Those Who Dare - [Raiding Forces 01] Page 7

  Sitting next to Captain Randal in her big easy chair, Lady Jane Seaborn appeared to be having the time of her life. She was thrilled by every trick. “Is he not simply wonderful?” she laughed, clapping her hands in glee. “I love him!”

  “Captain McKoy?”

  “No, Slick! I’ve never seen such a quarter horse before. He’s marvelous.”

  The white-haired entertainer finally gave the palomino a break. He dismounted with a flourish and slapped the horse on the rump. Slick trotted out of the ring to uproarious applause.

  One of the Commandos called out, “Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em, Slick.”

  Captain McKoy broke out his lasso and proceeded to perform every rope trick known to man. When he got tired of his rope, he strapped Miss Lilly to a turntable that looked like a giant roulette wheel, put on a blindfold, and threw knives at her as she spun around, outlining her body with quivering hilts. Then Captain John Randal had to go out in the ring and have the obligatory cigarette shot out of his mouth. Standing in front of his troops and Lady Jane while clenching the cigarette in his teeth and hoping the old Ranger would not pick that exact moment to develop palsy gave him an instant migraine.

  Finally, Miss Lilly Threepersons introduced the grand finale as the “Whispering Death.” She and Captain McKoy set up a large, shiny square of tin on an easel. The cowboy showman flourished a .22-caliber Colt Woodsman semiautomatic pistol in each hand. The pistols had long, strange-looking cylinders attached to the barrels. Taking careful aim, he emptied one pistol at the tin square and then he switched the other pistol to his right hand and emptied it.

  For once his shooting skills seemed to have deserted him. As he changed magazines, it became clear to the audience that the bullet holes were scattered all over the place. The men who had been cheering him on throughout the whole show grew quiet. From the looks they were exchanging, it was clear they thought any one of them could have done just as well... and British soldiers were well known for being rotten pistol shots.

  But Captain Randal had not even noticed the erratic pattern of the bullet holes. All that registered with him was that the Colt .22 pistols had not made a sound louder than that of a match being struck. He had never seen anything like it: silent pistols. He leaned across Lady Jane Seaborn and said to Lieutenant Terry Stone, “We’ve got to have some of those.”

  Lieutenant Stone nodded, apparently equally impressed. “Absolutely, old stick. Just the ticket for sentry elimination…provided, of course, we can ever manage to locate a German sentry.”

  When the sharpshooter had reloaded the silenced pistols, he suddenly emptied them into the tin, one after the other, with blistering speed. The random pattern of bullet holes magically transformed into the capital letters J. S.: Jane Seaborn. The troops were instantly on their feet, cheering as Captain Geronimo Joe McKoy swept his white Stetson off his head and made a grand bow.

  Captain Randal was the first person to shake Geronimo Joe’s hand. “Gettin’ a head start on the war, huh, John?” the old entertainer said, clapping the younger man on the shoulder. “I reckon there’ll be a lot more of us Americanos over here soon enough, a-killin’ Nazis. How’d you like the show?”

  “A lot of fun, Captain. All these troops are cavalrymen from the Life Guards and Blues Regiments, so you were performing for a critical audience.”

  “You don’t say. I’d a’ probably been real nervous if I’d a’ knowed everybody in the whole crowd was a genuine hoss soldier.”

  “Captain McKoy, about your silenced .22’s . . .We could use some quiet pistols in our line of work.”

  “Step into my office, John,” the showman said, gesturing toward the Silver Stream trailer. “Lady Jane told me you boys had yourselves a gun problem down here. She thought I might be able to help. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  McKoy listened intently, chewing on the end of a long, thin, unlit Cuban cigar as Captain Randal outlined the Small-Scale Raiding Company’s armament. He nodded when Randal was finished.

  “John, Lee-Enfields make excellent battle rifles, but they ain’t never going to do for what you boys need to use ‘em for. Now, I reckon if you were to give me some time, I could come up with something that’ll solve your close-in-shootin’ problems as good, or maybe even better, than a Thompson submachine gun. How’s that sound?”

  “That would be great, Captain.”

  “And I can slick up your Webleys, too. They’re good service revolvers, ain’t nothing to be ashamed of. But they need a little gunsmithing to smooth ‘em out some. Probably the best thing I can do for you is something you most likely never even thought about. And that’s to run your boys through some real intensive shooting drills specially designed to make ‘em better combat pistoleros—so they hit what they aim at. That’s something sadly overlooked in most all armies these days: marksmanship. My rule is, when you pull a trigger, make sure a bad guy falls down dead. You’ll find it’s a great firepower equalizer. It don’t matter how fast the opposition’s wonder gun is a-spittin’ out hot lead and missing if you plug ‘em through the liver on the first shot.”

  “What might you have in mind, Captain?”

  “John, you give me three weeks and I can have your boys shooting them Webleys like they was John Wesley Hardin.”

  “Is tomorrow too soon to get started?”

  “Why don’t you let me have a couple a’ days to tune up the men’s handguns first?”

