Chapter 25: Camp X

What did that note Major Blake handed us say? That’s secret!

I knew the place as Camp X. I spent a few weeks there just after Pearl Harbor before being sent to somewhere in England and then on to France in support of the Dieppe disaster. The place was unrecognizable. It might not have been “Camp X.” “Tar paper shacks” had been replaced by sturdy modern permanent structures of concrete. Billie and I had been picked up at a movie theater in Alexandria, Virginia, and driven around for hours. The car contained two men in business suits that they wore like military uniforms. No words were exchanged during the drive. I noticed that we had escort vehicles. We were taken into a room and strip-searched. We were given hospital gowns that tied in the back and hospital slippers. Then they handcuffed us!

“Don’t separate us,” Billie whined. “We’ll be good!”

Of COURSE they separated us! Fortunately, we were not drugged or tortured or the routine interrogation routines. First, we were in different interrogation rooms. Second, I was chained by my ankles to the bolted-down steel chair and then a chain was locked to my handcuffs and to the bolted-down table. I was given a pencil and legal pad.

“Write down everything you did and everyone you met over the past 24 hours,” I was told. I asked for the correct time before outlining my statement. I wrote, requested sharp pencils as needed, and wrote some more. I even sketched the café where I murdered four men. I stubbornly stuck to the facts and refused speculation. If I didn’t see it myself, I left it out. Hours later I laid my head on the table and closed my eyes while someone read my papers. “How can you sleep at a time like this?”

“Just lucky, I guess,” I slurred without opening my eyes. I was relaxing because interrogators get stupid and impatient. Some are just sadists. I felt someone at my ankles releasing the restraints, then releasing my handcuffs.

“Behave yourself and come with me.” The man was wearing a brown suit. I felt dizzy, slightly nauseated, so it wasn’t an act when I leaned against the man as I stood. I determined that he wasn’t armed. “Did you just frisk me, Jackie Dunn?”

“Yes, sir.” Why lie?

“When did you eat last?”

“The Fifth at eleven central time,” I said. “I lost track of time. What’s today?”

“it’s Friday and noon,” the man grumbled. “I’m told that you don’t complain.”

“No, sir,” I explained that complaining was counterproductive. “The mission is my priority.”

“Billie told me that you have an accelerated metabolism to support physical enhancements,” he said. “Let’s get you something to eat. A 24 hour fast for you is like three or four days for normal people.”

No wonder I was feeling depleted. Billie was waiting for me in the dining hall.

“Drink this,” Billie handed me a thick malted milk. “Sip slowly so you don’t get sick.

“Ed, thank you. You saved Jackie’s life. She can literally starve in under ten days,”

“Bring that along,” the man, Ed, directed.

We walked down a corridor. Sipping through a straw, I only managed to drink a third before we reached a vault door. A uniformed Marine sergeant stopped me and reminded me that food and drink were prohibited.’

“On my authority, Sergeant,” Ed said.

“Yes, General,” the Marine saluted, then pressed a buzzer. A quick exchange and the vault door opened into a small room. The vault door closed, and after a delay the inner door opened.

“In that office,” Ed ordered.

“Jackie will need another malt in an hour,” Billie said as she untied my gown.

“What are you doing?” Ed asked.

“You need to see us naked,” Billie said as she removed my gown. “Besides, I’m more comfortable naked. What’s this briefing about anyway?”

“Sit down,” Ed ordered as he closed the office door behind us and closed the blinds. He walked around the desk, fished for a key from his coat pocket, and unlocked a door. “This is compartmented information classified top secret. You are not to tell Major Blake any of this. He already has been told what he needs to know.

“Two operations are involved. Mongoose is a campaign to destabilize the Castro regime. I must read you onto that program because of Northwoods. The latter was a false flag operation much like the fake Polish attack on Germany that triggered World War Two. It was approved—and cancelled by the president. The problem is that Northwoods is a cell-less operation for maximum deniability. We were not able to stop all the operations. Sabotage. Terrorist attacks. Assassinations. We don’t know who the actors are. We have the target list but the agents on the ground, lone wolf operators mostly, will develop alternate targets. Agent Fritz did that protecting NATO nuclear assets. I’m surprised at how you killed three targets in the café. You went in unarmed.”

“Sir, I’m stronger than I look, I had experience with bare hand kills and I’m much faster than I’ve ever been,” I bragged. “An added advantage is that I don’t appear to be dangerous. See?”

Billie took that opportunity to show that I had lost several pounds. She joked that if Zara allowed, In Sharpe Focus would corner the diet market. Billie ran her hands along my visible ribs then over her own chest.

“Mission first, girls,” Ed reminded us. “I’ll show you Operation Northwoods and where Operation Mongoose overlaps. We should be finished in an hour. I’ve seen that Jackie does have a photographic memory.”

Shockingly there were several photographs of men who could have been brothers.

“One aspect of Operation Northwoods is that several operators are doubles—men who look like each other,” Ed explained. “Multiple sightings of the same person in different places at the same time will increase confusion and sow ‘reasonable doubt’ when witnesses report activities—making it easy to discredit those witnesses.”

“Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Churchill used doubles during the war,” I added. “So did the Nazis. I encountered and killed Adolf Hitler in Rome, except that it wasn’t Hitler. You probably didn’t hear about it because allowing the world to think Der Fuhrer was dead would have destroyed Germany. Look at how rapidly Hitler got on the radio after the 20 July plot.”