by Homer Hickam
Harro allowed a sad smile. “I have always liked lighthouses.” He shook his head. “But I must find my boat.”
“Let me take you home,” she said.
“I don’t live at the lighthouse,” he insisted.
“Yes, you do. You will remember when we get there.” She stood and held out her hand. “Keeper Jack will be so happy to see you.”
“Who’s Keeper Jack?”
“Your father.”
Harro took her hand and stood but resisted when she started to take him across the beach. “No,” he said, pulling away. He took the tin off the fire and blew on the coals, then added driftwood. “I must make a big fire. Then maybe my boat will come for me.”
“Oh, Jacob,” Willow despaired.
“Willow, I—” Harro began, but she placed two fingers on his lips and pressed them closed. She slipped into his arms, then she kissed him on his cheek.
“Even when we were little children,” she said, “I knew we were meant to be together.”
The girl was frightening Harro now. He pushed her away and went back to the fire, pulling up tufts of grass and throwing them into it to make smoke. Willow watched him with tears trickling down her cheeks. Harro kept looking over his shoulder at her. A storm of emotion, like flashes of sheet lightning, struck his core. He fought for rationality and made himself think of his duty to Captain Krebs, to his crewmates, to the fatherland itself.
But then a shadow fell across him, and her. He looked skyward. A cloud, its rim etched in silver and gold, had drifted across the sun. When he lowered his gaze, he saw the U-560, come to rescue him. But then he saw it wasn’t the U-560 at all, but the black U-boat of Kapitän Vogel. There were men on the tower and one was behind a machine gun. Harro heard a call from Vogel, followed by the hard metallic click of the charging handle of the gun being ratcheted back. “Nein!” Harro screamed, waving his hands. “Ich bin deutscher Seemann!”
The gunner swiveled his sight from Harro to the girl. Harro ran toward Willow, to throw himself in front of her, but then came the sound of hoofbeats. A man in an odd uniform on a great brown horse came charging down the beach. He was holding a rifle to his shoulder and fired a single shot. Vogel’s gunner snapped backward, his forehead spurting blood.
43
The sea off Killakeet always revealed its secrets, if only one knew where to look. Preacher helped Once pull the dead German boy out of the water and place him gently on the deck. Once took the boy’s name tag from around his neck and carried it to Lieutenant Thurlow. Preacher couldn’t stop looking at the boy’s innocent face. Except that his skin was wrinkled from immersion in seawater, he might have simply been asleep. Preacher crossed the boy’s hands on his chest. He wanted to pray but he couldn’t find the words. What Preacher couldn’t understand was why God would crush his shoulder in the coal mine, and then bring him to this sorry state. Why not kill him outright? “Who are you?” Preacher inquired toward heaven. “I mean, really? I would like to know.”
Phimble came over and squatted beside him. “What did you think war was all about, Preacher?”
“I killed this man in a righteous wrath,” Preacher said miserably.
“So what?” Phimble retorted. “Mister Thurlow swore you in and you did your duty. It’s like Joshua in the Bible killing those cretins on Jericho’s wall. Or David smacking Goliath upside the head with a rock. God’s partial to warriors, if you ask me, especially if they’re on his side.”
Preacher could not take his eyes off the dead boy. “He probably thought he was on the side of the Lord, too.”
Phimble lifted Preacher to his feet. “Here’s what’s going to happen now. You’re going to get your skinny tailbone on top of the wheelhouse and get behind the machine gun. And if we see any more Germans around here, you’re going to blast them, see? The Coast Guard says there’s only one God on their boats and that’s the captain it puts there. Don’t make me have to smack you.”
Josh was in the wheelhouse, unaware that the Coast Guard had made him God or anything else other than one angry lieutenant, junior grade. In fact, he was fit to chew on nails, mostly because he’d found the dead German boy so quickly, right where he thought he would be. Josh kept his expression stoic but inside he was howling the old and terrible question: Why had he not been able to find Jacob?
Josh’s fixed expression did not fool Stobs. He knew the lieutenant was just this side of exploding. “Sir?” he asked warily. “Do you want me to tell the Germans?”
“Tell them what?” Josh snapped.
