Mac Wingate 9, page 5
“Come on!” he cried, increasing the pace to a gentle trot.
The buildings lay on the near side of the road, and as they approached a dog began to howl. Wingate increased the pace, trying to calculate how long it would be before someone responded to the barking and came out to investigate. There were five buildings, a group of four to Wingate’s right and the fifth standing by itself to his left. It looked like a small farm. As he watched, he saw a light come on in an upstairs room in the building to his left, and a second later disappear as the blackout shades were drawn. It was pretty much what he had suspected. The building standing alone was the farmhouse, and the others were outbuildings. It had taken the farmer less than a minute to respond to the howl of the watchdog.
“Let’s go, Brad,” he called, ducking under the barbed wire and making for the outbuildings.
“Where the hell’s that dog?” said Manganaro, following him, at times putting a hand on his shoulder so as not to lose contact in the blackness.
“Just pray he’s not between us and those buildings,” Wingate replied. As he jogged forward, he dropped a hand quickly to check that the knife was still in the ankle scabbard.
He was going to have to use it if they ran into the dog.
The door of the house opened and closed. For a second, a figure with a gun was silhouetted against the light inside. “Hans! Hans!” a voice called to the dog, and the howling changed to a long series of barks.
“Quick!” snapped Wingate, as a flashlight beam from in front of the house began to probe the darkness.
He grabbed Manganaro by the elbow and pulled him at a run across the open ground that lay between them and the nearest building. They had ten yards to cover, then eight, then six, as the beam swept toward them. Wingate flung himself forward, still clinging to Manganaro, hit the ground and rolled. A split second later, the flashlight beam hit the corner of the building a couple of feet above their heads, and disappeared from sight.
Wingate moved forward, half crouched, moving as quickly as the position would allow him. Manganaro was right at his side. They checked the length of the building, but there was no way in. Somewhere behind them, the dog’s position had changed. The guy with the gun had unleashed him and was using the animal to track them. The series of barks had changed into an occasional deep growl.
They checked at the corner, then turned around it, Manganaro now a couple of feet in the lead. Wingate had gotten the big Colt out and was holding it muzzle-upward, praying that the soaking it had taken wouldn’t affect its performance.
“In here!” growled Manganaro.
When Wingate reached him, Manganaro had the door of the building open and was halfway through it. Wingate followed him. A wave of hot, fetid air hit him. The smell of shit and ammonia was almost choking. He closed the door behind him and followed Manganaro. There were sacks of animal feed ahead of them, and when they had groped their way around that, Manganaro found a boarded wall that came up to his navel. Beyond it, he could hear the panicked sounds of animals moving over a straw-covered floor. He leaned over the fence and groped in the darkness. Finally he touched something. It was warm and wet and after a moment he felt a long, mobile rasp force itself into his hand and attempt to wrap itself around his wrist.
“Jesus Christ!” he muttered, withdrawing his hand in sudden horror. “What the hell’s in there?”
“Calves,” Wingate muttered. “Can’t you smell them?”
“Something tried to get a hold of me. Something rough—wet!”
“For God’s sake,” snapped Wingate. “Get in! All they’ll do is lick you!”
Manganaro hesitated. Wingate grabbed him by the ass of the pants, tipped him into the pen and dropped in beside him. A second later, the door behind them opened and the beam of the flashlight stabbed through the darkness. There was a howl from the dog as it raced forward and flung itself against the boarded wall of the pen.
“Hans!” yelled the voice again, and the dog fell back panting.
“Down!” breathed Wingate. “Crawl into them! Quick!” The animals had gotten to their feet and were standing huddled together at the far side of the pen. Wingate groped his way toward them on his hands and knees, Manganaro beside him. When he reached them, he put out his hands and fondled them, nuzzled them with his head and face, and gradually worked his way into the middle of them. Once there, he lay down in the dung-covered straw between their legs and waited.
