by Bill Mesce
“Do it right, Sandy,” the major said. “You take this. Be sure you get Captain Anderson’s, too.”
There being nothing else, the lieutenant saluted. Markham gave another one of his forgiving smiles. “You don’t salute an officer who’s under arrest, Sandy.”
“They didn’t exactly say you were under arrest, Major.” And then, I’m told, Markham’s smile turned more amused, though sadly so. He looked at his watch, nodded at a thought he shared with no one, then stretched back out on his cot and closed his eyes.
*
Harry could see the ruddy-faced corpsman helping Charles Gresham up onto the tailgate step of a Royal Army lorry A soldier reached down from the back of the lorry and heaved the old man up, then helped him to a seat on the bench by his wife.
“They’re not like your Scots sheep,” Gresham called down to the corpsman. “They’re randy, they’ll bite each other’s legs.”
“I know me sheep, sir.” The corpsman smiled up at him and tossed up to the Royal Army chaperone a cardboard suitcase full of necessaries he’d packed for the couple. “I’ll see to ’em.”
“’N’ no rich meats for the dog!”
The corpsman raised the tailgate and latched it shut. “I’ll treat ’im like me own Spotty.” The corpsman stepped back and waved to the driver. The lorry engine sputtered and caught, gears gnashed.
“’E’s not like your Scots dogs!”
“Understood, sir. ’N’ we’ll see to the chickens, too. You just look after yerself and the missus.”
The old man put his arm around the shoulders of his wife as the lorry lurched. “’N’ keep ’em all outta the garden!”
The corpsman waved until the lorry was out of sight. His ruddy face went cold and he turned to the group of soldiers sitting in the shade of the stone cottage, picking through their ration kits for milk-and-nut. The corpsman pulled a trenching tool from one of the troopers’ packs and went round to the front of the cottage. He knelt by the tarp in the garden, tucked it gingerly round the small, bloody body underneath, and scooped it into his arms. He headed for the woods.
Ryan and Ottinger had a map spread out on the hood of one of the jeeps. They were doing a lot of officious pointing and proclaiming.
“The kind of cordon sanitaire you’re calling for is out of the question!” Ottinger protested. “These men here are all I have, along with the men at the roadblocks! That’s not even enough for an effective traveling cordon if — ”
“You could request — ”
“Colonel, to be perfectly candid, my people simply won’t spare that kind of manpower. They don’t have it to spare.”
Harry was seated on a mossy rock amid the deep, waving grasses some distance from the cottage. Looking through his half-moon glasses at the cartridge casing he was rolling between his fingers, he upended the casing and read the engraving on the base for the third time. There were dozens of them lying scattered round his rock and across the hundred yards between him and the cottage, twinkling between the blades of grass under the late morning sun. Harry rose, dusted off the seat of his trousers, and began walking toward Ottinger and Ryan.
“Might I suggest,” the British captain was saying, “there’s a Home Defence unit nearby at — ”
“No!” Ryan snapped upright. “No civilians! Until the word comes down saying otherwise, nobody on the outside is to know anything about this! You pass that on to your men, Captain: Clam up!”
“You’ll get that confirmed from our command, yes?” Ottinger put just enough emphasis on the “our” to be insulting without being tactless.
Ryan indulged his own insulting, tactful moment: a pause showing respect but no great urgency. “Of course. I’ll also talk to my people when I get back to London and see what kind of units they can spare to augment. Maybe,” and he smiled here, too disarming to be disarming, “we can take the whole load off your hands.”
“Appreciated,” Ottinger said flatly.
Ryan looked about for Bennett and found the captain standing by the edge of the chalky cliffs. “Captain Bennett!” The captain seemed to shake himself awake. He noticed the cigarette smoldering between his fingers and tossed it off the cliff. He walked over to the jeep.
“I was just telling Captain Ottinger here,” Ryan said, “and I want you to pass it on to our people, everybody who knows about this so far: Mouths shut. This is a security situation. Any breach is going to bring holy hell down on somebody’s head. That especially goes for the personnel out at the airfield where these jokers came from.”
