MATT HELM: The War Years

by Keith Wease

  In a way, it made our job that much easier. With the Germans looking over the hill - so to speak - for the enemy, they weren't so likely to look closer to home. Social activities were curtailed drastically, which let me off the hook - there were greater concerns than entertaining a minor Prussian nobleman. The next several days would have been mildly boring if it were not for the day-to-day possibility of someone making a mistake - including me. Every time a plane came near, I involuntarily looked up to see if it was the one.

  Knowing that nerves would be frayed, I resisted the impulse to "fine-tune" the operation. They all knew their jobs and no purpose would be served trying to second-guess an agent - or even provide a friendly word of encouragement. These weren't schoolchildren, they were trained fighting men and women who knew their jobs as well as, if not better, than I. Unless something changed, and as things stood it was unlikely that anyone would be transferred or allowed leave, I had to stay as far away from the others as possible, even Yvette. If she needed to get in touch with me, she knew where I was. I spent a lot of time thinking about Tina, and - on occasion - Yvette, which just made me feel guilty. So, for the most part, I turned my mind off and read a lot and slept a lot.

  One afternoon late in June, while I was sitting outside my hotel reading, a Messerschmidt flew toward the city, trailing smoke. I knew it was a Messerschmidt because I had been told it would be, not because I recognized it. As the plane passed overhead, a parachute opened as the pilot bailed out. Within a few seconds, the plane exploded in a tremendous ball of flame and debris, accompanied by the thunderous roar of the explosion an instant later. Anyone in town would have to have been deaf not to hear it.

  Well, that was the idea. Our biggest problem during the two weeks Frank and I had planned the operation had been the signal. We had to get word from the Allied Command that it was time to go, and then had to pass the word to sixteen agents. We couldn't have everyone walking around with a radio and tracking down that many people to personally pass the word simply wasn't feasible, not to mention mildly suspicious. We had to have a sure-fire signal that could not be misunderstood. If the timing was off or somehow a signal was accidentally duplicated - we'd toyed with the idea of ringing the church bell - the whole operation could fall apart. Frank had come up with the idea of flying one of our planes over the town and Mac had refined the idea into its present form. Where he got a Messerschmidt I have no idea. I'd wondered what the odds were of a real German pilot getting his plane shot up and heading for Cherbourg, but I'd been assured that we were out of the traffic pattern, to use some aerial terminology.

  Satisfied that the signal had been sufficient, I waited until the pilot landed just outside town and walked back to my chair and opened my book - War and Peace, if it matters. I'd started it in college and had never finished it and I was now remembering why. The signal did not require an immediate response. Each target was left to the assigned agent's discretion. If he - or she - could make the touch discreetly with no witnesses and little chance of the body being discovered prematurely, he would do so as soon as feasible. Otherwise, we would each wait until nightfall and then pick the best time, with four o'clock in the morning being the deadline, by which time the job became critical, to be accomplished by any means, regardless of risk.

  As I pretended to read, I hoped the pilot was as good an actor as Yvette. Mac couldn't resist a Machiavellian touch and the pilot was to bring the good news - for the Germans, of course - that the Allies were being pushed back into the Channel. He, and his companions in the Luftwaffe were winning the air battle and he, himself, had shot down three of the new American P-51B

  Mustangs, before being hit and, unable to steer, had ended up over Cherbourg.

  This should be cause for celebration, making our jobs easier as well as lulling the Germans into a false sense of security, making the scheduled dawn assault more of a surprise. Sometimes I wondered if the war wouldn't have been long over if Mac had been in charge of it. You may have gathered by now that, in our outfit, no one went around grumbling about the "old man" not knowing what he was doing - although I understand that's a favorite pastime in the more traditional military units. If Mac had told us that there was a twenty percent chance we could end the war by parachuting into Berlin in broad daylight and making a direct assault upon the German Command Headquarters, we'd probably grab our guns and head for the nearest airplane, knowing he wouldn't ask us to do something he didn't believe in himself.

  Not that Mac wouldn't send one of us out on a mission that was considered important enough to justify the death of an agent. If the mission was important enough and the chance of success good enough, he would accept it, even though the agent stood little chance of returning. But if that were the case, Mac would be the first to admit it. And, because of the loyalty and respect Mac commanded among his agents, not one of us would refuse to go.

  As near as I could figure out later, somewhere between forty and sixty people died that afternoon and night, including all sixteen of our targets and two of my group. The latter two were forced to break in on a party in which both their targets, junior officers, were celebrating the supposed German victory along with their men. They were both found inside the house, along with seven dead Germans, including the two officers. They didn't know each other, to the best of my knowledge, so I don't know if they met outside, compared stories and went in together, or if they each went in separately. In either instance, they gave a good accounting of themselves.

