MATT HELM: The War Years Read online

  MATT HELM®

  The War Years

  A Pastiche

  By Keith Wease

  Based on the works of Donald Hamilton

  Copyright 2012 by Keith Wease

  MATT HELM® was created by Donald Hamilton and is protected by copyright and trademark law. The works of Donald Hamilton, including MATT HELM®, are used with the kind permission of Integute AB and the family of Donald Hamilton.

  First Edition

  Introduction

  This book started on a whim several years ago. I was on vacation at a campsite beside a lake in South Texas, across from Louisiana, prepared to re-read the Matt Helm series for the umpteenth time. As I started Death of a Citizen, I began wondering just how much information Donald Hamilton had included about Matt's early days during the war. I made notes of any references to Matt's previous career, as well as biographical details. By the end of the vacation, I had finished the first dozen or so books and continued at home with the rest. As the series "aged," the war references stopped for obvious reasons, but I still got some more biographical information from the later books.

  At the time, I was working in a one-man shop doing professional writing for clients and had a lot of "down" time. Going through my notes and the books, I transcribed all the references into my computer, including a few favorite passages typical of Donald Hamilton's amazing descriptive talent. I organized the file into an arbitrary timeline for my own amusement. Once this was done, I had a fairly accurate, if rather sketchy, portrayal of Matt Helm's early career and biography, enough for about a 25-page essay. Other than trivia for myself and other Matt Helm fans, it had no practical purpose whatsoever. I toyed with the idea of sending it to Donald Hamilton in the hopes he might be persuaded to give us a prequel, but gave up the idea as presumptuous. I saved the file to a disk and pretty much forgot about it.

  Shortly after I learned that Donald Hamilton had died, I got the idea of writing the prequel myself. I located the disk and, as time and my imagination permitted, I filled in details for the various missions I already had, invented many more, and fleshed out my ideas of Matt's initial recruitment and training. My first complete chapters were the first and the last, once I had decided how to start and end the book. A couple of years later, I still needed two or three more chapters, including the one leading back to where the book began, but life got in the way for two or three more years before I finally finished it.

  I spent the next year and a half trying to track down Donald Hamilton's heirs to get permission to publish the book, but all I could find were old references and old addresses. Finally, a random search brought up a post on some blog by the ex-husband of one of Donald Hamilton's daughters. I emailed him and he forwarded the email to his ex-wife. She responded directly to me and, once I explained the situation, sent an email to Gordon Hamilton, the CEO of Integute AB, the company he and his father had formed to hold his father's intellectual property rights. Gordon emailed me and graciously agreed to read my manuscript. After several back and forth emails over the next year, including some valuable editing advice, Gordon approved the book and we had a contract. Thanks, Gordon!

  In closing, I'd like to make a point about my inclusion of verbatim quotes from Donald Hamilton's books. While being comfortable mimicking his "voice," I was not comfortable changing his words, so I chose not to rewrite those passages and included them as originally written by him.

  Keith Wease, 2013

  Chapter 1

  Lying in the Army hospital near Washington, I had a lot of free time to reflect upon Mac's offer. Officially, I was recuperating from a near-fatal jeep accident and undergoing physical therapy to restore full mobility to various parts of my anatomy. Well, the physical therapy part was correct - my left arm and leg were just now beginning to work properly - but the jeep was largely imaginary, unless you counted being bounced around for three days in the back of a German Mercedes-Benz L4500A as an accident.

  There were occasions during those three days when I'd wished they'd left me to die, rather than beat me to death slowly. Fortunately, I was unconscious most of the time, but my waking moments were filled with agony as we bounced and bumped along back roads - and quite often no roads - to avoid German patrols and make it back behind the front line to a field hospital. From there, I'd spent a lot of time in various hospitals before ending up here for some fairly specialized treatment.

  The "accident" was no accident; the bastard had meant to kill me. Well, I'd tried to kill him first, so I couldn't really blame him and it was my own stupidity that had given him the chance in the first place. I'd naively assumed that half a magazine from the old MP38 I'd appropriated had killed him and hadn't made sure before turning to take out his partner. He had managed to pull the pin on the grenade and toss it in my general direction. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for his partner, the grenade had landed behind a tree, partially shielding me from the blast, but blowing his partner to hell and gone. I vaguely remember cursing myself as I was lifted and thrown like a leaf by the pile-driver blow that slammed into my left side....

  The only thing I remember clearly from the following weeks, other than the pain, was looking up at Martinson as he helped load me into the back of some vehicle. I had a terrible feeling of something important left undone. Sensing the unspoken question in my eyes, he whispered, "It's okay, Eric, I made the touch." Satisfied that the job had gotten done despite my blunder, I lapsed back into unconsciousness.

