Dragonfly

The man in brown snapped shut the book he'd been reading and looked up with a stare of disbelief. There was no doubt about it, absolutely none. The five-member team the author described in this obscure little book about clandestine operations in German-occupied France during WWII was the same group he'd sent into Paris in the fall of 1942. Four had made it home, one barely, the last left behind dead, buried in an unmarked grave on French soil. Or so they'd all believed…

Alistair Renault sat very still. Eerily coincidental that he should have read that chapter in The Greatest Ruses of World War II today, almost twenty years after he'd watched the most amazing team of covert operatives he'd ever trained take off in the predawn darkness from England into enemy territory. In three weeks the team was to have met in Paris for a twenty-year reunion. The date, long canceled, had been suggested, insisted upon, by the team's missing member. Alistair wondered if September 23, 1962, was as stuck in the others' minds as it was in his.

He turned to the author page to read again, but with more interest, the credentials of John Peterson that qualified him to write The Greatest Ruses of World War II, a subject on which few had greater knowledge and none more experience than the man in brown. Mr. Peterson's sparse qualifications, the lack of footnotes and a bibliography, and the so-so writing, plus its publication by a little-known university press in 1952, would not have enticed a serious reader of WWII literature to give his war chronicles a try, but the title of the book, set on a low shelf in the local library, had caught Alistair's eye. All through his reading, he had wondered about the validity of the man's research. The acknowledgments page made no mention of persons from whom John Peterson had received assistance or the sources he had consulted. For all the reader knew, the author could have made up the dramatic content and labeled it nonfiction. Alistair did not recognize the names in the book's cast of characters, but he knew that the chapter detailing the clandestine activities of a five-agent team code-named Dragonfly that had operated in Paris during the city's darkest years was factual—at least up until the claim in the shocking climax. He should know: He was the man who'd run the operation. Whether the ruse the author had described at the chapter's conclusion was bogus, he didn't know. He suspected it was, against a flickering hope that it wasn't. He intended to find out.

John Peterson, bald, bespectacled, lackluster, appeared from his photo to have been in his late fifties in 1952. He'd be pushing seventy today and, if still living, was probably retired. Madison, New Jersey, was a little over a four-hour drive away. Before requesting John Peterson's telephone number in New Jersey, of which there must be a slew, he'd try Madison High School, where Peterson had been an American history teacher. Perhaps a talkative school clerk would give him all the information required for Alistair to locate him in Madison, and he would take a little motor trip to the Rose City to introduce himself to John Peterson.

He was indeed fortunate to be referred to a loquacious clerk who had handled student registration for the school since its founding in 1920. "Forty-two years I've been here," she said proudly, and to Alistair's questions replied, "Oh, Mr. Peterson's been gone from Madison for a long time. He and his wife divorced…No, I don't know where he relocated or even if he continued teaching. My guess is that he took off to travel around Europe. He was a big one for Europe."

"Europe…" Alistair mused. "Any special country?"

"He liked France."

Would she know if Mr. Peterson was still alive? Alistair asked.

"We haven't heard of his death, and I believe we would have," the registrar said.

What about his ex-wife? Maybe he could locate Mr. Peterson through her?

A snort. "That hussy disappeared with her paramour right after she took Mr. Peterson for everything he had, poor man."

Alistair thanked her, hung up, and then asked the long distance operator for the number of the book's publisher in Trenton, New Jersey. No such listing was available. The publishing house had probably gone defunct years ago. Alistair was not disheartened, for he was still in touch with an organization that could locate the most elusive persons of interest. He'd place a call to a buddy at the CIA with whom he'd served in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, and put him on to John Peterson's tracks. Meanwhile, he'd telephone the surviving members of Dragonfly to ask them to find and read the last chapter of The Greatest Ruses of World War II.

