Great throw, the guardhouse went in a blaze of light and percussion, making Leets blink, stagger, have a momentary loss of reality. His men were next to him, emptying Stens into the wreckage and at fleeing German figures.
“Un autre,” said Leon, another.
Leets got another grenade out, pinned the weight, and this time put more arm into it. It sailed into the darkness, where presumably Germans still cowered, perhaps unlimbering weapons, but the explosion was larger than the last — the Gammon power depended wholly upon how much 808 was packed about the Allways, and evidently Leets had been a little overexcited on this one.
Dust rose, half the lights went out, burning pieces of stuff flew through the air, it was all the chaos and irrationality of an explosion. Hearing was gone for the night. Leets paused for a second to get another magazine into his Thompson, made sure the bolt was back, and raced forward into the madness.
“They must be so brave,” said Millie Beeman to poor, hopelessly in love Frank Tyne. Frank was some kind of Maine ex-cop of French-Canadian extraction (hence his French), a husky guy, not liked by any of the crowd. He was crude, direct, horny, stupid, supposedly a hero but so full of himself.
“Good guys. See, the deal is, it was time to show Jerry some action. The general knew that. So these teams, they were put together as an opportunity for the outfit to show its stuff.”
“And tonight’s the night?”
“Tonight’s the night,” Frank said, with a wicked gleam in his eyes that suggested that maybe he was assuming tonight was the night in more ways than one.
They sat in the bar of the Savoy, amid smoke, other drinkers, and trysters.
“Frank, you should be so proud. It’s your plan, after all. You’re really doing something. I mean, so much of it is politics, society, canoodling, and it has nothing to do with the war. I just get depressed sometimes. Even Colonel Bruce, oh, he tries hard, he’s such a darling, but he’s so ineffectual. You, Frank. You are stopping the Nazis. That is so important. Somebody has to do the fighting!”
She touched Frank’s wrist, and smiled radiantly, and watched the poor schlub melt. Then, fighting the sudden rush of phlegm to his throat, he said, “Look, let’s get out of here.”
“Frank, we shouldn’t. I mean—”
“Miss Beeman — Millie, may I call you Millie?”
“Of course.”
“Millie, it’s the night of the warrior. We should commemorate it. Look, let’s go back to my office; I have a little stash of very fine Pikesville rye. We can have some privacy. It’ll be a great night, and we can wait for news of Team Casey’s strike to come in and celebrate.”
Millie played up the I’m-considering look, going through several yes-why-nots and several no-no-it’s wrongs, before seeming to settle on the yes-why-not.
“Yes, why not?” she said, but he was already pulling on his raincoat over his uniform.
Leets reached the center of the span, when a volley of rifle shots kicked dust and splinters up. He flinched, realized he wasn’t hit, recovered. The fire surely came from the other end of the bridge, where a small security force had been cowering, uncertain what to do. Fortunately the Luftwaffers were as poor at marksmanship as they were at aggression, and so all the shots missed flesh. Leets answered with another long burst from the Thompson, while his comrades chipped in with Stens.
“Throw some bombs,” he ordered, while he himself went to the railing of the span, looked over it.
It was not an impressive bridge. It was, in fact, a rather pathetic bridge. But it would do well enough to support the weight of a thirty-ton Tiger II tank, a column of which under the auspices of SS Das Reich now headed toward it on the road to Normandy. Leets had seen the structure at daylight: two buttresses, heavy logs, no apparent stone construction except at the base. He simply had to detonate enough 808 where the truss met the span to disconnect the support; the span would collapse of its own, or at least cave in enough to prevent passage of the heavy German vehicles; it needn’t be pretty or dramatically satisfying. A little tiny bang would be fine, just enough to get a little bit of a job done.
He knelt, slipped the Thompson off its sling and the satchel of 808 to the ground. He reached into it, pulled out a tin of the SOE-issue Time Pencils (“Switch, Delay, No. 10,” as the tin ever so helpfully read) and beheld the five six-inch-long brass tubes, each with a tin-wrapped nodule at the end. The problem with them, goddammit, was that as clever as they were, they were somewhat retarded in their firing rate. Supposedly they were set to fire a primer in ten minutes, but just as often they went in eight or nine or eleven or twelve. It was a matter of how quickly the acid in a crushed ampoule ate through a restraining wire, which, when it yielded, allowed the spring-driven needle to plunge into the primer, which went bang, causing the larger, encasing 808 to go bang.
So Leets took them out now, all five of them, discarded the tin, and stomped hard on the proper end of the pencils. Immediately a new odor arrived at his nose, that of the just-released cupric acid as it sloshed forward from the shattered vials in five pencils and began to chew at the metal. He wanted them cooking now, eating up the time so that when he and the boys fled, the Germans didn’t have a chance to pull the pencils free. He put them in the bellows pocket of his jump pants, buttoning it tightly.
He squirmed over the railing, eased himself down, flailed with a foot for mooring on the truss, found it, and carefully squinched down until he was beneath the bridge span.
Suddenly he heard a racket far-off. Oh Christ, he almost let go and plummeted twenty-five feet to the sluggish streambed below. Were they shooting at him? But then he recognized the glorious workman’s hammerlike bashing of the Bren gun, knowable because of its wonderfully slow rate of fire that enabled gunners to stay longer on target than our poor Joes with their faster-shooting BARs.
Goddamn, good old Basil! Basil, you snotty, arrogant, unimpressible, cold-blooded aristo, goddamn you, you got me my Brens, and maybe I will get out of this one alive.
Vive le Basil!
Brimming now with excitement and enthusiasm, he called up to Franc, “808, comrade!”
Franc leaned over, holding the satchel; it was a stretch, Franc dangling the satchel by its strap off the edge of the bridge, Leets clinging to the truss, grasping at the thing, which seemed somehow just out of reach, but in what seemed a mere seven hours, he finally snared it securely and pulled it in.
He was monkey-clinging to the truss now, his feet secure on a horizontal spar, crouched under the span, where it was damp and pungent, where no man had been in fifty years or so. He tried to find a way to attach the satchel itself, but in wedging it against junctures, he could never feel it secure enough to consider planted. Ach. It was so awkward. Christ, his muscles ached everywhere, and he could feel gravity sucking at his limbs, urging him downward into the muck below.
Finally, he managed to moor the satchel between his knees. Then, holding on with one hand, he unsheathed his M3 knife from his boot sheath and cut the canvas strap on the satchel. Now what to do with the knife? He couldn’t quite find the angle to get it back into the sheath, so he tried to slide it into his belt, and of course at a certain point it disappeared and hit the water below
Goddamn! He hated to lose a good knife that way. It was odd how annoyed he was at the loss of the knife.
Anyway, he liberated the satchel from between his knees, wedged it into the truss, and used the long strap to bind it securely. He pawed at the gathered, crunched material to find a passage to the explosive, and at last his fingers touched the sticky, gummy green stuff. He smelled almonds. He felt as if he were at a mixer at the Alpha Chi Omega house and the housemother had put little dishes of almonds out, to go with the punch, when all anybody wanted to do was get out of there and head down to Howard Street for some hooch. Now he reached into his bellows pocket, careful since it was at a radical angle and the pencils could easily slip out. But one by one, he removed a pencil and jammed it into the wad of 808 nested in the satchel nested in the bridge.