Mac Wingate 9, page 7
The German switched on the radio and waited for it to warm up. Through the front grill, Wingate could see the big glass valves gradually begin to glow. He made his decision. He couldn’t risk letting a rescue team go to the Brandt place and discover what had happened there. It would spark a massive hunt throughout the island, and warn Erikson that London was after him. By this time tomorrow the whole thing would be over. But until that time, the less people who knew about the presence of a couple of wrecked Norwegian fisherman, the better. He shifted his grip on the knife so that his thumb lay flat along the handle, the ball just touching the blade.
The radio began to crackle. The German picked up the microphone and put his hand out to flick over the transmission switch. As he did so, Wingate turned into him, hit him hard with the point of the knife and forced the blade high inside his chest and into the heart. At the same time, he slapped his open left hand across the German’s mouth to smother any cry. The man gave a great, rasping gasp as he fought to stay alive, but beyond that he made no sound. He stayed on his feet for three full seconds, then gradually sank to his knees. Wingate grabbed the lantern from his faltering grasp and let him slip over onto his side.
Wingate climbed into the back of the vehicle, then extinguished the lantern. He would think about Brad later. At the moment he needed to figure out what to do about the guy with the machine gun, hidden in the darkness ahead. If he turned off the car’s headlights, how suspicious would it make the bastard? Yet if he left them on, could he slip past them with his own Schmeisser without being seen? He could pick up the submachine gun where he had left it by the side of his seat, and shoot around the open door. But if his first burst missed, he could forget about any reunion with Erikson. He had to get closer and he had to throw some illumination on the guy in the sidecar.
He slipped into the driver’s seat, quietly put the car into gear and slowly eased out the clutch. The car slid forward, each yard bringing more of the ground ahead into the beams of the blinkered headlights. He had the Schmeisser across his knees and his right hand gripping the stock. The minute the machine gunner came into view, Wingate was going to flick the muzzle over the top of the door sill and squirt through the open window.
The car rolled three, four, five yards, then suddenly the headlight on the motorcycle snapped on and Wingate was caught full in its beam. He was blinded, struggling with one hand to shade his eyes and with the other to control the direction of the car. The Schmeisser slid off his lap and clattered to the floor. A second later, the gunner opened fire and the windshield exploded in Wingate’s face. He flung himself to his right and dropped to the floor. He wanted the protection of some of the car’s bodywork between him and the gun. He cursed the dumb bastard who had designed the thing. If he had put the engine in front where it ought to be instead of stuck in the vehicle’s ass, it would have been a whole lot better as a shield.
Wingate lay waiting for the gunner’s next move. There was absolute silence outside. The engine behind him had stopped and he could hear nothing but the slush of the waves on the beach and the soft moan of the wind. He had the Schmeisser in his hands again, and very slowly he lifted his head. Through the shattered windshield, he could see the single beam from the motorcycle headlamp still locked onto the car, and all around it impenetrable darkness.
He began to ease himself backward, planning to drop out of the back of the car and make a run for the nearest dune. As he did so, a burst of firing ripped the silence apart. Wingate saw the stream of muzzle flashes a second before he dove for cover. The guy in the cycle wasn’t alone. There was another machine gun position on the opposite side of the road. That same moment, he became aware of the stink of gasoline filling the car. Pretty soon he was going to have to cross that light beam from the cycle whether he liked it or not.
He turned in the cab, still crouched below the windshield, and took hold of the Schmeisser with both hands. He knew exactly where that second gunman was located and he pushed himself quickly upward with his knees and elbows. As the Schmeisser cleared the instrument panel, he fired a long burst through the broken windshield. There was an immediate cry.
A moment later he heard Manganaro’s voice screaming at him from the distance, “Mac! Get outa there! Mac—move it!”
The fumes of escaping gas were suffocating. A new smell blended with them, acrid and pungent. He spun around. An incendiary bullet had lodged in one of the bedrolls. He was sitting inside a deathtrap.
“Mac! For Christ’s sake—Mac!”