  The next day, we found Germans with broken necks, slit throats and small .22 caliber holes in various parts of their anatomy. Often, we found more than one German in the same spot, indicating a friend had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, most of the excess casualties came from a single occurrence. One of our agents, a man named Monk, had a thing about weapons that go bang in a big way. I remembered hearing the explosion around two o'clock that morning, but had been too busy myself to pay it much mind. As Frank told me later, Monk had wired the house of the Panzer Division Commander with explosives of his own devising and could have blown the building anytime after ten. However, the Commander was having his own celebration party, complete with female entertainment and, as people kept arriving, Monk simply waited for a full house and pressed the button. It was hard to tell how many people had been in the house after the explosion tore them apart.

  I had met Monk once before and, if I'd known Frank was going to select him for this mission I would have advised against it. It was on the Hofbaden job that I was assigned the explosives expert we called Monk. He had hulking shoulders and an oddly sensitive, handsome face. He had an ascetic face that could light up with a burning enthusiasm when he got that fanatical look in his bright blue eyes. It was one of his biggest assets. He was damn convincing playing a dedicated Heil-Hitler boy. His rather squat, powerful body went oddly with his long, sensitive face, crisp dark hair, and brilliant blue eyes. There was nothing wrong with him physically, but he gave an impression of deformity nevertheless. He seemed to have been made of parts intended for several different men. I'd never decided whether Mac had picked that code name for him because he was built like a gorilla or because he often wore the expression of a saint, and I'd never asked. There had been more important things to worry about at the time. I'd have killed him if I hadn't needed him, the murderous bastard. It was a perfectly simple job, but he wanted to make a wholesale massacre of it. He got his kicks from blowing up people in bunches instead of one at a time. He came under the heading of the kind of unfinished business we normally try not to leave behind us. I mean, it's only in the movies that you make bitter enemies in one scene and let them live to raise hell with you in the next. If Monk had been an enemy agent, I'd have shot him dead the instant I had no further use for him, as a simple act of self-preservation. As it was, I'd brought him back to base alive, knowing that I was probably making a mistake, and that it was a mistake the Monk himself would never have made. I'd got to know the guy pretty well - as well as you can ge
t to know a guy you've risked your life with and beat hell out of.

  In a technical sense, Monk was a very good man. He was a genius in the field of high explosives, where my own knowledge is less than adequate. The only trouble was, he just loved to see things blow, particularly if the things had people in them. Personally, if I'm assigned to get one man, I like to get that man. This business of demolishing a whole landscape with figures - even enemy figures - just to erase a single individual seems pretty damn inefficient to me. As the agent in charge, I'd had to lean on Monk pretty hard to make him do things my way. He wasn't the man to forget it.

  Well, he'd got to see another pretty building blow up with lots of people inside, including a few relatively innocent bystanders - not that that mattered to him - and when we got back to London, I told Frank about the Hofbaden incident, for what it was worth. Monk had been under his command and it was his decision what to put in his report to Mac.

  Anyway, as I have indicated, I was rather busy when Monk's explosion occurred. I had had a hell of a time locating Colonel Kiersten. He wasn't in his house and neither was Yvette. I finally found someone who told me she had seen him and Yvette walking down toward the beach. As I headed in that direction I heard the boisterous sounds of a party or two - apparently Mac's stratagem had worked - and, in the distance, sounds of gunfire. I never did find out if the gunfire was from one of our agents or simply Hans or Friedrich letting off a little celebratory steam. Apparently, no one else was curious enough to investigate either, and the mission was going off like clockwork, thanks to Mac's little embellishment.

  It was about then that Monk's explosion went off, which seemed a little extreme for a celebration, but I had a job to do. I was reasonably sure that Yvette would take care of it for me, but my job was to make sure. As I got near the rocky beach, I saw a lone figure walking from the water toward a small beach house, his silhouette clearly visible in the moonlight. As he approached the light streaming from the open door of the beach house, I recognized Kiersten a moment before he called out in German.

  "Charlene, my pet, what's taking you so long?" He held his arms out as though expecting her to run into them.

  I was still in the shadows and I knew he couldn't see me with the bright light in his eyes, so I pulled out my Woodsman, intending to finish the job right then. Before I had a chance, there was a small, solid thud, the sound of something hard and sharp burying itself in something moderately soft. Well, to be honest, I'm not that good at sounds; I'd caught the glint of the throwing knife before it struck. Kiersten's mouth opened, but no scream came out, just a barely audible - at my distance - gasp of pure agony. Then there was a rattle of dislodged stones beside him as she ran from the side of the beach house and threw an arm around his neck while the other hand groped for and found the weapon buried under the armpit, wrenched it free, and drove it home a second time. By the time I reached her, she'd laid him down and was squatting beside him, wiping her blade on his shirt. She looked up at me. Her eyes were strange and shiny; for a moment she was just another dangerous predator crouching over its kill, not quite human. Or very human, depending upon your definition of humanity.

  She was a unique specimen in a world of tender ladies who couldn't bear the thought of guns or violence. Keeping her leashed would be an offense against nature, like calling a beagle off a rabbit or asking a good pointer to ignore a covey of quail.

  "So?" she whispered.

  I didn't feel it was the right time to point out that she'd been very lucky that the German hadn't screamed; and that we don't like that throwing-knife routine even when silence is not important.

