Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  The copilot pulled back the throttle and propeller control, cut the fuel feeding to the engine, then struck a red button overhead. The engine feathered. As the Pratt & Whitney’s roar stuttered, then stilled, the Dakota yawed heavily to starboard, beginning a listing, downward slide. We braced ourselves in our seats, suddenly seeing the dark and inhospitably cold waters of the North Atlantic through the windows across the cabin. The copilot killed the ignition switch to the engine, then addressed the settings for the port engine, boosting its power. At the same time, Doheeny’s right hand danced among the tab controls while his left wrestled with the control yoke until the ship came back into trim, but now less than a thousand feet above the ocean. The pilot began a slow turn back toward Orkney. “Fellas!” he called back to us. “You’ve got about thirty minutes until H-hour.”

  Woody Kneece turned round in his seat and grinned at Harry “Makes you wish you’d stayed home in bed, huh, Major?”

  “I tried that,” Harry replied. “It didn’t work.”

  *

  “You lied to me back in Italy, didn’t you?” Ricks asked. He nodded at the weapons arrayed on the Officers Mess billiard table. “You really don’t know how to use these.”

  “Basic training was a long time ago,” Harry apologized.

  “We’ve only got time for a quick refresher. Mr. Owen, you should sit in on this.” There followed some quick instruction about safeties and magazine releases. “Got all that?”

  “What about aiming?” Harry asked.

  “If something pops, just put out as much fire as you can. I’m not so much worried about you hitting something as in putting out enough lead to keep them from getting a good bead on you.”

  Ricks turned at the sound of the Officers Mess door opening. He picked up one of the .45’s from the billiard table, made sure it was loaded and cocked.

  Astin Moncrief came into the Officers Mess with Jim Doheeny.

  “Ah, Major Voss!” Moncrief smiled a polite welcome. “Good to see you again, though I’m sure you and your mates’d just as soon be on your way home, eh? Bit of luck there, just beat this snow in, good-o!” The RAF major prattled on, but bit by bit, he noted the arms on the billiard table, the combat trousers extending below parka hems still carrying a bit of Italian mud, the look in Peter Ricks’s eyes every bit as cold and unforgiving as the muzzle of the pistol he held by his side. The polite blather became a desperate ramble, as if the longer he could talk the longer he would put off an unwelcome event. “Seems someone’s up to a bit of a to-do, eh?” He went dry, his voice giving out before five hard faces. “Might I ask what this is all about?” he squeaked.

  From icy stillness into sudden action, Ricks was explosive, quick-stepping across the room, grabbing Moncrief by the front of his bridge coat, and flinging him into one of the seats by the fire so hard the lieutenant had to put a boot on the seat to keep it from toppling over. Ricks grabbed a telephone from a nearby lamp table and dropped it into Moncrief’s lap. “I’m sure you have a pretty good idea what this is all about, Major.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t —”

  Ricks set him back into the seat with a push that was nearly a punch. “Major, try to get out of that chair again and I’m going to hurt you.” He picked up the telephone receiver and thrust it into Moncrief’s hand. “Now be a nice guy, get us some transportation, something we can all fit in. A command car would be nice. And then all of us are going to take a ride.” He placed the muzzle of the .45 against Moncrief’s forehead. He pushed the pistol hard against the skin, pushing Moncrief’s head against the seat back, burrowing the rim of the barrel in the flesh. He thumbed back the hammer of the pistol. “I won’t ask twice.”

  Harry pulled Doheeny aside. “Jim, we don’t know who else on this base might be involved, so there can’t be any alarm. Go back to your crew. If anybody asks if you’ve seen Moncrief, if you know where we went —”

  “The last time I saw you, you were all having a friendly chat here at the club.”

  “If anybody wants to change their mind,” Ricks announced, hanging up the phone for Moncrief, “this is their last chance.”

  Doheeny unhappily watched us strap on our pistol belts, sling on our carbines and bandoliers. He exchanged a look with Harry, Doheeny’s eyes pleading that Harry be the one to change his mind. Harry merely smiled a sad smile, patted the flyer on his shoulder, then sent him out into the freshening snowfall.

