Mac wingate 7, p.10
Mac Wingate 7, page 10
Somebody put an arm around his shoulders and lifted him up. Wingate looked at him. The face was familiar. He even remembered the name—it was Manganaro. They were on some mission together. He put his hand up to his eye and felt the caked blood clogging the lashes. Above it, there was a weal three inches long across his temple from which blood still oozed. As he felt the tenderness under his fingertips, he remembered the rocky defile, the Panzergrenadier, the butt of the submachine gun coming up to hit him.
“I’m OK,” he muttered.
He looked around. He was sitting on the floor of an open truck. Manganaro was sitting beside him. Propped against the side and facing him, sat Betty and the kid. De Lille was on his left, arms folded, head lowered, sunk into a deep gloom. There was someone standing over them, leaning against the back of the cab with a Schmeisser in his hands. It was the Panzergrenadier.
“Where are we?” asked Wingate. He could see the long stream of refugees stretching away behind them. He could see the heads of others appearing over the sides of the truck.
“We’re down on the road,” said Manganaro. “We walked into a gun transporter. Take a look behind.”
Wingate turned to the tailgate. Through one of the foot holes cut into the metalwork, he could see the muzzle of a 37-millimeter Pak 36 that they were towing. Boxes of explosives and ammunition were stacked up front on either side of the guard.
“We’re headed north again,” added Manganaro, wearily. “You get the feeling we’ve been this way before?”
Wingate called to the guard, “Sitte, darfich Wasser haben!” He pointed to his eye and took out a handkerchief.
The guard hesitated, then put out his hand. Wingate got to his knees and crawled toward him, the handkerchief held out in front of him. The guard took it, splashed water on it from his water bottle, and tossed it back to Wingate. Wingate thanked him and crawled to the back of the truck. If there was some way of unhitching the gun, it might force them to stop. With the chaos on the road outside, they just might have a chance of getting lost in it.
He settled against the tailgate and bathed his eye. He finally got it open again and put a field dressing over the head wound to stop any more blood from trickling down. As he did so, he checked the gun behind. It was coupled with a simple bolt dropped through the tongue and eye joint. All he had to do was lift it out. The gun would come loose and the milling crowd of refugees and horses and carts through which they were forcing a way would close in front of it. In ten seconds it would be invisible. He took a quick glance at the guard. The guy was nervous, suspicious. He kept tapping the trigger guard with his finger and he never took his eyes off Wingate. There was nothing for Wingate to do but put the whole scheme out of his head.
Something was happening ahead of them. The guy in the cab was sending out a continuous blast on the horn. A woman’s voice was screaming in Italian. A donkey let out a long series of brays. The truck slowed and finally came to a stop.
“Don’t move!” snapped the guard in German, covering them with a steady swing back and forth with the Schmeisser.
There was a tapping on the metal tailgate behind Wingate, and a voice said quietly, “Johnny—you American?”
“Yeah,” muttered Wingate, without taking his eyes off the guard.
“You like it in there?”
Who was this asshole? Of all the dumb questions! “What d’you want?” Wingate growled.
“You help me, I help you—OK?”
Wingate could see the guy’s face now, right beside his elbow. He was peering up through one of the foot holes, close enough for Wingate to smell the heavy garlic on his breath. He was dark-skinned, black-eyed, and bearded. When he spoke, he showed a mouthful of stained and broken teeth.
“OK,” muttered Wingate. What was there to lose—except maybe his life.
“I shoot the guard, you jump out, huh?” the face grinned. “But you move quick, huh?”
Wingate would have argued. His head wasn’t functioning straight and he needed time to think. But before he could speak, the muzzle of a 9-millimeter Beretta appeared beside him and three shots rang out. A look of blank amazement dawned on the guard’s face. His finger groped for the trigger but failed to find it. He took two slow paces forward, tripped over Manganaro’s outstretched foot, and fell with a resounding thump directly in front of Wingate.
