Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  Harry, head bowed. In thought? A prayer? Perhaps dwelling on the still-strong smell of cordite in the room.

  “Harry? Harry!”

  “Hm?”

  “Point that the other way, if you please.”

  He’d laid his carbine in his lap, unthinkingly leaving the barrel canted in my direction. “Oh. Sorry.” He stood the weapon on its butt, leaned his forehead against the barrel. “How long’s it been?” he asked after a bit.

  “It’s too dark to see my watch. Harry, I have to ask.”

  “Ask what?”

  “I don’t mean to question your altruism, but… Maybe I’m just jaded, turning into a surly old sod.”

  “What’s your question?”

  “I didn’t know Armando Grassi very well, but what I knew of him… I just can’t believe you’ve gone through these last two weeks for him.”

  “So everybody keeps reminding me.” He flexed the hand he’d fractured on the lieutenant’s jaw four months previous.

  “Why, then? Ach, you should be home where it’s safe” — I shivered theatrically — “and warm. I have a suspicion.”

  He nodded at me to go ahead.

  “You feel some fault lies with you for what happened last summer, aye? And you’re looking for some way of balancing out the scales.”

  He was silent for a long moment, as if considering. “Maybe. In part.”

  “The other part being?”

  Another moment. “Did I ever tell you how I got into the service? Joe Ryan pulled strings. Look at me, Eddie. Do you think I could’ve passed the physical without someone pulling strings for me? Once he got me in, he greased my way to my majority. He brought me with him to England and fed me the good cases to pump up my record. Eddie, I was in England for nine months. I lived like a king in Rosewood Court, sleeping on clean sheets every night in a four-poster bed.” A sigh. “I needed to earn it, Eddie.”

  “Earn what?”

  “Nine months of that and a failed case. For that I got a ticket home. I don’t know how to live with that, Eddie.”

  In a world gone insane with indecency, the man had enough conscience in him to shame a pope. It made me feel small. It also made me feel what a great tragedy it should be for the shoddy state of the world to lose that last good soul.

  I heard a deep rumble out of the east, becoming more distinct as it grew nearer. “Aeroplane?” I asked Harry.

  He nodded.

  “The X-ray plane?”

  He was looking skyward, judging. “Doesn’t sound like a C-47. Sounds bigger. Maybe one of those big flying boats that do the patrols. I wouldn’t think any of them’d be going up until this snow clears.”

  “I thought Moncrief fixed it so none of them’d be about at all.”

  Harry shrugged, as puzzled as I.

  The engine noise grew louder — the aeroplane must’ve been quite low — setting crockery and cookware rattling, the windowpanes fluttering in their frames. It faded, its drone drifting in and out of the rising and falling wind like a distant bee.

  Then another noise, similar, an engine — I thought, for a moment, the patrol plane might be circling back — but this one had a different, deeper pitch, a slower, more muscular rhythm.

  Harry rose, just enough to look over the sill of the window. What moon there was was dulled by the clouds and swirls of snow, but we could make out the foot of the dock, the rippling surface of the water. The far end of the dock, however, was lost in darkness. From somewhere beyond that, someplace out on the water, came this second, nearing engine.

  “I think this might be them,” I said. Surprising how hoarse even a whisper can be.

  A flashing spear of a light — small, probably nothing more than a torch or Aldis lamp — came out of the dark, swept this way and that, finally settling on the end of the dock. We could not see the yacht, only the glowing disc of the lamp, the pilings silhouetted in its beam. The engine dropped, revved, dropped again as the helmsman tried to sidle the vessel up to the dock. The engine died, we heard some voices — barked commands — the thud of boots as a crewman jumped across to the dock to moor the boat.

  A call from the boat: “Oy! Teddy-boy! Are ye about, old Ted?”

  A few murmurs, then the cadence of several pairs of boots trudging our way along the dock.

  Harry and I slid back down to the floor.

  “Good luck,” Harry said softly I gave a tight nod I hoped he could see.

  I brought the carbine to my chest and slid my finger round the trigger. In the cabins cold I felt sweat trickle into my eyes.

