for this shipment?”
“Damn right. It’s being guarded like the crown jewels.”
“And when is it due here?”
“The train from Oran will arrive at 0300 hours tomorrow morning. A truck will bring the shipment of penicillin from the station to the depot here, to be parceled out to field hospitals the next day. I’ve got a platoon of Rangers on the train with it now. They’ll guard the truck until it leaves here.”
“I think, sir, that we should keep the existence of our extra security quiet for now.”
“Why?” asked Harding.
“Because someone went to a lot of effort to hide this delivery from us, and maybe from the rest of the hospital staff. Villard may be planning to hit the truck en route. He’d have time to get away with a fortune in penicillin before anyone even knew it was gone.”
“So we let him have a go at it?” Harding asked, as if I had just gone around the bend.
“We shouldn’t tip our hand too soon.We might have a chance to trap him and his accomplices.”
“How?” asked Kaz, as he dumped sugar into his coffee.
“We keep quiet about the Rangers guarding the penicillin for now. If we let the information out late tonight, whoever is working with Villard will try to get word to him. We have to watch the phones, to see if anyone tries to get to the radio, or whether someone leaves the hospital for no reason. Then we’ll have them.”
“And if his inside person doesn’t manage to get word out, Villard will still try to hit the truck.”
“Yes sir. That’s why I want to be in that truck when it makes the pickup.”
Harding eyed me, trying to figure out what was going on. I didn’t usually volunteer, and with Diana safe here, he probably thought I’d be angling to stay put. He started to say something but stopped as a couple of officers sat down at the table next to us.
“I’ll think about it,” he said in a low voice. “Meantime, we’ll keep it zipped about the escort. Lieutenant Kazimierz, you work on this.” He produced the notebook that I had given him last night. Kaz flipped through the pages. He frowned.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I am not certain, but this looks much more complicated than the other code you showed me. That was actually a substitution cipher, really not a code at all.”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“Ciphers are different from codes.When you substitute one word for another word or sentence, you have a code. When you mix up or substitute letters, you have a cipher. You can also combine codes and ciphers by substituting one word for another and then mixing up the result. There are two types of ciphers also. Substitution ciphers replace letters with other letters or symbols, keeping the order in which the symbols fall the same. Transposition ciphers keep all of the original letters intact, but mix up the order. Of course, you can use both methods, one after the other, to further confuse anyone who intercepts the message.”
“I’m confused,” I admitted. I had stopped following his explanation before he was half done.
“Look here,” said Kaz, warming up to his subject. “These last pages do seem to be the same shorthand cipher we saw before. The words look intact. But here, on these pages, the letters are all in five letter groups. Here, there are just numbers in groups of three, separated by a dash. 45-16-4, 109-22-26, 8-31-38, and so on. No logical order. Whoever set this up used a number of different techniques, and then used the substitution cipher for quick messages.”
“When we’re done here, find a quiet place and work on it,” Harding said.
He didn’t like it and neither did I.We had both thought deciphering the contents of the notebook would be a quick fix to a tough problem. It would allow us to bring evidence to Ike of corruption at high levels within the Vichy French regime here, a reason to clean house. But it wasn’t going to be that easy.
“All right, Boyle, tell us what you found out in Bône,” Harding said, leaning back and sipping his coffee.
I told them about Le Bar Bleu, but not the room upstairs, or the fact that I’d burned the place down. I told them about the depot, finding Diana, and how I got the notebook, but not about shooting Mathenet in the foot. I told them about The Crossroads being the code name for the detention center in the desert, to which Villard now had moved the last of his slave laborers and his hijacked supplies, waiting for the highest bidder.Germans, Arabs, the Mafia, everyone on the wrong side of the war or the law was probably itching to get their hands on the new wonder drug. I didn’t tell them about promising Diana I’d get the rest of the prisoners out of his hands, since I had no idea how I could pull that off. By the time I finished figuring out what to leave in and what to leave out, I had only one question left. I refilled my cup with hot coffee and took a doughnut. Reporting is hard work.
“You know the thing that bothered me was how Villard and Bessette got this smuggling operation set up so quickly, as if they had known ahead of time about the hospital being opened here and even about the penicillin and how valuable it would be.”
“Right,” said Harding. “What did you come up with?”
“I think I have it figured out. Bessette’s family is involved in shipping between Algeria, France, and Portugal. I bet they use the ships for smuggling as well. He has a brother, Jules, who lives in Blackpool, England, where the 21st General Hospital was posted before being transported here. It’d be easy for Bessette to send a letter with a sailor going to Portugal with instructions to hand it off there to someone on a neutral vessel headed for England.When that sailor arrives, he simply mails the letter at a local post office.”