“Project Hannibal,” he continued. “Foxtrot-the obvious, and therefore fatuous, choice. Hannibal: Sergeant?”

“Sir?”

“Why ‘ Hannibal ’?”

I had no idea. It rhymed with cannibal, which seemed a bit gruesome, even for Gurley. Then I remembered that Mark Twain had grown up in Hannibal, Missouri. I mentioned this.

“Who?” Gurley said. “No, Sergeant. This is a war. Not bedtime stories. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general. Takes his elephants over the Alps. Hannibal: the perfect code name for the deployment of an unusual animal to seek a military victory.” He studied my reaction. “No, no one got it. But I pressed on.”

He took his audience through the background first: why this would frighten the soldiers, why it would, in fact, be more deadly than any conventional weapons. American bombs were certainly decimating Japanese ranks-but it was hard to claim that they had caused fear. Indeed, the Japanese fought more tenaciously the more casualties they suffered.

“And I was winning, Belk. I guarantee you. One man at a time. I could see, I could look around the room and watch as their smiles faded into a kind of-not awe, no, not that, but a kind of respect. Maybe that's even too strong a word. Interest, then. I saw them grow curious, despite themselves, one face at a time. I don't think I've ever seen anything lovelier.”

Gurley said that he finished his presentation and sat. He wanted to look around the room-he could hear the murmurs of interest and appreciation on all sides-but kept his eyes on the colonel who had been chairing the meeting. The colonel should have been his staunch ally Gurley said: they were both Princeton men; the colonel had graduated some ten years before. But the colonel had rarely deigned to speak with him, nor even meet his eyes, and he did neither now.

Instead, the colonel looked around the room and smiled. “What's Bob Hope say?” he asked. Gurley's stomach began to turn, slowly. Everyone's faces began to warm into smiles-not, Gurley was sure, in anticipation of the joke, but of his demise. Gurley held his breath. The colonel waited before going on. He was enjoying himself. Worse: he was playing to the crowd.

Quoting Bob Hope? What Gurley needed was a minute or two alone with the colonel. Man to man. One Princetonian to another. Some setting where the colonel wouldn't feel a need to appeal to the base instincts of a base crowd.

Gurley paused his recounting now, as well. At first I thought it was for theatrical effect, an attempt to wring whatever more suspense he could out of his story, but he looked down at his hands for a moment-only for a moment-and I saw something else. He'd left his little stage. He'd been kicked off the stage, in fact, at that meeting, and try as he might, had never quite found his way back on, at least not before audiences larger than, say, a solitary, teenaged sergeant. When he started speaking again, his volume had dropped by half or more, and I would have sworn he was crying. But he wasn't; I checked, his face was clear.

The colonel continued, Gurley said.

“What's the most dangerous thing in war?” the colonel asked. The room was already laughing. Gurley wasn't breathing. “A second lieutenant,” the colonel answered, “with a plan.”

With a map, Gurley told me now, seething. The colonel even screwed up the punch line, Gurley said. And everyone had to know it. Hope must have trotted that joke out every USO tour he ever made.

But if everyone knew it, they didn't care. In fact, they acted like the colonel's version was funnier. And you wouldn't even have said they were acting, Gurley said. They were enjoying themselves. As much as the colonel, who looked-and Gurley worked at finding the right word-a bit relieved at all the laughter. Relieved that his joke had gone over, and even more relieved that he wasn't alone in thinking Gurley's plan was poppycock.

“Dismissed, Lieutenant,” the colonel said. Gurley rose and left the room while the laughter rose and followed him, and then shut the door behind him.

A friend-or someone who wanted to twist the knife a little deeper-told him how the rest of the meeting went. Gurley was almost flattered to learn he remained the subject of the meeting for several more minutes. The colonel said that Gurley had fallen into a clever trap, set by OSS internal security to catch people who had taken to reading materials that they didn't have the proper classification for. A fictionalized, highly classified memo, designed to be outlandish enough to catch a wayward eye's interest, had been introduced into the office's paper stream. It was only a matter of time before the blue fox nabbed its prey, the colonel said, and he congratulated all those remaining in the room on their now-validated discretion.

“It was a trap?” I asked Gurley.

“A lie,” he said. “To be more precise. An elaborate and admittedly impressive spur-of-the-moment lie by the colonel himself.” The actor was returning. “For this self-proclaimed ‘friend’ of mine could not help but tell me something else. Something he found so funny and cruel, he could hardly bear not to share it. How could I not have known, he asked, that the blue fox was, in fact, quite real?” Gurley paused and looked at me. “My ‘friend’ went on: ‘Blue Fox’ was the nickname of the colonel's mistress.” Gurley closed his eyes and leaned back.

“Sir,” I said.

“Silence, Belk. Let us both agree that there is absolutely nothing adequate that you could say at this point, other than ‘Captain, shall I fetch you a thermos of coffee?’” He nodded toward the door.

“I'm sorry, sir,” I said, because I had to. He was pitiful.

“As I said, Belk: absolutely nothing adequate. Now try again: ‘Captain, shall I fetch you…’”

“Sir, it's just that-”

“Sergeant, ‘it's just that’… I haven't even gotten to the sorry part yet. Be gone.”

WHEN I RETURNED with the thermos, Gurley smiled and brought out a bottle. The label, faded, said “vodka,” but the liquid inside was brown. He asked with raised eyebrows if I wanted any, and when I declined, poured himself some in a chipped mug. He topped off the mug with coffee, and then raised it.

“A toast, then, to the Blue Fox. For it was due to her that I was assigned the crackpot casebook, the file containing letters from every asylum escapee who mails the OSS some deranged idea about how to wage war or defend our homeland.” Gurley rose and studied the map. “Dozens of these letters, Belk. And we read them all. Because buried in every hundredth, every thousandth, letter was something useful. A grandmother in Chicago uncovers a Nazi sympathizer. A lobsterman in Maine hauls up a trap full of codebooks and sabotage plans. And the lone inhabitant of a dot-sized Bering Sea island off the coast of Alaska, an Orthodox hermit with the unspellable name of Father Ioasaph, sends word of Armageddon. After a period of intense fasting and prayer, the good Father-whose isolation has driven him quite mad- witnesses the advance guard of the heavenly host descending in flames to his island. Or so he writes.”

Gurley took a sip from the mug and put it down. Then he walked around the desk and sat on the edge, before me. I think the object was to position his left leg for better viewing. “Some people can lose a limb quickly and efficiently, close by, perhaps in a traffic accident right around the corner,” he said. “I had to travel to the end of the earth.”

Gurley decided to go investigate Father Ioasaph's letter, for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was that it got him far, far away from the office, where he remained the subject of open ridicule. More important, an odd detail in the island hermit's account of Armageddon intrigued Gurley and made him wonder if, just maybe, the flaming angel that Father Ioasaph had reported might have brought redemption as well. For Father Ioasaph wrote that there was a particular, and curious, reason he was sharing this glorious news with Gurley's office: “…it would appear, dear sirs, that God's angels speak Japanese…”