Mac wingate 8, p.6
Mac Wingate 8, page 6
Wingate didn’t switch it on until he had checked his whereabouts. Poking his head outside, he could see he was in a warehouse like room near a door at the top of a stairway built into the wall. On either side of him were trucks and around them were crates, pretty much left where they were unloaded. Behind him were garage doors, which were closed, locked and bolted for the night. The American hopped out and silently trotted up the stairs. He tried the knob on the door. It was unlocked. He pulled it open and looked in. Silence and darkness yawned before him.
Wingate slipped inside, closed the door and waited another hour for possible patrols here. The sixty minutes went by uneventfully, making Mac wonder whether the Nazis’ hold on this factory was as strong as they seemed to think. The two hours of waiting didn’t bother him unduly. First, it was best to be safe. Even if there had been patrolling guards, he could have gauged when they came and still done his investigating. Second, he figured he had all night. The reason he was in the hole twelve hours was to wait until the place closed up. He figured he’d have eight hours before the dawn shift came in.
Only after the second hour was past did Mac turn on the light. In its dim crimson glow he could see the shining highlights of machinery stretching into the far distance. He saw that he was on a metal, railed balcony above the main body of the factory. Attached to this balcony was a series of catwalks which he imagined were used mostly by Nazi guards shepherding the captive help.
From various places on the catwalks and balcony were spiral and straight staircases leading to the factory floor. Rising between these were simple columns—columns that went from the floor to the ceiling. Wingate recognized them immediately. Support stanchions. They were what kept all the dirt and rock up above from collapsing on the factory down below. Suddenly his job became much easier.
Even so, Wingate spent another few hours checking the place in detail. He checked the overhead cranes and silent soldering equipment for their destructive uses and weaknesses. Before he made any final decisions about how to proceed, he wanted all the information he could get. Finally he finished his detailed examination, coming up with the same plan of action he hatched the moment he saw the support columns.
Now all he had to do was get his equipment inside the plant. Once he did, it seemed he’d have all the time in the world to set it up. Wingate returned to his hiding place to wait for his morning rescue. As he settled in, he forced himself to question the one puzzling detail: if no guard patrols, then why not? Two solutions occurred to him. First, a false sense of security. After all, they had built a “bombproof” factory, hadn’t they? Perhaps they figured the only ones they had to worry about were ignorant foreign slaves who were more likely to steal than sabotage.
And second, Erikson was probably right when he said the enemy was weakening. There weren’t that many troops in this part of France anyway—most of the real bastards were hanging around Paris. Further, all the extra soldiers were probably being shipped over to Italy to fortify the positions there, causing the remaining Germans to cut back on things like regular nightly factory patrols. Mac’s thought processes made good sense, but the question still disquieted him. He would have been a lot happier if he had seen some bad guys running around.
Morning came swiftly thanks to the imminence of the factory’s planned destruction. Sure enough, Wingate’s removal went like clockwork, impressing the American with the partisans’ ability. The truck rambled out of the factory loading dock, weaved through the streets of Clermont-Ferrand and wound up almost exactly where it started. Michael Talvick himself pulled the lid off Wingate’s coffin.
The American sprang up, slapped the Pole on the back, ran to the truck’s back, hopped out, and dove into the forest to relieve himself. Both the driver and the Pole laughed at Wingate’s predicament. It was all part of being human, the American told himself. Ending the reconnaissance the way it had begun, the Frenchman with the scar left the other two to climb back into the mountains. This time Mac was following the herds of cattle up, their bells clanging dully in the distance.
Bette and Elizabeth had food waiting for him when he returned to the cave. This time it was a mixture of beans, cabbage, carrots and herbs the younger girl pointed to and named “Ouillade.” Wingate figured that with the Nazis taking all the meat—probably even controlling the cattle herds that grazed on the mountain—the citizens had to make what they could out of what was left.
Wingate set down the new meal on the table and got down to brass tacks with Talvick, the other four partisans hovering around—busying themselves with whatever they could find.
“I’m all set,” the American told him. “All we have to do is get the explosives inside the factory.”
Talvick nodded, then turned to the gaunt woman named Elizabeth to say something in Polish. Elizabeth then spoke to the others in French. “Trans-lating,” Talvick explained to Wingate with a smile. “When you want the explosives inside?”
Now that was service, Mac decided. He told the Pole that he wanted to destroy the factory as soon as possible, then get out of the country immediately thereafter. Talvick decided that meant getting the equipment into the factory piecemeal—crammed into secret compartments on three different trucks. Mac agreed with that and set about the task of preparing himself for the mission that was still one day away.
Later that same day the scarred man and the Pole helped Mac carry the TNT down out of the volcano. As they did so, Mac occupied himself with figuring out the relationships among the six partisans. He discovered that Elizabeth and Talvick were indeed married, while Bette was the elder sister of the two boys—who were twins. When Talvick had escaped from the factory, he had run into the girl, who had helped him rescue his wife. Accepted by the freedom fighters, Talvick then hit upon the plan to reach the Allies with word of the underground factory when radio communication failed to elicit any response.
