Unless whoever was up there had carefully reconnoitered the hillside and knew just where to crawl in the dark.
Or unless there were others coming up the hillside behind us from the swampy cove even as we lay there with our attention focused on the ridgeline.
“I’m going up,” I whispered.
Hemingway gripped my upper arm, hard. “I’m going too.”
I leaned closer so that my whisper was almost inaudible. “One of us should head to the right where the answering lantern flash was. The other should try to approach the tree… see if the two men are still there.” I knew that splitting our force of two in the darkness was dangerous—if nothing else, we might end up firing at each other—but the thought of someone still out there on the right made my neck hairs crawl.
“I’ll head for the tree,” whispered the writer. “Take your flashlight. We don’t want to open up on each other.”
We had taken thick squares of red flannel cloth and wrapped them over the ends of our flashlights so that only the dimmest of red glows filtered through. It was supposed to be our recognition signal.
“Meet back here as soon as we check the areas,” whispered Hemingway. “Good luck.” He began squirming his way up under the low oak branches and roots.
I crawled out to the right, up and over the rim of our gully, all the way to the cane field before beginning to climb the slope toward the ridgeline. There was no sound now except for the wind in the cane, the surf, and my own muffled panting as I squirmed forward on my knees and elbows, remembering to keep my ass down. The moon would be up any minute now.
I knew when I had reached the top of the ridge only when I crawled out of the thick tangle of pepper bush and felt the grassy but hard-packed trail under me. To my left, the trail wound along the ridge to the tall tree. To my right, it curved left around the wall of cane and stayed on the east-facing slope as it dropped down to the bayside road that ran back to the railroad tracks and the abandoned mill. I scurried across the path and crouched behind a low oak, raising my head slowly and carefully.
No movement in either direction. I could not hear Hemingway fifty feet away as he approached the tree. I glanced down at the bay. Dark water and the rustle of royal palms from the opposite shore under the Doce Apostoles. I must have been almost exactly where the second lantern had been flashed, but I could see no track or sign in the darkness. My guess was that whoever had been here had gone back south on the trail toward the bay, the tracks, and the mill.
Or perhaps they were waiting just behind those low scrub oaks around the bend in the trail.
I slung the Thompson over my head, barrel down under my left arm, and pulled the .357 Magnum from my holster, sliding off the safety and setting my thumb on the hammer. Moving in a crouch and only for quick bursts, I started south down the trail, dodging from side to side, squatting behind cover and pausing to pant and listen. No sounds but the rattling cane and the increasingly distant surf.
There was a bare patch of trail on the hillside and I crossed it in a crouch sprint, weaving all the way, my stomach muscles tensed and waiting for the shot. It did not come. At the bottom I waited twenty seconds for my breathing to calm before stepping out on the old roadway that ran along the shoreline here. If Hemingway got in trouble now, it would take me a couple of minutes to run up the slope and down the ridgeline to get to him. And quite possibly run into another ambush.
This isn’t smart, Joe, I thought. Then I began moving south down the old road. When the mill had been working, this road probably had been smooth gravel, but now grass and vines grew waist high in the center and only two faint ruts showed. I ran while crouching, trying to keep my shoulders at about the height of the grass, the pistol raised and ready. My instincts told me that in this high grass and darkness, knife work might be called for.
Someone moved about a hundred yards ahead of me, right where the wall of cane was broken by the old railroad lines. I dropped prone and aimed the pistol with both hands, knowing the figure was out of range but waiting for another movement. Nothing. I counted to sixty and then got up and began sprinting in that direction, jumping from rut to rut at random intervals, feeling the tall grass whip at my legs and elbows.
There was no one on the road at the terminus of the first abandoned railroad line. The rusted rails running into the cane field curved out of sight about fifty yards in. The cane was so high and dark in there that it looked like a railroad tunnel. Far ahead and to the left, I could see the two abandoned docks running out into the bay. Both were empty.
