Nearing nightfall, Sofia was a hospital ship without a doctor.
Beauchene had guided his girl back into the smoke and fire to rescue survivors. They’d pulled from the sea fourteen badly burned men and six more who could at least walk. The sharks were indeed already returning to the sea what had walked on land. There was no sign of Manson Konnig’s body. It was going to be a long trip, the rest of the way to England, and there would surely be more canvas shrouds lowered over the side. For some of those burned scarecrows, it would be the merciful thing.
Eight Javelin crewmen were found hiding aboard Sofia, one of them in the closet of the second of V. Vivian’s unused staterooms. Another was hiding down a ventilation funnel. A third had to be shot because he attacked Olaf Thorgrimsen with a pocketknife.
Sofia was a mess. With the crumpled bow that had crossed her eyes, she could barely make four knots. Multiple leaks forward had been contained and the pumps were at work, but she was badly injured. Rough weather, Beauchene told Michael at a meeting in the mess hall, could bring the sea rushing in through the patches and now they had not a single lifeboat. Javelin’s heat had scorched the portside of Sofia’s superstructure and blackened her gunwales. The torpedo’s detonation had burst the eardrums and the resultant shockwave had broken the bones of more than one man. Every porthole on the ship had been either blown inward or cracked.
One thing could be said for Paul Wesshauser, in Beauchene’s opinion. The skinny bastard knew how to pack a long dick.
Michael suggested the fans ought to be turned on in the fertilizer hold.
Beauchene and Michael took a walk around the singed deck near seven o’clock. The captain carried his Thompson and Michael his revolver, because two hours ago another Javelin crewman had been found curled up under a tarpaulin. Most of Sofia’s lamps that still worked had been turned on. The crew was being fed and food was being prepared for the wounded prisoners, who’d been put into one of the forward holds. A dependable Pole had been named first mate and was manning the helm. A radio SOS had gone out and received a reply, and Sofia was meeting with the British freighter Arthurian for medical help and supplies around ten. Then the Russian, a good day’s work done, went to eat his dinner and get some sleep.
Sofia’s smashed nose headed west. Above the sea, stars filled the sky.
“She’s not pretty but she’s tough,” Beauchene told Michael as they walked. “I think we’ll make it all the way. If we have a calm sea. And if those patches hold. Ah, maybe we can get better equipment from your British friends, eh?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Come on, mon ami,” he said, and he reached up to clap Michael on the shoulder. “I’ve got another bottle.”
They climbed the scorched stairs to the wheelhouse, Michael following the captain. A few low lamps burned on the bridge. The first thing the two men saw was that the wheel was unmanned and Sofia was just beginning to drift off-course. The second thing was that the dependable Pole lay on the boards on his face with blood on the back of his sandy-haired head.
The third thing they saw was a ragged and burned figure standing in the corridor.
It still had a red goatee. The ebony boots were not now so glossy.
It also held a Luger, and it fired that weapon twice.
Gustave Beauchene cried out and clutched at his left side. He fell to his knees as the Luger trained upon Michael Gallatin.
Michael had no time to draw his own weapon. He propelled himself forward as the Luger barked and a bullet whistled past his left ear.
He hit the ruins of Manson Konnig in the midsection with his shoulder and drove the man back even as he grasped and held the gun hand. The Luger fired again, the bullet thunking into the ceiling. Konnig suddenly showed his strength and tremendous power of will by striking Michael a hard blow between the eyes with his free fist and then swinging him bodily around as his knees buckled. Michael crashed through the door onto the dirty carpet of Beauchene’s cabin.
Dazed, Michael saw the gun rise up again and flung himself aside as a bullet dug splinters from Beauchene’s desk. He got his own weapon out and fired a shot, which went wild over Konnig’s right shoulder. Konnig stood in the doorway, his teeth bared in the dark and melted face, and fired once more as Michael crawled under the protection of the desk. Then Michael lifted the entire desk up and heaved it at Konnig, who retreated into the corridor as papers flew about him and dirty plates clattered against the opposite wall.
A bolt was pulled back.
