MATT HELM: The War Years (14 page)

"Good show, old chap," Ryland said in his calm voice.  “Here come the guards. "

As I yanked the bolt back and slammed it home again and brought the scope back in line, I could see the two guards bending over Sir Robert.  They didn't really know what was going on.  The thunderous report of the Magnum would have sounded vague and directionless down there, like distant blasting.  At that range you can shoot at a deer all day, if you're that bad a shot, and he'll never even stop browsing until you land one close.

I took out the first guard, but the second one finally got smart and ran for the door.  Giving up on him, I chambered the last round as Ryland started spotting additional targets.

"To your left, about ten meters, just below the courtyard.  Why aren't they taking cover?"

I didn't waste my time explaining, concentrating on getting as many shots in as I could.  Since the target didn't matter, I took the most conspicuous one, an officer just standing there looking around for the source of the distant - to him - sounds he couldn't identify.  I settled the crosshairs on the insignia of his hat and let go.  I started hand-loading and got two more in three shots before they started scattering.  It was confused as hell down there and they still hadn't located our position.  I reloaded, feeling a little ashamed at myself for taking advantage of their lack of training for a situation such as this.

I mean, ours was a new type of warfare for them.  They were trained to respond to a direct assault or even long-range artillery fire.  This kind of sudden death accompanied by a small "pop" wasn't something they were used to.  One brave soldier stood behind his machine gun, moving it back and forth in our general direction, hoping to spot a target.  I hope they gave him a medal - posthumously, of course.

I think we got lucky.  From the total confusion apparent in the scene below, the officer I shot must have been the commander of the detachment, and nobody seemed to be giving any orders.  We heard the "rat-a-tat" of machine gun fire, but no bullets came near enough to our position to notice.

I guess the second guard had finally raised the alarm, because several officers came running out of the front door of the mansion.  As they paused in astonishment at the sight of their men running around in all directions, I got one more.  As I looked around for a second one I heard Ryland's calm voice.

"I say, old boy, that last shot seemed to have done it.  They've located us."

I looked around the scope and saw two officers pointing at us - well, in our direction - and screaming orders.  With leadership once again established, several soldiers started toward the gate to get to our hill.  I sent the last two shots in their general direction to slow them down, then grabbed the rifle bag and started crawling down the backside of the hill, followed by Ryland.

As soon as we could stand without being seen, we took off as rapidly as the underbrush allowed.  With the head start we had, as well as knowing the best path through the brambles and bushes, we never even saw any Germans.

After all the planning and the excitement of combat, the escape was anticlimactic.  I spent three days hidden beneath the floorboards of a safehouse - a hiding place that was used for the French equivalent of the Civil War's "underground railway" - and then was brought back to England by boat, once the hue and cry had settled down.

Mac congratulated me and gave me a week off in London.  The official story was that Sir Robert had bravely committed suicide to avoid interrogation by the
Gestapo
.  The Germans might have told a different story, but they weren't asked.  I never saw Ryland again, but would have been proud to work with him, anytime, had the occasion presented itself.

Chapter 15

I'm not particularly tolerant, and I don't really believe that everybody's equal.  Depending on what I needed him for, I'll judge a man by his IQ, or the score he makes on the target range, or the speed at which he can take a car around a track; and anybody who tries to tell me that some people aren't brighter than others, or better shots, or faster drivers, is wasting his time.  But except for recognition purposes, I've never found the color of a man's skin to be much significance in our line of work, and the idea of killing off a bunch of people just because of a slight chromatic difference or religious belief seemed fairly irrational to me.

As more and more information leaked out of the German-occupied territories, the full picture of the systematic genocide on the part of Hitler's regime against the Jews became painfully clear.  We began getting requests for action against various concentration-camp officials, apparently on the rationalization that they deserved to die for their atrocities, never mind the military importance of the target.  It was like we were a new toy in the hands of the bureaucrats, the ones who knew of our existence, and they wanted to expand the rules of the game.

Mac wasn't playing.  "We're not avenging angels," he told us once at our base outside London, "and we're not judges of right and wrong.  It would satisfy my soul to sign the death warrant of every concentration-camp official in the Third Reich, for instance, but it wouldn't contribute much towards winning the war.  We're not in business to satisfy my soul or anybody else's.  Keep that in mind."

There was, of course, one exception to this rule.  Whether to satisfy our souls or prosecute the war, we did try for Hitler himself - that is, certain optimists and egotists among us did, on three different occasions.  I had no part in that.  It was on a voluntary basis, and I'd taken a look at the preliminary reports on the job and come to the conclusion that it couldn't be done, at least not by me.  I wasn't going to get myself killed volunteering for the impossible, although under orders I'll stick my neck out as far as anybody.

After the third attempt - from which, like the first two, no one returned - counter-intelligence started hearing of queries from the continent, reaching the German espionage apparatus in Britain, concerning the possible existence of an Allied
Mordgruppe
aimed at
Der Fuehrer
.  This, of course, although a little off the beam, wouldn't do at all.  For the Germans to suspect the existence of anything remotely resembling our organization - whether aimed at Hitler or anybody else - was bad enough; what really worried Mac, however, was the possibility of the rumor getting back to the States.

