by Joel N. Ross
It was half a block before Tom regained his breath. He opened his mouth to shout, and the man with the teeth stepped up, one-two, one-two, one-two, leading with the left this time, in the man’s favorite rhythm. Tom’s mouth closed.
They stumbled onward, from dark to dark. Tom used his feet to keep upright, his weight borne by King Kong. His wrist was numb in the vise of the big man’s grip.
“Bleedin’ muck,” Kong said. “Can’t speck my own arse.”
“Keep it in the cupboard,” Teeth said.
“Sets me fookin’ off.”
Tom used Kong’s grip on his wrist as a fulcrum, pivoted his knee up, and drove it into the big man’s stomach.
Kong grunted and swatted him.
Tom went semiconscious, the dark streets and the dark of his mind flashing on and off. The clouds cleared. The moon shone. A misshapen skeleton projected against the sky, a building stripped by the Blitz—only the pipes remained, like the carapace of an insect, two stories tall. Then they were in a cratered field, amid a slab of granite, a pile of rocks, and an earthen mound. The man with the teeth pointed with the flashlight, and Kong tossed Tom at the heaped rocks. He fell hard. His chin was wet with blood from his nose. He wiped it away on his sleeve.
“Ten pounds,” he said. “It’s all I have.”
Kong thrust a massive hand at him. “Give over.”
Tom gave over. “I’ll need a receipt.”
“Visited by a ponce, weren’t you?” Teeth asked. “In the old Rowansea.”
“The fookin’ lock hospital.”
Tom shook his head. “That’s all the money I have.”
“Early this morning,” Teeth said, “a ponce came calling on you.”
“A ponce.” Tom put his left hand behind to steady himself. Found a rock.
“You know bleedin’ well,” Kong said.
“You’ve got the wrong man,” Tom said.
“Wrong yobbo,” Teeth said. “So many Yanks wandering the streets, one hand bandaged.”
“Are you gonna tell me?” Tom said. “Or you want me to guess?”
“What’d the ponce want from you, yob?”
“I got off the boat in Liverpool on Friday. Whatever the fuck you think—”
The big man slapped him. Tom rode with the blow and swung the rock. Left-handed, he didn’t have the speed or the strength, and barely touched Kong, a gentle swat.
Kong slapped him again, and it was like being slapped by a frying pan.
His eyes watered and he faked right, moved left. If he could reach the darkness, he’d disappear—but the flashlight beam was a searchlight at a prison camp fence. Kong swung, and Tom stepped under and past him, moving toward Teeth. Take the smaller man first.
He went in fast and low, but Teeth caught him in the eyes with the light. Tom swung, and the man wasn’t there. He stumbled, and Kong lifted him like a rag doll and slapped him again.
Then they got to work. Tom kept it together, silent and still. He rode the pain. Pain was an old friend, familiar territory. Take off his slippers and doze by the fire.
Then Teeth unwrapped the bandage on his right hand and pulled that arm from Tom’s body like a kid snapping the wing off an injured bird. Tom couldn’t look at his hand. An alien thing, ugly and writhing with nerves.
The big man put his heel on it and ground down.
THE NEXT MORNING, the locusts came.
Tuesday, May twentieth. The boys were shivering lumps under frost-stiff blankets. A nightingale called. One of the boys grunted and rolled and scratched at fleas. The whine of a Messerschmitt broke the stillness. Tom and the boys dived for the slit trench and Hanner, bleary-eyed, smacked Lifton on the back of his head.
While in Greece, Lifton had acquired the gift of remaining asleep while scrambling into a trench. He’d rest his head on an outstretched arm, eyes closed and still snoring. Tom had established LR duty: Lifton reveille.
“I’m fucking awake,” Lifton said.
They hunched as the fighter buzzed closer. The rattle of machine-gun fire sounded over the roar of the engine. Three bombers behind the Messerschmitt loosed their cargo with whistles and thumps and were gone.
“Good morning, Hitler,” Tardieu said, giving a rude salute.
They waited for the all clear and then climbed from the trenches to the shithouse and mess tent, an ear cocked for Jerry. The anxiety of the previous night was gone; it was morning, and they were young. An hour later, they were shoving Compo rations and eggs into their faces, washing them down with goat’s milk and raki, when there was a sudden roar of archie fire.
