Great throw, the guardhouse went in a blaze of light and percussion, making Leets blink, stagger, have a momentary loss of reality. His men were next to him, emptying Stens into the wreckage and at fleeing German figures.
“Un autre,” said Leon, another.
Leets got another grenade out, pinned the weight, and this time put more arm into it. It sailed into the darkness, where presumably Germans still cowered, perhaps unlimbering weapons, but the explosion was larger than the last—the Gammon power depended wholly upon how much 808 was packed about the Allways, and evidently Leets had been a little overexcited on this one.
Dust rose, half the lights went out, burning pieces of stuff flew through the air, it was all the chaos and irrationality of an explosion. Hearing was gone for the night. Leets paused for a second to get another magazine into his Thompson, made sure the bolt was back, and raced forward into the madness.
* * * *
“They must be so brave,” said Millie Beeman to poor, hopelessly in love Frank Tyne. Frank was some kind of Maine ex-cop of French-Canadian extraction (hence his French), a husky guy, not liked by any of the crowd. He was crude, direct, horny, stupid, supposedly a hero but so full of himself.
“Good guys. See, the deal is, it was time to show Jerry some action. The general knew that. So these teams, they were put together as an opportunity for the outfit to show its stuff.”
“And tonight’s the night?”
“Tonight’s the night,” Frank said, with a wicked gleam in his eyes that suggested that maybe he was assuming tonight was the night in more ways than one.
They sat in the bar of the Savoy, amid smoke, other drinkers, and trysters.
“Frank, you should be so proud. It’s your plan, after all. You’re really doing something. I mean, so much of it is politics, society, canoodling, and it has nothing to do with the war. I just get depressed sometimes. Even Colonel Bruce, oh, he tries hard, he’s such a darling, but he’s so ineffectual. You, Frank. You are stopping the Nazis. That is so important. Somebody has to do the fighting!”
She touched Frank’s wrist, and smiled radiantly, and watched the poor schlub melt. Then, fighting the sudden rush of phlegm to his throat, he said, “Look, let’s get out of here.”
“Frank, we shouldn’t. I mean—”
“Miss Beeman—Millie, may I call you Millie?”
“Of course.”
“Millie, it’s the night of the warrior. We should commemorate it. Look, let’s go back to my office; I have a little stash of very fine Pikesville rye. We can have some privacy. It’ll be a great night, and we can wait for news of Team Casey’s strike to come in and celebrate.”
Millie played up the I’m-considering look, going through several yes-why-nots and several no-no-it’s wrongs, before seeming to settle on the yes-why-not.
“Yes, why not?” she said, but he was already pulling on his raincoat over his uniform.
* * * *
Leets reached the center of the span, when a volley of rifle shots kicked dust and splinters up. He flinched, realized he wasn’t hit, recovered. The fire surely came from the other end of the bridge, where a small security force had been cowering, uncertain what to do. Fortunately the Luftwaffers were as poor at marksmanship as they were at aggression, and so all the shots missed flesh. Leets answered with another long burst from the Thompson, while his comrades chipped in with Stens.
“Throw some bombs,” he ordered, while he himself went to the railing of the span, looked over it.
It was not an impressive bridge. It was, in fact, a rather pathetic bridge. But it would do well enough to support the weight of a thirty-ton Tiger II tank, a column of which under the auspices of SS Das Reich now headed toward it on the road to Normandy. Leets had seen the structure at daylight: two buttresses, heavy logs, no apparent stone construction except at the base. He simply had to detonate enough 808 where the truss met the span to disconnect the support; the span would collapse of its own, or at least cave in enough to prevent passage of the heavy German vehicles; it needn’t be pretty or dramatically satisfying. A little tiny bang would be fine, just enough to get a little bit of a job done.
