Vengeance 10

by Joe Poyer

  Memling moved to the doorway. One guard was standing in the centre of the floor, a machine pistol slung over his shoulder, waiting patiently. Judging by his posture, the man was an expert at this business. Good, Memling thought. His actions would be predictable. The second man was sitting at one end of the couch, which had been moved to provide a clear view of the road through the open window. He was relaxed, one arm over the back. As Memling’s eyes adjusted to the gloom he saw that Francine lay, unmoving, in the space next to him. Occasionally he stroked her thigh.

  Memling eased back until he was deep in the shadows. The moonlight was now bright enough to cast a patch of silver light through the open window. Deliberately he kicked the washstand, waited a few moments, then did it again. This time the noise drew a sharp order for quiet. He remained motionless for nearly five minutes, then skittered a hairbrush across the floor. The order was louder this time, and to encourage the officer in the other room, he knocked against the porcelain washbasin. That seemed to do it; he heard the sound of boots hurrying across the floor.

  As the officer came through the door he would have seen a shadow and felt stiffened fingers thrust into his mouth to prevent a cry, and the searing pain of a knife as it drove into the unprotected flesh below his breastbone and up into his heart. He might have glimpsed his killer in the instant before he died of massive haemorrhage.

  Memling eased the man down, mumbling loudly enough for the remaining soldier to hear, then walked into the other room, shaking his head and muttering about incompetence. The soldier had turned as he came through the door, then swivelled back to the window as Memling knew he would. He veered without breaking stride and in a single paralysing stroke drove the knife down into the man’s neck. The soldier went rigid, his back arched. Memling released the knife and put his entire weight behind a chopping blow to the throat. The man was dead before his knees buckled.

  Memling had to go back into the bedroom to search the officer’s body for the keys to Francine’s handcuffs. The girl fell against him, barely conscious, and Memling eased her around into the moonlight. They had beaten her badly. Her blouse had been slashed with a knife, and they had used burning cigarettes on her chest and stomach. Memling slipped the gag back on, lifted her on to one shoulder and slung the dead guard’s machine pistol across the other. Francine was like a deadweight as he crossed the yard to the staff car. He had no idea how long it would be until the four dead SD men were discovered, but he knew that both of them had better be damned far away by that time.

  He laid the girl on the rear seat and hurried back to the trees for the radio. He started for the house, then hesitated. If the SD knew where to find him, they would certainly be listening for transmissions. If he tried now to get through to London, they would know something had gone wrong. He tossed the radio on to the floor beside the machine pistol - an MP40, he noticed, almost an old friend - and settled into the unaccustomed left- hand driving seat.

  The road was deserted, and he drove on until the trees closed in on either side. It took only a few minutes to reach a point where the road ran above the river for a short distance. Opposite, a spit of land divided the river Peene. The channel was deep but rather narrow here, and he stopped the car and lifted out the girl and the machine pistol. Memling then reversed for some distance, put the engine into first gear, and shot towards the bluff. He rolled out at the last moment, and the heavy car leapt the bank, landing nose-first several metres into the river to settle beneath the surface with a sullen belch of air.

  Memling covered the tyre marks as best he could, picked Francine up, and shouldered the machine pistol. The water was cold but the current less swift than he had expected. Francine gasped and struggled, but he forced her to swim the stretch of deep water to the island.

  Memling allowed them only a few minutes’ rest in the shelter of a clump of willows. Francine was exhausted and wanted only to sleep, but Memling dragged her with him through the trees to the far side. The channel was not as wide here, and they crossed easily. The girl was confused and on the verge of hysteria, but Memling knew that the best antidote was to keep her moving. Relentlessly he drove her along the riverbank, north towards the village of Freest.

  The stillness had grown palpable; nothing moved in the night. The moon had been hidden by a bank of cloud moving swiftly out of the north, and the darkness was intense. The storm was signalled only by a blinding flash of lightning and an earsplitting crack of thunder. Wind howled suddenly across the marsh, and the deluge was total; rain lashed by the wind blew at them from every direction. Francine’s fingers dug at his arm in terror, and he hunched down, trying to shield her with his body. The storm front seemed to take hours to pass, and even when it had done so, the rain continued to pour down unabated. The howling wind was unnerving, and without the river as a guide, Memling would have lost direction.

