General Coppersmith sent Dugan down to Yokohama to talk to a man who had some special and recent information about the Siberian-Manchurian border, both sides of which were controlled by the Communists, Russians facing Chinese. With Dugan definitely out of the way, he telephoned Colonel Landsiedel to come on over.
Meanwhile he gave Sarah dictation.
"The gamble is atrocious. Smooth professional half-criminal spies, like the Europeans who made a business of espionage, could not be persuaded to go into a half-Arctic wilderness with six divisions of police troops between themselves and the next safe place. And there is no point in asking the Japanese to do a job like this. They might get caught or end up on the wrong side. It had to be an American. Those tenses are all wrong, Sarah. Don't take it down."
"Yes, sir." She started to get up.
"No, don't go away. Just sit. I want somebody to talk to. You'll do." He looked down at the trim feminine figure, at her softly wavy brown hair, her gray-blue-eyes. She made the immaculateness of her uniform seem dainty instead of military.
Coppersmith knew why he was angry. He wanted to go himself. Twenty years ago, he would have fought for the chance. But he couldn't do it, now. He dared not risk capture; his mind was too full of things that the Russians wanted to know. Physically, he could not trot prodigious distances through rain and snow in the high latitudes. He could not move week after week among strangers, his life hanging on each casual word. This man Dugan was valuable, but he was still expendable. And Dugan, though no youth, was much harder and tougher than himself.
"Do you like him, Captain?" said Coppersmith. "You've been palling around with him."
Sarah looked serious. "Very much. He is a very humane sort of person. He likes everybody. But I don't know whether he has ever been candid. He's always on guard."
"That's no wonder," said Coppersmith. He stopped pacing and stood right in front of her. She bent her neck back, looking upward at him and then gave up. She looked at the notebook in her lap. She straightened out an imaginary wrinkle in her skirt. At last the silence compelled her to look all the way up to the general's face. He was standing so close to her that he seemed to reach to the ceiling. He was staring down at her. When she stirred, he became aware of her again.
"Sorry," he said. "So he's on guard. He ought to be. I've told you about him, haven't I?"
More accusingly than she should, she told him he had not.
Coppersmith looked puzzled. "All of this is in compartments. Nobody is supposed to know what's happening in the next box. Up to now Dugan has been working on Japanese problems, and he's been Landsiedel's man. Of course, I heard gossip. It was probably correct, considering who it was that told me."
"Who?"
He glared at her and then, without giving the source, told her the story.
Dugan was known as the odd American who looked enough like a Japanese to work in the Secretariat of the Board of Fleet Admirals and Field Marshals all through the war. He had planted himself there along about the summer of 1941. When Pearl Harbor broke, he risked his life to get a message out; but the message was stopped. No identifiable American couriers showed up, so Dugan had decided that a live Japanese captain — if boneheaded enough — was worth two dead spies any day. He had settled down to work in his assumed Japanese role, successfully mixing up papers, making other people imperil codes, and spreading misunderstanding around Imperial Headquarters. He had had a hand in sending Admiral Yamamoto to his death and, always in the guise of a doggedly loyal Japanese Army captain, he had slipped out bad news from one Japanese official to another until the Imperial Army refused to send air support to the Imperial Navy in the Philippines and the Imperial Navy had retaliated by withholding munitions needed by the Army on Okinawa.
Just before the Japanese surrender, Dugan had received a Japanese decoration. Right after the surrender, when he identified himself to some startled Americans at Atsugi airfield, he had been flown back to the United States. The President had him over to lunch at the White House and somebody in the Pentagon gave him a Legion of Merit, chiefly for having stayed alive.
"And the funniest part of the story was," Coppersmith concluded, "the way Finance refused to pay him when they found he had been drawing Japanese pay all those years. He offered to pay them back his Japanese in yen if they would give him his American pay in dollars. The last I heard of the story — and mind you, it may not be true — Dugan had gotten so mad at everybody that he put in for a Purple Heart because he got gashed during a B-29 raid on Tokyo. The people in Awards and Decorations said he couldn't get a gash counted if the Americans inflicted it on him, and Dugan stumped them on that by arguing that he had been hurt by a Japanese — by mistake. He didn't get the ribbon. Funny thing — I think he wanted it."
Colonel Landsiedel arrived promptly. He was a tall, slim young man who had been one of the Assistant Military Attaches in Tokyo just before the war. It had been his privilege to run one courier message to Dugan in 1941. He had expected to find a seedy half-caste in some unsavory barroom. Instead, he was ushered into the presence of an incredibly pompous Japanese captain who lectured him on Japanese military security, insisted on inspecting all of Landsiedel's papers while a dozen other Japanese officers hung over his shoulder, and ended up by slipping the reply message into Landsiedel's wallet as he returned it. Then he had Landsiedel marched out of a Japanese division HQ under MP guard, shouting rude things after him in bad English.
