Mac Wingate 6, page 5
“Impressive, truly impressive,” the small, solid Canadian said dispassionately. “You always enjoy torturing people who have to use Reisings, don’t you?”
Wingate grinned, hefting the seven-pound weapon in one hand. Its solid, steady feel added just a bit to his mental security. The Sten and his Browning, along with all the other tricks of his war trade, had almost become extensions of his limbs during the past months of battle. He knew enough to get by without them, but just the same, he liked the extra edge a good killing machine gave him.
And the Sten was good. Designed by Major R. V. Shepherd and H. J. Turpin of the Chief Superintendent’s Office, it was demonstrated in January 1941, officially tested in February, and delivered from the factories in June. It wasn’t perfect—the magazine sticking out the side sometimes led to problems—but Mac hoped the two Aussies and Canucks were as dependable as it was.
As he thought of them, the other commandos straggled in from below. Candy didn’t look happy, but the Australians maintained their languid indifference. They put down their own packs on the bridge floor.
“It’s not very good, Captain,” Candy reported. “Besides the Reisings and Enfields, there’s ammo and enough food to make dinner for eight, but just barely.”
Wingate swallowed what questions he had. He could have interrogated them for days, but he already knew what the answers would be. He didn’t need to ask to know there were no high explosives, no C-2 plastic, no limpets, and no primacord aboard. What he really wanted to know now was why, and he doubted the quartet could tell them that. Only the pair of colonels could fill him in on that, and they were below decks practicing their Cheshire Cat impersonations.
Commandos, however, were notorious for learning things they weren’t supposed to know. Wingate himself had made a wartime career of it. They had a lot of hours on the ocean to kill, so if Mac couldn’t check the explosives, which were nonexistent, he could at least check out his operatives.
He started slowly, making an attempt at casual conversation. “Too bad there’s no target I could test the Sten with,” he mused, examining the weapon in his hand.
“You could strafe the hold a couple of times,” Neill suggested.
That elicited a few chuckles from the gathered professionals, who had found places to sit in the small, rectangular control cabin. Breaker and Mike pulled their packs over to the left-hand wall, leaning and looking through the side windows at the rolling Atlantic water. Candy leaned forward over the bridge’s one table to the right of his fellow Canadian.
“I wouldn’t worry about those guns, me lad,” Breaker announced buoyantly. “You Canucks can use all of them if you want. We have our own weapons. If one Reising fails, just pick up another one.”
“And if that one fails?” Candy suggested.
“Use the Enfields,” answered Sumner. “And if that doesn’t work, take the bloody bullets out and throw them! The accuracy will be better than the pistol, and the power’ll be better than the submachine gun.”
Everyone chortled as if they were discussing a Sunday lark into the country rather than a mission in occupied territory. It was a good sign of growing camaraderie, but Wingate was more interested in something Biggins had said.
“You have your own weapons?” he echoed, looking at Biggins.
Breaker looked over the Sten in Mac’s hand, then reached for his own pack. “Great minds work alike,” he mumbled, pulling out a few familiar-looking metal pieces. Mike Sumner did the same and soon both Independent Company members had complete submachine guns in their hands.
Sumner had the Austen 9 mm in his grip, its barrel, body, and trigger copied from the Sten. In fact, “Austen” stood for “Australian Sten.” Its bolt mechanism, however, was stolen from the Schmeisser MP-38 Nazi gun. Made in Melbourne, it was an effective if unexceptional weapon that looked a little like a handgun with delusions of grandeur. Its compact sleekness seemed well matched with the lithe Sumner.
The machine Biggins had put together matched his personality also: big, impressive, and just a touch strange. He proudly displayed the Owen Mark I. Like Mac’s weapon, it looked like a bunch of spare parts slapped together, only more so. Its barrel was thinner, its body was even less ostentatious, and it had a grooved grip in front of the trigger butt for steadier handling. And since the thing fired 700 rounds per minute, 150 more than the Sten and 200 more than the Austen, it needed that extra grip.
