Mac wingate 2, p.2
Mac Wingate 2, page 2
He shook his head wearily and closed his eyes, the throbbing roar of the C-47’s engines lulling him ...
Wingate opened his eyes, startled. Corporal McCauley was bent over him, shaking him. Wingate sat up, aware immediately that the plane’s engines seemed to have reached a high, unnerving pitch. Wincing, Wingate looked questioningly into McCauley’s face.
“What is it?” he shouted.
“Stukas!” the corporal replied. “We’re over the airfield at Malta—but so are the damned Germans! They’re bombing hell out of it!”
Wingate peered out the window. The C-47 was banking steeply. For a moment all Wingate could see was the black mirror of the sea. Then Malta appeared from under the C-47’s wing. It appeared white, sepulchral under the bright moon, its pale surface blossoming with bright flowers from hell as the bombs landed. A Stuka climbed swiftly toward the C-47, its tracers arcing through the night. It resembled some monstrous hawk as it swept past them. Wingate saw that the C-47 had been hit, the Stuka’s tracers ripping into the fuselage above their heads. Through the holes the demented wind shrieked.
The C-47 leveled off and began to drop precipitously toward the field. Before Wingate could grab hold of anything to brace himself, he felt the plane slam with numbing violence onto the runway. The squeal of protesting tires sounded sharply, above the sudden roar of the engines. Then came the explosion as one of the tires blew.
The plane spun violently. Wingate felt himself being flung toward a heavy packing crate. He struck it, flipped over, and came to rest with bone-cracking force on the plane’s deck. For a moment he was too stunned to move; then he glanced up—just in time to see the corporal, trying desperately to stay on his feet, lose his footing and go flying over a low crate in front of him. Vanishing from sight, the big fellow struck with considerable force. Wingate heard the sound his bulk made as it struck. The corporal became ominously quiet.
The plane skidded to a halt finally, its tail swinging up at almost a forty-five degree angle, then slamming down again onto the airstrip. Abruptly, the roar of the engines ceased. At almost the same moment Wingate became aware of the sharp, acrid smell of high-octane aviation fuel.
The pilot and copilot burst through the cockpit door. “Get out!” the pilot cried. “The starboard engine’s on fire!”
“Get the door open!” Wingate told them as he scrambled over the low crate to get to McCauley’s still body. “And don’t wait for us!”
The copilot pulled open the door. The night air flooded into the plane—along with the sound of the hammering ack-ack and the awesome thumping of the bombs. The corporal was on his back, unconscious. There was a mean welt just above his right ear. In the dim light, Wingate could not see just how badly the man was hurt. Wingate slapped him, hard.
McCauley’s eyes flew open, his mouth hardening with angry resolve.
“Let’s go, soldier!” Wingate cried, enormously relieved. “This plane’s on fire!”
The big fellow lifted himself on his elbows and shook his head to clear away the cobwebs. “Hey, did you slap me, Captain?” he demanded.
Wingate got up onto his feet and grinned down at the corporal. “That’s right. And I’ll punch you silly if you don’t get up off your ass!”
The pilots, Wingate saw, were waiting for them. “I thought I told you not to wait for us!” Wingate cried. “Get the hell out of here!”
At that moment a titanic explosion ripped the plane, hurtling Wingate toward the open door. As the pilots jumped to the ground, Wingate reached the door and leaned out. The starboard engine had just blown. The entire wing was in flames. Wingate looked back at the corporal. The big man was on his feet now, lumbering clumsily over the boxes and equipment toward him. Wingate dropped to the airstrip, turned and waited for McCauley.
The heat from the flames was searing. As Wingate put up his arm to protect his eyes, McCauley scrambled clumsily from the plane. He came down hard beside Wingate and dropped to one knee. Hauling the big corporal to his feet, Wingate helped him down the crater-pocked runway toward the two pilots, who were crouching in the glare, still waiting anxiously for them.
As Wingate pulled up beside the pilots, the firefighters—dressed in grotesquely awkward asbestos suits—roared past in their trucks. Wingate did not give them much chance of saving the plane or its cargo, but he could understand their desire to save what they could. He looked away and saw a jeep bouncing across the runway toward them. As the driver pulled up beside them, Wingate saw a colonel sitting in the front seat beside the driver. There was a grin on the colonel’s face.