Harry had, by now, slid himself into the passenger seat of the jeep. “All of which brings a few things to mind,” he said, taking out his notebook to tick over a new list. “One, I want the field MP’s at that airfield, the ones guarding Markham and Anderson, I want them pulled and replaced by a crew from the Provost. I don’t want their jailers turning out to be their best buddies.”
“Pretty trusting, aren’t you, Major?” Bennett said dourly.
Harry pointed to the bullet-pocked cottage behind Bennett. “Offhand, I’d say Markham and Anderson had pretty much used up their trust quota for the day, wouldn’t you, Captain? OK, Number Two: I also want our MP’s guarding the planes that were involved until the ballistics boys get to them. Three: These guys fill out some kind of report or something after a mission, right?”
Bennett nodded. “G-2 conducts a debriefing after every mission. That’s SOP.”
“OK, when you have those gun films picked up, I want the debriefing reports impounded, too. What was that, Three? OK, this is Four,” and, relishing the drama of the moment the way one who gets few such moments does, Harry placed the cartridge casing on the prone windshield, carefully balancing it on its base.
Bennett stared at it for a moment. Then he picked up the casing, turned it over, and read the engraving. His eyebrows came together, and he handed the casing to Ryan.
“U.S. Army ordnance.” Harry told them. “You can still smell the powder. They’re all over out there, I guess from the plane that made the run on the house. I don’t want those shells touched until the photo crews get pictures, then I want a detail to scrounge up as many of them as they can find for Scotland Yard’s lab people along with slugs from the house and grounds. Captain, I think you should get started on that MP business ASAP.”
Bennett nodded. He shuffled off to the radio on the other jeep.
Ryan gave out a proud-dad smile. “You’re really something to watch at work, Harry-boy.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“One of us should start coordinating the London end of this thing.”
Harry climbed out of the jeep.
“That’s what I thought,” Ryan said, climbing behind the wheel. “Look, Harry, take as long as you need out here, but try to make it back for the case management meeting. I’ll hold it off till 1800 if I have to, which won’t make anybody happy, but we’ve got to talk about redistributing your caseload — ”
“And get me some support staff.”
Ryan took on a look not unlike the one on Harry’s face when he’d stepped off the little Piper Cub into cow manure. “I was hoping to keep the number of mouths around this thing to a minimum.”
“I believe you were the one who said this should proceed ‘expeditiously.’ To do that, I’m going to need help with the legwork.”
“Hoisted with my own petard, eh? OK, we’ll deal with that at the meeting, then me and you can talk it over at The Old Eagle. You want I should send the plane back for — ”
“No! I’ll hitch a ride back with the lab teams.”
Ryan laughed. “See you in the funny papers!” he said and drove off.
*
Harry was glad Ryan was gone. Considering his concern for limiting the number of mouths — as well as eyes and ears — privy to the incident at the Gresham cottage, his old friend would have had a heart attack at the parade that followed. There were the serious-looking men in medical white come for O’Connell’s body, and more
serious-looking men in dark suits spilling out of a convoy of police Wolseys from Scotland Yard’s forensics departments, and then a lorryful of eternally serious MP’s, now seriously surly when set prowling about on their knees to dig spent bullets out of the earth.
Overseeing the parade had taken Harry into the afternoon. He was now hungry and thirsty, and too uncomfortable with the idea of approaching Ottinger or his men, who seemed to be the only group with the foresight to have brought along something to eat and drink. The late-day heat began to make him feel gritty, headachy, and a little weak-kneed. He took a moment for himself, sitting in the cool front room of the cottage. On the bullet-riddled table, Harry had placed the jagged pieces of the porcelain sheep, picked out of the splinters and dust on the floor, and now he poked at them with a stubby forefinger, moving them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
The dark-suited serious men worked soundlessly round him, floating about like shadows, taking photographs, prying bullets out of walls and furniture, dropping them with somber little clunks into metal buckets. “’Scuse, sir,” one of the shadows murmured, and Harry rose and stepped out of the way so the shadow could dig bullets out of the table. He almost backed into two of the white coats carrying a covered stretcher out of the bedroom.
