Mac Wingate 9, page 10
“We have to get into the basement,” he said. “It’s the only safe place. What kind of a story do we spin them?”
She thought for a moment, trying to clear her mind. Then she said, “Hans Zaandam runs the place. He’s trustworthy. I don’t know about the others, it depends who is down there. We met on the road. Apart from that, we’ve never seen one another before. You’re a Norwegian fisherman, remember? I’ll ...” She shrugged. “I’ll simply tell the truth.”
The ground shook again with two explosions in rapid succession. The was the sharp tinkle of breaking glass from above them, and somewhere outside a dog howled in terror. “Come on,” said Wingate.
He put out a hand to help her but she brushed it aside. “I’m all right,” she said. “Until half an hour ago, we’d never met—remember? Let’s just get used to the idea now.” The room downstairs was a bar. There was no more than half a dozen people inside, but the smallness of the place made it seem almost crowded. A central kerosene lamp suspended from the ceiling cast a soft, yellow tinge over everything, and the air smelled of fuming oil and tobacco smoke. A clock over the bar showed 1:30. It was so wrong, Wingate couldn’t even guess whether it was hours fast or hours slow.
The singing quieted and finally stopped. Even the bent figure at the piano stopped playing, arthritic hands suspended over the keys. Everyone turned to look at the two newcomers, and the air of half-drunk abandon turned to one of deep suspicion, almost fear.
Wingate said in Norwegian, “The lady’s been injured. I found her lying on the beach. Can we get a drink in here?”
No one answered. The man behind the bar said something in Dutch. Mary answered him, and Wingate could feel a slight easing of tension in the room. He took a gamble. German was going to be risky. It was almost a mother tongue to him, but was it really the language that a loyal Norwegian would use to a group of loyal Dutchmen? Wasn’t it the language of the enemy, too painful a reminder of oppression?
“Can I please have a drink for the lady?” he asked in English. “She was hurt in the bombardment. I found her unconscious on the beach.”
“Well, of course!” the man behind the bar cried, his voice full of obvious relief. He was a big man, on the heavy side without being fat. Wingate took him for sixty—perhaps a little older. At a guess, he would have said that this was the Hans Zaandam that Mary had mentioned.
“Geneva,” said the girl, settling on one of the stools at the bar.
“Beer,” said Wingate. He turned and looked around the room. There were five others in the room, apart from the barman and the piano player. Three sat together in the far corner. They were locals, that much was obvious. They had the raw, rough complexions of men who had spent the whole of their lives in the open air. Fishermen, maybe, drinking late into the early hours and now trapped by the raid outside. They wore rubber boots and heavy sweaters and they were drinking beer from big stoneware steins.
“You’re not from around here?” the barman asked, passing the gin to the girl and addressing Wingate as he pushed the beer across the counter to him.
“From Oslo,” said Wingate. “We ran aground on one of the shoals and had to abandon her. I got ashore in a dinghy. I need a ship now that’s going back to Norway.”
“Good luck,” said the barman. Then he put out his hand and shook Wingate’s and added, “Hans Zaandam. I run the place.”
Three heavy explosions landed outside, rattling the building to its foundations. A cloud of soot fell down the chimney and into the open fireplace, billowing out into the room. A shudder ran through the room. The customers looked at one another. It was clear to Wingate that the barrage was moving. It was two or three hundred yards east of where it had started. If the Germans were moving up reinforcements from the camp, that would account for it. The commandos would be directing the naval fire to them by radio.
“Close,” said Zaandam. He ran a hand nervously over his heavy, drooping mustache, and Wingate saw that three fingers and part of the side of the hand were missing. The wound wasn’t all that old. The scar was still crimson and the double line of surgical stitch marks stood out angrily, like so many miniature bullet wounds.
One of the men at the bar next to Wingate had just about drunk himself unconscious. He didn’t react to the explosions or the tremor of the building. He lolled forward on his stool, elbows spread out on the bar and a glass of Geneva held at a precarious angle in his hand. His jaw sagged and the lids of his eyes were almost closed.