Wingate grabbed the gun and dragged himself upright. He wasn’t certain he could make it. He yelled, “Come on!” to the others. They had to get out of there before the guys in the cab realized what had happened. “Betty—take care of the kid!”
Wingate tumbled over the tailgate and hit the deck. Hands pulled him upright, ripped off his jacket, and flung a blanket over him. It stank of stale sweat and urine and he struggled to get out of it. Hands were holding him, lifting him, carrying him. He could feel the jostle of other bodies as he bumped into them. There were cries and protests, all in Italian. A male voice bellowed in German, “Get that vehicle out of there!”
A moment later, he was being stuffed into some confined space, held horizontally with his face uppermost. A weight came down on him, holding him securely against some hard, flat surface. For the second time in a couple of hours, he felt consciousness beginning to slip away from him. He fought the feeling, struggling to lift his arms and push away whatever it was that was crushing the breath out of him. For a moment he succeeded. The material on top of him was flexible, giving way to his struggles. He found the lower edge of the blanket and began to pull it clear of him. But the energy he was expending began to run out. His head swam and he slipped once more into unconsciousness.
Someone had hold of Wingate by the armpits. They were dragging him over some hard surface on his back. He struggled to sit upright, but some weight was still trapping his legs. Finally the blanket covering his head came off and he was looking up into the inverted face of the bearded guy who had shot the guard. The face was grinning at him. With all that hair covering it, the face might even have been the right way up—except the nose was above the eyes and the guy’s broken teeth were in his forehead. Wingate knew that couldn’t be right.
“Giuseppe Campo,” the hairy face was saying. “Giuseppe Campo. My troops—my army!” He laughed aloud and waved an arm around him.
Wingate sat up. He blinked and shook his head, trying to clear it. It was still foggy inside his mind. Where the hell was he? He looked around. For some reason it amused Giuseppe and he broke into a long, braying fit of laughter. He wasn’t alone. There was laughter all around him, laughter and the clapping of hands and a good deal of noisy backslapping.
There were a dozen people around Giuseppe, two or three women but mostly men. Their ages ranged from the mid-teens to the late fifties. They wore blankets and filthy sheepskin jackets and an array of pants and footwear salvaged from every army in Italy. They were armed with Lee Enfields, Stens, and American M1s, and they carried grenades hooked to their belts.
Wingate was sitting on the back of a cart. They had buried him under a load of straw and the bottom half of his legs were still covered by it. He pulled himself clear of it, tossed the blanket aside, and dropped to the ground. There was no sign of the road or the streams of fleeing Germans and refugees. They had come inland while he had been unconscious and they lay in a narrow valley under the cover of olive trees.
“Partisans,” cried Giuseppe, pushing his face into Wingate’s. “You understand me? Partisans!” He waved at the others. Everyone but Wingate laughed. “Free men!” he added.
Wingate nodded. “I understand,” he said. He couldn’t decide which was worse, the stink of the blanket that still clung to him or the smell of garlic on Giuseppe’s breath.
“So,” said Giuseppe. “We help you. You are free. Now—you help us.”
“Where are the others?” asked Wingate. “The people I was with on the truck.”
The Italian shrugged.
“You mean you left them?” cried Wingate. “They were part of the deal!”
“No deal,” said Giuseppe, shaking his head.
“There was a woman there—there was a kid!”
“We got women. We got kids,” said Giuseppe, nodding to the group behind him. “You—it is you we want.”
He was an inch shorter than Wingate but broad as a bull. He stood with his feet apart and the Beretta in his hands. There was no humor, no compromise in his eyes. He wouldn’t hesitate to use the gun if Wingate didn’t do exactly what he wanted, the way he’d used it on the guard.
Wingate still carried the Schmeisser he’d taken in the truck. There were thirty-two slugs in the magazine, assuming it was fully loaded. Should he take the risk? Could he drop twelve or thirteen armed guys before any of them could pull a trigger? He paused. What the hell was he doing? Was he crazy? These guys were partisans. They were on the same side as he was! Even if he’d been mad enough to open fire and wipe out the lot of them, what had gotten into him to consider treating allies that way? He shook his head to clear it. It felt like a mangled turnip sitting between his shoulders. He wondered if it was ever going to be any good to him again.
