* * * *
Leets applied the last of the burnt cork to his face. Burning corks had turned out to be no picnic. Back at Area 5 in the Catoctins, everybody had assured the trainees that burning cork was a piece of cake, but no one ever managed to explain how to do it. Major Applegate told stories about hunting Mexicans on the Arizona border with the border patrol, and how they’d always corked their faces when serious business was set for the evening, but he never ever explained exactly how to burn the goddamned cork. Leets had singed the hair off his fingers before he struck on the idea of wedging the cork into a doorway, holding it there by pressuring the door against it with his foot, and burning it with candle flame. It oxidized slowly, stupidly, and resentfully, but finally he had enough and managed to do a reasonable job of masquerading his fat, broad, uninteresting, and very white American face against the darkness.
* * * *
He was now ready, though he felt more like the football player he’d been than the soldier he was, so packed with gear very like the shoulder and thigh pads that had protected him in Big Ten wars. He had a Thompson gun and seven mags with twenty-eight .45s in each, the mags in a pouch strapped to his web belt, as were six Gammon grenades, Allways fuzes packed with half a stick of the green plasticky Explosive 808, all ready to have their caps unscrewed, their linen lines secured, and then be tossed to explode on impact. They smelled of almonds, reminding him of a candy bar he had once loved in a far-off paradise called Minnesota. He had a wicked, phosphate-bladed M3 fighting knife strapped to his right outside lace-up Corcoran jump boot, which was bloused neatly into his reinforced jump pants, an OD cotton slash-pocketed jump jacket, almost like Hemingway’s safari coat, over his wool OD shirt with his silver first lieutenant’s bars and the crossed rifles of Infantry, as he’d been a member of the 501st of the 101st before his French got him recruitment by OSS, a Colt .45 on the web belt, seven in the mag, two more mags on a pouch on the web, and a black watch cap pulled low over his ears so that he looked like one of the lesser Our Gang members. He also carried a satchel full of Explosive 808, also smelling pun-gently of almonds and, let’s see, was that it, oh yes, time pencils, that is, Delay Switch No. 10, a tin of five of them in the satchel with the 808 for quick deployment.
The plan: The Luftwaffers had wisely used French labor to cut down the forest around the bridge, so it was basically coverless, nude land on the approach, studded with evergreen stumps that were stout enough to stop all vehicles that ran on tires. Stealth was impossible, too, in the arc lights the Germans had mounted that blazed away all night long. There was no danger from the six 88-millimeter flak guns sandbagged around the bridge, since they were dedicated, meaning permanently mounted in antiaircraft trajectories to defend the bridge from Allied air attack, and so out of the picture tactically, and were unmanned at night, as no Typhoons or Jugs would risk a run in the dark. But there were at least six sentries, a sergeant of the guard and four or five riflemen, at each end of the bridge.
So stealth was out. Rather, in a rattly old Citroen, Leets and his three FFI maquis would approach the bridge and when called to halt at close range open fire. They would shoot the sentries, Gammon bomb the guardhouse, and lay down fire on the men at the other end of the bridge, and Leets would hop out to the center, monkey-climb over, plant the 808, and wedge in the already primed time pencils, and then they’d run like hell to the woods two hundred yards away. If reinforcements from Nantilles got there before they made it to the woods, they’d be dead friggin’ ducks, as the Germans, even incompetent Luftwaffers, could hose them down with MG-42 fire from the guns mounted on the trucks, while the men gave chase with Mausers and Schmeissers.
That’s where the Brens came in. The Brens could drive the trucks back, even destroy them, and scatter the easily frightened Luftwaffers. The whole thing turned on the Brens. The two Brens were the wanted nail that doomed the horse that lost the squad that let down the battalion that defeated the army that ruined the war.
“Great news, chum,” said Basil. “You have Brens!”
“What?”
“Hmm, it seems that Roger had a change of mind, or perhaps an order from higher HQ. In any event, even as we speak, Roger and his two Bren gun teams are setting up on the slope overlooking the road from Nantilles, three hundred yards beyond the bridge.”
