1989 - The Wolf's Hour v4, page 12
As the man danced and writhed and the fire burned blue in the puddle of fuel around the gas portal, Michael turned his attention to the three crewmen on the tank just below the barn roof. One of them had seen the automatic muzzle flash and was lifting his submachine gun. Michael shot him through the throat, and the submachine gun fired a pinwheel of tracers into the sky. Another man was about to shove himself headlong down the hatch. Michael fired, but the bullet clanged off metal; he shot again, and this time the man cried out and clutched his back, rolling off the tank’s side to the ground. Michael registered the fact that three bullets were left in the Colt’s magazine. The other crewman fled, running for cover. Michael jumped off the roof.
He landed on the tank near the main hatch with a shock that thrummed up his legs. He heard Harzer shouting for a machine gunner, and telling the soldiers to surround the barn. The hatch was still open, its rim smeared with German blood. Michael caught a movement to his right, almost behind him, and spun around as a soldier fired his rifle. The bullet passed between his knees and ricocheted off the hatch’s lid. Michael had no time to aim; he didn’t have to, because in the next instant a blast of bullets hit the German in the chest and lifted him off his feet before slamming him to the ground.
“Get in!” Gaby shouted, holding the smoking Schmeisser she’d picked up from the first man Michael had shot. “Hurry!” She reached up, grasped an iron handle, and pulled herself onto the tank. Michael stood stunned for a heartbeat. “Don’t you understand French?” Gaby demanded, her eyes full of fire and fury. A rifle spoke; two bullets whanged off the tank’s armor, and Michael needed no further persuasion. He jumped into the hatch, down into a cramped compartment where a small red bulb burned. Gaby followed him, reached up, and slammed the hatch shut, then dogged it tight.
“Down there!” Gaby shoved him deeper into the tank’s innards, and he slid onto an uncomfortable leather seat. In front of him was a panel of instrument gauges, what looked like a hand brake and a number of shift levers. On the floor were various pedals and before his face was a narrow view slit; to right and left were also view slits, and through the left one he saw the crewman burning on the ground beside the second tank, another man popping up from the tank’s hatch to shout, “Turret swivel right sixty-six degrees!”
The tank’s turret and stubby cannon began to crank around. Michael pressed his automatic’s muzzle against the view slit and squeezed the trigger, blasting a chunk out of the man’s shoulder. The German slid back into the tank, but the turret continued to swivel.
“Start us up!” Gaby shouted, an edge of terror in her voice. “Ram him!”
Bullets were knocking against the tank’s armored sides like the impatient fists of a mob. Michael had seen this type of German tank in North Africa, and he knew how it was steered—by the levers, which regulated the gears and speed of the treads—but he’d never driven a tank before. He searched in vain for a way to start it; then Gaby’s hand slid down in front of his face, turned a key in an ignition switch, and there was a grinding, clattering roar followed by the hollow boom of a backfire. The tank was shuddering, its engine running. Michael pressed his foot down on what he hoped was the clutch and battled with the gearshift. A Jaguar touring sedan this was not; the gears ground together, finally meshed with the speed of fresh tar. The tank jerked forward, slamming Michael’s skull back against the padded headrest. Up above him, in the gun loader’s compartment, Gaby saw figures leaping up onto the tank through her own view slit; she thrust the Schmeisser’s barrel through it and raked bullets across two pairs of German legs.
Michael pressed the accelerator to the floor and wrenched on one of the levers. The tread on the right stopped and the left one kept going, turning the tank to the right; that wasn’t the direction Michael wanted to go, so he tried another of the levers and this time the left tread stopped and the right tread lunged forward, turning the tank sharply to the left and toward the enemy. The tank vibrated, but it obeyed Allied as well as Axis hands. Michael saw the second tank’s turret about to reach the sixty-six-degree mark.
He jammed on the brake. The second tank’s cannon spat fire.
There was a banshee scream, and a wave of oven heat hit Michael’s face through the view slit. He had an instant of total confusion, not knowing whether he’d been blown to a million bits or not—and then there came the explosion, out in the farmland maybe three hundred yards beyond Bazancourt.
He had no time for shock, and certainly none for panic. He hit the accelerator again, and the tank continued its sharp left turn. The treads flung up yards of earth. And then the second tank filled the view slit before him, its turret cannon still flickering fire.
