The Wrecking Crew

Chapter Ten

Lou TAYLOR was waiting impatiently when I arrived at the field in a taxi, having slept too long, after my session with Vance, to catch the official airport bus.

"I was beginning to think you weren't going to make it," she said, and gave me a second look. "My God, what happened to you?"

My cut lip didn't show up too badly, although it felt very conspicuous, and I'd hoped my sunglasses hid the shiner, but apparently not. "You won't believe it," I said, "but I ran into the closet door in the dark."

She laughed. "You were right the first time. I don't believe it."

I grinned. "All right, I'll tell you the truth. I couldn't sleep last night, so I took a walk around town, and three big bruisers came out of an alley and attacked me for no good reason. Of course, being a right-living American boy, I beat hell out of all three of them, but one got through with a lucky punch."

"A likely story!" she said. "Well, you'd better get this paraphernalia checked in; there's not much time left before takeoff. Here, I'll give you a hand."

"Take it easy with that camera bag," I said. "Drop that and we're out of business."

They don't let you take pictures from an airplane over Sweden, so I guess all the security nuts in the world don't live in New Mexico, although sometimes when I'm home it seems that way. I took the seat by the window, nevertheless; Lou said it didn't matter to her. All scenery looks just about the same from a plane, she said, and she'd already seen it twice getting the dope for her story, going and coming.

Presently the stewardess announced in Swedish and English that we were flying at nine hundred meters and would reach Luleв-pronounced Lulie-oh-in two and a half hours. Lou informed me that the reported altitude was equivalent to approximately twenty-seven hundred feet since, she said, a meter is only a little longer than a yard

– thirty-nine and four-tenths inches, to be exact.

Already there were forests below us, and open fields, red roofs, plenty of lakes and streams, and more forests. I had a funny feeling of having seen it all before, although I'd never been doser to it than Britain and the continent of Europe. It was just something my romantic imagination was making up from knowing that my forebears had lived in this country a long time. I suppose a guy named Kelly would feel the same way flying over Ireland.

Then we swung out over the Gulf of Bothnia, that long finger of the Baltic that separates Sweden from Finland, and soon there was nothing to look at but water, roughened by a brisk cross wind. I turned to my companion and found that she was asleep. She looked all right that way, but at twenty-six, her age of record, she wasn't quite young enough to get sentimental about, sleeping. Only the truly young look really good asleep. They get a kind of innocence about them, no matter what kind of juvenile monsters they may be when they're awake. The rest of us haven't that much innocence left. We can be thankful if we manage to sleep with our mouths closed and don't snore.

She was wearing a brown wool skirt-kind of a pleasant rusty color-and a matching sweater with a neck high enough to cover the scar on her throat. The sweater was good wool but not cashmere; she wasn't a kid who blew her roll on clothes. Her shoes had set her back something, though. They were strong British walking shoes with sturdy soles. Although I had to respect her good sense, I must sayl prefer my women in high heels. Well, at least she'd had the decency to wear nylons. If there's anything that turns my stomach, it's a grown woman in bobby sox.

I lay back in my seat beside the sleeping girl and listened to the sound of the plane's motors and let my thoughts wander. Mac's little sentence had been a classic of its kind, I reflected: Realize difficulty of assignment, sympathize. In effect, I was being asked to locate, identify, and keep an eye on a man-eating tiger-but under no circumstances to shoot the beast. Repeat, under no circumstances. This is an order. This is an order. Clearly Mac was scared stiff I might try to be clever and rig up something resembling self-defense. He was in political trouble of some kind, and he didn't want any dead bodies whatever cluttering up the landscape until he got things straightened out.

Sara Lundgren had hinted that she was doing more than merely refusing to help me. What she'd meant, apparently, was that she'd lodged a stiff protest in Washington against my assignment. As Vance had said, it was ironical. I wondered how she'd have felt if she'd known that her action would prevent us, at least temporarily, from avenging her death. Of course, some of those idealists are pretty stubborn, and it was quite possible that she'd have been in favor of turning the other cheek.