“About finding the boy.”
Josh fumed. “I don’t care.”
Stobs transmitted.
T TO K. ONE FOUND DEAD. JOACHIM FELCHER. WILL BURY KILLAKEET.
As if the German radioman had been waiting on the other end, the response was nearly immediate.
RECEIVED.
“Received,” Josh growled at the one-word reply. “These krauts ever hear of ‘thank you’?”
“It’s not the same radio operator as the last time,” Stobs said. “His rhythm was different.”
“I guess they’ve got more than one radio operator,” Josh grumped.
“You want to reply?” Stobs asked, his finger poised over the key.
Josh’s expression darkened even more. “Tell that damn Nazi I mean to sink him!”
Stobs’s finger remained poised. “He probably knows that, sir.”
Josh ignored Stobs and slammed the wheelhouse door behind him, bellowing orders. “Man’s in a state, that’s what he is,” Stobs said to himself. He saw Once run past the wheelhouse, then Jimmy in the other direction. He heard scratching on the door and got up and let Marvin inside. The little dog dived under the table. “You’re smart, Marvin,” Stobs said. “I’d like to crawl under there with you!”
Another gunner jumped behind the machine gun on the black U-boat. Harro grabbed Willow and flung her down behind a sand hill. The big bullets ripped across the beach, throwing up smacks of sand.
Rex fired another round at the replacement German gunner, a fraction of a second before Joe Johnston caught a slug in his chest. The great horse faltered, but kept going. The gunner, hit by Rex in the mouth, pawed his face, then collapsed. The other men on the conning tower ducked out of sight. Then the diesels roared and the submarine sped up, curving seaward.
Rex leapt off Joe and took his reins. Blood spouted like a fountain from Joe’s chest, bathing Rex in it. Then the big horse began to tremble and made a awful groan. He tried to walk, but fell abruptly on his side, wailing and kicking. “Joe, Joe,” Rex cried, letting go of the reins, throwing down his rifle, and dropping to one knee at the head of the stricken animal.
Joe’s eyes were wide. He whinnied once, as if asking a question, then laid his head in the sand and shrieked. Rex sat down and lifted Joe’s massive head into his lap. The horse was trembling and his legs were jerking. His great breath was ragged. Rex knew he should pick up his rifle and shoot Joe in the head but he couldn’t do it. “Oh, Joe,” he said. “Good old horse.”
Joe blinked his eyes, turned huge and glassy, then a quiet nicker escaped from him. “I’m here, boy,” Rex said. “I’m here.” But Joe’s nicker was meant for someone else.
Harro couldn’t stop Willow. She struggled from beneath him and climbed on her hands and knees to the top of the dunes. “He’s coming,” she said. Harro crawled up beside her. The cowboy soldier who’d shot with such expertise was sitting in the sand, holding his wounded horse’s head. But then Harro saw a big gray horse plodding up the beach. His head held low, the horse walked up to the cowboy and his bleeding horse and stood over them.
“It’s Star,” Willow said. “He’s come to help Joe Johnston cross over.”
Rex had seen the stallion before during his patrols but never so close. Star lowered his nose until it was only inches from Joe’s nose. The two horses breathed the same air, back and forth, their nostrils flaring. Rex could feel and smell their warm breath, like fresh-cut grass on a summer’s day
. Then Joe made a long, low moan, and Rex felt only the wild stallion’s breath. Star raised his head, then dug at the sand. Then he walked away, back where he’d come from. Rex watched him for a time, then eased from beneath Joe’s head, resting it gently on the bloody sand. He brushed the sand as best he could off his blood-drenched pants and shirt. Then he picked up his rifle and knocked the sand off it. In the best Hollywood tradition, he’d not lost his hat during the entire ordeal.
Willow led Harro down from the dunes. Rex eyed Harro, took in his gray German coveralls, then leveled his rifle chest-high at the boy. “Say something,” he demanded. “And it better not be in German.”
“He’s Jacob,” Willow said. “He’s come home.”
Rex ignored Willow and narrowed his eyes at the boy. “Say something, you son of a bitch!”
“My name is Harro Stollenberg,” Harro said in accented English. “And I am a sailor in the Kriegsmarine.”
