Mac Wingate 3, page 6
“Enough!” cried Dmitri. “The mountains are filling with Germans! We risk much coming to this royalist nest! Come with us, Captain! Leave this Greek who knows only his King and his fear of the people! Come with us! We fight Germans!”
“Go on without me, Captain,” said Alexis. “Costi is right. You don’t need me.”
“You’ll be all right here?”
“I’ll be fine, Captain.” He smiled. “I can find out much, I am sure, if I just keep my eyes and ears open—in this nest of royalists.”
“All right, then.”
A moment later, as Wingate stepped through the door just behind Costi and Dmitri, Alexis called, “Be careful, Wingate!”
Turning in the doorway, Wingate asked, “Of what, Alexis? The Germans?”
Alexis’s smile was enigmatic. Laloula took hold of his arm, as if to warn him not to say too much. “Of course. What else could I have meant?”
Wingate was not fooled. He knew perfectly well what Alexis meant. He turned and followed Costi and Dmitri out into the moonlit darkness.
Clouds had swept across the face of the moon, plunging them suddenly into Stygian darkness. Nevertheless, even though the guerrillas were lugging oversized rifles and carried handguns and knives stuck in their belts, they clambered over the cuts and through the rock-strewn ravines with the speed and silence of disembodied shadows. Wingate had all he could do to keep up.
They were high in the mountains when Wingate entered a ravine and found Costi waiting for him. Wingate pulled up.
“Dmitri says to be careful,” Costi whispered. “He doesn’t like the smell of this place. He’s going ahead to investigate.”
Wingate glanced at the radium dial of his wristwatch. It was close to one o’clock. They had been traveling for almost four hours and he was grateful for the pause. “How close are we to the British camp?”
“Dmitri says we are nearly there.”
Wingate froze suddenly, then slapped Costi brutally to the ground beside him. He had heard the grating rattle of an automatic weapon being cocked. A second after they hit the ground, the darkness around them exploded.
Machine guns above and behind them opened up with a single, ear-shattering roar. Wingate saw two guerrillas at the far end of the canyon, caught in the storm of red and yellow tracer bullets, being swept away, their cries lost in the bowel-constricting clamor. The flickering light from the machine guns’ muzzle flashes enabled Wingate to see that he and Costi were huddled close under an overhanging shelf of rock. The moment he realized this, he knew also that once the Germans learned where he and Costi were hiding they would drop a grenade on them.
Wingate grabbed Costi and pulled him through the darkness after him. They were almost out of the ravine when two guerrillas behind them panicked, stood up and fled past them. At once German gunners directed their fire at the fleeing guerrillas. Still on the ground, Wingate watched as one of the men took a hail of lead in his back and was flung like a rag doll out of the canyon. Wingate started up again, and a second or two later the two men left the canyon and plunged down a short slope. In the cover of a shallow gully, Wingate dropped down as low as he could get. Screaming lead whipped over his head like a wind out of hell.
“Where’s Dmitri—and the rest of those guerrillas?” Costi asked, huddling close beside Wingate.
“Finished probably—unless they got through the canyon.”
“Dmitri was at the other end when he sent me to warn you.”
“If he made it through, he’ll be back for us.”
Wingate wished he was as confident as he sounded. The streams of tracer began cutting into the slope just above them, filling the air with rock splinters and blinding clods of dirt. Wingate began to finger his Sten. He was not going to be able to take much more of this without getting his own. At any moment a slug with his name on it would find him. He would much rather meet that slug fighting back than cowering like an animal in its hole.
Wingate was readying his Sten, thinking seriously of trying to surprise the Germans, when the barrage ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Wingate waited a moment, then lifted his head cautiously. The sound of shouting came to him faintly from beyond the canyon. He heard a German officer barking commands to retreat. Small arms fire came closer. The sudden roar of powerful motors and the clank of half-tracks came from below as German armored personnel carriers began to move off.
