MATT HELM: The War Years

by Keith Wease

  I knew a pilot who flew the Flying Fortresses, dumping death and destruction all over Germany. So finally the flak got his plane, and he bailed out. On the ground, he ran into a German soldier.

  He had his trusty forty-five out, and he probably could have gotten away, but he couldn't bring himself to shoot a man, not face-to-face like that, in spite of all the people he'd helped kill by remote control, so to speak. The German shot him, of course. And he wound up in a prison camp. I visited him in a London hospital where he had been evacuated after being freed in late '44 or early '45. I remember him explaining how he felt when he saw the German, but it was like speaking a foreign language as far as I was concerned. He went home crippled and sick and wasn't much use after that. He could be ruthless as hell saving the world for democracy as long as he was just pushing buttons umpteen-thousand feet up in the sky but couldn't bear to slam a forty-five-caliber slug into a real live human Nazi at point-blank range.

  Chapter 16

  I never discovered where or from whom Mac got his orders. It was fascinating to try to imagine the scene. I couldn't picture a straight-backed West Point graduate actually putting it into plain English; certainly it was never set down in writing, and you'll find no records of our activities in the archives of the Department of War.

  I used to visualize a conference room with a sentry at the door, very hush, with high-ranking general officers in secret conclave and Mac just sitting there in his gray suit, listening.

  "There's the fellow von Schmidt," says General One.

  "Ah, yes, von Schmidt, the fighter-group man," says General Two. "Based near St. Marie."

  "Clever chap," says General Three. This would be in London or somewhere nearby, and they'd all have picked up something of that insidious clipped British way of speaking. "They say he'd have Goering's job if he'd learned how to bend that stiff Prussian neck. And if his personal habits weren't quite so revolting, not that Goering's are anything to cheer about. But I understand that there isn't a female under thirty within a hundred kilometers of St. Marie with a full complement of limbs and faculties who hasn't been favored with the general's attentions - and they're pretty fancy attentions. He's supposed to have a few wrinkles that Krafft-Ebing overlooked."

  Mac would shift position in his chair, ever so slightly. Atrocities always bored him. We didn't, he'd say, go around killing people simply because they were sons of bitches; it would be so hard to know where to draw the line. We were soldiers fighting a war in our way, not avenging angels.

  "The hell with his sex life," says General One, who seems to be of Mac's persuasion. "I don't give a damn if he rapes every girl in France. He can have the boys, too, for all I care. Just tell me how to get my bombers past him. We take it on the chin every time we come within range of his fields, even with full fighter escort. Whenever we learn how to counter one set of tactics, he's got a new one waiting for us. The man's a genius, professionally speaking. If we're going to be given targets beyond him, I recommend a full-scale strike at his bases first, to knock him out of the air for a long time at least. But I warn you, it's going to come high."

  "It would be convenient," says General Two in a dreamy voice, after some discussion of this plan, "if something should happen to General von Schmidt during the attack, or maybe just a little before it. Might save the lives of some of our boys, if he wasn't around to give the last-minute orders; besides keeping him from being back in business within the month."

  Nobody looks at Mac. General One moves his mouth as if to get rid of a bad taste. He says, "You're dreaming. Men like that live forever. Anyway, it seems like a sneaky and underhanded thing to wish for, but if he should happen to fall down dead, about four in the morning of April seventeenth would be a good time. Shall we adjourn, gentlemen?"

  I don't vouch for the language or the professional terminology. As I say, I never learned how it was really done; and I never was a general or even a West Point graduate; and as far as aviation was concerned, it was all I could do, even during the war, to tell a Spitfire from a Messerschmidt. Planes were just something I climbed into, rode in a while, and then climbed out of after we'd landed on some strange and bumpy field in the dark - or jumped out of with a parachute, which always scared me silly. Given a choice, I always preferred to start a mission with a boat ride. I suppose that is another thing I owe to some ancestral Viking; for a man brought up in the middle of what used to be called the Great American Desert, I turned out to be a pretty good sailor. Unfortunately, a great deal of Europe can't be reached by boat.

  The German general's name was actually von Lausche instead of von Schmidt, and he was based near Kronheim instead of St. Marie - if such a place exists - but he was, as I've indicated, a military genius and an 18-carat bastard.

  That particular job had taken only a week. We'd made our touch right on schedule, earning a commendation from Mac, who wasn't in the habit of passing them around like business cards - but it had been a tough assignment, and Mac knew it. He gave us a week to rest up in London, afterwards, and we spent it together. We'd managed, quite illegally, to promote a car - a little twenty-seven horsepower Morris - that I was always having to use my Boy Scout knife on and dismantle that ridiculous electric fuel pump they must have got direct from the Tinker-Toy people. She was very impressed with my cleverness as, of course, she was supposed to be. That made a total of two weeks. I hadn't known her previously, and I never saw her again. If anyone asked me to guess, I'd have said she was still over in Europe. She was a fierce, bloodthirsty, shabby little waif with the gauntness of hunger in her face and the brightness of hate in her eyes.