The man in the corner was watching Wingate, and after a couple of moments he got to his feet, brought his drink around Wingate and sat down on the stool next to the girl. He was right out of one of the war movies that Hollywood was producing to boost Allied moral, a prototypical “wicked” German in the pay of the Gestapo. He was below middle height, slightly built, with a monocle that glittered in his right eye. He wore a calf-length black leather greatcoat and a black fedora pulled low over one eye.
“A sailor, hm?” he asked, with the harsh, crisp speech of a German wishing to be taken for an old-style Prussian.
Wingate looked at him. The monocle gave him a quizzical look, locking the brow of one eye into immobility while still allowing the other brow its full movement.
“Fisherman,” said Wingate.
“And the name of the vessel?” the man demanded, beginning to savor the power of his position.
“I don’t believe I caught the name,” said Wingate. The milk of human kindness wasn’t running any too strongly in him right now. If there had only been the two of them in the room, he would have gotten a lot of satisfaction in planting his fist square on the bastard’s nose.
“Hermann Weber,” the guy snapped. He gave a little crisp inclination of the head and somehow managed to click his heels. How he did it, Wingate couldn’t imagine. He was leaning forward on his stool and his feet were tucked away on one of the rungs.
“Herr Weber,” said Wingate.
“The ship,” repeated Weber.
“‘Drammen”.’ said Wingate. He didn’t like the situation. The guy was altogether too curious, considering the more pressing matter of the shelling that was clamoring outside. He surreptitiously dropped his elbow to check that his Colt was still in position.
“I don’t think so,” Weber said, sharply, his lips affecting a calculated little sneer.
“Ah, come, Herr Weber,” Zaandam protested, gently. He had his hands open in an appeal, and there was an easy smile on his face. “We have guests. It is the middle of the night. They are tired. Let them at least have a drink in peace. After that, if you wish—”
Weber dismissed him with a brisk wave of the hand, without taking his eyes off Wingate. “I think you are American,” he said. “A spy. I think you were educated at the University of Madison in Wisconsin, under the name of Peter Magnussen Wingate. I think you were the South American representative of the Presidential Advisory Organization, and took part in the destruction of some of the Reich’s supply facilities in Montevideo long before your country entered the war. You are here to remove Colonel Erikson from the labor camp and return him to London. Now tell me: how close am I to the truth?”
He had the smug, satisfied look of a magician who has just carried off half a dozen successful tricks in succession.
Wingate toyed with the idea of going for the big Colt automatic, but a second before he made his move he noticed the heavy 9 millimeter Luger that Weber had removed from its holster and was hiding in the folds of his open greatcoat. Priorities flashed through his head: Erikson was his target and that meant he had to get out of here alive. Everything else was secondary. He considered the chances of ramming his beer glass in the little guy’s face. He considered hurling the full weight of his body into the girl and letting her take the first bullet, giving him time to get around the end of the bar and pull the Colt. It was a hell of a choice.
It never came to that. Somewhere above the cellar, a shell slammed into the house and exploded. The building shuddered. The ground trembled and a couple of square yards of ceiling plaster dropped onto the array of bottles behind the bar. The guy sitting half-conscious to Wingate’s right opened his eyes wide, let his glass drop onto the counter, then slid off his stool and lay on the floor in an alcoholic stupor.
In the confusion Wingate grabbed for the Colt, but before he could reach it there was a clatter of footsteps racing down the stairs. A second later, a couple of scared teenagers in Wehrmacht uniforms dropped into the cellar carrying Mauser 98 rifles. “Commandos!” one of them yelled in German. “Hundreds of them!” There was panic in his voice and he looked in desperation for some way of escape. When he couldn’t see one, he turned to Zaandam, still behind the bar, and rammed the muzzle of his rifle into the big man’s gut. “Shout!” he yelled, voice half hysterical. “Tell them there are loyal Dutchmen down here!”
