Mac Wingate 8, page 1
The Home of Great War Fiction!
Traitors v. Resistance!
By October 1943, the Nazis had lost the Battle of Kursk on the Russian front and were gearing up for the long fight ahead. The Free French Resistance was crumbling, torn from within by warring factions.
Then the Allies get word of a bomb-proof underground factory just south of Vichy, at work for the Nazi cause. It's up to Mac Wingate, special agent and demolitions expert, to summon a ragtag army of resisters hiding in the surrounding volcanic hills, to sabotage the plant.
The game plan seems clear … until Mac is caught in a nest of traitors, bait for a Nazi trap!
MISSION CODE: VOLCANO
MAC WINGATE 8
By Bryan Swift
First Published by Jove Books in 1982
Copyright © 1982 by Ejan Production Company
This electronic edition published September 2020
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
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Published by Arrangement with Jet Literary Agency
Signal from de Gaulle to Eisenhower, Stalin, and Churchill, October 1943.
“The liberation of Corsica has boosted the morale of the resistance forces enormously. Now is the time to unify all the fighters before internal conflicts and personal differences negate all the accomplishments we have gained. If steps are not taken to unite all the French under the National Council now, the Germans will not need the Gestapo or the Abwehr. The resistance will destroy itself.”
Chapter One
Mac Wingate blew Adolph Hitler’s head off.
The Johnson M1941 machine gun’s .30 inch rounds plowed through Hitler’s neck like a finger poked through a wall of pudding. Pieces of the Nazi’s neck flew backward, fluttering to the weed-covered ground. The three group shots Wingate had fired were enough to make Hitler’s head drift back from his body at an unnatural angle. A moment later, the skull’s weight proved to be too much and the head ripped off the perforated neck.
Hitler’s face drifted down first, followed by the rest of his body—falling over like a stiff board. It clattered when it came to rest twenty-five yards from where Wingate stood, the butt of the machine gun against his hip.
Hitler got up again fifty yards from the American captain as he pulled the heavy weapon up to his shoulder. Sighting along the twenty-two-inch barrel, Wingate sent a second trio of shells into the dictator. Hitler fell lazily over again, only to solemnly rise once more a hundred and fifty yards away.
Without ceremony, Mac dropped to his stomach, keeping the almost fifteen-pound weapon steady with only his two hands. With hardly a conscious thought, he drove another three rounds into the center of the third Hitler’s head. He didn’t wait for this one to fall. As soon as the third round left the Johnson barrel, Mac rolled to the right—settling onto his stomach as the machine gun barrel came to rest on a conveniently placed sandbag. Two hundred and fifty yards away, Adolph Hitler got up for the last time.
Mac wasn’t interested enough in finesse and subtlety this time to attempt directing the bullets into the Nazi’s head. At this range and with this caliber, he blasted the rounds into the fourth Hitler’s chest—the widest part of the distant target. He didn’t even see the lead hit, but he knew the bullets had gone where he wanted them to. After almost a year crawling over Europe and killing all manner of Nazis, Mac had come to an understanding with his weapons. As long as he fired them first and the way they were supposed to be fired, he stood a much better chance of not dying. That sort of motivation did wonders for his shooting technique.
Wingate had blown away the maniac in question four times, but he derived little satisfaction from it. His limbs felt like bean bags, his throat felt like a blackboard with chalk scratched over it and his head felt like the inside of a washing machine. And it wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. The only satisfaction Mac could derive from the exercise was that he had successively hit the four man-sized targets on the training range in under a minute. And lucky for him that he had, too, or else he’d have to repeat the entire session over again.
The captain took a certain pride in being in shape. He knew that his body and mind was the only thing between him and a reservation six feet under, but sometimes he felt the lengths he went to keep fit were getting a little ridiculous.
First he had run one kilometer in full military regalia.
His helmet was on, his Sten gun was strapped over his shoulder, his Browning 9 mm automatic was secured in the holster on his hip, and he hauled somewhere around fifty pounds of explosives, detonators, tape, wire, fuse, pliers, and other assorted demolition tools in the pack on his back.
That was the easy part. After all, he wasn’t being timed, then. He could go as fast or as slow as he wanted—as long as his stride didn’t slow to a walk. In that case, he would have been cut off at the ankles. It was only when he reached the end of the kilometer—and the entrance to the obstacle course—that the fun really started.
First he had to struggle up an eight foot wall, his weapons clattering on his back like a barroom bully trying to pick a fight. Wingate didn’t know which was worse: lifting his hundred and seventy five pounds plus the fifty pounds of armament up, or letting all that weight try to drag him down. As soon as his heels had ground into the dirt on the other side of the wall, he had to run forward and throw himself over a high row of triple-stranded barbed wire.