“Welcome to Malta, Captain Wingate,” the colonel said. “I’m Colonel Holloway.”
Wingate saluted smartly.
“Get in, all of you,” the colonel said, “before those damn Stukas return.”
All four men piled into the back seat. The driver cut the wheel sharply, and then drove like a madman toward a large hangar at the far end of the airstrip. A plane was burning out of control in front of it, but the hangar was apparently unscathed.
But not for long.
As the jeep driver skillfully dodged the fresh craters, a lone Stuka appeared in the night sky behind the hangar, caught for an instant in one of the many probing searchlights that ringed the field. As the jeep bounced closer, the Stuka—flying straight toward them—released its eight wing bombs. Plumes of fire bloomed behind the hangar, then plowed through the building, marching relentlessly toward the onrushing jeep. The driver swerved off the runway and braked. The men flung themselves from the jeep and hugged the ground as it heaved convulsively under them. The Stuka, its wind-driven sirens screaming like banshees, swept over their heads close enough to whip up a hurricane of white dust. Then it banked sharply into a steep climb and punched a hole in the black sky, its sirens fading.
Wingate climbed wearily back to his feet and swore softly. The plane they had just left was now a blazing shambles, the hangar toward which they had been driving was a flaming skeleton and the spot where that burning plane had been sitting was now only a smoking crater.
As they got back into the jeep and drove toward what was left of the hangar, Wingate wondered if he would live long enough to meet this Albanian guerrilla leader, Ahmad Zogu II.
And if it really mattered.
Two
The night attack, Colonel Holloway was anxious to point out, was no longer the usual thing. Since North Africa had been cleared of Axis forces, such raids had become relatively rare. He sounded almost apologetic about the reception Wingate had received the night before.
“Fine,” said Wingate ironically. “The Nazis just wanted to welcome me to Malta.”
Holloway chuckled quietly.
The two men were on a sun-drenched terrace fronting a small cafe along Kingsway, Valetta’s main thoroughfare. They had just finished breakfast, during which Colonel Holloway had been acquainting Wingate with his background. Small cups of very strong coffee were still before them. British soldiers and a few Maltese were shoveling away at the white rubble left from the air raid, causing a low cloud of limestone dust to hang over the street. Wingate squinted through the dust and sipped at his coffee. They were waiting for McCauley to join them.
The waiter—an emaciated Maltese—appeared at their table. Speaking in faultless English, he inquired if either of them wanted anything more. Wingate was tempted to ask for a dollop of whiskey to sweeten his coffee, but thought better of it and shook his head. The waiter vanished back into the cafe.
Wingate looked back at the colonel. The man was only in his early twenties; he had a sunny, open face, with light, hazel eyes and sandy hair. His eyebrows were so fair, in fact, that at first glance it gave the impression he had none at all.
This tended to give him the appearance of a wide-eyed, impressionable innocent.
But Holloway was no innocent. He was an officer in the OSS—which explained how he could be a colonel at twenty-three—and he had begun to relate to Wingate some of his exploits behind the lines in Yugoslavia and Greece. When the German troops rolled into Yugoslavia in 1941, Holloway had been visiting his mother’s parents in Belgrade—a reward for his graduation from Harvard, where he had majored in Political History with a specialty in Balkan politics.
Caught up in a desperate attempt to flee the country with his grandparents, he soon found himself in the mountains of Serbia with Mihailovitch’s Chetniks. By a combination of luck and a large measure of audacity, Holloway and his aged grandparents were able to flee across the border into Albania. From there, they made their way across Greece to Turkey—and safety. His grandparents, both over seventy when their remarkable flight began, were now residing in New Jersey with Holloway’s parents.
Anxious now to hear more of the colonel’s adventures, Wingate asked the man a question that had been nagging him all during the colonel’s account of his escape. “Colonel, you had some pretty grisly things to say about the Croats and the Serbs just now. Hell, they’re both Yugoslavs, aren’t they? Fighting a common enemy, the Nazis?”
