Mac wingate 3, p.18
Mac Wingate 3, page 18
Then they were roaring, full-throated, through the dark, silent streets of Rethymnon. If there were any Germans in the town, none showed themselves as Clive gunned the truck out of the village and headed, still accelerating, toward the German airfield. Leaning out of the truck to peer ahead, Wingate was startled to see nothing ahead of the truck but the road and a stretch of desolate countryside. Off to his left and far below, the moonlit surf of the Aegean Sea pounded silently on the rocks.
Where the hell was the damn airfield?
Clive continued to accelerate and for a moment Wingate debated whether or not to call out and tell Clive to pull up. They must have missed the airfield in the darkness.
Abruptly the landscape before them lit up brilliantly. One of Clive’s men looking out alongside Wingate cried softly, “It’s the bloody Blackpool Illuminations, by God!”
The Germans must have spotted their approach. But there was no turning back now and he was heartened as he felt Clive continue to accelerate. Then, above the roar of the truck, Wingate heard the deep-throated roar of an incoming bomber. The lights ahead of them were landing lights! They hadn’t been spotted at all.
As they neared the field, the bomber, on its final approach, leveled off suddenly, then went to full power and roared back into the sky. At the same time the landing lights that had illuminated the airfield were switched off. The long line of hard-charging trucks had finally been spotted.
Wingate ducked back inside the truck and patted both Kowalski and Lubbock on the arm. His signal to get ready.
The sound of the truck’s wheels whining on the smooth tarmac of the landing strip was the signal Wingate had been waiting for; as Clive swerved the lead truck out of the way of the others, then slowed abruptly, Wingate, Lubbock and Kowalski leaped over the tailgate, hit the landing strip rolling and raced into the darkness as Clive drove swiftly after the rest of the trucks.
Pausing under the shadow of a Stuka’s wing, Wingate turned and sent a green Very light shooting up into the night sky. At once the trucks, in a single line once again, turned about and drove down the field between the rows of squatting airplanes. As they swept past the planes, they opened up on them with a devastating fusillade. The chatter of the Bren guns was mixed with that of the two MG-42 machine guns they had captured at Kastelli and the crackling thump of fragmentation grenades.
As Wingate watched their progress, he noted that there were not only Stukas caught on this airstrip, but Messerschmitts, Heinkels and at least a dozen Junkers 52s. They had caught the Germans with their planes down!
Still, the planes did not go up as fast as Wingate would have liked. Sometimes it took as long as thirty seconds after absorbing a storm of lead before the inside of the plane would glow red, followed by the thud of exploding fuel, at once turning the entire fuselage into a roaring sheet of flame. Other planes did not burn; they simply disintegrated under the withering impact of the bullets, some coming at them from less than fifty yards.
All this while, the German defenses were not idle.
The whistling scream followed by the dull crump of mortar shells added to the fierce cacophony that filled the night. Three Breda guns began their slow tattoo. They were using tracers, however, and it did not take long for Clive’s gunners to put two of them out of commission.
Wingate tapped Lubbock and Kowalski. It was time for them to plant their deadly eggs and for him to hunt up German pilots. They didn’t have all that much time. Running in a crouch, they headed for the field houses on the perimeter of the airfield. A German soldier appeared in front of them. He seemed as startled as Wingate, but Wingate’s Sten spoke swiftly and the German was flung away into the darkness.
The yawning emptiness of a hangar appeared off to Wingate’s left. He veered toward it. In a moment the three men were huddled in a corner of the hangar. Above the awesome rattle of gunfire and the dull thump of mortars, Wingate gave his men last minute instructions. They were to be certain their pencil fuses were set for only fifteen minutes and were to plant their bombs only on planes nearest the field’s perimeter and thus more likely to escape the fire from Clive’s men. They would all meet back at the northern perimeter of the airfield. They had less than ten minutes to accomplish their mission.
Wingate wished them good luck, watched them disappear in the direction of the field, then ducked further back into the hangar, found a door leading from it and slipped through.