  She carried a paratrooper's knife somewhere in her underwear and a capsule of poison taped to the nape of her neck, hidden by her hair. She always held the knife as if she was about to chip ice for a highball; it had been strictly an emergency weapon with her. I still carried the folding knife of Solingen steel that she'd watched me take from a dead man to replace the knife that he'd broken, dying. I remembered the wet woods at Kronheim, and the German officer whose knife was in my pocket, and the way the blade of my own knife had snapped off short as he flung himself convulsively sideways at the thrust. As he opened his mouth to cry out, Tina, a bedraggled fury in her French tart's getup, had grabbed his Schmeisser and smashed it over his head, silencing him but bending the gun to hell and gone.

  I'd first made contact with her in a bar, pub, bierstube or bistro - take your choice according to nationality - in the little town of Kronheim, which is French despite its Teutonic-sounding name.

  To look at her, she was just another of the shabby little female opportunists who were living well as the mistresses of German officers while their countrymen starved. She had a thin young body in a tight satin dress, with thin straight legs in black silk stockings and ridiculously high heels. I had briefly noted the big red mouth, the pale skin and the thin, strong cheekbones, but her most striking feature was her big violet eyes, at first sight dead and dull. Then, those seemingly lifeless eyes had shown me a flash of something fierce and wild and exciting as they caught my signal across the dark and smoky room that was filled with German voices and German laughter, the loud overbearing laughter of the conquerors. It was inconceivable at the time that I would soon be making love to this girl in a ditch in the rain, while uniformed men beat the dripping bushes all around us.

  General von Lausche had his quarters - you could spot them by the armed guard in front - only a few doors down the street from the tavern I've already mentioned. I kept a long-range watch over the house after I'd made my contact with Tina. It wasn't in the orders, precisely. In fact, I was supposed to show no interest in the place at all, until the time came. I didn't really know what I was watching for, since I'd already received from Tina a full report on von Lausche's habits and the routine of the guards, but it was the first time I'd worked with a woman, let alone a young and attractive girl who'd deliberately placed herself in such a position, and I had a feeling I'd better keep myself handy.

&nb
sp; The feeling paid off later in the week. It was a gray evening, and Kronheim was having a little wet, belated snow just to make things more pleasant. There was a stir of movement and Tina came running into sight partially undressed, a small white figure in my night glasses. She stumbled past the guards out into the slush of the street, carrying in her arms what was apparently the cheap dark skirt and jacket she'd worn into the place an hour earlier.

  I hurried out and intercepted her as she came around a nearby corner. I don't know where she was going, and I don't think she knew, either. It was strictly against instructions and common sense for me to contact her so openly and so close to our target; and taking her back to my place was sheer criminal folly, endangering the whole mission as well as the French family sheltering me. But I could see that I had an emergency on my hands and it was time to shoot the works.

  Luck was with us - luck and the lousy weather. I got her inside unseen, made sure of the lock on the door and the blind on the window, and lit a candle; it was an attic room, not wired for lights. She was still hugging the bundle of clothes to her breasts. Without speaking she swung around to show me her back. The whip had made a mess of her cheap blouse and underwear, and had drawn considerable blood from the skin beneath.

  "I'll kill the pig," she whispered. "I'll kill him!"

  "Yes," I said. "On the seventeenth of the month, two days from now, at four in the morning, you'll kill him."

  That was what I was there for, to see that she didn't go off half-cocked - it was her first mission with us - to make sure of the touch, and to get her out alive afterwards, if possible. There might be guards to silence; that was also my job. I was kind of a specialist at silencing guards silently. I never touched her, or even indicated that I might like to, those first half-dozen days. After all, I was in charge and it would have been bad for discipline.

  "You mean," she whispered, "you mean, you want me to go back?" Her eyes were wide and dark, violet-black now, deep and alive as I'd never seen them. I found myself, quite irrelevantly, wondering just how some middle-level bureaucrat in headquarters had gone about describing the color of Tina’s eyes. "Back to that swine?"

  I drew a long breath and said, "Hell, kid, you're supposed to enjoy it."

  Slowly the darkness died out of her eyes. She sighed, and touched her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. When she spoke again, her voice had changed, becoming flat and toneless: "But of course,

  Cheri. You are quite right, as always. I am being stupid, I love to be whipped by the general. Help me on with the clothes, gently."

  Two days later, we laid in the bushes while they hunted us in the dark and the rain. I ran my finger lightly over the scabbing gash across the back of her bare arm. "How bad is it," I asked.

  "Not so bad now. We killed the pig, didn't we?" she murmured. "We killed him good."