Holloway smiled coldly. “The Croats are Croatian nationalists first, Yugoslavs only under duress. Their hatred for the Serbians goes way back. The Croats are Catholics, don’t forget, the Serbs Eastern Orthodox.” The colonel shook his head. “Hell, even the Nazis were shocked at the Croatian barbarities. I overheard a German proverb: God save the Germans from cholera, famine and the Croats. I didn’t understand it the first time I heard it. But I soon understood what it meant. Wingate, the Ustashi began massacring Jews, Gypsies and Orthodox Serbs the moment Hitler set up their puppet regime.”
“The Ustashi?”
“An organization of Croatian Catholics. Their leader, Pavelich, spent his political exile in Italy under Mussolini’s protection. Pavelich has been credited with the remark that a good Ustashi is one who can use his own knife to cut a child from the womb of his Serbian mother. I have it on good authority that Pavelich keeps a wicker basket on his desk. It’s filled with forty pounds of eyes gouged from victims of the Ustashi.”
Wingate frowned and stared down at his coffee for a moment. “What about the Chetniks?”
Holloway laughed shortly, bitterly. “You mean the Serbian irregulars under Mihailovich? They fight Tito’s partisans with more enthusiasm than they fight the Germans. And like the Croats, they have their own prejudices. Not long after I left them, they went on a rampage and annihilated more than nine thousand Moslems in the Sandjak region bordering Bosnia and Serbia. From what I heard, they amused themselves raping young girls and, in some cases, roasting their victims to death over fires.”
“Jesus. How can you tell the real Nazis without a scorecard?”
“Precisely,” Holloway snapped.
“This Tito. What do you know about him?”
“He’s a Communist. But he’s a tough fighter, considerably tougher than Mihailovich. We’re dropping him considerable quantities of materiel, and he’s using them, tying down at least twelve German and Italian divisions. Despite all his great publicity, Mihailovich keeps low, collaborating with the Italians in some cases, I am sure. He is simply unwilling to see his people lined up and shot by the Germans. The cost, after all, is one hundred Yugoslavs for every German soldier killed by a guerrilla.”
“But this Tito does not mind that cost?”
“No.” Holloway chuckled coldly. “After all, he’s a Croat. And right now he’s a force to be reckoned with in Yugoslavia.” Holloway looked shrewdly at Wingate. “That’s one other good reason why you are being sent into Albania—to do what you can to strengthen what we hope is an anti-Communist force in the Balkans.”
“I get the impression, Colonel, that you are not too hopeful about the results.”
Holloway shrugged. “The Balkans are a can of worms, Wingate. And from what I’ve seen, republican or monarchist forces seldom show the tenacity or courage of a Communist group.”
Reflecting on that disquieting observation, Wingate glanced down the street and saw the tall form of Corporal McCauley striding toward them. Before the corporal could pull himself to a halt and salute, Wingate called out to him.
“You have breakfast yet, Corporal? Sit down.”
As the man sat down at the table, nervously, he nodded quickly to his superior officer. “Yes, sir. I did.”
“Your quarters were comfortable?” Wingate inquired solicitously.
“Yes, sir. They were fine, sir.”
“Colonel Holloway has been telling me what a jolly time we can expect to have in the Balkans. But you got here just in time. I was about to ask him about that fellow who will be our host in Albania—Ahmad Zogu II.”
Holloway leaned back in his chair and considered a moment. He seemed reluctant to begin. Then he shrugged and leaned forward. “All I really know, Wingate, is that he is related to King Zog, a mountain tribesman who took over the Albanian government between the wars and who was able to hang on to his throne only with the help of the Italian treasury. Under Zog, Albania was a banana republic bankrolled by Mussolini. When Mussolini got tired of footing the bill, he sacked Zog and took the country over. There are two basic factions in the country. Those who live on the plains and those who live in the mountains. As you can guess, it is the Moslem tribesman living in the mountains who supply most of the manpower for the guerrillas.”
“And Ahmad Zogu leads those guerrillas?”
“Yes.”