Dmitri must have counterattacked with his guerrillas from the other side of the ridge!
“Let’s go find Dmitri,” said Wingate, as he got to his feet and started back through the darkness. “I’d like to thank that big bear. He saved our asses.”
But instead of Dmitri and the rest of his guerrillas, Wingate and Costi were suddenly surrounded by jubilant British soldiers led by a tall Englishman. The fellow’s chin jutted proudly as he pushed through his men toward Wingate. His hand was outstretched, and as soon as Wingate—astonished—clasped it, the British officer shook his hand warmly.
“Heard the row,” the man told Wingate. “Thought we’d join the party. Hope you don’t mind. Captain Clive Smith, at your service. You’d be the American, Mac Wingate, I assume.”
“You assume correctly, Captain Smith,” Wingate replied. “And I’m not going to complain at all about your crashing this party. I might have done something very foolish if you hadn’t arrived when you did.”
“Is this your entire force, Captain?” Smith asked.
“The remainder of my men are waiting for me some distance from here in a cave.”
“Good. Your men and ammunition, I hope. We can use both.”
Wingate nodded. “You’ve been in contact with Cairo?”
Smith smiled, his blue eyes seeming to twinkle in the dark. “They’ll be pleased to know you arrived safely.” Smith looked around him. “And it appears to me you are a very lucky man. We’ve already counted three dead guerrillas back there. Was Kessel with you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we haven’t found his body. He must have escaped.” He considered a moment, then commented, “Strange he should have left you behind like that. He’s a tough old bird. Eats Germans alive.”
“He warned us to expect something,” Costi explained quickly. “He was going ahead to investigate when the Germans began firing on us.”
Smith nodded. “The mountains have been swarming with Jerries for the past couple of days. I suggest we move out at once. I can send some men after the rest of your command first thing in the morning, Captain.”
“How far is your headquarters?”
“Not far,” Smith replied. “But I am afraid it is almost straight up. These are very young, very precipitous mountains, I am afraid.”
“Lead the way, Captain.”
“Call me Clive. If that suits you.”
That suited Wingate fine, and as they set out through the night, Wingate suggested the captain should treat him just as informally.
The large force of British soldiers moved with disciplined silence through the moonless gloom, finding with casual skill the steep trails that led ever upward. As Wingate kept pace alongside the tall captain, he found himself wondering the same thing Clive had wondered earlier.
Where the hell was Dmitri Kessel? And why hadn’t he come back for them?
There were two quite logical explanations, Wingate realized. Kessel could have been wounded by the German fire and had only barely managed to escape. Or he could simply have concluded that there was no sense in returning for Wingate and the others, since he would find only dead comrades. Yet every time Wingate thought of those waiting half-tracks on the trail below, an uneasy warning stirred within him. The waiting personnel carriers meant that those Jerries were not just a random patrol that had stumbled upon them in the night.
For the second time in two days, Wingate had been led into a German ambush.
Six
Clive Smith had found a high, narrow valley among the clouds, rimmed with peaks and steep-sided ravines. The valley was lush with trees and waist-high grass. An icy stream cut through its center, and on each side of it ragged tents had been set up under heavy camouflage netting. It was dawn when they reached the valley, and in the early light the tents resembled pathetic shanties. The biggest danger, Wingate found, once he had passed the outer and inner rings of sentries, were the low-hung clotheslines, each one laden with damp laundry.
Captain Smith led Wingate and Costi to the far side of the valley and up a steep slope to a large cave. The trail they followed to reach the cave had been guarded by three sandbagged machine gun emplacements, and Wingate caught glimpses of other redoubts as well. He was impressed by the captain’s deployment of his men.
The valley was theirs as long as the Germans were not close, Clive explained. As soon as the German patrols started thrusting into the region, the tents would be folded and the clotheslines taken down, and his men would melt into the surrounding ravines and caves—into what was virtually an impregnable fortress. Meanwhile, from the air, the camouflaged tents and any other sign of the soldiers’ presence would be completely hidden.