The flashlight beam came steadily closer to where the dog was prowling back and forth outside the pen. Finally it stopped. It began to sweep every foot of the pen’s floor, working systematically from one side to the other, then back again. All the time, the dog kept up a low, snuffling whine. Wingate glanced at Manganaro. He had his head in the straw and his arms covering his head. No flesh showed that might have reflected the light and attracted the attention of the guy with the flashlight. Wingate smiled, admiringly. Brad was a pro to his fingertips.
The light reached the animals, huddled together against the far wall. They moved their feet nervously. They bleated. Two or three pissed in their panic and the acrid stink scorched Wingate’s nostrils. He still gripped the Colt, wondering whether the calves would stay bunched, or suddenly decide to shift their position to some other place in the pen. If the guy had any sense, he thought, he would put the dog into the pen. It would expose them in a couple of seconds. He waited, motionless, one eye half open to check the movement of the flashlight beam.
The beam swept the backs of the animals, occasional little shafts of light falling through some gap between them and hitting the straw beneath. Wingate held his breath. He was absolutely motionless, his gun hand hidden underneath his belly. Seconds passed, minutes, hours it seemed. Every moment he expected to hear the triumphant yell of discovery from the guy with the flashlight, to hear the howl of the dog and see the shadow of the gun poked forward toward him. But there was nothing. In the end, the beam shifted its position to the floor outside the pen. There was the sound of a boot thudding viciously into a body, and a sudden yelp of pain from the dog. A couple of minutes later, the door of the building opened and the place returned to darkness.
Wingate sighed. His mouth was dry and his heart raced. His shoulders ached where he had been holding the muscles in tension. But the worst pain was the return of feeling in his frozen hands and feet, generated by the heat from the animals around him.
“Jesus!” Manganaro complained, lifting his head and wiping the rotting straw and shit from his face. “I thought the bastard would never go! Another second and my lungs would have bust.”
“Stay with the animals,” said Wingate. “That way we’ll have a chance of thawing out without losing a limb to frostbite.”
Slowly the animals began to settle. They broke from their tight mass at one end of the pen, spread out and finally lay down. Carefully, the two men crawled among them, calming them with touches, reassuring them with soft words. In the end, it was possible for Wingate and Manganaro to lie down beside them, sharing the heat of the animals’ bodies, gradually regaining the circulation that the bitter cold of the sea had almost stopped. Then, as muscles slowly relaxed and aches grew easier, they began to doze. In half an hour, every living creature in the barn was asleep.
How long he slept, Wingate could only guess. The sea had stopped his watch, but a shaft of weak sunlight coming through a hole in the roof told him it was well into the morning. He blinked, yawned, rubbed his eyes and slowly sat up. Manganaro was still beside him fast asleep. He looked around the dimly lit barn, trying to orient himself. The calves were at the far end of the pen, butting and shoving at one another in order to get at a long trough of food. Somewhere, a dog gave a soft, low growl.
For a moment, Wingate paid no particular attention to the sound of the dog. It was part of the general sounds that he had always associated with a farm. Then it began to dawn on him that the growl of a dog wasn’t the kind of sound he wanted to hear in his present condition. He got to his knees and started to get to his feet, putting his hand toward the holster where the Colt lay.
As he did so, a voice spoke to him in Dutch. It spoke quietly and very carefully. He could figure out some of the words from his knowledge of German, though the tone of the voice told him everything he needed to know. He kept his hand well away from the Colt and looked up. There to his right stood a kid in his teens. He was thin and pale, with a long face and hair the color of silver. He was holding a 12 gauge double-barreled shotgun, the muzzles less than a foot from Wingate’s head.
Chapter Four
Wingate spoke in Norwegian. He spoke slowly, knowing that the chances of the kid understanding him were slim, but wanting to lay a basis for the story he was going to pitch later. The kid shook his head and motioned the two men out of the pen with the shotgun.
Wingate tried German. As he did so, he moved slowly to the side of the pen and made to get over the low boarded wall. He wanted to draw the kid’s attention off Manganaro. He was acutely aware that Manganaro was trying to rip the telltale insignia off the tunic he was wearing under the heavy lamb’s-wool flying jacket. Anyone spotting those wasn’t going to buy a story about a shipwrecked fisherman.
