Mac Wingate 9, page 8
Mary Raven.” The voice purred with satisfaction. “Now do you wish to tell us the truth?”
The name came as a terrible shock to Wingate. It was the first shock this overfed bastard had been able to deliver. You expected the Gestapo to know everything else, that’s what they were trained and paid for. But who else but he knew about the girl, let alone knew her name? A suspicion began to form in his mind that he couldn’t throw off.
The Frenchman waited patiently, taking an occasional pull at the cigar, occasionally blowing on it to keep the end glowing and free of ash. At last, he tired. He gave a quick nod. Kroon stepped forward, grabbed Wingate’s feet, and held them immobile, one on either side of his own body. The others stepped in from the sides, took hold of his arms and pulled him back against the chair. Wingate saw the fat man come slowly forward toward him, his glasses glinting in the fierce light, the eyes behind them entirely invisible. Wingate had figured the situation out now. The fat bastard was the real Gestapo agent, the real professional. The others were simply agents on their way to London, already wearing the uniforms of the services they were briefed to infiltrate. He felt absolutely impotent. He knew the truth, yet there was no way he could warn London. Jesus, had Erikson talked already?
The fat guy was right on top of Wingate now. Wingate could smell the heavy stink of garlic on his breath, and the sickly sweet stench of unwashed clothing. The guy stuck a stubby left hand on Wingate’s face, the heel under his chin, and forced his head right back into the chair. Wingate struggled, but was held. The fat guy’s face was a black, featureless lump, blocking out everything but the glaring lights above. Wingate could see the glowing cigar butt, he could feel its heat as it approached his left eye. He locked the eyes tight, but a hand clawed at his forehead from behind and dragged them half open. He fought to move his head, to clamp his eyes tight closed again, to lash out with his feet, but the four of them were holding him immobile.
“Now perhaps we can have the truth, Captain Wingate,” the voice crooned into Wingate’s face. “You are an American, am I right? You are a spy. We have every right to shoot you out of hand, but we might spare you, you and your accomplice, for a simple admission of fact. Now ...”
“I am a Norwegian,” growled Wingate, the statement barely comprehensible under the pressure from the fat man’s hand. “The other guy’s Italian. We were shipwrecked west of Borkum—” He gave a piercing scream as Kroon’s thumb found a sensitive nerve point in his left foot and jammed it sharply against the anklebone.
“American!”
“Go fuck yourself!” Wingate yelled. “Go fuck the Führer ...!”
The fat man withdrew the hand from Wingate’s mouth and slammed the back of it against the side of Wingate’s face. It seemed to Wingate that his eardrum had burst. He fought again to free himself from the hands of the men behind him. He knew what the next move would be. The glowing end of the cigar still hovered over his eye, and now it was going to be stubbed out into it. Could he stand the pain? He locked his jaw to prevent the scream that he knew was bound to come. He waited, every fraction of every second dragging into an eternity. And still he waited.
A voice in the distance said quietly, “That’s enough. It’s Captain Wingate. Let him go.”
It was a woman’s voice, and as the hands came off him, Wingate opened his eyes and peered into the darkness ahead of him. He could make out the shadow of the speaker in the glow from the fireplace. She was middle height with shoulder-length hair. She could have been any age but there was no denying her authority.
“Do you think he’ll stand up to it?” Kroon growled, turning toward the figure in the shadows. “Not that we really did anything to him.”
“Let’s hope he’s never put to the test,” said the woman’s voice. “Wake up the other one. It’s time we went.”
She came toward Wingate, stepping briskly out of the shadows and into the circle of light. “Are you ready—Mac?” she asked.
Wingate gaped. He couldn’t grasp it. Standing a couple of yards in front of him was Mary Raven, the girl who had been killed in the London air raid.
Chapter Six
Wingate was stunned. His mind groped for some sensible explanation, but couldn’t come up with one. He started to get mad as the inescapable truth clamored for recognition. He got slowly to his feet and looked the girl full in the face. The bitch was actually smiling! Wingate threw a punch. It was a short punch, traveling no more than twelve inches, but it was a hard punch, delivered with the full weight of his body, the way he meant it to be. It took her square on the jaw and flung her backward, slamming her into the far wall. She hung for a moment against the stonework, then her knees caved and she slid down to a sitting position on the floor.