Landsiedel that very day became a Dugan hobbyist and found there were several other men in the Army who shared his interest in collecting stories about Dugan. When Landsiedel came in with the Occupation and found Dugan not only alive, but decorated by the Japanese, he almost wept with the sheer artistic pleasure the sight gave him, Landsiedel, as an intelligence officer.
Landsiedel spoke fair Japanese and found himself Dugan's immediate superior. He set Dugan to tasks worthy of Dugan's talents and, before Coppersmith called Dugan in, Landsiedel had had Dugan seeking spiritual peace in the quietude of a remote Buddhist monastery. It just happened that one of the co-priests was a Japanese Field Marshal whom the Japanese government — from either ignorance or charity — had listed as dead.
Landsiedel gave a glowing account of Dugan's exploits, winding up with:
"He's the greatest actor I've ever seen or heard of, General. He doesn't use make-up or costumes or anything like that. He can just work himself into a role till he feels like it from the inside out. He can be old or young, Japanese or American, a professional man or a breezy workingman, any time he feels like it. People believe him. If he had happened to turn crook, he'd have been the greatest confidence man of all time. He's anybody, General. Mr. Anybody."
The general waved the eulogies aside.
"That's all right, Colonel. I'll take your word on it. Is the man loyal, or just clever?"
"He's pathologically loyal, General. Because of his family background."
"What is his family background?"
"I thought you knew, sir. Half-Irish and half-Aleut."
"Half-what?" snapped Coppersmith. "I thought he was one of those American Japanese what-you-may-call-ems?"
"Aleut. Aleutian Islander. Sort of like American Indians or Eskimos, sir. I don't really know. They're Christian — Russian Orthodox. The Russians converted them before we bought Alaska. Dugan once told me that his father was Catholic and his mother Russian Orthodox but that he had joined the Presbyterian Church."
Coppersmith said, "Never mind the religion. How could anybody get to be an Irish Aleut? It doesn't seem possible to me."
Landsiedel explained. "Dugan's father was an Irishman from Minneapolis. He went up in the Yukon gold rush and didn't find any gold. He went to the Andreanof group in the Aleutians when he got the idea of starting a fox farm—"
"Fox farm?"
Sarah interrupted. "People do raise foxes, for their skins. They bring terrific prices in the fur market."
"That's right, Captain," said Landsiedel. "Only Dugan's father met this native girl and married her. When the baby was still tiny, the parents died in a typhus epidemic. They were both buried two inches above the frost line. The baby was taken back to Minneapolis and brought up there."
Coppersmith looked out of the window. "Minneapolis doesn't seem to be a very good place to become an Imperial Japanese Army officer. How did he learn to pass for a Japanese?"
"He never really told me, but I met a man who knew him in high school and at the University of Minnesota. Dugan looked even more Oriental when he was a boy than he does now. Other children nicknamed him 'Jap' Dugan. That got him so thin-skinned that he took up the study of Japanese in college. You can't ever get through explaining that you're half-Irish and half-Aleut."
"I'm not, Colonel," said Coppersmith glumly. "Hudson Valley Dutch."
"That was a figure of speech, sir. What I meant was that—" Landsiedel looked puzzled and sympathetic. "If a man really is Irish and Aleut, what can he do? He can't just settle down to being the hometown preacher or lawyer. And neither Ireland nor the Aleutians meant a damned thing to Dugan, personally. He looked like a Japanese and he felt like an American. So he joined the Army, figuring we could use him. He got a direct commission long before the war, on the strength of his Japanese studies."
"You have his Army record in black and white?"
"We can account for it, General. All except the war, when he was here. And Dugan doesn't know it, but two of the locked-up Japanese lieutenant generals have given him a very good character. They didn't even know that he was an American."
"How's that?" interjected Coppersmith.
"One of them said that the idiot Hayashi mislaid the papers for the Okinawa logistic plans and the other testified that Captain Hayashi made everybody nervous by keeping in touch with a nincompoop Imperial prince they had as chairman for some do-nothing planning board. The regular generals and admirals would get a decent plan made up without the prince having a chance to muddle it, and then Hayashi would tip off the prince and everything would get held up for six months. Nobody could put a finger on Hayashi, because the prince might go off to the palace and tattle. They didn't know that their 'Hayashi' was an American. I'm satisfied with what he did here from Pearl Harbor on…" Landsiedel unconsciously looked out of the window at the half-rebuilt ruins of Tokyo.
"You're defending him," said Coppersmith. "Why are you defending him?"
"I guess I am." Landsiedel smiled wryly. "Some people back in the Pentagon thought that Dugan shouldn't have sat on his — shouldn't have just hung around Tokyo. They said that he should have made a run for China or Russia after getting his hands on everything he could."
"And why didn't he?"
Sarah spoke up, "I don't see that he could have gotten away from Japan. It wouldn't have been easy for a Japanese officer to desert. Did you ever hear of one who did?"