“That box behind you!” Gaby shouted. “Reach into it!” Machine-gun bullets whined off the turret, making Gaby duck instinctively.
Michael reached into the box and came up with a steel-jacketed projectile. Gaby pulled a lever, twisted another one, and there was the sound of metal sliding open. “Put it here!” she said, and helped him fit the shell into the cannon breech. She slammed the breech shut, prickles of sweat on her face. “Keep us going straight!” she told him, and she pulled another lever. Something whined, beginning to charge up.
The second tank began to back away, its turret turning again to get off another shot. Michael manipulated the levers and held a steady course, heading right at the monster. A man’s head emerged from the hatch, shouting something that Michael couldn’t hear above the engine’s roar. But he could guess what the order was: Turret turn to ninety-eight degrees. That would give them a killing shot.
The cannon swiveled, seeking its target.
Michael started to hit the brake again, but stopped himself. They might expect him to halt this time. He kept pressing the accelerator, and a stray bullet hit the view slit’s edge to his right and knocked sparks all around him.
“Hang on!” Gaby warned, and pulled a red trigger marked Feuern.
Michael thought that two things had happened concurrently: his eardrums had been blown out of his head and his bones had wrenched out of their sockets. He instantly knew, however, that his discomfort was mild compared to what befell the second tank’s crew.
In the rioting red glare of explosion and flames, Michael saw the entire turret sliced off the other tank like a scalpeled wart. Its cannon fired into the sky as the turret lifted up, spun twice around, and smashed into the dust. Two human torches leaped out of the monster’s body and, screaming, ran in search of death.
Michael smelled cordite and seared flesh. Another explosion erupted from the other tank, sending pieces of metal banging down. Michael hit the brake and steered violently to the right to sweep past the gutted carcass.
German soldiers shouted and fled from the tank’s path. Michael saw two figures through the view slit: “Fire! Fire!” Harzer was shouting, Luger in hand, but all order was gone. A few paces behind him, Boots watched impassively.
“There’s the sonofabitch!” Gaby said. She reached up, unlocked the hatch, and threw it open before Michael could stop her. She lifted her head and shoulders out, took aim with the Schmeisser, and blew most of Harzer’s head away. His body took three steps backward before it crumpled, and Boots threw himself flat on the ground.
The tank roared past. Michael grasped Gaby’s ankle and pulled her back in. She slammed the hatch shut, blue smoke curling from the Schmeisser’s muzzle. “Across the field!” Gaby told him, and he drove straight ahead as fast as the tank could go.
Michael smiled tightly. He was sure Captain Harzer would understand that it had only been Gaby’s job.
Its treads boiling up thick yellow dust, the tank rumbled on across the field, away from the village and the erratic flashes of gunfire. “They’ll track us with the scout cars,” Gaby said. “They’re probably already calling for help. We’d better get out while we can.”
Michael had no argument. He pulled another cannon shell out of the wooden box behind his seat and wedged it against the accelerator pedal. Gaby climbed up through the hatch, waited for Michael to join her, then tossed her Schmeisser over and jumped. He leaped off a couple of seconds later, and finally landed on the chalky soil of France.
For a moment he couldn’t find her in the dust. He saw movement to his left, and she gasped, startled, when he came up silently beside her and grasped her arm. She had the submachine gun, and she motioned ahead. “The woods are that way. Are you ready to run?”
“Always,” he answered. They started sprinting toward the line of trees about thirty yards away. Michael restrained his pace so he wouldn’t get ahead of her.
They made the woods with no difficulty. Standing amid the trees, Michael and Gaby watched two of the scout cars pass, following the tank at a respectful distance. The tank would lead them several miles, at least.
“Welcome to France,” Gaby said. “You believe in grand entrances, don’t you?”
“Any entrance I survive is grand.”
“Don’t congratulate yourself just yet. We’ve got a long way to go.” She put the Schmeisser’s strap around her shoulder and cinched it. “I hope you’ve got a good strong heart; I travel fast.”
“I’ll try to keep up,” he promised.
She turned away, all business and deadly purpose, and began to move quietly through the underbrush. Michael stayed about twelve feet behind, listening for the sounds of anyone or anything coming after them. They weren’t being followed; with Harzer dead, all initiative had broken down and no soldiers were combing the woods. He thought of the man with the polished, cleated boots. Killing an old man was easy; he wondered how Boots might do against a ferocious opponent.