Wingate was once again wearing his German helmet and greatcoat as he walked boldly toward the line of barracks he saw huddled in the darkness behind the largest of the hangars. As he had suspected, the yard in front of the barracks was alive with German pilots and mechanics, all standing about in angry groups, watching the methodical demolition of their planes.
As Wingate neared them, he heard a cheer. He turned back to look at the airfield and saw one of the trucks blossoming into flame. A tracer bullet from the remaining Breda had punctured its gas tank. Wingate glimpsed men, some of them screaming torches, diving from the truck and running into the darkness.
Turning back to the barracks, he kept on walking, his shoulders back, his eyes cold. The small groups of pilots, all of them exceedingly young it seemed to Wingate, paid little or no attention to him as he stalked arrogantly through their midst and entered the largest of the pilots’ living quarters. His plan was to walk through it quickly, planting Lewis bombs set with hour and longer pencil fuses, then come out on the far end, where a far larger crowd of pilots and mechanics were huddling. With Sten fire and grenades, he should be able to cut down the majority of them before racing off into the darkness for his rendezvous with what trucks remained intact.
The building was broken up into small, exceedingly neat rooms, two bunks to a room. Each room had a desk, and on each one, it seemed, Wingate glimpsed the picture of a sweetheart, parents or a small, wide-eyed child. Twice he tried to plant a Lewis bomb with a long time fuse in one of the rooms, but each time he held back and moved on to the next room.
Wingate found himself remembering Costi’s taunting assertion that Wingate loved Germans too much to kill them. Was it true? Memories of his father overwhelmed him suddenly and he realized how similar in appearance these pictures were to those he had always noticed about his own home as a boy. Indeed, it was as if he could hear the booming, authoritative, yet kindly voice of his father once again.
Wingate fled swiftly through the barracks, leaving it so precipitately that he almost knocked over a German colonel in the act of loading his Mauser so that he could join the battle out on the airstrip. As Wingate pulled up, excusing himself in faultless German, the pilots and mechanics crowding around at once berated the two of them for not rushing out onto the field to save their planes.
Grimly, the colonel waved Wingate after him and trotted toward the blazing hulks that now sent searing waves of heat sweeping toward them. Wingate’s and the colonel’s eyebrows were soon singed, but nothing, it seemed, could stop the dauntless colonel as he pulled up beside a blazing Stuka and began blasting away at a truck at least a hundred yards down the strip and racing away from them at a prodigious rate.
The German colonel’s actions were quixotic, if nothing else. There was no way a slug from his single Mauser was going to make any difference in this battle. Not a plane would be saved by him. Yet he stood defiantly, crackling planes blazing on all sides of him, his clothes smoking from the heat, perspiration pouring down his granite like face, bullets whining off the tarmac in front of him and slamming into the already destroyed planes around him. Despite himself, Wingate felt a grudging admiration for the man’s courage, if not for his good sense.
Then, out of a roiling coil of smoke that now partially obscured the other side of the field, another truck careened wildly toward them. The machine guns in its rear were still sending a deadly hail into the planes and a soldier with a Sten leaning out of the side window of the cab was adding his bullets to all the others. At once the colonel began firing at it, yelling at Wingate all the while, demanding he open fire as well.
The truck loomed closer. In the garish, leaping light, Wingate thought he recognized the driver as Clive Smith’s orderly, Miles Dunham. The colonel whirled on him. He was obviously out of ammunition. As he proceeded to reload, the colonel howled at him in German, “Damn you, Lieutenant! I told you to fire! What is the matter with you?”
And then, for the first time, he looked closely at the submachine gun in Wingate’s hand—and recognized it as a Sten, not the German MP-40 it so closely resembled.
The expression on his face changed. Black fury transformed him. He raised his reloaded Mauser to fire into Wingate’s belly, but Wingate’s Sten was quicker. His finger riding for what seemed an interminable time on the trigger, Wingate flung the man violently back into the blazing wing of the Stuka. The man became a torch in an instant, struck the ground—and began rolling frantically.
