by Bill Mesce
“You saw it, too.”
“Those tire tracks? So? We left tracks. Moncrief’s been out there before. He would’ve left tracks.”
“With his jeep, yeah. But those weren’t jeep tracks leading out to the dock, Major. Those tracks were wide and heavy, like a truck. That old fart’s telling us he toodles around on a horse and buggy, but he’s got tire tracks from a truck out to the dock. The ground out there has been thawed and froze up so many times I can’t tell real well how old those tracks are, but maybe a coupla weeks, I’d guess.”
“How can you tell that?”
By the sickly light of the dashboard Kneece’s grin looked sinister. “I’m a good Southern boy, Major. Every good Southern boy has done his fair share of raccoon hunting, and every good ’coon hunter knows how to read sign.”
“Did you find anything out on the dock?”
“Rub marks on the piles, like from a rope. Somebody’s been tying up there. I can’t read that kind of sign, but those marks don’t look that old.”
“You’re not going to tell me you learned all this criminology at the elbow of Uncle Ray?”
“Dick Tracy’s Crime Stoppers.”
They had reached the crest where they parked that morning. To their left were the calm waters of Scapa Flow. In front of them, the moonlit Atlantic heaved restlessly under the relentless wind. Kneece turned off the headlamps and tried navigating the rutted track that led to the wood by the light of the waning moon.
“You think Moncrief is involved,” Harry said. “Otherwise we’d be doing this with him and a squad of his MP’s.”
“I don’t know that he is, I don’t know who else here might be connected, but somebody is. Somebody has to be, besides the old fart. You said this thing needed somebody to organize it at our end, and you’re figuring maybe Edghill in D.C. Wouldn’t they need somebody at this end, too?”
“Somebody who knows the routes and schedules of the air and navy patrols.”
“The plane comes in after dark, in the grass, under their radar, flying down the seam between the patrols. It leaves the same way. They truck the cargo to the dock and it goes out by boat while the patrols have their backs turned.”
Kneece turned the jeep off the track, killed the engine, and let it coast across the icy pasture to a stop.
“Which brings us up to now.” Harry looked apprehensively at the dark wood ahead. “The question of the moment is, what is it we’re doing here?”
“You remember much of your basic training?”
“I remember not liking it much.”
“I hope it comes back to you.” Kneece climbed out of the jeep.
Reluctantly, Harry followed.
Despite the bulk of his parka and heavy boots, the captain seemed to glide easily and silently through the tangled underbrush. Every footfall of Harry’s brought the crack of ice and rustle of dead leaves, the betraying snap of fallen branches. The rustles and snaps seemed to cut through the whiffle of the night wind with a deafening clarity that Harry was certain carried all the miles back to Kirkwall.
Kneece stopped. “Do you think you could try not to make so much noise?”
Harry trod still slower, still more carefully, yet could never match the near-silent tread of Kneece.
Kneece halted at the fence. He extracted a fence cutter from his coat pocket and snipped his way slowly through the links of the fence from the ground up until he’d opened a slit three feet high along one of the support poles. He peeled back one side of the slit and nodded at Harry to crawl through. Kneece followed, then bent the flap back into place. In the dark, with the opening made so close to the pole, no one walking by would see the gap in the fence. Or so Harry hoped.
Through the dense wood, Harry could see the glow of a lit window from the cottage. Mingled with the groans of swaying branches and puffing wind were the muffled strains of music, something orchestral with a low, crooning voice in the lead. Kneece stopped so abruptly that Harry bumped into him.
“What’s the matter?” he whispered, panicked.
Kneece pointed to his ear and then in the direction of the cottage.
Harry listened more intently. He almost laughed. Old Ted was listening to a recording of Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra, with Frank Sinatra singing “Fools Rush In.”
At the edge of the clearing, Kneece motioned Harry to stay, slipped across the clear space to the stone walls, then crept along until he reached the cottage window Kneece snuck a look inside, then beckoned Harry to join him. Beyond the panes, Harry could see Old Ted slouched in one of the chairs, head back, mouth sagging, eyes closed. On the table in front of him was a plate, a few orts of supper nosed round by a pair of cats. A third feline was curled in Ted’s lap, a fourth on the old man’s rising and falling chest. The phonograph had completed its emission of “Fools Rush In.” Harry could hear the hiss of empty vinyl regularly punctuated by the thump of the needle against the hub of the record.