Konnig’s head swivelled to the right.
Gustave Beauchene, blood blotching his shirt at left side and left shoulder, was aiming his submachine gun. He had a crooked grin on his gray face.
“I’ve come,” he gasped, “to remove the garbage.”
He opened fire.
Michael saw the bullets start at Konnig’s belly and stitch upward along the chest and into the face. Konnig danced a dead man’s jig. A chunk of his head vanished in a red spray. The Luger fired once more from the nerveless fingers, the slug going into the floor.
Beauchene kept firing to the end of the clip, and then Konnig crumpled like a rag doll that had been held over a campfire by a bad little boy.
Konnig’s body twitched and twisted, but without much of a head there was not much of a brain therefore he was strictly yesterday’s news.
He was red all over.
The body was still. Beauchene lowered his Thompson, clutched at his wounded side again and then he too dropped. Michael emerged from the cabin and went directly to the captain’s aid. He tore the shirt open to look at the wounds. Three crewmen alerted by the noise of gunfire, among them Dylan Custis, came rushing into the wheelhouse and gathered around Michael and the captain.
“For Christ’s sake,” Beauchene asked them, “what’s the fucking fuss?” He blinked heavily, struggling to focus. “Haven’t you ever seen a man who needs a drink?”
It was a sunny morning when Sofia made harbor in Dover. The lines were thrown and secured, the anchor was dropped, and the ugliest ship that had ever crossed under the view of Dover Castle was safe. The gangplank went down, and the journey was done.
Several black trucks and ambulances were waiting, as well as two polished black sedans. Another crew came on to unload the cargo. The cranes moved and the hoists rattled. Blinking in the English sun, the men walked off Sofia carrying their duffel bags and strode off along the pier either alone or in groups: Olaf Thorgrimsen, soon to be bound back to Norway on another ship, and Dylan Custis, eager to visit his wife in Croydon; the engineers, electricians, mechanics, carpenter and welder; the able seamen and the ordinary seamen; the men of many nations but now the rather proud owners of one citizenship.
The freighter trash.
Marielle Wesshauser and her family had been met by some men she knew must be important. One of them was very tall and boyish-looking, though he was probably in his late forties. He had silvery-blonde hair and pale blue eyes. He had a high forehead, so he must be smart. Freckles were scattered across his cheeks and the bridge of his crooked nose. He talked quietly to her father and kept eye-contact. He seemed very cool and collected. She’d seen that same man speaking to Captain Beauchene on deck not long ago, and he’d spoken that very same way. Afterward, he and Captain Beauchene had shaken hands and then Marielle had watched the Frenchman wander around the ship. It seemed he was touching everything he could, as if saying goodbye to someone he’d once loved.
But she understood now that one had to look ahead. Always ahead. And that one had to keep working at life. Working at it, all the time. Working and working, like Vulcan at his forge.
For how else would anything beautiful be created?
They were leaving now, she and her family. The important men wanted to put them in one of the black sedans and take them to a hotel in London. That would be very much fun, Marielle thought. It would be very exciting, to walk around in London.
But first…
She searched and searched. Then she searched some more.
S
he looked everywhere.
But the gentleman was gone.
“Come on, Marielle! It’s time!” said her father, who offered her his hand as usual to negotiate any precarious path, such as the gangplank.
But she decided she didn’t need his hand today. Today she felt the sun on her face, and today she felt so light.
Because Billy was standing at the bottom, waiting for her, and when he saw her he smiled and came up to meet her halfway.
The
Wolf
and the
Eagle
One
“Buckle up, Major.”
The major was already buckled up.
“Short flight today, sir.”
“If you say so,” said Michael Gallatin, who occupied the rear seat of the RAF Westland Lysander aircraft. He was wearing his khaki British Western Desert Force uniform, sun-bleached and dusty, consisting of a sweat-damp short-sleeved shirt, shorts, gray knee-socks and tan-colored ankle boots. Around his neck and into his collar was tucked a dark blue scarf. It was meant to keep out the chafing grit that could lead to not only great mental distress but to serious infection, particularly if the flies got their diggers in the wound. His officer’s cap was the same color as the Libyan wasteland, the hue of the endless sand and the countless stones. Crammed into the space under his boots was his kitbag. It held a change of clothes, his canteen, his shaving accoutrements and his dependable American Colt .45 automatic. He wore his insignia of rank at a slight angle, which did him no good with superior officers but earned the silent approval of those below; in any case, the superior officers had been informed to leave him alone by the letter he carried from a very important man in London.
