Mac wingate 6, p.18
Mac Wingate 6, page 18
Sumner tied a length of cord to the ring of the pin, with a large slipknot at the other end. Then he wound the length, carefully laid it over the knot, and taped it to the side of the grenade for easy access. He repeated these steps with another device. Neill, in the meantime, had been preparing a third explosive in a slightly different manner.
The same “quick-release” cord ran from the sock to the grenade, but in this case the Canadian attached it directly to the altered pin. Then he took all three sock-bombs and laid them carefully in another rucksack side by side. After that, there were only two gravel-filled socks left. Sumner gave one each to the MILORGs handling the two machine guns. They attached them to the length of cord hanging off the butt, which was tied around the trigger.
Neill had just closed the sock-bomb sack and sighed with relief when Wingate clapped him on the shoulder. “Donald, give me one of your cigars, will you?”
Neill looked up unassumingly. “Uh. What cigars, Captain?”
“Come on, Sergeant,” Wingate admonished, curling his fingers in a “let’s go” gesture.
“But Captain!” the Canadian blurted. “They’re the only things I salvaged off the sardine scow!” Then he remembered the Reising. “Of worth,” he added.
Wingate shrugged. “It’s for the war effort.”
As they played out the scene, everyone in the room began to watch. By the time Neill miserably handed over a stogie, everyone was smiling. They didn’t understand the exact words, but they were all cheered by the expressions and obvious humor.
At that moment, the room was filled by the thin, tiny tinkling of a bell.
Wingate slapped the cigar down and moved swiftly for the side table and his Sten. “I’ll take care of that later,” he told Neill. “Positions, everyone. This is it.”
It was Kirsten’s signal. Earlier she had rigged up an absurdly simple string and bell system as an alarm. It meant that, as far as she knew, the undersea commandos were in position.
She was in no position herself to know for sure. All six would not be in her room. As much as she might have suggested it, the Nazis weren’t as perverted as the Quislings. They might indulge in a threesome, but they thought of themselves as the world’s future-man. They drew the line at male-dominated orgies.
It made their execution more difficult. Making it doubly difficult was the fact that Wingate didn’t want to bring the whole town down on the place while he did it. In fact, he couldn’t afford even to let the other patrons know that men were being slaughtered just a wall away from them. The Aryan men had to die silently.
Wingate moved to the entrance of the tunnel. Sumner moved to the stairs leading to Kirsten’s bedroom. Larsen whipped on a pair of gloves and started to wrap a thin copper wire around his palms. Tyler suddenly rose and approached the American captain.
“Wingate, I ...”
“Now is not the time, Colonel,” Wingate hissed. Tyler raised his submachine gun before Mac’s eyes in response. His M3 had suddenly sprouted a silencer. “Been holding out on us, eh, Tyler?” Wingate commented.
“I said anything I could do ...”
“Come on, then,” Wingate urged. The two men moved down the tunnel. They followed its twisting, rising paths until they came to the section with the light between the cracks. Only this time there was sound to go with the sight. As they approached, they heard moaning.
Wingate hoped Tyler knew what to do. He had been present when they had worked it out with Kirsten. A solid hall of rooms off to the side was reserved for the Nazi commandos. Each would be taken into a different room, three on each side of the hall. The doors were positioned in such a way that an assassin could pivot from one room to the next in a very short time. All he had to do was kick open one door and shoot, turn, kick open another, shoot, turn, and so on.
But that wasn’t fast enough for Mac. He took into consideration that these Nazis weren’t the only ones in the rooms. And that the sound of the first door being broken into would alert the last Nazis in line for massacre. Even the best shot with a silenced gun couldn’t be sure of getting everyone dead-to-rights.
So everyone had to do their parts quickly and wait for Wingate to handle the rest. Kirsten would work it so she would get on top. When the man under her was the most vulnerable, she would slip a knife out of her mattress, clap her hand across his mouth, and bury the blade where it would do the most harm. Only after she had accomplished that would she hit the signal.
