Mac wingate 9, p.9
Mac Wingate 9, page 9
“Chaptal, François Chaptal,” the Frenchman was explaining from the depths of Mandanaro’s embrace. He was having difficulty keeping his wire-framed glasses on his face and any moment he looked as if he might actually smother to death.
“You’re not going anywhere,” the girl called, going across to Manganaro and tapping him on the shoulder.
Manganaro unfolded himself from the Frenchman and turned to face her. “You talking to me, miss?” he asked.
“I’m talking to you,” said Mary.
“Then just what are you talking about?” Manganaro was needled and it showed. He had a suspicion of what was coming, but he wasn’t going to be the first to voice it.
“This is not a Boy Scout camp that we are going to enter,” she said, facing him squarely but keeping her voice cool and contained. “It is a labor camp—a slave labor camp under the control of the SS. You cannot simply walk in with a Boy Scout’s knife hanging from your belt. You need papers, you need photographs. Even then, your mother tongue should be German or Dutch—or perhaps, if you are lucky, French. For Captain Wingate we have all the necessary documents. We are told by London that he is fluent in Norwegian as well as German. But in your own case—” she gave a little shrug, “I know nothing about you.”
Manganaro took a couple of paces toward her, and faced her with his feet apart and his hands on his hips. “Well then, let’s get right down to essentials,” he said. “The name’s Manganaro—Brad Manganaro. The rank’s lieutenant, the trade’s pilot and the outfit’s the Air Corps of the old U.S. of A. And come to that, lady, how come you’re able to walk in and out of this camp that you say’s going to be so damn difficult to get into?”
She looked at him coldly, not remotely thrown by his heavy male bluster. “Because I have a pass,” she said. “Because the commandant knows me personally. Because I am the personal secretary to the head of security... And because I am a German.”
Wingate looked at her. If she was a German, what was she doing on this side of the fence? What was he walking into by agreeing to go with her into the very heart of enemy territory? There were a dozen questions that clamored in his mind for answers. He put them to one side and said to Manganaro, “Forget it, Brad. You’re staying here. You weren’t expected. It’ll take hours to forge the necessary documents for you, and we can’t afford hours.” He buttoned up his pea jacket and pulled his cap down ready to go.
Manganaro prevented him. He wasn’t satisfied. He stepped up to Wingate and grabbed him by the elbow. “Hey, c’mon, Mac ...” he protested.
Wingate snapped, “That’s an order, Brad. Now back off.”
Manganaro hesitated, face dark with fury. Finally he threw up his arms in resignation. “Goddamn!” was all he muttered.
“We must go,” said the girl. She put on a belt with a Walther P-38 in a holster, then pulled a heavy overcoat on.
Wingate followed her down the spiral stone staircase and out into the night. The wind had fallen now, and the stars were visible through the scud of low clouds. The air was bitter. It was sharp and painful to breathe and Wingate could feel the crunch of a light covering of ice under his feet. They went around the curve of the lighthouse wall and pulled a couple of bicycles out of a wooden lean-to shed.
“You can ride a bicycle?” she asked, a little edge of sarcasm in her voice.
“I guess if you can, I can,” said Wingate.
They rode in silence down the road with the soft shush of the North Sea to the left of them. Wingate checked the position of “The Plow” constellation and found the north star. Give or take a few degrees, they were heading due east.
The little hooded light mounted just below Wingate’s handlebars threw almost no illumination on the road ahead. In the end, he figured it safer to get behind her and follow the red glow of her taillight. At last, the dunes that had overshadowed both sides of the road gradually leveled out. In the distance, occasional fringes of light around blackout shades indicated some human habitation. Now and then, a dense black shape would rear up suddenly from the side of the road and Wingate would smell the woodsmoke of some dying fire in a passing house.
“What do you know about marine engineering?” Mary asked, at last, dropping back a little so that he came alongside.
The question threw him. It had no relevance that he could see. “Nothing,” he said.
“London said you were an engineer. You’re a graduate from Wisconsin University ...”
“Engineering’s a hell of a field,” he said. “Mining was my specialty.”
“But you could fool me into believing that you were a marine engineer, is that right?”
“Well—I guess,” said Wingate.
“I certainly hope so,” she said. “That’s what your papers say. You’re a marine engineer brought in from Norway to advise on part of the project.”
“What project?” he asked. She seemed to be taking a deliberate pleasure in being enigmatic.
“If you live long enough, you’ll see. Don’t say any more than you have to. Let them do all the explaining. And if you have any serious difficulties, put them down to language differences. You speak Norwegian. Your German doesn’t have to be all that good.”
There were a couple of little flashes of light on the horizon to his left. The kind of little stabs in the darkness that an Aldis signal lamp might put out. He thought of his own position a few hours earlier. If there was somebody else out there in the drink in this temperature, God help them.
“I don’t get it,” said Wingate. “Are you really German?”
“I told you,” she said. “Why would I lie? I come from Konigsberg in East Prussia.”
“Then why the hell are you doing this? Betraying your own people? I don’t get it.”
“You are not supposed to get it, Captain,” she said. “You are not supposed to bother yourself with such matters. I have my reasons—but they are my reasons.”