But the oddest thing about the device was its magazine. Rather than poking out the side, or hanging below, it rose out of the top of the weapon’s body. It certainly seemed to make sense—the extra help of gravity would make the bullets feed easily—but it certainly looked funny.
“Merde,” breathed Candy. “Did someone forget to tell us something or what?”
“First lesson in staying alive,” Breaker said solemnly. “Never trust anything a superior says.”
“Present company excluded,” Sumner added, nodding at Mac.
Mac nodded back with a smile, then turned to the slightly dejected Canadians, whose expressions said that they were caught with their equipment down. “I’m as much in the dark about this as you are,” he admitted. “They pulled me out of the Mediterranean for this little jaunt, then suddenly got a bad case of lockjaw. Anybody know what this is about?”
The commandos responded with almost a sense of relief. Each had been masking his own doubts about the mission through forced whimsy. Once they thought Mac wasn’t holding out on them, they opened up.
“Damned if I know,” Neill growled, still irritated by the lack of a reliable gun. “Since the Dieppe disaster, we’ve been crawling all over northern France and Sicily. When our commander asked if we’d like an easy time of it in Norway, we bit.”
“Easy?” Wingate asked. That word was contrary to the build-up Erikson had given him.
“Well, compared to Dieppe, yeah,” the helmsman said a bit less assuredly.
Dieppe was a disaster. It had been an Allied “test” to see if they could capture any Nazi-held harbor in the North Atlantic. Only this test was played out for real, using real Canadians. It was incredibly badly planned and the wonder was not that the raid failed, but that any of the commandos survived it. In August of 1942, five thousand North Americans went in. Half of them came back and much the worse for wear. Total German casualties? Six hundred. It didn’t help Wingate’s survival sense that the leftovers from that fiasco were sent to help him on this one.
“We’ve been scratching MacArthur’s back in New Guinea.” Breaker delineated the Australian background.
“He still wants to return, you know,” Sumner cracked at Candy.
“Our boss said he thought we could use a little rest and relaxation, the pommy bastard,” Breaker continued. “So here we are, freezing our bloody butts off. As to what we’re doing and where we’re going, I was hoping you’d tell me!”
“Isn’t that just like the brass,” Neill interjected, the growl back in his voice, his eyes straight ahead out to sea. “They never tell you enough. It’s like they’re afraid you’ll survive.”
“Yeah,” agreed Sumner. “They figure it’s better that you become a ghost and haunt them than become a hero and come back to bother them.”
Wingate couldn’t help but agree. Except in the extreme cases of safeguarding a “sleeper” agent inside enemy territory, he could never understand why his superiors consistently told him less than he needed to know to do a thorough job. It wasn’t like he was a foot soldier whose responsibility was to shoot anything that moved. Still, that wasn’t what he wanted to discuss. They had already established the fact that they all knew next to nothing. He needed some kind of clarification. Any kind.
“Forget hero,” he said. “Let’s just see if we can make this a round trip.”
“According to our superiors,” Sumner replied, “there should be no doubt of that.”
“He made it sound like a bleeding vacation!” Breaker added.
“Not a chance,” Candy said quietly, looking down at Neill’s chart. Not surprisingly, everyone looked in his direction. He didn’t need any further encouragement. He looked up slowly, a small smile on his face. “We’re the last team. The backup squad. The final chance. There were two groups ahead of us who couldn’t do the job.”
The other four men reacted as if someone had just found a time bomb in his shorts. They didn’t panic, but they didn’t run around laughing hysterically, either.
“You’d better elaborate,” Wingate recommended.
“Yeah, elaborate,” Neill snarled at his countryman.
“I don’t have all the details, Captain,” Baker informed Wingate, “but on the eve of our departure here, I shared a glass or two with our commander ...”
“Never let this man get you alone in a tavern,” Neill warned. “He may look thin, but he’s hollow.”
“And ...?” Wingate prompted.