Wingate translated this from Talvick’s fractured English. By the time he had finished piecing the story together, night had fallen. It was time to catch some sleep for the following day’s destruction. The American moved into the cave room, doused the torch and lay down on the layers of blankets which made up his bed against the wall. He fell immediately asleep.
In the first few years of his life, he had often been unable to sleep when he knew something exciting was going to occur the next day. His tense expectation would keep him awake. But as time went on, and he learned more about life as well as explosives, these bouts of insomnia became fewer and fewer. And the war blasted them away completely. He got to sleep so irregularly and so infrequently now that his body adjusted immediately as soon as rest was offered.
He woke up immediately. His body had also adjusted to rousing itself the second a noise entered its consciousness. Wingate only became aware of the other person in the darkness after his body awoke to the sound of the blanket door being drawn back. At the same moment he was waking, his hand automatically reached into his jacket and gripped the butt of the Browning. Only after he was fully awake was he able to control his instinctive defenses.
The dark shape and sound of the footsteps led Wingate to believe that his visitor was either one of the women or a very effeminate Gestapo agent. But when he felt the body being rubbed against his, he knew it couldn’t be anyone else but Bette. He had no problem attaching the curves he felt to the woman he had seen.
If it could be said that war women were hungry for love, then Bette was starving. She all but attacked Wingate in her passion. The American was tempted to turn down her advances at first, but once she got her hands on him, it was like trying to suggest politely that the marines leave the Halls of Montezuma. To his knowledge, this was the first time he was ravished. Perhaps she was making a sexual allusion to what the Nazis had done to her country, Wingate thought momentarily. Then he was swept into the action, trying to maintain a certain modicum of control.
It was like trying to swim up Niagara Falls. Bette obviously wasn’t interested in concern, or caressing. She wanted the big guns and she wanted them hot. Her lips were covering his face with lustful liquid as her hands quickly undid the various buttons in her way. There was something to the metaphor between Bette and France, Wingate decided in a state of aroused surprise. This girl was launching a full-scale invasion upon his person.
The lips left his face with an almost audible pop of suction. Then the tongue was tracing a line down his chest toward his private parts. She worked down there as long as she had to and then swung onto his hips as if she were a cowboy and he was the saddle. Mac immediately discovered that she wore nothing under her long dress. She rose and fell on him with varying speeds until he was having a little trouble dealing with it. Bette seemed intent on satisfying herself while testing his sexual limits.
Wingate gritted his teeth and reached up to touch her cheek, only to find cloth in the way. Feeling along her jaw he discovered that she had gagged herself to prevent any sounds of joy from escaping her lips. Mac fell back onto the blankets as Bette continued her contortions. Suddenly he heard her breathe in deeply and then a bubbly sigh gurgled out from behind the sodden cloth between her teeth. It was the same sound Wingate had heard many times in the past—only then it was the death rattle of men whose throats he’d cut with one hand while holding the other over their mouths.
Then, just as quickly as she had appeared, she was gone again, the flapping of the blanket door being the only clue to her disappearance. If it weren’t for his disarrayed clothes and upright member, Mac might have thought it was all a dream. As it was, he wasn’t sure whether to ask for a repeat performance or yell “rape.”
Instead of either, he wiped off his wet skin with the top blanket, buttoned up, and leaned back on the remaining cushions. War was hell, he decided, and everyone reacted to its pressures in different ways. Bette’s response might make her very popular with the troops, but the sooner Wingate forgot about her sad, desperate version of sex, the happier he would be. Figuring he’d get far more satisfaction from the explosion he was planning for the factory, he drifted back to sleep.
Bette made believe she didn’t even know him the next day. The bowl of fresh water was waiting for him on a rock outside the cave while she occupied herself with her twin brothers. Mac slapped some liquid onto his face as Talvick approached, the sunrise streaking the sky above and behind him.
“You do it today, huh?” he asked pleasantly. Mac noticed the conspicuously absent pronoun “we.” He nodded. “You ready then?” the Pole inquired further. Wingate shook his hands out and nodded again. As Talvick turned back toward the volcano lip, Mac took a last look back at Bette and the boys. He realized that he couldn’t wait to get out of the camp and into the truck’s secret compartment.
As it was, however, only the previous day’s experience made the traveling or waiting any more bearable. His smartest move was not to drink any liquid that morning and to make defecation time before he left. Otherwise it was the same fetid, cramped box. And whatever his prior incarceration had taught him was all but negated by the feeling that someone might discover him. The first time the hiding place seemed oppressive but innovative. This time it was only oppressive, and he had plenty of time to think about the worst possibilities.
Any number of things could have gone wrong and Wingate’s imagination pictured a small platoon of Gestapo men with torture implements marching for the loading dock at that moment. Seconds after that thought, Mac attributed it to a slight delirium brought on by the claustrophobic conditions. To forget it, he thought about the soldier’s lot: either getting crap shot out of him in the heat of a battle which made no sense at all or waiting for days for something to happen until you’d welcome getting the crap shot out of you.