All the Germans could do, aside from taking a few precautions, was squawk; but the outraged moralists back home could put us out of business in short order.  Killing Nazis was very commendable, to be sure, but it must be done, they'd cry, according to the rules of civilized warfare: this
Mordgruppe
sort of thing was dreadful, besides being very bad propaganda for our side.  I wonder just how many good men and good ideas were sacrificed before the shiny, cellophane-wrapped god of propaganda.  There were times when I got the distinct feeling that even winning the damn war was frowned upon because it might have an adverse effect upon our public relations somewhere, perhaps in Germany or Japan.

Anyway, our activities were sharply curtailed for several months, and all further volunteers for the Big One, as we called it, were told to relax and forget it; henceforth we'd confine our attentions to less conspicuous targets.  Mac's worst enemies had always been the gentle folks back home.  As he'd said himself once, there wasn't much danger of the Nazis breaking us up, but one softhearted U.S. Senator could do it with a few words.  Ironically, it seems to be all right to plan on, and create the machines for, exterminating millions of human beings at a crack, but just to send out a guy to rub out another who's getting to be an active menace, that's considered very immoral and reprehensible.  I must say that I don't get it.  Why honor and respect a guy who drops a great indiscriminate bomb, and recoil in horror from a guy who shoots a small, selective bullet?

I knew a pilot who flew the Flying Fortresses, dumping death and destruction all over Germany.  So finally the flak got his plane, and he bailed out.  On the ground, he ran into a German soldier. 

He had his trusty forty-five out, and he probably could have gotten away, but he couldn't bring himself to shoot a man, not face-to-face like that, in spite of all the people he'd helped kill by remote control, so to speak.  The German shot him, of course.  And he wound up in a prison camp.  I visited him in a
London hospital where he had been evacuated after being freed in late '44 or early '45.  I remember him explaining how he felt when he saw the German, but it was like speaking a foreign language as far as I was concerned.  He went home crippled and sick and wasn't much use after that.  He could be ruthless as hell saving the world for democracy as long as he was just pushing buttons umpteen-thousand feet up in the sky but couldn't bear to slam a forty-five-caliber slug into a real live human Nazi at point-blank range.

Chapter 16

I never discovered where or from whom Mac got his orders.  It was fascinating to try to imagine the scene.  I couldn't picture a straight-backed
West Point graduate actually putting it into plain English; certainly it was never set down in writing, and you'll find no records of our activities in the archives of the Department of War.

I used to visualize a conference room with a sentry at the door, very hush, with high-ranking general officers in secret conclave and Mac just sitting there in his gray suit, listening.

"There's the fellow von Schmidt," says General One.

"Ah, yes, von Schmidt, the fighter-group man," says General Two.  "Based near St. Marie."

"Clever chap," says General Three.  This would be in London or somewhere nearby, and they'd all have picked up something of that insidious clipped British way of speaking.  "They say he'd have Goering's job if he'd learned how to bend that stiff Prussian neck.  And if his personal habits weren't quite so revolting, not that Goering's are anything to cheer about.  But I understand that there isn't a female under thirty within a hundred kilometers of St. Marie with a full complement of limbs and faculties who hasn't been favored with the general's attentions - and they're pretty fancy attentions.  He's supposed to have a few wrinkles that Krafft-Ebing overlooked."

Mac would shift position in his chair, ever so slightly.  Atrocities always bored him.  We didn't, he'd say, go around killing people simply because they were sons of bitches; it would be so hard to know where to draw the line.  We were soldiers fighting a war in our way, not avenging angels.

"The hell with his sex life," says General One, who seems to be of Mac's persuasion.  "I don't give a damn if he rapes every girl in France.  He can have the boys, too, for all I care.  Just tell me how to get my bombers past him.  We take it on the chin every time we come within range of his fields, even with full fighter escort.  Whenever we learn how to counter one set of tactics, he's got a new one waiting for us.  The man's a genius, professionally speaking.  If we're going to be given targets beyond him, I recommend a full-scale strike at his bases first, to knock him out of the air for a long time at least.  But I warn you, it's going to come high."

"It would be convenient," says General Two in a dreamy voice, after some discussion of this plan, "if something should happen to General von Schmidt during the attack, or maybe just a little before it.  Might save the lives of some of our boys, if he wasn't around to give the last-minute orders; besides keeping him from being back in business within the month."

Nobody looks at Mac.  General One moves his mouth as if to get rid of a bad taste.  He says, "You're dreaming.  Men like that live forever.  Anyway, it seems like a sneaky and underhanded thing to wish for, but if he should happen to fall down dead, about four in the morning of April seventeenth would be a good time.  Shall we adjourn, gentlemen?"

I don't vouch for the language or the professional terminology.  As I say, I never learned how it was really done; and I never was a general or even a West Point graduate; and as far as aviation was concerned, it was all I could do, even during the war, to tell a Spitfire from a Messerschmidt.  Planes were just something I climbed into, rode in a while, and then climbed out of after we'd landed on some strange and bumpy field in the dark - or jumped out of with a parachute, which always scared me silly.  Given a choice, I always preferred to start a mission with a boat ride.  I suppose that is another thing I owe to some ancestral Viking; for a man brought up in the middle of what used to be called the Great American Desert, I turned out to be a pretty good sailor.  Unfortunately, a great deal of Europe can't be reached by boat.

The German general's name was actually von Lausche instead of von Schmidt, and he was based near Kronheim instead of St. Marie - if such a place exists - but he was, as I've indicated, a military genius and an 18-carat bastard.