The goddamned crescent moon was rising. Because my eyes had adapted to the dimness of the starlight, it seemed like someone was suddenly shining a searchlight on the bay and hillside. I stayed to the left, in the shadow of the high grass there, and loped to where I could see the smokestack and the docks.
There were two abandoned brick buildings about a hundred and twenty yards ahead, where the processed cane had once been loaded onto flat-bottomed barges. The broken windows and rooftops were perfect sniper roosts now. I lay on my belly in the grass of the road and considered my options. The road curved around the hillside here toward the buildings, the hill beyond, and the actual sugar mill, a quarter of a mile beyond the docks. Unless I tried to cut through the jungle and cane field behind these first buildings, I would have to pass them along the road with the moon behind me. Even crawling, I would be a target for anyone on the second floor or roof of the old buildings. I had the Thompson and the Magnum… neither of which would be worth shit to me for another seventy or eighty yards. Someone with a rifle and scope near the stack could take me out as soon as I came around this curve of the hill.
If it had not been the two infiltrators firing, then there had to be at least two other people out here tonight—the one with the lantern and the one who had done the shooting. It had sounded like a Luger or Schmeisser firing, but God alone knew what other weapons they were carrying. Or how many other men were out there.
It was time to be a coward.
I turned and crawled on my belly until I was around the bend and out of sight of the buildings and the docks. Then I ran in a loping crouch back the way I had come.
The ridgeline was still silent. I could crawl straight ahead and see if Hemingway had checked out the area from where the shooting had come, but I decided to head back to our duck blind first. I crawled along the edge of the cane field until I reached the gnarled oak that had been my landmark, and then started down the hill toward our gully. Ten yards out, I rose just enough to hold up the flannel-covered flashlight and flash it once, very quickly. Then I dropped back into the shrubbery and waited, pistol aimed. An interminable fifteen seconds later, a dim red circle flashed once in the gully. I holstered the Magnum and crawled ahead.
“THEY’RE BOTH DEAD,” whispered Hemingway. He was sipping from a silver whiskey flask. “The Germans who came ashore,” he said. “Both dead under the tree. Shot in the back, I think.”
“Anyone else around?”
He shook his head. “I checked the east slope all the way down to the bay road. Crawled through the brush on either side of the ridgeline. Then I covered everything on this side of the hill back to the Lorraine. No one’s here.” He took another sip. He did not offer me a drink.
I told him about the glimpse of the figure by the railroad tracks and my decision to turn back.
Hemingway just nodded. “We can check it in the daylight.”
“Be even better for snipers then,” I said.
“No,” said Hemingway. “They’ll be long gone. They did what they came to do.”
“Kill the two men who landed,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“But why?” I said, knowing that I was just musing around. “Why would the Todt Team… if that was who it was… kill their own agents?”
“You’re the professional,” said Hemingway, setting the flask back in the pocket of his safari jacket. “You tell me.”
We were silent for a while. I said, “What can you tel
l me about the bodies?”
Hemingway shrugged. “I didn’t crawl down to them. Good chance they’re booby-trapped. Two dead. Men. Both in German army uniforms. Moonlight was on one of them. Young. A boy. Some gear and crap littered around them… the lantern they used to signal, a courier pouch, some other stuff.”
“Uniforms?” I said, surprised. Secret agents arriving by raft in enemy territory did not make a habit of arriving in uniform.
“Yeah. Basic Wehrmacht infantry, I think. I didn’t see any insignia or division patches or anything… probably removed… but both are definitely in uniform. One of them is lying face up… the one in the moonlight… and I could clearly make out that goddamned Gott Mitt Uns belt buckle they like to wear. The other one, face down, was wearing one of those soft, wool German infantry caps.”
“You’re sure they’re both dead?” I said.
Hemingway gave me a look. “The crabs are already busy at them, Lucas.”
“Okay, we’ll take a look at first light.”
“Five fucking hours from now,” said Hemingway.
I said nothing. Suddenly I was very tired.