  I'd briefly seen Mac in the London hospital where most of the final repairs had been accomplished, some five weeks and four operations later. Apparently I was going to live and even get to keep my left leg - there had been some doubt for a while, due to a particularly nasty infection that could have gone either way. Mac had told me I was being transferred to Washington for some plastic surgery. We needed to cover up some potentially embarrassing round scars which were inconsistent with my cover as an Army Public Relations Officer who had never seen combat, but had been dumb enough to overturn a jeep near Paris.

  I was now remembering our conversation earlier in the day. Mac had come into my room wearing a medium weight gray suit - even though it was spring over here, it was still a little cool outside. I had never seen him without a suit and never in any color but gray; just different weights, depending on the weather.

  "Good morning, Eric. You seem to be recovering nicely." My real name, if it matters, is Matthew L. Helm, but in Mac's organization I was known as Eric, a name he'd apparently chosen due to my Scandinavian heritage. Except under special circumstances, we always used our code names when on official business. Of course, with Mac, everything was official business. I still knew nothing more about his background or personal life than the first time I met him, over three years before. Hell, I didn't even know his real name.

  I sat up in the bed, a little painfully. "Yes sir, everything seems to be working right, finally." I thought I saw his lips twitch into a brief smile at the "sir" - it had been a small joke between us since our first meeting - but I could have been wrong; he wasn't really a smiling man.

  "I understand the last of the more obvious scars have been covered."

  "Yes sir, all seven of them. The Doc also took care of two stab wounds that seemed a little excessive for peaceful little me. That only leaves me with a half dozen or so, caused by pieces of my imaginary jeep landing on me. May I ask why you've gone to all this trouble? Not that I don't appreciate it - at least I think I do. I'm not sure which hurt more, the bullet or covering up the scar." I seemed to be sore all over. I wouldn't have believed how painful plastic surgery could be.

  "Bullet wounds always raise a few eyebrows, especially for a known noncombatant. We like to be thorough when we construct a cover, a
s you know. Besides, you wouldn't want to shock your lady friend."

  I gave him a sharp glance. How he'd found out about Beth I had no idea, but I shouldn't have been surprised. There was damn little that ever got past him. I decided not to ask. "What now, sir, the Pacific?" I already knew that our particular role in the war in Europe - actually, everybody's role, other than the mopping-up crew - was over.

  "I think not, Eric. You did quite well in Europe." I was flattered; coming from Mac, this was high praise. He continued dryly, "However I can't quite envision a six foot four, two hundred pound, blond Swede with blue eyes infiltrating Tojo's army."

  I grinned. "You may have a point, sir. But it's not two hundred pounds - not yet, but I'm gaining on it." I had lost over twenty pounds in the first three weeks and had only got back ten of it so far.

  "In any case, the Pacific is not our kind of war. There's a new kind of war coming, Eric, one which will require our particular talents."

  "You mean the Russians?" I had had similar thoughts. Even though they were still considered our allies, I had a feeling that wouldn't last long once Hitler was taken care of.

  "Soviets, please." Mac was always precise in his language. "Yes, in the immediate future. However, the world is a savage place, and once a weapon has been developed, it tends to be used when needed. I foresee a use for our specialized type of weapon for a long time to come."

  I should have known. Mac wasn't the type to just fade away and he had some very definite ideas when it came to solutions to problems of a violent nature. To the very few who were aware of our existence, we were known as the M-Group, "M" meaning "murder." Actually, the name had been suggested by the Germans. Their word was Mordgruppe, and the counter-intelligence people in Britain began picking up whispers of such an Allied organization from their spies in Germany. They thought it was just an excuse dreamed up by some German bureaucrats to explain certain failures - after all, we wouldn't stoop to such underhanded methods, would we? - but for those in the know, the name stuck.

  I hadn't given much thought to what I would do once the war was over - at least not until very recently, after meeting Beth. She was a slim, lovely New England girl who was working at the hospital with the USO. I had met her a little over a month ago and we had hit it off big. So big, that I found myself thinking rather strange thoughts.

  Mac brought me out of my reverie. "Eric, we are preparing your discharge papers. In the next few days, you'll be out of the Army and free to do whatever you want." Again, he surprised me. He seemed to know what I was thinking. He continued, and I knew what was coming.

  "We will also be out of the military, if we were ever really in it. I have received permission to continue our little operation under civilian authority, never mind just which authority. If you'll consider it, I would like to have you continue with us. I have a feeling this will be a bigger decision for you than it might have been a few weeks ago, so I'll give you time to think it over. The doctors tell me you'll be ready for release in another few days. Let me know your decision at that time."

  I couldn't think of anything to say other than, "Yes sir." He turned and left. Well, he never was much for pleasantries or long goodbyes.

