Chapter 30 RAM

"Sir! Would you mind telling me where we are going, sir!"

Lieutenant Monkberg heaves a deep, quivering sigh, his rib-cage shuddering like a tin shack in a cyclone. He executes a none too snappy pushup. His hands are planted on the rim, and so this action extricates his head from the bowl, of a toilet-or "head," as it is referred to in this context: an alarmingly rundown freighter. He jerks down a strip of abrasive Euro-bumwad and wipes his mouth before looking up at Sergeant Robert Shaftoe, who has braced himself in the hatchway.

And Shaftoe does need some serious bracing, because he is carrying close to his own weight in gear. All of it was issued to him thoughtfully prepacked.

He could have left it that way. But this is not how an Eagle Scout operates. Bobby Shaftoe has gone through and unpacked all of it, spread it out on the deck, examined it, and repacked it.

This allowed Shaftoe to do some serious inferring. To be specific, he infers that the men of Detachment 2702 are expected to spend most of the next three weeks trying as hard as they can not to freeze to death. This will be punctuated by trying to kill a lot of well-armed sons of bitches. German, most likely.

"N-N-N-Norway," Lieutenant Monkberg says. He looks so pathetic that Shaftoe considers offering him some m-m-m-morphine, which induces a mild nausea of its own but holds back the greater nausea of seasickness. Then he comes to his senses, remembers that Lieutenant Monkberg is an officer whose duty it is to send him off to die, and decides that he can just go fuck himself sideways.

"Sir! What is the nature of our mission in Norway, sir?"

Monkberg unloads a rattling belch. "Ram and run," he says.

"Sir! Ram what, sir?"

''Norway."

"Sir! Run where, sir?"

"Sweden."

Shaftoe likes the sound of this. The perilous sea voyage through U boat-infested waters, the collision with Norway, the desperate run across frozen Nazi-occupied territory, all seem trivial compared with the shining goal of dipping into the world's largest and purest reservoir of authentic Swedish poontang.

"Shaftoe! Wake up!"

''Sir! Yes, sir!"

"You have noticed the way we are dressed." Monkberg refers to the fact that they have discarded their dog tags and are all wearing civilian or merchant-marine clothing.

"Sir! Yes, sir!"

"We don't want the Nuns, or anyone else, to know what we really are."

"Sir! Yes, sir!"

"Now, you might ask yourself, if we're supposed to look like civilians, then why the hell are we carrying tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges, et cetera."

"Sir! That was going to be my next question, sir!"

"Well, we have a cover story all worked out for that. Come with me."

Monkberg looks enthusiastic all of a sudden. He clambers to his feet and leads Shaftoe down various passageways and stairs to the freighter's cargo hold. "You know those other ships?"

Shaftoe looks blank.

"Those other ships around us? We are in the middle of a convoy, you know."

"Sir, yes sir!" Shaftoe says, a little less certainly. None of the men has been abovedecks very much in the hours since they were delivered, via submarine, to this wallowing wreck. Even if they had gone up for a look around they would have seen nothing but darkness and fog.

"A Murmansk convoy," Monkberg continues. "All of these ships are delivering weapons and supplies to the Soviet Union. See?"

They have reached a cargo hold. Monkberg turns on an overhead light, revealing-crates. Lots and lots and lots of crates.

"Full of weapons," Monkberg says, "including tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges, et cetera. Get my drift?"

"Sir, no sir! I do not get the lieutenant's drift!"

Monkberg comes one step closer to him. Unsettlingly close. He speaks, now, in a conspiratorial tone. "See, we're all just crew members on this merchant ship, making the run to Murmansk. It gets foggy. We get separated from our convoy. Then, boom! We slam into fucking Norway. We are stuck on Nazi-held territory. We have to make a break for Sweden! But wait a second, we say to ourselves. What about all those Germans between us and the Swedish border? Well, we had better be armed to the teeth, is what. And who is in a better position to arm themselves to the teeth than the crew of this merchant ship that is jam-packed with armaments? So we run down into the cargo hold and hastily pry open a few crates and arm ourselves."

Shaftoe looks at the crates. None of them have been pried open.

"Then," Monkberg continues, "we abandon ship and head for Sweden."

There is a long silence. Shaftoe finally rouses himself to say, "Sir! Yes, sir!"

"So get prying."

''Sir! Yes, sir!"

"And make it look hasty! Hasty! C'mon! Shake a leg!"

"Sir! Yes, sir!"

