IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE HORSES RAN AT THE Ascot Racetrack in Brisbane. The infield’s a commotion of stretched khaki. The grass has died from lack of sun and from the trampling feet of enlisted men. The field has been punctured with latrines, mess tents have been pitched. Three shifts a day, the residents trudge across the track, round back of the silent and empty stables. In the field where the horses used to stretch their legs, two dozen Quonset huts that have popped up like mushrooms. The men work in those huts, sitting before radios or typewriters or card files all day long, shirtless in the January heat.
It has been just as long since whores sunned themselves on the long veranda of the house on Henry Street, and passing gentlemen, on their way to or from the Ascot Racetrack, peered at their charms through the white railing, faltered, checked their wallets, forgot their scruples, turned on their heels, and climbed up the house’s front stairs. Now the place is full of male officers and math freaks: mostly Australians on the ground floor, mostly Americans upstairs, and a sprinkling of lucky Brits who were spirited out of Singapore before General Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya and the conqueror of that city, was able to capture them and mine their heads for crucial data.
Today the old bordello has been turned upside down; everyone with Ultra clearance is out in the garage, which thrums and roars with the sound of fans, and virtually glows with contained heat. In that garage is a rusted steel trunk, still spattered with riverbank mud that partially obscures the Nipponese characters stenciled on its sides. Had a Nipponese spy glimpsed the trunk during its feverish passage from the port to the whorehouse’s garage, he would have recognized it as belonging to the radio platoon of the 20th Division, which is currently lost in the jungles of New Guinea.
The rumor, shouted over the sound of the fans, is that a digger—an Australian grunt—found it. His unit was sweeping the abandoned headquarters of the 20th Division for booby traps when his metal detector went nuts along the banks of a river.
The codebooks are stacked inside as neatly as gold bars. They are wet and mildewed and their front covers are all missing, but this is mint condition by the standards of wartime. Stripped to the waist and streaming with sweat, the men raise the books out one by one, like nurses lifting newborn infants from the bassinette, and carry them to tables where they slice away the rotten bindings and peel the sodden pages off the stacks one by one, hanging them from improvised clotheslines strung overhead. The stench and damp of New Guinea saturate the air as the river water trapped in those pages is lifted out by the rushing air; it all vents to the outside eventually, and half a mile downwind, pedestrians wrinkle their noses. The whorehouse’s closets—still redolent of French perfume, powder, hairspray, and jism, but now packed to the ceiling with office supplies—are raided for more string. The web of clotheslines grows, new layers crisscrossing above and below the old ones, every inch of string claimed by a wet page as soon as it is stretched. Each page is a grid, a table with hiragana or katakana or kanji in one box, a group of digits or Romanji in another box, and the pages all cross-referenced to other pages in a scheme only a cryptographer could love.
The photographer comes in, trailed by assistants who are burdened with miles of film. All he knows is that each page must be photographed perfectly. The malarial reek practically flattens him the moment he walks in the door, but when he recovers, his eyes scan the garage. All he can see, stretching as if to infinity, are pages dripping and curling, turning white as they dry, casting their grids of information into sharp relief, like the reticules of so many bomb sights, the graven crosshairs of so many periscopes, plunging through cloud and fog to focus distinctly on the abdomens of Nipponese troopships, pregnant with North Borneo fuel, alive with burning steam.
RAM
* * *
“SIR! WOULD YOU MIND TELLING ME WHERE WE ARE going, sir!”
Lieutenant Monkberg heaves a deep, quivering sigh, his ribcage shuddering like a tin shack in a cyclone. He executes a none too snappy pushup. His hands are planted on the rim, and so this action extricates his head from the bowl, of a toilet—or “head,” as it is referred to in this context: an alarmingly rundown freighter. He jerks down a strip of abrasive Euro-bumwad and wipes his mouth before looking up at Sergeant Robert Shaftoe, who has braced himself in the hatchway.
And Shaftoe does need some serious bracing, because he is carrying close to his own weight in gear. All of it was issued to him thoughtfully prepacked.
