The Bavarian Gate

by John Dalmas

  The rubber boat was low enough that any chop would have soaked and any real seas upended them. But the sea was relatively calm, its low smooth swells the aftereffect of some distant storm, perhaps off the west coast of Jutland. Neither Montag nor Anna spoke, even in a whisper. They'd been warned not to, before they'd climbed out the conning tower.

  Now he could see the beach ahead, low and sandy in the starlight, the swooshing of the low surf as regular as a heartbeat. The sub was well out of sight behind them, and Macurdy wondered if crewmen, off in a rubber boat, ever had trouble finding it at night.

  Then the surf gripped them, drove the boat onto the beach and left it grounded. Anna's mobility was hampered by the heavy wool, knee-length coat she wore, and hoisting her over a shoulder, Macurdy stepped out, a petty officer leading, hurrying a few paces to avoid the next wave. Once on dry sand, he put her down. They had no baggage, only Anna's purse and Macurdy's wallet, neither with anything incriminating except their skillfully counterfeited papers and English money.

  "Everything is all right?" the petty officer asked Anna. He'd been told she was in charge.

  "Yes."

  "Well then, good luck." The man took time to shake their hands, then with the other seamen, pushed the boat back into the cold surf, and paddled out of sight in the darkness. Macurdy felt faintly guilty watching them leave, for wishing them a safe arrival, to their ship if not their port. This war, he told himself, needs to be over, and wished he could make it so.

  Then the two spies crossed the sand to the thick bank of heath shrubs behind it. Beach contact, they knew, was the most uncertain point in such landings. The beaches were patrolled, or said to be, and their would-be pickup team might have to lay back, might even have been captured. Another possibility was that the captain had miscalculated, and put them ashore on the wrong beach.

  Anna looked at her English watch. "It is about two hours till dawn," she said. "You might as well sleep. I'll stay awake and watch for our contacts. If I get too sleepy, I'll wake you and we will change places."

  Macurdy lay down on the sand, protected from the damp chill by the Web of the World, and a heavy sweater with a Scottish label.

  * * *

  He fell asleep almost at once, and in that sleep dreamed: He was aboard the liner Queen Elizabeth, with the men he'd served with at Camp Robinson, at Benning, in the 509th, the 505th. Shuddering, he remembered dreaming this before, and had let it get away. The liner became a landing craft, one of many, but he was the only man on his, as if it were some derelict caught up unintended in the assault. Shells rumbled, warbled, roared. The craft staggered in the surf, then grounded. The ramp dropped, and he rushed off into chest-deep water; waves lifted him, set him down, and he was on the beach, no longer alone, one of thousands that packed the sand.

  From between two dunes came giants, 50-foot redheaded monsters carrying great chains, anchor chains, wielding them like fly swatters, beating the beach with them. With each blow, dozens of men died. There were shrieks. A chain smashed the sand in front of him, jerked upward thick with blood and flesh, started back down ... and he awoke, panting.

  The beach had no crushed bodies. There was only Anna standing watch a few yards away, looking at him. He wondered if he'd cried out in his sleep. Shivering not with cold, he got to his feet, thinking of the Voitik sorcerers scheduled to meet the invasion army with spells and monsters. To the east, a band of faint silver lay on the horizon, and already he could see farther than before. Soon it would be daylight, and they had not been picked up. Anna had a decision to make.

  Anna still watching, he began to do side-straddle hops to activate his body. When he'd finished, she said "let's go," and they began walking along the beach until they came to a path leading inland through the heath. They took it.

  Macurdy's attention was not on where they were. It was on the dream beach where monsters tramped among G.I.s, crushing them beneath great clawed feet, smashing them with bloody chains. He hadn't dreamt it idly, he told himself. It was a reminder of duty, a duty he'd only now recognized.

  * * *

  They hiked through heath for much of a mile, while the dawnlight strengthened. Then the heath ended. Ahead was what had been a farm cottage, now a home guard outpost, with two Jeeps parked outside and a uniformed sentry by the door. Anna headed straight for it, Macurdy following, wondering.

