“You’re an Army man,” said Smith, “But don’t forget there’s a US Navy out there too, and the Royal Navy right at our shoulder. That’s the opening round of this whole thing. We win that, and our boys will get to Casablanca alright.”
“Burrough is leading the naval contingent,” said Clark, his mood darkening somewhat. “You know what he told me? He said he’d feel lucky if we got half the transports safely to their landing zones. And I’ve heard the same from a number of good men—they say we have a 50/50 chance in this.”
What do they know?” said Eisenhower dismissively. “Gentlemen, let me tell you what our ground commander has been up to lately. He’s gotten religion. Patton is selling this operation like he was going to make a personal profit from the affair. In fact, the other day he came in and wanted to show me his first draft of a demand he’s planning to read the French commander—a demand for his immediate surrender! I like that man’s style. So God help the French when we do get there, because with Georgie out in front leading our boys in, the Frogs won’t have a chance.”
He fished about in his pocket, producing a pair of cigars. “Gentlemen—to our last night in London!”
Americans had staked out a little patch of London since the time when John Adams had visited England in 1785. Grosvenor Square had been developed in 1721 by Sir Richard Grosvenor, 4th Baronet, a member of Parliament at the time and the ancestor of the Dukes of Westminster. There were elegant mansions, and a palatial estate that was later rebuilt with swank hotels. Eisenhower had followed in the footsteps of Adams when he set up his headquarters at Number 20 Grosvenor Square, to coordinate the planning for Torch. There, his meticulous aide, Lieutenant Commander Harry Butcher, USN, had been keeping a diary of these events, noting all important discussions and decisions, but that morning, as they prepared to get down to the long line of cars waiting to take them to the airport, something was troubling Butcher.
A former news man and broadcaster for CBS, Butcher was the perfect man to take on the role of journalist, documenting the doings of Eisenhower and his staff as they worked up to the brink of this momentous opening campaign. But something was wrong.
“Harry?” said Ike, giving him a look. “You get a bad egg for breakfast?”
“No sir… It’s very odd.”
“What’s wrong?”
“The War Diary. You know I’ve been keeping minutes of all the meetings, notating everything in a daily diary for the historical record. But this is strange. I went to make an entry this morning, and a page is missing—page 117.”
“A page missing…” Eisenhower didn’t like the sound of that. “What was on that page?”
Butcher swallowed. “Well sir… That was the day we finalized the objectives for TORCH. I had all those pages on my desk just last night before I bound them so I could pack them. I’m sorry sir, but I’ve looked everywhere.”
“Good Lord. Missing? It’s got to be somewhere close by. Look for it again, and by God, be careful. I had a loose lipped naval officer in here yesterday and I read him the riot act and sent the son-of-a-bitch home. This thing is about to get traction, and security is paramount.”
They looked everywhere, high and low. Eisenhower went through his desk and personal office from top to bottom. They opened every attaché, every brief, any file box that might harbor the missing page. Then orders went out that a search was to be made of all baggage stored for shipment to the Azores. Nobody was going anywhere that morning, and a phone call was made to the airport to stand Eisenhower’s plane down. The page was never found.
A hundred miles southeast of London, the B-Dienst station at Calais was very busy that morning. Unbeknownst to the Allies, the Abwehr had a witless collaborator inside the headquarters facility, just a cleaning woman, and with no real position in the echelon of agents and provocateurs Canaris employed. She had passed through Butcher’s office while carrying out a basket of trash the previous night, saw the page on the floor, and thinking it had been meant for a waste basket, she simply added it to the one she was carrying.
That night a truck came by the dump bin for the facility, and two men got out, about to make off with an unscheduled rubbish haul. These men were not unwitting collaborators, but willful agents in the web Canaris had spun, and by 04:00 they had discovered the unshredded paper and could not believe their eyes. They immediately drove to a quiet hotel on the edge of the city, handing the find off to yet another man, who sent a coded message to B-Dienst.
At dawn, the message was on the desk of Canaris, and he looked at it with a mixture of anticipation and fear in his eyes. There it was, chapter and verse, the landing sites, the units assigned, the list of objectives and expected times when they might be secured. He shook his head, realizing that something had slipped on the other side, a look approaching shock on his face. Only two other men could have seen the document, the signalmen who first received it.
Canaris leaned back, thinking. Then he reached for a secure telephone and rang up Calais. He wanted those men in a car heading for Brussels immediately, and he made arrangements to go there himself. Then he took the message, folded it quietly, and lit a match beneath it over his waste basket. Later that day, the two signalmen would meet a most unexpected fate in Brussels. Canaris was a very careful man, for one had to be very clever to lead the life he was living out at that moment.
He was head of the Abwehr, all German intelligence gathering, and he had just told Keitel that, as far as he was concerned, the Allies still remained incapable of mounting any real offensive threat for 1942. There had not been a whisper or shred of evidence indicating otherwise, and all of his most reliable sources of information had dried up. That was the way he intended to keep things, nice and quiet, for Canaris was secretly in league with British MI-6, even while he also quietly organized a select group of men that would come to be known as the Schwartz Kapelle—the “Black Orchestra.” Together they had been working on a dark fugue in the chorus of the Nazi regime, intending to plot the eventual assassination of Hitler.
Yet no matter how careful Canaris was, other men had looked on him with suspicion for some time. Goring and Raeder had hidden reservations about the man, but it was the sinister head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, that would soon be on his trail. That signal had also been received by the special SS listening post on the coast, and it had been routed to Himmler as well. The pallid faced bespeckled man pressed his lips together as he read it. Then he simply opened a briefcase and slipped it into a special folder, the one that held the transcripts of trans-Atlantic cable intercepts that not even Canaris had been privy to. Himmler had been quietly reading the transcripts of conversation between Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Churchill and others. He knew everything that was about to happen on the coasts of Spain and Morocco now, and he also knew that Canaris had received that same message, even while he had been insisting that no threat was imminent.
He smiled, a dark cold smile that would have frozen the blood of a detention camp prisoner. It was going to be a very busy morning.
Part VII
Charlemagne’s Ghost
“Take action! An inch of movement will bring you closer to your goals than a mile of intention.”
Chapter 19