He could have left it that way. But this is not how an Eagle Scout operates. Bobby Shaftoe has gone through and unpacked all of it, spread it out on the deck, examined it, and repacked it.
This allowed Shaftoe to do some serious inferring. To be specific, he infers that the men of Detachment 2702 are expected to spend most of the next three weeks trying as hard as they can not to freeze to death. This will be punctuated by trying to kill a lot of well-armed sons of bitches. German, most likely.
“N-N-N-Norway,” Lieutenant Monkberg says. He looks so pathetic that Shaftoe considers offering him some m-m-m-morphine, which induces a mild nausea of its own but holds back the greater nausea of seasickness. Then he comes to his senses, remembers that Lieutenant Monkberg is an officer whose duty it is to send him off to die, and decides that he can just go fuck himself sideways.
“Sir! What is the nature of our mission in Norway, sir?”
Monkberg unloads a rattling belch. “Ram and run,” he says.
“Sir! Ram what, sir?”
“Norway.”
“Sir! Run where, sir?”
“Sweden.”
Shaftoe likes the sound of this. The perilous sea voyage through U-boat-infested waters, the collision with Norway, the desperate run across frozen Nazi-occupied territory, all seem trivial compared with the shining goal of dipping into the world’s largest and purest reservoir of authentic Swedish poontang.
“Shaftoe! Wake up!”
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
“You have noticed the way we are dressed.” Monkberg refers to the fact that they have discarded their dog tags and are all wearing civilian or merchant-marine clothing.
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
“We don’t want the Huns, or anyone else, to know what we really are.”
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
“Now, you might ask yourself, if we’re supposed to look like civilians, then why the hell are we carrying tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges, et cetera.”
“Sir! That was going to be my next question, sir!”
“Well, we have a cover story all worked out for that. Come with me.”
Monkberg looks enthusiastic all of a sudden. He clambers to his feet and leads Shaftoe down various passageways and stairs to the freighter’s cargo hold. “You know those other ships?”
Shaftoe looks blank.
“Those other ships around us? We are in the middle of a convoy, you know.”
“Sir, yes, sir!” Shaftoe says, a little less certainly. None of the men has been abovedecks very much in the hours since they were delivered, via submarine, to this wallowing wreck. Even if they had gone up for a look around they would have seen nothing but darkness and fog.
“A Murmansk convoy,” Monkberg continues. “All of these ships are delivering weapons and supplies to the Soviet Union. See?”
They have reached a cargo hold. Monkberg turns on an overhead light, revealing—crates. Lots and lots and lots of crates.
“Full of weapons,” Monkberg says, “including tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges, et cetera. Get my drift?”
“Sir, no sir! I do not get the lieutenant’s drift!”
Monkberg comes one step closer to him. Unsettlingly close. He speaks, now, in a conspiratorial tone. “See, we’re all just crew members on this merchant ship, making the run to Murmansk. It gets foggy. We get separated from our convoy. Then, boom! We slam into fucking Norway. We are stuck on Nazi-held territory. We have to make a break for Sweden! But wait a second, we say to ourselves. What about all those Germans between u
s and the Swedish border? Well, we had better be armed to the teeth, is what. And who is in a better position to arm themselves to the teeth than the crew of this merchant ship that is jam-packed with armaments? So we run down into the cargo hold and hastily pry open a few crates and arm ourselves.”
Shaftoe looks at the crates. None of them have been pried open.
“Then,” Monkberg continues, “we abandon ship and head for Sweden.”
There is a long silence. Shaftoe finally rouses himself to say, “Sir! Yes, sir!”
“So get prying.”
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
“And make it look hasty! Hasty! C’mon! Shake a leg!”
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
Shaftoe tries to get into the spirit of the thing. What’s he going to use to pry a crate open? No crowbars in sight. He exits the cargo hold and strides down a passageway. Monkberg following him closely, hovering, urging him to be hastier: “You’re in a hurry! The Nazis are coming! You have to arm yourself! Think of your wife and kids back in Glasgow or Lubbock or wherever the fuck you’re from!”
“Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, sir!” Shaftoe says indignantly.
“No, no! Not in real life! In your pretend role as this stranded merchant son of a bitch! Look, Shaftoe! Look! Salvation is at hand!”