  “Just as long as you promise to teach me how to shoot my initials, Captain. That’s some trick.”

  “Had much experience handlin’ pistols, John?”

  “A little.”

  “Well, then, all you have to do is: Watch the front sight close, touch her off, and adios. Take your time in a hurry. It’ll be my pleasure to teach you and your boys all I can.”

  ~ * ~

  Sitting in her Rolls-Royce before she drove off, Lady Jane Seaborn said to Captain John Randal, “Looks as if you’ve made progress on some of your problems, John.”

  “Thanks to you, Lady Seaborn.”

  “Call me Jane, won’t you?” she said in her smoky voice. “Now, the navigation issue is another matter entirely. I have no idea how to help you there, and neither does anyone I have discussed the situation with. By the way, John, I have to ask: How did you ever manage to sail straight over and capture General von Rittenhauser the way you did?”

  “We were lost.”

  The lazy, million-dollar glamour-shot smile she gave him with her head cocked back as she put the Rolls into gear and drove away was stunning. After all the first aid training they had been doing, Captain Randal seriously considered lying down on the grass, elevating his brand-new, rubber-soled, canvas-topped raiding boots, and treating himself for shock.

  ~ * ~

  Captain Geronimo Joe McKoy was as good as his word. He taught the Commandos combat pistol craft, and he proved to be a world-class instructor. The first thing he did was to repeat the shooting portion of his exhibition, this time armed with a pair of the tuned-up Webley revolvers. Then he drilled the men exhaustively from dawn to dusk for three solid weeks as they learned to shoot their reworked pistols. The troops ate it up.

  The knowledge that they were now able to shoot better than any group of Nazi storm troopers they were likely to encounter—unless maybe they ran into the German Olympic pistol team late some night—gave the Commandos a sense of confidence that carried over into all areas of their soldiering.

  Lesson learned, Captain John Randal took note: A man who thinks of himself as a gunfighter is a superior soldier. It had been a good day for the Small-Scale Raiding Company when Geronimo Joe McKoy showed up.

  It had been an even better day, Captain Randal decided privately, when Lady Jane Seaborn adopted the Small-Scale Raiding Company as her pet project. The woman clearly knew how to identify a problem, craft a solution, and make it happen.

  But... why was she going to all the trouble?

  ~ * ~

  6

  TO BLOW
A TRAIN

  DESPITE THE SMALL-SCALE RAIDING COMPANY ACQUIRING NEW men, equipment, and skills, a feeling was growing that if anything could possibly go wrong on an operation, it was going to go wrong.

  It did not sound like a difficult thing to load into a boat, cross twenty to thirty miles of the English Channel at night, and land on the continent of Europe, preferably somewhere in enemy-occupied France. In actual practice, however, it was turning out to be harder than anyone ever dreamed.

  Night after night they went out in HMY Arrow, and night after night something unanticipated occurred, causing them either to abort the operation entirely or to make landfall but to be disoriented and have only a short amount of time ashore before they had to sail for home or risk being caught at sea in daylight. The dawn fighter sweeps that the Luftwaffe routinely flew over the Channel would make being spotted at first light tantamount to a death sentence.

  Late one night in the Blind Eye, Lieutenant Terry Stone hit their problem squarely on the head: “Even when nothing can go wrong, something always manages to.”

  Some of their problems would have been laughable if they had not been so deadly serious. For example, one night the Arrow stood offshore in an area ringed by a treacherous necklace of semi submerged rocks that would rip the bottom out of any boat unlucky enough to brush up against them. Midshipman Randy Seaborn had carefully pointed out a landmark ashore for Captain Randal to guide on. Using his Zeiss binoculars to avoid the rocks during the row in, he led the landing party on its way.

  The powerful Zeiss glasses were a splendid piece of German precision engineering. Being Wehrmacht issue, however, they were not fitted with the spray shields standard in the Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy. Consequently, the glasses soon misted over on the trip in to shore, rendering them useless.

  End of mission ... because of a lack of two inches of hard rubber.

  The times when they did make it ashore, their small teams were seldom able to accomplish very much. The Commandos were still armed with outdated revolvers—even though they were now dead shots with their finely tuned Webley .455s—but they no longer carried rifles at all, having substituted canvas bags full of hand grenades. The few chance encounters they had with German patrols were minor, inconclusive affairs, with both sides quickly breaking contact.

  The discouraging fact was that the Small-Scale Raiding Company did not have much to show for its nearly continuous efforts. Weather, winds, tides, and a lack of sophisticated navigational equipment were their major concerns. So far, the Nazis had been virtually a non-factor.

  The one bright spot was that ship-to-shore boat work was no longer a problem. The Lifeboat Servicemen had a phenomenal ability to handle small boats in all water and weather conditions. In fact, their attitude was, the rougher the better. The Royal National Lifeboat Institute men were routinely tasked to operate in much worse weather than anything the Commandos would ever dare to brave. They saw their assignment to the Small-Scale Raiding Company as easy duty—with the occasional occupational hazard of being shot at.