  Francine had recovered enough to understand the urgency of the flight, but she was so weak that Memling was forced to half carry her. He knew she was in constant and severe pain from the burns, but there was nothing he could do.

  Freest was only three kilometres from the point where they crossed the Peene, but they were forced to circle inland to avoid another village, Kroslin, where a small army garrison had been stationed. Freest was located on the Greifswalder Boden, the bay that emptied into the Baltic proper, above the boom that closed the river to traffic. He had no clear idea what they were going to do when they got there, other than try to steal a boat and move along the coast, away from the immediate vicinity. For the moment the necessity for getting as far away as possible before dawn overrode all other considerations.

  It took them an hour to cover the last kilometre to the village. Memling allowed a few moments’ rest crouched in the shelter of a building. He was exhausted, soaked to the skin, and shivering violently. The girl seemed to have slipped back into a mild delirium, and he had difficulty rousing her. Memling was not familiar with the village, so he could only follow along the top of the low bluff edging the bay. The terrain rose slowly. The wind seemed to have steadied from the north. Suddenly a light flashed, and he heard shouts only a few metres ahead. The girl stumbled and slipped from his grasp as he stopped; her cry was lost in the wind, but the sound scared Memling badly.

  He sank down on his haunches, covering the girl’s mouth with one hand and holding her down with the other. The light flickered in their direction and then swung to show a soldier helping several men tie up a fishing smack that had worked loose from her moorings. Memling had a brief glimpse of a stove-in hull and guessed that she would be on the bottom by morning. Beyond the damaged boat were several others barely visible in the thin beam. He lay down then, covering the girl’s body with his own, resisting her feeble struggles until she was quiet. There was nowhere else he dared go.

  As the rain beat upon his back and mud seeped into his clothes, a plan was beginning to take shape. Sweden lay one hundred and fifty kilometres or less due north. He had not considered attempting escape in that direction because of aircraft and naval patrols. But this storm gave every appearance of working up to a near hurricane. If they could make four knots, they would be in Sweden in less than twenty-four hours. The storm would likely keep the Luftwaffe grounded at least that long. And any naval patrols would have their hands full just staying afloat.

  Memling’s experience with small boats was limited to his commando training, but there was no other choice. The trek to Denmark across three hundred miles of enemy territory was not only unrealistic but suicidal. And with four dead SD agents to his credit, the Nazis would not rest until they captured them both.

  The men on the pier checked the moorings on the other boats and then moved off. Memling picked up the unconscious girl, stumbled through the blackness to the pier, and crossed slimy wooden planks to the third boat in the line. He eased down on to the deck, hanging on for dear life as the waves, even in the sheltered inlet, tossed the boat about. Checking quickly to see that the craft was unoccupied, he laid the gir
l on the deck in the shelter of the wheelhouse and found the engine compartment. The cover slid back with a squeal, and he froze. But the storm was loud enough to cover the firing of an eighty-eight-millimetre cannon.

  Fifteen minutes of feeling about the greasy, fume-ridden space and he had found and set the magneto and opened the fuel petcock, all the while blessing his trainers for their hysterical insistence on operating machinery under the most adverse conditions. It took several tries before the engine coughed into life, and he left it to warm up then while he carried Francine down into the cabin. Even here he dared not risk a light. The cabin smelled of long occupancy and little cleaning, but it was dry. He stripped off her sodden clothing and chafed her cold body, covered her with dirty blankets found by touch in one of the lockers and tied her into the bunk with torn strips of cloth. It would be some time before he dared leave the wheel.

  He then dried the machine pistol and left it under the other bunk. The Walther must have slipped from his pocket some time after he had left the house, but it made little difference now.

