Mac wingate 7, p.8
Mac Wingate 7, page 8
Hazlitt broke into his thoughts over the intercom. He said, in his usual calm, unemotional way, “We have a little problem. We picked up a bit of that shit back there—a couple of machine gun bullets, maybe. It’s sheared one of the fuel leads to the inner port engine. I’m going to have to shut it down and feather, otherwise she’ll catch fire. But we can’t maintain altitude. With luck I can keep her up until we cross the line. If not, just remember all they can ask you is your name, rank, and number ...”
The situation outside became more confused, the lower they got. Vehicles and men were going in both directions now, and not only along the roads but across the open countryside. Craters began to appear in the distance, throwing up towering columns of earth and rock that hung level with the aircraft for a moment before tumbling back to the ground. They were right in the middle of the action now. Somewhere to starboard lay Naples and the coast. To port, the great snow-clad spine of the southern Apennines ran along the horizon like the long back of a hog.
Manganaro called, “Hey—our guys below! You see the armor over to starboard? That bunch of trucks—they’re Dodge three-tonners! Hey—get an eyeful of those Sherman tanks!”
“OK,” came Hazlitt’s voice. “We’re going down. It could be rough without an undercarriage, so face aft and get your backs against a bulkhead. Don’t move till I tell you. And for Christ’s sake, don’t smoke!”
Wingate settled down next to Betty Andrews. The boy was in her arms now and she was protecting his body with hers. De Lille had dropped behind the aft bulkhead. Wingate could see his elbow projecting into the gangway. As ground features became clearer and clearer through the window to port, turbulence increased alarmingly. The aircraft slewed and bounced, dropping a wing, picking it up, then dropping it again. It seemed they were being punched from underneath. In other circumstances, Wingate would have thought they had run into a sudden barrage of flak. But they were south of the front ...
“Brace yourselves!” called Hazlitt.
The engine noise faded, then died. The nose eased for a moment, then gradually came up, up, up ...
They struck. There was a horrendous ripping sound under the floor as the belly of the Liberator made contact with the ground. A smell of charred paint and smoking rubber filled the fuselage and Wingate could feel his heart drumming in his head. Action was one thing; sitting helpless while some aluminum coffin careened across the Italian countryside at eighty miles an hour was quite another.
They had slowed but they hadn’t come to a stop when Hazlitt’s voice bellowed over the scream of metal, “Out! Get out!”
Wingate got to his feet, clung to a strut to steady himself, then reached for Betty and the kid. He pushed her forward in front of him toward Manganaro, who was standing just aft of the main flight deck. Manganaro had gotten a hatch open in the roof and he grabbed the boy and pushed him through it, then turned to help Major Andrews. Beyond him, Wingate could see flames leaping from the port inner engine and curling back over the wing. The flight deck was already full of black, acrid smoke.
He pushed past Manganaro to where Hazlitt still sat in the pilot’s seat. He was leaning forward, his head against the instrument panel. His safety harness had broken on impact and he had slammed forward into the glass-covered dials. He lifted Hazlitt’s head and undid the harness. Hazlitt’s face was a mess. He had broken his nose and the bone had pierced the skin. The flesh was peppered with a thousand glass fragments and blood poured from innumerable little surface wounds and trickled down his chin.
Manganaro had come forward and took hold of Hazlitt’s shoulders. Between them they struggled to lift him clear before the main gas tanks blew. It was impossible. He was jammed. Manganaro continued to heave, yelling, “Come on, Tiny! For Christ’s sake, help me! The son of a bitch is going to explode!” Wingate started to check Hazlitt to see what was holding him, feeling down his arms, his waist, his legs.
Hazlitt let out a single, terrifying scream. “Get out, you damn fools!” he screamed. “Leave me!”
Wingate grabbed Manganaro and shook his head.
“Mac!” Manganaro yelled. “I’ve flown with this guy ...! He’s like a brother! I’m not going to leave him!”
Wingate cried, “It’s no good, Brad! Take a look! We don’t have time!”
