Chapter 17

“Name please!” asked the snippy young thing at the Navy Department Reception Desk.

“R. L. Grant,” I told her. “To see Admiral Ballister. By appointment,” I added.

“Have you any identification, Mr. Grant?” she inquired.

“Of course not. Tell the Admiral that Z-2 has no identification. He will understand.”

She looked at me very dubiously but dialed a telephone and muttered into it. Suddenly she cackled, “You don’t say? Sure! I’ll send him right up.”

She beamed at me. “The Admiral is expecting you, sir,” she said. “Here’s your badge. Will you please sign this form?”

She thrust a blue-and-white celluloid saucer at me, with a number on it, and passed a mimeographed form, which I duly signed “Robert E. Lee, C.S.A.,” and which she duly accepted and filed. A Marine sergeant appeared out of the shadows and led me up a flight of stairs and along several unevenly paved concrete floors to an office where a battery of Waves and Junior Lieutenants promptly took me in charge.

Admiral Ballister was a civilian’s dream of a Navy Officer--”every other inch a sailor,” as we used to say in the Pacific--with a ruddy face tanned by ocean winds or rye whisky, grizzled hair, incipient jowls, a “gruff old sea-dog” manner and a hearty hand-clasp.

“Glad to see you Grant,” he told me. “I’ve been checking up on Z-2 since McIntosh called. You boys have been doing one hell of a swell job on your security. There’s not a word about you in our files.”

“Z-2, Admiral,” I replied modestly, “is forbidden by the terms of the Executive Order setting us up to put itself on record. We have no identification, we get no glory, but a Z-2 agent was in the Jap squadron that attacked Pearl Harbor and one of our men was military secretary to Rommel in North Africa. At least two of our agents hold the rank of General in the Red Army. As you know, sir, we report directly to the President, and always verbally. Nothing on paper.”

“I know, I know,” the Admiral agreed wistfully. “McIntosh is usually all wet”--he paused for me to register a flash of strictly subordinate glee at his meteorological witticism--”but he gave me a fill-in on the fine job you did on the Alaska case.”

“I’m afraid I worried your O.N.I. group in New York, sir!”--in addressing an Admiral, the “sir!” should not be slurred but should come out with a touch of whip-crack, if you wish promotion in the U.S. Navy--”They almost penetrated my cover as W. S. Tompkins, a Bedford Hills stock-broker with offices in Wall Street, and reported me to the F.B.I.”

“Oh!” Ballister seemed relieved. “So you are Tompkins. No wonder Church Street was worried. Of course, they didn’t know you were Z-2.”

“Naturally I couldn’t tell them, sir!” I confided. “I was due to report to President Roosevelt at Warm Springs next Monday but since his death, I have to report to you, according to previous White House instructions. The new President hasn’t had time to get orientated on Z-2 operations and this Alaska business can’t wait, sir!”

Ballister did some dialing, asked a few terse questions--gruff old sea-dog style--over the telephone and then turned to me.

“It’s lucky for you, Grant, you didn’t try to report to the White House. The Secret Service might have nabbed you,” he said. “The Naval Aide tells me that all Roosevelt’s papers and records have been impounded for the Roosevelt Estate under the law and that it may be weeks before they are untangled. Now, tell me about the Alaska. We’ve had no report on her since early on the second, when she cleared Adak.”

“Before I report to you, sir!” I replied, “I’d rather you ask me a few questions about Alaska and Operation Octopus. In that way you can satisfy yourself that I know what I’m talking about.”

“Good!” the Admiral grunted. “Wish O.N.I. had as much sense as Z-2. Save a lot of time. When was Alaska commissioned?”

“Late in February, sir! At Bremerton. Trial run in March to Pearl Harbor, back to San Diego for fueling and up the coast to Bremerton again. Latest U.S. light carrier in the Pacific. A sneak-job. 38 knots at full speed, 8,000 mile cruising radius. Twenty-four planes--eight light bombers, sixteen fighters. Anti-aircraft and radar out of this world.”

Ballister studied the map of the Pacific across the room from his desk. “Who is her commander and what’s his nickname?”

“Captain Horatio McAllister, U.S.N., sir! Commonly known as Stinky McAllister. No reason assigned for ‘Stinky, ‘ at least so far as reserve officers knew.”

“Stinky? That’s because he once used perfumed soap before going to the Midshipmen’s Ball in Washington,” the Director of Naval Intelligence informed me. “It was his second year at Annapolis. Who was Stinky’s exec?”

“Commander B. S. Moody, sir!” I answered. “His nickname is suggested by his initials--a roly-poly sort of guy and hipped on boat-drills and all that.”

Ballister glanced at a list on his desk. “Her chaplain?” he asked.

“Father Eamon Devalera O’Flaherty, begob and begorra, savin’ your riverence,” was my reply. “A grand man and a good priest. God rest his soul.”

Ballister wriggled in his chair with some discomfort, as though he felt he ought to stand at attention or order a volley fired over the ship’s side.

“What about Commander Chalmis?” he inquired, with an air of baiting an elephant-trap for me. “What job did he do?”

“Chalmis was not a commander, sir!” I told him. “He was a civilian. He had some kind of a thorium bomb and the chief job he did was to use it to blow up the ship. The mission was to drop it on Paramushiro before the Army could get going with its uranium bomb. Chalmis got cold feet, sir! when he thought of the carrier instead. He argued that the Navy Department would conclude that thorium was unreliable and drop the atomic project until the end of the war.”

Ballister leaned back in his chair and gave careful consideration to the design of his Annapolis Class pin. After a long pause, he swung around in his swivel-chair and faced me squarely.

“Grant,” he barked, “I’m going to ask you an unofficial question. You don’t have to answer it. I have no authority over Z-2 anyway, but this is mighty important to the Navy.”

“Go ahead, sir!” I told the Admiral, “if I can’t answer it I’ll tell you why.”

“Do you believe,” the Chief of O.N.I. asked slowly, “that Chalmis could have been inspired by Another Government Agency to make a failure of--” he paused.

“Operation Octopus, sir?”

“Right! Could Chalmis have deliberately destroyed Alaska and sacrificed his life in the interest of General Groves and the Army’s bomb?”

Groves was a new name to me but I took it in my stride. I looked the Admiral full in the eye--a thing which Admirals rate along with a snappy “Sir!” as proof of initiative, intelligence and subordination on the part of their inferiors.