“Weather’s fine for flyin’ this mornin’, sir,” said the young Cockney pilot, whose sidelong grin displayed his crooked front teeth. He was enjoying an obvious moment of mirth concerning his rather nervous passenger. “No reason to worry.”
“Who’s worried?” Michael fired back, a little too quickly. In the North African desert in mid-August a clear sky could never be called upon to lift the spirits. It might be cloudless but it was often a pale milky color more white than blue, as if that cruel sun had burned all the beauty even out of Heaven. “You just tend to the flying,” Michael said, and told himself to relax. Easier told than done. He didn’t relish flying very much; it was a combination of his distrust—one should not call it fear, of course—of confinement and heights, and the whole idea of sitting in a sputtering machine many thousands of feet above the earth seemed even more unnatural to him than a sea voyage.
But it was the aircraft that really bothered him. This thing, with its stubby nose and thick-waisted bulk and clumsy-looking fixed landing gear, seemed to Michael a relic more suited to the last world war than the one in the unfortunate present. As Michael understood, the Lysander had been an antique even on its maiden flight in 1936. This was the year 1941, and what in the world was this thing even doing on a landing strip, much less about to take to the air as soon as the three Spitfire fighters went up. Michael shifted his bottom in the hard leather seat, whose rips were oozing cotton, and mused upon the fact that the Lysander was named after a Spartan general.
He knew what Spartan soldiers said about their shields: With this, or upon this.
Somehow, it was not comforting.
The airfield at the Bir Al Kabir oasis was a slapdash construction of tents and prefabricated buildings brought in by cargo planes from Cairo, two hundred and twenty-four miles to the east. The scraggly palm trees around the waterhole were not pretty and the water was not sweet, but even water that smelled and tasted of rotten eggs was life in this climate of a hundred and twenty-two degree days. A hot wind sometimes blew in, nagging at the tents and hissing through the aircraft engines to find their weak places, as more spinning sheets of dust painted machines and men alike the blanched shade of misery.
There was a war going on, and it was not always necessarily Churchill’s British versus Hitler’s Germans and Mussolini’s Italians; sometimes it was the Brit versus the invasion of a hundred thousand biting flies, or the Brit versus the month of burning days so stunning saliva dried within seconds to white crust on the cracked lips, or the Brit versus the empty horizon upon which heatwaves threw mirages of huge lakes that shimmered like molten vats of white glass.
The first of the Spitfire fighter planes was taking off. Woe to the other pilots behind him, including the Cockney kid at the Lysander’s controls, due to the amount of dust the takeoff stirred up. “You must be an important chap, sir,” came the next comment. “Three Spit escort and all, beggin’ your pardon.”
“I have my uses,” Michael answered. The way the Lysander’s engine made the plane vibrate did not make him talkative. The pilot would be throttling up and rolling out onto the runway when the third Spit took to the air, any minute now.
“Roger that. We’re waitin’. Over,” said the pilot through his headset microphone.
The second Spitfire roared off into the sky. The third was taxiing into takeoff position.
Michael checked his Rolex wristwatch. He figured he’d be in Cairo in time for a debriefing meeting at HQ and then on to lunch on the shaded veranda of the Piper’s Club. He hadn’t realized how much he missed their small filets, a platter of orange rolls and a fine cold beer. Two beers would be doubly fine. Then on to sleep for about twelve hours, on sheets of Egyptian cotton.
The third Spit took off, trailing dust. “Here we go, sir,” said the pilot cheerfully, and Michael thought he must be a budding sadist, for the kid gave the plane a little jerk as it rolled forward onto the strip, as if it wanted to leap into the air without benefit of a proper sprint. The noise of the engine was like hammers beating hollow metal drums to a madman’s rhythm, and over that unholy racket Michael could hear what sounded to him like loose bolts jumping in the wings.