“And I discovered that they’ve tried whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing twice before and it failed both times.”
“Target?” Wingate asked hopefully.
“Unknown,” Candy answered.
“Casualties?”
“Unknown.”
“Importance?”
“Unknown.”
“What else do you know?” Wingate finally inquired in desperation.
“Only that we’re cutting it close,” Baker said. “According to the CO, if we blink on this one, we might miss it.”
Wingate threw up his hands in exasperation. The only thing anybody had been able to tell him for sure was that time was of the essence. Add that to all his other information and it seemed that somebody was in a rush to get no place to do nothing.
“So what else do we know?” Wingate asked.
“About what?” Sumner asked.
“About anything,” Wingate responded. “Let’s grab at straws. It looks like they are all that’s left us.”
“Well, I know that if both the previous missions went to Norway by way of the ‘Shetland Bus,’” Neill spoke up, “their chances were slight to begin with.”
“What are you babbling about?” Biggins demanded. “We’re on the ‘Shetland Bus!’”
“Right,” Neill continued. “Out of the thirty-seven trips from Scotland to Norway and back since last year, only nineteen were successful. And most of those were on submarine chasers.”
“Heartening news,” Candy commented.
“Ah, yes,” Neill agreed, “but none of those sunken eighteen had me as the captain.” The compact Canadian took a moment to pull out a cigar from his jacket pocket and clamp it between his teeth before returning his attention to the sea. “More heartening news,” Candy decided.
“Are you just saying that to prepare us for the inevitable,” Wingate asked the white-haired helmsman, “or to give us heightened faith in your seamanship?”
“Like you said, Captain,” Neill replied, “as long as there aren’t any major storms or a sudden descent by the Luftwaffe, I’ll get us there. Once we arrive, though, I’m not promising anything.”
“I’ll take it from there,” Mac assured them. “Let’s just arrive, all right?”
“You’re the captain, Captain,” Neill shrugged.
“Right,” said Wingate, not really relishing the position. “If any of you can think of, or remember, anything that might give me a better idea of what we’re getting into, let me know. In the meantime, do your best to prepare for our arrival.”
“What would you suggest we do, Captain?” Breaker inquired with just a touch of sarcasm.
“Break out the stores,” Wingate retorted sharply. “Find out who’s doing the cooking around here. Prepare the weapons for easy access. Get your commando outfits on. Get some sleep. Do I have to do everything around here?”
“Yes, sir!” Breaker responded, snapping to attention and hurling a salute at his forehead. The big man let the side of his hand bounce off his brow, and wobbled as if he had been karate-chopped. Sumner and Baker laughed. Neill elaborately chewed his cigar from the left side of his mouth to the right.
Great, Wingate thought. A joker. The slightly forced humor was back. In the face of the unknown, Breaker was the kind of guy who’d whistle a merry tune. As long as he shot fast and straight, Wingate didn’t care.
“All right,” he said. “Get going.”
The three commandos filed out to do whatever they could find that needed doing. Neill remained behind the fishing trawler’s wheel, the cold, midmorning air creating a chill inside the bridge. Mac took up a position where he seemed to be poring over the charts. But he did not see the maps for wind and water currents, nor the various towns at the mouth of the Trondheim fjord. Instead he saw Erikson’s expression as he sent the American back to his hereditary homeland. It was the face of a man shutting out all emotion. Like the face of an executioner who took pride in his ability but didn’t like the job. A man who was doing what he felt he had to do.
“It’s really too bad about the Reisings,” Neill commented. His words broke Wingate out of his reverie.
“What?”
“The Reisings,” Neill repeated. “Not good guns. Not good at all.”
“No,” Mac agreed, looking out at the rocky sea. “Hardly better than my Browning automatic. I told Walters so. He reminded me that the Browning was a British-made weapon.”
“Like hell,” Neill scoffed. Mac looked over at the little man. “It may have been designed by John Moses Browning, but it was developed by the Belgians. The blooming British had their chance to make them in 1941, but declined. The gun you’ve got, Captain, was probably manufactured by John Inglis and Company, Toronto, Canada.”