  Check to the gent in the pajamas with the stupid look on his face, bandages covering half his body and a scary, half-formed idea of the future beginning to percolate in his thick skull.

  Chapter 2

  How he'd ever managed to sell the project to someone in authority, I never found out. It must have taken some doing, since America is a fairly sentimental and moral nation, even in wartime, and since all armies, including ours, have their book of rules, and this was certainly not in the books.

  Exactly why he - or whomever he used for recruiting purposes - picked me, I never found out for certain. After all, I had the impression there were very few of us - an elite few I often thought in youthful enthusiasm - although I didn't know for sure. Curiosity wasn't encouraged and we operated on the principle that what we didn't know, we couldn't be forced to tell. I just didn't think there were that many people suited to that type of work, but why me in particular?

  Certainly I fit the basic profile. I had been a hunter before the war. Mac liked 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 crazed butcher. What criterion Mac used for the women - yes, we had some - I don't know.

  Another reason Mac may have been interested in me was a different skill, one less common than marksmanship or hunting. As a kid I'd been interested in all kinds of weapons, but particularly in the edged ones. My parents were Scandinavian and I was a red-hot Viking aficionado as a kid. I read every gory old Norse saga I could get my hands on. I was crazy about the old battle-axe. I particularly liked H. Rider Haggard, who specialized in African adventure tales. His best-known book is probably King Solomon's Mines, but I read them all; and the one I remember best was called Allan Quartermain. Allan was the wise white hunter, and his native sidekick was the great Zulu warrior Umslopogaas, one of my favorite fictional characters at that youthful time. Umslopogaas carried an outsized battle-axe and died nobly, shattered axe in hand, holding a palace stairway against overwhelming odds. The inhabitants of Umslopogaas's home village were known as the People of the Axe. I guess it's the Viking in me. Guns are fine, but I'm an old sword-and-dagger man at heart. All through college, I'd been on the fencing team, and a few of us played around after classes with throwing knives. During Officers' training, I was one of the best with the bayonet. I enjoyed shooting, and my marksmanship scores were high in the expert range, but I looked forward with more anticipation to bayonet classes.

  However, there are still an awful lot of people to choose from who are expert with both guns and knives of one sort or the other. Personally, I think Mac had a spy in the Army's Officer Training School, one of the instructors, who recommended me.

  Like many young men of my age, I joined the Army a few months after Pearl Harbor. For me, it was a matter of conscience. Although born here, I was first generation. My parents had immigrated from Sweden, changing their name in the process. It was originally Stjernhjelm, but my father shortened it to Helm, chopping it down to something Yankees could pronounce when he got to America. From the time I was born - well, actually I'm not sure of that, but at least from the time I could understand speech - my parents spoke English around the house. Maybe they spoke Swedish in the privacy of their bedroom, but all I heard was English until I was old enough that it was my primary language, then they taught me some Swedish. They had very firm ideas of loyalty. We were now Americans, this was our country and we would speak and act as everybody else did. Of course they never entirely got rid of the accent, but they made damned sure it didn't rub off on me. I think my dad was a bigger patriot than most of those born in America, an attitude he shared with a large percentage of immigrants, and it must have been passed on to me. Call it loyalty, call it patriotism, but my country was at war and my duty was clear.

  Thanks to a degree in journalism, acquired shortly before my parents died, I was considered officer material and sent to OTS. Although I was a journalist of sorts, having got a job with a camera on a newspaper in Santa Fe, New Mexico after graduation, and then working for some other New Mexico newspapers, the last being in Albuquerque, I requested infantry training rather than accepting a position in Public Relations. My drill instructor, a grizzled veteran named March - as in the month - approved and seemed to take a liking to me.

  One day, I got
into a fight. Well, it wasn't much of a fight as fights go. I'd never been sold on fists as a way to settle anything. First of all, you can't do much damage that way - at least I can't - and second, you often leave someone very mad at you, someone you haven't damaged enough to stop from getting revenge. There's a third reason; when you hit someone in the mouth with your fist, damn it, it hurts!

  Although the instructors tried to keep it to a minimum, there were always fights getting started. After all, we were at war. We were going to go kill us some Nazis and the adrenaline was flowing. Put that together with a bunch of young, eager new recruits and something has to explode occasionally. Mine started the way they usually do. His name, as I remember, was Cameron. He was a hell of a big man, not quite my height - very few are - but much wider and heavier with the craggy face of the professional muscleman. His nose had been broken many years ago. It could have happened in college football, but somehow I didn't think so. You know the type. There's something tight about the mouth and eyes, something contemptuous and condescending, and he didn't like me a bit. I don't know if it was jealousy - I had beaten him badly in both bayonet and judo classes - or if he just disapproved of my loner attitude. I don't make friends easily and have never been much for team sports. I'd refused his offer to join the baseball team they'd organized when off-duty.