Mac's worst enemies had always been the gentle folks back home. As he'd said himself once during the war, there wasn't much danger of the Nazis breaking us up, but one soft-hearted U.S. Senator could do it with a few words. Nowadays it seems to be all right to plan on, and create the machines for, extenninating millions of human beings at a crack, but just to send out the guy to rub out another who's getting to be an active menace, that's still considered very immoral and reprehensible.

I'll admit that I found the idea a little startling myself, even in wartime, when Mac first explained to me exactly what this group was that I'd been picked to join. It was in that office of his in London, with a view of wrecked buildings through the single dusty window, and I'd just been through the first phase of my training-the one you got while they were still evaluating your possibilities and deciding whether they wanted you, after all. Mac had looked up at me for a moment as I stood before his desk.

"Hunter, aren't you?" he'd said, and then he'd asked me some questions about Western hunting. Finally he said, "Doesn't seem as if you're very particular about what you hunt, lieutenant." That was before I'd been assigned the code name Eric, that had been mine ever since.

"No, sir," I said.

"Well, I think we can find you some game, if you don't mind stalking a quarry that can shoot back."

Anyway, that's approximately the way the conversation went. It's a long time ago, now, and I won't vouch for the exact words. He always did like to get men who'd done some hunting; it was the first thing he looked for in a prospective candidate. It wasn't that you couldn't train city boys to be just as efficient, as far as the mechanics of the job were concerned, he explained to me once, but they tended to lack the balance of men who were accustomed to going out once a year to shoot something specific, under definite legal restrictions. A city kid, turned loose with a gun, either took death too seriously and made a great moral issue of the whole business-and generally finished by cracking up under a load of self-imposed guilt-or, finding himself free of restraint for the first time in his life, turned into a crazy butcher.

What criterion Mac used for the women-yes, we had some then and still do-I don't know.

I've never been ashamed of it. On the other hand, I've never talked about it, if only because I was under orders not to. Even my wife, until quite recently, thought I'd spent the war at a desk, doing public relations work for the Army. When she stumbled onto the truth, she couldn't stand it. I supposed it changed her whole picture of me, herself, and our marriage. Instead of having for a husband a staid, respectable, kindly man with literary inclinations, she suddenly found herself bound to an unpredictable and potentially violent character, capable of deeds she could barely imagine.

Well, we're all capable of deeds we can barely imagine. Beth's attitude still had the power to annoy me a little, because I was quite sure she'd never have dreamed of breaking up our home if she'd merely discovered, say, that I was the bombardier who'd pushed the button over Hiroshima. I must say that I don't get it. Why honor and respect a guy who drops a great indiscriminate bomb, and recoil in horror from a guy who shoots a small, selective bullet? Sara Lundgren had had the same attitude. She'd been perfectly willing, presumably, to collect data, as part of her job, for the use of the Strategic Air Command-that might lead to the eventual obliteration of a city or two-but she'd balked violently at the idea of feeding information to a lone man with a gun.

To be perfectly honest, even before I rejoined, more or less as a reaction to Beth's leaving me, I'd always been just.a little proud of having been a member of Mac's outfit. After all, it was an elite organization: the wrecking crew -the Mordgruppe, as the Nazis had called us-the last resort of the lace-pants boys. When they came up against someone too tough for them to handle, they called on us. The M-Group.

Lou Taylor awoke when we landed at Luleв. There were gray-green military planes on the field marked with three gold crowns, presumably the insignia of the Swedish air force. From Lulea, the airlines map showed, we bad to make a hitch due west first, before bearing up to the northwest for Kiruna. I asked the stewardess about this when we were airborne again, and was told that we had to make a little detour because the Swedish Army didn't like people flying over its great fortress at Boden. It was the first I'd heard of it, and I couldn't help wondering what a fortress looked like these atomic days, and who was kidding whom.