“Do we know that for a fact?”
“Chum, if Roger says they’re there, then they’re there.”
“I wish I could actually see the guys.” But he looked at the Bulova he wore upside down on his wrist and saw that it was 0238 British War Time, so it was time to go.
“Okay,” he said, “then let’s blow this son of a bitch.”
“Good attitude. I’ll be with the other boys in the woodline. We’ll lay down fire from our end.”
“You can’t see well enough to do any good, and that goddamn little peashooter”—Leets indicated the Sten Machine Carbine hung around Basil by a sling, a tubular construction that looked as if it had been designed by a committee of very dull plumbers, a 9-millimeter burp gun that fired too fast when it fired at all, and then its bullets did little good when they got there if they got there at all—”won’t frighten anyone.”
“Beets, I can’t help it that their guns are so much better than ours. We make do with what is. We do our bit, that’s all.”
“Yeah, yeah. Well, let’s go then. Batter up!” Leets said bitterly. He stormed to the Citroen for his drive to battle. But then he remembered his manners.
“Sorry, captain. I’m a blowhard, I know. Just venting because I’m scared shitless. Anyhow, thanks, what you did was swell, it was, I don’t know—”
“Stop it, Beets. Just go blow up your silly bridge.”
“Captain, one last thing. Who the hell are you? Where are you from? How do you know so much? What are you doing here? Surely you’re too old, too advanced, too brilliant for all this running around. You should be a general or something. You look forty. Who are you?”
“Long, long story, chum. Blow the damned bridge and we’ll have a chat.”
* * * *
Enter Millie Beeman. Millie, from Millicent, from the Beemans, you know, the Beemans of the North Shore. Millie was a lovely girl, clever as the devil. She graduated with high marks from Smith but never bragged or acted smart, got her first job working as a secretary at Time in Manhattan for the awful Luce and his hideous wife, spent some time on a Senate staff (her father arranged it), and then when war came, she gravitated toward the Office of Strategic Services just as surely as it gravitated toward her. People knew where they belonged, and organizations knew what kind of people belonged in them, so General Donovan’s assistants fell in instant love with the willowy blonde who looked smashing at any party, smoked brilliantly, and had languid, see-through-anything luminosity in her eyes. Everyone loved the way her hair fell down to her shoulders; everyone loved the diaphanous cling of a gown or blouse to her long-limbed, definitely femalesque torso; everyone loved her yards and yards of legs, her perfect ankles well displayed by the platform of the heels all the girls wore.
By ‘43 she’d transferred to London station at 72 Grosvenor in Mayfair, under Colonel Bruce, one of whose assistants she’d become, and wore the uniform of a second lieutenant in the WACs. She was in charge of the colonel’s social calendar, important since one of the common jests of the time was that OSS actually stood for Oh So Social. She answered his phones or placed his calls, but it was more than that. She also knew the town, in the sense of “knew the town,” and so was able to prioritize. The colonel was hopeless and said yes to every invitation in the days before she arrived on station. She knew who was in, who out, which receptions it was important to be seen at, which could be safely ignored, which generals were in the ascension, which in the decline, which FFI liaison officers could be trusted, which should be avoided, which journalists were helpful, which were not, who could be blackmailed, ignored, betrayed, dumped, manipulated, or insulted and, by contrast, who could be trusted, used, co
unted on, confided in, who had access, represented the kind of people we like and need, and so forth and so on. She was indispensable, she was ruthless, she was efficient, she was beautiful and brilliant at once, and she was the third-ranking NKVD agent in OSS, the star of INO (Foreign Intelligence Section) who had been trained at SHON, Shkola Osobogo Naznacheniya, the Special Purposes School, in Balashikha, fifteen miles east of the Moscow Ring Road, when everybody thought she was rusticating in the Hamptons.
