Mac Wingate 11, page 13
“They ask what you want of them.”
“I want to prove our trust and innocence. We can’t have them trying to kill every Allied soldier who goes through town because of some misunderstanding.”
“What misunderstanding?” Gammellini wanted to know.
“Never mind that. Tell them that they can accompany us out of town, carrying the boxed weapons if they want. Then they’ll see for themselves that we mean them no harm. Go on, tell them.”
“Sir, I protest,” Gammellini said strongly. “These boys are dedicated Fascists. They see their job as killing Allied soldiers. We can’t just walk into their bloodthirsty clutches! Trust me, Captain, I know.”
“I’ve trusted you enough, Private,” Wingate replied. “Tell them.”
Wingate watched intently as Gammellini reluctantly translated his words. He watched the young boys’ hard, doubting faces. After a short life filled with hate and hardship, Mac understood that it wasn’t easy for the Ricottari. He watched as the head boy spoke again.
“He says, ‘How do we know it isn’t a trap?’” the private told his superior. “‘How do we know you will not ambush us on the way?’”
Bingo, Mac thought. If the Ricottari had been conscienceless murderers, as Gammellini said, then they would have agreed immediately to the arrangement—in order to kill the soldiers and escape into the back streets before any trap could be sprung.
“Tell them for the same reason we are not killing them now. But, if it will make them feel better, we four will walk on all sides of them. If there was a trap, we would be the first killed.”
“Captain Wingate, you can’t be serious,” the Sicilian complained stridently. “I can’t let you do this.” Gammellini turned his head to look down the barrel of Wingate’s Browning.
“You’re the second one of my own men I’ve had to do this to,” Mac mused. “It’s beginning to become a habit. Now just tell them what I told you to.”
Gammellini twisted back toward the kids. “You’re bucking for a Section Eight, you are,” he said under his breath.
“Without the editorializing,” Wingate admonished. He had to admit he was feeling pretty good. His hunch had paid off in spades. Unless he was very mistaken, they were about to finalize a deal which would give him the necessary supplies and get him out of town in one fell swoop. If all went well, they could be hitting the Adrano guns by midnight.
Just as he finished considering that, the roof fell on top of him.
So where’s the great Wingate sixth sense now, he heard his subconscious shout, as all of Pallottola’s weight smashed onto his shoulders and back. Where’s the vaulted survival instinct which saved you time and again, his mind screamed as his face smashed into the sacks and Pallottola’s boots collided with his torso.
Wingate didn’t know where anything was for seconds thereafter. His face bounced from the sacks and back into the huge man’s fist. He felt himself being spun around and smashed again, all vision blocked out by pulsating bands of color and exploding foreground shapes. As he floated upright, the still rational part of his mind told him that Duga’s hulking bodyguard had dropped on top of him from the vent in the ceiling.
Little things were plucking at his body. He felt his gun belts being ripped off, and his Sten torn out of his hands. One by one his grenades were plucked off until the they were gone. Dazed, he stood uneasily, and then began to topple.
But his adversary wouldn’t even let him do that. He fell forward, all right, but two strong arms caught him before he hit the floor. In the distance, he heard the angry chatter of machine guns.
Then the two arms that caught him lifted him off the ground. For a moment he felt himself lying on a mattress of air. Then he was jettisoned out of the bed, hurled sideways over the balcony’s banister. For the split second he was falling, the air sweeping by his face cleared his mind somewhat. Then he hit a pile of food sacks on the main floor, blasting the breath out of him.
Wingate felt himself rolling, then hitting a much harder surface. He had rolled off the pile and tumbled to the floor, some of the sacks dropping atop him. Just as he felt blackness swirling across his mind, he thought about what was happening. He had been jumped by Pallottola. He had been stripped of his weapons. He had been dropped over the side. Somebody was shooting somewhere.
Wingate thought about what they could be shooting at. The sergeants, the Ricottari, the food sacks, the kerosene lamps ...