Manganaro hesitated. “Oh, my God!” he moaned, at last. The impact had forced both rudder pedals back out of their mountings. Hazlitt’s legs were smashed and the connecting rods were wrapped around his ankles like manacles. It would take an oxyacetylene torch or a surgical saw to free him.
Manganaro let himself be shoved off the flight deck and up through the hatch. He was sobbing out loud as he dropped to the ground. Wingate followed him. He was halfway out of the hatch when the flames burst into the flight deck. As he ran clear of the wreckage to where Betty and the boy were crouching, he could hear Hazlitt screaming behind him.
When he reached the others, Betty yelled at him, “Where’s the pilot?”
“It’s no use,” gasped Wingate, his lungs full of smoke. “There’s nothing you can do ...”
“You left him?” she screamed. “In that?”
She took off for the burning plane before he realized what she was doing. She was half a dozen strides ahead of him before he began to follow. “Betty, for God’s sake!” he yelled. “It’s going to blow! Get down!”
Ahead, flames were now running back from the wing and halfway down the fuselage. He hammered his legs into the ground, racing to catch her before she killed them both. “No!” he gasped.
The hatch in the top of the fuselage had now disappeared from view. A great billow of smoke shot skyward as the flames reached the rubber life rafts in the midships stowage. Betty hesitated. Wingate flung himself toward her in a horizontal flying tackle, took her around the knees, and carried her to the ground. They were less than thirty yards from the aircraft when the main gas tanks blew.
A blast of scorching air struck Wingate on the exposed backs of his hands. There was a stink of singed hair and clothing and the woman lying beneath him gasped with shock. The noise of the explosion cracked across his eardrums and left him momentarily deafened. He got to his knees, grabbed Betty by the arm and scrambled clear of the fallen debris. A few seconds’ delay in getting out of that hatch and they would have been incinerated. As it was, Hazlitt was finished. Death from the blast must have been instantaneous. When the heat had done with him he would be so much ash.
“I guess I was wrong, Mac,” gasped Betty, struggling to keep up with him. “I’m sorry.”
“You were wrong,” said Wingate.
They reached the others. De Lille had gotten clear of the rear turret and was already snapping out instructions. “We need to establish contact with our men. Follow me.”
Manganaro looked at Wingate. Wingate shrugged. De Lille was making for the cover of a small wood. It seemed as good a place to go as any. Once under cover they could check their position on one of the maps they were carrying, then figure out the best direction to head in.
They were halfway across the open field when de Lille let out a sudden cry and pointed ahead of him. A group of men were coming out of the woods toward them.
“Mon Dieu!” cried de Lille, waving his arms to them. “They are Frenchmen! Frenchmen!”
Wingate took Kenny by the hand and began to follow de Lille. Manganaro trotted alongside on their right and Betty was at Wingate’s left shoulder. How de Lille could tell the nationality of the men ahead of them, Wingate had no idea. They were a couple of hundred yards away and at that distance they might have been Eskimos. They were in Allied battle dress, that’s all he knew.
They closed with the group, jogging up the slight incline ahead toward the wood. Wingate ran over the situation in his mind. It was a quarter after seven in the morning. He should have been in Malta fifteen minutes ago. He had a meeting at ten with the commando group and at midday the sub was due to leave. As it was, he wasn’t in Malta, he was somewhere east of Naples. If these guys ahead could get him to a forward airstrip, he might just make that meeting. That would leave him a couple of hours in which to lay on another supply of explosives. Under no circumstances must he miss that sub.
There was something disturbing about the group ahead. They were signaling with the muzzles of their weapons for de Lille to put his hands up. Sure, he was wearing French insignia, but what was odd about that? There were thousands of guys in Italy dressed the same way. In any case, according to de Lille, these guys were supposed to be French themselves.
“Stick close to me,” said Wingate, gripping the boy’s hand. “Just do as I tell you. You’ll be OK.”
There were six in the group and now that they were closer Wingate could make out their faces. They might have gotten separated from their unit or they might have spent the last four days on the beach. Either way, they had thick growths of stubble and drawn expressions on their faces. The bags under each man’s eyes suggested nights without sleep.