  Locating a pinpoint target at night was proving to be impossible, given their lack of equipment and the present state of their training; they simply could not do it. Initially, Captain Randal and his officers assumed that navigation was hampered by a lack of accurate intelligence; all they ever had to work with was grid coordinates taken off a map sheet. When Squadron Leader Paddy Wilcox started photographing targets for them and taking selected Small-Scale Raiding Company personnel on aerial reconnaissance flights prior to their operations, the thought was that they would naturally find it easier to carry out operations on targets of their choosing.

  To their chagrin they soon found that simply because they had a dedicated target, had reviewed photos of the target area, and had flown over and eyeballed it beforehand did not mean they could hop aboard the Arrow, sail over, and raid it. The Commandos still had to find the eight-digit coordinate, a tiny pinpoint, in the dark and fog; they seldom could.

  All was not wasted, however. The officers and men of the Small-Scale Raiding Company were becoming extremely proficient at launching long-range, independent operations, even if they virtually never worked out as planned. Forced by circumstances to be self-reliant, they were learning from their mistakes, working through them, and gradually developing ways to solve their operational problems—except for finding the desired target.

  “The problem with our navigation is that we are trying to find minuscule targets located far away from major terrain features, such as lighthouses or ports,” Lieutenant Stone expounded one evening in the Blind Eye, restating the problem constantly on everyone’s mind. “We do not have any equipment other than a compass and a chart to work with. We can’t get a fix on the stars in the amount of time we have because it is nearly always cloudy or foggy. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for the weather to clear so we can take our bearings. And we can’t simply aim for a permanent terrain feature or big beach because we know all of those will be guarded or mined; we have to go for some rugged, out-of-the-way objective the size of a dog yard in the middle of London. We’re never going to find them the way we’re going about it.”

  “Being issued any sophisticated navigating gear is out of the question,” Midshipman Seaborn said gloomily. “In this war, anyway. Maybe the next one.”

  “Could be we’re going at this the wrong way,” Captain Randal offered. “If we can’t find the pinpoints, then maybe we ought to quit looking for them.”

  “Good idea, old stick,” agreed Lieutenant Stone, sounding dejected. “Then I can go back to my regiment and be packed off straightaway to the fleshpots of Cairo. I could use a tan.”

  “No, listen up.” Captain Randal cut him off, an idea beginning to crystallize. “There are two types of targets. Point targets and—”

  “Area targets,” Lieutenant Stone finished his thought. “You may be onto something. Where are you going with this?”

  “What’s an example of an area-type target we could raid?” Captain Randal asked.

  “Railroads,” Sergeant Major Maxwell Hicks replied almost immediately. “They run right along the coast in a number of places. It’s impossible for the Germans to guard them for their entire length. We could blow a railroad at any point on the line.”

  Leaving their drinks unfinished on the table, the Commandos stood up, paid their tab, drove straight back to Seaborn House, broke out charts of the coast of France, and started searching for coastal rail lines.

  A likely target rail line was quickly located and an operation laid on for the next night. The company was placed on alert for the mission, and the raiding party was designated and all personnel briefed. Captain Randal ordered the Arrow to be made ready.

  When the appointed hour came to sail, the weather conditions were only marginally favorable, but that didn’t discourage anyone. At the last minute, Midshipman Seaborn’s grandfather, Vice Admiral Sir Randolph “Razor” Ransom, VC, KCB, DSO, OBE, DSC, arrived and requested permission to accompany them in order to observe their night’s work. The Razor was sixty-three years old and long retired, but who was going to refuse him? Not anyone on the Arrow.

  The old admiral donned his foul-weather gear, and once he was on board, the yacht slipped the dock right on schedule. The sky turned green, then black. The rain came down and the swell rose. The Arrow slammed ahead, with waves the size of small houses breaking over her. The wind was south Force 7, the sea was very rough, and squalls followed one another, their howling winds slinging sheets of icy rain at the yacht. Those who were not seasick to the point of prostration were practically incapacitated with fear.

  HMY Arrow rode fairly well, but the acrobatics she performed amid the huge, gray-green waves were nothing short of heart-stopping. The men on the tiny ship were taking a heavy pounding. Shortly, the wind was gusting to Force 9 with high seas, heavy swells, and cutting rain.

  Admiral Ransom appeared to be thoroughly enjoying himself.

  The Arrow stood on. Time seemed to stand
still. The big green waves kept rolling in, threatening to smash the yacht into kindling. At the crest of each wave, the Arrow stood up on her tail like a tarpon trying to shake a hook, then slammed down into the trough, fought her way up a wall of water on the other side, arced over the top, and plunged down the far side. She repeated the whole death-defying act over and over and over again, for hour followed by excruciatingly long hour.

  After what seemed like a lifetime of pure gut-wrenching, seafaring terror, the lookout on the bow sang out, “Enemy trawlers, Green One Five.” Due to the optical illusion experienced at night at sea, the Nazi ships looked a lot closer than they actually were.