Wingate snapped instantly awake. While his sixth sense had failed him, his survival instinct had not deserted him completely. The realization that he was on the main floor with bullets, knives and oil all around him put his sense of survival into overdrive. He had come out of unconsciousness the way a shock would sober a drunk in a second flat.
The first thing Wingate did was grab a food sack and hold it over his torso and head. As he had awoken, he sensed a boy leaping at him, his knife raised. The blade sank into the sack and then three bullets plowed into the boy from above. The boy jerked three times in three different directions, then dove back, his knife still in the food bag.
Wingate saw him land right on top of a lamp. His body crushed the glass enclosure and the freed kerosene spread out in a pool just as the flame ignited it. The boy and the floor also caught fire, both beyond caring. The crimson of the boy’s blood was replaced by the bright orange-yellow of the fire which gobbled up the small figure like a ravenous dragon.
Mac could only get a glimpse of the boy’s doom since he was already scrambling away from the gunfire and flames. As he ran toward the underlip of the balcony, he saw that the entire area was awash with bullets, dead bodies and fire. Whoever had shot down had aimed for the kerosene lamps and the Ricottari right off. After that, it was every boy for himself.
Duga had been right. The boys were no match for bullets. They pulled out their pitiful knives and desperately searched for a target. It looked like the only one they could attack was Wingate. Mac dove and somersaulted under the balcony he was thrown from, trying to collect his thoughts. All he collected was enraged, betrayed Ricottari. They came at him from all sides, their knives out in front of them.
Mac instinctively reached for his guns, only to find they weren’t there. He responded to the dire situation as fast as he could, considering that a boy had leaped through the air at him from the left. Mac’s next moves were nearly invisible since he had to do them so fast. He grabbed the boy’s knife arm in midair while pulling his torso back. He pulled the boy forward so that his blade sank into another boy’s chest coming up from the right.
Then he punched the boy on his left with his right fist while ducking to avoid a boy coming up behind him. The boy behind him tripped and collided with another boy who was running directly at him. The boy with the knife in his chest died. The boy Mac had slugged fell back, pulling his blade from the other boy’s chest. The last two fell to the ground and struggled to extricate themselves from each other.
Wingate dove back, his eyes desperately searching for a way out. His brain told him there had to be a door. Hitting the floor with his shoulder, he rolled and came up on his feet, seeing a bunch of boys trying to ram open a large swinging partition, but having absolutely no luck. It must have been barricaded from the outside.
Logic also stated that there had to be a stairway from the first floor to the balcony. But as he ran beneath the balcony, he saw that the steps were completely engulfed in flame. It was an unnatural progression. The floor nearby hadn’t even caught fire yet. Mac saw the reason when a boy tried to race up the flaming stairs. A quarter of the way up, he was smashed back by a load of buckshot across the upper part of his body.
Duga had left little to chance. He must have sent a couple of men with Pallottola to cover the stairwells with sawed-off shotguns. The boy who was hit by the point-blank load fell back into the fire. His weight and the flame’s heat were enough to collapse that section. As Wingate watched, the boy and the charred wood crashed onto the main floor.
That brought Wingate’s attention back to ground level. Through the flickering heat and light, between the bodies of the hysterical children, he could see the Allied equipment—the boxes of bazooka shells, the crates of explosives. He imagined Duga didn’t tell any of his men about this. If Wingate didn’t exit soon, he’d probably be given a one-way trip to the top of Mount Etna.
Wingate raced across the floor, dodging the pockets of burning oil and screaming Ricottari as he went. Both loomed into his view suddenly, like a scare tactic on a haunted house ride. Wingate punched, tripped, kicked and threw the young boys out of the way, utilizing his army self-defense training. He wished he could tell them what he was planning to do and get them organized, but there was no hope of that.
Putting his own survival and the success of the mission first, Wingate pummeled the kids out of his way, refusing to take their knife attacks seriously. He had reached a level of deadly calm inside himself. He knew what he was capable of and simply swept away anything that got between him and his objective. He refused to let anything slow him down.
