Casey at the Bat
Stephen Hunter
Stephen Hunter tells a story of derring-do behind German lines in World War II, with oddball British and American agents vying to figure out how best to blow a bridge — for all the good it does in the end.
Stephen Hunter
Casey at the Bat
“No, no,” said Basil St. Florian. “Bren guns. We need the Bren guns. It is simply undoable without Bren guns. Surely you understand.”
Roger understood but he was nevertheless unwilling.
“Our wealth is in our Bren guns. Without Bren guns, we are nothing. Pah, we are dust, we are cat shit, do you see? Nothing. NOTHING!”
Of course he said “Rien,” for the language was French as was the setting, the cellar of a farmhouse outside the rural burg of Nantilles, département Limousin, two hundred miles south and east of Paris. The year was 1944, and the date was June 7. Basil had just dropped in the night before, with his American chum.
“Do you not see,” Basil explained, “that the point in giving you Brens was to wage war upon the Germans, not to make you powerful politically in the postwar, after we have pushed Jerry out? Communists, Gaullists, we do not care, it does not matter, or matter now. What matters now is that you have to help us push Jerry out. That was the point of the Bren guns. We gave them to you for that reason, explicitly, and no other. You have had them eighteen months, and you have never used them once. The war will be over, we will push Jerry out, the Gaullists will take over, and we will demand our Brens back, and if we don’t get them, we will send Irishmen to get them. You do not want Irishmen interested in you. No good can come of it. It’s my advice to use the Brens, help us push Jerry, become glorious heroes, happily give up the Brens, then defeat the Gaullists in fair, free elections.”
“I will not give you Bren guns,” said Roger, “and that is final. Long live Comintern. Long live the Internationale. Long live the great Stalin, the bear, the man of steel. If you were in Spain, you would understand this principle. If you—”
Basil turned to Leets.
“Make him see about the Brens. Dear Roger, listen to the American lieutenant here. Do you think the Americans would have sent a fellow so far as they’ve sent this one just to tell you lies? I understand that you might not trust a pompous British foof like me, but this fellow is an actual son of the earth. His pater was a farmer. He raises wheat and cows and fights red Indians, as in the movies. He is tall, silent, magnificent. He is a walking myth. Listen to him.”
He turned to his chum Leets and then realized he had, once again, forgotten Leets’s name. It was nothing personal, he just was so busy being magnificent and British and all that, so he couldn’t be troubled by small details, such as Yank names.
“I say, Lieutenant, I seem to have forgotten the name. What was the name again?” He thought it was remarkable that the name kept slipping away on him. They had trained together at Milton Hall on the river Jedburgh in Scotland for this little picnic for six or so weeks, but the name kept slipping away, and whenever it did, it took Basil wholly out of where he was and turned his attention to the mystery of the disappearing name.
“My name is Leets,” said Leets in English, accented in the tones of the middle plains of his vast homeland, the Minnesota part.
“It’s so strange,” said Basil. “It just goes away. Poof, it’s gone, so bizarre. Anyhow, tell him.”
Leets also spoke French with a Parisian accent, which was why Roger, of Group Roger, didn’t care for him, or for Basil. Roger thought all Parisians were traitors or bourgeoisie, equally culpable in any case, and that seemed to go twice for British or American Parisians. He didn’t know that Leets spoke with a Parisian accent because he’d lived there between the ages of two and nine while his father managed 3M’s European accounts. No, Leets’s father was not a farmer, not hardly, and had certainly never fought red Indians; he was a rather wealthy business executive now retired, living in Sarasota, Florida, with one son, Leets, in occupied France playing cowboys with the insane, another a naval aviator on a jeep carrier that had yet to reach the Pacific, and still a third 4-F and in medical school in Chicago.
Roger, namesake and kingpin of Group Roger, turned his fetid little eyes upon Leets.
“I can blow the bridge,” said Leets. “It’s not a problem. The bridge will go down; it’s only a matter of rigging the 808 in the right place and leaving a couple of time pencils stuck in the stuff.”