The rest was even trickier, but Mac had faith in his men. He pictured their roles in his mind. Sumner and Larsen would enter Kirsten’s room by the secret passage and make their way quickly and quietly to the next two quarters. Sumner would go across the narrow hall to the room opposite Kirsten’s, sneak into the darkened place, wrap one arm around the commando’s neck, and grind the knife into his kidney.
Larsen would enter the darkened room next to Kirsten’s. Wingate had tried to convince him to use a knife, but his earlier fight with Mac had spooked him. He resorted to a garrote. It was nastier, but just as silent and deadly.
As Mac and Tyler positioned themselves a wall away from the last of the rooms, Wingate listened for any undue noise above the orgiastic groans of the people in front of him. When he heard nothing else after a few seconds, he silently placed the barrel of his gun flat along one of the wider cracks. His silenced Sten was pointing into the room, right at the bed.
He looked through the crack, the dim light of the moon reflecting off his pupil. The lovemakers were silhouetted in the window. He saw a man’s shape rise and fall. It reminded him of a penny arcade shooting game where the target popped up and down, only this was far more difficult and far more dangerous. He couldn’t afford to wait too long before acting.
The gods of pleasure were with him. The girl suddenly cried out in climax, and the man’s shape rose slowly, ecstatically, to expose his entire torso. Mac pulled the trigger.
The click of the bolt, the cough of the escaping air, and the tear of little wall pieces all mingled minutely. The loudest noise was that of the commando falling over and hitting his head on the back of the bed. The girl did not react to the blood splashing on her. In the darkness, it was just another liquid.
But she did respond as soon as the man died. She got up, pulled the many heavy bedclothes out from under the corpse and off the bed, then brought them over to the wall. She held them against the thin slats as Wingate pressed all his weight on them from the other side. Seeing what he was trying to do, Tyler added his weight. The centers of the wood started to crack. The blankets muffled the sound.
Soon, Mac could slip into the room sideways from the long rip in the wall. The water-logged slats practically bounced back intact. Instead of a hole, there was only a thin tear in the wall that a man could push himself through. Tyler followed.
“There are only two more men,” Wingate whispered to him. “You help back us up.” The colonel nodded. Wingate went to the door. He was at the end of the special section, but not the end of the hall. Directly to his left as he looked out the door were the stairs to the lobby, where other horny men—the local Quislings—waited. Farther to his right were several more rooms, where the traitors were entertained. None of Wingate’s men could afford to be in the hallway too long. There was no way to regulate everyone’s timing.
Wingate looked to the right. He saw Larsen and Sumner looking at him from the two doorways they had first invaded. The American nodded. On the count of three, he and Sumner would both move into the remaining two rooms.
Sumner nodded “two.” Wingate nodded “three.”
When they moved, they did not do it quickly. They did it smoothly. They didn’t want to break down doors and attack frenetically. They did not want anyone to cry out in surprise. Each man simply went to the door he was assigned, easily twisted the knob, opened it just enough to slip in, and closed it again.
Wingate refused to deal with complications. He had set his killing instinct on automatic. He didn’t care what the two people were doing on the bed. He unerringly moved over, placed the barrel against the man’s neck, and pulled the trigger at the same time. The whole move took less than two seconds.
The commando fell dead atop the prostitute. In the moonlight Mac could see the girl was quietly crying. She slid out from under the corpse and nodded through her tears.
“Takk dem,” she said very quietly and very honestly. “Thank you.”
Wingate looked out the door again. Sumner and Larsen were both looking back. Everyone was finished. Mac turned around. Tyler was in the door by the stairs, still checking. Wingate tapped the doorjamb. Tyler turned. They all signaled success. Wingate nodded again. On another count of three, they would all slip back into Kirsten’s room, except for Wingate. He would join Tyler and go through the wall.