“OK, OK,” he said. “I just like to know who I’m operating with. I’ve got enough guys out there to worry about, without having doubts about internal loyalties.”
The minute he had said it, he regretted it. She was right. It was none of his damn business. She’d stuck her neck out far enough already to show where her sympathies lay.
“Hey, Mary,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
She was slowing, and as he slowed with her he realized she hadn’t even heard him. She put her foot on the ground and came to a stop. She was looking out to sea, craning forward a little. He was close enough to her to smell the warm perfume of her body.
“Something’s wrong,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. “Quick—off the road! There’s a patrol coming.”
She ran her cycle off the road and down into a drainage ditch. Wingate followed, picking up his machine and running with it. The road was raised up on a dyke and he miscalculated the steepness of the drop beyond it. He lost his balance and slithered on the icy rock and sand and finished up beside her on his back. Only then could he hear the low throb of an engine on the road above them, and see the dim glow of distant headlights.
They knelt together, pushed against the sloping wall of the dyke. Wingate put out a hand and found her arm and gripped it. It was a gesture of gratitude to her for the warning.
The headlights came nearer. There were two sets, one behind the other, and they were gradually slowing. Above the sound of the engines there were occasional raised voices barking orders. Finally, the lead vehicle came to a halt immediately above them, and the other drew up behind. There was a clatter of feet on the road surface and a torrent of orders in German. It was quite a sizable patrol, not the routine couple of men that Wingate had expected. He put the number at around twenty—perhaps as much as a platoon. The girl was right. Sure as hell, something was wrong.
The lights on the two vehicles were doused. The clatter of feet was silenced. There were low, brusque instructions being given above, and the metallic clicking of breechblocks and rifle bolts. On the far side of the road, Wingate could imagine them setting up a tripod and mounting an MG-34 machine gun, and perhaps a couple of 8 centimeter mortars. This was more than a patrol. They were expecting some serious attack. He listened for the sound of aircraft approaching, but there was nothing.
Then suddenly the sky flared and some heavy shore gun roared into action from the direction of the camp ahead. Ten seconds later, another had joined it from a position further south, ripping the air apart with noise. Wingate moved closer to the girl and put an arm around her shoulders, pushing her even closer against the wall. At any moment he expected a parachute flare to go off right over their heads, lighting up the whole seafront. When that happened, he wanted them to be as inconspicuous at possible. Above them, he could hear the crackle of a radio receiver.
A dozen more shots thundered out, each sending shock waves through the ground and the dyke wall supporting the road.
“D’you know where we are?” Wingate asked. “Exactly?”
“Yes,” she whispered, from inside the protection of his arm.
He could feel the tension in her body, the slight tremble. The strain of playing whatever role it was that she was playing had taken its toll. He got the impression that, despite her tough front, it wouldn’t take all that much to push her past the breaking point. What a dumb thing war was. She should have been having a good time, enjoying herself, maybe finishing her education. She was young, beautiful, bright. Instead, she was crouched double in some ditch in the middle of this godforsaken sandpit, with krauts waiting just above her to gun her down if she moved, and the roar of 17 centimeter K-18 fieldpieces splitting her ears.
“How far to the nearest building? Somewhere we can get the hell out of this?” he asked.
“Two hundred yards,” she said. “Perhaps a little more. Toward the camp and on the other side of the road. The Rembrandt—a small inn. A lot of the locals use it.”
“Slide over to your left,” Wingate whispered. “If we have to make a dash for it, we don’t want to get caught up in the bikes.”
She edged clear of the dyke wall and moved to her left. Wingate was right beside her, extricating himself from the two machines by feel. They had covered five yards of ground when the sky lit up momentarily behind them, and Wingate turned to see the dying glow of two guns that had been fired from a ship out at sea. A moment later, the air was filled with the scream of shells followed by two massive explosions somewhere inland beyond the dyke wall. There were cries from the Germans above them, followed by screamed orders and the clatter of feet. Finally, debris that had been blown into the air began to fall back. Wingate pulled the girl to him and buried her head in his chest. Pebbles rained down on him, followed by a fine mist of falling sand.
There were two more flashes from the guns out at sea, and the scream and explosion of a couple more shells. Then one of the mortars that Wingate had predicted would be above them with the German patrol, put a parachute flare into the sky. It burst into an incandescent glow, illuminating every inch of the beach between them and the sea. Just hitting the beach were three small landing craft, troops already leaping out of them and running for cover. Above, a machine gun opened fire with a stammering roar, sending long loops of tracer over Wingate’s head and down onto the beach.
“Jesus!” Wingate breathed. He pushed the girl away from him along the dyke wall, then started after her. “Move!” he cried, knowing his voice would be inaudible to the Germans above the clatter of the machine gun. “Let’s get to this inn. We’ve don’t have a chance stuck here. It’s a commando raid—and we’re right in the middle of it!”
Chapter Seven
Wingate got ahead of the girl, grabbed her hand and pulled her after him. He felt as exposed as a clown caught in a circus spotlight. The flare threw dense black shadows of them on the dyke wall. The moment they were spotted, they were sitting ducks.