The idea here was to soar over the ripping fence in a dive, so he could hit the dirt on the other side. It was not a great idea during a battle to hop over barbed wire and then stand there, waiting for applause. In this case, Wingate jumped, flying as high as the heavy equipment he was carrying would let him, dove down, landed on his shoulder, pulled himself to his side, barrel-rolled, and then pushed himself up. His feet had hardly settled when he was churning them for running again.
His next obstruction was a losing proposition no matter how he handled it. Stretching out fifteen feet in front of him was a pool of mud three feet deep. It was there to strengthen the soldier’s leg muscles, since he had to slip in and wade through. The overall effect was like trying to run the five-yard dash through gelatin. Only gelatin was a lot cleaner, less gritty, and didn’t stick as much. When Wingate pulled himself out of the brown pit, he looked and felt like he had a rancid chocolate coating from his waist to his boots.
The excess gunk tried to weigh him down as he sped forward, but he managed to get much of the stuff off while hopping through a series of ten roped-together tires. It was the same exercise pro footballers had made famous, only the pros had merely to contend with their burly uniforms. Mac had a mud coating and enough explosives on his back to flatten the Goodyear blimp.
Wingate didn’t unduly concern himself with that. All his concentration was on clearing the way between his mind and his muscles. Everything had to work perfectly if he wasn’t going to slip, trip, or balk. And if he did, the least that could happen was he’d have to start over again. The most that could happen was that they’d be picking up pieces of him for the next few weeks.
Mac knew his interior process was working because he attained that buzz he always got when his body was in harmony with his brain. His limbs seemed to be moving faster and smoother than ever before, yet he still saw himself in almost slow motion. He saw his mud-flecked boots rising from the center of one tire and landing in the center of the next. He felt his legs rising and falling as if they were piston-driven. He could feel the slack, sack like weight of exhaustion in his limbs, but at the same time, the seemingly solid rubber body moved as if weightless. It was a dichotomy Wingate had gotten used to. He was still amazed that his body had done so much for so long with so little, but he had accepted that fact and used it to his advantage.
Having sunk in the mud and stepped in the middle of tires, it was now time for Mac to rise to the occasion: the occasion being twelve-foot-long parallel bars eight feet off the ground. His first problem was pulling himself up. His second problem was traversing the length straight-armed. Wingate’s hands went up between the two poles, their backs facing one another. His naked fingers gripped the bars as his knees straightened and his toes pointed. He sprang up in the air, his arms going from being pointed up to being pointed down, and locked his elbows in place. Rocking slightly from side to side, the captain swung and pulled himself along.
Mac occupied the time by concentrating on how to breathe. One of the inexperienced soldier’s biggest mistakes was not forgetting how to breathe, but neglecting to do it at all. One of the best ways to weaken oneself was to hold one’s breath, consciously or unconsciously. In the thick of activity, however, it wasn’t unusual. So Mac made it a practice to check himself once in a while. He breathed in deeply through his nose and exhaled through his open mouth.
The American dropped off the parallel bars only to face another high-minded exercise. It was the infamous horizontal ladder, also mounted eight feet off the ground . Wingate leaped forward, catching the first rung with his left hand. He swung his entire weight on that limb, his right hand reaching for the third rung. That way, he set up a swinging rhythm. His right hand gripped the third rung, he swung, his left hand grabbed the fifth rung, he swung again, and so on. The stretching of his ligaments and the dull popping sounds his muscles made were strangely comforting to the soldier.
After he swung off the last rung, Wingate’s air time wasn’t finished. He took two fast steps and jumped up to grab a single bar, which held him just above a recessed pool of oil. Wingate traversed that delay hand over hand. At the very end, he pulled his legs forward and dropped over the lip of the oil hole. Not five feet away was a rope rising fifteen feet off the ground. At its summit it was attached to a metal arm, which in turn was attached to a vertical pole.
Wingate jumped as high as he could, grabbed the rope, trapped the strand further down between his feet and began to climb. As he went, he thought about gloves. He knew that if he had been wearing any, the coarse, thick rope would not be rubbing his flesh so badly. But he also knew that the reality of war cut down their usefulness considerably. They did him absolutely no good during those times when he had to set explosives. His superiors wouldn’t let him wear them in cold climates if action was imminent. And they had the bad habit of getting slippery if either their surface or his skin got wet. So, since they weren’t practical for emergencies, Wingate decided to get used to not having them at all.
By the time he finished that digression, he had reached the top the rope. Holding onto the rope with his right hand, he reached over to the connecting bar with his left. He swung over to the supporting pole and slid down, a slight smile on his face. His instructions had been to touch the pole at the top of the rope. Nothing was said about using the rope to get back down again. Wingate was pleased to use any shortcut he could work out.
All the climbing had stretched him out. Now the obstacle course was intent on scrunching him up again. Yawning before him was a fifteen-foot-long wire mesh tunnel—through which he had to duck-run. Having a circumference of about three feet, Mac couldn’t stand straight, but his time restriction didn’t leave room for crawling. Besides, the mesh would tear his hands worse than the rope did.