Wingate flung himself through the open door, hit the road surface and rolled over the sandy edges. Once he struck the first of the dunes, he clawed his way over it and hurled himself into the shelter of the far side. As he did so, the blast of the explosion behind him struck his legs, scorching the flesh and flipping him over in a somersault onto his back. He lay there for a long moment, bruised and dazed, as the burning gasoline sent a great plume of smoke and flame soaring into the sky. Then a hand grabbed him by the shoulder of his pea jacket and dragged him clear.
Manganaro was on his knees beside Wingate, yelling, “Can you move? Can you walk? We’ve got to get the hell out of here before every kraut in the Wehrmacht jumps on our necks!”
He pulled Wingate to his feet and shoved him away from the blaze. Gradually Wingate’s head cleared. He found his legs were running, carrying him alongside the road with Manganaro at his shoulder.
They passed the motorcycle, its headlight still beaming into the night. In the sidecar, the machine gunner lay slumped backward against the seat padding, head lolling to one side and helmet missing. As he took in the scene, it began to dawn on Wingate what had happened. Yet the discovery didn’t entirely please him.
“Listen, Brad,” he said, an edge to his voice. “Next time you decide to take off, drop me a note—huh?”
“Sure,” said Manganaro. “If there’s time I’ll send flowers.” They covered a hundred, then two hundred yards. There were no sounds from behind them. The wind had dropped and the sky had cleared. Stars began to appear to the south, and the crash of the sea had become a long, low shuffle over the wide stretch of beach beyond the dunes.
“Hold it,” Wingate panted, slowing to a walk. “We ought to be getting near that lighthouse.” After a moment, he asked, “How the hell did you get clear of that vehicle? I never saw a thing. Sure as shooting, I thought you were still inside when that kraut lifted the canvas cover. I had my knife out. I damned nearly put it in him then.”
“I got out the back, soon as I saw the gunner in the sidecar,” said Manganaro. “I had my Schmeisser. I knew then I was going to have to kill him. No way were those two going to let us past without a fight.”
“How come you’ve got night vision as good as that?” asked Wingate.
“My Mom’s part owl,” muttered Manganaro. He was gripping his Schmeisser in both hands, expecting the lighthouse to loom up ahead of him any moment.
“Some bird,” breathed Wingate.
“Yeah,” said Manganaro, more to himself than to Wingate. Brooklyn and his family seemed a million miles from this bleak beach, stuck out in the North Sea. There were times when he wondered how he had ever gotten into this war. This was one of them.
Wingate put out a hand and stopped Manganaro. He could just make out the darker shape against the dark sky beyond. “You see it?” he whispered.
“Yeah,” breathed Manganaro. The sight of some kind of shelter reminded him how bitterly cold it was in the open, and the pangs of hunger began to twist his gut. “Come on,” he said, starting forward again, anxious to get inside the shelter, desperate to cram something warm and edible down his throat.
“Hold it,” said Wingate. He was weighing the odds against them. He was only here, outside the lighthouse, on a hunch. The old woman had mentioned Jan Kroon, the keeper. There was something about the way she had said it, something about the way she’d given him information about Erikson’s arrival, that had given Wingate the impression she had been trying to give him a lead, without daring to bring it out in the open. That was the hunch he was playing. The next ten minutes would tell him how right he was—or how wrong.
There were no lights in the building, or none that showed outside. It could have been deserted for all the signs of life there were. They skirted it, feeling their way over rocks, dropping ankle deep into pools of icy seawater trapped among the rocks around the base. There was only one way in. It lay at the top of a flight of concrete steps, through a solid wooden door.
“OK,” Wingate whispered, when they had completed the reconnaissance. “Let’s go.”
He gave a couple of heavy raps on the door with the butt of his Schmeisser, then waited. There was no sound from inside, no tap of footsteps on stairs, no creak of bolts, no sound of a door opening—nothing. He rapped again.
Suddenly there was a rustle of sound behind the door and a quick snapping of bolts. The door opened half an inch and a deep voice, still half asleep, growled, “Ja?”
“Brandt,” Wingate snapped. It was the first word that came into his head.