  At fifteen yards, the middle-aged sentry pointed his rifle at them. "Stop right there," he said, and they did. "Who are you, and what's your business here?"

  "My name is Anna Hofstetter," Anna replied in upper-class English. "We were just put ashore by a German submarine, and wish to report our mission to the authorities."

  For a moment both the sentry and Macurdy gawped, then Macurdy added, "I'm Lieutenant Curtis Macurdy. We're an OSS mission—the Office of Strategic Services, U.S. Army. I need to get in touch with our superiors, at once."

  The sentry gathered his wits. "Sergeant!" he shouted, forgetting protocol. "Come out here right away!"

  Anna's stunned gaze didn't leave Macurdy till the sergeant arrived. They repeated their identities for him, then he ushered them inside and phoned his superiors. That done, he gave the phone to Macurdy, who reached Grosvenor Square by the confidential number he'd memorized. Afterward the home guard fed them porridge, bread and jam, cheese, coffee—even bacon!

  A jeep from MI5 arrived from London in about an hour, in the charge of a green 2nd lieutenant, to take them into custody. Macurdy fended them off with obstinacy and lies, insisting that he was a 1st lieutenant, and not about to be ordered by a junior officer. Minutes later an OSS jeep arrived with an American captain, and took them away, leaving the unhappy lieutenant behind.

  * * *

  What stuck in Macurdy's mind, though, riding off down the road to London, wasn't his small victory over MI5, or even how quickly things had developed. It was that he'd never suspected Anna's disloyalty to the Nazis. Apparently she'd lived so long in secrecy that her aura had adjusted!

  31

  "Should Auld Acquaintance..."

  Before the day was over they'd both been debriefed, which took until evening because the OSS wanted everything. Among other things, he emphasized that it was Anna who led them to the British Home Guard station and turned them in.

  Normally his mission officer would have debriefed him, but the man was away, and a young lieutenant did it. Handling it quite professionally, even the description of the Voitar and their ears, and the drills Macurdy had done—until Macurdy told about his visit to Hithmearc. The lieutenant got nervous then; it showed in his eyes, and conspicuously in his aura. He's afraid of me, Macurdy realized. He thinks I'm crazy.

  Awakening spontaneously the next morning, Macurdy went to breakfast and found Anna there. Someone had arranged for MI5, the British counter-espionage service, to pick her up. "And Curtis, I'm afraid," she said. "I feel threatened by them. I was, after all, born here to an English mother, and they may consider me a traitor."

  Her aura told him she really did feel threatened, though he couldn't imagine the threat being real.

  "I'll see if I can do something about it," he said.

  When the MI5 man arrived—a lieutenant less green— Macurdy was with her, and explained that she was a German national, working with him. "We've got a mission," he lied. "We'll be leaving before noon."

  "Sorry, chap," the Englishman said, "but I'm afraid you'll have to find someone else. She's our responsibility now."

  Scowling, Macurdy stepped close, pushing his broken nose in the man's startled face. "Look, shit-for-brains, she and I have been working together for months. She may have been born in England, but you people never even heard of her until yesterday. So hear this, and hear it well. The only way you take her with you is to whip my ass first, and you don't have a chance in hell of doing that."

  The man didn't flinch, only grimaced, as if he found such language and behavior offensive. "Your superiors shall hear of this," he said stiffly, and turning, stalked away.

/>   They probably will, Macurdy thought ruefully, then turned and grinned at Anna. "Let's you and me go get a mission officer assigned to us right away," he said. "We need to find our Abwehr contacts and get them rounded up. Okay?"

  She cocked her head at him. "Lieutenant Macurdy, you are a never-ending source of surprises. And yes I think we should." She paused thoughtfully. "Right now you're the only friend I have here, actually. The only friend I have anywhere."