Again, the kid shook his head. Either he didn’t understand German, or as a loyal Dutchman he wasn’t prepared to admit to doing so.
“OK,” said Wingate, throwing one leg over the wall. “Let’s try it another way. Do you speak English?”
The young man thought for a moment, then said, carefully, “A little.”
“Thank God,” said Wingate, stepping out of the pen. “I was starting to think we were going to spend the rest of our lives stuck in this place.”
Wingate’s easy manner and slow, relaxed movements failed to reassure the kid. The more friendly Wingate became, the more wary the kid became. He threw a glance at Manganaro and found that the big man was on his knees in the pen, scratching in the straw bedding. He yelled suddenly, “What are you doing? Get up! Out, out!”
“You’d better get out, Brad,” said Wingate, quietly. Manganaro was smiling. He had his hands open and his arms out wide, like a magician anxious to convince an audience that he has nothing hidden up his sleeve. “Please—my frien’,” he said, laying on a heavy mock-Italian accent, and getting out of the pen.
“Go!” snapped the young man, no touch of humor in his voice. “Go, now!” He prodded Manganaro with the muzzles of the shotgun, and guided him out of the door of the barn. Wingate was ahead of Manganaro, the dog beside him giving an occasional low growl.
The day was clear and bright. The storm of the night before had blown over, leaving a crisp freshness in the air. They were in a yard with a fence around it and a couple of large white pigs rooting in a manure heap. Hens walked carefully among the frozen puddles, necks craned, looking for missed grains of corn. They were in the middle of a small farm. Wingate put the place at around five acres. Remembering the farm he’d grown up on back in Sawyer County, he wondered how anyone could grub a living out of a place like this. What did it amount to? A little calf-rearing, a couple of milking cows, chickens and a few pigs. Jesus! It was hardly the way to riches.
A woman stood in the doorway of the farmhouse watching them. She was like a bird—small, quick in her movements, with a great mat of uncombed hair. She wore a dark blue greasy apron and there were clogs on her feet. She called across the yard to the boy in a voice that sawed the air like a corncrake’s. Her dialect was so far removed from ordinary Dutch that only one word was comprehensible to Wingate—the word “gun.”
The young man’s reply was no more comprehensible. He walked past Wingate and Manganaro, handed the gun to the woman and disappeared into the little lean-to building to the left of the house. When he reappeared a moment later, he was wheeling a bicycle and pulling up the collar of his coat.
Without a glance at the woman, he mounted and peddled off toward the main road.
The dog came up to the woman and tried to rub its head against her leg, ingratiatingly, but she took a savage kick at it and struck it in the belly with a clog. It gave a pained yelp and slunk to one side, finally settling down in front of the big wooden kennel that stood by the door. “English?” she snapped at Wingate.
“Norwegian,” said Wingate.
“Liar!” There was a half-smirk on her face, as if it gave her satisfaction to contradict Wingate. She had a patch of gray hair on the left side of her chin that grew out of a dark brown birthmark. At some stage in her life she had had an injury to her nose. It had healed badly, the scar tissue puckering her cheek, pulling the corner of her right eye inward toward the nose and giving her the appearance of a squint. It seemed to Wingate that she would have done better as a sideshow freak at a fair than she could ever hope to do as a farmer.
Wingate shrugged. He smiled and said, “Fishermen. From Oslo. We hit a mine the other side of Borkum and sank. Our life raft’s still on the beach.”
She shifted her gaze to Manganaro. She looked at his flying jacket for a moment, then the flying boots he was still wearing. Finally she signaled with the gun that she wanted to see what was under the sheepskin jacket. “Open!” she croaked.
Wingate cut in, quickly, “He doesn’t speak much English. He’s Italian. The engineer who was sailing with us. He picked up the dress from an American prisoner back home. It’s pretty good for this kind of weather.”
She gave Wingate a derisory glance, then croaked again, “Open!”