The waiting was the worst ... that is, until the bullets started flying and the bombs started falling. But at least then you didn’t have time to think. When you were waiting, you suddenly got the picture of a bullet plowing into your brain. And the more you waited, the more often that thought came and the more vivid it got and the more possible it seemed. It often became so bad that you were convinced that was the only possible thing that could happen. Sooner or later, a bullet would find you. And the horrible thing, the truly horrible thing, was that you’d never know it. Even if it came right in front of you, you’d never see it.
Then you’d be hurled into whatever was on the other side. If it was heaven or hell, well, all right. At least you would be “alive” in some way. But it could be nothing. An end. Absolute blackness that you’d never feel. You would be gone. To have it happen was easy. It simply happened and whatever was, was. But it was the thinking about it that drove men crazy.
Wingate considered this in a very objective, analytical way. It was a way of passing the time and making some sense of the insanity raging all around him. After all, he could only check, double-check, triple-check, and doublecheck the triple-check of his explosives so often. At times like this, he was in the hands of Providence.
Providence smiled on him that evening. The noise stopped, the workers left and the factory was closed down. Wingate waited an extra hour just to make sure. He didn’t want his exit ruined by some jerk working late. But when he was pretty sure that he was alone, he pushed back the covering and went to work.
First he pulled open the two secret compartments in all three trucks, revealing nine blocks of the high explosives in their carry-on, screw-on packs. He had had to leave one out because there wasn’t enough room. That was fine, because he probably didn’t even need nine. Next he pulled out the wire on the three spools. That done, he grabbed two twenty-pound explosive blocks in each hand and carried them up the loading dock stairway. He returned for four more and then carried up the last one along with the spools.
From there he repeated the action through the door and down the steps of the catwalk-lined balcony until the explosives and spools were on the factory’s main floor. He did it all without lights, having memorized the establishment’s layout the last time. Pushing them all into the deepest shadow beneath the balcony, he went back up the stairs two at a time, crossed the balcony, slid through the door and vaulted over the stairway banister there to land on the loading dock, then jump into the nearest truck. All without hardly making a sound.
Wingate was having a field day, celebrating his release from truck bondage and limbering his limbs. Inside the vehicle he whipped on a backpack and carried a second in his arms. He hopped out of the truck and ran to the nearest garage door. He placed the second pack in the deep shadows next to it, then ran back to his explosives. He pulled the pack off his back, laid it carefully on the ground, then reached in to retrieve a spool of thick black tape.
Taking each explosive one at a time, he connected the lightweight double-stranded cord to its screw-on terminals, then taped it to a support stanchion. Then he ran its wires back to his demo pack. From his pack he then produced a board, the way a magician might pull a rabbit out of his hat. On this board were ten groups of terminal screw-downs which matched the wire holders on the Cyclonite-TNT. And each set of screw-downs was connected at its base by metal strips.
This was the central connecting terminal: the device Wingate used to make sure that all the explosives went off.
If he had connected the explosive blocks to the generator in succession—that is, the generator connected to the first block which was connected to the second block and so on—there was a chance, however slim, that the first bomb would go off, severing the wire connection to the second block before the current could continue. With the central connecting terminal, all the bombs would get the electric current at once, setting them all off at the same time.
Having connected all the bombs by wire to the terminal, Wingate connected another double strand to the final pair of screw-downs and ran that up the stairs, across the balcony, down to the loading dock and over to the second pack by the door. Placing the wire spool next to the pack, Wingate produced a thin metal pick from his jacket and—in a matter of fifteen seconds—opened the lock.
Now was the really dangerous part. There may not have been any guards on the inside, but sure as shooting there’d have to be somebody on the outside. Wingate retrieved his demo pack and pulled out the four sections of his Sten. First he clicked on the twelve-inch stock, making the gun thirty inches long. On the front went the silencer wrapped with a thick flesh-colored pad. Into the side went a thirty-two-round clip.
Wingate lay on his stomach, the submachine gun held in his right hand. Ever so carefully he started lifting the garage door. He stopped its rising just far enough to see out the bottom. Waiting for an hour, he saw that a one-man patrol passed every ten minutes. Other than that, there was only a chain link fence in his way. The Nazis were pretty damn sure of themselves all right, Wingate thought. They didn’t even bother to put barbed wire at the top of the obstruction.
Mac sat up, putting his gun down and pulling the wire off its spool. He judged it was now long enough to reach the fence and way beyond. He didn’t even need his third spool. He put that back into his demo pack. The empty spool he left on the garage floor. He wrapped the wire around his hand loosely after taping the packs together and putting them both on his back. Then it was flat on his stomach again, waiting for the guard to pass.
The lone German went by and still Mac waited another five minutes. But the second that time was up, he pushed open the garage door far enough to crawl out, closed it quietly atop the wire strand and ran for the fence, trailing the looped wire behind him. When he reached the obstruction, he pushed the remaining wire through a link next to the ground, then began to climb over the fence.
That was why he had waited five minutes after the guard passed. He had to make sure the man was far enough away not to hear his climbing. As quickly as he could with the heavy packs, he got over the fence and dropped to the ground on the other side. He retrieved the wire and kept playing it out until he reached the shrub-covered ditch on the other side of the access road.
