by James Thayer
One of the inconveniences of waterfront property in Lake Forest was that after Morgan turned off Sheridan Road, he had to traverse almost a mile of unimproved dirt road to reach home. That night, they were returning from Mrs. Potter Palmer's party at which the beginning of the Christmas season for Chicago society was officially declared. Five minutes after the stormtroopers crossed the fence, Mr. and Mrs. Morgan almost collided with the parked bakery van. Mrs. Morgan had indulged excessively and did not notice the car's violent swerve other than to smile even more sweetly and drunkenly.
"Jesus," Morgan yelped as he tromped on the brakes. The car careened to a stop several inches short of an oak tree alongside the dirt road. He quickly looked at his wife, who was still smiling, charming the jockey box.
"Now, what miserable idiot would park a truck on a one-lane dirt road?" Morgan asked angrily as he climbed out of the car. He immediately saw the truck's cab was empty. "And why park it here? We're the only house at the end of the road."
Anger turned to puzzlement. One of the truck's doors was open. It creaked as a gust of wind swung it. Nothing unusual about the cab. Horsehair tufts clung to a spring that stuck through the dilapidated seat cover. As Morgan stepped to the rear to check the truck's panel doors, a word painted on the side caught him as if a hand had grabbed his hair. "Bakery." He stared at it for five full seconds before its import registered. Daniel Morgan ran back to his car.
John Crown and Everette Smithson leaned against their car, parked at the Glencoe police station. Thirty minutes before, the Chicago police chief had received a relayed phone call from a Glencoe schoolteacher who had been walking his dog on Sheridan Road. The teacher had spotted the bakery truck crossing the suburb's northern city limits. Lieutenant Sullivan and the two agents had sped to Glencoe, but no further sightings had been reported. The Glencoe Police Department was now in on the search. Nothing.
The Great Lakes Naval Training Station had been notified. The station's security chief ordered the three secret submarine-tracking devices surrounded by shore patrolmen. Nothing else on the base had anything but the lowest secrecy priority. The guard at the gates and on perimeter patrols was doubled. No other defense measures were ordered.
Sullivan sprinted from the Glencoe station and dived into his squad car. Crown was already in when the engine jumped to life, but Smithson had barely stuffed himself into the back seat before the car screeched away from the curb.
"One of the millionaires on the North Shore spotted the truck," Sullivan said as he jammed the transmission into second gear. "It's in his driveway, which is a long dirt road right next to the naval station."
"What's there, Everette?" Crown asked.
"Three top-secret buildings," Smithson puffed. "By now they're surrounded by shoulder-to-shoulder sailors. Nothing else of importance." Smithson shrugged his meaty shoulders. "I can't figure out why they'd head there."
"They've gone to a lot of trouble," Crown said. "And they've got a lot of powder with them. So whatever their target is, it'll be blown to shreds."
Erich von Stihl unrolled the mat and placed it on the step in front of the security hut. It was a triggering mechanism Graf had made that afternoon out of odds and ends. The mat had several layers. Topmost was a rubber mat stolen from a front porch. It had "Welcome" printed on it in raised block letters. Under the rubber was a sheet of wire screen cut from a screen door. A dozen or so thumbtacks were inserted into the screen, with the points sticking down. Next was a quarter-inch-thick piece of cardboard. Below that was another piece of screen, this time with no tacks. The bottom layer was a second piece of cardboard. Electric wire was tied to the top screen, and another strand to the bottom screen. Von Stihl connected one wire to a small battery, which he hid under the step. He began to unroll wires that would connect the welcome mat and battery to the blasting cap implanted in the dynamite. When the mat was stepped on, it would be a completed and very deadly circuit.
Inside the hut, Hans Graf twisted two screws out of the bottom of the telephone and lifted the cover off the mechanism. A phone made a perfect triggering device. Graf dug out two alligator clips from his kit and snapped them onto two screw connections on top of the phone's circuit box. He tucked a small relay box onto the phone chassis and connected the alligator clip wires to it. A phone does not have enough power to throw a switch. The relay box would cure that. He replaced the phone cover and reinserted the cover screws. He taped these relay-box wires to the phone cord, so they were almost impossible to see. He shoved the wires through a floor-level crack at the base of the wall, then placed the phone in the exact position on the desk it had been when he entered the shack.