He knelt, slipped the Thompson off its sling and the satchel of 808 to the ground. He reached into it, pulled out a tin of the SOE-issue Time Pencils (“Switch, Delay, No. 10,” as the tin ever so helpfully read) and beheld the five six-inch-long brass tubes, each with a tin-wrapped nodule at the end. The problem with them, goddammit, was that as clever as they were, they were somewhat retarded in their firing rate. Supposedly they were set to fire a primer in ten minutes, but just as often they went in eight or nine or eleven or twelve. It was a matter of how quickly the acid in a crushed ampoule ate through a restraining wire, which, when it yielded, allowed the spring-driven needle to plunge into the primer, which went bang, causing the larger, encasing 808 to go bang.
So Leets took them out now, all five of them, discarded the tin, and stomped hard on the proper end of the pencils. Immediately a new odor arrived at his nose, that of the just-released cupric acid as it sloshed forward from the shattered vials in five pencils and began to chew at the metal. He wanted them cooking now, eating up the time so that when he and the boys fled, the Germans didn’t have a chance to pull the pencils free. He put them in the bellows pocket of his jump pants, buttoning it tightly.
He squirmed over the railing, eased himself down, flailed with a foot for mooring on the truss, found it, and carefully squinched down until he was beneath the bridge span.
Suddenly he heard a racket far-off. Oh Christ, he almost let go and plummeted twenty-five feet to the sluggish streambed below. Were they shooting at him? But then he recognized the glorious workman’s hammerlike bashing of the Bren gun, knowable because of its wonderfully slow rate of fire that enabled gunners to stay longer on target than our poor Joes with their faster-shooting BARs.
Goddamn, good old Basil! Basil, you snotty, arrogant, unimpressible, cold-blooded aristo, goddamn you, you got me my Brens, and maybe I will get out of this one alive.
Vive le Basil!
Brimming now with excitement and enthusiasm, he called up to Franc, “808, comrade!”
Franc leaned over, holding the satchel; it was a stretch, Franc dangling the satchel by its strap off the edge of the bridge, Leets clinging to the truss, grasping at the thing, which seemed somehow just out of reach, but in what seemed a mere seven hours, he finally snared it securely and pulled it in.
He was monkey-clinging to the truss now, his feet secure on a horizontal spar, crouched under the span, where it was damp and pungent, where no man had been in fifty years or so. He tried to find a way to attach the satchel itself, but in wedging it against junctures, he could never feel it secure enough to consider planted. Ach. It was so awkward. Christ, his muscles ached everywhere, and he could feel gravity sucking at his limbs, urging him downward into the muck below.
Finally, he managed to moor the satchel between his knees. Then, holding on with one hand, he unsheathed his M3 knife from his boot sheath and cut the canvas strap on the satchel. Now what to do with the knife? He couldn’t quite find the angle to get it back into the sheath, so he tried to slide it into his belt, and of course at a certain point it disappeared and hit the water below
Goddamn! He hated to lose a good knife that way. It was odd how annoyed he was at the loss of the knife.
Anyway, he liberated the satchel from between his knees, wedged it into the truss, and used the long strap to bind it securely. He pawed at the gathered, crunched material to find a passage to the explosive, and at last his fingers touched the sticky, gummy green stuff. He smelled almonds. He felt as if he were at a mixer at the Alpha Chi Omega house and the housemother had put little dishes of almonds out, to go with the punch, when all anybody wanted to do was get out of there and head down to Howard Street for some hooch. Now he reached into his bellows pocket, careful since it was at a radical angle and the pencils could easily slip out. But one by one, he removed a pencil and
jammed it into the wad of 808 nested in the satchel nested in the bridge.
They always said: Use two to make sure. He used all five and made certain in his orthodox Midwestern way that each one was secure and driven in deep enough so that gravity wouldn’t pull it out.
God, I did it, he thought.
It seemed to take an hour to clamber back up to the bridge span itself, and Franc and Leon pulled him, while the third maquis hammered away with the Sten periodically.
On the span he was elated, yet also exhausted.