Halfway to the trenches, they knew it was starting. The sky was mottled with German planes: diving, bombing, buzzing, strafing. Then came the waves of silent silver gliders, moving slow toward Canea on long, tapered wings and landing with ghostly quiet in the scrub around Hill 107. A single Hurricane could have chewed through them like a wolf through kittens, but there wasn’t a single Hurricane. There were no Allied planes—the Nazis owned the skies.
“Arms!” Tom heard himself shouting. “Stand to! O’Rourke, Corelli!”
Cooks, clerks—every man not attached to the field hospital or ambulance unit grabbed a weapon as the throb of the Nazi paratroop carriers sounded overhead. Black-and-yellow behemoths dropped green, pink, and black spores to the earth. The elite Fliegerkorps. Yellow parachutes, blue parachutes, they drowned the sky.
They died by the hundred, hanging in the air.
It was a game of fish-in-the-barrel, hide-and-seek. Take cover in a trench, behind a cactus, aim and fire. Parachute silk billowed from the barrage of bullets and caught fire. Distant paratroopers twitched and went suddenly stiff. Legs kicked downward, desperate for the ground; bodies jerked in harnesses and fell still.
The Bofors gunners at the edge of the airfield had been punished for weeks, and they were answering now with endless blind roars behind a haze of bomb-borne dust and smoke. A full fucking battalion was dropping from the sky. Another battalion to the west, out of range of the Bofors, was digging into the dry riverbed. Not Tom’s problem, not yet. Slaughter them in the air—and if they set foot on his island, hunt the bastards down.
He could smell the sweat and fear, the burn of cordite. Tom’s eyes stung; his hands ached as he fired and fired again. He heard the hoarse roar of his men, of his own voice, the machine growl of Bren guns and rifles, mortar shells, and the pop of automatic pistols. The sky was full. They killed and killed, but it didn’t matter. The Nazis never stopped coming. They landed; they massed.
The Bofors boomed ineffectually now, the onslaught out of range, and Nazi light field and 20-mm antitank guns answered from the west. Machine-gun and rifle fire cut down Germans driving toward Hill 107. A bloody crossfire: Bodies tumbled down the slope; the wounded crawled beneath shrubs and into hollows.
A three-inch antiaircraft gun barked over a rise. A 40-mm hurled a hail of incendiary and tracer bullets skyward, barrel glowing dull red—and got lucky. A Junker transport plane exploded into a brilliant orange fireball. A cheer arose and was indistinguishable from the screaming.
The paratroops were machines. They dropped, shed harnesses, sprinted for the weapons canisters. With drill-field precision, they checked and loaded weapons, stepped around their dead buddies, and joined in the battle. The Luftwaffe pounded the Allied positions, covering the paratroops, buying them time to rally, dropping weapons and more men, always more men. . . .
The squad was on recon, skirting a field of barley. O’Rourke froze at a sound, signaled. Manny and Rosenblatt crawled into hollows and relaxed: Kiwi accents. A lieutenant was leading three dozen armed men—released prisoners—from Prison Valley. On a turkey shoot, he said, head-hunting Nazis.
Twenty minutes later, they found a Kraut whose parachute had caught in a tree. He was slumped in his harness, dead—until Hanner approached. The Kraut’s gravity knif
e snicked open and Tom shot him without a pause in his sentence: “We’re not fucking grave robbers. Weapons, yes, open season. Take what you can carry. And cigarettes. Leave the rest.” The paratroopers were Christmas come early—chocolate and rusks, cigarettes and sausages and rubbers, hypodermic syringes of jump juice, and blankets and socks and vests. They carried 9-mm Parabellum Lugers and hand grenades. Their supply canisters were treasure troves of Mauser K-98s, Schmeisser MP-40 submachine guns, MG-34 light machine guns. And ammunition. Blessed fucking ammunition. “Manny, radio base and request—”
From a scraggly grove of olive trees came the woof of mortar shells. The squad moved, fired, moved, fired; stalked forward like one animal, preying on the ground troops and cringing from the air attacks. The sky was the enemy. The Germans bombed and strafed and fell in waves, an endless swarm.