Even when somebody from the balcony saw him running and started shooting at him, he continued on his way, moving in and out of flame cover. He felt the bullets streaking by, heard the fire sizzling around his legs and saw the young boys dying in his wake, but he didn’t let the tragedy slow him down. In this case, if he hesitated, they were all lost.
Wingate leaped into the air as he neared the box he was running for. He pictured it detonating while he was in midair, but in reality he landed without being shot, stabbed or blown up. His heavy boots crushed on the thin wood covering, revealing the tell-tale red sticks of TNT within the crate.
Mac kneeled as he landed, scooping up some of the sticks. Then he quickly pulled his army knife out of his calf scabbard, cutting the tied-together fuses. Then he brought the blade quickly up as Ricottari ran right onto it. As the boy struggled and died, the tip deep in his chest, Wingate decided where to throw the TNT first.
He wanted to open up a section of the wall, but he was afraid he would be shot before he could get through it. And since the killing gunfire was coming from the side of the balcony he was thrown from, he stayed on one knee, pushed the loose fuse into a nearby patch of flame and then threw the stick overhand.
The explosive soared across the room, avoiding the lead that shot by it. Someone had guessed what Wingate was trying to do and was trying to hit the TNT before it landed. Mac welcomed their attempt. It meant they weren’t shooting at him and there were a lot more TNT sticks where that one came from.
Luckily for the good guys, the man wasn’t a great shot. The stick hit the food sack and dropped onto the floor between the bags and the banister. That was enough for Wingate. He grabbed a few more sticks and a block of gelignite, then ran for the opposite wall.
Because of that, he didn’t see Pallottola take cover, or another man wearing a Sicilian vest and cap scramble over the top of the bags toward the spitting TNT stick. He got his hand on it just as it exploded.
The man was sent spinning into the air as the front section of the balcony burst outward, flecking the ceiling with shrapnel and showering the floor with debris. What was left of the Sicilian slammed onto the floor with a sickening thud.
Mac was already at work with his second attack. Spying the few support beams which held up the now weakened balcony, Mac lit two more sticks and threw them at the uprights. Both the Ricottari and their adversaries were too stunned by the first blast to do anything about it.
After he let the next two sticks fly, Mac battled his way through terrified boys to the far wall. In their frenzied search to find a way out, they had all but forgotten about trying to kill Wingate.
The following pair of blasts happened almost simultaneously. They ripped into the uprights like a lion taking a bite out of a lamb. Following the whomping detonation, the interior of the storehouse was filled with the loud sound of tearing, creaking, tortured wood. With a teeth-gritting sound, the support poles broke.
The balcony hung, almost completely unsupported, for a few seconds. Only the joining at the far wall kept it raised. But then the weight of the food and the killers was too much for it. It ripped out of the wall and collapsed. All the bags and men tumbled from their perch into the flames and ruined corpses of the Ricottari. They screamed as they fell, they screamed as they smashed onto the floor, they screamed as flames licked at their clothes and they screamed as the still-surviving boys leaped onto them, their knives digging deep.
The warehouse was a chaotic hell of smoke, flame and death as Wingate took the last TNT stick he had, ran back toward the center of the room, lit it and threw it at the far wall. With all his experience, every bomb Mac threw went right to the place he threw it. He always calculated automatically the flight, weight, bounce and roll factors. When it left his hand he knew how far it would go, how it would bounce when it landed and how far it would roll either forward or back.
This stick dropped below the lip of the far balcony, hit the floor, bounced, hit again and rolled right against the wall. Most of the running boys had attacked the fallen Duga men, so there were few feet to get in the way or kick the stick out of range. Wingate fell flat on his face as the explosive detonated, ripping a decent size hole in the wall.
He was up again instantly, afraid that someone or something would fall on him while he had his guard down. Turning all the way around, he saw that almost everyone was concerned with their own survival and not with ending his life. The rest of the room was rapidly filling with noxious smoke. The only clear path he could see was between him and the hole in the far wall. Keeping his army knife in his hand in case anybody tried to stop him, Wingate took his first step toward the exit and freedom.