Millie sniffed something was up at six p.m. that evening, when Colonel Brace’s mood immediately brightened. The issue of the day had been Operation Jedburgh, by which three-man teams of OSS/SOE/FFI agents had parachuted behind the lines to wreak havoc on German communications and transportation lines in the immediate wake of the Normandy show. So far, no good. No teams had hit a target, many had drifted apart in the descent and failed to link up with maquis units whom they were supposed to lead, and several had never acknowledged arrival by radio and were considered combat-lost. It was looking like a washout, and Colonel Bruce knew he was meeting with Sir Colin Gubbins, head of SOE, and that Gubbins would blame the muck-up on the American third of the units. It was so important that the teams do well!
But around six, an SOE liaison informed the colonel that radio intercepts strongly suggested one team was in position and would strike tonight at midnight against a bridge on Das Reich’s route to the beachhead.
“Millie, do you see? This is what we need.”
It was a great issue with OSS that it was considered immature, inferior, and amateur in comparison to the far savvier British intel outfits, and it drove General Donovan mad.
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, the boys,” said Colonel Bruce. “Those wonderful, wonderful boys, they make me so proud. Here’s to Casey’s turn at bat!”
Millie, of course, was not privy to code names and didn’t know which groups were operating where; she just scooped up all available information and turned it over to her KGB INO control, a fellow named Hedgepath who’d been big in WPA before the war and was now big in the Office of War Information, the propaganda unit, where he was some sort of chief of psychological operations or something like that, reporting directly to Mr. Sherwood. She adored Hedgepath, because of course he was one of the few men on earth who didn’t yield to and couldn’t be budged by her blandishments, charms, and beauty; she had no way of knowing he was a sexual deviate and therefore immune to such.
She called him from a phone in Accounting Section, feeling utterly secure, because no one monitored internal calls between American entities such as 72 Grosvenor and the London OWI headquarters nearby. It was Kate Jesse’s phone, and Kate thought she used it to speak to a secret lover, an RAF bomber pilot. Kate’s problem: She read Redbook magazine too earnestly.
“Hullo,” said Hedgepath.
“Millie here.”
“Of course, my dear. Report, please.”
She reiterated what she had learned that day: the colonel’s schedule, his incoming calls, reports, office tidbits, expenditure, the nuts and bolts of it. Finally she mentioned some kind of show that was set for the evening and the colonel’s curious explosion of glee, “Casey’s turn at bat.”
“Oh, baseball,” said Mr. Hedgepath. “I loathe baseball. It’s mostly standing around, isn’t it? Awfully boring. Who’s this Casey?”
“It’s from a famous poem. ‘Mighty Casey’ they call him, a sort of Babe Ruth figure. All hopes are on him. It’s very dramatic.”
“Who knew there was drama in baseball?”
“At any rate, ‘Casey at the Bat’ is about a hero’s chance to win the big game. As I recall, he fails. In America, it’s regarded a tragedy. I think Casey has to do with something they’re calling Operation Jedburgh.”
Jedburgh?
“Hmm,” said Hedgepath. He knew from NKVD Moscow Center that the terrible Zyborny had sent a flash to GRU earlier, but Center wasn’t completely able to penetrate the GRU code and knew only that the subject of the message was a Brit-Yank-Frenchy thing called Operation Jedburgh, some silly blowing-up of structures that would have to be expensively rebuilt after the war. But Control did not want GRU operating with impunity anywhere, and the two agencies cordially hated each other. NKVD Moscow Center was suddenly interested in Operation Jed, not as part of the war against the Germans, which it knew was won, but in the war against GRU for postwar operational control of the intelligence mechanism.
“Urgent you penetrate Jed,” Moscow had ordered.
“My dear Miss Beeman,” said Mr. Hedgepath. “Can you focus tonight on this ‘Casey’ thing? There’s a lot of interest in it. Possibly flirt it up with one of the cowboys and get me some information soonest? I’d like to pop a line to Our Friends before bedtime if possible.”