  Balancing on the heaving deck, he tried to recall details from the map he had studied so carefully over the past weeks. The Greifswalder Boden was free of most navigational hazards except for the scattered sandbanks that edged this tideless inland sea. They would be the greatest problem, as all channel markers would have been removed at the start of the war. There was, however, no other choice. Accordingly, he slipped the bow mooring, ran back and lifted the stern-line off the cleat, and, as the boat swung about under the battering of the waves, raced for the wheelhouse. There was a grinding crash as the boat collided with the one to starboard, then a second, and he had the engine full astern and the wheel spinning over.

  The boat responded sluggishly to the helm at first, its bluff coaster hull wallowing heavily, and as they cleared the point the gale-force winds laid her right over. Memling fought the wheel, pulling the throttle further and further open until the engine screamed in protest. The boat came reluctantly under control, and he reduced the rpm. He had no idea how much diesel oil there was in the tanks, but knew it would be damned little. There was a sail furled professionally about the boom, and he suspected it saw a great deal of use given the shortage of fuel in Germany.

  By accident Memling found the switch that started the circle of glass set in the windscreen spinning to provide a semblance of visibility. Huge seas, only half-hidden by the darkness, reared about the boat, and spume snatched from the wave crests was flung away by the violent wind like shotgun pellets. Summer gales in the Baltic were doubly dangerous because of its shallowness, and Memling wondered if they would survive.

  The sky began to lighten near dawn, revealing heaving white- flecked mountains of water towering in all directions. Irrationally Memling had expected the storm to moderate, but instead it seemed to increase in fury. The compass showed a north-easterly course. The fuel indicator was broken so there was no way of judging the distance covered or the magnetic correction factor to be applied to the compass; yet he felt they must have come far enough to have cleared the island of Rugen, which formed the northern rim of the Greifswalder Boden, and to have left the dangerous sandbanks behind. Memling was forced to guess at the magnetic correction as he altered course due north, turning the wheel a bit at a time until the compass needle was oscillating north, north-west. He was hazy about the exact directions and distances involved but recalled that the island of Bornholm also lay to the north of Usedom and was less than sixty kilometres from the Swedish coast. But Bornholm was occupied Danish territory, and he had no idea how to distinguish between it and neutral Sweden without actually landing. With the fatalism that his present predicament encouraged, he decided to worry about that if and when the time came.

  The gale slackened a bit towards noon, and he was able to lash the wheel and hurry below. Francine was still in the bunk, but the blankets had been churned into knots. He found and lit a lantern and swore the souls of the four SD men to damnation. Any regrets over their killing disappeared at the sight of her breasts - where they had concentrated the cigarette torture. Bruises on her thighs suggested she might have been raped. When he eased her over, he discovered large crisscross weals on her back where they had used their belts.

  Memling rummaged through the lockers but found nothing with which he could treat her burns and the cuts from the belting. He made her as comfortable as possible in the narrow bunk and retied the restraints. Her pulse was slow and weak, and her breathing noisy.

  The gale picked up in violence again during the afternoon and raged on into the night. He was on the verge of total exhaustion, and some time during the night he fell asleep. A violent twisting, corkscrewing motion shook him awake, and he stared out at the phantom shapes rearing above. The rain had stopped, but the wind had worked up to a screaming frenzy, piling up water in unstable masses that struck down on the boat, threatening to smash her under at any moment. Memling realised that unless he could turn and run before the sea, they would be swamped. He shoved at the wheelhouse door, but it refused to open, held shut by the wind. He wasted no more time then. The waves were silhouetted against the night sky, lighter now that the rain had stopped. He waited until the boat forced its way to a crest, then risked a quick look at the following wave and spun the wheel hard over hard to port, yanking open the throttle at the same time. They dropped below the crest, sheltered from the wind for a brief moment, and the boat fought around. There was a moment’s sickening vertigo as the deck fell away and then a jolt, and the bow buried itself to the hatch cover. For one agonising moment Memling was certain the boat would go right under, but like a terrier, she shook herself free and bounded upright. With wind and wave now dead astern, her motion became easier. Memling slumped on the wheel, gasping for breath, exhausted beyond endurance. For the remainder of the night he fought the seas that threatened to turn them broadside as they raced south-east towards Germany.