“We’ll have to secure the area,” said Hemingway. “Keep watch up there to make sure that no one comes back to loot the bodies.”
“Two-hour watches?” I said. “I’ll take the first one.” I grabbed a canteen and a spoon from the mess kit and started crawling out of the gully. Hemingway grabbed me by the leg to stop me.
“Lucas? I’ve seen lots of dead men. The first war. Reporting in Turkey and Greece and Spain. Lots of corpses. And I’ve seen men die… in the bullring, on the battlefield.”
“Yeah?” It seemed an odd time to brag about that.
Hemingway’s tone shifted, became the voice I had used as a boy in the confessional. “But I’ve never killed a man, Lucas. Not personally. Not face-to-face. Not at all, that I know of.”
Good, I thought. I hope to hell that doesn’t change tonight or tomorrow. I said, “All right,” and climbed up the slope.
IT WAS LIGHT ENOUGH by five A.M. to inspect the corpses.
Hemingway had been right about most of the particulars. Two very young men—one blond, one with wavy, brown hair—both in uniform, both shot twice in the back, both quite dead. The land crabs had come up from the beach and were busy when we arrived in the first light. A few scuttled away, but half a dozen were too busy around the boys’ faces and showed no sign of leaving. Hemingway had removed his pistol and aimed it at one of the bigger crabs that was standing its ground, claws raised, but I touched the writer’s wrist, tapped my ear to signify noise, and used a stick to bat the crab halfway back to the sea.
We crouched by the bodies, Hemingway on one knee and watching the weeds and the ridgeline while I studied the corpses. There were no grenades rigged—no booby traps.
Boys. He had been right about that. Neither man had been older than twenty. The blond one on his back looked to be about Patrick’s age. The crabs had taken both his eyes and been busy with his pug nose and girlish lips. The smell was very strong and rigor mortis had long since set in.
Both men had been shot in the back, evidently by someone concealed on the east slope. It must have been fairly short range—probably no more than twenty feet away.
“We have to hunt for the brass,” I said.
Hemingway nodded and moved down the east slope, keeping his eyes peeled down the ridgeline but also checking the ground. A few minutes later he was back. “The sand’s scuffed in several places. Boot marks, but indistinct. No hulls.”
“Our killer is tidy,” I said softly. I had rolled the brown-haired boy onto his back and was checking his tunic pockets. Nothing. Hemingway had been right about the uniforms: basic Wehrmacht issue, but without insignia or unit designation. Very strange.
Each man had been shot twice, once in the lower spine, once in the upper body. The lung shot on the blond man had exited high in his chest, creating quite a mess and an opening for the crabs, but both of the bullets were still in the other man. I rolled him back onto his face and checked his trouser pockets. Nothing. The same with the blond boy. The trousers were thick wool. These men would be sweltering today if they were alive and had not yet changed clothes.
“Do you think they planned to change clothes once they made contact here?” said Hemingway, seeming to read my thoughts.
“Probably.” Each man had been carrying a Luger. The blond-haired boy’s was still holstered; the boy with curly hair had drawn his before being gunned down and it now lay in the weeds a foot beyond his splayed fingers. I checked the weapons. Neither had been fired.
Most of the gear they had dropped was not worth investigating closely: the broken lantern; a folding entrenching tool; an ammo box filled with compasses, cooking gear, and flare pistol; a rucksack stuffed with ponchos and two pairs of black, civilian street shoes; two Wehrmacht-issued bayonets still in their scabbards; some rolled charts of the area with only Point Roma and this area circled in grease pencil. But one canvas ditty bag was heavy and pliant. I let Hemingway open the brass fastener and root through the bag. He pulled document after document out of smaller waterproof pouches in the bag.
“Good Christ Almighty,” whispered the writer. He showed me a page. It was a photostat of a nautical chart of Frenchman Bay, Maine, showing the proposed route for submarine U-1230 through the bay, complete with morning and afternoon stops clearly marked, culminating in scribbles showing the nighttime disembarkation of two Abwehr agents at a place called Peck’s Point on Crab Tree Neck, north of Mount Desert Island.