The truck Wingate had refused to fire upon slammed to a tire-screaming halt just beyond him. Dunham leaned his head out of the cab.
“Hurry up, Captain!” he cried. “We’ve about worn out our welcome!”
The soldier with the Sten pushed open the door for him as Wingate raced across the tarmac. As he leaped inside and pulled the door shut, he cried, “Thanks, Dunham. I was beginning to wonder when the next bus would be coming by.”
“This is the last one, Captain. We lost two trucks and the rest are mighty crowded, a lot of the men wounded as well.”
“What about Kowalski and Lubbock?”
“I believe they’ve already been picked up. The captain sent me to look for you. We should be the last one out of this—if we make it.”
As the truck roared on down the airstrip, slicing through the fiery rows of planes, Wingate heard sudden, powerful detonations further back, closer to the hangars. Fresh fountains of flame pulsed into the night sky as the Lewis bombs Kowalski and Lubbock had planted were now adding their two cents to the holocaust.
Wingate felt sudden, enormous relief. With so many planes destroyed it was no longer essential that the German pilots be wiped out as well.
“Captain?”
It was the soldier who had been brandishing his Sten through the side window as the truck roared up to them. Wingate turned to him. There was a frown on his face.
“What is it?” Wingate asked.
“That German bloke you were with when we drove up. Who the hell was he? It looked like you knew him.”
“Did it? Well, in this uniform I was mistaken for one of his men. He wanted me to help him stop you fellows.”
The soldier grinned suddenly. “Well, you bloody well showed him! You must have blown him halfway to hell and back.”
Wingate nodded and looked back out the window. The blazing airstrip was behind them now and he could see only dimly the remaining trucks whipping through the gathering darkness ahead of them. Then they were on the road, the truck’s suspension no longer having such an easy time of it.
He tried to take comfort from the soldier’s words, but could not. Yes, he had blown the man halfway to hell and back, but he would have preferred to have been able to spare that mad, quixotic colonel if he could have. And Wingate was not at all ashamed that he felt that way.
Fifteen
The road was clear almost all the way back to Suda Bay, but Clive, driving the lead truck, did not let them push their luck. As dawn flushed the sky ahead of them, the trucks pulled to a halt along the side of the road and the men gathered around Wingate and Clive for their orders.
They were a weary bunch of men. Many were walking wounded, a few were unable to stand and three or four needed medical help soon if they were to survive. Neither Clive nor Wingate had seen any sign of Alexis or Stephanos’s guerrillas during the drive back. This made Wingate exceedingly nervous.
Stephanos knew which beach the landing party was going to use to take them off the island. If he had gone renegade, he and his men could be waiting for them now among the rocks. Still, there was always the possibility that Stephanos had an excellent reason for not attacking the airfield. Furthermore, neither he nor his men could have known for sure that Wingate’s men, not Germans, were in those trucks bearing down on them out of the night.
“All right, men,” Wingate called. “The beach we’re looking for is about a quarter of a mile further along the coast. We’ll climb down from here and make our way to the beach along the shore. It’ll be rough going for some, so each man should make himself responsible for any wounded comrade who needs help.”
Mention of the beach and what that implied pleased the men. They began talking excitedly among themselves. Grins flashed back at Wingate out of the night.
Clive spoke up then. “This operation isn’t quite over, chaps,” he reminded them quietly. “The navy hasn’t arrived yet, and until it does, we’ll find ourselves inviting targets for some very angry Germans. As soon as it is daylight we can expect some aircraft to start prowling overhead. So let’s move it as quietly as possible, and stay alert. We are still in enemy-held territory.”
This quiet, matter-of-fact warning by Clive sobered the men instantly, and it was a silent, careful group that followed Wingate and Clive down into the rocks on their way to the pounding surf far below.
