by Bill Mesce
“I guess his style hadn’t mellowed up there,” Peter Ricks told Harry.
“— then I get this message from Edghill, 121 X-ray —”
“The makeup flight,” Kneece said. “You’d lost the cargo, they were sending in another one —”
“— and they say, ‘You get on that plane!’ and that’s goin’ east, not home, they’re not b-b-bringin’ me h-home… east. I didn’t know what that meant, I didn’t know it was gonna be th-this shit, but I know it’s not gonna be good ’cause it’s f-fuckin’ east!”
“The flight came in, Andy, and you and Grassi got on it.” “He s-says to me, he t-tells me, ‘Andy, they’re gonna try to fuck ya,’ he says and they’re sendin’ me east so maybe he’s ri-right, and he wants on that plane on that plane, you he-help me, he s-says, and it’s b-better for you and I’m helpin’, right? Helpin’ you, right? You kn-know what they want why they s-sent me out here —”
“You got Grassi on the plane?”
“I say to the c-crew another m-message came in maybe they d-d-didn’t receive it or some bullshit that Grassi’s supposed to come wi-with me, I dunno what he thought he was g-gonna do when he g-got there —”
“That, sadly, also sounds like Armando.” Ricks stubbed out what was left of his cigarette.
“The plane landed in the Orkneys,” Harry went on. “Then what?”
Coster looked at him, helpless. “They got spooked, I g-guess, they saw him, d-didn’t know what he was do-doin’ there, somebody pulled a g-gun… I didn’t have anythin’ to do with —”
“I know, Andy. Did you see the man who shot Grassi? Can you identify him?”
“They put me out here to die you know that dontcha out here to fuckin’ die! They said they’re just gonna tuck me someplace ’til stuff dies down but they want me fuckin’ dead!”
“Andy, you said Edghill brought in McKesson, and McKesson brought you in. Who brought Edghill in?”
“What makes you think anybody did?” Ricks asked Harry. “How do you know this isn’t all Edghill’s own brilliant idea?”
“Because I don’t see how a G-4 transportation officer in Washington came to do business with our friend with the title in Canterbury. Who, Andy?” Harry pressed.
Coster was guarded now; frantic eyes settled down enough to show the calculating going on inside the pep-pill-addled brain. “I heard a name. A big name. That was the c-carrot, all the w-w-way at the beginning that sonofabitch M-Mac said, ‘Andy, do this right and when this is all over we’ll n-never have to worry ’bout a job.’”
“What’s the name, Andy?”
Coster smiled, deviously, maliciously “N-n-n-no!”
“Andy —”
“You find this guy that shot Grassi, I’ll f-f-finger him for you. I’ll he-help you run down the 121 X-ray flight crew. I’ll g-give you the name the name!” The bargaining collapsed into a pleading sob. “But you gotta get me outta here. I c-c-can’t b-be here! I don’t belong here! I didn’t kill that guy, I g-g-got into all this to stay away from all that! Get me outta here and I’ll give it all to you all to you all to you!
Peter Ricks rose with a disgusted grunt, dropped his helmet back on his head, and headed out.
“Stay with him,” Harry told Kneece, meaning Coster, and went after the lieutenant.
Outside, he found Ricks huddled by the trunk of the outermost cypress tree with Dominick Sisto. Harry found the empty foxhole on that side of the OP and slid into it. In the distance, somewhere down in the dale, Harry could hear a voice; faint, weak. German: “Bitte… Amerikaner Kameraden… nicht schiessen…” Then: “Americans… help me, please… I wounded… please… bitte…”
Harry saw Sisto point to the base of the defile the Germans had used for their withdrawal. Ricks came back and slid into the foxhole beside Harry.
“Will they come out to get him?” Harry asked.
“The krauts?” Ricks shook his head. “He’s too close to our line.”
“How about our people?”
“Nobody’s going down there in the dark.”
“What if he’s still alive at daybreak?”
“We’ll see then.”
“Amerikaner… I have hurt, please… Bitte…”
Ricks nodded at the OP “I hope you’re not thinking of taking Mr. Section Eight with us?”
“Why not?”