The siren switch was on the wall next to the desk. It was a simple red-button/black-button box connected to the sirens on the roof. Graf stepped through the shack door, carefully avoiding von Stihl's welcome mat, and closed the door behind him. At the side of the shack, he found the relay-box wires and attached a battery to one of them. The phone trigger was ready.
It took Graf thirty seconds to turn the siren into the third switch by grafting a roll of wire onto the siren wire. With the telephone-wire roll in one hand and the siren roll in another, he backed away from the building, allowing the strands to play out from the unwinding rolls. He followed the welcome-mat wires von Stihl had laid a few minutes before.
When he reached the amphibious-craft garage, Graf dropped one of the rolls and continued backing toward the weather-observation post. At the side of the weather post was the crate of explosives the colonel had left there. With his SS dagger he cut the wire from the roll and split the strand into its two wires. He peeled back an inch of insulation from each, then wrapped the wires around the two prongs of the blasting cap that he had inserted into the paraffin that morning. The bomb was ready. He tucked the package under a floor beam at the side of the weather building.
"Ready?" von Stihl asked. He had placed two packages under the floor of the pom-pom station.
Graf's laugh sounded like the crackling of icicles. "Let's wait to watch this."
"Five minutes after they go off, there'll be more sailors swarming over this place than there are in the North Sea Fleet. We can't risk it. Let's wire the garage and get away from here."
The last paraffin container was wired and placed inside an open window of the garage. Von Stihl whistled for Lange. The three stormtroopers began retracing their steps to the perimeter fence. The next patrol was due in three minutes, not long enough to construct the arch, so they would wait in the tall grass north of the fence.
Chief Petty Officer Bud Holz didn't envy his counterpart in charge of the sub-tracking trainers. They would be overworked and overwrought that night. Christ. A saboteur alert. The first real one in the naval training center's history. The rear admiral had doubled the perimeter patrols and stationed two armed jeeps at each of the gates. The CPO guarding the sub trackers had roused all his men to stand watch. Three shifts of angry shore patrolmen and a half-dozen yawning German shepherds patrolled the northwest quadrangle, where the secret equipment was located.
Holz's jeep growled down the dirt road toward his security headquarters. Despite the wool gloves, his hands seemed frozen to the steering wheel. His southeast quadrant was a sleeper. It was bordered on the north by a small creek and on the east by the lake. It contained numerous training facilities, but nothing that would make a likely target. The saboteurs were going after something big, concluded the rear admiral at the emergency briefing a few minutes before. He couldn't imagine what it was, and neither could Holz. Probably a false alarm from the nutso Chicago cops. But then, that truck hijacking this morning that was splashed all over the papers was real enough. The hoods had gone loco. Holz would never understand it. He pumped the jeep's accelerator, and the four-wheeler jumped forward, spewing gravel behind it.
Gunning the jeep down the short dirt road to the shack was the only action Holz got in the navy since he had been withdrawn from fleet duty. He had been on the deck of the Arizona almost a year
before, when a Japanese bomb tore into the foredeck and blew out his right eardrum. For some reason he failed to understand, the navy considered the injury sufficient to disqualify him from Pacific duty. He loathed stateside assignments, particularly this, guarding several desolate acres of Lake Michigan shoreline.
The jeep slid to a stop in front of the security hut. Holz flipped the headlights and ignition off, then stared balefully at the shack. What an asshole job. An idiot could coordinate perimeter patrols. He spent most of his time in the shack reading or playing cards with shore patrolmen. Holz climbed out of the jeep and mockingly saluted each of his charges, the pom-pom trainer, the weather station, and the garage. He walked to the shack, wondering what variation of solitaire he would play that night. He knew every one ever invented. At least he had an electric heater in the shack, unlike the poor schmucks at the front gates. They would freeze their tails off tonight.