“Hold it,” said Wingate. “Something’s wrong.” He came to a stop with the boy and the woman. Manganaro joined him while de Lille ran on ahead.
Immediately, one of the men ahead fired a burst into the air. Another yelled in Italian.
“They want us to join them,” Manganaro growled. “What do you think?”
There was a little rocky defile five or six yards to their left. Once there, he could get the big Colt out of its holster and maybe play for time. If Manganaro really had seen Allied troops on the ground just before the crash, they must still be around somewhere. Was it worth taking a chance? He glanced at Betty standing defiantly beside him, hands on hips. He looked down at Kenny, still clutching his hand. Finally, he shook his head. “We wouldn’t have a prayer,” he said, nodding toward the assortment of M1s and Stens that faced them.
“Let me check,” said Manganaro.
He put up his hands and strolled casually forward. De Lille had already reached the group and was haranguing the leader in French. The man was dark and thickset. He dismissed de Lille with a glance and brushed him aside, then called out to Manganaro.
They talked together for a couple of moments, Manganaro standing stolidly with his hands on the back of his head. Then Manganaro rejoined the others.
“One of the snags of being Italian-American, I guess,” he said. “You understand the language.”
“For God’s sake, Brad,” snapped Wingate. “What did he say?”
“They’re not our guys,” said Manganaro, simply. “Our guys are nowhere around ...”
“But you said you could see them!” Wingate protested. “A couple of minutes before we hit the deck ...!”
“Give me a break,” Manganaro cut in. “I made a mistake. Christ—the general thought they were French, and he was only a hundred yards away. The front line’s six miles further south.”
Wingate sighed. “What do they want with us?” he asked, exasperated by the further delay. “They’re not krauts.”
“They’re fascist!” said Manganaro, quietly. “They’re pretty desperate—take a look at them. They’ve pulled out of Naples before our guys get there. They’ve got a truck in back of the woods. They’re headed north—and they’re taking us with them.”
“They’re what!” yelled Wingate. “Like hell they are!”
He dropped his hand automatically toward the pistol, then checked. The odds against him were ridiculous. He managed a shrug and a grin as he looked toward the group’s commander.
He could kiss Malta good-bye. He could forget the guys who were waiting for him, he could forget the sub and the explosives and the guerrillas hiding in the mountains north of Larissa. He wasn’t going to see any of them. This mission was suddenly a whole new ball game. It had a one-word code name—Escape!
Wingate had to admire the kid. Kenny Fields had never once complained. When Wingate had first pulled him out from behind the blanket in the aircraft fuselage, he had been half frozen with cold. He’d crossed the Alps in that position, with no more than short pants and a light jacket to protect him from the savage temperatures. There must have been times when they were struggling to reach 15,000 feet when Kenny had almost lost consciousness through lack of oxygen, and the blood had stopped circulating in his hands and feet. Yet never for a second had the kid complained.
It was the same now. They were in the back of the open truck being driven north by the band of escaping fascists. There were six of the bastards, four in the cab, the other two in the back holding Sten guns. There had been no explanations. De Lille kept up a constant barrage of questions. Neither of the Sten gunners spoke. Most of the time they ignored de Lille, but occasionally one or the other would jab a gun in his direction and he would lapse into a stream of incomprehensible mutters. But Kenny Fields sat on the floor, unable to see over the sides, and simply stared ahead of him.
De Lille was a pain in the ass. What the Christ was he goading the gunners for? The guys’ nerves were in shreds already, that much ought to be obvious to a moron. They were shitting their pants with fright. The least irritation could tip them over the edge. It would only take one short burst from a Sten to finish the lot of them. At that range, they wouldn’t have a chance.
And what was the dumb frog trying to find out that wasn’t obvious? They were hostages. They had been roped together in the back of the truck for one very good reason. Daylight travel in western Italy was about as safe as waltzing with a grizzly. The Allies had total air superiority. P-47s and Spitfires patrolled the roads from dawn to dusk. Nothing moved without their say-so. The sight of Allied officers roped to the vehicle was designed to persuade the pilots to hold their fire.