Sitting on canvas chairs in the cave’s entrance, with the bright morning sun just lifting over the peaks, Wingate and Costi accepted the cup of tea Clive’s aide, a Corporal Dunham, had prepared for them as soon as they reached the cave. Wingate was weary, and the tea helped, but he would have preferred something a little stronger. He glanced around at the walls of rock soaring upward into the brilliantly blue sky and shook his head in wonder as he sipped his tea. Smith could stand off a brigade in this place.
Clive sat down in a canvas chair beside him and Costi. The three men might have been colonial planters, looking fondly out over their estates.
“I am impressed, Clive,” Wingate told him. “You seem to have found an ideal fortress.”
Drinking his tea, the captain nodded. “It is a formidable redoubt, I must admit. I discovered the valley and these caves less than a year ago. Since that time, I have lost only sixteen men. The Germans know we are here, of course. At first our tenacity infuriated them. But after fruitless and quite costly assaults, they backed off, content now to send their hapless Italian allies after us, or ignore us.” He smiled. “We have a few Eyetie prisoners down there now. They are content to serve us in any way they can without complaint. The poor devils are delighted to be free of the Germans.”
“I can understand that perfectly,” said Costi.
Four British soldiers, in full battle dress, complete with web equipment and Enfield rifles, climbed the ledge in front of the cave, filed to a halt in front of Captain Smith and saluted smartly. Clive stood and returned the salute just as smartly and addressed the sergeant in command.
“You have all you need, Sergeant Whipple?”
“Yes, sir.”
Clive turned to Wingate. “These are the men I am sending after the rest of your party, Mac. They will need directions as to how to find the cave.”
Costi stood up. “I’ll take them.”
Wingate got to his feet also. “You’ve been on the move since we landed, Costi,” Wingate told him, frowning. “Are you sure you’re up to it?”
The little fellow was a bit unhappy at Wingate’s suggestion that he might not be capable of handling the assignment and bristled slightly, pulling himself up to his full five feet four. “I was sent with you, Captain, because I know the island, every inch of it. I doubt if anyone else here could find that cave as easily as I can. I’ll sleep when I return.”
Wingate smiled. “All right then. Take care you stay out of German ambushes. We’ve been lucky so far, but our luck isn’t going to hold forever.”
“I know that, Captain,” Costi responded, somewhat grimly.
As Wingate watched Costi and the four British soldiers file down the trail to the valley, he turned to Clive. “I don’t trust the ELAS,” he said.
Clive did not seem at all surprised at Wingate’s comment. He simply leaned back in his chair and said, “And why not, Mac?”
Wingate told him about the two ambushes. When he had finished, Clive was silent for a moment or two, finished his tea and placed the empty cup and saucer down gently on the ground beside his chair. “You suspect Dmitri Kessel—or one of his men—was behind each of those ambushes, the second as well as the first.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve known Kessel for some time. I have always been able to trust him. He is, as I have already told you, a fierce enemy of the Germans. And his band of guerrillas are loyal to a man.” Clive chuckled. “They have to be. He’ll kill any man who shows the slightest sign of defecting. I am not so sure I approve of his recruitment methods. But they are effective.”
“How does he recruit?”
“He marches through the villages seeking out youths old enough to join him. Any who refuse the honor are shot on the spot. He will sometimes allow the village elders he trusts to plead for those able bodied men whose families would be destitute without them, but on the whole, he takes the men he wants without challenge.”
“And these become his loyal recruits.”
“I see what you mean. And I have often given it serious thought, but until now I have seen no sign of a crack in his ranks.”
“After what my men and I experienced, it seems pretty obvious that if not Kessel himself, then at least someone high in his councils is out to stop me—with the aid of the Germans.”
“What you mentioned about those waiting personnel carriers does bother me, I admit. The Jerries were waiting for you, and that’s a fact.”