Shaftoe turns around to see Monkberg pointing at a cabinet marked FIRE.
Shaftoe pulls the door open to find, among other implements, one of those giant axes that firemen are always carrying in and out of burning structures.
Thirty seconds later, he’s down in the cargo hold, Paul Bunyaning a crate of .45-caliber ammunition. “Faster! More haphazard!” Monkberg shouts. “This isn’t a precise operation, Shaftoe! You are in a blind panic!” Then he says, “Goddamn it!” and runs forward and seizes the ax from Shaftoe’s hands.
Monkberg swings wildly, missing the crate entirely as he adjusts to the tremendous weight and length of the implement. Shaftoe hits the deck and rolls to safety. Monkberg finally gets his range and azimuth worked out, and actually makes contact with the crate. Splinters and chips skitter across the deck.
“See!” Monkberg says, looking over his shoulder at Shaftoe, “I want splinteriness! I want chaos!” He is swinging the ax at the same time as he’s talking and looking at Shaftoe, and he’s moving his feet too because the ship is rocking, and consequently the blade of the weapon misses the crate entirely, overshoots, and comes down right on Monkberg’s ankle.
“Gadzooks!” Lieutenant Monkberg says, in a quiet, conversational tone. He is looking down at his ankle in fascination. Shaftoe comes over to see what’s so interesting.
A good chunk of Monkberg’s lower left leg has been neatly cross-sectioned. In the beam of Shaftoe’s flashlight, it is possible to see severed blood vessels and ligaments sticking out of opposite sides of the meaty wound, like sabotaged bridges and pipelines dangling from the sides of a gorge.
“Sir! You are wounded, sir!” Shaftoe says. “Let me summon Lieutenant Root!”
“No! You stay here and work!” Monkberg says. “I can find Root myself.” He reaches down with both hands and squeezes his leg above the wound, causing blood to gush out onto the deck. “This is perfect!” he says meditatively. “This adds so much realism.”
After several repetitions of this order, Shaftoe reluctantly goes back to crate-hacking. Monkberg hobbles and staggers around the hold for a few minutes, bleeding on everything, then drags himself off in search of Enoch Root. The last thing he says is, “Remember! We are aiming for a ransacked effect!”
But the bit with the leg wound gets the idea across to Shaftoe more than Monkberg’s words ever could. The sight of the blood brings up memories of Guadalcanal and more recent adventures. His last dose of morphine is wearing off, which makes him sharper. And he’s starting to get really sea sick, which makes him want to fight it by doing some hard work.
So he more or less goes berserk with that ax. He loses track of what is going on.
He wishes that Detachment 2702 could have stayed on dry land—preferably dry warm land such as that place they stayed, for two sunny weeks, in Italy.
The first part of that mission had been hard work, what with humping those barrels of shit around. But the remainder of it (except for the last few hours) had been just like shore leave, except that there weren’t any women. Every day they’d taken turns at the observation site, looking out over the Bay of Naples with their telescopes and binoculars. Every night, Corporal Benjamin sat down and radioed more gibberish in Morse code.
One night, Benjamin received a message and spent some time deciphering it. He announced the news to Shaftoe: “The Germans know we’re here.”
“What do you mean, they know we’re here?”
“They know that for at least six months we have had an observation post overlooking the Bay of Naples,” Benjamin said.
“We’ve been here less than two weeks.”
“They’re going to begin searching this area tomorrow.”
“Well, then let’s get the fuck out of here,” Shaftoe said.
“Colonel Chattan orders you to wait,” Benjamin said, “until you know that the Germans know that we are here.”
“But I do know that the Germans know that we are here,” Shaftoe said, “you just told me.”
“No, no no no no,” Benjamin said, “wait until you would know that the Germans knew even if you didn’t know from being told by Colonel Chattan over the radio.”
“Are you fucking with me?”
“Orders,” Benjamin said, and handed Shaftoe the deciphered message as proof.