  That sobered Macurdy. With Anna in tow, he went to Personnel to see if Vonnie Von Lutzow was around; Vonnie knew the ropes there a lot better than he did.

  He was around, now wearing a major's oak leaves on his collar. Macurdy got through to him by feeding a WAC secretary a cock-and-bull story. Von Lutzow had just returned from France again, and had spent the day before at Bushy Park, Eisenhower's new headquarters, reporting to the commander's G-2 on a mission he'd carried out in France. He seemed to have enjoyed his day with the high brass, as if the experience had been invigorating.

  Macurdy sketched out his and Anna's situation, and Von Lutzow promised to get back to them that morning if possible, but just then he had a meeting to run to. He left them in his office, ordering his secretary to forget they were there. While waiting, Macurdy asked Anna if she knew anyone or anything that might be useful.

  She smiled ruefully. "My spinster aunt Agnes," she said, "a rather dear soul, in her way, but an intransigent fascist." Anna explained that when she'd been a little girl in England, her mother's older sister, Agnes, had been her favorite aunt. Agnes had always been kind to her, and after they'd moved to Germany, their English vacations had been based on Agnes's flat.

  When the war began, of course, all that had ended. Agnes had promptly and publicly renounced her fascist loyalties, and denounced those who didn't, including Anna's mother for abandoning England and taking German citizenship. But that had been a cover. Dear Aunt Agnes still did things for the Abwehr from time to time, unless she'd been found out since then.

  When Anna had finished her story, Macurdy knew what he wanted to try.

  When Von Lutzow returned, General Donovan's office had already called him, but he delayed calling back When Macurdy told him what he had in mind, the major said he'd set it up. Then he took the two into an office whose occupant was on mission, and left them there. An hour later he was back with hastily drafted mission orders for Macurdy, and a temporary appointment for Anna as an agent, described as a German national. Which legally she was. As mission orders went, these were sketchy. They had to be; MI5 had already complained to Donovan's office, insisting that Anna was a British subject accused of treason. They also wanted Macurdy disciplined. Donovan's deputy had agreed to drag his feet, but the general was trying to cool the usual friction with MI5, so it was important that Anna be gotten out of sight.

  The mission was risky, Von Lutzow pointed out. The local Abwehr apparatus would have known they were expected, and where, because on the night before the landing, the Abwehr would have been contacted by the submarine via radio. The message would have been no more than a code word, but when related to a previous and much more detailed message, it would have indicated when they'd land—namely the night after the code word was received—and on which of several candidate beaches.

  That much Anna and Macurdy already knew. But now they'd show up two days late, which by itself was grounds for suspicion. And the Abwehr, of necessity, was not only paranoid, but ruthless with those they considered traitors.

  On the other hand there were grounds for optimism, Von Lutzow went on. Spy missions were notorious for screwups. The Abwehr was well aware of that, expected it, and to some degree allowed for it. And a few days earlier, the Abwehr station chief and two of his key people had been picked up by MI5, undoubtedly leaving the local apparatus confused and temporarily leaderless. In fact, it was possible they'd never received the radio signal.

  Presumably a new station chief was in place by now, but in an apparatus organized into cells, with restricted communication between cells, a lot of information could have been lost. And Anna could make their connection through Aunt Agnes, who almost certainly wouldn't know when or if a code-word had been received. Nor, presumably, would she have any reason to question Anna's story.

  Finally, Anna read minds and Macurdy auras, and Anna would carry a 6.35mm Beretta pistol.

  Meanwhile MI5 just might have a tap on her aunt's phone. Anna should keep the possibility in mind when she called.

  All in all it didn't look too sticky.

  * * *

  The next morning before daylight, a sergeant drove the two to a village in Essex, where shortly after dawn, Anna dialed her aunt on a public phone. After several rings, a voice answered: "This is Agnes Henderson."

  "Aunt Agnes, I realize this is terribly early, and I hope it isn't too great a shock, but I'm your niece, Anna."

