Casey at the Bat Read online

  By ‘43 she’d transferred to London station at 72 Grosvenor in Mayfair, under Colonel Bruce, one of whose assistants she’d become, and wore the uniform of a second lieutenant in the WACs. She was in charge of the colonel’s social calendar, important since one of the common jests of the time was that OSS actually stood for Oh So Social. She answered his phones or placed his calls, but it was more than that. She also knew the town, in the sense of “knew the town,” and so was able to prioritize. The colonel was hopeless and said yes to every invitation in the days before she arrived on station. She knew who was in, who out, which receptions it was important to be seen at, which could be safely ignored, which generals were in the ascension, which in the decline, which FFI liaison officers could be trusted, which should be avoided, which journalists were helpful, which were not, who could be blackmailed, ignored, betrayed, dumped, manipulated, or insulted and, by contrast, who could be trusted, used, counted on, confided in, who had access, represented the kind of people we like and need, and so forth and so on. She was indispensable, she was ruthless, she was efficient, she was beautiful and brilliant at once, and she was the third-ranking NKVD agent in OSS, the star of INO (Foreign Intelligence Section) who had been trained at SHON, Shkola Osobogo Naznacheniya, the Special Purposes School, in Balashikha, fifteen miles east of the Moscow Ring Road, when everybody thought she was rusticating in the Hamptons.

  Millie sniffed something was up at six p.m. that evening, when Colonel Brace’s mood immediately brightened. The issue of the day had been Operation Jedburgh, by which three-man teams of OSS/SOE/FFI agents had parachuted behind the lines to wreak havoc on German communications and transportation lines in the immediate wake of the Normandy show. So far, no good. No teams had hit a target, many had drifted apart in the descent and failed to link up with maquis units whom they were supposed to lead, and several had never acknowledged arrival by radio and were considered combat-lost. It was looking like a washout, and Colonel Bruce knew he was meeting with Sir Colin Gubbins, head of SOE, and that Gubbins would blame the muck-up on the American third of the units. It was so important that the teams do well!

  But around six, an SOE liaison informed the colonel that radio intercepts strongly suggested one team was in position and would strike tonight at midnight against a bridge on Das Reich’s route to the beachhead.

  “Millie, do you see? This is what we need.”

  It was a great issue with OSS that it was considered immature, inferior, and amateur in comparison to the far savvier British intel outfits, and it drove General Donovan mad.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, the boys,” said Colonel Bruce. “Those wonderful, wonderful boys, they make me so proud. Here’s to Casey’s turn at bat!”

  Millie, of course, was not privy to code names and didn’t know which groups were operating where; she just scooped up all available information and turned it over to her KGB INO control, a fellow named Hedgepath who’d been big in WPA before the war and was now big in the Office of War Information, the propaganda unit, where he was some sort of chief of psychological operations or something like that, reporting directly to Mr. Sherwood. She adored Hedgepath, because of course he was one of the few men on earth who didn’t yield to and couldn’t be budged by her blandishments, charms, and beauty; she had no way of knowing he was a sexual deviate and therefore immune to such.

  She called him from a phone in Accounting Section, feeling utterly secure, because no one monitored internal calls between American entities such as 72 Grosvenor and the London OWI headquarters nearby. It was Kate Jesse’s phone, and Kate thought she used it to speak to a secret lover, an RAF bomber pilot. Kate’s problem: She read Redbook magazine too earnestly.

  “Hullo,” said Hedgepath.

  “Millie here.”

  “Of course, my dear. Report, please.”

  She reiterated what she had learned that day: the colonel’s schedule, his incoming calls, reports, office tidbits, expenditure, the nuts and bolts of it. Finally she mentioned some kind of show that was set for the evening and the colonel’s curious explosion of glee, “Casey’s turn at bat.”

  “Oh, baseball,” said Mr. Hedgepath. “I loathe baseball. It’s mostly standing around, isn’t it? Awfully boring. Who’s this Casey?”

  “It’s from a famous poem. ‘Mighty Casey’ they call him, a sort of Babe Ruth figure. All hopes are on him. It’s very dramatic.”

  “Who knew there was drama in baseball?”

  “At any rate, ‘Casey at the Bat’ is about a hero’s chance to win the big game. As I recall, he fails. In America, it’s regarded a tragedy. I think Casey has to do with something they’re calling Operation Jedburgh.”

  Jedburgh?