“And Kessel got clean away.”
“After sending Costi back to halt you in the canyon.”
“Yes.”
“That means he sacrificed his own men to the Germans.”
“He doesn’t appear to be the kind of a man who would have any difficulty swallowing that.”
“No, so he doesn’t. But why? Mac, he has been a fierce and relentless killer of Germans. To the people of this beleaguered island he is an authentic—a mythic—hero. What could possibly make him a turncoat now?”
“He is a Communist and does not want the Allies or any royalist faction with me to get credit for our upcoming assaults on this island. As it is now, he has the show all to himself. When peace comes he and his party, the ELAS, will take power just as surely as they will in Greece—if they remain popular there as well.”
“That is pretty Machiavellian, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps so, but I consider the Communists the purest disciples of Machiavelli alive today.”
“You realize, we can’t proceed with any attack on the German strongholds on Crete if what you say is true. We must have the guerrillas’ aid if we are to succeed.”
“I realize that.”
“Then what do you propose?”
“That we become as Machiavellian as Dmitri. Listen, the islanders could not all be one hundred percent behind this man—not considering the number of young men he must have shot down in the course of his recruiting drives.”
“There are murmurs of discontent, but very well muted, as you can imagine. No one has spoken out openly against Dmitri.” Clive frowned thoughtfully for a moment. “There is one man, though—one of Dmitri’s lieutenants, a fighter almost as legendary in his exploits as Kessel—who has on more than one occasion dared to challenge Dmitri. Dmitri suffers him only because of his immense popularity. He is a fighter equally as fierce as Dmitri.”
“That’s our man then. What is his name?”
“Stephanos Zotos. The Germans wiped out his family early in the occupation, along with all of the men in his village. Then they took his betrothed to work in their brothel in Iraklion. The girl killed herself before the SS could make use of her charms. Zotos has been killing Germans with a metronomic regularity ever since.”
Wingate nodded. The grim story reinforced his conviction that Zotos would be the man to turn to in the event they were able to unmask Dmitri. Such a man would not collaborate with the Germans—and he would not allow a man who would to live long.
“The question is,” said Clive, “how are we to get word to Zotos?”
“I’ll send Costi after him. He was able to bring Dmitri. Perhaps he can bring Zotos as well.”
“You can trust Costi?”
“No. He is a brave man, but he is loyal to Dmitri and would not want to believe what we do about him. I will just tell him I must see Zotos without Dmitri knowing. No explanations should be necessary.”
Clive stood up. The newly risen sun was impaling him while he sat in the chair. “Of course you realize, Mac, that we have no proof—none at all—that Dmitri has been selling out to the Germans. And we may be wrong, after all.”
Wingate got up also, aware as he stood of an immense fatigue. “I realize that.”
“Then how do you propose to gain this proof, if there is any?”
“I’ll think of that later, Clive, when my men have been brought safely here and Costi has found this Zotos fellow for me. At the moment, all I want is a place out of this sun where I can grab some shut-eye.”
“Of course,” said Clive, smiling. “Corporal Dunham has already readied a cot for you well back in the cave.”
Wingate smiled wearily. “You better show me the way. I’m pretty rocky at this stage. I want to be at my best when Stephanos Zotos gets here.”
Clive took Wingate’s elbow and steered him past the chairs and into the dim, cool recesses of the cave. Far in the back, with the cave’s entrance glowing in the distance, Wingate slumped on the cot provided for him and plunged instantly into an exhausted sleep.
Wingate came awake with cold sweat on his brow, his hand groping for a weapon. The snarling whine of a Stuka’s motor was burrowing into his head like a dentist’s drill. It took him a moment to orient himself. The dazzling sunlight that had filled the cave’s entrance had dimmed considerably, and the sound of the dive bomber was coming from well beyond the cave; it was the low rock walls of the cavern that had concentrated the high, droning sound so intensely.