“Because you won’t get him any further than Porter’s HQ. Do I have to remind you about the shell game you played with Captain Dumbass’s orders to get us out here? You and Kneece are already so far above your authority I’m surprised you don’t have nosebleeds. Hell, I’m supposed to be at a convalescent hospital in London right now. I’m going to be lucky if I don’t get busted down for going AWOL when we get back.”
“That won’t happen,” Harry promised. “I’ll tell them —”
“Nothing.” Not harsh or angry; simply final. “I made my choice, Major; I’ll deal with it.”
“Bitte, please to have help… American friend, please…”
“You saw the kind of guy Porter is,” Ricks said. “He’s got cover-my-ass stamped all over him. You show up with this Looney Tune and he’s going to send a message back to G-l in London that says, ‘Please inform whoever it is wants this crackpot out here so badly that some legal people just took him into custody.’ And because Porter is a cover-my-ass kind of guy, he’s not going to let you go anywhere until he gets an answer, Major. You won’t even get Coster as far as Naples.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“For now, leave him until you can arrange some kind of bullshit reason to pull him out of here. The guy’s nuttier than a bag of pistachios. You should be able to pull him out on a psycho.”
He saw Harry’s look of concern toward the dugout.
“You don’t want to tell him?” Ricks said. “Fine. I’ll give him the bad news. I don’t mind. You want to pity him, have a ball; but for him, I’m dry.”
“I’ll tell him,” Harry said. “He’s right, Pete; he doesn’t belong here.”
“Fuck him,” Ricks snarled. “Nobody belongs here.” He looked at his watch. “We’ve got about two and a half hours of dark. You’ve been going all night. Why don’t you sleep for an hour. That’ll still give us plenty of time for me to have you around the back of that hill before sunup. Hey, Corp! Inside. Catch some sack time before we head out.”
“What about you?” Harry asked.
“I’ll be all right.”
“Amerikaner, bitte… Baseball, Roosevelt. You help, ja? Bitte?”
“Lieutenant,” Sisto called, still at the cypress tree. He nodded down into the dale. “This guy’s gonna keep this up all fuckin’ night. Hey, it’s not like they don’t already know we’re here.”
Ricks gave a nod.
Sisto squeezed off three quick bursts from his BAR.
The dale went quiet.
Sisto slung his BAR on his shoulder and started for the OP “Maybe now we can get some fuckin’ sleep.”
Inside the dugout, Kneece asked Harry, “What was that shooting?”
“Shut up,” Harry snapped, and sat down to talk to Coster.
*
As they started back down the path through the minefield, Harry stopped and looked back at the hump of the OP. He was just able to make out the shadow of Coster standing in the entryway.
“You come back for me,” Coster said. The Benzedrine was gone now, the voice tired and feeble. “Please.”
Harry raised a hand, then turned and headed across the field.
*
Major Porter assigned Captain Joyce to drive them back to Naples. Even the jeep with its four-wheel drive couldn’t negotiate the boggy, rutted road, so Joyce took another route, an ad hoc jeep trail through the groves that brought them back onto the road they’d followed out from Naples, only at a point much farther north than where they’d left it the night before. A few minutes’ travel and they were stopped by MP’s directing traffic off the road, along a detour that ran through a field
.
The road ahead, for a length of some two hundred yards, was pocked with shell craters. This was the site of the explosions and the glow of flames they’d seen the previous night. A half-dozen lorries lay smashed, crumpled like lead foil, gutted by fire, canvas covers burned away, leaving the ribs exposed like the blackened bones of a fire-consumed dinosaur. A squad of engineers with shovels worked in support of a Hough loader piling dirt into the craters to put the road back into usable shape. Other engineers attached the first of the wrecks to the hook of a Diamond “T” recovery vehicle to haul it clear of the road. By the roadside, a dozen blanket-covered bundles lay in a neat line as a Graves Registration unit loaded corpses onto a lorry bed.
Among the wrecked lorries Harry saw the burned-out shell of a Sherman tank. In the field were several more lorries and another stricken tank, hit as they’d tried to make for the concealment of the olive groves some yards off.
Harry told Joyce to pull out into the field. He climbed out of the jeep and started for the blasted Sherman.
A human body that dies by fire is a grotesque nightmarish stick-figure drawn in charcoal. The muscles contract, pulling the face back in a hideous grin; the skeletal arms and fingers and legs curl inward. It was these rigid, twisted shapes another Graves Registration detail — with kerchiefs tied in place over their mouths and noses against the stomach-turning smell of seared flesh and burnt petrol — was trying to wrestle clear of the charred hulk.