Wingate took the opportunity to slide off the stool and pull the girl after him. He got as far behind the furthest corner of the bar as he could manage. He knew damned well what he would do if he was one of the attacking commandos. He wouldn’t ask questions if he had seen a couple of krauts duck into the building. He would kick in the door and lob a couple of fragmentation bombs inside before he made a move to come in himself. When that happened, he wanted to have every shred of protection between himself and those lethal splinters of shrapnel that he could manage.
Zaandam raised his voice and cried out in his heavily accented English, “Don’t shoot, up there! There are women down here! Loyal Dutchmen! Wait—we’ll come out with our hands in the air!”
There was silence, except for the background rattle of machine guns and the crump of mortar shells. Then a voice from the top of the stairs snapped, “How many of you?” Again, a pause as Zaandam looked around. “Seven—eight,” he called.
“What about the two Germans?” came the voice. It was an authoritative voice that wouldn’t take any bullshit.
Zaandam looked at the kid with the gun on the other side of the bar facing him. Zaandam’s expression was asking silently for instructions. The kid shook his head vigorously.
“What Germans?” Zaandam yelled. “There are no Germans here! Do you think if there were Germans ...?”
“Jesus!” Wingate muttered. The dumb bastard had blown it. No trained commando was going to fall for shit like that.
He looked around desperately, trying to figure out a more secure position. Even if he survived the grenades, how the hell would he convince the guys upstairs that he was on their side? He deliberately carried no identification papers. He wasn’t in uniform. The only thing he had with him that was American was the Colt, and there must be half a million of those kicking about Europe right that minute.
Mary had gotten around the back of the bar without drawing the attention of either of the German soldiers. Their attention was riveted on the stairs. When Wingate glanced in her direction, he saw that she had a trapdoor in the stone floor half open. There must be some kind of storeroom below the cellar that held the reserve supplies of liquor. He moved toward it through the shadows, took hold of the lip of the trap and pushed it open. It gave a loud squeak that attracted Zaandam’s attention, but he didn’t say anything. A moment later, Wingate was through the opening, grabbing the girl’s legs from below and helping her down after him.
Apart from the pale filter of light from the bar behind, the place was in darkness. Wingate got the general impression of racks of wines and liquor on either side of a narrow passageway. He led the way forward, checking the necks of bottles on each side with his hands, feeling the ground ahead of him with his feet. Each step he took increased his sense of being trapped. They were worse off than they had been in the bar. At least back there there’d been the chance of voice contact with the attackers, and if the frag bombs had really come there was some minimal cover. Here there was nothing. The racks were of solid two-by-two lumber, that formed barriers on either side as impenetrable as prison bars. A grenade tossed through the trap behind them would rip them to shreds. There was not only the shrapnel to consider, but the millions of flying razors of glass from the shattered bottles.
It was then that the trap behind them slammed closed, and all illumination disappeared.
“Stay with me,” Wingate said, turning for a moment and taking the girl’s hand and putting it on his shoulder. “Don’t lose contact.”
They had covered twenty feet in pitch darkness, the racks of bottles still on either side, when Wingate became aware of a new smell. It penetrated the musty smell that had hit him when he had first dropped into the place, and began to predominate over everything else. It was one of those smells that he came across every day of his life, but it was so unexpected that for a moment he couldn’t put a name to it. Finally, it hit him. It was kerosene. Why the hell would anybody store kerosene where it could ruin a whole cellar full of wine?
Mary was on to it before he was. “Hold it,” she whispered. “Have you felt these bottles, Mac? Run a thumb around the corks.”
She was right. The dread of being caught down here by shrapnel paled into insignificance. The wine supply had come to an end some way back. The bottles they were walking among right now were Molotov cocktails—one liter containers filled with a mixture of kerosene and tar, with a little rag wick jammed into the necks with the corks. They were stuck in a potential crematorium, with the possibility of being fried alive at any second.