  *

  My leg made it simplest for me to ride up front alongside Ricks at the wheel, while Harry and Kneece in the rear squeezed Astin Moncrief between their parka-clad bulks. Even without my leg, I think Ricks would have preferred the arrangement. All through the flight I had noticed Ricks and Kneece kept a distance, both physically and otherwise, always cool to each other, never saying more to each other than they needed to.

  My gloved fingers flexed round the barrel of the carbine propped between my knees. I was sure I could feel the cold steel through the gloves.

  Over the course of my twenty years on the job, I have been shot at with weapons of all calibers, from pistol to cannon. I have been threatened by blade and blunt object, assaulted by fist and boot. I have been bludgeoned, beaten, bombarded, and bombed, and climactically dismembered. One never ceases being afraid; one can even grow accustomed to being afraid.

  But being afraid to die is one thing. And killing is something else again. You would think it an easy enough thing to do, there being so much of it about. What did it require? A few pounds of pressure on the metal crescent of a trigger. But now, faced with the possibility…

  We passed the cottages of Stromness. I glimpsed a woman tending the blackout curtains, two boys gawking at the command car bounding past, a white-maned gentleman — pipe clenched in his teeth — contemplating the falling snow. Perhaps it was the aftereffect of all those toddies, but they all looked beautiful to me.

  “This is where they found Armando,” Harry said a few minutes later, and Ricks slowed the car to a halt.

  Beyond the sequined curtain of snowflakes, the frozen beach where Grassis body had lain was invisible in the dark.

  “The minstrel boy will return we pray

  When we hear the news, we all will cheer it.

  The minstrel boy will return one day

  Tom perhaps in body not in spirit…”

  It was Woody Kneece, singing softly.

  “Knock it off,” Harry said.

  “Would you prefer another song? I do a mean ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me.’”

  “I prefer you shut up. Pete, the road you want is just up ahead. Turn here.”

  Ricks slipped the car into gear and started along the track of frozen mud that followed the head of the beach.

  Woody Kneece leaned forward and pointed through the snow-splattered windscreen. “You can pull off right up there and I can show you where I made a hole in the fence. We can slip in there.”

  But Peter Ricks did not pull off the road. Instead, the car began to accelerate, and in moments we saw the gate rushing toward us.

  “Pete…?” Harry asked.

  I don’t know which of us cried out “Jesus!” Perhaps we all did. The toddy-fueled journalist in me prevented me from completely closing my eyes, wanting to note every detail, as the protective cage over the command car’s grille hit the gate square on, the chain holding it snapped, and the gate rebounded against the fence with a metallic twang. The blow shattered both headlamps, and I wondered how Ricks vaulted the car up the rutted path in the snowy dark without hitting any of the trees lining the route.

  He skidded the vehicle to a halt in front of the cabin and bounded out of the car, carbine in hand. Old Teddy Bowles was already in the door, shotgun in one hand as he hastily pulled on his mackintosh.

  “Mr. Bowles!” Ricks called out. He had the carbine at his shoulder, leveled at the old man. “Either you or that weapon goes on the ground now!”

  “Please, Teddy!” Moncrief called from the car. “Drop it!”<
br />
  It took Bowles only a second to make a sage decision.

  Ricks nudged Bowles inside the cabin with the muzzle of his carbine. “Major Voss, would you mind getting his weapon? Mr. Owen, please escort Major Moncrief inside. Captain Kneece, I’d appreciate you pulling the car around back out of sight.”

  No peat-burning stove could compete with the Orkney winter, but after the wind-whipped ride in the command car, the inside of the cottage was comparatively cozy. I gravitated to the glowing stove, warming my hands before the grate. Kneece reached for the pot of coffee simmering atop the stove.

  “Don’t,” Peter Ricks said curtly. “Unless you want to pee on yourself once you’re outside.” He took in the pride of felines dotted about, almond-shaped eyes fixed curiously on the newcomers filling the room. “What’s with all these goddamned cats?”

  Harry nodded Teddy Bowles and Astin Moncrief to chairs, then perched on the edge of the table, looking down at the two men.

  “Major Voss,” Moncrief ahemmed, trying to reassert some composure, “I don’t know what you think you’re about, but you are making a horrible mistake.”