“That’s what I thought, you rotten Nazi bastard. Put your hands up where I can see them.”
Harro raised his hands, then clasped them on the back of his head. “I am sorry about your horse. That was not my boat.”
Rex wanted to shoot the German so bad he could taste it. This was one of those bastards who had killed all those poor people washed up on Killakeet’s beaches. And now they’d killed the best trick horse that had ever taken a turn before the cameras in Hollywood. About the only thing that stopped him was poor, simple Willow, who was standing so close to the boy, hanging off him, nearly.
Rex waved the barrel of his rifle up the beach toward the lighthouse. “Go on,” he growled at Harro. “March! And do me a favor. Try to make a break for it. I’d like nothing better than to plug you.”
Harro shrugged. “Don’t worry. I know I wouldn’t have a chance. You even chased away a U-boat all by yourself.”
Rex barked a harsh laugh. “Me? I guess you missed something.” He nodded his head seaward.
Harro looked toward the ocean and saw the cowboy soldier was correct. He had indeed missed something and it was rather large. Easing in beside the beach was the patrol boat, the Maudie Jane herself.
Krebs found Pretch on the ravaged tower erecting a makeshift radio antenna fashioned from wire wrapped on a diamond-shaped wooden frame. “The antenna shorted out,” Pretch explained. “Hans and the Chief keep turning the batteries off and on and I think they finally overloaded a relay. I’m trying to fashion something that will at least let me work short-range.”
“Before you lost contact, did you hear anything more from the Americans?”
“No, sir. Sorry.”
Krebs went below, to see how the Chief and Hans were doing on the electric motors. “We’ll be ready to test them in a few hours, Kaleu,” the Chief said. The motors were back on their mounts and the Chief was untangling the wires leading into a breaker panel.
“We must start immediately for a shipyard,” Hans snapped, throwing down his wrench, which clanged against the deck plates. “To even attempt to operate my electrics in this condition is unacceptable.” He rounded on Krebs. “You caused this. Why were we in such shallow water?”
“Hans, this is the captain,” the Chief cautioned. “Be careful what you say.”
“It’s all right, Chief,” Krebs said. “Hans, you’re right. I was careless. But we are not going across the Atlantic. You are going to get your motors operational again. We have a duty to perform here. Until we do it, we will stay.”
Hans’s expression, already sullen, turned darker. He stood rigidly, breathing heavily, his hands knotted in fists. The Chief took Krebs aside. “Give us another hour,” he said.
“An hour!” Hans screamed. “We need to be in a dockyard!”
“Shut up, Hans!” the Chief snapped. “One more word out of you and I will beat your brains out with your own wrench!” He turned again to Krebs. “One hour, sir, and we’ll be ready to make a test dive.”
“Thank you, Chief. I’m going to have a ceremony for those boys laid out on deck. Then, when you’re ready, we’ll make our test.”
The Chief, weary to the bone, nodded and went back to the ravaged breaker panel while Krebs went to see Max to borrow his Bible.
Josh and Once climbed out of the raft and came trudging up the beach. “What you got here, Rex?” Josh demanded.
“A damn Nazi, Josh. You just missed his friends. They killed Joe Johnston.”
“It was not my boat,” Harro said.
“Shut up,” Rex snapped.
Josh called over his shoulder to the Maudie Jane. “Tell Stobs to send a signal to Krebs. We found his other boy.”
Harro was so astonished, he lowered his hands. “You send messages to my captain?”
“Get your hands back up, boy,” Rex warned.
“Leave him alone,” Willow said. She hugged Harro’s arm. “Don’t you recognize him, Josh?”
“Why would I recognize him?” Josh demanded.
“Because he’s Jacob.”
Josh felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. “That’s an evil thing to say.”
“Can’t you see it in his face?” Willow asked.
Josh stared into the boy’s face and was met by steady, blue eyes. Even while he was doing it, he knew it was crazy but he tried to read into the German’s features his own, or his father’s, or . . . my God, was that his mother’s face? Perhaps. Maybe. It could be. Josh shook his head. “Willow, this is cruel.”