Before the wireless failed, they heard that Nazi troop transport had taken the beaches; Junkers had crash-landed in the fields. The swarm was unstoppable. Nazis were on the bridge over the Tav riverbed. Farther south, they’d captured a handful of hospital ground staff, used them as human shields while pushing up Hill 107 toward the airstrip.
Farther south? Tom’s squad was farther south.
They flanked the Nazis; the squad fired hesitantly around the white-faced Aussies and Brits, afraid of hitting an ally. The hostages were beaten forward but maintained composure, unwilling to panic. But the Krauts were taking the fucking hill. If they took the hill, they took the airfield. If they took the airfield, the island fell.
Tom couldn’t shape the words, couldn’t speak the order. His mouth moved into a snarl, he squeezed the trigger. His captured Schmeisser 9-mm spoke, and was silent. The boys mopped up.
Still they came. Waves of bombers, waves of men.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
NIGHT, DECEMBER 1, 1941
THE YOUNG WOMAN who called herself Duckblind adjusted her burleigh hat to a more rakish angle. She smiled in the darkness of Mr. Pentham’s garden—there was never a time when the angle of one’s hat wasn’t simply vital—and reached for her bicycle, which was propped against the gate.
They’d been lackadaisical, the Luftwaffe—halfhearted raids, scalded cats scampering quickly away. How she did wish they’d begin bombing properly again. She’d heard stories of the Blitz, fire raging at the docks, bombs falling in an endless hail, sirens shrieking, the chatter of bullets as fighter pilots dueled to the death in the sky above, like gladiators.
All she wished was the teensiest bit of pageantry and splendor, a spot of color in this gloomy city. Not that the people were gloomy. They were lovely. They made her laugh. They were too perfectly easy to deceive, the English. Of course, she was good at roles—sometimes she even fooled herself. It reminded her of playing dress-up when she was a little girl, clumping about in Mama’s shoes, draped in ropes of pearls that fell to her calves. Mr. Pentham had some divine old trinkets, too, tobacco pouches and tiepins, lovely theatrical props.
Poor Mr. Pentham, so brave and bewildered. Duckblind hoped this new English gentleman, the one she was bicycling across the city to meet, would treat her as kindly. She’d been surprised when she’d discovered the request for a meeting in the dead-letter drop, surprised and wary, as the request had been imperfectly encrypted and the drop had been imperfectly marked. But then, after she retrieved the message, it wasn’t so surprising after all. It was not the man she called Bookbinder who had requested a meeting in such a clumsy manner, but a lesser agent he controlled, an agent freshly recruited. An agent who did not know for whom he was working, but who had listened and learned and would heed his master’s call.
Duckblind would meet him at the bomb site and learn the full text of Bookbinder’s message. She propped her bicycle against a tumbling brick wall and picked her way over the wreckage to an observation point to wait. She settled into the shadows, her hand on a length of iron piping.
THE CHAIR SQUEALED as Davies-Frank put his feet on the desk. He held the phone to his ear and listened to it ring, watching Highcastle scowl at maps across the cramped office at Hennessey Gate.
“Mrs. Davies-Frank,” he said into the phone when his wife’s voice came on the line.
“Lambkin,” Joan said, her voice pitched low and warm. The tone and the pet name told him everything he needed to know. She forgave him the late hours, the midnight calls. She more than forgave him.
“Did the twins finish dinner without catastrophe?” he asked.
“Without undue catastrophe.”
He felt himself relax. Not because he’d been worried about dinner; because he could relax, with Joan. “Excellent news.”
Highcastle, across the room, ran a finger along the crease of the map on his desk, not bothering to listen, not bothering to pretend he couldn’t hear.
“They’re upstairs as we speak,” Joan said. “Giggling under the blanket with a torch.”
“Wasting batteries.”
“You ought to speak sternly to them when you come home. I shouldn’t wait up?”
“Not tonight, love.”
“No. Well, do try to get some sleep, my sweet.”
Davies-Frank told her something to make her smile, then returned the phone to the cradle as gently as kissing the back of her neck.
Highcastle spoke without looking up. “There ought to be a law.”
“Jealous, old cock?”
The salt-and-pepper head rose. “Yes. You’re a lucky man.” He jabbed a thick finger at the map, where he was planning the capture of Duckblind. “Ten-fifteen. We need a minimum of six men. Better a dozen.”