Kneece slipped along the wall, then across the clearing to the barn. There he again signaled Harry to join him. Kneece drew a torch from his parka pocket and handed it to Harry. He pointed to the ground. By the light Harry saw the same wide tire treads he’d seen leading to the cottage’s dock.
“Hold the light on the lock,” Kneece said. “Move around here to block it.”
Under the beam Harry saw Kneece take a small leather case similar to a manicure kit from his pocket. Kneece unzipped the case and had Harry hold it open for him. The captain took off his gloves and drew several needlelike instruments from the case, the stainless steel winking in the torchlight. Kneece inserted the needles into the padlock on the bam door and began to finesse them about.
“Where’d you learn how to pick locks?” Harry whispered.
“A fox gets in your henhouse, you don’t learn to catch him by thinking like one of the hens.” Kneece paused a moment to warm his fingertips with his breath.
“You and your Uncle Ray really ought to send these little gems of wisdom to Reader’s Digest.”
“There we go!” Kneece slipped the padlock clear of its loops, then took the torch from Harry. He started to ease the door open. One of the hinges squeaked. Kneece killed the torch and froze. They both looked to the cottage. Stillness.
Kneece spat on the offending hinge several times, rubbing the saliva into the metal parts. This time the door opened quietly. He ushered Harry inside, closing the door behind them.
The bam was rife with the smells of must and damp hay, leather tack and animals. Harry heard hooves nervously paw the ground. The torch blinked on; Kneece sent the beam to the right, then left.
There were stalls along either side. Immediately to Harry’s left, the torch beam fell on the bony posterior of a cow. The tail flicked anxiously, and Harry had a glimpse of large, nervous eyes, uncannily like his own. He affected what he thought would be a disarming smile and waved a casual hullo to the cow.
“You’re not around animals much, are you?” Kneece muttered. On the captain’s side of the bam were two stalls inhabited by broad-backed dray horses. One of them tossed its head, snorted. Kneece stroked its flank, moving forward to where he could cup the animal’s cheek. “There, there,” he crooned. “Easy, boy Easy” The horse grew still.
Immediately in front of them, blocking their way farther into the bam, sat a stout dray equipped with a hayrack.
“If he uses the wagon to get around with,” Kneece grumbled, “what’s this supposed to be? His spare?”
Harry pushed past the wagon. Kneece now stood beside a hulking shape that, even concealed under a large tarpaulin, Harry easily recognized as a sizable lorry, perhaps weighing in at as much as a ton. Kneece flashed his light at the tires. All were crusted in dried mud. He leaned close for a better look at their treads. Kneece slipped under the tarp and into the cab. Then, finding nothing of note, he slid out and climbed up into the cargo bed. “Major… C’mere and have a look at this.”
Harry slipped under the tarp and stood on the hub of a rear wheel to l
ook up into the truck bed. Kneece was kneeling over several boxlike objects.
“What’re those?”
In answer, Kneece fiddled along the side of one of the boxes, Harry heard the click of a switch, then Kneece slid open a panel on the top of the box and a blindingly brilliant light shot upward.
“What the hell —!”
“Pathfinders use these to signal aircraft for paratroop drops, glider landings —”
“Or what have you.”
“Around here I’d say the ‘what have you’ looks to be the thing.”
Outside the bam, Kneece reclosed the padlock, but instead of leading Harry back the way they’d come, to Harry’s consternation the younger man headed away, skirting the clearing round the cottage in a direction opposite the ocean-front.
“We’re not going back?” Harry whispered, hurrying after Kneece.
“We’re not done yet,” the young man replied grimly
The lorry tracks led them to a gap in the trees, a narrow lane that had been concealed by the canopy of tree branches so tightly knit little of the moonlight seeped through. They followed the tire marks for several minutes, then the wood fell away and they found themselves at the edge of the large clearing Harry had spied earlier that day, the supposed site for Johnnie Duff’s unbuilt manufactory.
