MATT HELM: The War Years (18 page)

I must have let some of my thoughts show on my face.  Yvette brought me back to reality fast.  "Damn you!" she hissed, her eyes flashing.  "Don't you
dare
feel sorry for me!"

The transformation was startling.  Instead of a little tired and gray and worn, she now looked young and savage and alive, and I realized that I had misjudged her.  At least a part of what I had been reading in her face and eyes was due to excellent acting ability.  In that moment I wondered if perhaps I had been somewhat hasty in feeling a little superior to her.  She no longer looked like someone who had been forced by circumstances to use her talents as her country needed.  I made a mental note to ask Mac exactly who had recruited whom.  This girl was something special.

"I wasn't feeling sorry for you," I lied.  "You just reminded me of someone else there for a moment."

Her eyes softened.  "Ah," she said in French, "a long-lost love, perhaps?"

"Perhaps," I said.  There's nothing like a story of lost love to soften up a female, especially a French female, but it made me feel a little guilty, using Tina in that way.

"It happens, especially in wartime.  But one must go on."  She paused a moment, perhaps reflecting on a memory of her own.  Then she took a deep breath and I watched in fascination as her features relaxed back into the original mask I had first seen.  She was as good as some of the celebrity-impersonators I had seen who could change characters at will.

"We'd better get back to the party before my Colonel gets jealous," she said, back to business-as-usual.  "Come, I'll introduce you."

We went back inside and I spent the next hour observing the social amenities before I could get away.

All of our agents were now in place.  In total, we had nine of ours, not counting Frank and me, and seven of BI's, counting Yvette as theirs.  That made a total of sixteen individual targets.  Only Frank and I knew the whole picture - even Yvette thought that Kiersten and the new second-in-command were the only targets. In an operation so large, it was impossible to select only agents who didn't know one another, so Frank and I had agreed upon a cover story.  Each agent was told that his or her particular mission was in support of a secondary mission.  In the event two or more agents recognized one another, we hoped they would each think the other was assigned to the secondary, less important mission.  We hoped.

After finalizing our plans, I had spent the next three weeks briefing BI's agents and refreshing their training in the finer arts of surveillance techniques, while Frank did the same in London.  BI provided the necessary papers for both groups and we infiltrated the agents into Cherbourg over a four-week period.

There are times in practically every operation when things come to a tired halt and there's nothing to do but wait patiently for them to get moving again.  Finally, things got tense as the news of the Allied landing at Normandy shocked the Germans - and exhilarated the French - but it came as a relief to me.  That information was no longer critical and I was just as happy not to worry about it.

In a way, it made our job that much easier.  With the Germans looking over the hill  - so to speak - for the enemy, they weren't so likely to look closer to home.  Social activities were curtailed drastically, which let me off the hook - there were greater concerns than entertaining a minor Prussian nobleman.  The next several days would have been mildly boring if it were not for the day-to-day possibility of someone making a mistake - including me.  Every time a plane came near, I involuntarily looked up to see if it was the one.

Knowing that nerves would be frayed, I resisted the impulse to "fine-tune" the operation.  They all knew their jobs and no purpose would be served trying to second-guess an agent - or even provide a friendly word of encouragement.  These weren't schoolchildren, they were trained fighting men and women who knew their jobs as well as, if not better, than I.  Unless something changed, and as things stood it was unlikely that anyone would be transferred or allowed leave, I had to stay as far away from the others as possible, even Yvette.  If she needed to get in touch with me, she knew where I was.  I spent a lot of time thinking about Tina, and - on occasion - Yvette, which just made me feel guilty.  So, for the most part, I turned my mind off and read a lot and slept a lot.

One afternoon late in June, while I was sitting outside my hotel reading, a Messerschmidt flew toward the city, trailing smoke.  I knew it was a Messerschmidt because I had been told it would be, not because I recognized it.  As the plane passed overhead, a parachute opened as the pilot bailed out.  Within a few seconds, the plane exploded in a tremendous ball of flame and debris, accompanied by the thunderous roar of the explosion an instant later.  Anyone in town would have to have been deaf not to hear it.

Well, that was the idea.  Our biggest problem during the two weeks Frank and I had planned the operation had been the signal.  We had to get word from the Allied Command that it was time to go, and then had to pass the word to sixteen agents.  We couldn't have everyone walking around with a radio and tracking down that many people to personally pass the word simply wasn't feasible, not to mention mildly suspicious.  We had to have a sure-fire signal that could not be misunderstood.  If the timing was off or somehow a signal was accidentally duplicated - we'd toyed with the idea of ringing the church bell - the whole operation could fall apart.  Frank had come up with the idea of flying one of our planes over the town and Mac had refined the idea into its present form.  Where he got a Messerschmidt I have no idea.  I'd wondered what the odds were of a real German pilot getting his plane shot up and heading for Cherbourg, but I'd been assured that we were out of the traffic pattern, to use some aerial terminology.

Satisfied that the signal had been sufficient, I waited until the pilot landed just outside town and walked back to my chair and opened my book -
War and Peace
, if it matters.  I'd started it in college and had never finished it and I was now remembering why.  The signal did not require an immediate response.  Each target was left to the assigned agent's discretion.  If he - or she - could make the touch discreetly with no witnesses and little chance of the body being discovered prematurely, he would do so as soon as feasible.  Otherwise, we would each wait until nightfall and then pick the best time, with four o'clock in the morning being the deadline, by which time the job became critical, to be accomplished by any means, regardless of risk.