She had the shotgun pointed right at Manganaro’s gut. There was no doubt she was prepared to use it. Manganaro put his hand reluctantly to his collar and unzipped the jacket. The Air Corps tunic from which he had managed to remove the insignia was revealed.
The smirk on her face turned into an open leer of triumph. “So!” she gloated. She spat directly at Wingate and snarled, “Dirty Yankee liars!”
Wingate dropped the pretense. He wiped the spittle off his face with the back of his hand. He was wondering now exactly how he was going to take her. If she hadn’t had the gun, he would have walked right over to her despite the dog. He thought briefly of reaching for his Colt, but there wasn’t enough time, and a couple of barrels from a 12 gauge shotgun at ten feet would make an awful mess for the undertaker.
He said, “OK. So what do you want? Are you going to keep us out here till we freeze to death? I figure we’re waiting for somebody. Can’t we wait inside?”
She considered for a moment, head cocked on one side like an old hen, squint eyes summing him up. At last she began to back through the open door and into the house, covering them both with the gun. “Come!” she snapped. And then, “Hans!” The dog got to its feet and went behind them. Wingate could hear it snuffling and growling behind his ankles. At any moment he expected to feel teeth in the flesh of his calves. The woman let them pass in front of her, then she kicked the door closed behind them.
The place smelled of damp and woodsmoke. A log fire was burning in the big hearth and a black iron kettle hummed on the hob to one side. Wingate was ravenous. How long had they been asleep in that calf pen? He did a rough calculation. Sometime after two in the morning they had had to ditch the Walrus. An hour in the water, maybe more. God knows how long wandering the beach and following that wire fence through the fields. And then the farmyard and the barn, where they had hidden, finally settling down among the animals and losing consciousness. Add to that a five or six hour sleep, and it must be early afternoon already. No wonder he felt hungry!
“Do you have anything to eat, ma’am?” asked Wingate, trying to sound polite. “Maybe something hot to drink?” He nodded to the kettle.
She looked at him suspiciously. The dog, following her movements, growled. Finally, she croaked, “Sit!”
They sat on the two wooden chairs in front of the fire, but she made no attempt to get anything for them to eat or drink. The dog never took his eyes off them, lying in front of them on a couple of sacks spread on the bare brick floor. To Wingate, he looked a cross between a Doberman and a German shepherd, and he had no doubt that the bastard had all the mean points of both.
“You got any ideas?” Manganaro muttered, zipping up his sheepskin jacket again. As he did so, he tried to check that the little Colt pocket pistol was still in the holster on his belt. It wasn’t. Somewhere along the way it had disappeared. Things began to look pretty rough to him. No way could he take the woman before she pulled those triggers.
“Not so’s you’d notice,” said Wingate. He leaned right back in the chair, trying to figure out its strength. Could he create a diversion by getting the thing to collapse under him, and maybe give Manganaro a chance to do something? He came to the same conclusion as Manganaro. There wasn’t a prayer.
The woman eased a little now that they were sitting. The light outside was fading as the early winter evening closed in. She took a taper and lit it from the fire and put it to the wick of the oil lamp on the chest of drawers. From some other room, a clock chimed four. Wingate glanced at Manganaro. Had they slept the best part of a day away?
The woman drew the drapes and sat facing them, the shotgun across her knees. “Who brought you here?” she snapped. “That pig Jan Kroon up at the lighthouse? Why the Germans don’t shoot him I don’t know. He’s always bringing people in. Everybody knows it. Why only yesterday, my son tells me, there was another spy came in posing as a Norwegian. But the Germans caught him—took him to the camp at the other end of the island. The Germans are too clever for you. The Germans will win the war ...”
The sound of a vehicle outside broke her train of thought. The dog got to its feet at once, went to the door and starting barking.
“Hans!” croaked the woman, getting up and backing carefully toward the door.
“Hold it, Brad,” Wingate muttered, his eyes fixed on the woman and the gun. He could sense Manganaro’s eagerness to do something before whoever was outside came in. “I’ll take the light, but not yet.”
