Agents of Treachery

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “You okay, boss?”

  “Couldn’t be better, dude.” He gave his teammate an upturned thumb, then swiveled, squatted, and put his M4 in low ready. Gave himself a burst of IR light, saw nothing but air, and duckwalked forward.

  0426. Charlie was having trouble breathing. He hadn’t gone two hundred feet, yet his lats felt as if they’d been napalmed. His fifty-two-year-old back screamed Yo, geezer, give me a fricking rocking chair and a screen porch. Yeah, well, he thought, Rangers lead the way.

  Lead the way even when you knew it could get you hurt. The way he’d felt jumping at five hundred feet over Grenada. The way he’d felt in Mogadishu. The way he felt now. This is what he did.

  A hundred feet ahead, the tunnel veered left—west. It looked to be about a forty-five-degree turn. Charlie edged closer to the left wall so as to give himself cover. That’s where I’d set the ambush if I was them.

  He halted. Brought out the do-rag and Treo, covered his face and head, and fired it up, only to confirm there was no reception down here. That was another bad-news element of twenty-first-century netcentric warfare: It is signals dependent. Block the signal, you defeat the system.

  He stowed the PDA. Pressed the transmit button on the radio twice.

  Immediately Jose’s voice came back at him: “Boss?”

  Charlie hit the transmit switch twice again, telling Jose he was okay. At least the radios were working.

  0429. He figured he was about three-quarters to the first villa west of Tariq’s safe house. Thing was, he wasn’t sure what he’d do when he got there.

  He was missing something here. They had to know he’d find the tunnel. Had to know he’d come after them. Had to know he wasn’t without resources. In—-he checked his watch—four and a half minutes the Apaches with all their firepower would be on-site to rip these scumbags new assholes.

  0431. Muscles burning, he eased into the curve, moving inch by inch, his NVGs scanning floor, walls, ceiling.

  Nothing.

  But something deep inside Charlie still made him bring the M4 up. His right thumb eased the safety downward. He was surprised by the loudness of the metallic click as it snapped into the fire position.

  Scan and breathe. Eyes open, he kept a sight picture through the NVG-capable Aimpoint.

  He moved forward soundlessly, his boots heel-toe, heel-toe on the packed earth, trigger finger indexed, touching the side of the M4’s magazine well.

  He paused to control himself. Took a deep breath.

  Okay. What was the main thing here?

  That’s the key, Charlie thought. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

  And then, as he cleared the bend, Charlie saw something thirty feet ahead that could be the main thing.

  A teenage kid. Facing Charlie. Propped up against a wooden crate, kind of sitting on his hands. The kid wasn’t wearing a shirt but sported a pair of the baggy pajama bottoms that young Iraqi boys wore before they transitioned to blue jeans.

  The left leg of the kid’s pj’s was cut off above the knee, revealing an ugly, raw stump.

  One of the main things about this could-be main thing was that the kid wore an American helmet and stared back at Charlie through its NVGs. On the front of the helmet cover, Charlie read the name maupin.

  As unfatherly as it might have been, Charlie’s first instinct was to shoot the kid preemptively. Then he thought better of it. But he kept the Aimpoint’s dot on the kid’s bare chest.

  He advanced, the kid staring at him.

  From ten feet away, Charlie asked in Arabic, “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Rachid.”

  Charlie nodded. “Where’d you get the helmet, Rachid?”

  The kid’s voice was so subdued he might have been on painkillers. “From my father.”

  Always ask a question to which you know the answer. Charlie gave it five seconds. “Who’s your father, Rachid?”

  “My father is Tariq.”

  That was when Charlie realized what the real main thing was. That the real main thing was Charlie. Charlie, who’d put one big fricking dent in AQI’s operations.

  “Show me your hands, Rachid.”

  Shrugging, the kid brought them out. Each adolescent hand held a single alligator clip attached to a pair of wires. The wires ran under the boy to the crate. Two short pieces of wood dowel separated the tips.

