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Chapter 10. London, 1942: Good Time Robby

Major Robert Malone, who was just having a cigar and brandy in his London office with Colonel Ivor Crane and Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, understood the strategic importance of rubber. He came from a family of rubber barons. As his older brother Teddy had once remarked, they were born with a rubber spoon in their mouths, the Malones of South Carolina and Arizona. What neither Donovan nor Crane could know was that Rob Malone had a serious problem, and he needed a drastic solution—fast.

Donovan had recently formed the Office of Strategic Services, which he now headed under the aegis of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was the belated United States answer to the mother country’s vaunted intelligence services like MI-6. Tall, graying, priestly, with a wild but melancholy look in his eyes, he was certainly eminent and gray enough to be the pope of this new spookery.

Ivor Crane was an amateur spy master, a friend of Allen Dulles and other dabblers in the new American sophistication now that the former colonies were becoming a world power while the old countries of Europe had yet another one of their senseless bloodbaths. Also tall, but younger, darker haired, a big eager child, sincere without sacrificing a certain carefully weary worldliness, he had stocked the empty oak shelves of his Lambeth offices with at least a thousand volumes of U.S., Canadian, and British as well as Continental reference books, classics, everything from Hugo and Goethe to Twain and Hawthorne, with Rabelais and Paine in-between, and of course all the dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference works to populate an effective spymaster’s office. Crane had been badly wounded in North Africa, and now had an artificial, wooden left forearm and hand, not to mention an achy left elbow that he rarely complained about.

Robert Malone, at 30, was the youngest of the three. He had already seen service in North Africa with Montgomery in a liaison capacity at El Alamein and Tobruk, and taken a piece of shrapnel in one shoulder. Luckily the wound had healed during a month-long convalescence behind the lines in Rabat, Morocco. The experience had given him a taste for Africa that Donovan and Crane now wanted to exploit.

Besides their tailor-fitted dark olive jackets with polished cross-shoulder leathers and expensive pistol belts, the three men offering each other a toast of pre-war French Armagnac from crystal snifters, while holding the driest and most fragrant Cuban cigars, had this in common: all three had graduated from elite colleges. Their leader, Bill Donovan, was a World War I hero and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient after being gravely wounded in battle. At least one movie (“The Fighting 69th,” an acclaimed 1940 production starring Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney) had been made at least indirectly about him and his Irish-American regiment. Born into an Irish family of modest means, he had put himself through Columbia University and practiced law before assuming command of the 69th. Now, as FDR’s premier spymaster, he was recruiting the best and brightest from the top U.S. universities. Malone, an Irish American (Yale, ‘35) and Crane (Princeton, ‘28) were no exceptions. It earned O.S.S. the soubriquet ‘Oh So Social.’

This evening, aromas of cigar smoke, brandy, and prime bluish gin for later filled the bookish London rooms housing Crane’s O.S.S. division. Rain dribbled down the windows. The three men turned from their laughter and conversation about New York and Boston society to rumors about some ominous work being done on a new weapon of unimaginable destructive potential.

“It’s all a theory as yet,” Donovan said, sitting on the corner of Crane’s desk swinging his leg.

“Sounds a bit far-fetched,” Crane said. “What is this thing called?”

“An energy bomb,” Donovan said. “That’s all I know. Uses heavy elements somehow to release the energy in the atom. Hard to believe that a piece of it the size of a coffee can could devastate a small city, but that’s what I am told.” He looked at Malone. “All strictly hush-hush, mind you, though the intelligent reading man could find it in the newspapers before the War.”

Robert Malone felt as if he had unfinished business in Africa. He could still hear the call of the muezzin to prayer, and see the minarets of a mosque etched against a purple desert evening sky along with camels and palm trees. Like Richard Burton and other explorers before him, he was hooked on the magic of Africa. Donovan had read Malone’s file and recruited him for the job that was about to befall him. “Rob, I need you down in black Africa. Down in the Belgian Congo, in a place called Katanga Province. That’s where the world’s prime uranium comes from, and I need a competent man on the ground there to keep me informed.”

“Uranium,” Ivor Crane said with a shudder. “Sounds ghastly, doesn’t it? “

Malone could see the image. “Dark, mysterious, ungodly.” He held up the watch on his wrist to Donovan, asking: “Does it glow in the dark like this?”

Donovan shrugged patiently and honestly. “I don’t know. I understand if it’s concentrated enough it will. It’s radioactive, that’s for sure, so don’t go bathing in it or anything.”

Crane said: “I hear that those men who paint the watch dials are all getting lip and tongue tumors, have you heard that? They take their brushes like so, and rub them in their tongue to put a good point on them before dipping them in the uranium. Makes their mouths glow in the dark. Then they all get sick.”

“Well,” Donovan said, “it’s nothing to mess around with, that’s for sure. All we really need to know, Rob, is what the production statistics are and where the stuff is going. There has been a glut on the market for at least a decade—how many watch dials can there be? The Belgians own the Congo, and the Nazis own the Belgians. However, the Nazis are almost finished in Africa, and the Belgians tend to act on their own—we are getting ready to openly station troops down there, regardless of all the Nazi sympathizers, and I want you to keep an eye on them for us, Rob.”

“Sure,” Malone said self-confidently. He’d spent parts of his childhood in Malaya and other faraway rubber-producing tropical places that most people could only dream about. The idea of keeping tabs on yet another esoteric substance being gathered in a tropical locale seemed like more of the same to him. He would have no qualms being stationed there or anywhere else, as long as the women, the liquor, and the cigarettes were first-rate, along with the betting.

“You might,” Donovan added, “keep an eye on our good friends the Soviets while you’re at it. We need them almost as much as they need us, and there is one school of philosophy which says that after we beat the Nazis we’ll have to watch our backs about Uncle Joe Stalin.”

“I’ve heard that,” Ivor Crane said with bland curiosity. “Anything to that, Sir?”

Donovan shrugged. “Hard to say. Russia is in ruins, almost one fifth of her population dead, her industry destroyed, rail capabilities gone, devastation everywhere. They’ll need a century to recover from all the damage. I think we’d do well to focus on our primary adversaries right now, the Axis.” He added. “Bob, you’ll keep an eye on the uranium that Uncle Sam is lusting after. That may take you as far south as Capetown or as far north as the Kasbah. Do what you feel you have to do, get a solid foothold down there for us, and keep me informed through secure channels.”

Crane snapped the fingers of his hale right hand and jiggled his hips. “Begin the Beguine!”

Malone laughed. A bachelor, he thought about the Belgian women stuck in the jungle. He’d done well with British girls stuck in places like Ghana just waiting for a fine young English-speaking fellow to come along with charm and breeding. “So when do I leave?” he asked Donovan.

The general’s dour mien broke into a smile. “How about Monday?”

“That will be great with me, Sir.” Rob Malone grinned back. What he doubted even Donovan knew was that he was awash in gambling debts more than ever in his life. Gambling was his passion and his weakness, more even than women. Women might come easy to him, but Lady Luck kept playing him bad. Maybe down there he’d find the angle he needed, that new spin on things, to pull out of the hole he was in and get himself flush again.