“Need another look ’fore we take him out, sir?” one of the white coats asked. Harry shook his head. He watched the stretcher float out the door and into the bright glare outside. A moment later he heard the ambulance engine stutter off.
Then, Ottinger was in the doorway. “Ready for you at the plane, sir.”
Harry followed him outside, careful to skirt the squad of MP’s digging bullets out of the dirt and clunking them into their upended white helmets. One picked up a pulped squash and held it out to one of his mates.
“Hey, Coop, imagine if that’d been your noggin!”
“Be an improvement!” another said, and they all laughed.
There was a long, flatbed U.S. Army lorry parked near the cliffs. Next to it an Army crane chattered and clanked as it swung its arm out over the chalk rim. Conducting the operation was a bare-chested Army engineer, his arms going this way and that like a rabid Stokowski. The engineer had tied his olive drab handkerchief round his head and a set of technical sergeant stripes were pinned to it over his forehead like an extra set of eyebrows.
“Swing it this way!” the sergeant screamed at the crane. “Right, stupidass, right! No, stupidass, my right, my right! OK, there! Drop it!”
Harry followed the cable from the arm of the crane down to the small beach. The squad of engineers and some of Ottinger’s men had pulled the plane almost to shore and gotten a lift girdle round it. One man stood on a wing, attaching the crane hook to the girdle. The others stood on the shore, holding lines attached to the aeroplane’s wings they would use to keep the craft from swinging into the cliff face. The cable attached, the man on the wing waved to the sergeant and jumped clear.
The sergeant turned to bellow toward the cottage. “Hey, Major — Oh! There you are! We wuz just waitin’ for you, Major. You said you wanted to be — ”
Harry cut him off with an impatient nod.
The sergeant, with the intolerance of one absolutely sure he’s the only one who knows what he’s about, issued a haughty sniff, then turned back to the work at hand. “Awright, you goofballs; up!”
“Go easy,” Harry cautioned.
“Hey, Major, I don’t tell you how to do whatever it is you do, right? Trust me. Nice ’n’ easy for the major, Jimbo!”
The crane motor revved and the exhaust streamed blue smoke as the cable went taut. The plane started to rise, sucking clear of the surf, streams of seawater draining from its wounds.
“Away from the cliff, you stupidass! Away!”
The crane groaned against the weight and the rear ends of its treads began to peel from the ground. The aeroplane began to swing; Harry closed his eyes. He heard the sergeant curse the men below, the men curse back, and the crane operator curse them all. Then, there was only the growl of the crane’s gears and Harry felt a cooling shadow pass over his face. He opened his eyes. He saw the Thunderbolt pendulating above them, spraying water on him and the sergeant.
From the cliff top, wallowing in the low waves, the aeroplane hadn’t looked like much, just another piece of flotsam washed in to shore like a twisted piece of driftwood. But now, watching it sway above him, the Thunderbolts great bulk and massive engine, visible through the peeled-away cowling, seemed incredibly oversized for the purpose of sending one puny human being into the air.
The engineer sergeant picked absently at the mat of hair on his chest with one hand while he guided the crane operator with the other. The plane swung over the flatbed. The sergeant noted the anguished look on Harry’s face and hand-signaled some “Don’t worry” braggadocio, hardly justified by the way the Thunderbolt came down so hard that Harry was certain the spine of the lorry would snap.
“Sorry!” Jimbo called from the operator’s cab.
“I want to get a look inside,” Harry said.
“Better wait’ll we get ’er secured, Major,” the sergeant advised. “She looks a little rocky up there.”
“I want pictures,” Harry said. He was standing by one of the wings, looking up at a cluster of bullet holes near the cockpit.
“I seen some o’ them suits with cameras over by the house,” the sergeant told him. “Should I — ”
“Yeah, yeah, I want the whole thing covered. Inside and out.”
“Yeah, we wanna get a shot, too.”
Harry turned and looked down at the hairy sergeant. “What shot?”