But Basil interrupted, on the wings of an epiphany.
“It’s because you’re all so similar,” he said, as if he’d given the matter a great deal of Oxford-educated thought. “It has to do with gene pools. In our country, or in Europe on the whole, the gene pool is much more diverse. You see that in the fantastic European faces. Really, go to any city in Europe, and the variety in such features as eye spacing, jawline, height of forehead, width of cheekbones is extraordinary. I could watch it for days. But you Yanks seem to have about three faces between you, and you pass them back and forth. Yours is the farm boy face. Rather broad, no visible bone structure, pleasant, but not sharp enough to be particularly attractive. I fear you’ll lose your hair prematurely. Your people do have good, healthy dentition, I must give you that. But all the plumpness on the face. You must eat nothing but cake and candy. It goes to your face and turns you rather clownish, and it’s wizard-hard keeping you apart. You remind me of at least six other Americans I know, and I can t remember their names either. Wait, one of them is a chap called Carruthers. Do you know him?”
Leets thought this question rhetorical, and in any event it seemed to tucker Basil out for a bit. Leets turned back to the fat French communist guerrilla.
“We can kill the sentries, I can rig the 808 and plant the package, and it doesn’t even have to be fancy. It’s simple engineering; anyone could look at it and see the stress points. So: Pop the tab on the time pencil and run like hell. The problem is that the garrison at Nantilles is only a mile away, and the minimum time I can get the bridge rigged is about three minutes because we have to go in hard. When we shoot the sentries, it’ll make a noise, because we don’t have suppressors. The noise will travel and the garrison will be alerted. Meanwhile, I have to get down and lash the package just so on the trusses. They’ll get there before I’m done. So my team will get fried like eggs if we’re still rigging when they show. That’s why we need the Brens. We’ve only got rifles and Stens and my Thompson, and we can’t build enough volume of fire to hold them off. I need two Brens on the road from Nantilles with a lot of ammo to shoot up the trucks as they come along. You can’t disable a truck with a Sten. Simple physics: The Sten shoots a nine-millimeter pistol bullet and it doesn’t penetrate metal. Sometimes it even bounces off of glass. The Bren.303 is a powerful rifle- and machine-gun round which will penetrate the sheet metal of truck construction, damage the motor, rip up the wiring and tubing, as well as rupture the tires. It will pierce the wood construction of the truck bed and hit the men it carries. It can also lay down heavy, powerful fields of fire that will drive infantry back. That’s what it’s for; that’s why the British gave you the Brens.”
“The lieutenant knows a lot about guns, doesn’t he?” said Basil. “I’m rather alarmed, to be honest. It seems somewhat unwholesome to know that much about such a macabre topic.”
“Non!” said Roger, spraying them with garlic. He was a butcher, immense and sagacious. He’d fought on the Loyalist side in Spain, where he was wounded twice. He was almost grotesquely valiant and fearless, but he understood the primitive calculus of the politics: The Brens were power, and without power Group Roger would be at the mercy of all other groups, and that was more important than the prospect of 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich using the bridge to rush tanks to t
he Normandy beachhead, as intelligence predicted they would surely do.
“My dear brother-in-arms Roger,” said Basil, “the bridge will be blown, that I assure you. The only thing in doubt is whether Lieutenant Beets—”
“Leets.”
“Leets, yes, of course, whether Lieutenant Leets and his team of maquis from Group Phillippe will make it out alive. Without the Brens, they haven’t a chance, do you see?”
“Phillippe is a pig, as are all his men,” said Roger. “It is better for them to die at the bridge and spare us the effort of hunting them down to hang after the war. That is my only concern.”
“Can you say to this brave young American, ‘Leftenant Beets, you must die, that is all there is to it’?”
“Yes, it’s nothing,” said Roger. He turned to Leets with uninterested eyes. “‘Leftenant Beets, you must die, that is all there is to it.’ All right, I said it. Fine. Good-bye, sorry and all that, but policy is policy.”