“Whoa,” he said in English, “wouldn’t want to do that job over.” Then, reverting to French he said, “Friends, let’s get the hell out of here!”
He grabbed his Thompson and ran back down the bridge, past the blown-out guardhouse, deserted, sandbagged gun pits with their silent 88s pressing skyward, the wreckage and small fires from the Gammons; now it was only a question of the long run up the hill to the treeline in the darkness, waiting for the boom from the . . .
That’s when he noticed the Brens were no longer firing.
That’s when he saw a German truck scuttling over the crest of the road, and it began to disgorge troops, many of them, while up top, a soldier unlimbered an MG-42.
* * * *
It was spread out before her on Frank Tyne’s desk: Operation Jedburgh.
She could see all the locations for the teams and all their targets, laid out across all of France, all the boys who’d gone in with darkened faces and knives between their teeth. Teams Albert and Bristol, Charles and David, Teams Edward and Francis, and on and on to Teams Xylophone and Zed, with the mission to set Europe ablaze.
“Oh, Frank,” she said. “And to think, you thought it up. That’s your plan. Those magnificent men, fighting and killing, and all under your direction.”
Frank swelled a bit, then turned modest.
“Sweetie, you have to understand, I didn’t think it up on my own. I mean, it was a true team effort, and it involved logistics and liaison between three entities; I was just part of the team that put the players on the field, that’s all. It’s my bit. Nothing dramatic. I don’t want you thinking I’m a hero. The kids are the heroes.”
Her eyes scanned the map with incredible intensity, and if dumbbell Frank had had a whisper of sense in his brain he would have noted how inappropriate her concentration was, but of course he was way gone. He was over the edge. His dick was as big as a wine bottle.
“Ooooo!” she squealed girlishly. “What’s this one? Casey. At Nantilles.”
“You must have heard the name in the air. Casey’s on for tonight. There’s a bridge, Casey’s going to hit it, take it down, ka-boom!”
“Such heroes.”
“If there’s room for heroics. First you have to get through the bullshit—oh, excuse me—the bull crap about politics. France is not only fighting the Germans, but the French themselves are always trying to skew this way or that for political advantage after the war.” He wanted to show her what an insider he was. “Casey was hung up for some reason, because a commie guerrilla outfit wouldn’t give them support. Somehow the Brits managed to get it all the way to Moscow and back, and the commies were ordered to pitch in.” He smiled smugly, loosened his tie, took another swig of rye.
“And it’s happening tonight?”
He looked at his watch, worn commando-style upside down on his wrist.
“Real soon now. We should know by dawn.”
“It’s so exciting.”
“Millie, whyn’t you come over here on the couch and we’ll relax for a bit, have a few more drinks? Then I’ll wander down to Radio and see if anything’s come in on Casey.”
“Oh, Frank,” she said. She sunk down on the old sofa that comprised his office furniture, beside the desk and the battered filing cabinets and the safe, and snuggled close to him and felt him groping to get his beefy arms around her.
“Oh, Millie, Millie, God Millie, if you only knew, Jesus Millie, I’ve had the same feeling for you you have for me. I’m so glad the war has brought us together, oh Millie.”
She smiled, and when he closed his eyes to kiss her, she brought a handkerchief full of knockout drops to his nostrils and felt him struggle, then go limp.
She got up quickly, went to the map, marked the coordinates for Nantilles and Casey’s operational area and then realized of course they would know all this. The big info was that a red group had agreed to assist the Jeds, which meant assist the FFI. She knew NKVD would go through the roof on that one! It felt so wrong to her, so unjust. If you helped FFI, then the war would have been for nothing; when it was over, it would just go back to what it had been before, with big money ruling everything and the little guy squashed to nothingness and all the bullies and all the rich scum and all the boys who’d pawed her at Smith—brutal, smelly, drunken Frank Tynes—all those men would be triumphant, and what, really, what would have been the point? The only hope was the Soviet Union, the greatness of Uncle Joe, the justice of a system that didn’t depend on exploitation but that enabled man to be all that he could be, noble and giving, generous and loving. That was a world worth fighting for, and if she didn’t have a gun, she had a telephone.