Outside All Souls Church at the rendezvous tomorrow night, at what Sondegger had called a ‘treff.’ Davies-Frank untangled the phone cord. “You’re confident we’ll make the arrest?”
“In the blackout?” Highcastle said. “No guarantees, even with a dozen men. Lethal force has been authorized. Better he’s dead than free.”
“There’ll be clear skies and a moon tomorrow,” Davies-Frank said. “Raid weather, but good visibility for us. We’ll catch him.”
“If he’s there.”
“Duckblind will be there.” Because if he wasn’t, Sondegger would be executed. It was the only reason Davies-Frank believed the rendezvous information was correct. Though why Sondegger had insisted on telling only Earl . . . “Why Earl? Sondegger could have told us the rendezvous information directly.”
“Tom’s holding back.”
“Is he?”
“Not sure,” Highcastle said. “Let the Americans worry that. We’ve too much on our plate already.”
“Mmm. At least Sondegger seems to believe Tom is Earl.” Davies-Frank rose to look at the map with Highcastle. “You’re satisfied?”
Highcastle grunted. “You briefed Rippen?”
“Rippen won’t be holding the white umbrella. I will.”
A short sharp silence. “That’s daft.”
“I’m the only one with enough German to pass for native, if it comes to that.”
“And if Duckblind draws down . . .”
“He’s a wireless operator, not Commander Flash. I’ll make contact, then withdraw.”
Highcastle scowled at the map, his spectacles magnifying his eyes. “Thomas Wall,” he said in disgust.
“What’s he to do with anything?”
“Amateurs. The pair of you.”
Davies-Frank flicked his lighter open, flicked it closed. “Making contact with an unarmed WT operator while surrounded by your men—it’ll be a walk in the park.”
“Or a minefield,” Highcastle said.
IN THE SMALL ROOM under the eaves, the small man at the small desk removed his earphones with a jerky, nervous motion. Melville was pale—and as he stood and stepped close to the wall, he turned paler.
He lifted an ink-stained hand. He nodded to himself. Nodded again. He knocked on
the wall. Two quick, two slow.
Farquhar, another transcriptionist, would relieve him in fifteen minutes. How time swept by so fast, and crept so slow! The duration of time came from the succession of ideas, from the speed at which thoughts formed and dissolved, a slick of petrol in a puddle of rainwater. Not only time but life itself flowed from the mind. Melville had learned a great deal. He knew so little. The message entrusted to him was in a language he could not decipher. It didn’t matter. It was not for him to judge significance. He was merely a receiver—well, now a transmitter, too.
He returned to the small desk. He had fifteen minutes. He had never known conviction until tonight. He would never again be so brave as he was tonight.
“A MINEFIELD?” Davies-Frank stifled a yawn. “That’s the way to buck up the old esprit.”
“Ought to turn in,” Highcastle said, talking of the narrow folding Plimsat bunks downstairs. “Tomorrow won’t be short.”
“One last briefing and I’m done.” Davies-Frank checked his watch. “Farquhar’s late.”
Before Highcastle could respond, there were footsteps on the stairs. Farquhar arrived, all apologies, and Davies-Frank briefed him—the fire and its aftermath, the new terms and response keys—and escorted him to the transcription room. Pretending to escort him for courtesy’s sake, but actually testing himself. He couldn’t function properly, afraid. He monitored his heart as they passed the warder at the bulky desk, approached the whitewashed door. His heartbeat stayed level and smooth. Bless you, Joan.
Important to remember that one was not a superstitious primitive, that a man was never more than a man. Important to remember the reason for the dread, the lies, the nights away from home: all those who risked their lives, who risked even more than their own lives, to defeat the Nazis. He would never forget them.
Mr. Krajewski. The Pole who dragged a shattered collarbone from Lodz to the Baltic Sea by willpower alone, hijacked a fishing trawler with an empty pistol, trained with the SOE in England, and returned to Poland with a different name. Mr. Vedel. A soft-spoken Frenchman almost single-handedly responsible for the dozen pocket bombs that reduced the railroad in his département to a level of inefficiency so egregious, the Germans preferred lorry convoys, which traveled over bridges that Vedel then bombed.