Shaftoe tries to get into the spirit of the thing. What's he going to use to pry a crate open? No crowbars in sight. He exits the cargo hold and strides down a passageway. Monkberg following him closely, hovering, urging him to be hastier: "You're in a hurry! The Nazis are coming! You have to arm yourself! Think of your wife and kids back in Glasgow or Lubbock or wherever the fuck you're from!"

"Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, sir!" Shaftoe says indignantly.

"No, no! Not in real life! In your pretend role as this stranded merchant son of a bitch! Look, Shaftoe! Look! Salvation is at hand!"

Shaftoe turns around to see Monkberg pointing at a cabinet marked

FIRE.

Shaftoe pulls the door open to find, among other implements, one of those giant axes that firemen are always carrying in and out of burning structures.

Thirty seconds later, he's down in the cargo hold, Paul Bunyaning a crate of .45-caliber ammunition. "Faster! More haphazard!" Monkberg shouts. "This isn't a precise operation, Shaftoe! You are in a blind panic!" Then he says, "Goddamn it!" and runs forward and seizes the ax from Shaftoe's hands.

Monkberg swings wildly, missing the crate entirely as he adjusts to the tremendous weight and length of the implement. Shaftoe hits the deck and rolls to safety. Monkberg finally gets his range and azimuth worked out, and actually makes contact with the crate. Splinters and chips skitter across the deck.

"See!" Monkberg says, looking over his shoulder at Shaftoe, "I want splinteriness! I want chaos!" He is swinging the ax at the same time as he's talking and looking at Shaftoe, and he's moving his feet too because the ship is rocking, and consequently the blade of the weapon misses the crate entirely, overshoots, and comes down right on Monkberg's ankle.

"Gadzooks!" Lieutenant Monkberg says, in a quiet, conversational tone. He is looking down at his ankle in fascination. Shaftoe comes over to see what's so interesting.

A good chunk of Monkberg's lower left leg has been neatly cross sectioned. In the beam of Shaftoe's flashlight, it is possible to see severed blood vessels and ligaments sticking out of opposite sides of the meaty wound, like sabotaged bridges and pipelines dangling from the sides of a gorge.

"Sir! You are wounded, sir!" Shaftoe says. "Let me summon Lieutenant Root!"

"No! You stay here and work!" Monkberg says. "I can find Root myself." He reaches down with both hands and squeezes his leg above the wound, causing blood to gush out onto the deck. "This is perfect!" he says meditatively. "This adds so much realism."

After several repetitions of this order, Shaftoe reluctantly goes back to crate-hacking. Monkberg hobbles and staggers around the hold for a few minutes, bleeding on everything, then drags himself off in search of Enoch Root. The last thing he says is, "Remember! We are aiming for a ransacked effect!"

But the bit with the leg wound gets the idea across to Shaftoe more than Monkberg's words ever could. The sight of the blood brings up memories of Guadalcanal and more recent adventures. His last dose of morphine is wearing off, which makes him sharper. And he's staffing to get really seasick, which makes him want to fight it by doing some hard work.

So he more or less goes berserk with that ax. He loses track of what is going on.

He wishes that Detachment 2702 could have stayed on dry land-preferably dry warm land such as that place they stayed, for two sunny weeks, in Italy.

The first part of that mission had been hard work, what with humping those barrels of shit around. But the remainder of it (except for the last few hours) had been just like shore leave, except that there weren't any women. Every day they'd taken turns at the observation site, looking out over the Bay of Naples with their telescopes and binoculars. Every night, Corporal Benjamin sat down and radioed more gibberish in Morse code.

One night, Benjamin received a message and spent some time deciphering it. He announced the news to Shaftoe: "The Germans know we're here."

"What do you mean, they know we're here?"

"They know that for at least six months we have had an observation post overlooking the Bay of Naples," Benjamin said.

"We've been here less than two weeks."

''They're going to begin searching this area tomorrow."

"Well, then let's get the fuck out of here," Shaftoe said.

"Colonel Chattan orders you to wait," Benjamin said, "until you know that the Germans know that we are here."

"But I do know that the Germans know that we are here," Shaftoe said, "you just told me."

"No, no no no no," Benjamin said, "wait until you wouldknow that the Germans knew even if you didn'tknow from being told by Colonel Chattan over the radio."

"Are you fucking with me?"

"Orders," Benjamin said, and handed Shaftoe the deciphered message as proof.

As soon as the sun came up they could hear the observation planes crisscrossing the sky. Shaftoe was ready to execute their escape plan, and he made sure that the men were too. He sent some of those SAS blokes down to reconnoiter the choke points along their exit route. Shaftoe himself just laid down on his back and stared up at the sky, watching those planes.