Surprisingly, he found them all at their places of work on this late Friday afternoon. They were still young and active at forty-two and, though scattered all over the country, had remained in his life and one another's since their first reunion in New York City on the twenty-third of September in 1945, forever bound by ties that transcended blood, lifelong friendships, and career attachments. Initially, it had been their doing, the remaining in touch, unusual in a business where war-weary operatives were only too glad to shake themselves free of their case officers as soon as their missions were over. At first he had resisted continuing the association—the idea of it was so foreign to him—but the team had held fast, and after a while he had responded with pleasure to their phone calls, visits, and invitations to weddings, christenings, holidays, and milestone celebrations. The four who had returned, along with their spouses and children, had become the closest to family he'd ever had.

He telephoned Labrador first. He had never stopped thinking of the members of Dragonfly by their OSS field names, just as they had never dropped his military rank when addressing him. It was always Major, never Alistair.

Labrador met his summary of the last chapter of John Peterson's book with a shocked silence that lasted a long five seconds. Alistair waited as his listener gnawed at the possibility that there might be a grain of truth to the author's preposterous claim, but then protested, "I don't believe it. The others all say they watched the execution from their cell windows. Peterson just made up that cock-and-bull ending to fit his 'ruse' scheme."

"I'm inclined to think the same," Alistair said, "but I want you kids to read it for yourselves and get back to me with your analysis. Meanwhile, I am going to try to track down John Peterson."

"If he's not living, we'll never know."

"There are ways to find out. I'll begin working on it."

"Good grief, Major, what if…his conclusion is correct?"

"Then we'll go from there and follow the path to wherever it leads." (No one said Good grief anymore, a throwback to the '40s, Alistair thought, amused.) "The book is out of print, I'd think. If you and the others can't locate a copy, I'll xerox the chapter and mail it to you."

The others received Alistair's news with the same degree of shocked silence, for the last chapter of The Greatest Ruses of World War II maintained that the missing member of Dragonfly had survived the firing squad that three of the group had witnessed. The execution had been carefully planned to fool the Nazi SS. Comments ranged from an explosive "Nonsense!" to expletives prompted by rage at the cruelty of the author's claim. None of the team members had ever discussed their exploits with anyone nor had they been approached for an interview by a man named John Peterson.

After the last call, Alistair pushed back from the telephone. What if the chapter's conclusion was correct? What if the missing member of Dragonfly was alive and well and living in Europe as the chapter claimed? The execution had occurred on June 11, 1944. It had been eighteen years since three members of the team had witnessed the brutal death of one they had loved and still mourned. What if Dragonfly was not missing one of its wings after all?

There might be one quick and easy way to find out.

The man in brown drew open a desk drawer and pulled from it a thick set of files, each labeled with the names of the candidates who eventually became Dragonfly. He'd absconded with the files after President Harry Truman terminated the OSS in October 1945, putting him out of the job he was born to do until the CIA had snapped him up. If he had left them, the dossiers would only have gathered dust in locked-away, classified government files, their names and missions forever forgotten along with those of other courageous men and women who had risked their lives for their country. In the back of his mind, Alistair had a notion that someday he might write his own book, telling of the bravery and selflessness of five young people who had volunteered for infiltration into the city of light gone dark.

Unable to find a current phone listing for the missing dragonfly's parents, Alistair then dialed the private number of his friend at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, and after speaking with him, took the weighty collection of files to his easy chair, attempting to ignore a pack of Lucky Strikes in the drawer of his armchair table. But the urge to smoke overpowered his doctor's warning that his lungs were a puff away from emphysema. This situation called for a nicotine fix. He settled the bundle on the table, lit up, took off his shoes, placed his socked feet on the chair's ottoman, and reached for the first file.

Along with his other epithets, Alistair had been known as "the ferret" when it came to searching out information on a subject. Flipping through the candidates' intimate details and mental and physical qualifications, he mused on how these collections showed the kids' mettle even then. Prodded by John Peterson's specious, poorly written version of Dragonfly's years in Paris, Alistair thought that he just might decide to write that book after all, tell the derring-do tales of five young Americans code-named Labrador, Liverwort, Lodestar, Limpet, and Lapwing. He would begin in May 1942.