Derring-Do

By Andre Jute

“Wild but exciting. A grand job with plenty of irony.”
New York Times

DERRING-DO
is Book 3 of
COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS
the epic saga of ten intertwined Russian and American families who live and die by their love of liberty and the searing passions their fight for freedom arouses in war and peace.
THE GREATEST
SECRET INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN
BEGAN AS ONE MAN’S DREAM

There was David, the Boston patriarch, comrade of “Wild Bill” Donovan and father of the intelligence mandarin Joshua. And Joshua’s friends. The roistering, confessing Richard, the last soldier-priest. Joe-Bob from the Louisiana swamps, who saw the power of politics, an artist with a knife. Hillel, the penniless Jewish refugee from Germany, equally handy with a pistol or a computer. Harvey McQueen, the permanent outsider, the greatest spy of all time, who exposed Kim Philby and dug the Berlin Tunnel into the heart of Russia’s darkest secrets.
And their women. Virginia, the senator’s daughter. Nicole the Resistance fighter. Giselda the German spy. Jen whom the pressure turned into a lush. Belinda the brain. Fiona the faithful.
And there was Hubbell, who saw the final truth. He knew it was greater than power could ever be—and gladly risked the world for it.
***
There were two cars. One took away their jumpsuits and parachutes. They climbed into the other car. David sat beside the driver, a woman. He leaned over the back of his seat. ‘The Contessa de Grubelli drove racing cars before the war but I hope her skill will not be called upon tonight. I asked General Donovan to send me his very best men.’
‘To do what?’ Hillel asked.
‘To take over a country.’
‘It had better be a small country, sir,’ Richard said. ‘There are only three of us.’
‘It is only a small country.’
‘Then between us and the sea we got them surrounded,’ the irrepressible Joe-Bob laughed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andre Jute
• Release date: Feb 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781908369239

Andre Jute

André Jute is a novelist and, through his non-fiction books, a teacher of creative writing, graphic design and engineering. There are about three hundred editions of his books in English and a dozen other languages.He was educated in Australia, South Africa and the United States. He has been an intelligence officer, racing driver, advertising executive, management consultant, performing arts critic and professional gambler. His hobbies include old Bentleys, classical music (on which for fifteen years he wrote a syndicated weekly column), cycling, hill walking, cooking and wine. He designs and builds his own tube (valve) audio amplifiers.He is married to Rosalind Pain-Hayman and they have a son. They live on a hill over a salmon river in County Cork, Eire.

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CONTENTS

Book Jacket

Start Reading DERRING-DO

Family Tree

Glossary

More Books by André Jute & Friends

Book Jacket

Wild but exciting. A grand job with plenty of irony.

New York Times

DERRING-DO

is Book 3 of

COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS

the epic saga of ten intertwined Russian and American families who live and die by their love of liberty and the searing passions their fight for freedom arouses in war and peace.

THE GREATEST

SECRET INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN

BEGAN AS ONE MAN’S DREAM

There was David, the Boston patriarch, comrade of Wild Bill Donovan and father of the intelligence mandarin Joshua. And Joshua’s friends. The roistering, confessing Richard, the last soldier-priest. Joe-Bob from the Louisiana swamps, who saw the power of politics, an artist with a knife. Hillel, the penniless Jewish refugee from Germany, equally handy with a pistol or a computer. Harvey McQueen, the permanent outsider, the greatest spy of all time, who exposed Kim Philby and dug the Berlin Tunnel into the heart of Russia’s darkest secrets.

And their women. Virginia, the senator’s daughter. Nicole the Resistance fighter. Giselda the German spy. Jen whom the pressure turned into a lush. Belinda the brain. Fiona the faithful.

And there was Hubbell, who saw the final truth. He knew it was greater than power could ever be—and gladly risked the world for it.

***

There were two cars. One took away their jumpsuits and parachutes. They climbed into the other car. David sat beside the driver, a woman. He leaned over the back of his seat. ‘The Contessa de Grubelli drove racing cars before the war but I hope her skill will not be called upon tonight. I asked General Donovan to send me his very best men.’

‘To do what?’ Hillel asked.

‘To take over a country.’

‘It had better be a small country, sir,’ Richard said. ‘There are only three of us.’

‘It is only a small country.’

‘Then between us and the sea we got them surrounded,’ the irrepressible Joe-Bob laughed.