  As Charlie watched, the kid squeezed the clips. The dowels tumbled in slo-mo onto the tunnel floor.

  I should have shot him, Charlie thought. I should have killed him even though he’s someone’s son, because the fathers here are fricking nuts.

  Rachid looked at Charlie with the same sort of blank stare Charlie had seen on khat-eaters in Somalia.

  “My father says to tell you Happy Father’s Day.”

  In the heartbeat between the time Rachid released the clips and the tunnel disintegrated in a violent orange fireball, Charlie thought he saw the kid smile.

  <>

  * * * *

  CASEY AT THE BAT

  Stephen Hunter

  “No, no,” said Basil St. Florian. “Bren guns. We need the Bren guns. It is simply undoable without Bren guns. Surely you understand.”

  Roger understood but he was nevertheless unwilling.

  “Our wealth is in our Bren guns. Without Bren guns, we are nothing. Pah, we are dust, we are cat shit, do you see? Nothing. NOTHING!”

  Of course he said “Rien,” for the language was French as was the setting, the cellar of a farmhouse outside the rural burg of Nantilles, département Limousin, two hundred miles south and east of Paris. The year was 1944, and the date was June 7. Basil had just dropped in the night before, with his American chum.

  “Do you not see,” Basil explained, “that the point in giving you Brens was to wage war upon the Germans, not to make you powerful politically in the postwar, after we have pushed Jerry out? Communists, Gaullists, we do not care, it does not matter, or matter now. What matters now is that you have to help us push Jerry out. That was the point of the Bren guns. We gave them to you for that reason, explicitly, and no other. You have had them eighteen months, and you have never used them once. The war will be over, we will push Jerry out, the Gaullists will take over, and we will demand our Brens back, and if we don’t get them, we will send Irishmen to get them. You do not want Irishmen interested in you. No good can come of it. It’s my advice to use the Brens, help us push Jerry, become glorious heroes, happily give up the Brens, then defeat the Gaullists in fair, free elections.”

  “I will not give you Bren guns,” said Roger, “and that is final. Long live Comintern. Long live the Internationale. Long live the great Stalin, the bear, the man of steel. If you were in Spain, you would understand this principle. If you—”

  Basil turned to Leets.

  “Make him see about the Brens. Dear Roger, listen to the American lieutenant here. Do you think the Americans would have sent a fellow so far as they’ve sent this one just to tell you lies? I understand that you might not trust a pompous British foof like me, but this fellow is an actual son of the earth. His pater was a farmer. He raises wheat and cows and fights red Indians, as in the movies. He is tall, silent, magnificent. He is a walking myth. Listen to him.”

  He turned to his chum Leets and then realized he had, once again, forgotten Leets’s name. It was nothing personal, he just was so busy being magnificent and British and all that, so he couldn’t be troubled by small details, such as Yank names.

  “I say, Lieutenant, I seem to have forgotten the name. What was the name again?” He thought it was remarkable that the name kept slipping away on him. They had trained together at Milton Hall on the river Jedburgh in Scotland for this little picnic for six or so weeks, but the name kept slipping away, and whenever it did, it took Basil wholly out of where he was and turned his attention to the mystery of the disappearing name.

  “My name is Leets,” said Leets in English, accented in the tones of the middle plains of his v
ast homeland, the Minnesota part.

  “It’s so strange,” said Basil. “It just goes away. Poof, it’s gone, so bizarre. Anyhow, tell him.”

  Leets also spoke French with a Parisian accent, which was why Roger, of Group Roger, didn’t care for him, or for Basil. Roger thought all Parisians were traitors or bourgeoisie, equally culpable in any case, and that seemed to go twice for British or American Parisians. He didn’t know that Leets spoke with a Parisian accent because he’d lived there between the ages of two and nine while his father managed 3M’s European accounts. No, Leets’s father was not a farmer, not hardly, and had certainly never fought red Indians; he was a rather wealthy business executive now retired, living in Sarasota, Florida, with one son, Leets, in occupied France playing cowboys with the insane, another a naval aviator on a jeep carrier that had yet to reach the Pacific, and still a third 4-F and in medical school in Chicago.