“Ah, we always take one with a job, a little group shot. You know, the boys and me standin’ ’round the — ”
“Those photographers are here strictly on JAG business!”
“I know that,” the sergeant said with his haughty little sniff. “We got our own camera. Hey, Jimbo!” and Jimbo climbed out of the cab proudly holding up a little Brownie box.
“What the hell kind of security — ”
“Hey, Major, it’s not like We’re gonna run it in Stars and Stripes. We know the drill; this is all strictly on the q.t., right? This’ll just be for us.”
“No pictures!” Ignoring the sergeant’s hurt look, Harry held on to the overhanging wing to steady himself. The engineer’s idea of security had joined with his own hunger and thirst to send his head spinning again.
Men were pushing Harry out of the way now, as they started strapping the plane to the loading bed. The engineer sergeant boosted Harry up onto the loading bed. Harry stepped up on the wing and the metal boomed hollowly underfoot as the plane tottered. He stepped up to the cockpit and stuck his head in past the remaining shards of Plexiglas. Dials stared back at him from what was left of the control panel. The violence of the moment of impact was still there, frozen in time, the punctures in the side of the cockpit and control panel trailing rigid tendrils of metal suspended in space. Up on the other wing, the sergeant whistled appreciatively and drew Harry’s attention to the back of the pilot’s seat. It had been pierced four times, clear through the seat armor. A few traces of blood were splattered on the canopy, but anything more had been washed away by the sea.
*
The cab left Harry at the Annex gate a few minutes before six. Joe Ryan intercepted him on a staircase as he hurried to the conference room at the top floor of JAG Building A.
“Where the hell’ve you been? What’s with this chit for a cab? This is like a chit from Magellan! You take this cab around the Horn? You couldn’t take one of their jeeps back? Where the hell’ve you been? I haven’t heard from you since this morning!”
Ryan was a believer in the philosophy that one never allows one’s juniors to see their leader flustered. Without waiting for Harry’s response, he took a moment to straighten his uniform as well as his usual grinning composure and then, with a whispered, “We’ll talk about it later,” entered through the double mahogany doors of the conference r
oom with Harry in tow.
The room had once been a comfortable den, now made cramped by the conference table occupying most of the floor space. The civilian tenants had cleared the shelving of their treasured tomes, but those same shelves now made a suitable home for the JAG’s law volumes, giving the room double duty as a research library. The weekly case management meetings held here were intended to keep Ryan apprised of the status of the London JAG’s various cases, but it usually became an opportunity for his juniors to try to impress him — and each other — over a buffet of coffee and doughnuts.
Ryan took his seat at the head of the table with Harry on his right. Around the table were the other JAG barristers: another major, three captains, and two lieutenants, all young, all feeling they deserved better than to absorb Harry’s caseload for the unspoken but obvious reason of clearing his way for a major case, all hungry for — and feeling worthier of — that same case. Joe Ryan listened to their complaints, nodded with grave understanding and deep concern, then responded that he was a colonel and they were not; end of debate. Any queries from “outside” about the case reassignments were to be referred directly to him. There would be no idle speculation or conference outside the room on the matter. Period.
Not long after, Harry and Ryan were parked in their usual corner booth of The Old Eagle, a dowdy pub not far from the Annex, at the end of an ignored cul-de-sac lined with similarly dowdy shops that sold old bottles, chipped dishware, and other assorted bric-a-brac. It was that ignored and forgotten air of The Old Eagle that appealed to Harry and Ryan, as it provided a welcome relief from the constant sight of American uniforms, which filled the city in those days.
Harry and Joe Ryan routinely huddled at The Old Eagle, lost among the few old duffers mumbling cricket scores to each other. Harry would nurse a toby of ale while Ryan worked his way through a pitcher, and they ate shepherd’s pie and small sandwiches which, for all the culinary deficiencies of the barman/cook/waiter/clean-up man — and English cuisine in general — was still a change from the Annex canteen. Sometimes they would sit and not talk at all, because sometimes that’s all old friends need to do.
