Death and Honor

[SIX]

Army Security Agency Facility Vint Hill Farms Station Near Warrenton, Fauquier County, Virginia 1940 13 July 1943

As the black 1942 Buick Roadmaster approached the small frame guard shack, floodlights came on and a large military policeman—one of three on duty— came out of the shack. He held up his right hand in an unmistakable Stop right there! gesture.

When the car had stopped, he walked to the driver’s window.

“You didn’t see the sign, ‘Do Not Pass—Restricted Military Area’?”

“We’re expected, Sergeant,” Colonel A. J. Graham said from the backseat of the Buick.

The MP sergeant shined his flashlight in the backseat and saw a well-dressed civilian.

“My name is Graham, Sergeant.”

“Colonel Graham?” the MP asked dubiously.

“That’s right.”

The flashlight went off.

“Lieutenant!” the MP sergeant called.

Graham saw a barrel-chested young Signal Corps officer push himself off the hood of a jeep where he had been sitting. He marched purposefully toward the Buick.

“Is there a problem?” the lieutenant asked in a booming voice.

“Sir, there’s a civilian in the backseat of the Buick, says he’s Colonel Graham.”

“ ‘Civilian’?” the lieutenant parroted, making it clear he thought that what he had been told was highly unlikely.

He marched to the Buick and boomed, “Colonel Graham?”

“That’s right.”

“We expected a Marine colonel,” the lieutenant boomed.

“And that’s what you got,” Graham said, and held out his identity card.

The lieutenant examined the card, and then Graham, very carefully.

Then he handed the card back, came to attention, saluted, and boomed, “Good evening, sir. Sir, I am Lieutenant McClung, the officer of the day. If the colonel will have his driver follow me, I will take you to the colonel, who is waiting for you, sir.”

“Thank you,” Graham said.

“The colonel will understand that when I said we expected a Marine colonel, we expected one in uniform, sir.”

“That was reasonable,” Graham said. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

“To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure, Colonel?” Colonel Raymond J. Scott, Signal Corps, commanding Vint Hill Farms Station, asked as he shook Graham’s hand.

“I didn’t mean to make waves, Colonel,” Graham said. “But I had to come out here as soon as I could, and I’d never been here before, so I asked our commo officer, Colonel Lemes, to set it up.”

“Well, what he did was call the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, and his deputy called here and said you—Colonel Graham of the Marines and the OSS—was on his way out here and to give him—you—whatever you wanted. So I sent Iron Lung to the gate—”

“ ‘Iron Lung’?” Graham chuckled. “I can’t imagine why you call him that.”

“He does give new meaning to the phrase ‘voice of command,’ doesn’t he? Actually, he’s a fine young officer.”

“That was the impression I formed,” Graham said. “He’d have made a fine drill instructor at Parris Island.”

“Actually, before he came here, he was a tactical officer at Signal Corps OCS at Fort Monmouth.”

“What was that, the round peg in the round hole?”

Scott laughed.

“So how can we help the OSS?” Scott said, waving Graham into a chair.

“I’ve got a team in the field that needs better radios than they have to communicate with Washington.”

“Where are they?”

“South America. They’ve asked for six Collins Model 295 Transceivers.”

“Well, they know what to ask for, but . . .”

“There’s a problem?”

“How skilled is your commo sergeant?”

“He’s a long-service Navy chief radioman. About as smart as they come. As a matter of fact, he’s about to be commissioned.”

“Then no problem. They’re great radios, but they need people who know what they’re doing when they go down. And, as matter of fact, to set them up. When do you want them?”

“Would tomorrow morning be too soon?”

“You’re serious?”

“Within the next couple of days.”

“How are you going to ship them?”

“By air. In an airplane that’s also going down there.”

“Can you give me forty-eight hours?”

“That would work fine.”

“Happy to be able to oblige,” Colonel Scott said. “Where do you want them?”

“We’re in the National Institutes of Health complex on—”

“I know where it is. I’ll have Iron Lung personally check them out and deliver them himself.”

“I’m really grateful, Colonel. Thank you.”

“Anything else the Army Security Agency can do for the OSS?”

“No. That’s about it,” Graham said. Then he changed his mind. “This is a wild hair . . .”

“ASA deals with wild hairs all the time.”

“Cryptography.”

“You came to the right place. What’s the problem?”

“When we augmented the team down there, we sent an Army M-94 cylindrical cipher device with them, thinking it would be an improvement over the hand encryption they’re using. El Jefe refuses to use it. He says it’s too easy to break.”

“El Jefe? The Chief?”

Graham, smiling, nodded.

“Well, he’s right. Who’s liable to intercept?”

“The Germans, most likely. Others.”

“Apropos of nothing whatever, Colonel, does the term Enigma mean anything to you?”

“Yes, it does.”

“I thought it might. Well, the bad news is we don’t have anything nearly as good. The M-94 is pretty primitive. We have another one called the SIGABA, which is almost as good, as safe as the one whose name is classified.”

“We have those at several places,” Graham said. “But when I asked Colonel Lemes, he said that not only are they awfully expensive—”

“Is that a problem for you?” Scott interrupted.

Graham shook his head and went on. “—but that they are large, heavy, delicate—apparently they’ve never successfully dropped one by parachute— difficult to operate, and a mechanical nightmare.”

“Unfortunately, he’s right. About the only place they work reliably, outside of fixed bases, is aboard ship.”

“How common is that? I mean, would they have one aboard a destroyer?”

“What destroyer? Some do, some don’t.”

“The USS Alfred Thomas, DD-107,” Graham said.

“You want me to find out?”

“Could you?”

“Sir,” Lieutenant McClung boomed from the door. “I have—more precisely Lieutenant Fischer has—the information the colonel requested vis-à-vis the SIGABA aboard a Navy vessel.”

“Is he out there with you?”

“Yes, sir,” McClung boomed.

“Bring him in.”

The two young officers marched into Colonel Scott’s office.

Second Lieutenant Leonard Fischer, Signal Corps, was nowhere as large as First Lieutenant McClung.

“What did you find out, Len?” Scott asked.

“Sir, there is one aboard the Alfred Thomas. My source in the Navy says he doesn’t know if it’s operable, and probably is not, because the chief radioman who knew how to operate it and repair it was taken ill and removed from the ship somewhere in South America—Argentina or Uruguay, he wasn’t sure.”

Colonel Scott and Colonel Graham looked at each other, but neither responded directly.

“Lieutenant, let me ask you a question,” Graham said. “What would you say the chances are that a SIGABA could be shipped about five thousand miles on one airplane—I mean, it would be loaded aboard the airplane in Washington and off-loaded at its destination, not go through depots, et cetera—without suffering irreparable damage?”

“It would need a lot of work, sir,” Lieutenant Fischer said, after thinking about it. “Five thousand miles in an airplane is a lot of vibration, and there would be, I’d guess, half a dozen landings and takeoffs to make it that far. But irreparable? No, sir. Presuming the parts were available, and we know pretty well which parts will fail, and there was someone who knew what he was doing to make the repairs, it could be made operable.”

“Thank you,” Graham said, and looked at Scott.

“That’ll be all for right now, but stay close,” Scott said.

“Yes, sir,” McClung boomed, drowning out whatever Fischer replied.

Scott looked at Graham after the two had left.

“Did I ever tell you, Colonel, that in addition to everything else we do here, some of us read minds?”

“Read mine,” Graham said.

“How long will Lieutenant Fischer be on temporary duty with you?”

"It’s important, Colonel, or I wouldn’t ask,” Graham said. “Can I have him for thirty days?”