“Save that a minute,” I said. “I want to make absolutely sure there are no shell casings around here.”
It was a relief to move upwind from the bodies while we crawled on our knees to check the sand under and around the shrubs in widening circles with the bodies as the locus. We went all the way down to the spit of sand below the cliffs to the north, the bay to the east, and our own gully to the west. Hemingway had been right. There were scuffs in the sand about eighteen feet away on the east slope, in a concealed area just off the ridgeline, where the ambusher had done the deed. One person. Boot marks but nothing distinct. No brass.
“All right,” I said as we moved back into the shade and the stench under the tree. “We’ll check the rest of that bag in a minute. I think that’s what this landing was all about. But I need to see something.” I rolled the dead blond-haired boy onto his face. His arms were so stiff that it was like turning over a department store mannequin. The entrance wounds through the shirt and just below the high belt of his wool trousers were much less dramatic than the exit wound on his chest. I pulled up the young man’s gray wool blouse and dingy undershirt, reached around to undo his belt, pulled it off, handed it to Hemingway, and tugged down his trousers so that the upper parts of his buttocks were exposed. The boy was very pale except where the blood had settled along his back and buttocks during the night. There the flesh was so livid as to be almost black.
I removed my own shirt.
“What in hell are you doing, Lucas?” hissed Hemingway.
“Just a minute,” I said. I clicked open my pocketknife, took out the spoon I had brought from our picnic mess kit, and began cutting into the boy’s back. Gasses had swollen the corpse considerably already, even before the heat of the sun had struck him, and the flesh there was pulled as tight as a drumskin. I knew that the bullet had traveled upward from the entrance wound just above the coccyx, but there was still a lot of digging involved before I found the slug embedded in the third sacral vertebra. Then the digging and prying began in earnest—dulling the scalpel-sharp point of my knife and almost snapping the bowl of the spoon off at one point—before I managed to leverage out the flattened slug.
I wiped my knife and hands on the grass, tossed away the bent spoon, wiped the bullet with my handkerchief, and held it up in the light. The head of the slug had been flattened by bone, but the black nose was still visible, as was the short twist of rifling at the base. I was glad. I did not
want to dig around in the other boy’s upper thoracic cavity until I found another slug.
I showed it to Hemingway. His gaze was fixed on me. “Who are you, Lucas?”
I ignored that. “Nine millimeter,” I said as I pulled on my shirt.
“Luger?” said the writer.
I shook my head. “Black heads. From a Schmeisser machine pistol.”
Hemingway blinked and looked at the slug. “But the killer wasn’t firing on full automatic.”
“No. Single shots. Very careful. One each in the lower spine. One each in the upper back. He took his time.”
“It’s a nasty place to shoot a man,” Hemingway said softly, as if speaking to himself. “Why not in the head?”
“It was night.” I put the bullet in my handkerchief and the handkerchief back in my trouser pocket. “Let’s have a look at those documents.”
“All right,” said Hemingway. “But let’s move upwind first.”
THE SUN ROSE as we studied the documents. The first one was the photostat of U-1230’s course in Frenchman’s Bay.
“This can’t be real, can it?” said Hemingway.
“Why not?”
“It must be… what do you call it in espionage? Disinformation. There’s no reason for two German agents to be carrying this during an infiltration, is there?”
“None,” I agreed. “Unless their mission was to deliver this stuff to someone. Notice that there’s no date set on this sheet for the landing. If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s possible that the photostat is just a tease… that they’re negotiating some price for the date and time.”
The next photostat was more cryptic:
“Code?” said Hemingway.
“It looks like a German attempt to decode a Russian cipher,” I said. “The date down in the corner says 5 March, 1942. It’s recent enough. This one is from German Army Group North and seems to be an intercept of a communication from the Soviet 122nd Armored Brigade.”