Soon the stewardess announced that we were crossing the Arctic Circle; shortly thereafter she came to the seat and pointed out to us-I guess we looked like tourists-an impressive, snowcapped mountain range ahead, the backbone of the Scandinavian peninsula. Beyond was Norway. Off to the right was Finland and, not too far away, Russia. She was particularly proud of a peak called Kebnekaise, which she said was the highest point in Sweden, some seven thousand feet by our barbaric way of reckoning, two thousand meters by more civilized measurement.

Having already been briefed on the metric system once that day by Lou-as if I hadn't had it in college and used it in the darkroom ever since-I was getting a little tired of being educated by well-informed young ladies. I was tempted to tell this stately blonde girl that, approaching my home town of Santa Fe, New Mexico, you pass the six-thousand-foot mark several miles out of town, hit seven thousand at the Plaza-and there's nothing in the world to prevent your taking a pleasant little drive up to ten thousand in the nearby Sangre de Cristos. From there you can still keep going up a ways, if you don't mind walking. I kept my mouth shut, however. No good New Mexican wants to be heard boasting like a Texan, even in a foreign country.

At two o'clock we landed at the Kiruna airport. This seemed to consist mainly of a bleak open field and a wind sock, which was working hard. Three taxis were waiting at the fence. We all climbed in-pilots, stewardess, passengers, everybody-and were driven in to town, leaving the plane standing alone in the arctic wasteland with only the cold wind for company.

When I knocked on the door of her hotel room half an hour later, Lou called, "Come in, it isn't locked."

I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. She was sitting at the dresser in her slip, energetically brushing her short, dark, boyish hair. Her slip was a plain and practical white garment, about as sexy as a T-shirt, but her bare arms were quite nice and feminine. It occurred to me that she'd probably photograph well. That was convenient, since photogenic models might be scarce up here in the frozen north, and there are times when a human figure is almost a necessity in a picture, for scale if nothing else.

"Sit down somewhere," she said. "Let me tell you the schedule. The rest of the afternoon you're on your own. Tomorrow the company is sending a guide and a car to take us through the mine. They'll pick us up after breakfast. You'll want some views of the town, of course-maybe you can get some this afternoon-and of the railroads, particularly the one west into Norway, the spectacular one they use sending the ore over the mountains to Narvik, on the Atlantic. It's the only way of getting there except on foot; they've never managed to get a road built over those mountains… But the mine's the main thing, as we agreed in Stockholm, and I've fixed it so you can get started on it tomorrow. Tomorrow night, we're going to dinner at a company bigshot's, some people named Ridderswдrd. I've lied and told them we're both traveling light, so they won't expect a dinner jacket, but I hope you brought along your suit and a clean white shirt in that mountain of junk."

"Yes, ma'am," I said. "Shoes and everything." I stood behind her chair and grinned at her reflection in the mirror. "You're taking over, is that it, Lou?"

She swung around to look at me directly. Her expression was startled and innocent. "Don't be silly!" she said quickly. "I just thought…" She checked herself, got up, and wrapped herself in a plain robe of blue flannel that had been lying on the bed; then she swung back to face me. "I'm terribly sorry," she said. "I didn't realize how it would look… I always used to make the routine arrangements for Hal. It just… well, it just seemed natural to get on the phone downstairs and… well, I met all these people the last time I was up here and…"

"All right," I said. "All right, Lou. Relax."

She said, "I really didn't mean to be officious. I was just trying to help. If I bend over, will you give me a swift kick to put me in my place?"

I said, "Forget it. As a matter of fact, it sounds pretty good the way you have it arranged, except for the damn dinner, and I don't suppose we can avoid that." I laughed. "Hell, you've got yourself a job, if you want to keep at it. I've never worked with -an executive assistant before, but it seems like a nice deal. I just want to warn you, there's no money in it."

She smiled. "Just shoot a good set of pictures, that's all I ask."

It was a nice scene, with all the warm sincerity of two sharpies dickering over a used car. As she turned away, in the mannish robe, I kept hearing her strange, husky voice in my head and comparing it with another voice I'd heard recently: a harsh, rasping voice that I'd assumed to be masculine, since it had come from a shadowy figure in pants.