  We heard the footsteps — couldn’t tell how many — leave the planking and crunch across the snow and frozen mud in front of the cabin. One set of steps paused:

  “Oy! I say, Ted-o!”

  A mumbled consultation with his mates, then several sets of steps crunched toward the bam, and a single set toward the cabin. We never found out why: a search for hot coffee, a pack of cigarettes, maybe he just wanted a moment out of the cold.

  Perhaps from my vantage it was easier to discern the parting of the group. I looked to Harry to see if he recognized it as well, but he signified nothing from his crouch below the front window. I waved in his direction, but there was no response. I turned my carbine on the front door, toward which the single pair of boots seemed to be heading.

  “Hold it right where you are! All of you!”

  Woody Kneece.

  “Goddammit!” Harry hissed.

  “This is the United States Army! Throw down your weapons and surrender or we will open fire!”

  It began with a single shot that hugged the snow-filled air round the cabin for an incredibly long moment, coming — so it sounded — from the man who’d been heading for the cabin. Then a flurry of shots from Woody Kneece’s position. A flurry answered from the bam.

  “Now!” Peter Ricks yelled. “Nownownow!” and the crack-crackcrack of his carbine.

  I rose and saw the two shadows near the bam, each armed with a rifle, their forms flashlit by muzzle flares, firing toward Peter Ricks as they backed their way to the bam.

  I didn’t aim, didn’t even raise the carbine to my eye — I just tucked it in my shoulder and began squeezing the trigger.

  A burst of automatic fire, a Sten, from the boat.

  “Woody! Woody!”

  It was Harry He was standing in the window, the carbine forgotten in his hands. Then a noise from deep inside him — a cry, a scream, something of anger, something of pain, all commingled in one horrible, inhuman explosion. His carbine came up and he began firing, even as he screamed, firing, pulling the trigger even when the weapon had nothing left to spit out.

  “Reload, Harry! Reload!”

  I was scrambling to push a fresh magazine in my own weapon. Loaded and cocked, I turned back to the bam. In the muzzle flashes I saw a figure on the snow-dusted ground. The other man had made the bam, was snapping off shots at Ricks through the open gap of the door.

  Then the whole of that side of the island filled with the ghastly, flickering light of parachute flares, drifting down in a line following the shore. Peter Ricks exposed himself, jumping to the top of his cluster of covering rocks, waving his arms in mad signals into the sky.

  Those heavy engines came down, so low the whole cabin vibrated, so near I thought the cabin roof would be tom clear.

  “Stay down!” Ricks yelled to us, then jumped into the rocks.

  It came down like rain in hell, a cascade of tracers from the machine guns of the thundering Sunderland overhead. The guns raked the length of the dock, flinging up a shower of splinters, scything their way toward the yacht. I saw figures jump clear of the boat as the deluge of machine-gun fire tore away at the varnished wood and brass fittings until some of those fiery little lances managed to burrow deep enough into the hull to find the petrol tanks.

  The blast sent a gust of warm air through the room. Again the cabin rattled. The yacht rose up nearly clear of the water as the aft section dissolved in a swirling, ugly, mott
led ball of flame.

  In just seconds the boat settled to the bottom, leaving only the shattered, smoldering bridge above water amidst a stinking halo of floating, burning petrol.

  Peter Ricks had dashed out from the rocks onto the dock, waving an all-clear at the Sunderland, still rumbling about unseen behind the glare of the flares.

  I charged out of the cabin, forgetting my leg. By the dying light of the flares I saw two staggering figures on the end of the dock. Ricks advanced toward them, carbine up and ready.

  “Lie down on your faces! Hands on the back of your head!”

  He signaled me to move on the bam. The man who’d hidden himself there advanced toward me. I raised my weapon.

  “Not me, mate!” he called out, tossing his rifle to the ground and then raising his hands. “I’m done!”

  “Goddammit!” Harry Partly an oath, partly a sob.

  I swung round. He’d clambered up the rocks where Woody Kneece had stood, and was now sliding back down to the bank.

  “Goddammit!”

  Harry took his carbine by the barrel and smashed it down on the rocks, again and again and again: I heard the walnut stock splinter.