Harry walked round to the rear of the tank. Much of the paint had been burned or blackened away, but some of the white stenciling along the rear of the turret still survived: ma’s Boys. Above, hanging from the tank’s radio antenna by a blackened strip of ribbon, was a lump of charred wood, shapeless, like a lump of Christmas coal.
“You shouldn’t’ve gotten out of the jeep,” Peter Ricks said softly behind him, steering him back to his seat.
Chapter Ten: Kronos
“And what is it you want me to do about this flyboy, this Lieutenant Coster?” Ryan busied himself about the fireplace, poking the embers uselessly.
“Work out a ploy to bring him back from Italy.”
“From Italy.” Ryan set down the poker. “A ploy?”
“So that no one knows why he’s being pulled off the line.”
“Which is?”
“He’s a witness to Armando Grassi’s murder.”
Ryan came round the front of his desk. He leaned against the glossy oak, the polished toe of his shoe nudging at the flakes of dried mud left by Harry’s boots. “He told you that?”
“And that he can name the names of some of the other people involved.”
Ryan sighed. “Coster’s not a witness, Harry.”
“Don’t do this, Joe.”
The colonel flinched as a gust of wind accelerated the patter of rain against his office windows. “Harry, you have a guy who’s in a place he doesn’t want to be, who — by his own admission — was a participant in a criminal enterprise as a way to avoid combat duty, and now he’s offering some uncorroborated fairy tale to get himself off the line. I’ve got no authority out there, Harry, and you’ve got even less. For me to reach fifteen hundred miles to pull this guy off the line, I’d probably have to take it up with 5th Army Headquarters. There’s no way I’m going to tangle with Mark Clark’s staff armed with as little as this.”
“You’re not even going to try?”
“Try what?” Ryan withdrew to his chair behind the desk, dropping to the seat with an exasperated huff. “It’s over, Harry. It’s been over! You weren’t even supposed to be in Italy!”
“Be a lawyer for five minutes and do this.”
“Let me remind you: You’re only here on Captain Kneece’s coattails, and your invitation expired when the CIC terminated the investigation. This was never a JAG case, Harry! Even if this office were called in, you’re not staff here! You’re Fort Dix, remember? You do not belong here! You do not exist! Can I make it any plainer than that? Oh, Harry,” Ryan said, pained, “what the hell were you doing out there? God forbid something happened to you, what was I supposed to tell Cynthia?”
“I wouldn’t want you to tell her a thing.”
The colonel stiffened at the rebuke. He reached for the brass cigarette box on his desk. “You’re out of here, Harry,” he said as he flicked his Zippo aflame. “Captain Doheeny and his crew have already been notified and are standing ready at Duxford. As soon as this weather clears — which should, I’m told, be late this afternoon or early evening — you and Captain Kneece are on your way home. That’s an order, Harry, straight from Prince’s Gate. You’ve got some hours to kill, so why don’t you have yourself a nice hot shower and a shave, the canteen’s still serving breakfast, get some hot food in you, have a little Postum and take a long nap.” Ryan exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke into the air. “With a good tailwind and you don’t stop to pee, you should be home for Christmas.”
Harry wearily pulled himself from his chair and headed for the door.
“You’re welcome,” Ryan called as Harry banged the office door shut behind him.
*
Harry felt too tired to fight blowing rain, too tired to do anything. He lowered himself to a bench in the entry hall, not sure if the creaking he heard was coming from the wooden seat or his bones. The rain against the leaded panes of the entry hall was a monotonous finger-tapping. He tottered on the abyss of sleep.
A break in the weather in the Naples sector had allowed Harry, Kneece, and Ricks to fly from Italy directly to England. While that made for a faster return transit, it also meant a half-day of enervating air travel still wardrobed in the combat kits they’d been wearing for forty hours. Ryan had had an Army saloon and driver waiting to hurry them to Rosewood Court — Harry to be immediately ushered into Ryan’s office; Woody Kneece to McCutcheon’s, the CIC senior officer.