  Roger, namesake and kingpin of Group Roger, turned his fetid little eyes upon Leets.

  “I can blow the bridge,” said Leets. “It’s not a problem. The bridge will go down; it’s only a matter of rigging the 808 in the right place and leaving a couple of time pencils stuck in the stuff.”

  But Basil interrupted, on the wings of an epiphany.

  “It’s because you’re all so similar,” he said, as if he’d given the matter a great deal of Oxford-educated thought. “It has to do with gene pools. In our country, or in Europe on the whole, the gene pool is much more diverse. You see that in the fantastic European faces. Really, go to any city in Europe, and the variety in such features as eye spacing, jawline, height of forehead, width of cheekbones is extraordinary. I could watch it for days. But you Yanks seem to have about three faces between you, and you pass them back and forth. Yours is the farm boy face. Rather broad, no visible bone structure, pleasant, but not sharp enough to be particularly attractive. I fear you’ll lose your hair prematurely. Your people do have good, healthy dentition, I must give you that. But all the plumpness on the face. You must eat nothing but cake and candy. It goes to your face and turns you rather clownish, and it’s wizard-hard keeping you apart. You remind me of at least six other Americans I know, and I can t remember their names either. Wait, one of them is a chap called Carruthers. Do you know him?”

  Leets thought this question rhetorical, and in any event it seemed to tucker Basil out for a bit. Leets turned back to the fat French communist guerrilla.

  “We can kill the sentries, I can rig the 808 and plant the package, and it doesn’t even have to be fancy. It’s simple engineering; anyone could look at it and see the stress points. So: Pop the tab on the time pencil and run like hell. The problem is that the garrison at Nantilles is only a mile away, and the minimum time I can get the bridge rigged is about three minutes because we have to go in hard. When we shoot the sentries, it’ll make a noise, because we don’t have suppressors. The noise will travel and the garrison will be alerted. Meanwhile, I have to get down and lash the package just so on the trusses. They’ll get there before I’m done. So my team will get fried like eggs if we’re still rigging when they show. That’s why we need the Brens. We’ve only got rifles and Stens and my Thompson, and we can’t build enough volume of fire to hold them off. I need two Brens on the road from Nantilles with a lot of ammo to shoot up the trucks as they come along. You can’t disable a truck with a Sten. Simple physics: The Sten shoots a nine-millimeter pistol bullet and it doesn’t penetrate metal. Sometimes it even bounces off of glass. The Bren .303 is a powerful rifle- and machine-gun round which will penetrate the sheet metal of truck construction, damage the motor, rip up the wiring and tubing, as well as rupture the tires. It will pierce the wood construction of the truck bed and hit the men it carries. It can also lay down heavy, powerful fields of fire that will drive infantry back. That’s what it’s for; that’s why the British gave you the Brens.”

  “The lieutenant knows a lot about guns, doesn’t he?” said Basil. “I’m rather alarmed, to be honest. It seems somewhat unwholesome to know that much about such a macabre topic.”

  “Non!” said Roger, spraying them with garlic. He was a butcher, immense and sagacious. He’d fought on the Loyalist side in Spain, where he was wounded twice. He was almost grotesquely valiant and fearless, but he understood the primitive calculus of the politics: The Brens were power, and without power Group Roger would be at the mercy of all other groups, and that was more important than the prospect of 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich using the bridge to rush tanks to the Normandy beachhead, as intelligence predicted they would surely do.

  “My dear brother-in-arms Roger,” said Basil, “the bridge will be blown, that I assure you. The only thing in doubt is whether Lieutenant Beets—”

  “Leets.”