“You goddamn hooker!” Wingate snarled.
He wasn’t done with her. He made to get around the chair to where the girl was slumped, but Kroon got hold of him from behind. He dug an elbow backward into Kroon’s ribs. Kroon grunted but held on.
“Hold it, hold it, Mac,” yelled the guy in the Air Corps uniform. “Just back off and listen!”
He came over to where Wingate was still struggling to free himself from the big Dutchman’s clutches and tried to subdue Wingate. But Wingate wasn’t about to be subdued. He was too mad at the con trick the girl had pulled, and he was conscious that somewhere in the shadows Manganaro lay half-conscious, beaten up on this broad’s say-so for no very good reason. He drove an elbow deep into Kroon’s rib cage once more and at the same time stamped down on the arch of his foot with the full weight of his body. The big man howled with pain, threw back his head and slackened the grip with his arms.
Wingate broke the grip with a quick thrust outward of both elbows. A second later, he was free. But it was too late. The guy in the Air Corps uniform slammed a fist into Wingate’s unprotected belly. There was no pulling of the punch, it slammed into Wingate’s flesh the way an armor-piercing shell from an 88 millimeter slammed into a tank. The blow was totally unexpected. It sapped all Wingate’s resistance, and he would have sagged to the floor if Kroon hadn’t grabbed him, dragged him to one side and dropped him in a chair.
“The name’s Bob Storm,” said the Air Corps lieutenant, standing in front of Wingate, feet apart and still carrying the Schmeisser in his left hand. He looked like the Aryan counterpart of Manganaro—medium height, blond hair and fair complexion, and a chest like the end of a barn. “What you’ve walked into here is the end of an Allied escape route. Any guy lucky enough to make it to here from a POW camp or a shot-down aircraft, Kroon arranges to ship them to England. We knew you were coming. We know why you’re here. London keeps Kroon informed. Twenty or thirty guys go through here every week. If the krauts uncovered the real operation instead of the operation they think goes on here, we’d lose a thousand guys a year. So when you hit the place and claim to be Mac Wingate, we’ve got to be sure.” He looked over to where the guy in the RAF squadron leader’s uniform was bending over the girl, bathing her face with a wet sponge and gradually coaxing her back to consciousness. “OK,” said Storm, with a little nod. “I guess we’re sure now.”
Kroon was standing to one side of Wingate, watching him. He stood with his weight on one foot, trying to ease the pain in the damaged one. There was deep anger in his eyes and he held his jaw tightly clenched. Eventually, his expression eased. He’d lied to Wingate about being Gestapo. He couldn’t really blame Wingate for acting the way he had. He grunted, “We can untie the other one. Captain Wingate seems convinced. There won’t be any more trouble.”
He turned and went into the shadows and threw a switch that brought up the general lighting, then he turned off the overhead floods.
The room contained half a dozen bunk beds standing opposite the fireplace, and in one corner stood an open wooden staircase leading to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Wingate figured that the lighting chamber for the lighthouse lay immediately above them. Three or four small rooms opened off the room they were in, apparently set into the thickness of the walls. From one of them came the occasional crackle of a Morse buzzer being picked up by a radio receiver. How the hell was it, he wondered, that such a hideout had never been unearthed by German security?
Manganaro came into Wingate’s field of vision from the right. There was caked blood on his forehead and someone had punched him square on the nose. “Jesus!” he muttered, feeling his face and snorting a couple of times to clear his nose.
“You OK, Brad?” Wingate asked. It seemed a dumb question to ask, with so much blood around.
“I guess,” he said. He turned to Kroon and asked, “You think one of you guys could fix us something to eat? We haven’t seen food since we left London. And maybe a couple of gallons of coffee or a crate of beer?”