His eyes closed and he saw Dominick Sisto, the boy he remembered playing kick-the-can on brick streets, now grown up and emptying his BAR into the night; “Bitte… please…”; the obscene caricatures of an incinerated Angstrom and his crew.
The memories might fade, he knew, but he also knew they would never leave him completely A day in Branch Brook Park with his boys, an embrace from Cynthia, a summer afternoon basking on the back porch of his tenement — everything would be poisoned after this. There would, forever after, be a part of him his family could never know or understand, and that he could never explain.
And this also came to him: It was over and he’d failed. Again.
“Major? Major! Y’all got canned, too?” It was Woody Kneece, dripping with rain. “I hope it was nicer than the reaming I got from McCutcheon. There ought to be a law against that kind of abuse.”
Harry hadn’t the energy for more than an acknowledging nod.
Kneece shrugged prosaically. “Well, hell, I made a choice. I just didn’t figure — Well, until that first time you go to the dentist, you don’t really know how bad he can hurt you.” He shrugged again, this time a hopeless designation for the material in his hands.
“What’s that?”
“Irony.” Kneece held up a large manila envelope marked:
EYES ONLY CONFIDENTIAL
TO: CAPT. D. KNEECE.
C/O CID LONDON
“It’s that stuff my Washington contact got me on Edghill. And these were waiting in our room when I got there.” He handed Harry three wireless messages:
FROM: LT CMDR G ZAGOTTIS
CO NARSSARSSUAQ AIR STATION
TO:MAJ H VOSS
C/O JAG LONDON
DATE: 12-22-43
RECD RADIO COMM THIS AM TO EXPECT 132 XRAY THIS STATION 1500 HRS GMT STOP THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW STOP PLS ADVISE END MESSAGE
FROM: LT CMDR G ZAGOTTIS
CO NARSSARSSUAQ AIR STATION
TO: MAJ H VOSS
C/O JAG LONDON
DATE: 12-22-43
132 XRAY ARRIVED THIS STATION 1520 HRS GMT STOP DEPART DELAYED DUE TO WEATHER STOP EXPECT DEPART LATE AM 12-2
3 STOP PLS ACKNOWLEDGE ADVISE ASAP END MESSAGE
FROM: LT CMDR G ZAGOTTIS
CO NARSSARSSUAQ AIR STATION
TO: MAJ H VOSS
C/O JAG LONDON
DATE: 12-23-43
132 XRAY EN ROUTE ICELAND ETA 1320 GMT
STOP ACKNOWLEDGE STOP GUESS ITS YOUR
PROBLEM NOW END MESSAGE
“How come he sent these to you?” Kneece asked Harry. “Factually this is — was — my investigation.”
“I’m prettier. If this is like the other X-ray flights, it’ll hold up in Iceland until it can time its arrival in the Orkneys for after nightfall.”
“This is like salt in the wound,” Kneece groused. “Ya know, Uncle Ray used to say —”
“I hope he said get me a car.”
“What?”
“A car, a jeep, I don’t care.”
“Major, we are done! McCutcheon made it clear to me that after this any ideas I have about a career in the Army I can pretty much kiss —”
“Kneece, for all I care you can sit here picking your nose if you want after you get me some transportation, but right now get me something with wheels and a motor now, now, NOW!”
Harry very nearly pushed Kneece out into the rain before turning to the corporal at the entry-hall reception desk and reaching for his phone.
“Sir, you can’t —”
Harry smiled coldly, pointed to the gold major’s leaves on his collar, put the same finger to his lips, then used it to dial the G-2 complex at Grosvenor Square.
*
“I wouldn’t mind just once going someplace where we sit in something warm,” Kneece grumbled.
Harry, however, was oblivious to everything but the contents of Woody Kneece’s manila envelope. He flipped through the pages, reading by the gray light as runnels writhed down the jeep’s plastic windows.
Dear Pecker-Wood —
Do you owe me big for this!!!! I am in so much trouble because of you! Every day I’ve been on this Colonel Brass Ass keeps coming in here asking me what it is I’m spending so much time on instead of the casework I’m SUPPOSED to be on. You damn well better crack open that little black book of yours when you get back and share. I don’t mean those crows you’re always trying to pass off when you’re hooked up with the pretty sister. No, sir, my ration book is all used up on “nice personalities” — ha-ha. You start sharing the GOOD quiff.