“OK,” he said, at last. “What do you want?”
Giuseppe’s expression changed dramatically. He smiled and lowered the Beretta. “Come, my friend,” he cried. “Let me show you.”
The tension broke. The little group parted as Giuseppe led the way through them and up the slope to his left. They were on the same ridge that Wingate had been on before, but a little further north. From the crest, the coast road came into view again, still hectic with refugees and military traffic. Wingate guessed that one of the reasons the krauts were letting civilians on it at all was to keep the P-47s and Spitfires away. Allied Air Command wouldn’t lay on strafes with so much risk to innocent people.
“See, see!” Giuseppe cried, handing his binoculars to Wingate. “The truck. The gun. Your woman!”
Wingate dropped to his knees and crawled forward to take the binoculars. The truck came into focus, three or four hundred yards away. They had put another guard in the back and he was standing with a submachine gun at the ready.
Apart from that, nothing had changed. De Lille still sat with his head lowered and Manganaro was next to the kid. Betty was up against one of the ammunition boxes, arms folded, a defiant expression on her face. Some woman, thought Wingate. Not his woman, exactly, the way Giuseppe seemed to think, but at some other time and in some other circumstances—well, now ...
“So?” said Wingate.
“We want the gun, the ammunition, the—explosives. You understand? You speak German, I hear you in the truck. Me—” he made a sour face, collected a mouthful of saliva, and spat dramatically, “I wouldn’t dirty my mouth with the filthy language.”
He led the way back to the olive grove. The rest of the group had deployed themselves on either side of a narrow cut in the valley. Wingate could see them leaning on rifles and machine guns, half hidden by scrub and rocks. High up on the far side of the cut, a lookout scanned the road beyond the ridge.
Wingate hesitated. All his earlier doubts returned. On the other side of the cut, where the track through the valley turned left to join the main coast road, there was a Type 82 Volkswagen car in German camouflage with a black cross stenciled on the door. Behind the wheel sat a figure in the uniform of a Scharführer in the 1st SS Panzer Division. Wingate turned to the dark, thickset man beside him. Giuseppe grinned, then threw back his head suddenly and roared aloud with laughter.
“We fool you—huh?” he cried. “Good! Good! We fool you, we fool the Tedeschi—the Germans!” He turned from Wingate and bellowed, “Maria!”
A woman in her late thirties, fat and dressed from head to foot in black, waddled out of the olive grove. Her arms were full of clothes and she had a pair of knee-high boots slung over her right shoulder. She came over to Giuseppe and stood silently in front of him, waiting for instructions.
Giuseppe took one of the garments from her, lifted it up in front of him, and looked at it with distaste. It was the uniform jacket of a Standartenführer in the Waffen SS. Wingate could see the rank insignia and the SS runes on the collar.
Giuseppe tossed the jacket to Wingate and nodded to the other garments in the woman’s arms. “Put it on,” he said. “All of it.”
Wingate was about to protest, but where was the point in wasting his breath? Time was running out for whatever the Italian had in mind and there was a sharp irritability in his voice. The armed figures lining the narrow cut ahead of him were watching the scene, ready to back up their leader at the least sign of noncooperation from Wingate.
Wingate gave his own clothes to the woman and pulled on the German uniform. It was a size bigger than he usually wore but that wasn’t a bad fit. At least it gave him room to move.
Giuseppe watched with growing satisfaction. “Hm, hm,” he muttered, walking critically around Wingate. “Hm, hm.” He slapped Wingate smartly on the back when Wingate had finally finished, and cried, “Good, good! You even smell like one of those turds. You stinking German pig!” He bellowed with laughter. His supporters joined in and Wingate felt the tension in the group suddenly ease.
“You go in the car,” Giuseppe instructed. “You drive to the road. You stop that truck with your woman in it. Make it come up here.”