As soon as the sun came up they could hear the observation planes crisscrossing the sky. Shaftoe was ready to execute their escape plan, and he made sure that the men were too. He sent some of those SAS blokes down to reconnoiter the choke points along their exit route. Shaftoe himself just laid down on his back and stared up at the sky, watching those planes.
Did he know that the Germans knew now?
Ever since he’d woken up, a couple of SAS blokes had been following him around, staring at him. Shaftoe finally looked in their direction and nodded. They ran away. A moment later he heard wrenches crashing against the insides of toolboxes.
The Germans had observation planes all over the fucking sky. That was pretty strong circumstantial evidence that the Germans knew. And those planes were clearly visible to Shaftoe, so he could, arguably, know that they knew. But Colonel Chattan had ordered him to stay put “until positively sighted by Germans,” whatever that meant.
One of those planes, in particular, was coming closer and closer. It was searching very close to the ground, cutting only a narrow swath on each pass. Waiting for it to pass over their position, Shaftoe wanted to scream. This was too stupid to be real. He wanted to send up a flare and get this over with.
Finally, in midafternoon, Shaftoe, lying on his back in the shade of a tree, looked straight up into the air and counted the rivets on the belly of that German airplane: a Henschel Hs 126* with a single swept-back wing mounted above the fuselage, so as not to block the view downwards, and with ladders and struts and giant awkward splay-footed landing gear sticking out all over. One German encased in a glass shroud and flying the plane, another out in the open, peering down through goggles and fiddling with a swivel-mounted machine gun. This one did all but look Shaftoe in the eye, then tapped the pilot on the shoulder and pointed down.
The Henschel altered its normal search pattern, cutting the pass short to swing round and fly over their position again.
“That’s it,” Shaftoe said to himself. He stood up and began walking towards the dilapidated barn. “That’s it!” he shouted. “Execute!”
The SAS guys were in the back of the truck, under a tarp, working with their wrenches. Shaftoe glanced in their direction and saw gleaming parts from the Vickers laid out on clean white fabric. Where the hell had these guys gotten clean white fabric? They’d probably been saving it for today. Why couldn’t they have got the Vickers in good w
orking order before? Because they’d had orders to assemble it hastily, at the last possible minute.
Corporal Benjamin hesitated, one hand poised above his radio key. “Sarge, are you sure they know we’re here?”
Everyone turned to see how Shaftoe would respond to this mild challenge. He had been slowly gathering a reputation as a man who needed watching.
Shaftoe turned on his heel and strolled out into the middle of a clearing a few yards away. Behind him, he could hear the other men of Detachment 2702 jockeying for position in the doorway, trying to get a clear view of him.
The Henschel was coming back for another pass, now so close to the ground that you could probably throw a rock through its windshield.
Shaftoe unslung his tommy gun, pulled back the bolt, cradled it, swung it up and around, and opened fire.
Now some might complain that the trench broom lacked penetrating power, but he was positive he could see pieces of crap flying out of the Henschel’s motor. The Henschel went out of control almost immediately. It banked until its wings were vertical, veered, banked some more until it was upside down, shed what little altitude it had to begin with, and made an upside-down pancake landing in the olive trees no more than a hundred yards distant. It did not immediately burst into flame: something of a letdown there.
There was perfect silence from the other men. The only sound was the beepity-beep of Corporal Benjamin, his question now answered, sending out his little message. Shaftoe was able to follow the Morse code for once—this message was going out plaintext. “WE ARE DISCOVERED STOP EXECUTING PLAN TORUS.”
As their first contribution to Plan Torus, the other men climbed onto the truck, which pulled out from its hidey-hole in the barn and idled in the trees nearby. When Benjamin was finished, he abandoned his radio and joined them.
As his first task of Plan Torus, Shaftoe walked around the premises in a neat crisscross pattern echoing that of the searching reconnaissance planes. He was carrying an upside-down gasoline can with no lid on it.
He left the can about one-third full, standing upright in the middle of the barn. He pulled the pin from a grenade, dropped it into the gasoline, and ran out of the building. The truck was already pulling away when he caught up with it and dove into the waiting arms of his unit, who pulled him on board. He got himself situated in the back of the truck just in time to see the building go up in a satisfying fireball.
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