  The flares died, the flames at the end of the dock dwindled, the hovering Sunderland drew back up into the snowy sky.

  The rest, as Hamlet said, is silence.

  Chapter Eleven: Great Pan Is Dead

  It took quite a bit of rapping the brass knocker, pounding on the door, and yanking on the bellpull before a bleary-eyed Gordon Fordyce, clad in silk pajamas and dressing gown, his hair an oily tangle, pulled open the door. “Major Voss!”

  Harry pushed past him into the entry hall. “Do you mind? It’s raining.”

  Fordyce peered outside to see if Harry was alone, saw only the empty jeep parked in the drive in the early-morning grayness. It was a chill rain, quickly poisoning the warmth of the hall. Despite the damp, Fordyce remained by the open door, his hand still on the knob, an unsub tie suggestion that Harry was welcome to leave. “What’re you doing here?” Harry shucked off his sodden parka, shook the rain off his crushed officer’s cap, made a show of scraping fresh mud from his combat boots along the edge of the varnished oak step. “You’re up awfully early, Gordie.”

  “I don’t sleep through the night. Insomnia.”

  “Guilty conscience?”

  “What do you want? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I want you out. This is an absurd hour, whatever the reason. If you wish, you may make an appointment —”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Gordie.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  Harry strode over to him, pushed the door free of his hand, and slammed it closed. “Get your tail upstairs, wake up your boss, and get his fat arse down here.”

  Fordyce took a step back. For the first time he took in the ruffled American, his unshaven face, bleary eyes, filthy combat fatigues. “I don’t know what your particular madness is, Major, but if you don’t leave immediately, I’ll ring your superiors. To hell with that — I’ll ring the police and have you arrested.”

  “I’m asking you nice to go get the chief, Gordie, and I wish you’d do it. I’ve had a long, bad night. I’m not in the mood for a lot of discussion.”

  Fordyce picked up the receiver and began dialing. “Enough of this. I am calling the police! I’ve given you fair warning —”

  Harry moved with a suddenness unexpected from someone who appeared asleep on his feet. He grabbed the receiver out of Fordyce’s hand and yanked the telephone wire free of its wall connection. Going to the door, he opened it, and tossed the phone out into the rain. “There! Now we won’t have that distraction.”

  “You are mad!”

  “Mad, Gordie? I’m downright pissed.”

  “Gordon!”

  They both turned to the staircase. Sir John Duff stood there on the landing in his velvet dressing gown.

  “Sir John, this man —”

  “It’s all right, Gordon,” Duff said, making calming motions with his hand. “I take it you’re here to see me, Major? Gordon, why don’t you start a fire in the library?” Fordyce hesitated. “Now.”

  As Fordyce disappeared into the library, Harry pointed through the archway of the salon where the Christmas tree, now heavily adorned with ornaments of foil and crystal, stood.

  “Pretty,” Harry said. “But I wouldn’t count on Santa leaving too many presents under there tonight. His sleigh got hung up in the Orkneys last night.”

  “I’m not sure I get your meaning, Major.”

  Harry studied the aristocratic face looking down at him. “Are you that good a liar, Sir John? Or is that Gordie’s job — dealing with the dirty work?”

  Duff’s face remained serene. He walked slowly to the bottom of the stairs. “Would you like to meet more comfortably?” He indicated the library

  “Why don’t you invite your houseguests? They always seem to have an interest in things that aren’t any of their business.”

  “As it happens, my guests have departed.”

  “Really.”

  “Called away. Personal matters.”

  “No kidding.”

  He again motioned toward the library. “Please, Major.”

  Harry scooped up his parka and trudged into the library. Gordon Fordyce had the beginnings of a blaze going in the fireplace. “Why don’t you sit here by the fire?” Duff suggested. “Would you care for something to eat, Major? From the looks of you, I doubt you’ve had breakfast. No? Coffee perhaps? Gordon, bring us a pot of tea, please. Don’t wake Alden, he needs his rest. Tend to it, won’t you, Gordon? There’s the good fellow.” Duff waited for Fordyce to leave. “Please, Major, sit down before you fall down. Good lord, you look utterly done in!”