A hundred yards or so from the trees, Kneece called to Harry and pointed at the ground. Here, the tire tracks appeared to circle and cross themselves.
“This is where he stopped and turned around so he could back up,” Kneece explained.
“Back up to what?”
“Should be right along here. Here we go.” Kneece’s light had fallen on another tire imprint, this larger and running at a right angle to those of the lorry.
Harry was impressed at the width of the tire mark, nearly twice that of the lorry. “What kind of truck is that?”
“The kind that flies. Keep going and y’all’re going to find another one parallel to this one, and in between them a smaller one.”
“Left landing gear, right landing gear, tail wheel in the middle.”
“Oy!” The shout echoed across the field.
Harry and Kneece froze. Kneece switched off his torch.
“‘Oo’s out there, eh?” Harry heard the voice of Old Ted Bowles.
The old man was invisible against the shadows of the trees.
“What do we do?” Harry whispered to Kneece.
“Get down.”
“What?”
“Down!”
BOOM!
Harry instantly recognized the blast of a shotgun. Old Ted no doubt had nothing in his hands as elegant as Taffy Macnee’s Purdy, but the weapon sounded just as lethal.
“Jesus!” Harry hissed and clawed the hard earth, trying to pull himself closer to it. He closed his eyes, the equivalent under those circumstances of a terrified child pulling the bedclothes over his head so as not to see the monsters rising up out of the dark to devour him. “What now?” he asked Kneece.
“Now we run!”
“Where?” poor Harry demanded.
But Kneece was already bolting across the field. Hearing the clatter of Old Ted reloading the shotgun in the dark behind him, Harry scrambled to his feet and took off after the fading footsteps of Kneece.
The captain was soon lost in the shadows of the woods.
Harry ran blindly. For the moment, he opted for simply trying to put as much distance between himself and Old Ted as possible.
“Woody!” he hissed out into the gloom ahead of him. “Woody!” He crashed into the underbrush, fending off branches that tore at his eyes, caroming off tree trunks in his path. Bulling his way through the woods, he collided with the barrier fence, bounced off its springy links, and fell painfully onto his backside.
BOOM! The pellets from the double-barreled blast ripped through the brush behind him.
Harry pulled himself to his feet and instantly fell victim to another collision, this time with Woody Kneece, who’d been running along the line of fence.
“I can’t find the hole!” Kneece said.
“What?”
“The place where I cut through! I can’t find it! I don’t even see the jeep!”
The captain continued along the fence, running his gloved fingers along the links, trying to find the gap. Harry followed at his heels.
They could hear Old Ted slogging through the brush behind them, sounding terribly close and horribly angry, swearing oath after oath at the brambles and branches pulling at him.
“We’ve gotta go over!” Kneece told Harry.
“What do you mean —”
Kneece went into a squat, his hands together in a stirrup. “C’mon, Major! Unless you think you can climb it!”
The nearing sound of Old Ted erased any hesitancy Harry felt. He stuck his boot into Kneece’s clasped hands and pulled himself up the fence as Kneece shoved him upward. The topping strands of barbed wire bit into his gloved hands as he stepped free of Kneece’s laced fingers, but the toes of his boots slipped on the links, too big to find purchase in the narrow apertures.
“Dammit, Major,” Kneece growled and leapt onto the fence like a fly. He scrambled upward, perched himself at the top to haul Harry up. The two men, awkwardly engaged, teetered atop the fence. “Jump!” Kneece bellowed, then pushed Harry over the top. BOOM!
It was less a leap than a fall: Harry barely managed to get his feet under him before slamming into the ground. His ankles buckled under the impact and he toppled over.
“There’s the jeep!” Kneece called out.
Harry saw nothing but stars of pain. He felt Kneece grab him under one arm and jerk him to his feet. The stars multiplied. Harry felt himself sliding free of Kneece, then he was prone on the ground.
“Woody? Woody!”
Kneece was gone.
BOOM! The metal fence sang as the lead shot whined off the links.