  “Leets, yes, of course, whether Lieutenant Leets and his team of maquis from Group Phillippe will make it out alive. Without the Brens, they haven’t a chance, do you see?”

  “Phillippe is a pig, as are all his men,” said Roger. “It is better for them to die at the bridge and spare us the effort of hunting them down to hang after the war. That is my only concern.”

  “Can you say to this brave young American, ‘Leftenant Beets, you must die, that is all there is to it’?”

  “Yes, it’s nothing,” said Roger. He turned to Leets with uninterested eyes. “‘Leftenant Beets, you must die, that is all there is to it.’ All right, I said it. Fine. Good-bye, sorry and all that, but policy is policy.”

  He signaled his two bodyguards, who after rattling their Schmeissers dramatically film-noir style, rose and began to escort him up the cellar steps.

  “Well, there you have it,” said Basil to Leets. “Sorry, but it looks like your number is up, leftenant. You get pranged. Sad, unjust, but inescapable. Fate, I gather. Yours not to reason why, et cetera et cetera. Do you know your Tennyson?”

  “I know that one,” said Leets glumly.

  “I suppose one could simply not go. I think that’s what I’d do in your shoes, but then I’m not the demo man, you are. I’m the head potato, so I’ll supervise quite nicely from the treeline. As for you, if you decide not to go, it would be embarrassing, of course, but in the long run, it probably doesn’t make much difference whether the bridge goes or not, and it seems silly to waste a future doctor of all the fabled Minnesotans on such a local Frenchy balls-up between de Gaulle’s smarmy peons and that giant, stinking, garlic-sucking red butcher.”

  “If I catch it,” said Leets, “I catch it. That’s the game I signed up for. I just hate to catch it because of some little snit between Group Roger and Group Phillippe. Stopping Das Reich is worth it; helping Roger prevail over Phillippe is not, and I don’t give a shit about FFI or FTP.”

  “Yet they can’t really be separated, can they? It’s always so complicated, haven’t you noticed? Politics, politics, politics, it’s like chewing gum in the works—it gets in everywhere and mucks up everything. Anyhow, if you like, I’ll write your people a very nice letter about what a hero you were. Would you like that?”

  As with much of what Basil said, the words were pitched in a key of meaning so exquisite Leets couldn’t exactly tell if they were serious or not. You could never be sure with Basil; he frequently said the exact opposite of what he meant. He seemed to live in a zone of near-comedy in which nearly every damned thing was “amusing” and he took great pleasure in saying the “shocking” thing. The first thing he said to Leets all those weeks ago at Milton were, “It’s all a racket, you know. Our richies are trying to wipe out their richies so they can get all the nig-nog gold; that’s what it’s really all about. Our job is to make the world safe for nig-nog gold.”

  “Jim Leets,” Leets had said, “Sigma Chi, N.U. ‘41.”

  Now Basil said, “I can, however, in my tiny British pea brain, concoct one other possibility.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, it has to do with a radio.”

  “We don’t have a radio.”

  The radio was lashed to
Andre Breton’s body which, unfortunately, had hit the earth at about eight hundred miles an hour when Andre’s parachute ripped in half on the tail spar of the Liberator that had dropped them the night of the invasion. Neither the radio nor Andre had been salvageable, which is why Team Casey was down 33 percent strength before its other two-thirds landed under their chutes a minute or so after Andre had his accident.

  “The Germans have radios.”

  “We’re not Germans. We’re good guys, remember? Captain, sometimes I think you don’t take this all that seriously”

  “I speak German. What else is necessary?”

  “This is crazy. You’ll never—”

  “Anyway, here’s my idea. I cop a German uniform tomorrow, and walk into the garrison headquarters at eleven a.m. With my command presence, I will send Jerry away. Then I will commandeer his radio and put in a call. A fellow owes me a favor. If his groundwork is solid, it just might work out.”