The Last Mission

Are you willing to undertake a dangerous mission behind the enemy lines? Knowing you may never return alive? What you have just heard is the question asked during the war of agents of the OSS. Ordinary citizens who do this question answered, yes.

This is... ...Cloke and Dagger. Warfare. Espionage, international intrigue. These are the weapons of the OSS. Today's adventure, the last mission, the story of an American OSS agent in Canton, China, is suggested by actual incidents recorded in the Washington files of the Office of Strategic Services.

A story that can now be told. He must have had another name, but I never knew what it was. Everybody in the water front called him Charlie. He was old and he limped and he should have drunk less and shaved more.

We'd see him in the war in the afternoons in his dirty dungarees and thorns sweeter, begging cigarettes from sailors. Then evening he would hobble into leech and stubborn, where I worked to beg for something else.

Hey, turn ya! Hey, ain't you gonna buy Charlie one little drink, eh? No, I'm not Charlie. No drinks on the house tonight. Oh, but tonight's the night to rot to be drinks in the house.

Now you were forgetting it was just five years ago tonight, Canton fell to the Japanese. We got to celebrate, don't we? What's the matter? You say something wrong? I don't like your sense of humor.

I don't see what you got again in the Japs, don't you? With all of them nationalities mixed up in you, you probably got some Japs blood yourself. No, I haven't. Every other kind, maybe Spanish and Russian, even Irish, but there's not a drop of Japs blood in the bonniecas.