Cold War, Hot Passions

Book 3

*

DERRING DO

André Jute

*

CoolMain Press

DERRING DO

Copyright © 2013 André Jute

The author has asserted his moral right

First published by CoolMain Press 2013

This edition published at Smashwords 2014

www.coolmainpress.com

Editor: Lynne Comery

Glossary: Lisa Penington

Cover Photo: Belovodchenko Anton

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

For

Roz and Charles

Cold War, Hot Passions

DERRING-DO

André Jute

*

Glossary

RUSSIAN / TRANSLATION

Bolshoi cheroy / ‘Big Boil’, euphemism for big shot, important personage

Bolshoi drap / Big panic (in the face of German assault in WW2

Chernozhopy / Black asses (racist epithet)

Cheka / Secret Police

Chekist / Member of the Secret Police

Dacha / Country cottage/house/second home

Ekaterinburg / Large city in Russia. Tsar and family executed here in 1918

Electromontor / Torturer (usually with electricity)

Frunze Ulitza / Street in Samara, Russia

Glasnost / Openness and transparency

Glavni protivnik / Main adversary

Gulag / Acronym for the general administration of prison camps

Kholkos / Those engaged in the construction of modern society.

Khulighanism / Hooliganism

Kolkhos / Collective farm

Komsomol / Youth organisation

Koshka-mishka / Cat and mouse, children's game

Kremlin / Official residence of Russian Government

Kulak / ‘Fist’, prosperous peasant

Matushkas / Grandmothers

MVD / Previously Cheka

Nash / One of our own

Nechevo / Nothing

Nomenclatura / The higher officials of the Soviet Union

Perestrelka / Shooting, euphemism for executions

Perestroika / The overcoming stagnation program

Petrograd / Later Leningrad/St Petersburg

Pizda / Female genitalia (perjorative)

Politburo / Political bureau of the Central Committee

Referenture / Country-specific officers-in-charge

Sluzhba / Pejorative slang term for secret police

Smert spionam / Death to Spies

Spetsnaz / Special Commandos

Stukachi / Informers

Tovarich / Comrade

Veruyushchii / Literally believers, meaning the religious

Vosdushna Desontniki Voist / Air assault forces

DERRING-DO

OSS was an exact parallel to SOE, drawing on the ethnic dregs of America for skill in languages and knowledge of foreign countries.

Captain Henry Kerby, MP, quoted in

Phillip Knightley

The Second Oldest Profession

After the birth of the OSS, Donovan was launching operations every hour on the hour through the world, and while his defeats were spectacular and Byzantine, many of the operations were successful, and some of them would rank with the greatest exploits of human daring and bravery in the history of the United States and of World War II.

Anthony Cave Brown

The Last Hero

1

They left for Europe on November 2, 1942. The State Department had finally agreed that David should be called Assistant to the Minister, which was meaningless enough to mean anything. The Atlantic Ocean was stormy and the air above it gave the lumbering Catalina flying boat a bumpy ride. The Germans would not require Operation Torch actually to start before grasping that they must for their own security take direct control of Vichy France. Preparations of such magnitude can never be kept completely secret. Every hour en route was another hour less before the Germans took hold of Vichy France.

In the Azores the plane was held up by the weather. The hours ticked away. David slept on a hard bench, his overcoat pulled over him.

‘How can you sleep at a time like this?’ Richard Drexler demanded.

‘I’m surprised your soldiering hasn’t taught you already.’ David replied, gesturing towards where Hillel still slept.

He noticed Joshua sitting quite still, staring ahead. The boy had not slept. David sat down beside him. He wanted to hug his son but Joshua was not demonstrative.

There had been a wedding, not one whit less impressively organized than if Maria Adams disposed of a year to supervise every detail. The President attended and another 1300 guests. It was the wedding of 1942. One tipsy bridesmaid asked Joshua, ‘What’s ‘ginia got that I haven’t?’

‘She doesn’t giggle,’ Joshua said and was glad when the girl’s beau cut in.

Donovan even spared Joshua an ‘unlimited’ honeymoon which would end when David’s standing at Berne was settled with State, in a day or two they thought. But the couple enjoyed seven days in New Hampshire in late fall: Joshua would never forget the golden glory of the trees, nor afternoon tea with cream and strawberry jam served by one of the Adams great-aunts whom Virginia charmed effortlessly.

Then the telegram came and Virginia cried. ‘I shan’t cry in public,’ she assured him.

‘Better a childless widow than an unmarried mother,’ Joe-Bob Rempton said behind Joshua in their twelfth hour in the Azores. ‘You did the right thing, boy.’

Joshua, turning his head to snap at the man, caught himself. ‘For two years I couldn’t wait to go to war. Now I’m starting to understand why some fellows want to stay home.’

‘Anyhow, I read your bones and you’re going to come through, both of you Adams men.’

‘Bones?’

‘Nigger magic. I had this old boy worked for me. He was from Haiti. He wasn’t exactly black, nor coffee, but sort of grey wrinkles all over. Said you got that way in your coffin. Claimed he was risen from the dead. Made a good cuppajoe. Speaking of which.’

While Joe-Bob was away getting coffee, David asked, ‘Why do you keep that impertinent lout around?’