Coppersmith ignored her question and kept his eyes on Landsiedel.
Speaking very deliberately, Landsiedel said, "That wasn't Dugan's way of doing things. He told me that most spies fail because they forget their primary mission—"
Landsiedel hesitated long enough to get their full attention, and then went on, " — which consists of staying alive. He said he could have gotten away from the Japanese but he was not at all sure that he could get through the Russians or the Chinese. They might have shot him. He could do something in Tokyo. He did not know what he would be worth if he started out for Washington and lost two years or lost his life in the process. That brings me to this mission, General. Don't expect him to be orthodox. He'll float where others would sink. He'd rather come back alive and report failure than not come back at all. You can't push Dugan."
"Sounds timid to me," said Coppersmith, with an ironic curl to his lip showing that he did not really mean the remark.
"Timid?" Landsiedel was aghast. "No, no. Nothing like that. But you can't hurry Dugan. When he himself feels like hurrying, the Irish part of him gets to working and he goes through obstructions like a shotgun slug through peanut brittle. But if there's no point in hurrying, he takes his time like his mother's people. I think he could wait a hundred years if he had to."
"I can't wait. Not about Atomsk," said Coppersmith.
"He knows it. He'll go at it, lopsided. He will improvise. He doesn't believe in plans. He says that every day of spying involves thinking about six thousand choices ahead, and that if every man tried to multiply all the six thousand choices to their mathematical aggregate, he'd freeze like a catatonic. Dugan says that the only way to stay alive is to float with the run of things. It's gotten him places nobody else ever reached."
"Such as—?"
"He visited Nazi Germany in 1939 on leave, just before he settled down in Tokyo. He went on his own money and his own time. When he got there he introduced himself as a representative of the Japanese secret police. Right in Gestapo headquarters. The Germans showed him all their engineering designs for the proposed murder camps and Dugan copied out a set. He thought that the White House might want to release them, off the record. Nobody believed him in Washington."
"What's so wonderful about that?" said Coppersmith. "The War Department hadn't told him to do it."
"Don't you see it, sir? You do, don't you, miss?" He waved his arms at them. "He goes into Germany on a regular American passport, without any cover or plans or preparations. He talks his way into Gestapo headquarters, chums around with the whole pack of them, takes his reports to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, who was a little mystified but who accepted the stuff anyhow — much good it did Japan! — and then walked out of Germany under his own power with the Gestapo congratulating him on his wonderful set of forged American papers. Has anybody else you ever heard of done anything like that, sir?"
"I've heard a lot of things in my time, Colonel. How will he do on Atomsk?"
"He knows Russian pretty well. He can pass for some kind of Soviet Asiatic subject. He speaks Chinese badly but fluently. He knows perfect Japanese, excellent German, and several other assorted languages. He'll get as near as anybody could. It's not a matter of comparing him to anybody else. He has one chance in a hundred. Nobody else has a chance at all."
Sarah couldn't help looking up at Coppersmith. This was so much like what the general himself had been saying to her that she wanted to see how he took it.
Coppersmith stood up. Landsiedel stood up, too. Coppersmith waved him back into his chair with an imperious gesture.
Coppersmith said, "Your man is expendable this time. Tell him I don't want the one-percent chance. I want success. Nothing but success. He can float all he wants to; he can run the show himself. But he must reach Atomsk, study it, let the Russians know that somebody has been there, and come back here. By this coming summer. If he can't do that, he needn't bother."
"Bother? You mean, bother to go? Who else would you send?" Landsiedel tried to rise to protest, but Coppersmith dropped an authoritative hand on the colonel's shoulder. The yellow leonine eyes blazed as Coppersmith said, with judicial and terrible distinctness:
"Tell him not to bother to come back at all. He can die. You would, Colonel, for a job like this. I would, too. He's no better than the rest of us. Atomsk matters more than our whole army in Japan."
Sarah was on her feet, struggling for words to protest.
Coppersmith snapped at her: "Sit down, Sarah. I know what I am doing. I'm going to give these orders to Dugan, myself."
Landsiedel murmured, "Will he take them?"
Coppersmith glared at him, "Take them? He's got to take them."
"Sir," said Landsiedel, "if he gets near Atomsk, who's going to follow him to make him obey? Don't pin him down, General. He'll do better if you give him leeway."
"Colonel Landsiedel," said General Coppersmith, "do you think that you and this girl and I can originate these orders? This is the American nation commanding. Dugan must succeed or fail. If he fails, others will follow. With the same orders. Till we reach Atomsk."
Coppersmith dropped his hand from Landsiedel's shoulder and sat on the edge of the desk. He opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness and finality.
Landsiedel stood up. "Yes, sir," he said.
It was then that they both noticed Captain Lomax. Completely silent, she was weeping. They could see the tears roll down her cheeks and see the effort she was making to regularize her breathing. She broke away from them and ran out of the room.