Mac somehow managed to get through that without catching the tip of his Sten gun, but then he had to do the roped-together tires one better. He had to run across seven sawed-off tree trunks, placed together like a connect-the-dots game. Mac connected the dots with himself, leaping from cut surface to cut surface, successful in his attempt not to slip or fall. The speed and balance he needed for that was nothing compared to the skill he called upon to go from the stumps to the full-scale log mounted horizontally six feet off the ground.
Running across its twenty-five-foot length may not have been as bad as tightrope walking, but it was close. First, he was going a lot faster than the high wire artists. Second, he was wearing thick, heavy boots instead of slippers his feet could grip through. Then there was the weight of his pack and guns—which went without saying.
Three yards across the log and suddenly Wingate was back in Sawyer County, Wisconsin. He had been born there thirty years before, the son of a German-Norwegian farmer and an American mother of Indian descent. Growing up strong, straight and independent, Mac had spent many hours in the woods near his home, testing himself against the elements. There was hardly a self-made dare he wouldn’t take. If someone else tried to make Mac do something, he’d probably turn and walk away silently, but Mac never failed to meet his own goals.
He remembered coming to a small valley in the woods, created by eroding dirt. A chopped tree had fallen across the five-yard expanse. A small river coursed at the bottom of the gulley. The river was just shallow enough and the valley just deep enough to cause him some serious damage if he fell. He could have walked several hundred feet to go around the obstruction, but something pulled Mac right over and onto the sagging, chipped tree. With almost no preparation except his own solid health, Wingate ran across the makeshift bridge to the other side.
He remembered the log bouncing beneath his trotting sneakers. He remembered hunks of bark breaking off wherever he put his foot. He remembered the sudden, quick rush of fear and freedom that swept across him as he flew into the breeze coming from the corroding hole. He remembered falling in a triumphant heap onto the branches at the other end. He ignored the cuts and scrapes the brittle, dying wood gave him as he pushed through and continued on his way.
Wingate remembered that moment now, as he ran across the thick, solid log on the obstacle course. Compared to the tree in Sawyer County, this one was child’s play. He jumped off the end and charged right at a window. Only this was just a window frame, seemingly floating in space, its structure lined in flame.
It was a metal square wrapped in flaming muslin strips. Fixing it in his sight, Wingate could picture a similar view in his mind’s eye. It was a Brazilian mining camp in 1940. One of the many tropical storms in the jungle had sent a bolt of lightning snaking across the ceiling of their supply hut. If the TNT housed within went off, not only would many of the miners get scattered in dozens of ripped, bloody pieces, but their work schedule would be delayed by weeks. Mac had practically dragged the motley crew of native workers outside the back wall, leaped into the fiery room and hurled the boxes of high explosives out as the flames licked around him.
After the last crate had been carried to safety, the whole shack was ablaze. Flames were licking at the window frame then, just as they were on the obstacle course. Wingate repeated his action. He ran forward, jumped, pulled himself into a hunched-over ball for the split second it took him to pass through the window, then straightened again, landing on his feet and running.
A year after the supply hut fire, word came to him that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Two years after that and he was dragging his butt through another flaming window. It was as if he had been preparing all his life for World War II. One part of his mind bemoaned the fact that he found fulfillment in a conflict where millions of people were getting killed, but another part figured what the hell, he hadn’t started this insanity—he was trying to finish it. And making damn sure that some idiot who found his thrill baking Jews got his just desserts.
Wingate ignored his guilty conscience completely. He realized he probably would’ve been just as content working in Canada, the Southwest, Mexico, and South America as an engineer—which is what he had been doing before the war started. But then that incredible megalomaniac had somehow gotten to power in Germany and the world needed Mac’s talents for explosives and survival much more than the mining conglomerates.
So Mac just kept on honing those talents, which he needed very badly just to get through this overcast morning in November of 1943.
The damn thing just never stopped, he thought, coming up to the next obstacle. Neither the course or the war. The next stop on the course was a “run-up” of logs, put together like a high rooftop, which he had to run up and then down again without breaking his legs. The next stop on his tour of the war he was still in the dark. But considering where he had been, Wingate doubted if his next destination would surprise him.
He had gone from the African desert to Casablanca, from there to points all over the continent. He had frozen his can in Norway, climbed mountains in Corsica, and battled through the burning city of Warsaw. It wouldn’t surprise him if he was dropped into the heart of Berlin with an umbrella and a water pistol with instructions to drown Goering. As he had said before, he had been doing so much with so little for so long, headquarters seemed to think he could now do anything with nothing.
Mac didn’t mind. The only thing he hated worse than being taken for granted was being wasted. The moment he found himself sitting on his hands was the moment he most wanted to ram his fist up somebody’s ass. Wingate was into serious, practical destruction. And that meant that he was always thinking, always moving, and always in the best condition he could possibly force his body into.