  Dawn brought an easing of the violent gale, although the seas were as wild as ever. Again he struggled to bring the boat about towards Sweden. The boat responded well enough and settled down to doggedly bashing a way through the waves. Once more Memling found it possible to lash the wheel and go below for a few moments. Francine’s condition did not seem to have changed, except for her breathing, which had become noisier, making him fear pneumonia. There was not much he could do but try to feed her some of the small supply of food he had found in one of the lockers and make her as comfortable as possible.

  The day wore on into afternoon, and still the boat chugged on into seas that never seemed to change. Memling napped whenever possible and between times stared, hypnotised, at the heaving water. When the engine died, he was surprised but not disconcerted. As the bow fell off he slipped the cord over the wheel and dashed on to the deck.

  He had prepared by tracing the sail’s hauling mechanism and the sheets that controlled its movement. He slipped the lashings that held the canvas sail to the boom, inserted the handle into the winch, and cranked like a madman. The sail came up freely on to the mast, bellying out in the thirty-knot wind, and the boat heeled to windward. Immediately she became easier as the huge cat-rigged sail balanced her, allowing her to heel so that a minimum of hull was in the water.

  Memling found the boat amazingly responsive to the helm. This was what she had been built for, to bend the elements to her will, not to potter along under the impetus of a smelly diesel. There was an impression of great speed as the little boat shot along, bow wave creaming and wake stretching behind, and Memling, exhausted as he was, began to enjoy himself. He checked the engine and found that a cooling line had snapped, allowing the engine to overheat and seize up. But as long as the wind held steady, they were probably making better time under sail, and so he did not mind the loss of the engine. For hours they raced northward close-reached, wind steady over the starboard quarter. At four the weather and the seas had moderated, so he felt it safe enough to go below.

  Francine was in a deep but restless sleep. Her
face was flushed, her hair damp with sweat, and her skin hot and swollen. She tossed against the restraints, fingers plucking weakly at the blankets. When he examined her burns again, he found that several of the deeper ones had turned a puffy grey. Her breathing, Memling was certain, indicated that she had pneumonia. He covered her as best he could and rummaged through the cabin stores, finding only a dried, stringy sausage and a piece of cheese. There was a bare spoonful of tea in a canister, and he heated water over the recalcitrant alcohol stove and tried, without much success, to get her to sip a little. Her murmuring had turned to country German in which only the name Karl - a brother, he supposed, or a friend - was understandable. He made certain the lashings were secure before going back on deck with the rest of the tea. He knew she was going to die, and found himself cursing the fools who had sent her to this fate; then he stopped, recognising the futility of it all. He finished the tea slowly, making it last, and chewed on the tasteless sausage and cheese.

  In late afternoon the sun broke through to cast long pillars of light on to the sea. At seven o’clock he sighted a smudge of land. For a long moment the old fear rushed back. Neutral Sweden or Nazi-occupied Bornholm? There was nothing to do now but wait. He went below then to check on the girl and clean the machine pistol.

  Francine was comatose; her skin was hot and dry to the touch, and her mouth worked with the effort to breathe. Fluid was filling her lungs with unbelievable rapidity. He sat helplessly on the bunk, holding one limp hand. There was nothing he could do other than to keep watch while she died.

  When he went back on deck an hour later, the skies had cleared almost completely. The wind had dropped, and the sail slatted sullenly. The aircraft had apparently been circling for some time, engines throttled back. Memling grunted; its appearance had been inevitable. The plane had twin booms, three engines, and stabilising pontoons slung beneath the wings. He identified it as a Bv138 naval reconnaissance seaplane-an aircraft the Swedes did not use. Half-heartedly Memling waved, hoping they would think he was a Swedish fisherman. The plane made one more circuit and climbed for altitude until he lost it in the darkening sky. Radioing for instructions, he suspected.