They covered twenty, thirty yards, the girl barely staying on her feet at the speed Wingate was dragging her. The ground over which they were racing was uneven, part sandy with sudden, unpredictable areas of rock. Wingate tripped, fell heavily to his knees, then got up again and continued running. Behind him, the clatter of machine gun fire ripped the air apart, and the thump of mortars lobbing shells toward the attackers shook the ground.
There was an abutment in the dyke wall thirty yards ahead, running at right angles a dozen feet from the main wall, toward the sea. It had been constructed to break the swirl of the winter tides, and cut down erosion of the main dyke. That wasn’t how Wingate saw it. To him it meant the only possibility of temporary safety from the chaos behind them. If they could make that before anyone spotted them, they had a chance of living through the rest of the night.
He put on a final spurt, driving his feet hard into the rocky sand beneath him, leaning forward with his shoulders, hanging on to the girl with one hand. So far, she was keeping up with him, panting, gasping for breath, yet still holding her own. Then suddenly she slipped.
He felt her go, felt her body twisting away from him, felt her hit the sand.
“Mac!” she cried. “Mac, for God’s sake ...!”
He ignored her cries, dragging her after him across the beach toward the approaching abutment. She was going to be black and blue after the experience, but at least she was going to be alive. It was then that some guy with a machine gun spotted them. They were ten yards from the abutment when a line of bullets stitched its way across the approaching concrete wall, less than a foot above Wingate’s head. He flung himself forward, still hanging on to the girl, hit the sand with the flat of his chest and began to crawl frantically toward the cover.
“Hang on!” he cried. “We’ll make it! Just crawl!”
A second line of bullets slammed into the wall ahead, then ricocheted into the night with high-pitched whines. They were less than four feet from the base of the wall. If they had still been standing, they would have taken it right across the middle of the spine.
Wingate rolled and shifted, moving with his free elbow and both feet, switching direction, altering pace.
“We’re going to make a dash for it!” he yelled. “You think you can make it?”
“I can make it,” she called.
He let go his grip on her, got to his hands and knees and sprinted, crouching, for the corner of the wall. A line of bullets chopped up the ground to his left and he flung himself the final six feet, caught the corner of the wall with both hands, and pulled himself around it and into the cover and darkness that lay beyond.
He waited. She didn’t come. He lost all sense of time. What the hell had happened to her? Had that final burst caught her, or some new one hit her just as he reached over? He forced himself to wait, telling himself there was a mission to complete and that was the first priority.
“Damn the mission,” he muttered, at last.
He lay flat on his belly and poked his head slowly around the wall. In the distance, there were guys racing up the beach, and along the dyke a big caliber shell exploded on the German position as one of the naval vessels got its range.
The girl was lying sprawled on the beach, less than six feet from him. Her face, turned away from the blaze of the flare, was in deep shadow and he couldn’t make out any expression. He flung himself forward, grabbed her by the shoulders, and dragged her into the cover of the abutment. In the deep shadow there, he ran a quick check on her. There was no sign of blood on her clothes as far as he could feel. She was breathing and her pulse wasn’t all that much above normal. But something had hit her somewhere. She was quite limp and her eyes were closed.
“Mary,” said Wingate, gently. “Mary, can you hear me?”
He patted her cheeks, but there was no response.
Finally, he picked her up and dropped her over his shoulder. Now that the navy had located the opposition, all hell was being let loose further along the dyke. In the distance he could hear the wail of sirens, and other guns on the island were opening fire. This was no place to be caught in an artillery bombardment. He jogged with her along the wall for another fifty yards, then clambered up the steep slope with her and crossed the road to the far side.
The Rembrandt was in darkness. In the dying light from the parachute flare, Wingate made it out as a square, gaunt building with a couple of outbuildings in back and a creaking wooden sign on the road side. He gave the front door a couple of sharp raps with the toe of his boot, then when there was no response he went around the back. He could feel the girl across his shoulder beginning to stir. Above his head, shells from both the shore batteries and the naval units lying off the coast continued to scream through the air. The German patrol back up the road was taking one hell of a pounding.
There was a thin sliver of light leaking through a crack in the blackout shade of one of the basement windows. From inside there came the sound of someone playing a piano and voices raised in some martial-sounding song. It seemed an odd time to hold a party, unless they were trying to shut out the din of the bombardment. Wingate went right up to the back door and unceremoniously kicked it in. The tenon bolt ripped the mortise out of the doorjamb and the door flew open.
Wingate went into the darkened passageway, kicking the door shut behind him. The sound of noisy singing rose from a stairway to his left. He paused to assess the situation. If that naval barrage moved a couple of hundred yards east, he had to get into that basement if he and the girl were to stand any chance of survival. But what language would he use when he got down there? Should he stick with the original shipwreck story? He was still wearing the cap with the name of the mythical ship on it. That ought to be some kind of proof.
The girl interrupted his decision. She muttered, “I’m OK, Mac. Put me down, I can manage.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, putting her gently to her feet. “What happened? I couldn’t find a wound.”
“My head,” she said, putting a hand up to her forehead. “That final dash. I fell. I must have taken a knock.”