CPO Bud Holz would testify at the navy inquiry that he never saw the welcome mat. He stepped up to the shack door as he had done a hundred times before, but this time his foot pressed the thumbtacks through the layer of cardboard and into contact with the lower screen, completing the circuit. The antiaircraft trainer exploded with a horrendous roar. Holz dove onto the shack floor, a response learned the hard way last December. Bits of wood blew by the shack door, and the pressure of the explosion slammed it shut. Windows rattled fiercely. Splintered beams and twisted metal shards landed heavily on the security hut's roof. Then Holz could hear nothing else over the waves.
He rose to his feet and stupidly tapped his right ear. The Arizona explosion blew the eardrum out. Maybe this one fixed it. No such luck. He quickly scanned his hut. No damage. He opened the shack door and stepped outside. The remains of the pom-pom trainer were on fire. Wind rushing in from Lake Michigan fanned the flames out over the dirt road. Jesus, he thought, if it hadn't been for the two buildings in between, I would've bought it.
The rear admiral's warning came back to Holz. He shook his head to clear it. Could it be the saboteurs? What else? A pom-pom doesn't explode on its own volition. Holy shit. Real saboteurs in his southeast quadrant. He ran back into the hut and stopped in front of his desk. What's the damned procedure? He held his hands in front of him like a wrestler about to meet his opponent, and spastically wiggled his fingers as adrenaline energy built inside him. The procedure. His eyes fell on the siren button. "Local breach requires local alert first," flashed from memory. He punched the red siren button.
A ferocious explosion tore the weather post from its foundations and hurled it over the embankment, where it rolled in a flaming ball to the beach. The blast blew out the security hut's windows and threw Holz onto his desk. Booming thunder stung his brain. His hand was numb, speckled with glass chips from the window. He could hear nothing but a dull ringing deep in his head. He forced air into his lungs. It smelled of cordite and fear. Holz rolled off the desk and stood on weak knees. Tiny crystals of glass dug into the CPO's palm as he tried to brace himself against the desk. His hand jerked back from the glass slivers and brushed the phone. Only then was Holz reminded of his duty: warn the base. With his uninjured hand he lifted the phone receiver.
Holz's head seemed to erupt with pressure as the amphibious-craft garage was torn apart by the last bomb. The north wall of the security hut ripped from its frame and flew across the room, sweeping the heater, the desk, and Holz into the far wall. The thin plywood had no noticeable braking effect. Holz smashed through it and landed in the dirt ten feet from the remains of his shack.
He lay on his back without moving, afraid to try. He thought he was conscious. The ringing in his head was gone. Now there was no sound, no waves. A sharp pain in his mouth, and the taste of blood. He had bitten clear through his tongue. His eyes opened. The sky was red from the fires. He coughed. Bits of lung whooped up into his mouth. Bile mixed with blood, and he wanted to vomit. He gagged, rolled onto his stomach, and spit onto the dirt. His chest felt as if airplane cable was wrapped tightly around it, squeezing and suffocating him. He struggled to his knees. Consciousness began to seep from him, so he spread his hands to avoid toppling. He focused on staying awake and concentrated on the ticking.
It wasn't ticking. It was the crackling of the fires. Holz could hear. Elation welled within him. There were no more buildings to blow. They'd gotten them all, but they hadn't gotten his good ear. He croaked a laugh, but choked it back when blood from his tongue splashed to the ground.
It took Holz sixty seconds to rise to his feet. The back of his head pounded rhythmically. He stumbled past the wreckage of his hut, which was illuminated by the fires rapidly consuming the remains of the other buildings. Fighting numbness in all his limbs, Holz crawled into his jeep.
Hans Graf would have laughed at the sound of the explosions had it not been for the extra perimeter patrol.
"I thought you said they came around every fifteen minutes, Lange," Graf whispered. The three stormtroopers were kneeling in tall grass north of the fence. An unexpected team of shore patrolmen was walking in and out of the dim fence-post lights along the perimeter.
"It was every fifteen minutes, Colonel," Lange responded, ignoring Graf. "Now it's every seven or eight."