“That’s it?” asked Wingate. If he’d known earlier that all Giuseppe wanted was for him to walk into the middle of a retreating German army masquerading as an SS colonel, he might have argued a little about putting on that uniform. If he was caught they’d put him before a firing squad before the dust from that road had settled on his boots. But it was too late for protests now.
The driver spoke nothing but Italian. He drove through the cut onto the plain beyond, his eyes fixed on the narrow dirt track ahead of him and a look of dogged determination on his face. Wingate settled back against the leather squab behind him, emptying his mind of everything but the job that lay ahead, planning step by step what had to be done. The Schmeisser was still in his hands as he rehearsed the German phrases he was going to use to pull the truck off the main road and get the driver to follow him into the ambush that Giuseppe Campo was laying.
The Volkswagen bounced over the corrugated track that dropped down toward the coast road. The silent Italian next to Wingate clung to the wheel. Wingate hit the roof of the cab a couple of times. There was nothing to hang on to and all he could do was jam his feet against the metal bulkhead in front of him and force himself back into the seat. They couldn’t slow down. At the present speed they would reach the road only a few seconds ahead of the truck.
Finally, they had to slow. Groups of refugees were being forced off the road by the retreating Germans and were spilling into the fields on either side. Wingate’s driver blasted the horn. Tired, uncomprehending faces turned to look at the Volkswagen, ignored it, and turned away again. The truck was fifty yards to their left, following immediately behind an armored scout car that was clearing a path through the tide of refugees with a stream of bellowed instructions over a heavy-duty amplifier.
It was obvious to Wingate that they were going to miss the truck. The only way of reaching the road ahead of it was to drive right through the pathetic stream of humanity that blocked the track ahead. No civilized guy could do that to innocent people, no matter what uniform he wore.
“Hold it, hold it!” Wingate yelled to the driver, waving his hand vigorously to get his point across.
He opened the door beside him and as the Volkswagen slowed to a crawl he leapt out, ran ahead of it, and began fighting his way through the refugees toward the road. Occasionally the human stream stopped for him, more frequently he had to elbow it aside, screaming at the top of his voice, waving the submachine gun over his head, hoping that the uniform he was wearing would give him enough authority to carry him through.
He reached the road alongside the armored scout car and came to a stop. The lieutenant standing in the central turret looked at him enquiringly. He wasn’t suspicious, he was waiting for some new orders from this superior officer standing beside his vehicle. Wingate couldn’t risk too close a scrutiny. He waved the scout car on toward the north. The lieutenant barked an order to the driver below him and the car clattered on again.
As the scout car moved past, Wingate stepped into the path of the oncoming truck and put out his arm, indicating that the truck should turn off the road and head west. What Wingate had in mind was to follow the truck in the Volkswagen until it was too deeply committed to the ambush to pull back from it. But instead of obeying, the driver merely stopped, wound down his window, and called out in German, “What now?”
Wingate stormed up to the truck and leaped onto the running board. It was going to take all the acting ability he could drum up. Failure in this performance meant the firing squad. “Are you blind, you scum?” he screamed, pushing his head through the open window and into the startled driver’s face. “Don’t you see who I am? I’m giving you an order! Move this thing off the road. The Americans have made an armored breakthrough. We need the gun up there in the hills!”
The driver had paled before Wingate’s attack. He became confused, finding difficulty in engaging the gears.
“I said, move!” Wingate shouted. “Move!”
As he spoke, a voice from the truck howled, “Traitor! Quisling!”
Wingate turned. It was de Lille. He was crimson with fury. His mustache bristled and he began to get up from his sitting position onto his knees.
“Shut up!” yelled Wingate, in German. Then, when de Lille continued to rant, Wingate snapped, “Guard! Deal with the prisoner!”
The guard standing behind the truck’s cab took two quick steps toward de Lille and kicked him full in the guts. The breath whistled out of de Lille’s body and the blood drained from his face. He swayed on his knees for a moment, then fell forward on his face and disappeared from Wingate’s view behind the wooden planking of the truck body.