Did he know that the Germans knew now?

Ever since he'd woken up, a couple of SAS blokes had been following him around, staring at him. Shaftoe finally looked in their direction and nodded. They ran away. A moment later he heard wrenches crashing against the insides of toolboxes.

The Germans had observation planes all over the fucking sky. That was pretty strong circumstantial evidence that the Germans knew. And those planes were clearly visible to Shaftoe, so he could, arguably, know that they knew. But Colonel Chattan had ordered him to stay put "until positively sighted by Germans," whatever that meant.

One of those planes, in particular, was coming closer and closer. It was searching very close to the ground, cutting only a narrow swath on each pass. Waiting for it to pass over their position, Shaftoe wanted to scream. This was too stupid to be real. He wanted to send up a flare and get this over with.

Finally, in midafternoon, Shaftoe, lying on his back in the shade of a tree, looked straight up into the air and counted the rivets on the belly of that German airplane: a Henschel Hs 126[12] with a single swept-back wing mounted above the fuselage, so as not to block the view downwards, and with ladders and struts and giant awkward splay-footed landing gear sticking out all over. One German encased in a glass shroud and flying the plane, another out in the open, peering down through goggles and fiddling with a swivel-mounted machine gun. This one did all but look Shaftoe in the eye, then tapped the pilot on the shoulder and pointed down.

The Henschel altered its normal search pattern, cutting the pass short to swing round and fly over their position again.

"That's it," Shaftoe said to himself. He stood up and began walking towards the dilapidated barn. "That's it!" he shouted. "Execute!"

The SAS guys were in the back of the truck, under a tarp, working with their wrenches. Shaftoe glanced in their direction and saw gleaming parts from the Vickers laid out on clean white fabric. Where the hell had these guys gotten clean white fabric? They'd probably been saving it for today. Why couldn't they have got the Vickers in good working order before? Because they'd had orders to assemble it hastily, at the last possible minute.

Corporal Benjamin hesitated, one hand poised above his radio key. "Sarge, are you sure they know we're here?"

Everyone turned to see how Shaftoe would respond to this mild challenge. He had been slowly gathering a reputation as a man who needed watching.

Shaftoe turned on his heel and strolled out into the middle of a clearing a few yards away. Behind him, he could hear the other men of Detachment 2702 jockeying for position in the doorway, trying to get a clear view of him.

The Henschel was coming back for another pass, now so close to the ground that you could probably throw a rock through its windshield.

Shaftoe unslung his tommy gun, pulled back the bolt, cradled it, swung it up and around, and opened fire.

Now some might complain that the trench broom lacked penetrating power, but he was positive he could see pieces of crap flying out of the Henschel's motor. The Henschel went out of control almost immediately. It banked until its wings were vertical, veered, banked some more until it was upside down, shed what little altitude it had to begin with, and made an upside-down pancake landing in the olive trees no more than a hundred yards distant. It did not immediately burst into flame: something of a letdown there.

There was perfect silence from the other men. The only sound was the beepity-beep of Corporal Benjamin, his question now answered, sending out his little message. Shaftoe was able to follow the Morse code for once-this message was going out plaintext. "WE ARE DISCOVERED STOP EXECUTING PLAN TORUS."

As theirfirst contribution to Plan Torus, the other men climbed onto the truck, which pulled out from its hidey-hole in the barn and idled in the trees nearby. When Benjamin was finished, he abandoned his radio and joined them.

As hisfirst task of Plan Torus, Shaftoe walked around the premises in a neat crisscross pattern echoing that of the searching reconnaissance planes. He was carrying an upside-down gasoline can with no lid on it.

He left the can about one-third full, standing upright in the middle of the barn. He pulled the pin from a grenade, dropped it into the gasoline, and ran out of the building. The truck was already pulling away when he caught up with it and dove into the waiting arms of his unit, who pulled him on board. He got himself situated in the back of the truck just in time to see the building go up in a satisfying fireball.

"Okay," Shaftoe said to the men. "We got a few hours to kill."

All the men in the truck-except for the SAS blokes working on the Vickers-looked at each other like did he really just say that?

"Uh, Sarge," one of them finally said, "could you explain that part about killing some time?"

"The airplane's not going to be here for a while. Orders."

"Was there a problem or-"

"Nope. Everything's going fine. Orders.

Beyond that the men didn't want to gripe, but a lot more looks were exchanged across the bed of the truck. Finally, Enoch Root spoke up, "You men are probably wondering why we couldn't kill time for a few hours first,before alerting the Germans to our presence, and rendezvous with the plane just in the nick of time."