"It means we were discovered before the explosions," von Stihl said quietly. "They wouldn't have had time to set up the extra patrols, otherwise. Someone saw the truck." He scanned the distance between them and the fence. It looked immeasurably more formidable than when they had come in. "We'll have to break for it. Same setup formation. Lange, you go over first and cover us."
They waited in the grass. Von Stihl shivered uncontrollably. Lange nervously flicked the bolt on his Schmeisser. Now the shore patrolmen were alert, searching the grass and woods with their eyes. They had been briefed and had just heard the series of explosions. This SP's rifle was in his hands, not slung over his shoulder. The dog sensed his master's urgency and kept his nose to the frozen ground. The patrol disappeared down the line of lights.
Von Stihl was about to sprint for the fence when he heard the low rumble of a jeep in first gear approaching from the east. He quickly ducked back down into the grass.
"They've called in the cavalry," Graf said.
The jeep had a thirty-caliber machine gun mounted behind the front seat. An angry SP crouched behind it, gripping the firing handle, looking for something to blow away. The jeep prowled down the fence and vanished in the darkness.
Von Stihl rose to his knees and checked the fence line. He could see no other patrols. "Let's go."
The Germans left their blind at a dead run. Graf scooped up the ladders as they passed. Navy guards would be in sight in two or three minutes.
The escape arch was erected even faster than when they had come in. While von Stihl surveyed the fence line, Lange hustled up and over the ladders. He jumped to the ground and dashed for the cover of the woods. He posted himself between two elms and looked back as von Stihl climbed over the arch. No patrols were in sight. Nor could he hear a jeep's engine. As von Stihl raced to the forest edge, Hans Graf began the ladder climb.
Lieutenant Michael Sullivan was pulled through the woods by the instincts of an Irish setter after a duck. He and the agents had heard the explosions a half-mile back. Smithson had remained at the bakery van with his pistol drawn. Sullivan and Crown lurched through the Stygian woods, stumbling over exposed roots and vines. Crown could barely see Sullivan's back as they high-stepped over the treacherous ground. The cop was puffing hard. His pistol was drawn, and he was begging for a fight. Crown hoped they weren't the first to find the stormtroopers. Sullivan and he were carrying popguns compared to the German's weapons. A fire fight would be short and predictable. Crown saw the flickering light of a fence post through the thick bank of trees.
Sullivan clawed through a thorny bush to the edge of the fence clearing just as Graf reached the apex of the ladder arch. They saw each other at the same instant. Precariously perched atop the ladders, Graf raised his submachine gun, but was too late.
Sullivan fired three times. Graf's fingers convulsed around the Schmeisser's trigger, and it spat out an aimless stream of bullets into the ground. He toppled forward into the barbed wire. His arms caught and twisted in the wire as he somersaulted down and away. The huge body almost reached the ground before it was snapped back by the tension of the barbed wire. Graf's feet swung two feet above the ground, with his arms entangled above him. His legs spasmed several times and then relaxed as Hans Graf died.
John Crown acted without thinking. He yanked Sullivan by the collar back into the woods just as Willi Lange jumped two steps into the clearing thirty yards west of them. The German fired, but the bullets careened harmlessly off trees. His targets had disappeared into the undergrowth. As the echoes of the Schmeisser blast died, von Stihl heard the jeep again. It was rushing toward them along the fence line. From the other direction, two sentries and their dog sprinted toward Graf's body.
"Through the woods, Lange," von Stihl yelled, already plummeting into the protective darkness of the timber.
Crown and Sullivan struggled back to the dirt road. Smithson was behind the car, with his pistol aimed at the woods over the hood. He jerked it toward Crown as he emerged from the trees.
"Christ, it sounds like a war in there."
"It is," Crown answered as he joined Smithson behind the car. "They'll be coming out this way. They're outgunned by the shore patrol behind them."
Sullivan produced a shotgun from the trunk of his car. He crouched behind the bakery van. From the woods came the sound of a fire fight. Several short bursts were followed by a deeper, more ferocious pounding of the navy's .30-caliber. A single shot echoed in the forest. The .30-caliber answered.