Kroon nodded. The fat little Frenchman cut in quickly, “Allow me. I was the one who hit him.” He smiled, the soft lights glinting on the thick lenses of his glasses. He gave a little inclination of the head and went over to one of the side rooms. When he switched on the light inside, Wingate could see it was equipped as a kitchen, with a small sink on the far wall and a mini-cooker standing on the table beside it.
“I was checking out the place,” Manganaro went on. “I walked right in on them. François there—” he indicated the Frenchman already breaking eggs into a bowl in the kitchen—“was transmitting. He used the name ‘Wingate.’ Plain language, no code—just like that! I knew they were on to us, but it was too late to get out. Sure, I tried, but the little guy got between me and the stairs and slammed the butt-end of a Schmeisser into my head and Bob Storm here put a cannonball into my nose. After they had me gagged, I heard them talking. I realized they were our guys. I might have tried to warn you, but I knew they wanted proof and you were the only proof that existed. It was up to you to convince them, not me. Sorry I had to drop you in it. No hard feelings?”
Wingate looked at him. Apart from the bloody nose, there was a deep welt from one side of Manganaro’s forehead to the other. “No hard feelings,” said Wingate. He got to his feet and took a long, deep breath. His gut ached and his whole rib cage was sore, but nothing was broken. He’d been through far rougher times, and he guessed he would be going through them again in the future.
He stepped over to Kroon, deliberately turning his back on the girl who had now regained consciousness and was looking up at him with a half-glazed stare. She was going to have to come up with some pretty good explanation before he got around to trusting her again.
“This camp the krauts have,” said Wingate. “How long’s it been here?”
“Two or three months,” said Kroon.
“What goes on there?”
Kroon shrugged. “I’ve never been in,” he said. He walked over to the fire, tossed a couple of three-foot logs on it and pushed them into place with his foot. The fire flared and a shower of sparks disappeared up the chimney. “I stay as far away from the Germans as I can,” he went on, his voice low-pitched and booming. “I cannot afford to be noticed. But I hear from a contact that there is a lot of building. A new labor camp, they tell me. They are bringing in workers from southern France.”
“What for?” asked Wingate. He didn’t trust Kroon, whatever the others thought. Despite his talk about keeping clear of the Germans, his whole operation was too high-profile to go unnoticed. His story didn’t hang together. And if the girl wasn’t in with the krauts, what the hell was she doing tracking Wingate all the way from Oxford?
“I’ve no idea,” said Kroon.
The smell of boiling coffee and frying bacon was filling the place now. The smell distracted Wingate. He couldn’t remember a time he had been so ravenous, except for the time as a kid when he had gotten lost in the northern woods of Wisconsin and had to go almost thirty-six hours without food. Manganaro had gone over to the kitchen and was standing in the open doorway letting the smell drive him crazy.
“I never ask,” Kroon added. “But they bring a lot of supplies in through the harbor.”
“Does London know?” Wingate demanded.
“Of course,” said Kroon, calmly.
“What kind of stuff?” Wingate wanted to know. There was this new rocket weapon the krauts were developing around Peenemunde. Had he stumbled on a future launching site?
“Ask the girl,” said Kroon.
Wingate turned to look at her. She was on her feet again now, supporting herself on the arm of the thin, pale-eyed guy in the Royal Air Force uniform. She looked fully conscious now. The glaze had gone from her dark eyes and there was an expression of wry humor playing around her lips. She put a hand up to her chin and fondled it carefully.
“The girl?” asked Wingate, turning back to Kroon.
“She’s my contact inside the place. She’s the one who is going to get you in. Whatever you think of her now, you are going to have to trust her. She is your only hope of getting to Colonel Erikson.”
The Frenchman brought in a vast pewter platter of bacon, scrambled eggs and cottage fries and set them down on the table.
“Jesus!” Manganaro breathed. “I thought I’d never eat again. I feel like my belly button’s knocking on my spine.”
He sat down on the scrubbed pine bench, cut himself a great section of scrambled eggs from the platter and piled it on his plate with half a dozen slices of bacon and a stack of fries. Eating was an act of worship to him after having been so long without food, and he ate with steady, rhythmic movements of his fork in absolute silence.