From way behind there came the sound of two dull explosions. They were the grenades that Wingate had expected in the cellar earlier. How long would it be before the commandos burst down the steps to clear up what was left—and how long before they discovered the trapdoor? As the thought occurred to him, he heard the sharp chink of something hard striking a couple of bottles way behind him, and suddenly he knew they weren’t alone. Someone else had dropped through the trap after them and pulled it closed. He put his hand inside his pea jacket and pulled out the Colt. A moment later, he moved forward again.
The passageway took a sudden turn to the right. He lost contact with the left rack altogether, and the bottles to his right were replaced by wooden cases. At a guess he would say they were ammunition boxes, maybe something even more interesting. They had walked right into an underground arsenal built up by the resistance. The minute the truth dawned on him, his hopes began to rise. Was it conceivable that Zaandam would allow this kind of merchandise to pass in and out through the main door of his inn? Jesus, the Gestapo had eyes everywhere. They’d never miss something so obvious as that. There had to be some other way out of this rabbit warren.
“Mac,” the girl whispered from over on Wingate’s left. “Over here.”
He let go his contact with the wall of boxes and groped into the pitch blackness. He took four, five steps, realizing that they were no longer in a narrow passageway but a large, open storeroom.
“Where?” he breathed, conscious that whoever was behind them must be getting closer.
“Keep coming.”
There were sounds coming down some shaft from outside; gunfire and the zing of shrapnel sizzled on the air. He made for them and a moment later Mary had grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him forward. He could feel the draft of bitter night air on his cheeks and forehead. Another step and his boot struck the edge of a stone step and he led the way upward, dropping the Colt back into its holster to free both of his hands.
The staircase spiraled upward and finally led into a six-foot concrete sewer pipe. Ahead, the sky was lightening with the first blush of dawn and from beyond the opening the sounds of firing were more fierce than ever. It seemed to Wingate that the Germans had mounted a counterattack. Most of the loudest noise appeared to be coming from the east.
“Let’s take a look,” he said, aware that whoever was behind them must have reached the foot of the stairs by now.
He moved forward carefully, half crouched, left hand steadying himself on the wall of the pipe and right hand ready to grab the Colt. A couple of paces behind him, the girl followed.
The pipe opened out of the dyke wall, directly onto the beach. He paused a moment, deciding the best way to make his first reconnaissance, then dropped to his hands and knees and crawled forward. He edged his head clear of the pipe, then listened. His guess had been right; the shooting from the commando force was withdrawing toward the lighthouse as a German counterattack was building from the direction of the camp. The gunfire was mostly behind them, running along the road on top of the dyke and through the low dunes beyond.
“Come on,” he said, quietly. From somewhere behind, he could hear the tap, tap of clogs on the stone stairway.
He moved out of the sewer and onto the beach. He turned toward the camp, staying next to the dyke wall, the girl a couple of yards behind him. On the road above, he could hear the occasional clatter of boots as some section of advancing Germans dashed from one piece of cover to another. The naval barrage had stopped, and he figured that the couple of corvettes sent to support the raid were being withdrawn. This near to the coast, they’d be sitting ducks for the Stukas once dawn broke.
Ahead, another concrete buttress loomed. He turned and grabbed the girl’s hand and pulled her toward it. On the other side, she could take the lead. They were past the worst of the fighting and she was the one who knew the way to the camp. He dodged left to get around it, ran past it and dodged back toward the dyke wall. The next second he had dropped to his knees with the girl’s body sprawled across his back.
The way Wingate saw it, he’d taken a slug right in the gut. The pain was excruciating. It burned into the flesh and sent waves of agony through the whole of his body. He couldn’t think straight. He couldn’t breathe. He lifted his head slowly to see what had happened. Standing immediately in front of him was the bulky figure of a man, holding the muzzle of a Schmeisser a couple of inches in front of his face.
Chapter Eight
The girl was the first to speak. She slid off Mac Wingate’s shoulders and looked at the guy in front of them. “Good God!” she said, at last. “How on earth did you get here?”