"Yeah!" said a whole bunch of guys and blokes, vigorously nodding.

"That's a good question," said Enoch Root. He said it like he already knew the answer, which made everyone in the truck want to slug him.

The Germans had deployed some ground units to secure the area's road intersections. When Detachment 2702 arrived at the first crossroads, all of the Germans were freshly dead, and all they had to do was to slow down momentarily so that some Marine Raiders could run out of hiding and jump on board.

The Germans at the second intersection had no idea what was going on. This was obviously the result of some kind of internal Wehrmacht communications fuckup, clearly recognizable as such even across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Detachment 2702 were able to simply open fire from underneath the tarp and tear them to pieces, or at least drive them into hiding.

The next Germans they ran into weren't having any of it; they had formed a roadblock out of a truck and two cars, and were lined up on the other side of it, pointing weapons at them. All of their weapons looked to be small arms. But by this time the Vickers had finally been put together, calibrated, fine-tuned, inspected, and loaded. The tarp came off Private Mikulski, a surly, brooding two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Polish-British SAS man, commenced operations with the Vickers at about the same time that the Germans did with their rifles.

Now when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high school, he'd been slotted into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes. A certain amount of his time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces of wood or metal into smaller pieces. Numerous saws were available in the shop for that purpose, some better than others. A sawing job that would be just ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand saw would be accomplished with a power saw. Likewise, certain cuts and materials would cause the smaller power saws to overheat or seize up altogether and therefore called for larger power saws. But even with the biggest power saw in the shop, Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was imposing some kind of stress on the machine. It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it would vibrate, it would heat up, and if you pushed the material through too fast it would threaten to jam. But then one summer he worked in a mill where they had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its supply of blades, its spare parts, maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room. It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure.It was the size of a car. The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight-spoked things that looked to have been salvaged from steam locomotives. Its blades had to be manufactured from long rolls of blade-stuff by unreeling about half a mile of toothed ribbon, cutting it off, and carefully welding the cut ends together into a loop. When you hit the power switch, nothing would happen for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out of the earth, as if a freight train were approaching from far away, and finally the blade would begin to move, building speed slowly but inexorably until the teeth disappeared and it became a bolt of pure hellish energy stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it. Anecdotes about accidents involving the bandsaw were told in hushed voices and not usually commingled with other industrial-accident anecdotes. Anyway, the most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but it didn't seem to notice that it was doing anything. It wasn't even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down. Never heated up.

In Shaftoe's post-high-school experience he had found that guns had much in common with saws. Guns could fire bullets all right, but they kicked back and heated up, got dirty, and jammed eventually. They could fire bullets in other words, but it was a big deal for them, it placed a certain amount of stress on them, and they could not take that stress forever. But the Vickers in the back of this truck was to other guns as the bandsaw was to other saws. The Vickers was water-cooled.It actually had a fucking radiatoron it. It had infrastructure,just like the bandsaw, and a whole crew of technicians to fuss over it. But once the damn thing was up and running, it could fire continuously for daysas long as people kept scurrying up to it with more belts of ammunition. After Private Mikulski opened fire with the Vickers, some of the other Detachment 2702 men, eager to pitch in and do their bit, took potshots at those Germans with their rifles, but doing so made them feel so small and pathetic that they soon gave up and just took cover in the ditch and lit up cigarettes and watched the slow progress of the Vickers' bullet-stream across the roadblock. Mikulski hosed down all of the German vehicles for a while, yawing the Vickers back and forth like a man playing a fire extinguisher against the base of a fire. Then he picked out a few bits of the roadblock that he suspected people might be standing behind and concentrated on them for a while, boring tunnels through the wreckage of the vehicles until he could see what was on the other side, sawing through their frames and breaking them in half. He cut down half a dozen or so roadside trees behind which he suspected Germans were hiding, and then mowed about half an acre of grass.

By this time it had become evident that some Germans had retreated behind a gentle swell in the earth just off to one side of the road and were taking potshots from there, so Mikulski swung the muzzle of the Vickers up into the air at a steep angle and shot the bullet-stream into the sky so that the bullets plunged down like mortar shells on the other side of the rise. It took him a while to get the angle just right, but then he patiently distributed bullets over the entire field, like a man watering his lawn. One of the SAS blokes actually did some calculations on his knee, figuring out how long Mikulski should keep doing this to make sure that bullets were distributed over the ground in question at the right density-say, one per square foot. When the territory had been properly sown with lead slugs, Mikulski turned back to the roadblock and made sure that the truck pulled across the pavement was in small enough pieces that it could be shoved out of the way by hand.