‘Hillel’s my friend,’ Joshua said, ‘and Joe-Bob comes with Hillel. Simple.’

‘The clever German boy?’

‘Yes. He’s the smartest fellow I have ever met and he reckons a man like Joe-Bob can see anyone through a war. Behind that chatter Joe-Bob’s mean little eyes are always looking over your shoulder for the knife. He took the knife off every one of our unarmed combat instructors and outshot all the so-called sharpshooters. In survival training Hillel and Richard and I lolled in camp and still ate as well as at home because the fish just beg to be caught by Joe-Bob and the animals to be snared by him. He brought us to within ten feet of what must be the last wolf in Maryland. The instructors tried to get us lost and tired and dirty and hungry and thirsty but every time Joe-Bob led us in clean, with our clothes pressed between stones.’

‘Anyhow,’ Joe-Bob continued when he returned with coffee for all of them, ‘this zombie taught me to cast the bones. Any small bones will do. Of course they don’t mean anything in themselves. They just help to concentrate the mind, though some niggers get awful attached to their particular set of chicken bones or even people bones. But it’s like reading tea-leaves. You don’t read the chicken tracks, you turn your eyes inward and read the vibrations the other person sends to your own brain.’

The Anglo-American convoys must already be on their way to North Africa.

‘That,’ David said, ‘is as fine a functional description of the craft of intelligence as I have ever heard. What do you tell people when you know they will die?’

‘I lie.’

2

At Port Bou, the last Spanish station before the frontier with France, David climbed down from the train and checked his watch. The Anglo-American convoys were that moment entering the Mediterranean.

He had picked up some Swiss banking acquaintances on the train journey across Spain and now offered them lunch in a Port Bou bistro he remembered from another journey when he had been hardly more than schoolboy. The talk at table was of banking and skiing and bullfighting and the inconveniences of war.

The restaurant was full and the man who asked if he could sit with them had clearly chosen the Schweitzerdeutsch accent of his compatriots as the safest harbor for himself and his chained briefcase. He was the official Swiss diplomatic courier. ‘The English and the Americans have invaded North Africa,’ he said over a glass of fine old Spanish brandy the proprietor brought out for his free-spending guests.

Later, as he held her coat in the vestibule, his friend’s wife whispered, ‘Don’t do it, Mr Adams. Turn back to Lisbon. Hitler will subjugate all of France immediately.’

It was her friendly tone which decided him. She was, racially, a German. She was constitutionally, as a Swiss, neutral. But she was not speaking only as his friend, she was the friend of America, as her remark made plain. It would be worth taking the chance to reach Switzerland.

By the next morning, as the train chuffed through southern France, he had second thoughts. His diplomatic passport would be no bar to arrest by the Germans. They knew who he was; they had known as early as 1916. There were compromising papers on his person, not least a draft for one million dollars on a bank in Berne. The Germans would soon realize that he had valuable information to impart, not only about the American Navy but about the anti-Nazi plotters he had nurtured, aided and abetted, funded in New York. Being questioned by experts was not a pleasant prospect.

His banker acquaintance invited him into the passage for an after-breakfast cigar. They could see both ways if anyone came. ‘I will say you are with us, at least until it endangers my wife,’ the Swiss said. ‘You are incredibly foolish and should turn back. You would not risk other people’s money like this.’

David nodded, enjoying the good Havana. ‘I am superstitious about trains. Nothing disastrous can happen to me while I am on a rail journey. Once, in 1920 during the inflation of the mark, I was carrying over one million dollars in United States bills to Berlin for my uncle, a banker who allowed no-one more than one mistake. At Cologne the train made its usual ten-minute halt. I left my baggage and the money quite securely locked in my compartment while I strolled on the platform for a breath of fresh air.’

‘And it was broken into and the money stolen?’ the other banker said, fully appreciating the horror of such a loss to a young banker.

‘Worse. I bought a newspaper and, as I turned around, I saw the train rolling out of the station, taking with it my luggage and my career and my future.’

‘Oh, you poor fellow! And from that you worked yourself back to your present eminence? My God, what a story!’

‘I regret it is much simpler than that. Five minutes later the train steamed back into the station. It merely went to a siding to hook on extra carriages. From that day trains have been lucky for me.’

All the same, David decided, if he saw as much as a single Nazi checkpoint in any town he would jump the train and try to return to Spain. Whatever could Donovan have been thinking of when he permitted him to embark at this late date? But David knew he should himself have seen the recklessness of a man with his inside knowledge traveling across enemy-dominated territory. The Gestapo had abducted two SIS officers from neutral Holland. If they knew David Adams was in Unoccupied France, they would enter it and abduct him without awaiting the formality of a complete takeover. He cursed Bill Donovan for the wildness of his mind, and he cursed himself for the desire he damned in others, the urge to lash out personally