“Roger, on our way,” the pilot told his controller. “Over.” He throttled up and the Lysander began to roll.
The Lysander’s chief talent was that it didn’t need a very long runway. They were off the ground in about ten seconds, and Michael placed his hands on his knees and squeezed the blood out of them as the craft rose quickly to meet the three Spitfires circling above the field.
“Goin’ up to fifteen thousand today, sir,” the pilot told him. “Get yourself a good look at the desert from way up there.”
Another look at the desert was the last thing Michael Gallatin needed or wanted.
His entire four-day mission out here had involved looking at the desert. He knew what they’d called him at the airfield: Majorly Strange. That was because after every sundown he drove through the guards’ position in an open-topped Morris truck and drove back in an hour before sunup. They knew that he was a reconnaissance officer, but they were puzzled as to why he went out alone. What they didn’t know was that, once out in the desert at a distance of a couple of miles or more, the recon major stopped his truck, took off his uniform, folded it and put it away, and then Majorly Strange became a creature that the word ‘strange’ utterly failed to describe. Over the sand and fist-sized stones of the hammada he ran westward on four legs, and cloaked by the night he travelled mile upon mile to make note in his human mind of the brutal landscape: the soft pits of sand that could swallow a truck or a tank, the series of dunes that would turn a soldier’s legs and willpower to jelly, the vast flat plains stubbled with cactus that rose to mountains and fell off again into chasms of jagged red rock. He was searching also for the German mines that lay in their thousands under the sand or the stony crust, and these he could smell by the metallic tang of danger that thrust at him, snake-like, as he approached. So much metal, and so much high explosive. The air reeked.
He used his heightened sense of direction to place these minefields on the map he’d learned to carry in his head, and so on he went alert for German patrols or the movement of troops and armored vehicles or the almost imperceptible blue lamps of an enemy outpost whose machine guns were trained on a m
aze of barbed wire, tank traps and Bouncing Betty mines designed to burst up from the ground and explode red-hot shrapnel into a man’s groin.
His job was to find a path for the British Army to move westward and destroy the Afrika Korps’ seige of Tobruk, which had trapped over twenty-four thousand Commonwealth soldiers in a ring of steel since the tenth of April.
At the airfield on his return, Majorly Strange would retire to a radio room and send his findings to his contact in Cairo in a code based on British nursery rhymes. Therefore the future of the war in North Africa and the lives of many thousands of men hung on the likes of Old King Cole, Strutting Cock Robin and the hungry wolf at the door.
“Easy peasy,” said the pilot. “Lemon squeesy.”
They had taken up their position just behind and below two Spitfires with the third guarding their tail. They flew east. The Lysander’s engine noise became a dull rumble. Michael did not care to sightsee what his sight had already seen, so he closed his eyes and tried to rest.
Yesterday had happened one of those rare encounters that made life, to Michael, such an interesting mystery. Such things could not be written in books and be believed.
He’d been walking to his quarters after he’d sent the radio codes when someone had fallen into step beside him.
“Excuse me, sir. Major?”
“Yes?” Michael was tired and ready for sleep, his senses a bit dulled. He saw the young man in the dusty Western Desert Force uniform and the two-bar chevron of the corporal’s rank. The corporal saluted, Michael returned the salute and then smiled and offered his hand. The young man took it.
“I thought it was you, sir!” said the young man, with an equally dusty smile. He’d been wearing goggles and around his eyes was the only area the desert hadn’t gotten to.
“Our company pulled in for water awhile ago, sir. May I ask…what you’re doing here?”
“On duty,” said Michael.
“Oh…yes, of course. Well… I felt I had to do my duty too, sir. What with all this going on. She asked me if I wouldn’t rather have joined the Navy, but I told her I’d had enough of the sea.” He paused to make sure the major understood. “We were married last April, sir. Marielle and I. Three years to the day we met.”
The Hunter From the Woods Page 12