  And we killed the one who almost caught us as we were getting away, and, hiding in the bushes, waiting, we made love like animals to wipe out for her the memory of that Nazi beast. And then the planes came in, those beautiful American planes, coming right on the hour, on the minute, coming in with the dawn, filling the sky with thunder and the earth with fire.

  Chapter 17

  "Good morning, Eric," Mac said. "Did you and Tina enjoy your little vacation?"

  I had just said goodbye to Tina and was still feeling the lingering effects of a wartime romance, this time from the opposite viewpoint. I was the one who watched the other go off to war - if you could call what we do war. Tina had been assigned another mission the previous day and had left this morning.

  Having given us the opportunity to rest up and recuperate from a difficult mission, I guess he felt I needed to get back to work before I started brooding about her. In a way, it was like having a second mother, working for Mac. Not that he was warm and loving, by any stretch of the imagination, but he felt he knew exactly what was best for us at any given time, just like my mother. The fact that we disagreed with his assessment was entirely beside the point, just like my mother. And the sad part was that, after the fact, he usually turned out to be right, just like my mother. It was funny, in a way, and probably some psychologist would make a big deal of it, but none of us ever compared him to our fathers. He just projected a mother image, albeit a particularly feral, deadly mother.

  I tried to shake that thought out of my mind. Sometimes it seems Mac can read my mind - I'd heard others voice the same thought - and I wasn't sure I wanted to be anywhere around if Mac ever got the idea we compared him to our mothers.

  "We enjoyed it very much, Sir," I answered his question. "At least until this morning," I added, dryly.

  "I only promised you a week, Eric. The war presses on and Tina was needed for a special job. Just like I need you for one." His voice was slightly reproving. He was not one to put up with much complaining, and I had taken one step too far with my last comment.

  He went on in his normal voice, having made his point. "It seems you have some professional driving experience." It was not a question.

  Before the war, as kids will, I used to play around with some fairly rapid machinery. I raced some and covered other races with a camera; and a couple of times, on assignments for Mac, I had occasion to do a little driving under fairly hectic conditions.

  "I don't know that you would call me a professional, Sir, but I did do a little racing."

  "That's what I meant. Does your expertise also include starting an automobile when the owner has the keys and is not anxious to share them with you?"

  "You mean hot-wiring a car? Yes, I guess you could consider me experienced in that area. I used to hot-wire my Dad's old pick-up when he wasn't around, until he caught me at it one time and started watching the odometer. But I haven't tried it since the time in college when I lost my keys while …" I shut up, remembering what I had been doing when I lost them. Some things were none of his business, damn it!

  He continued without comment. "I assume it's not something you forget. I have a team that needs a car expert, and you're as close as we've got."

  I didn't say anything to that. If Mac needed a driver, he could find one. Apparently he needed a driver with some extra talents. The nice thing about working for Mac was that he didn't believe in wasting resources. If a job seemed a little demeaning at first, you could bet that, before it was over, you would have brought into play some of the specialized training you'd received to get out alive.

  "Everyone will have his own assignment, but in the event of problems, you will be in charge. This will be your first time into Germany itself, however, so I've assigned a new agent, Herman, to help you out. He was born near Loewenstadt and knows the country, so he can help you plan your escape. In France we have much more help available; however, in Germany, getting clear is often the hardest part of the mission. Herman should be of assistance in this area."

  "Who else is in the team?" I asked.

  "Jacob, Thomas and Brent are the other three. You haven't met them yet. Thomas will make the touch, while the rest of you provide backup and camouflage. Jacob will play the part of a German Colonel, with Brent and Thomas as his assistants. You and Herman will be enlisted, Herman a personal aide and you, of course, the Colonel's driver."

  "I assume the car is up to me?"

  "That's right. You will steal an appropriate vehicle in or near Loewenstadt and drive it to your destination, which will accomplish three things. It will get you far enough away so the theft will not likely be noticed; it will make the car look suitably driven and dusty; and it will provide you with a - I believe the term is 'get-away car'?"

  "Yes, Sir," I agreed. "As in Jimmy Cagney movies."

  "I believe that's where I heard the term." As usual, he ignored my feeble attempt at humor.

  "What's the destination and who's the target?"

  He told me.

  Chapter 18

  I took us through the city through the sparse evening traffic and sent the overpowered beast snarling up the long grade out of town. There was a
release of sorts in turning loose all that horsepower. I've always enjoyed driving, fast or slow, but fast added to the enjoyment. The fact that I was driving in enemy territory with my life on the line in more ways than one, somehow added to the thrill. I do what I do because I'm good at it, which makes me lucky. The world is full of people stuck in jobs that don't suit them. To some extent, it's the danger that drew me to it and kept me in it. I never gamble with money, because neither winning nor losing money means a hell of a lot to me. But when I gamble my life, that's something else again. The biggest goddamn crap game in the world. It's a compulsive thing, and very few women seem to have it. Maybe that makes them more sensible than men, I don't know; but I can tell them they're missing something.