It was at that moment that Pallottola’s meaty hands fell upon his shoulders from behind.
Eight
“Who’s there?” Captain Gordon D. Browne asked the darkness before his eyes. It was dark outside, it was dark in the room, but the Englishman had no way of knowing, since the point-blank firing of the Beretta in his face had singed his corneas. Not only was the delicate membrane burned, the close-up flash had had the power of a small, concentrated sun. Its afterimage hung on to his vision long after the flash itself had dissipated.
So Browne’s world had changed from one of sight to one composed completely of sound. That was what had tipped him off in the first place. He had heard something unusual in his otherwise quiet room. He hadn’t heard the footsteps on the stairs outside. He hadn’t heard the same feet along the hallway. He hadn’t even heard the door of his room swing silently open.
What he had heard was the person’s first step inside. He had heard it when the leather of the shoe creaked as the weight of the leg was put upon it.
“Who is it?” Browne asked again. The only reply was another creak—closer this time.
“Private Gammellini?” he guessed. There was no answer. Just another creak ... one step closer.
Browne raised his head to the breeze he felt across his face from the open window behind him. “Sergeant Steiner? Jackson? Is that you?” Again, there was no vocal reply to his questions. Only one more move of a squeaking leather shoe.
“Answer me, curse you!” the captain swore, his mouth dry. But no answer was forthcoming. Feeling an electric like shock stretching across all his nerves, Browne scrambled for the holstered Webley hung on the headboard. He felt a great wind of relief as he wrapped his hand around its substantial butt, pulling it free of its holder. He struggled up onto his feet, holding the pistol before him.
“You’ll talk now, I’ll wager,” Browne said with conviction. “Who are you? What do you want?”
Another creak did not sound.
“Yes, that’s right,” Browne gloated. “Don’t like the odds now, do you? Yes, I have a gun here. A gun powerful enough to blow a hole as big as a quarter in your stomach. So don’t toy with me, if you know what’s good for you!”
There was no response of any kind.
“Come on, speak up,” the Britisher almost begged. “Where are you? You can’t stay still forever, you know. Have to pay the piper sometime.”
He heard a low chuckle right by his ear.
Browne reared back, realizing the person had stepped out of their shoes and approached him in stocking feet. He lost his balance, his arms flailing, and started to fall. He did not feel the wall where it should have been, and, to his horror, he realized that he was falling out the open window.
His mouth opened wider to shout, but then two strong arms wrapped around his waist, pulling him back. Browne was doubly happy about this. Not only was he being saved from a bad fall, but it also meant that whoever was in the room didn’t mean him any harm. He came to rest square on his feet again.
“Well, thank you, my good man,” Browne told his benefactor. “Good God, that was a near miss, wasn’t it? I say, you gave me quite a start at first. Shouldn’t do that to a man, don’t you know?”
Browne was able to finish that phrase before the sharp knife blade was pulled across his throat.
The Englishman was totally amazed. It didn’t make sense to him that he would be saved only to be killed. He felt his neck open up. He felt the curtain of blood streaming down his neck. And he felt the drowning sensation those with slit throats were supposed to feel.
Mercifully dying with numb shock rather than much pain, Browne fell to his knees on the floor, his torso and head lying across the bed.
The person with the squeaky shoes pried the Webley out of his limp hand, pointed it at the back of his head and pulled the trigger three times.
Wingate was lifted completely off the floor, the huge pawlike hands squeezing his shoulder blades like a torture device. He immediately pulled his knife back, trying to bury it in one of the flesh-and-blood clamps. But Pallottola was faster than he looked. His right hand quickly left Wingate’s shoulder and latched on to the wrist. As the monster’s fingers began to tighten, Wingate knew what he wanted and decided to accommodate him. The American dropped the knife as if it were a snake.