“Well, hell,” Wingate breathed, looking at Neill with new respect. He was impressed. And he was pretty sure he and the cocky little Canadian would get along just fine.
“Damn colonels don’t know what they’re about,” Neill mumbled. “Neither of them. The ‘British’ Browning is made in Canada and the Yank air force trains in Canada. Who’s fooling who?”
“Hold that thought,” Wingate suggested. “If there’s any trouble, get in touch with me on the horn.” The captain pointed to the tube communications device attached to the side of the chart table. Neill nodded. “I’ll relieve you come dinner time,” Mac finished. With that, he moved to the rear door and went below.
He marched down the hallway and rapped on the colonels’ door smartly. He was answered with a clipped, booming “Come!”
He entered to see the two superior officers in more or less the same position he left them. Walters was sitting at the plank desk and Tyler was leaning over his shoulder, looking at some papers clutched in the Englishman’s hand. The only difference was that they were no longer wearing their coats. Both were in casual uniform.
Walters was quick to lay the papers face-down on the makeshift desk as Wingate entered. It was a casual, but fully considered motion. He wanted to make Mac suffer any way he could.
“Everything under control, I trust?” the British colonel inquired.
Wingate did not say what he wanted to. He did not say, “Sir, the men are a little worried. They’ve been on secret missions before, but this secret mission is a secret!” Instead, he had to play Walters’s game again. He couldn’t afford to antagonize the superior any more than he already had. So instead he said, “Yes, sir,” and stood at attention in front of the Englishman.
Walters took it well. He smiled, leaned back, folded his hands over his belly, and commanded, “At ease.”
Wingate planted his feet and put his hands behind his back. Walters mused at him for a few seconds.
“All right, Captain,” he finally said, his voice melodious. “I suppose it is time to clear the air just a bit. Now that we are under way, it becomes important for you to know what you’re dealing with.”
Wingate said, “Yes, sir,” and couldn’t help but lean forward slightly in anticipation.
Walters also leaned forward, carefully assuming the position used by any wise, self-respecting, old war-horse when he wanted to get his men’s loyalty. “We are going to Alten fjord in a minor, backup capacity. Our mission, at best, is a minor diversionary one that may not even be required. Until we know for sure, we are at the service of the Norwegian underground... the ...” Walters paused while he checked the paper in front of him. “The Militow Organization.”
The silence following Walters’s short speech was deep, thick, and deafening. Wingate just barely kept from saying, “Is that all?” Instead, he tried to draw Walters out with an elaboration.
“Do you mean the Militoer Organisajonen, sir?” he asked.
Walters checked the paper again. “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
“Begging the Colonel’s pardon, sir, but is it the Norwegian resistance force? They’re called MILORG for short.”
“Yes,” Walters pronounced, still looking at the page. “Yes, that’s right, Captain. It says right here: MILORG.”
Wingate relaxed from his tight “at ease” position for a moment to scratch his head. He waited, but no more words of explanation were forthcoming. Mac refused to let it bother him.
“Very good, sir,” he said and performed a sharp about-face in the cabin.
“Captain Wingate,” Walters said to his back. Wingate turned, silent. The English colonel leaned over and pulled up a small sack which he plopped down on his desk. He undid the knotted corners and laid out a small block of C-2 plastic explosives, some various casings, and a short length of white primacord.
“I have those materials we talked about,” Walters said. “The ones you needed for experimentation? I trust you will do what you can and report to me before our arrival in Norway.”
Slowly, Mac approached the desk. Scanning the paltry materials, he was tempted to do just what Walters asked. Experiment detonating C-2 inside a waterproof casing with primacord. Setting off explosives on a ship whose first hole meant sinking. On a ship whose primary requirement was to be covert. Even if he could proportion the C-2 so it wouldn’t be more powerful than a firecracker, setting off even firecrackers would be U-boat bait.