Millie sighed. She knew exactly what she had to do. Drinks with Frank Tyne, a horrible man who was all swagger and bluster. He’d been in and out of France for two years now and it was rumored had actually killed several Germans. More to the point, he adored her and had been asking her out for weeks.
Tonight, his dreams came true.
* * * *
Leets was having some trouble breathing. His stomach was edgy, his fingers felt like greasy sausages from someone else’s body, and he wanted only to sleep. He’d felt this way before games sometimes. He’d been a tight end usually, because of his size, a blocker, but there were a few plays in the book that designated him as receiver, and he both loved and hated that opportunity. You could become a hero. You could become a goat. It all happened in a split second in front of fifty thousand yelling maniacs cram-packed into Dyche Stadium or some other Big Ten coliseum. Once, memorably (to him at any rate) he caught a touchdown ball on a freakish, lucky, thing-of-beauty pass that he’d ticked with a finger, popped into the air, and snatched while himself falling. He was a hero who knew he’d been lucky and secretly felt he didn’t deserve the Monday of acclaim he’d gotten. It was his favorite memory; it was his worst memory. It came to him now in both formats.
The car rolled onward. No wonder they called them coffee-grinders, a little turtle of a thing powered seemingly by batteries. Chut-chut-chut it went. Leon drove. Leets was in the passenger’s side with the Thompson. In the backseat, in fetal positions, were Jerome and Franc, good guys, kids really, all with Stens. They’d have trouble getting out, so it was up to Leets, really. He’d deliver the first blows for freedom in this part of France. He felt sick about it, but it was increasingly obvious that it didn’t matter how he felt, as what would happen would happen, and if the Brens were there, thank God and Basil St. Florian, and if they weren’t, Dad would be so upset.
A bottle was produced. It came to Leets with a small glass. He poured some bitter fluid, man, it kicked like a mule, JESUS CHRIST! he gasped for breath, poured another tot, and held it over for Leon to gulp down.
“Vive la France!” said Leon, completing the transaction.
“Vive la France!” came the salute from the rear.
Vive my ass! thought Leets.
They entered the cone of Luftwaffe arc light, and immediately the two sentries at the gate raised hands and began to scream, “HALT! HALT! HALT!” They were kids also, a little panicked because no cars ever emerged from the darkness out of nowhere, and they themselves didn’t know what to do, open fire or run and get a sergeant. Their helmets and weapons looked too big.
It was murder. It was war but it was still murder.
Leets rolled from the Citroen and put three into each boy from the hip at a range of about ten yards. The Thompson seemed to point itself, so hungry to kill, and under his feathery trigger control convulsed spastically three times in a tenth of a second, then three times more in another tenth of a second, leaking incandescence and noise, and the boys were gone. He brought the gun to his shoulder, zeroed in on the guardhouse through the aperture sight to the blade at muzzle and feathered off the rest of the magazine, holding the butt tight into his shoulder, watching the wood and dust splinter and leap as the rounds str
uck and ripped, glass shattered, and a door broke, punctured, and fell. Sensations: the harsh percussion of the detonating cartridges, the weirdness of the empty brass poppity-popping out of the breach in a glinting arc, the substantiality of the bolt sliding through the receiver at thunderbolt speed, the dazzle of the muzzle flash, the acrid stench of burning powder, the spurt and drift of the gun smoke.
The gun empty, he reached into his pouch pocket and pulled out an already primed Gammon. With a thumb he pinned the little floppy lead weight at the end of the Gammon linen against the side of the bag, feeling the slight squishiness of the clump of 808 inside, cranked slightly to the right to the classic QB pose so he could come off his right foot, and launched a tight spiral toward the guardhouse fifty feet away, following through Otto Graham-style. As the bomb sailed through the air, its weighted linen wrap unfurled, and when it separated it popped a restraining pin free inside the Allways fuze, arming that gizmo to detonate on impact. That was the genius of the Gammon; when armed it was volatile as hell, but it always went off.
Agents of Treachery Page 23