Then he ceased firing at last. Shaftoe felt like he should make an entry in a log book, the way ships' captains do when they pull a man-of-war into port. When they drove past the wreckage, they slowed down for a bit to gawk. The brittle grey iron of the German vehicles' engine blocks had shattered like glass and you could look into the engines all neatly cross-sectioned and see the gleaming pistons and crankshafts exposed to the sun, bleeding oil and coolant.

They passed through what was left of the roadblock and drove onwards into a sparsely populated inland area that made excellent strafing territory for the Luftwaffe. The first two fighters that came around were torn apart in midair by Mikulski and his Vickers. The next pair managed to destroy the truck, the big gun, and Private Mikulski in one pass. No one else was hurt; they were all in the ditch, watching as Mikulski sat placidly behind the controls of his weapon, playing chicken with two Messerschmidts and eventually losing.

By now it was getting dark. The detachment began to make its way cross-country on foot, carrying Mikulski's remains on a stretcher. They ran into a German patrol and fought it out with them; two of the SAS men were wounded, and one of these had to be carried the rest of the way. Finally they reached their rendezvous point, a wheat field where they laid down road flares to outline a landing strip for a U.S. Army DC-3, which executed a deft landing, took them all on board, and flew them to Malta without further incident.

And that was where they were introduced to Lieutenant Monkberg for the first time.

No sooner had they been debriefed than they were on another submarine, bound for parts unknown or at least unspecified. But when they turned in their warm-weather gear for ten-pound oiled-wool sweaters, they started to get an idea. A few claustrophobic days later, they had been transferred onto this freighter.

The vessel itself is such a pathetic heap that they have been amusing themselves by substituting the word "shit" for "ship" in various nautical expressions, e.g.: let's get this cabin shit-shape! Where in hell does the shit's master think he's taking us? And so on.

Now, in the shit's hold, an impassioned Bobby Shaftoe is doing his best to create a ransacked effect. He strews rifles and tommy guns around the deck. He opens boxes of .45 cartridges and flings them all over the place. He finds some skis, too-they'll be needing skis, right? He plants mines here and there, just to throw a scare into whatever German happens along to investigate this shitwreck. He opens crates of grenades. These do not look very ransacked, sitting there full, so he pulls out dozens of them, carries them abovedecks, and throws them overboard. He tosses out some skis also-maybe they will wash up on shore somewhere and contribute to the overall sense of chaos that is so important to Lieutenant Monkberg.

He is on his way across the upper deck, carrying an armload of skis, when something catches his eye out there in the fog. He flinches, of course. Many strafings have turned Bobby Shaftoe into a big flincher. He flinches so hard that he drops all of those skis on the deck and comes this close to throwing himself down among them. But he holds his ground long enough to focus in on this thing in the fog. It is directly in front of them, and somewhat higher than the bridge of the freighter, and (unlike plunging Zeros or Messerschmidts) it is not moving fast-just hanging there. Like a cloud in the sky. As if the fog had coagulated into a dense clump, like his mother's mashed potatoes. It gets brighter and brighter as he stands there watching it, and the edges get more and more sharply defined, and he starts to see other stuff around it.

The other stuff is green.

Hey, wait a minute! He is looking at a green mountainside with a big white snowfield in the middle of it.

"Heads up!" he screams, and throws himself down on the deck.

He is hoping to be surprised by the gradualness, the gentleness of their collision with the earth's crust. He has in mind the kind of deal where you run a little motorboat at a sandy beach, cut the motor and tilt it out of the water at the last minute, and glide up gently onto the cushioning sand.

This turns out to be a very poor analogy for what happens next. The freighter is actually going a lot faster than your typical putt-putt fishing boat. And instead of gliding up onto a sandy beach, they have a nearly head-on collision with a vertical granite wall. There is a really impressive noise, the prow of the vessel actually bends upwards, and suddenly, Bobby Shaftoe finds that he is sliding on his belly across the ice-glazed deck at a high speed.

He is terrified, for a moment, that he's going to slide right off the deck and go flying into the drink, but he manages to steer himself into an anchor chain, which proves an effective stopper. Down below, he can hear approximately ten thousand other small and large objects finding their own obstacles to slam into.

There follows a brief and almost peaceful interlude of near-total silence. Then a hue and cry rises up from the extremely sparse crew of the freighter: "ABANDON SHIT! ABANDON SHIT!"