Harro was irritated that no one would pay attention to him. “The girl is confused,” he said. “I am Harro Stollenberg.”
Josh still couldn’t tear his eyes from Harro’s face. “Where did you grow up? Who are your parents?”
“I do not have to answer you,” Harro snapped.
“Answer the lieutenant or I’ll bust your skull,” Rex huffed, raising the butt of his rifle.
Harro looked at the rifle butt and raised his chin. “Go ahead. Hit me. I will not answer your questions.”
“Skipper!” It was Phimble from the deck of the Maudie Jane. “Stobs says he’s got a fix on the U-boat!”
Josh kept staring at Harro until Once tugged at his arm. “Did you hear Bosun Phimble, sir?”
Josh nodded. “Can you handle the prisoner, Rex?”
“Count on it.”
Josh took another look at Harro. “You are not Jacob,” he said, and then headed for the raft.
44
Harro was very tired. After all, he’d swum for miles and hadn’t slept much. If he could only rest, he thought, he might make some sense of what was happening. But the cowboy soldier kept prodding him along the beach. Willow followed, her arms crossed, her head down. When they reached a lone house on the beach, a woman, wearing a uniform nearly as odd as the cowboy’s, came out. Then Harro recognized her as the woman who had shot at his U-boat.
Dosie saw the blood on Rex’s uniform. “What happened, Rex?”
“Got ourselves a Nazi, Dosie,” Rex said. “But, dammit, he killed Joe Johnston.”
Dosie gasped in horror. “Not old Joe!”
“I did not kill his horse,” Harro said wearily. He was so terribly tired.
Willow came sobbing and threw herself into Dosie’s arms. “Why, Willow,” Dosie gasped in surprise. She had never seen the girl with any emotion, beyond a certain petulance, and here she was crying on her shoulder, of all things.
Willow lifted her head, her face wet with tears. “This is Jacob, Josh’s brother. And Rex wants to shoot him.”
“I am not Jacob,” Harro said, weaving from fatigue. He was having trouble staying upright.
“He’s forgotten who he is,” Willow explained.
“Josh saw him earlier,” Rex said. “He ain’t his brother. But Willow’s right about one thing. I’d like to shoot him.”
Dosie stroked Willow’s hair. “We’ll go see Keeper Jack, honey. He’ll know what to do.”
Willow tore away from Dosie and began to dance. “Yes! Keeper Jack! He’ll know!” She danced around Harro. “Your dadd
y will know you!” Then she sprinted on ahead.
“Crazy as a betsy bug,” Rex said, watching Willow run, her bare feet kicking up the sand.
“I agree,” Harro said.
“Shut up and keep moving,” Rex growled.
Ready was at the wheel and the Maudie Jane was rumbling toward the Stream. Josh and Phimble read the U-boat’s latest message. “They stayed on for about three minutes, sir,” Stobs said.
PLEASE YOU TO CALL IF HAVE FOUND OUR CREW BOYS. WE ARE LEFT WHEN YOU GIVE US THIS.
“This took three minutes to receive?”
“No, sir,” Stobs said. “But they kept sending it over and over. When I realized they were going to keep sending it, I fired up the direction finder and got a bead on them.”
Josh scratched Marvin’s head when the dog came out from beneath the table. “Which operator sent this?” he asked Stobs. “The first one or the second one?”
“Second one, sir.”
“His English is pretty bad.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You smell a trap, Skipper?” Phimble asked.
“I don’t know,” Josh said, after a few seconds thinking about it. “Go make sure Jimmy’s got the sonar fired up. Tell him I want to know everything he hears, even if he thinks it’s just a fish jerl.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Phimble said, and headed below.
• • •
Harro stood before the lighthouse. He had never seen anything quite so beautiful as the tall black and white spire.
“There’s the Keeper,” Dosie said.
Harro looked across the grass to the house built beside the lighthouse. Willow was on the porch and with her was a man dressed in a dark blue uniform. She was clutching the man’s hand and began to pull him up the sandy path. He walked with a stiff authority, yet Harro sensed the man’s gentleness. As he neared, Harro saw he was older than he’d looked from a distance, his beard gray against a sun-browned and deeply wrinkled face.