  “I kind of thought we were overdue for this tune,” Kneece said.

  “Major Moncrief, please,” Harry said dismissively. “We know about the X-ray flight coming in tonight. We know it’s going to set down on Sir John’s land. We know the cargo will be transferred to his yacht and be taken down to his lodge in Scotland. What we need are details.”

  “I don’t know what this X-ray rubbish is you’re spouting on about,” Moncrief blustered, “but as soon as I can get word to my sergeant-at-arms, you and your men will find yourselves under close arrest, and when I contact your superiors in London —”

  “Yell loud,” Ricks suggested, fingering the grip of his carbine. “I strongly urge you gentlemen to see the error of your ways. Decide to be heroes, help us out, and maybe you’ll get a break on the back end.”

  “They said there’d be no troubles, is what they was always sayin’,” Bowles protested shakily.

  “They were wrong, Mr. Bowles,” Harry told him. “Right now I can stand in the well at the Old Bailey and make a case against both of you not only as parties to all this smuggling, but as accessories to the murder of an American Army officer. But that’s not how it has to be.”

  “Ye want me t’ do foul by Sir John ’n’, noope, I won’t ’elp ye make yer lies against him.”

  “Lies?” Peter Ricks said it with a biting iciness. He nodded at Bowles and Moncrief. “They’re going to waste time, and we don’t know how much time we have.”

  Harry regarded the hard eyes of the lieutenant, gave a glum, almost imperceptible nod, then stepped away.

  Ricks’s eyes settled on a pear-shaped tabby seated at the far end of the table. He raised his carbine, holding it out toward the tabby in his outstretched hand like a pistol, and squeezed off a shot.

  The room exploded in cats dashing fearfully this way and that.

  The dead set of Ricks’s face had not changed, nor did it as he swung the still-smoking muzzle toward the shocked faces of Teddy Bowles and Astin Moncrief. “You guys have a choice. You either help us, or you do not see the error of your ways and I blow your fucking brains out. Look me in the eye, gents; I am not bluffing.” Moncrief turned away as the carbine muzzle hovered just in front of his eyes, blinking against the sting of the tendrils of smoke curling from the black hole. “If I don’t get some cooperation by the count of three, somebody is going to be dead. Onetwo —”

  “All right!” Moncrief spat.

  Like Moncrief, I had looked into Peter Ricks’s dead eyes: I was nearly as relieved as the British major when the lieutenant lowered his weapon.

  “One loves a penitent man,” I said. “Inspiring.”

  “What time do the X-ray flights touch down?” Harry asked.

  “It’s never the same,” Moncrief gasped. His chest heaved, his body sagged. The last few seconds had utterly unmanned him. “It depends on what can be worked with the patrol schedules.”

  “What about tonight?”

  “It should be around 2200 hours. A little after, perhaps.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “There isn’t constant communication with the flights. I’m only told when they’ve left Reykjavik, then I estimate.”

  “That gives us about two hours,” Kneece said, regarding his watch.

  “What about the boat?” Harry continued. “When does the boat get here?”

  “Tonight, there’s a one-hour gap in the patrol screen. They should arrive anytime during that period, a half-hour either way of 2100.”

  “Mr. Bowles,” Ricks said. “How many men crew the boat?”

  Teddy Bowles’s eyes were on the spray of blood and brain matter at the far end of the table.

  “Mr. Bowles!” Ricks poked the old man in the chest with the barrel of his carbine. “How many men are on the goddamned boat?”

  “Hm? N-not always the same, noope. A half-dozen maybe, sometimes I seen as many as ten.”

  “Which of you two is here when the boat comes in?”

  “I’m never here,” Moncrief said. “It’s safer for me not to be directly involved.”

  “Was safer,” Ricks corrected. He turned to Bowles. “Are you always here when the boat comes in?”

  “No. I mean it’s oop to when the plane comes down, isn’t it?”

  “How’s it supposed to work tonight? The plane is coming in at ten o’clock, the boat before.”

  “I’d be out at the field fer the plane. I gots to light off the smudge pots, don’t I? So the plane can see the field. I brings the spare petrol so they can refuel.”