He signaled his two bodyguards, who after rattling their Schmeissers dramatically film-noir style, rose and began to escort him up the cellar steps.
“Well, there you have it,” said Basil to Leets. “Sorry, but it looks like your number is up, leftenant. You get pranged. Sad, unjust, but inescapable. Fate, I gather. Yours not to reason why, et cetera et cetera. Do you know your Tennyson?”
“I know that one,” said Leets glumly.
“I suppose one could simply not go. I think that’s what I’d do in your shoes, but then I’m not the demo man, you are. I’m the head potato, so I’ll supervise quite nicely from the treeline. As for you, if you decide not to go, it would be embarrassing, of course, but in the long run, it probably doesn’t make much difference whether the bridge goes or not, and it seems silly to waste a future doctor of all the fabled Minnesotans on such a local Frenchy balls-up between de Gaulle’s smarmy peons and that giant, stinking, garlic-sucking red butcher.”
“If I catch it,” said Leets, “I catch it. That’s the game I signed up for. I just hate to catch it because of some little snit between Group Roger and Group Phillippe. Stopping Das Reich is worth it; helping Roger prevail over Phillippe is not, and I don’t give a shit about FFI or FTP.”
“Yet they can’t really be separated, can they? It’s always so complicated, haven’t you noticed? Politics, politics, politics, it’s like chewing gum in the works — it gets in everywhere and mucks up everything. Anyhow, if you like, I’ll write your people a very nice letter about what a hero you were. Would you like that?”
As with much of what Basil said, the words were pitched in a key of meaning so exquisite Leets couldn’t exactly tell if they were serious or not. You could never be sure with Basil; he frequently said the exact opposite of what he meant. He seemed to live in a zone of near-comedy in which nearly every damned thing was “amusing” and he took great pleasure in saying the “shocking” thing. The first thing he said to Leets all those weeks ago at Milton were, “It’s all a racket, you know. Our richies are trying to wipe out their richies so they can get all the nig-nog gold; that’s what it’s really all about. Our job is to make the world safe for nig-nog gold.”
“Jim Leets,” Leets had said, “Sigma Chi, N.U. ‘41.”
Now Basil said, “I can, however, in my tiny British pea brain, concoct one other possibility.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, it has to do with a radio.”
“We don’t have a radio.”
The radio was lashed to Andre Breton’s body which, unfortunately, had hit the earth at about eight hundred miles an hour when Andre’s parachute ripped in half on the tail spar of the Liberator that had dropped them the night of the invasion. Neither the radio nor Andre had been salvageable, which is why Team Casey was down 33 percent strength before its other two-thirds landed under their chutes a minute or so after Andre had his accident.
“The Germans have radios.”
“We’re not Germans. We’re good guys, remember? Captain, sometimes I think you don’t take this all that seriously”
“I speak German. What else is necessary?”
“This is crazy. You’ll never—”
“Anyway, here’s my idea. I cop a German uniform tomorrow, and walk into the garrison headquarters at eleven a.m. With my command presence, I will send Jerry away. Then I will commandeer his radio and put in a call. A fellow owes me a favor. If his groundwork is solid, it just might work out.”
“Jerry will put you up against a wall at 11:03 and shoot you.”
“Hmm, good point. Possibly if Jerry is distracted.”
“Go ahead, I’m all ears.”
“You blow something up. I don’t know, anything. Improvise, that’s what you chaps are so good at. Jerry runs to see. While Jerry’s got his knickers in a wad, I enter the garrison headquarters, all snazzed up, Jerry-style. It’s easy for me to commandeer the radio, make my call. Five minutes and I’m out.”
“Who are you trying to reach on radio?”
“A certain fellow.”
“A fellow where?”
“In England.”
“You’re going to radio England? From a German command post in occupied France?”
“I am. I’m going to dial up Roddy Walthingham, of the Signals Intelligence Branch, in Islington. He’s some kind of mucky-muck there and there are sure to be lots of radios about.”
“What can he do?”