“Brandt?” the voice asked, incredulously. “Willem Brandt?”
Wingate growled. He didn’t want his accent giving him away, now that he had got the guy off guard. He nudged Manganaro and a second later both of them had hit the door and were inside the room, with the door slammed closed behind them.
Wingate checked the room. It was large and circular, built of rough-hewn stone blocks and lit by a single light bulb hanging from a beam in the center of the ceiling. There was a huge fireplace on the far side, the ashes of a fire still glowing in it, and above it an old muzzle-loader and a couple of mounted deer heads.
“Jan Kroon?” asked Wingate.
The man nodded. He was very tall and broad, with a great untrimmed tangle of beard. He looked down at the muzzle of Wingate’s Schmeisser but he didn’t put his hands up.
Manganaro began to check the place, poking behind draperies, opening closet doors. A flight of stone steps wound downward beside the fireplace. He took a flashlight from the mantelpiece and began to check them. They were damp and the lower he went down them the thicker the moss grew on the walls. Finally they ended abruptly in the sea. He had expected a cellar, perhaps even Erikson himself, but all he had come across was a secret escape route from the lighthouse.
Back in the main room, Kroon was sitting in the big chair beside the dying fire and Wingate was pacing back and forth over the stone floor. He had laid his Schmeisser on the heavy oak table that stood under the central light, and he was spinning his wrecked Norwegian line. There was another flight of spiral stairs leading upward from beyond the table. Manganaro went over to it and listened, then he shone the beam of the flashlight up into the darkness and began to climb.
“We need a ship,” said Wingate, injecting a slight Scandinavian lilt into his English. “The Germans are looking for us. We had trouble with some guards in the night. We need to get off the island before they catch up with us.”
He turned directly to Kroon to watch his reaction. He was taking one hell of a risk, coming right out with the problem the way he had. If his hunch was wrong, if Kroon was in the pay of the krauts, then Wingate and Manganaro would be in Gestapo hands within the hour.
Kroon looked at him, then he looked at the Schmeisser lying just behind Wingate on the table. He said, “Why should I help you? You wake me in the middle of the night, you force your way in, you stick a gun in my belly ...” His voice was little more than a deep growl that rolled around the cavernous room. He sat back in the chair with his hands resting on the wooden arms, very much in charge of the situation.
“You’re a loyal Dutchman,” said Wingate.
“Who says so?”
“The Brandt woman,” said Wingate, quickly. “She says you have a boat. You get people on and off the island every day.”
Kroon stirred in his chair, then leaned forward. “She said that?” he asked. “Gretchen Brandt said that?”
Wingate took a step forward. He had Kroon’s attention at last. His hunch was paying off. “There was another Norwegian, she told me,” he said, looking directly at Kroon. “You brought him in, the day before yesterday. If you brought him in, you can take us out. We need to get to Oslo—”
“This other Norwegian,” Kroon cut in. “Do you remember his name?”
“Erikson,” said Wingate. “The Brandt woman said ‘Erikson. ’”
“You’re a liar!” roared Kroon, suddenly. “She told you nothing of the sort. She couldn’t have. She didn’t know his name. You’re not a Norwegian any more than I am.” He made a great gesture of spitting on the floor. “You’re a spy—a damned American come here to kill one of our agents. We’ve been expecting you since your aircraft was shot down.”
Wingate spun around and made a lunge for the Schmeisser on the table. His face ran right into the muzzle of a P-38 Walther, covering him from the far side of the table. Behind the gun was a tall, slim man in his thirties, wearing the uniform of an RAF Squadron leader. Manganaro was nowhere to be seen.
The man stared at him in the stark light with pale, watery eyes. There was a half-smile on his face that contained no humor. At last, he curled a lip and said in Norwegian, “Welcome to Gestapo headquarters—Captain Wingate.”
“Jesus,” muttered Wingate.
“Allow me to introduce your Mr. Erikson,” said Kroon, coming from the fireplace and standing at the table beside Wingate. “One of our very best contacts in London.”