  “So if you’re not here, the people on the boat wouldn’t worry.”

  “‘Ey’d be thinkin’ I’d be at the field, wouldn’t they?”

  “What would they do then?”

  “‘Ey’d go to the barn, eh? I leaves the bam open, I does, there’s a lorry there, ’ey’d roll ’er out ’n’ starts for the field.” Ricks nodded approvingly and lowered his weapon. He looked round, spied the open door to the storeroom, and disappeared inside. In a moment he returned with a length of rope. “Captain Kneece,” and he nodded in the direction of the dead tabby. Kneece went into the bedroom, came back with a pillowcase. He knelt down out of sight, came back up with a bundle soaking dark red through the linen. Kneece carried the bundle outside.

  “Mr. Bowles,” Ricks said, “I’m going to put you and Major Moncrief in your storeroom. Since there’s no lock for the door I’m going to tie your hands and legs. I’m not going to gag you, but if either of you make the least little noise, I’m going to come in there and both of you are going to join your little furry friend. Mr. Owen, why don’t you help Mr. Bowles and the major get comfy in back.”

  When I closed the storeroom door on Teddy Bowles and Moncrief, I found Ricks by one of the front windows, gloved finger to lips in thought as he studied the ground outside. Woody Kneece returned.

  “What’d you do with it?” Ricks asked.

  “Burial at sea. I threw it in the water.”

  Ricks nodded. He picked up a poker and began to break up the fire. “I don’t want smoke coming out of the chimney,” he explained.

  “A lot of ground to cover,” Kneece said, “here and the landing strip.”

  “Fuck the plane,” Ricks replied. “The worst that happens is they beat it back to Iceland. By the time they land well be in a position to call for MP’s to be waiting for them when they touch down. We need to give the boat crew the idea that Teddy’s off dealing with the plane. The way I see it, some of the crew come off, go for the bam to get the truck. Some will stay with the boat. Major, Mr. Owen, I’m putting you two here in the house. Mr. Owen, that’ll be your position there. Major, you take that front window by the door. If something pops, depending on how things break, from there you can direct fire either at the bam or at the boat. See those rocks on the bank by the north side of the dock? I’m going in there. That’ll p
ut the guys going for the bam in a crossfire. If somebody starts shooting, they’ll fall back on the barn. You told me that door is the only way in or out of the bam, so well have them bagged.”

  “And me?” Kneece asked.

  “I’m putting you in those rocks on the south side of the dock. You’ll be able to either support my fire on the barn, or lay down suppressing fire on the boat as needed.”

  “Factually, once things start to ‘pop,’ unless those fellas on the boat are somebody’s idiot cousins, they’re gonna cut and run,” Kneece pointed out.

  Ricks shrugged. “That’s that many fewer of them for us to worry about. It doesn’t matter if Moncrief has anybody in the local Navy group in on this with him. We show up back at Kirkwall with those guys in the bam and nobody’ll want to be on record as refusing a request to intercept that boat.” He went round the room, turning down the Colemans that lit the cottage. “Major, Mr. Owen, you should leave those windows open. If there’s a fight, you don’t want to have to worry about flying glass. Here’s the big thing: No matter what happens, nobody does a thing, nobody makes a move, nobody opens fire unless I do. I make the first move. Understand?” He turned to Kneece. Even in the darkened room, I would not have wanted that invisible glare turned on me. “Do you understand this time, Captain? Let me hear you say it.”

  “I understand,” Kneece said.

  “Major, Mr. Owen, you two keep your heads down until you hear me give the word.” Peter Ricks paused to consider if he’d left anything undone or unsaid. “I guess that’s it, then.”

  “Just a moment.” They all turned to me. I shrugged. “Seems we should say something heroic, don’t you think?”

  I thought I heard a breathy chuckle from Ricks’s direction. “Amen and give ’em hell,” he said, and stepped out into the eddies of snowflakes.

  Kneece followed. The door closed.

  I don’t know how long Harry and I sat there, growing colder with each tick of the clock, listening to the wind draw sighs from the rafters of the cabin. Whatever glow I’d retained from the toddies flickered out; I was feeling grimly sober. In the shadows of the unlit room I could just make out