Wingate was within sight of the beach when the bright early morning shuddered with the sound of distant detonations. Wingate recognized the sound. There was no other like it: a naval bombardment. The rocks around him began echoing the powerful blasts as the ground itself began to shake. A moment later came the high scream, followed by the earth-shuddering impact, as the big shells landed on the naval base. Glancing out to sea, Wingate saw the low silhouette of the British cruiser that had been promised them, its graceful bow cutting prettily through the waters as it entered the bay. Gray, broken smoke rings were lifting into the sky above the gun turrets.
At sight of the cruiser, a shout went up from Kowalski and Lubbock directly behind Wingate, a shout echoed by the rest of Clive’s troops. Before Wingate could do anything to discourage it, they broke into a run past him toward the beach. But Wingate had no desire to discourage the men. He felt as good as they did.
Beside him, Clive turned to Wingate, a wide smile creasing his long face. “Jove!” the man cried. “Have you ever seen a prettier sight?”
Wingate smiled back at the tall Englishman. “No, I don’t think I have.”
The men were cheering at every detonation now, and when the two escort destroyers swept into view as well, there was almost pandemonium. Wingate and Clive hurried after the men, both of them aware that they were not safely out of this quite yet and that some form of discipline had to be maintained.
It was Corporal Dunham who settled things down rather quickly.
“Captain Smith!” he cried suddenly. “Over here, quick!”
There was no mistaking the urgency in his voice. The men turned and watched as both Clive and Wingate hurried into the rocks where Dunham was standing.
Beyond Dunham, crumpled grotesquely in a narrow defile, were the bodies of Zervas and Alexis. There could be no doubt about it. Both men were dead.
Higher above them, on the slope between the rocks, were the bodies of the other royalist guerrillas. From the sprawled appearance and the ugly sight of occasional bones protruding through the skin, it was apparent the bodies had been flung from a great height.
As the men crowded in behind Wingate and Clive, the shocked silence was shattered by a strident voice from above: “Death to the Capitalist dogs!” Stephanos cried. “And death to their royalist lackeys!”
The moment this cry ceased, the guerrillas above them in the rocks opened up. Wingate did not need to tell the men to take cover as the vicious fire began spraying down upon them. A few of Clive’s men did not reach the safety of the rocks in time. Wingate was relieved to see that Kowalski and Lubbock were not among those unlucky few.
Crouching down beside Clive, Wingate swore bitterly. Bullets were whining uncomfortably close around both of them, sending geysers of dirt into their eyes. They were pinned nicely. Fat chance any of them would have now to use that beach to get off this island. The return fire from Clive’s men was sporadic, dispirited. They had been through a long night, and this treachery was almost too much for them.
Wingate glanced once again at the lifeless body of Alexis sprawled less than ten feet from him. Alexis had landed beside Zervas—the ancient, one-legged miracle, as Wingate had come to call him. Zervas’s right hand had somehow managed to fall across Alexis’s chest, almost as if—even in death—the older man were trying to ward off any further violence to his younger companion.
Wingate thought of the beautiful Laloula then, waiting for Alexis back in Richea. She would never see him alive again. And she had lost him, not to the Germans, but to politics. Wingate found it difficult to stomach.
The fire was intensifying. Clive looked at Wingate.
“We can’t just cower here like this, old boy,” Clive said. “We’ll never get off this bloody island if we do.”
“What do you propose, Clive?”
“Attack the bloody turncoats. We can take them.”
The fire from above was so heavy by this time that Wingate could barely hear the bombardment coming from the sea, though the ground under them was still quivering with every shell that screamed into the base.
“Your men are too far gone,” Wingate told Clive. “Let me see what I can do. That bastard Stephanos is always telling us how much he loves to kill Germans. Maybe I’ll let him and his men get a chance to kill a few more.” Wingate was still wearing his German helmet and the greatcoat. He inspected the hat and then the coat carefully, making sure the insignia was still intact.
“What are you planning to do?” Clive asked. “Give the Germans a personal invitation?”
“That’s close enough,” Wingate said, snatching up his Sten. “Tell your men to cover me. I’m going to work my way back along the shore, then try to make it up to the abandoned trucks.”
