''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
'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.