Well, life was full of possibilities.
Michael followed the French girl, and the forest sheltered them.
2
After more than an hour of fast walking in a southwesterly direction, crossing a few fields and roads with Gaby’s Schmeisser cocked and ready and Michael’s ears pricked for sounds, she said, “We wait here.”
They were in a stand of trees at the edge of a clearing, and Michael could see a single stone farmhouse ahead. The house was a ruin, its roof collapsed; destroyed, perhaps, by an errant Allied bomb, a mortar shell, or German SS troopers hunting partisans. Even the earth around the house had been charred by fire, and a few blackened stubs of trees were all that remained of an orchard.
“You sure you have the right place?” Michael asked her; a pointless question, and her chilly gaze told him so.
“We’re ahead of schedule,” she explained, kneeling down with the Schmeisser across her lap. “We won’t be able to go in for…” She paused while she checked the luminous hands on her wristwatch. “Twelve minutes.”
Michael knelt beside her, impressed by her directional skills. How had she navigated? By the stars, of course, or else she simply knew the route by heart. But though they were apparently where they were supposed to be by a given time, there was nothing in the area but the single destroyed farmhouse. “You must’ve had some experience with tanks,” he said.
“Not really. I had a German lover who was the commander of a tank crew. I learned everything from him.”
Michael lifted his brows. “Everything?”
She glanced quickly at him, then away again; his eyes seemed to glow like the hands of her watch, and they held steady. “It was necessary that I… do my duty for the benefit of my country,” she said, a little shakily. “The man had information about a truck convoy.” She felt him watching her. “I did what I was supposed to do. That’s all.”
He nodded. The man, she’d said. No name, no emotion. This war was as clean as a slashed throat. “I’m sorry about what happened at the village. I—”
“Forget it,” she interrupted. “You’re not to blame.”
“I watched the old man die,” he went on. He’d seen death before, of course. Many times. But the cold precision of Boots’s kicks and stomps still made his insides writhe. “Who was the man who killed him? Harzer called him Boots.”
“Boots is—was—Harzer’s bodyguard. An SS-trained killer. Now that Harzer’s dead, they’ll probably assign Boots to some other officer, perhaps on the Eastern Front.” Gaby paused, staring at a fragile glint of moonlight on the Schmeisser’s barrel. “The old man—Gervaise—was my uncle. He was my last blood relative. My mother, father, and two brothers were killed by the Nazis in 1940.” It was stated as hard fact, without any hint of emotion. The emotion, Michael thought, had been burned out of her as surely as the life in that orchard.
“If I’d known that,” Michael said, “I would have—”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” she told him sharply. “You would have done just as you did, or your mission would be over and you’d be dead. My village would be burned to the ground anyway, and all the people there executed. My uncle knew the risks. He was the man who brought me into the underground.” Her gaze met his. “Your mission is the important thing. One life, ten lives, a village lost—it doesn’t matter. We have a greater purpose.” She looked away from his gleaming, penetrating eyes. If she could tell herself that over and over, it might make death more than senseless, she thought. But deep down in her charred soul, she doubted it.
“It’s time to go in,” Gaby said when she checked her watch again.
They crossed the clearing, Gaby ready with the Schmeisser and Michael sniffing the air. He smelled hay, burned grass, the apple-wine fragrance of Gaby’s hair, but no odor of sweating skin that might’ve meant soldiers hiding in ambush. As Michael followed Gaby into the ruined farmhouse, he caught just a hint of a strange oily smell; a metallic odor, he thought. Oil on metal? She led him through the tangle of broken timbers and stones to a heap of ashes. He found the oily metal smell again, around this ash pile. Gaby knelt down and inserted her hand into the ashes; Michael heard the hinges of a little compartment open. The ashes were not all entirely ashes, but a cleverly painted and arranged mass of camouflaged rubber. Gaby’s fingers found an oiled flywheel, which she turned to the right several revolutions. Then she drew her hand out, and Michael heard the noise of latches being unbolted under the farmhouse floor. Gaby stood up. A hatch smoothly lifted, the rubber ashes piled on top of it. Oil gleamed on metal hinges and gears, and there were wooden steps descending into the earth.