Three was reached and the men moved again. At that second a Quisling came out of the last room down the hall, tucking in his pants. Tyler did not wait. And he was a very good shot. He hit the traitor right between the eyes with the first pull of the trigger. It was all that was necessary. The prostitute serving the fascist had been worried about this very thing happening, so she was right behind the man to catch him as he fell. With quality of forethought, she dragged him back into her room.
The men continued their action regardless. Larsen and Sumner disappeared back into Kirsten’s quarters and Mac rejoined Tyler.
“I’m sorry, Mac,” Tyler apologized.
“What for?” Wingate said with respect. “You had no choice and you hit him perfectly.” Mac expected to hear no more about it, when the hooker who had caught the corpse appeared again.
“He has friends downstairs,” she said in Norse. “What shall I do? What can I tell them?”
“Ah, fuck,” Wingate said in English. He told the girl to go back into her room and stay there. Then he translated for Tyler. “Sit tight,” he finished. “I’ll be right back.” Checking the hall first, Mac moved silently to Kirsten’s room.
“Trouble,” he told the trio inside as he closed the door behind him. “How big is your waiting room, Kirsten?”
“Fairly small,” she said. “Like all the rooms. Rectangular. Barely enough space for a dozen people to sit comfortably.”
“Good. Any doors or rooms off the lobby they could wander into?”
“No. There is only the front door and the stairway up here.”
“Larsen,” Wingate immediately ordered without comment. “Climb out the window and lock the front door from the outside. Kirsten, give him the key.” She quickly complied. The Norwegian acted without question.
“What are you going to do?” the girl asked, already guessing the answer.
“Tie up all the loose ends,” Wingate said, moving toward the door.
“No!” Kirsten hissed. Mac turned at the urgency in her voice. “No matter how fast you move, they will be alarmed the second they see you. They will scream and run as they die.”
Wingate thought about it and nodded. “Come with me,” he said. Both she and Sumner followed him down the hall to where Tyler waited. “Give her your weapon,” Wingate instructed. “It’s much easier to hide than a Sten.”
The colonel picked up on the new plan right away. And he agreed with it. With the Sten’s magazine sticking out the side, there was almost no way Kirsten could block it with her body short of being triple-jointed. He handed his gun over.
“Go back downstairs,” Wingate told Sumner, “and get Neill and Sørum.”
For a few seconds, Wingate, Tyler, Kirsten, and the prostitute waited in silence. Then three men came single-file through the wall. “Einar,” Wingate said, “can I trust you?”
He replied with a simple, “Yes.”
“Kirsten and I are going to take care of the lobby. As soon as we go down, I want you and the others to kill everybody in the other rooms who aren’t female.”
Again, Sørum replied, “Yes.”
“The door should be locked by now,” Wingate said. “Let’s go, then.”
Kirsten didn’t even take a moment to collect herself or square her shoulders. She had slipped on a robe after killing the first man, and she now put the M3 behind her. Being only thirty inches long, there was no problem hiding it. Wingate just hoped the men downstairs would not be tipped off by the one hand behind her back.
As she began to move down the stairs, Wingate let go of his previous thought. She was so beautiful, and she held herself so well, that the one hand toward her back looked natural, even alluring. He heard the men in the foyer respond as she came fully into view. He saw her from the back, midway down the stairs. Only he saw the machine gun resting against the back of her leg.
Immediately after their initial laughs and bawdy comments, she brought both hands forward and up. Most of the men were looking at each other to make remarks when the first bullets slashed out. The first few who died didn’t even see the gun. They were lucky. Their last memories were of a beautiful woman on the stairs. They didn’t see Wingate leap down next to her and start shooting himself.
From his point of view, the massacre was difficult to watch. It was strange and frightening because it was silent. There was hardly any decoration in the sitting room so nothing really broke. The walls, the wood, and the flesh accepted the whirling lead with little sound. The loudest thing was the hollow “click-click-click” of the guns’ bolts sliding back and forth.