It wasn’t Erikson—not the Erikson that Wingate knew. It wasn’t the least bit like him. Wingate cursed himself. Instead of trapping Kroon into giving him the information he had wanted, he had blown the whole game. The Gestapo had him, but they knew who he was and what he was doing here. He had risked everything on a hunch that some old woman had inspired, and it had come unstuck. All he could do now was seize any opportunity these bastards might accidentally give him, and when the time came to go, to take as many of the sons of bitches with him as he could.
“Take him upstairs, Olaf,” said Kroon, leaning past Wingate, picking up the Schmeisser and prodding Wingate with it in the side.
“Olaf,” thought Wingate, moving around the table with his hands above his head and walking toward the circular stairway. Jesus, they’d even gone to the trouble to use Colonel Erikson’s own first name! They knew every detail of the situation.
The room upstairs was similar to the one below, but the immediate effect was one of severely restricted space. There was a cluster of brilliant lights placed centrally over a chair, that threw the rest of the place into deep shadow.
“The guy I was with?” Wingate demanded, turning to face Kroon. “What have you done with him?”
Kroon nodded into the shadows. Manganaro was lying on his side, his feet and hands roped together behind his back and a gag drawn tightly over his mouth. There was a cut over one eye from which a little trickle of blood leaked down his cheek.
“You bastards!” snapped Wingate, taking a couple of quick paces toward Manganaro before he was pulled up short. A couple of new figures had stepped out of the shadows into the glare of the central lights and stood facing him. One of them had Manganaro’s submachine gun pointed at his gut.
“Sit down,” Kroon growled, in his deep, resonant voice. He motioned to the chair in the middle of the room and the two new men took Wingate by an elbow each and backed him into it.
Wingate looked around him. Manganaro lay bleeding somewhere behind him. In front of him were the stairs that led to the room below, and between him and them stood the giant, bearded figure of Kroon, the lights from above him throwing the whole of his face into a mask of distorted shadows. The one called Erikson was on Wingate’s right, still with the Walther pistol in his hand. On Wingate’s left stood the new figures. The one with the Schmeisser was also in Allied uniform—the uniform of an American lieutenant bombardier in the Air Corps. The other figure was a civilian. He was in his middle forties, short and fat, with thick-lensed eyeglasses and a bristling gray mustache.
“You had trouble with some German guards, huh?” asked Kroon. “Where was this?”
Wingate looked up at him defiantly. The glare from the lights above him, and the angle at which he had to lift his head in order to see Kroon’s face, made him squint his eyes. He didn’t speak.
“How long ago?” asked Kroon, patiently.
Wingate said nothing.
“Tell me what happened?” Kroon persisted.
Again, Wingate didn’t reply.
The fat man with the mustache and the eyeglasses, standing to Wingate’s left, took out a cigar. He lit it very carefully, drew in a breath of smoke and let it out again, and finally blew on the end of the cigar so that it glowed bright red. He took a couple of steps toward Wingate. With each step the shadows on his face became more distorted in the overhead lights, but Wingate could make out an amused grin and a couple of broken bottom teeth in the middle of his lower jaw.
“Why add to your troubles, Captain Wingate?” he asked. His voice was soft, almost effeminate, as if it had a coating of fur protecting it. “Admit it, there never were any Germans. You are no more Norwegian than your bruised friend on the floor there. We know exactly who you are and why you are here. We knew you were coming, long before you took off from Manston. We know you were flying a Walrus aircraft and that one of our U-boats shot it down into the sea. We know the name of the Norwegian ship you were supposed to have been a fisherman on, the type of gun you are carrying under that jacket, the sort of knife that’s strapped to your right ankle. We have your fingerprints, your date of birth, your grades in the final examinations at the University of Wisconsin at Madison ... Do you wish me to go on?”
Wingate said nothing. He was trying to place the accent. He came to the conclusion that it was French. Why would a Frenchman be working for the Gestapo on some godforsaken sliver of sand lying off the north Dutch coast?
“We even know the name of the girl you were with that last night in England. The girl who was killed in the air raid.