Somewhere ahead, quite close by, the gears of an engine ground, a motor roared, and then brakes squealed as the jeep pulled to a stop beside him, shielding him temporarily from the fence, the passenger door open above him. Somehow, Harry found the strength to pull himself inside. While his feet were still dangling in the night, Kneece whipped the jeep into gear. The vehicle bounded across the moonlit pasture, leaving the cursing Old Ted and his menacing shotgun behind.
Even after Kneece found the road, he didn’t turn on the headlamps until they were almost to Stromness. Harry was surprised — and not a little unnerved — to see, in the light of the dashboard, that Kneece was smiling.
“Was that something?” the captain said, sounding giddy. “I swear, Major, I swear that old sumbitch damn near parted our hair with that shot at us on top of the fence. It couldn’t get any closer!” Kneece chortled over this, evidently assuming this brush with death to be some sort of coup.
Harry had neither the strength nor breath to tell Woody Kneece how little he thought of his exuberance. “You know, Woody, I’ve been a lawyer almost fifteen years without getting anything more serious than a paper cut. You’ve almost gotten me killed twice in the last two days!”
“It’s nice to get out from behind the desk once in a while, right, Major? Hey, you think their mess hall is open this late? I could really use something to eat after all that skedaddling around. How about you?”
“There’s something wrong with you, Woody. Something really wrong.”
Woody Kneece laughed again. Dropping his voice into a Bing Crosby bass, he began crooning “Fools Rush In.”
Chapter Seven: Tartarus
Harry was standing over the Officers’ Mess billiard table weighing one of the.45’s in his fist. The gun looked as unnatural in his hand as a second thumb. His fingers flexed about the grip, his index finger held cautiously clear of the trigger. “Somebody’s going to have to show me how to use this,” he said.
*
Though England sits as far north as Canada’s Goose Bay, by grace of that phenomenon known as the Atlantic Drift, Harry stepped ont
o the tarmac of the American bomber base at Duxford and turned his face skyward, basking in the warmth. Saturday, December 18th was a particularly pleasant day in East Anglia. The sun was a vivid yellow orb in a sky of winter cobalt, tinting the mud and harvested wheat fields into squares of the muted brown and amber Gainsborough favored in his days there.
An Army staff car and driver waited for Harry and Kneece by the lollipop-shaped hardstand where Doheeny’s aeroplane was directed to park. The staff car driver brushed by them to load their bags in the car’s boot. Harry sighed happily, feeling like a knight-errant shedding the load of his armor.
“We’ll probably be in London for a couple of days, Captain,” Kneece told Doheeny. “There’s no reason you and your men can’t enjoy some stand-down time. I just ask that wherever you are you check in with Operations twice a day. If we’re going to need transport, that’s where I’ll leave a message. I promise no more at-a-minute’s-notice stuff.” And he was off for the car.
“Well,” Harry said to Doheeny.
“Well,” said Doheeny. He held out his hand to Harry. “Seems like this trip is all hullos and good-byes.”
Harry grasped the pilot’s hand. “Until the next hullo, then.”
*
“Everything looks smaller than I thought it would.” The sentiment did not keep Kneece from avidly pressing his face against the staff car’s window as the humble shops and flats of Camden gave way to the Victorian poshness of Mayfair. “Where’s all the famous stuff? Like Big Ben and Piccadilly Circus?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Everything looks pretty good. I mean, I thought with all the bombing…”
“You’ll see more damage closer to the river, down in Westminster. The worst of it came down on the other side of the Thames.”
This was all as new to Kneece as the snows of Massachusetts and Goose Bay’s polar bears. His bright eyes devoured each brick, each passerby’s countenance, the pubs and greasy-smelling fish-and-chip shops, the restaurants with canopied entrances and liveried doormen.
Harry fidgeted stiffly. They’d had to pull over three times on the narrow country road to make way for convoys of American Army lorries. The aerodromes on their route all buzzed with the bombers and fighters of the 8th Air Force, and one stretch of farmland had been turned into a sea of Army tents, rolling on acre after acre. When Harry’d first arrived in England a year earlier, those same fields had still been home to wheat and cows. Now, with its sixty air bases and swelling complement of Army camps, so many of his countrymen were stationed in East Anglia alone that American and Englishman alike had begun calling it Little America.