“Are there any other factions?”
Holloway smiled. “Of course.”
“Communists?”
“Of course.”
“And who leads them?”
“I do not know that. My only contact has been with Ahmad Zogu, and when I ask about any other guerrilla forces in the mountains besides him and his band, he insists there is none. But I know differently. Only I do not know who their leader is, or how powerful his forces might be.”
“But they are Communists.”
“Yes. I would stake my recent promotion on that.” He smiled impishly. “In fact, I already have.”
“Then my job is not only to help Ahmad Zogu blow up this supply depot, but also to find out what I can about this other guerrilla band.”
“Precisely. What we must know, Wingate, is which one we should back. We would like to back the non-Communist faction, obviously. But not if that faction is as abortive a fighting unit as Mihailovich’s Chetniks—or as unreliable.”
“But my primary mission is to send that supply depot sky high.”
“And my mission at this moment is to see to it that you have what you need for that job—and to give you what instruction you and your team will need in parachuting into Albania.”
Wingate saw McCauley wince. He could understand the corporal’s uneasiness. Bailing out at night over unfamiliar, most likely mountainous, terrain was not exactly a pleasant prospect. “I’ll need explosives, naturally,” said Wingate. And then he glanced at the corporal. “Perhaps you’d better explain to me about that Lewis bomb you mentioned in Cairo, Corporal.”
McCauley leaned forward eagerly. “I thought maybe you had forgotten about that, Captain,” he said, grinning. “I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Well, out with it, then.”
“I was with a force that relieved one of Rommel’s prison camps. One of the men captured just a week before the Germans surrendered was a Sergeant Gus Holliman, a fellow who was with the SAS.”
Wingate leaned forward intently. He had heard about that group. The initials stood for Special Air Service. They were a band of British raiders that created havoc behind Rommel’s lines, destroying hundreds of his planes and blowing up countless dumps and airfields. They had been led by a Major Stirling, who had started out with the idea of parachuting behind Rommel’s lines. But after a disastrous attempt to launch an attack in that fashion, they had decided to use land transportation. From then on, their success had been spectacular.
“I’ve heard of them, Corporal,” Wingate said. “Go on.”
“Well, sir. They needed a special kind of bomb, you might say—one that would not only blow up a plane, but set it afire. It had to be both an explosive and an incendiary.”
Wingate nodded quickly. “And it would have to be small,” he said.
“That’s right, sir. Light enough to carry a long ways. If they took only high explosives with them, they could destroy the airframes of the planes, but the engines might be left intact. If they tried to take both high explosives and incendiary bombs, the weight would be so heavy they could only carry enough to destroy four or five planes each.”
“Yes,” Wingate said. “I’ve heard of their success, and I wondered how they were able to pull it off. At times I even questioned the number of planes they were supposed to have destroyed.”
“It was the bomb that did it, sir.”
“What do you know about its construction, Corporal?”
The man smiled. “Simplicity itself. A man called Jock Lewis made it for the group. He tried quite a few combinations and almost blew himself up in the attempt. But he had a real brainstorm. Finally. He had tried all kinds of combinations. Thermite and gelignite and ammonal and a half-dozen other substances, and each time they either exploded or ignited, but they wouldn’t do both. So one day, he was handling a lump of plastic explosive. It felt like dough. And that gave him the idea: maybe the thermite was failing to ignite because it wasn’t being distributed evenly enough through the plastic.” Wingate nodded intently. He was beginning to realize what Lewis had discovered.
“So this guy Lewis figured there must be a missing ingredient, something that would give a better mix. It was like making bread. He needed something to knit the different materials together.” Corporal McCauley paused significantly.
“Liquid,” said Wingate quickly. “Some form of liquid.”
“That’s right, Captain,” the corporal said, grinning. “And Lewis figured he could use just a little oil and work it into the plastic with the thermite. That’s what he did; he rolled it into a lump about the size of a tennis ball, put a fuse into it and laid it on top of an oil drum. Then he ran back and watched. There was a loud explosion, then a flash as the gasoline blazed into fire. He had it. An explosive incendiary bomb as light as a feather.”