  Harry dropped into a chair, letting his parka drop to the floor beside him.

  “Better, eh? Let me get this fire up a bit for you. If you’d like, I can provide you with a bath. Perhaps you’d like to rest a bit, use one of the spare rooms. We can always have this discussion later today.”

  “We could. But it’s fresh in my mind now. You know how that is.”

  Duff juggled the fireplace logs about with a set of tongs until the fire crackled warmly. “Ah, there we go! You were saying something about the Orkneys?”

  “Why don’t you ask little Gordie about it? He’s the night crawler, he must’ve already gotten the call. I’m sure he didn’t want to disturb his lord and master. Or maybe that’s what his job is — to keep you insulated.”

  Duff lowered himself into the plush chair across from Harry. He drew one leg across the other, tucked his dressing gown primly closed. “Again, Major, I’m afraid I don’t follow Are you saying you’ve just come from the Orkneys?”

  “I went up there last night, flew back early this morning.”

  “Good lord, no wonder you’re such a sight.”

  “Major Astin Moncrief is under arrest. Mr. Bowles is under arrest. We’re holding some of the men who brought your boat into your dock on your land.”

  “My boat? Did you hear that, Gordie?” Fordyce had appeared in the doorway, tea things on a silver tray in his hands. “He’s talking about the Rascal, aren’t you, Major? The major says —”

  Fordyce set the tray down on a table by the fireplace. He poured two cups of tea. His hands were trembling.

  “Gordon had just been looking into that for you, Major,” Duff went on. “When was that, Gordon? Just yesterday, wasn’t it?”

  “Just yesterday. Milk, Major? Sugar?”

  “Remember, Major? When you were here last we said we’d look into that for you. We have some troubling news, I’m afraid.”

  “Somehow I’m not surprised,” Harry said.

  “Tell him, Gordon.”

  Fordyce handed Harry his cup. “It seems the Rascal has gone missing.”

  “Do tell,” Harry said.

  “Evidently, it’s not the first time, either. There was an exemployee of Sir John’s, a man named Carlyle Booke. He was, at the time, a
very trusted member of the household staff at a lodge Sir John keeps in Galloway.” The ever-so-smallest bit of a smile: “Perhaps you know of it?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “Sir John moored the Rascal there. Booke had open access to the lodge grounds and the boat. In fact, it was his responsibility to care for the boat.”

  Harry set the teacup down on the table, untouched. “Let me guess: You fired Booke.”

  “Several years ago, in fact. I can’t remember the reason at the moment. Some form of misconduct.”

  “I’ll bet that was around the end of 1940.”

  That little smile again. “It may have been, yes. How did you know?”

  “I’m clairvoyant.”

  “It seems that Booke never quite turned in all his keys, that he’s actually been availing himself of the grounds and the boat for some time. We didn’t know, because —”

  “You haven’t been up there since the war.” Harry yawned. “Well, you don’t have to worry about your boat anymore. Or Mr. Booke. Your boat — what’s left of it — is on the bottom at the edge of your dock. Eight men came in on the boat. Five are dead. Carlyle Booke is one of them.”

  “Good lord!” Sir John Duff gasped. “Gordon! Did you know about this?”

  “First I’ve heard.”

  Harry made an unimpressed clucking sound with his tongue. “I suppose that’s your way of telling me you have no idea what Booke’s been doing with your boat?”

  “It’s a yacht, actually,” Gordon Fordyce said.

  “It was a yacht,” Harry reminded him.

  “Mind yourself, Gordon,” Sir John snapped. “Major, are you implying that we might somehow be involved?”

  “What could be going through my head to make me imply that? I must be deranged.”

  Sir John shook his head, quite stricken by the news. “It’s so much to grasp. You said… you said Old Teddy was under arrest? Yes? Was he connected to all this? And Major Moncrief?”

  “I’m afraid that’s how it looks, Sir John,” Harry replied.

  “I never would have thought that of them. Of any of them. I mean, we were forced to let Booke go, but I hardly thought… And Old Ted, of all people…” Sir John shook his poor trouble-plagued noggin.