“These poor, dumb bastards!” Manganaro growled, turning to face Wingate and speaking out of the side of his mouth. He nodded toward the two guards. “Look at them. What do they think it’s like, flying a fighter? Listen, I’ve done low-level strafing from a B-25 and that’s bad enough. You don’t see details of what you’re shooting at. Uniforms, insignia—they don’t mean a thing. All you see is a big square shape. If it moves, you hit it. If it doesn’t, you let it alone. It’s as simple as that. The minute some pursuit ship spots us, we’re dead!”
“That’s nice to know, Brad,” muttered Wingate, sarcastically. “Real comforting.”
“Aw, c’mon, Mac,” said Manganaro. “You knew that.”
“I guess so,” said Wingate. “I just wish there was some way of saving the woman and the kid.”
“Listen,” Manganaro grumbled, “I’ve got enough trouble, trying to figure out how to save this nice Italian kid from Brooklyn.”
Manganaro was right. They didn’t have a prayer. They had to get off that truck before they were blown off it. He checked the situation. The gunners weren’t all that interested in them. They figured the prisoners were safe enough, roped to one another and roped to the cleats on the truck’s sides. They spent most of their time scanning the bright morning sky.
Wingate was standing with his back to the cab, the camouflaged metal behind him coming up as high as his shoulder blades. On his right, a couple of feet away, was Manganaro with de Lille hunched beyond him. Betty was on Wingate’s left. She had her back to the cab the way Wingate did, but she had her arms folded and she had let herself sink back against the cab so that it gave her support from the swaying motion of the vehicle and took some of the weight off her feet.
It was Kenny who interested Wingate most. He was sitting beyond Betty, his left shoulder resting against the wooden side of the truck. Immediately ahead of him in the woodwork was one of the cleats they were secured to. The kid was sitting very quietly, staring directly ahead of him, and it was only after a moment that Wingate saw what he was doing. He had his arms folded and, masked by his left elbow, his right hand was steadily picking at the knot around the cleat.
The fascists had done a pretty good job tying Wingate. His hands and feet were tied, and the long rope that tied the lot of them together went a couple of times around his waist. But they had done a lousy job on the kid. Both his hands were free. So were his feet. He was only held by two or three turns of the main rope around his belly, and it was the end of that that he was carefully undoing.
Wingate said loudly, “Hey, Brad. Is that some of the RAF boys?” He nodded into the air, high above the rear of the truck.
“Where?” asked Manganaro, peering into the sky behind them.
“For Christ’s sake,” muttered Wingate, urgently. “Help me out. The kid’s working on the rope.”
“Yeah. Spitfires!” cried Manganaro. “Three—four ...”
The word threw the two guards into instant panic. They swiveled around immediately, Stens halfway to their shoulders. They muttered to one another and Manganaro grinned at Wingate.
“Watch it,” Wingate cautioned, giving a quick glance in Betty’s direction. “We’ve got to move together. Hit ’em hard. Easy—easy now.”
“Mac, Mac,” Manganaro was saying. There was a total change in his manner. His voice had an urgency to it that had been absent before. This time he wasn’t acting.
Wingate looked at him. He was staring up the long slope of the hillside to their left, beyond an olive grove and the broken area of rocky outcrop that lay on the far side of it. Just topping the horizon were a couple of P-47s.
Wingate looked at the kid. His fingers had got the knot loose at last and were on the last stage of untying it. Wingate’s mind raced. They were dead if they didn’t get out of that truck in the next few seconds. There was nothing to lose by rushing things now.
“Kenny!” he yelled. “Pull it out! Move, kid!”
As he shouted, he started to move forward. The rope came off the cleat and he burst toward the guards with all the power that he could force out of his thigh muscles, dragging Betty and the kid with him. They hit the guards in their backs and drove them over the top of the tailgate in a single sweeping movement.