  “Hmm,” said Hedgepath. He knew from NKVD Moscow Center that the terrible Zyborny had sent a flash to GRU earlier, but Center wasn’t completely able to penetrate the GRU code and knew only that the subject of the message was a Brit-Yank-Frenchy thing called Operation Jedburgh, some silly blowing-up of structures that would have to be expensively rebuilt after the war. But Control did not want GRU operating with impunity anywhere, and the two agencies cordially hated each other. NKVD Moscow Center was suddenly interested in Operation Jed, not as part of the war against the Germans, which it knew was won, but in the war against GRU for postwar operational control of the intelligence mechanism.

  “Urgent you penetrate Jed,” Moscow had ordered.

  “My dear Miss Beeman,” said Mr. Hedgepath. “Can you focus tonight on this ‘Casey’ thing? There’s a lot of interest in it. Possibly flirt it up with one of the cowboys and get me some information soonest? I’d like to pop a line to Our Friends before bedtime if possible.”

  Millie sighed. She knew exactly what she had to do. Drinks with Frank Tyne, a horrible man who was all swagger and bluster. He’d been in and out of France for two years now and it was rumored had actually killed several Germans. More to the point, he adored her and had been asking her out for weeks.

  Tonight, his dreams came true.

  * * *

  Leets was having some trouble breathing. His stomach was edgy, his fingers felt like greasy sausages from someone else’s body, and he wanted only to sleep. He’d felt this way before games sometimes. He’d been a tight end usually, because of his size, a blocker, but there were a few plays in the book that designated him as receiver, and he both loved and hated that opportunity. You could become a hero. You could become a goat. It all happened in a split second in front of fifty thousand yelling maniacs cram-packed into Dyche Stadium or some other Big Ten coliseum. Once, memorably (to him at any rate) he caught a touchdown ball on a freakish, lucky, thing-of-beauty pass that he’d ticked with a finger, popped into the air, and snatched while himself falling. He was a hero who knew he’d been lucky and secretly felt he didn’t deserve the Monday of acclaim he’d gotten. It was his favorite memory; it was his worst memory. It came to him now in both formats.

  The car rolled onward. No wonder they called them coffee-grinders, a little turtle of a thing powered seemingly by batteries. Chut-chut-chut it went. Leon drove. Leets was in the passenger’s side with the Thompson. In the backseat, in fetal positions, were Jerome and Franc, good guys, kids really, all with Stens. They’d have trouble getting out, so it was up to Leets, really. He’d deliver the first blows for freedom in this part of France. He felt sick about it, but it was increasingly obvious that it didn’t matter how he felt, as what would happen would happen, and if the Brens were there, thank God and Basil St. Florian, and if they weren’t, Dad would be so upset.

  A bottle was produced. It came to Leets with a small glass. He poured some bitter fluid, man, it kicked like a mule, JESUS CHRIST! he gasped for breath, poured another tot, and held it over for Leon to gulp down.

  “Vive la France!” said Leon, completing the transaction.

  “Vive la France!” came the salute from the rear.

  Vive my ass! thought Leets.

  They entered the cone of Luftwaffe arc light, and
immediately the two sentries at the gate raised hands and began to scream, “HALT! HALT! HALT!” They were kids also, a little panicked because no cars ever emerged from the darkness out of nowhere, and they themselves didn’t know what to do, open fire or run and get a sergeant. Their helmets and weapons looked too big.

  It was murder. It was war but it was still murder.

  Leets rolled from the Citroen and put three into each boy from the hip at a range of about ten yards. The Thompson seemed to point itself, so hungry to kill, and under his feathery trigger control convulsed spastically three times in a tenth of a second, then three times more in another tenth of a second, leaking incandescence and noise, and the boys were gone. He brought the gun to his shoulder, zeroed in on the guardhouse through the aperture sight to the blade at muzzle and feathered off the rest of the magazine, holding the butt tight into his shoulder, watching the wood and dust splinter and leap as the rounds struck and ripped, glass shattered, and a door broke, punctured, and fell. Sensations: the harsh percussion of the detonating cartridges, the weirdness of the empty brass poppity-popping out of the breach in a glinting arc, the substantiality of the bolt sliding through the receiver at thunderbolt speed, the dazzle of the muzzle flash, the acrid stench of burning powder, the spurt and drift of the gun smoke.

  The gun empty, he reached into his pouch pocket and pulled out an already primed Gammon. With a thumb he pinned the little floppy lead weight at the end of the Gammon linen against the side of the bag, feeling the slight squishiness of the clump of 808 inside, cranked slightly to the right to the classic QB pose so he could come off his right foot, and launched a tight spiral toward the guardhouse fifty feet away, following through Otto Graham-style. As the bomb sailed through the air, its weighted linen wrap unfurled, and when it separated it popped a restraining pin free inside the Allways fuze, arming that gizmo to detonate on impact. That was the genius of the Gammon; when armed it was volatile as hell, but it always went off.

  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.