She picked it up and dialed, knowing that nowhere on earth would anyone see anything suspicious about Frank Tyne of OSS calling David Hedgepath of the Office of War Information at 10:14 p.m. on the night of June 8,1944.
* * * *
Leets did a quick tumble through the facts as he thought them to be and concluded that yes, Team Casey had a chance.
Luftwaffe troops were basically antiaircraft gunners, their rifle marksmanship and combat aggression had to be somewhat deficient. They wouldn’t understand elevation or deflection fire at moving targets. It was dark; untrained, unblooded troops didn’t care for the dark. They weren’t sure where they were going, and at best they’d put in a half-effort, each fellow thinking, “I don’t want to be the one guy who dies tonight.”
“Okay,” he said to the maquis, “we’ll go ahead by leapfrogging. As each guy runs, the other three pour fire on Les Boches. When you hold on them, aim a man high, or your rounds won’t reach the target. Shoot, move, don’t stop no matter what. We spread out, try and go about fifty yards per spurt. Up top they’ll be covering us. We don’t need the damn Brens; we’re fine.”
“Fuck that fat Roger,” said Leon. “He is pig filth, swine, a screwer of mothers and babies.”
“That communist shit, the reds should be rounded up after the war and—”
“We will visit Roger, I promise you,” said Leets. “Now come on, guys, let’s get a move on.”
Franc went first, then was passed by Leon, and finally Jerome. Leets crouched behind a sandbag revetment and had a wild, insane heroic impulse. Maybe I should stay here, cover them, and keep the Krauts off until the bridge blows.
Then he thought, Fuck that.
He was moving, was past Franc, past Leon, almost to Jerome, moving through fire that was sporadic at best, now and then licking up a spit of dust in the general area, and he’d heard nothing blazing by his ears, indicative of the fact that Jerry had zeroed on them.
The flare popped, freezing him.
Flares? These clowns have flares?
He looked back to the bridge and beheld with horror the reality that two more trucks had arrived, in the dappled camouflage coloring of 2nd SS Das Reich, and watched as from each truck spilled lean, toughened Panzergrenadiers in their camouflage tunics, hardened by years on the Eastern Front, a unit noted and feared far and wide as the finest of the SS Divisions. These characters carried the new Stg-44, something the Germans called an “attack rifle,” which fired a shortened 8mm round with accuracy and a high rate of fire. Oh, fuck, they could really lay fire with that sonofabitch.
Another flare popped, and then another, and the whole scene lit up, this puny French river valley, he and his three maquis racing uphill toward a treeline through a landscape of flickering shadow, as the descending parachute flares caught on the stumps o
f the so recently cut pines and threw blades of darkness this way and that, like scythes, the Germans still two hundred yards away but coming strong, the camouflaged Panzer-grenadiers racing through and past the confused young Luftwaffers, and now, suddenly, from the ridgeline, a long arc of tracer as the MG-42S tried to range the target.
We are screwed, he thought. This is it.
The bridge went.
It wasn’t the blossoming, booming movie explosion so familiar from the Warner Bros, backlog agitprop films, but more of a disappointingly insubstantial percussion, lifting a large volcano of smoke and dust from the structure in the aftermath of a flash too brief for anyone to see. Leets stole a moment in the fading parachute flare to examine his legacy: The bridge, as the dust cleared, was not downed, leaving a gap as if a mouth had been punched front-teethless, but the roadway span hung at a grotesque 45-degree angle, torquing downward, meaning the truss Leets had 808’ed had gone, but the other one held. It would take days to repair, or to detour around, and those would be days with no 2nd SS Das Reich at Normandy.
Agents of Treachery Page 24