  There's a lot of bone in a human body, and slipping a blade accurately between the ribs is difficult enough at contact range. From ten or twelve feet away, it's strictly a game of chance.

  "You did fine," I said.

  "Bullshit! I got lucky. I was planning to take him at the house, but he came in all excited and insisted that we go out for dinner. This knife was the only weapon I could get my hands on. I carry it in my purse all the time - for protection, I told him. He thought it was cute, the sexy little French girl with the sexy little knife."

  Actually, on second look, the knife did seem a little sexy, with the pretty carved hilt and the etched steel blade. I hadn't noticed before - a weapon that has just killed a man looks deadly to me, always.

  She seemed to feel the need to explain something to me. Well, a talking jag is a fairly common reaction after a kill, especially among women. Yvette continued, "He used to make me dress up in a femme fatale getup, with the knife slid down in my stocking. It turned him on. We would pretend that I was trying to kill him and he would take the knife away from me and hold it to my throat or stomach while he made love to me. He also liked to cut me, just a little."

  She took a deep breath. "Look at me, chattering away like an amateur." She smiled wryly. "Anyway, I thought it was a sort of poetic justice, to kill the pig with this knife that he liked so much."

  "Sure," I said, "I understand." Actually, I did. In this business, it's not often that you get to kill someone you hate, and we're human - regardless of opinions to the contrary. When revenge and duty go hand in hand, why not enjoy it? Tina had taught me that.

  "The job got done, that's what counts," I added, softly, looking down at her. Then she stood up and I really looked at her as a person. She was quite pretty in her one-piece swimming suit, still a little wet and revealing the small swell of her erect nipples. I saw her eyes change as she watched me staring at her and I remembered another common reaction after a kill - common to both men and women.

  She took a small step toward me and whispered, "It would be a shame to waste this lovely beach house on such a beautiful night, wouldn't it Eric?"

  I tried to think of a suitably flippant reply, but my mouth was suddenly dry. I just moved forward and picked her up and carried her inside....

  Afterward, we lay there feeling luxuriously relaxed after the long tension. She was smoking a cigarette I lit for her, after pouring two glasses of Kiersten's favorite Margaux. I wasn't much of a red wine fan, but this tasted pretty good. Perhaps I just hadn't spent enough money before.

  Finally, I had gone out and dragged the body around the side of the house, thankful that nobody had come by. When I came back, Yvette had refilled our glasses. As I sat down on the bed beside her, she turned to me with a strange look on her face. "Who was she, Eric?" she asked gently, "This Tina, that you love so much?"

  I stopped with the wine glass halfway to my mouth. I frowned at her, then remembered my momentary lapse in the throes of passion, so to speak.

  "I'm sorry, Yvette," I said, "it was just a slip of the tongue." She didn't seem to be upset, just mildly curious. "I wouldn't exactly call it love - we only spent two weeks together, a couple months ago. I guess it was just so recent, that I'm still used to using her name."

  "Who's kidding who?" she laughed. "I'm a woman, and I'm French. I know when a man is in love." She held up her hand. "Don't try to spare my feelings, Eric. I am not so fragile, especially now. Besides," she went on, "you're not really my type. I've got a sweet young man waiting for me in London. After the war, we will be married, and I'll tell him some beautiful lies about my thrilling adventures as a courier for the Resistance, and how I stayed true to him, and he will tell me some beautiful lies and we will live happily ever after."

  I had to laugh at her practical approach to life. She was doing what she could for her country and then she would do what she could for her husband. It was a typically French attitude. "And I'm just a temporary diversion, is that it?" I asked with a grin.

  "Just so. And a very beautiful diversion." She stubbed out her cigarette and drank the last of the wine in her glass. Lying back in the bed, she opened her arms and said, "Come here, Diversion, I am not through with you yet."

  She wasn't.

  We stayed in the beach house until dawn when the troops arrived. Within a few hours Cherbourg was liberated, so I guess you could call th
e mission a success. We took a couple of days getting back to London, where Yvette promptly disappeared with her boyfriend, and a couple more days reporting to Mac. I never found out if the Taussig technique was used again - at least I wasn't involved if it was - but I had my suspicions on at least two other occasions. Mac wasn't the type to pass up a winning strategy.

  Chapter 21

  While things were being sorted out following the invasion of France, I had some free time, but Tina was off on another mission. I had a feeling Mac was planning things that way, but was afraid to ask him - he might have told me the truth. After a few days I got bored and reported back to the camp just in time to be grabbed for instructor duty. As the pace of the war increased, and our casualties mounted, Mac was recruiting and training faster, and more of it was being done here in Britain. In between assignments we occasionally filled in to help out.

  I didn't mind it. Actually, I got a kick out of teaching the finer points of sniping and knife work. I was more effective now, having gained some insight by practicing in the field. I found that there's nothing like a few close calls to sharpen your teaching techniques, and the students tend to pay more attention to someone who's been there and done it. Theory is all well and good, but I think our educational system would be better off if the teachers and professors were forced to practice their trade for a few years before they were allowed to teach it.