“You didn’t hear this from me, chum, but it’s said he’s one of the pinks. Pink as in red. Same team, just different players, for now. Joe for king, that sort of thing. Anyhow, he’s sure to know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody in the big town.”
“London?” asked Leets, but Basil just smiled, and Leets realized he meant Moscow.
So Basil turned himself into a passable German officer with little enough trouble. The uniform came from an actual officer who had been killed in an ambush in 1943, and his uniform kept in storage by the maquis against the possibility of just such a gambit. It smelled of sweat, farts, and blood. It was also a year out of date in terms of accoutrements, badges, and suchlike, but Basil knew or at least believed that with enough charisma he could get through anything.
And thus at eleven a.m., as Leets and three maquis from Group Phillippe prepared to blow up a deserted farmhouse half a mile out of town the other way from the bridge, Basil strode masterfully to the gate of the garrison HQ of the 113th Flakbattalion, the lucky Luftwaffers who controlled security there in Nantilles. The explosion had the predictable effect on the Luftwaffers, who panicked, grabbed weapons and other equipment, and began running toward the rising column of smoke. They were terrified of a screwup because it meant they might be transferred somewhere actual fighting was possible.
Basil watched them go, and when the last of several ragtag groups had disappeared, he strode toward the big communications van next to the chateau, with its thirty-foot radio mast adorned with all kinds of Jerry stylistics; this one had a triangle up top. These people!
It helped that the officer whose uniform he wore had been a hero, and a lot of ribbons and badges decorated his breast. One, in particular, was an emblem of a tank, and underneath it hung three little plates of some sort. The other stuff was the usual mishmash of bold colored ribbons and such, and it all signified martial valor, very impressive to the distinctly nonmilitaristic Luftwaffers who hadn’t run to the blasts and didn’t know skittles about such stuff but recognized what they took to be the real McCoy when it appeared.
Basil got to the radio van easily enough and chased the duty sergeant away by proclaiming himself Major Strasser — he’d seen Casablanca, of course — of Abwehr 31, top secret.
He faced a bank of gear, all of it rather H. G. Wellesian in its futuresque array of dials, switches, knobs, gauges, and such forth set in shiny Bakelite.
The transceiver turned out to be a 15W S.E., a small, complete station with an output power of 15 watts, just jolly super and what the doctor ordered. The frequency range embraced tho
se used by the British and the mechanics for synchronization between transmitter and receiver was very advanced.
He faced the thing, a big green box opened to show an instrumentality. Two dials up top, a midpoint dial displaying frequency, the tuner below, and below that buttons and switches and all the foofah of radioland. Had he a course on it somewhere in time? Seems he had, but there was so much, it was best to let the old subconscious take over and run the show.
It was very Teutonic. It had labels and sublabels everywhere, switches, dials, wires, the whole German gestalt in one instrument, insanely well ordered yet somewhat overengineered in a vulgar way. Instead of “On/ Off” the switch read literally, “Makingtobroadcast/Stoppingtobroadcast Facilitation.” A British radio would have been less imposing, less a manifesto of purpose, but also less reliable. You could bomb this thing and it would keep working.
The machine crackled and spat and began to radiate heat. Evidently it was quite powerful.
He put on some radio earphones, hearing the noise of static to be quite annoying, found what had to be a channel or frequency knob, and spun it to the British range.
He knew both sides worked with jamming equipment, but it wasn’t useful to jam large numbers of frequencies, so more usually they played little games, trying to infiltrate each other’s communications and cause mischief. He also knew he should flip a switch and go to Morse, but he had never been a good operator. He reasoned that the airwaves today were totally filled with chatter of various sorts and whomever was listening would have to weigh the English heavily, get interpretation from analysts, and alert command, and the whole process had to take days. He decided just to talk, as if on telly from a club in Bloomsbury.
“Hullo, hullo,” he said each time the crackly static stopped.
A couple of times he got Germans screaming, “You must use radio procedure, you are directed to halt, this is against regulations,” and turned quickly away, but later rather than sooner, someone said, “Hullo, who’s this?”
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