“Entrez,” a dark-haired, sallow young Frenchman said, and motioned Michael down the stairs into, literally, the underground.
Michael entered the hatch, with Gaby following right behind him. Another man, this one older, with a grizzled gray beard, was standing in the passageway ahead, holding a lantern. The first man closed the hatch and spun the flywheel shut from the inside, then threw three latches. The corridor was narrow and low-ceilinged, and Michael had to crouch as he followed the man with the lantern.
Then they came to another descending stairway, this one made of stone. The earthen walls were chunks of rough, ancient rock. At the bottom of the steps was a large chamber and a series of corridors snaking off in different directions. Some kind of medieval fortress, Michael assumed. Light bulbs hung from cables overhead and gave off a dim glow. From somewhere else came whirring noises, like sewing machines at work. On a large table in the chamber, laid out under the light bulbs, was a map; Michael approached it, and saw the streets of Paris. Voices swelled, people talking in another room. A typewriter or coding machine clacked. An attractive older woman came into the chamber with a file folder, which she deposited in one of several filing cabinets. She glanced quickly at Michael, nodded at Gaby, and went back to her business.
“Well, laddie,” someone said in English, a voice like the rasp of a handsaw, “you ain’t a Scotsman, but you’ll have to do.”
Michael had heard heavy footsteps a few seconds before the voice, so he wasn’t startled. He turned, and faced a red-bearded giant in a kilt.
“Pearly McCarren, at your service,” the man said, with a rolling Scots burr that made spittle and steam fly out of his mouth into the chilly underground air. “King of Scottish France. Which is from that wall to the one yonder,” he added, and brayed with laughter. “Hey, André!” he said to the man who’d carried the lantern. “How about breakin’ out a good glass o’ wine for me and me guest, eh?” The man left the room through one of the corridors. “That’s not really his name,” McCarren told Michael, holding his hand to his mouth as if he were confiding a secret, “but I canna pronounce most of their monickers, so I call ’em all André, eh?”
“I see,” Michael said, and had to smile.
“You had a little problem, didn’t ya?” McCarren turned his attention to Gaby. “Bastards been chewin’ up the radio for the last hour. They almost clip your tails?”
“Almost,” she answered in English. “Uncle Gervaise is dead.” She didn’t wait for an expression of sympathy. “So is Harzer, and quite a few other Nazis. Our associate is a good shot. We also took out a tank: a panzerkampfwagen two, bearing the organizational symbol of the Twelfth SS Panzer Division.”
“Good work.” He scribbled a note on a pad, tore off the page, and pressed a little bell beside his chair at the map table. “We’d best let our friends know the SS Panzer boys are prowlin’ around. Those Mark Twos are old machines; they must be scrapin’ the barrel’s bottom.” He handed the note to the woman who’d brought the file folder, and she hurried off again. “Sorry about your uncle,” McCarren said. “He did a helluva fine job. You get Boots?”
She shook her head. “Harzer was the important target.”
“Right you are. Still, it hurts my soul to know that big son of a bitch is alive and kickin’. As the sayin’ goes.” His pale blue eyes, set in a moon-shaped, jowly face the color of Dover chalk, fixed on Michael. “Come over here and take a look at the noose you’re gonna be stickin’ your neck into.”
Michael walked around the table and stood beside McCarren, who towered at least three inches over him and seemed as broad as a barn door. McCarren wore a brown sweater with patches on the elbows, and a dark blue and green kilt: the colors of the Black Watch regiment. His hair was a few shades darker than his unruly beard, which was the orange hue of flint sparks. “Our friend Adam lives here.” McCarren jabbed a thick finger down on the maze of boulevards, avenues, and winding side streets. “A gray stone buildin’ on the Rue Tobas. Hell, they’re all gray stone, ain’t they? Anyway, he lives in apartment number eight, on the corner. Adam’s a filin’ clerk, works on the staff of a minor German officer who processes supplies for the Nazis in France—food, clothes, writin’ paper, fuel, and bullets. You can learn a lot about troops from what the high command’s supplyin’ ’em with.” He tapped the street maze. “Adam walks to work every day, along this route.” Michael watched as the finger traced the Rue Tobas, turned onto the Rue St. Fargeau and then ended on the Avenue Gambetta. “The buildin’s here, surrounded by a high fence with barbed wire on top of it.”