In moments, they were all dead. Kirsten lowered her gun at the same second Mac did. She looked proud of her work. Mac realized it had been her revenge, her ultimate dream of paying back all the real whores of the town, all the men who had come to use her. Wingate hoped she was satisfied, because it was all the revenge she was going to get.
Wingate looked behind him. Colonel Tyler stood behind the upstairs banister with a bloody knife in his hand. He gave Mac an “OK” sign with the other. Mac looked at his watch. 3:00 a.m. Four and a half hours to go.
He went down the last few steps to navigate among the corpses toward the door. He rapped twice between the bullet holes in the wood. The tumblers turned over and Larsen slipped inside.
The Norwegian spy surveyed the silent, ugly scene dispassionately. He then shook his head and said quietly, “It is over for us here.”
Mac had to hand it to him. It was the understatement of the hour. It had been over the minute Kirsten killed the first commando. The Nazis’ lust couldn’t save her this time.
MILORG was finished in North Cape. Their cover was totally blown. Any one of the bodies could have brought them down, let alone all of them. The Germans would assume there had been a spy in their midst and it would be only a matter of time before suspicion would fall on Larsen. Perhaps they wouldn’t bother to suspect anyone. Maybe they would just round up all their Norwegian employees and gun them down.
The Quislings would turn the town into a slaughterhouse. The streets would run red with the blood of their innocent prisoners. The tailor and the prostitutes would be swept away in the process.
Together, the Nazis and the traitors would declare a blitzkrieg on Alten fjord. The mountains would be turned into a shooting gallery. They would raze them to the ground to find Sørum and his compatriots.
They all had to leave. Tonight. Immediately. Larsen had to take Henrik Erling, the whores, and everybody else across the mountains to Murmansk. Right now. Their usefulness had run out.
Sørum and Kirsten could follow later. There were still some things they had to do.
Chapter Nine
Mac Wingate dragged himself under the chain-link fence of the hilltop infantry camp at 6:10 a.m. He had removed the petrol can from his back outside the perimeter, so now he pulled it through after him. The bag with the empty tins hung from his left fist, the Sten around his neck. He hauled the petrol can over his right shoulder and ran for the empty barracks.
He was cutting it close. He had to. He couldn’t afford anyone getting the chance to foul up the works. He had left himself and the two other commandos no more than a half hour to set the diversion. He had to rendezvous with Kirsten no later than 6:45, be in the water and cut the net by 7:30, and be the hell out by 8:00 when the two-ton bombs blew.
Wingate sped stealthily into the barracks. His mind threw a picture of him entering a room full of sleeping SS men by mistake, but he threw it back as soon as it had taken shape. In actuality, the structure was perfect. It was a large wooden building on short stilts measuring fifteen yards in length and three yards in height. Its windows were all intact and the solid slat walls were a tribute to German craftsmanship.
He stopped admiring the building and looked outside for any sign of a guard. He saw none, so he waved Neill and Sumner on. The two commandos immediately burrowed under the fence and charged for their respective trees. While they went, Sumner held a ball of cord while Neill had the free end. As they separated, the line was paid out quickly between them.
Wingate saw Sumner jump up into the low branches of a tree right in front of him. He saw Neill run out of his view along the side of the empty barracks. He turned around to witness the Canadian climbing a tree outside the opposite window. In the purple-gray dawn, he could just make out the cord being lifted off the ground as the two commandos pulled it up over the empty barracks’ roof.
Seeing that that went without a hitch, Mac set to work inside, pulling out the topless tins. As he set them on the floor and broke out the petrol, he thought about how his plan had taken shape.
As almost anyone with an explosives background knows, an open cup of gasoline in a small, sealed room would evaporate into fumes so volatile that after one hour an open flame would cause an explosion equivalent to a stick of dynamite. That’s how and why a lot of inboard motorboats blew up.