As I pretended to read, I hoped the pilot was as good an actor as Yvette.  Mac couldn't resist a Machiavellian touch and the pilot was to bring the good news - for the Germans, of course - that the Allies were being pushed back into the Channel.  He, and his companions in the
Luftwaffe
were winning the air battle and he, himself, had shot down three of the new American P-51B

Mustangs
, before being hit and, unable to steer, had ended up over Cherbourg.

This should be cause for celebration, making our jobs easier as well as lulling the Germans into a false sense of security, making the scheduled dawn assault more of a surprise.  Sometimes I wondered if the war wouldn't have been long over if Mac had been in charge of it.  You may have gathered by now that, in our outfit, no one went around grumbling about the "old man" not knowing what he was doing - although I understand that's a favorite pastime in the more traditional military units.  If Mac had told us that there was a twenty percent chance we could end the war by parachuting into Berlin in broad daylight and making a direct assault upon the German Command Headquarters, we'd probably grab our guns and head for the nearest airplane, knowing he wouldn't ask us to do something he didn't believe in himself.

Not that Mac wouldn't send one of us out on a mission that was considered important enough to justify the death of an agent.  If the mission was important enough and the chance of success good enough, he would accept it, even though the agent stood little chance of returning.  But if that were the case, Mac would be the first to admit it.  And, because of the loyalty and respect Mac commanded among his agents, not one of us would refuse to go.

As near as I could figure out later, somewhere between forty and sixty people died that afternoon and night, including all sixteen of our targets and two of my group.  The latter two were forced to break in on a party in which both their targets, junior officers, were celebrating the supposed German victory along with their men.  They were both found inside the house, along with seven dead Germans, including the two officers.  They didn't know each other, to the best of my knowledge, so I don't know if they met outside, compared stories and went in together, or if they each went in separately.  In either instance, they gave a good accounting of themselves.

The next day, we found Germans with broken necks, slit throats and small .22 caliber holes in various parts of their anatomy.  Often, we found more than one German in the same spot, indicating a friend had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.  However, most of the excess casualties came from a single occurrence.  One of our agents, a man named Monk, had a thing about weapons that go bang in a big way.  I remembered hearing the explosion around two o'clock that morning, but had been too busy myself to pay it much mind.  As Frank told me later, Monk had wired the house of the Panzer Division Commander with explosives of his own devising and could have blown the building anytime after ten.  However, the Commander was having his own celebration party, complete with female entertainment and, as people kept arriving, Monk simply waited for a full house and pressed the button.  It was hard to tell how many people had been in the house after the explosion tore them apart.

I had met Monk once before and, if I'd known Frank was going to select him for this mission I would have advised against it.  It was on the Hofbaden job that I was assigned the explosives expert we called Monk.  He had hulking shoulders and an oddly sensitive, handsome face.  He had an ascetic face that could light up with a burning enthusiasm when he got that fanatical look in his bright blue eyes.  It was one of his biggest assets.  He was damn convincing playing a dedicated Heil-Hitler boy.  His rather squat, powerful body went oddly with his long, sensitive face, crisp dark hair, and brilliant blue eyes.  There was nothing wrong with him physically, but he gave an impression of deformity nevertheless.  He seemed to have been made of parts intended for several different men.  I'd never decided whether Mac had picked that code name for him because he was built like a gorilla or because he often wore the expression of a saint, and I'd never asked.  There had been more important things to worry about at the time.  I'd have killed him if I hadn't needed him, the murderous bastard.  It was a perfectly simple job, but he wanted to make a wholesale massacre of it.  He got his kicks from blowing up people in bunches instead of one at a time.  He came under the heading of the kind of unfinished business we normally try not to leave behind us.  I mean, it's only in the movies that you make bitter enemies in one scene and let them live to raise hell with you in the next.  If Monk had been an enemy agent, I'd have shot him dead the instant I had no further use for him, as a simple act of self-preservation.  As it was, I'd brought him back to base alive, knowing that I was probably making a mistake, and that it was a mistake the Monk himself would never have made.  I'd got to know the guy pretty well - as well as you can get to know a guy you've risked your life with and beat hell out of.

In a technical sense, Monk was a very good man.  He was a genius in the field of high explosives, where my own knowledge is less than adequate.  The only trouble was, he just loved to see things blow, particularly if the things had people in them.  Personally, if I'm assigned to get one man, I like to get that man.  This business of demolishing a whole landscape with figures - even enemy figures - just to erase a single individual seems pretty damn inefficient to me.  As the agent in charge, I'd had to lean on Monk pretty hard to make him do things my way.  He wasn't the man to forget it.

Well, he'd got to see another pretty building blow up with lots of people inside, including a few relatively innocent bystanders - not that that mattered to him - and when we got back to London, I told Frank about the Hofbaden incident, for what it was worth.  Monk had been under his command and it was his decision what to put in his report to Mac.

Anyway, as I have indicated, I was rather busy when Monk's explosion occurred.  I had had a hell of a time locating Colonel Kiersten.  He wasn't in his house and neither was Yvette.  I finally found someone who told me she had seen him and Yvette walking down toward the beach.  As I headed in that direction I heard the boisterous sounds of a party or two - apparently Mac's stratagem had worked - and, in the distance, sounds of gunfire.  I never did find out if the gunfire was from one of our agents or simply Hans or Friedrich letting off a little celebratory steam.  Apparently, no one else was curious enough to investigate either, and the mission was going off like clockwork, thanks to Mac's little embellishment.