  "Anna? Really! What a nice surprise to hear from you! How is your dear mother?"

  "I'm afraid I haven't seen her for months. I've been away on confidential business, to do with the war effort actually, and been hard to reach. The reason I'm calling is that I'm stranded here in Essex, in East Dunsford, and desperately need transportation to London. For myself and my husband. It's quite urgent, I'm afraid. We have important business to transact there for our employer, and I do hope you can help me."

  "I see. Well." Anna could imagine the wheels turning in her Aunt's mind, and wished she could tune in telepathically at distances like that. "Let's see. It is now?—6:12. Where can you be picked up?"

  "I'm in the lobby of the Dunsford Inn. It's in the center of the village, easily found."

  "I won't be able to pick you up myself, my dear, but someone will be along later today. I'm not sure when. How are they to recognize you? I haven't seen you for years, you know."

  "I'm still small, which doesn't surprise you, I'm sure. My husband is large—he looks rather like a docker, actually— and limps from a war wound. Both of us are unkempt just now—almost as if we'd spent the night walking about the heath—but we'll take the opportunity to tidy up a bit.

  "How may we recognize the person you're sending?"

  "I don't know yet who it will be. I need to phone around. But he'll wear—let's see. Something in his cap. A small flag perhaps, or a sprig of something."

  She paused. "This call is costing you or your employer money, my dear, so unless there is something else that must be said, I'll hang up."

  "No, I think not. It was so nice speaking with you, and so good of you to help. We're registered here as Mr. and Mrs. Monday. And thank you again."

  Anna hung up and turned to Macurdy. "And now, Mr. Monday, it is time to register. I hope they have a room with a private bath. I could use one, and then a nap." She lowered her voice. "Can I trust you?"

  Macurdy laughed, and answered softly: "Colonel Landgraf trusted me, and you know how that turned out. But yes, you can trust me, and I'll trust you."

  * * *

  Macurdy was still napping when their pickup arrived. Anna had been waiting in the lobby with the Times, and leaving the man there, went up to get her "husband."

  She wakened him with a shake. "He's here," she said quietly. "Our ride. He's Irish. He even has a sprig of shamrock in his cap! With his connections that's idiotic during wartime! Let's go before he draws attention."

  Macurdy got up and put on his sweater, the only outer garment he had. "And remember not to talk," she reminded him. "It's best if he thinks you speak only German—I'm sure the station chief does—but the innkeeper knows you're a Yank."

  He'd do better than simply not talk, he decided. Once out of the inn, he'd reinstate fully his persona of Montag the retarded, Montag the handicapped.

  In the lobby, the Irishman hardly glanced at him. His aura reflected a low level of curiosity and a simmering discontent. He'd taken the shamrock from his cap though, as if he'd only worn it for Anna's recognition.

  Also, he'd brought along a small bag from Alice, with travel odds and ends for Anna.
Seemingly she suspected her niece had arrived by submarine, a reasonable supposition.

  Despite his dourness, the Irishman drove wisely, observing the speed limits all the way to London. It was dusk when they got there. Macurdy had wondered if they'd be delivered to Agnes, but instead they were taken to a tenement in a working class neighborhood, where their driver led them up two flights of stairs and knocked at an apartment door.

  "Who is it?"

  Macurdy couldn't identify the accent.

  "It's Wicklow, come to ask after my spectacles."

  The door was thin; Macurdy could hear someone moving around inside. Then it opened, and a smallish balding man looked out at them questioningly through thick glasses. The Irishman fished a small-folded paper from his watch pocket and handed it to him. The baldheaded man unfolded it and read, then looked up. "Come in. Come in."

  "Not I," the Irishman muttered, "I've things to do," then turning, slouched toward the stairs.

  Anna stepped inside, Macurdy following, the bald man closing the door behind them. He looked them up and down without speaking, then led them into the kitchen, and after gesturing them to sit, sat down himself. "What language shall we use?" he asked in English.