Wingate sat beside him. The food was very, very good. It took him right back to those breakfasts he used to sit down to back in Sawyer County, where the finest products the land could produce appeared at every meal. The similarity increased his curiosity about the whole set-up that Kroon had established here. “How come you can lay on food like this with rationing as tight as it is?” he asked.
Kroon let his face collapse into a smile. “I have—a little understanding with the Führer,” he said.
“I guessed as much,” said Wingate.
The girl came around the table and sat next to Wingate. She put a hand on his arm. “Listen,” she said. “We had information from London that you were coming. That you had to get into the camp to rescue Colonel Erikson—”
“London said that?” he cut in, quickly. “‘To rescue Colonel Erikson?’” That sure as hell wasn’t what London had told him.
“Of course,” she said. Her English was almost perfect. Almost, but not quite. It didn’t surprise him that in the chaotic period he had spent with her in London, and on the train earlier, he had missed the hint of some minor mispronunciations, but now that he listened carefully he could hear them.
“I was instructed to go to Oxford for a briefing, then escort you to London. When you went out to Manston, there was a high-speed launch waiting at Lowestoft to bring me back here.”
Wingate nodded. Instead of clarifying things, she was only making them more muddy. Why would anyone be called to Oxford for a briefing in connection with him? All his briefings came from London. But that was only one of the things that bothered him. The main one still hadn’t even been hinted at. It was time they brought it into the open.
“Why did that doc in the ambulance lie to me?” he asked, “Do you know how that cut me up? I was getting pretty fond of you. I know relationships tend to get ahead of themselves in wartime, but I really thought we had something going.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I was being followed. All the way from Oxford. The man sitting opposite—tall, slim, blond ...”
“I don’t remember him,” said Wingate. He could remember someone had knocked her knees a couple of times in the crowded compartment, but that was all.
“You weren’t supposed to. He had a newspaper in front of his face all the time. But he must have picked up a cab right behind ours from Paddington, because he came in the pub a couple of minutes after we did. Later, he was down in the cellar with us. I had to get rid of him. I couldn’t have him following me to the coast. When you picked me up and put me in the ambulance, I told the doctor a man had been bothering me and would certainly come looking for me. I heard the doctor lie to you, but there was nothing I could do about it. It was better that you thought I was dead than have the other man think I was still alive.” She looked at him for a moment with her large, liquid eyes, then said, “Mac, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you to get upset.”
She really was beautiful. His first impression of her age had been wrong. He put it now at around twenty-four, rather than his original guess of nineteen. Under any other circumstances he would have made a very serious play for her, but he was acutely conscious of the passage of time and the need to get to Erikson before the Germans flew him out to Berlin.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” he said. “But, Jesus, I was mad at you!”
“No hard feelings,” she said, sliding her hand along his forearm and gripping his hand for a moment. Then her manner changed abruptly and she glanced at her watch. “It’s time to go,” she said. “We have to reach the camp gates the moment it’s light.”
They got up from the table and Kroon put out a big hand and pumped Mac’s. “Good luck,” he said. “By the time you get back with Colonel Erikson, I shall have news of the submarine that is expected to pick you up.”
The others came forward and shook Mac’s hand. The man in the RAF uniform said, “Forget what Kroon said about my name. One of his jokes. I’m from Copenhagen. The name is Jim Anders. Two of us got out of a POW camp in the Eifel a month ago. Unfortunately, I’m the only one who made it this far. Look forward to seeing you when you get back.”
The blond, thickset American thrust out a hand and seized Mac Wingate’s. “Bob Storm,” he said. “Took a lot of shit a couple of nights ago over Bremen. Had to bail out. Be expecting you, Mac, so take it easy, huh?”
“I’ll take it easy,” said Wingate, prizing his hand free from Storm’s grip.
Manganaro had his arms around the fat little Frenchman. He was beating him on the back with the flat of a hand and crying, “François! Jesus, what a cook! You ever need a job after the war, look me up in Brooklyn!”
