Comes the War

by Ed Ruggero

  Harkins got the belt around his chest and had only a second to enjoy the relief before he thought of Staff Sergeant Jesus Cortizo, non-swimmer, going over the side, life belt snug around his waist, where Harkins had so helpfully tightened it.

  26

  28 April 1944

  0500 hours

  Harkins and the two navy men were in the water only a few minutes before they were rescued by some U.S. Coast Guardsmen in a thirty-foot launch. The boat already held about eight survivors, and Harkins could see what looked like two or three bodies under a tarp behind the small wheelhouse. The coasties were kind enough to keep the dead out of sight. One of their rescuers, a chief of some sort, examined the sailor with the severed leg, testing the tourniquet with his fingers.

  “Is this your necktie, sir?” he asked the ensign Harkins had freed.

  The exhausted junior officer nodded.

  “Good job,” the chief said.

  Eventually they unloaded onto a small pier, where some navy corpsmen and an older officer, probably a doctor, checked the survivors and directed them to a nearby street, where a warming tent had been set up. The most seriously injured men went directly into waiting ambulances. Harkins, shivering but not badly hurt, stripped off his clothing, then used bandages to wipe away the fuel oil before putting on a navy enlisted man’s uniform that someone handed him. He had lost his shoes in the water.

  “What’s your name?” the ensign asked. He was a small man, couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds. Improbably, his eyeglasses were still in place.

  “Harkins. Eddie Harkins.”

  The ensign clasped Harkins’ right hand in both of his own, which dripped fuel. His uniform was black with the stuff, his neck and chest smeared, but a corpsman had helped him wipe the oil from around his eyes and mouth.

  “I’m Guy Cedrick,” the ensign said. “You saved us.”

  Harkins wasn’t sure what to say to that.

  “You could have left us,” Cedrick said. “But you decided to stay behind.”

  Harkins, who was quite sure he’d made no such decision consciously, said, “Yeah, okay.”

  * * *

  When the sun came up, Harkins, still wearing a sailor’s uniform and wrapped in a blanket, sat on a stretcher in the same street where he’d been triaged. He’d found some discarded cloth to wrap his feet, like a time-traveling soldier from Valley Forge. Someone handed out coffee and a loaf of bread, which he shared with three other survivors. None of them knew what to do or where to go. They gave their names to a sailor who came around with a clipboard and asked what unit they were in.

  “SHAEF Headquarters,” Harkins answered.

  “You army?” the clerk asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “The uniform threw me,” the man said. “I’m going to have someone pick you up, soon as I can. Bring you to the right collection point.”

  No one knew exactly what had happened out in the channel, though there were already some fantastic rumors: the Luftwaffe had bombed them, the RAF had bombed them, the stricken ships had hit mines, there were saboteurs in the fleet. Harkins had heard blame heaped on the Soviets, the Free French, even British Communists.

  He mostly sat quietly, though he got sick twice, either from swallowed fuel or adrenaline released by the ordeal. Throughout the morning he watched as other launches and bigger ships brought in stunned victims and more bodies. A detail of sailors set up a canvas screen to hide the door of a warehouse near the pier. A makeshift morgue. He watched for an hour before he could steel himself to walk through, looking for Staff Sergeant Cortizo, who had shared his jeep with Harkins. When he did not find the man, he allowed himself a tiny bit of hope. Thirty minutes later, a three-quarter-ton truck pulled up to take the GIs to a barn that had been turned into a collection point for army survivors. That’s where Sinnott and Wickman found him.

  “Harkins!” Wickman called.

  Harkins was in the middle of changing into an army uniform when Wickman reached him.

  “Thank God you’re okay,” Wickman said.

  “I guess,” Harkins said, pulling on the trousers, which came only to his calves.

  “You guess you’re okay or you guess we should thank God?” Wickman asked, trying humor.

  Harkins shrugged.

  Major Sinnott pushed his way through the crowd at the door of the barn, spotted Harkins and said, apparently to Wickman, “See! I told you he was a tough bastard and would make it!”

  Sinnott and Wickman were both dressed in field uniforms. Sinnott wore a pistol belt and holster, but Harkins could see the holster was empty.

  “You injured?” Sinnott asked.

  Harkins touched his fingers to the lump on the side of his head, where the dog handle had hit him. “Just a bump on the head, I think. Banged-up ribs.”

  “You’re a lucky son-of-a-bitch,” Sinnott said.

  “What happened out there?” Wickman asked.

  “I don’t know,” Harkins said. “One second I was talking to this sergeant who let me sit in his jeep, out of the weather. And the next second there was a giant explosion and the ship was on fire and sinking.”

  Sinnott took off his helmet and ran his fingers through his hair. Harkins noticed that he was not wearing Brylcreem today. Ready for war.

  “It’s still preliminary, but it looks like some German E-boats out of Cherbourg found the convoy.”

  “What’s an E-boat?” Harkins asked.

  “A fast torpedo boat,” Sinnott said. “They probably got in and out in a few minutes.”

  “Doesn’t the navy guard these convoys?” Harkins asked.

  “Who knows what happened?” Sinnott said. “I’m sure there’ll be an inquiry. Somebody will hang or someone will get a slap on the wrist for a major fuck-up. Right now, we have another problem.”

  He produced a sheaf of papers from a map case slung over one shoulder.

  “All the guys on this list were bigoted and part of the exercise. You know what bigoted means?”

  “Means they know details about the invasion,” Harkins said.

  “We have to account for them,” Sinnott said. “Find them alive or dead so we can figure out if the Krauts scooped up one or two as prisoners. That could be a disaster. I said we’d help look. You up to it?”

  “I think so,” Harkins said. “As soon as I find some shoes.”

  * * *

  Sinnott left Harkins and Wickman while he went looking for whoever was keeping track of the identification of recovered remains. It was close to sixteen hundred when a Graves Registration unit took over the handling of the corpses, and Harkins was impressed with both their efficiency and sense of propriety, the dignity with which they treated the dead.

  Wickman, following one of the teams, found a lieutenant colonel of engineers—dead—who was bigoted. Harkins found no one on the list, nor did he find Staff Sergeant Cortizo. After they’d checked every recovered corpse in this morgue—there were over one hundred and fifty—Harkins and Wickman stepped outside. A private noticed Harkins’ bare feet and found him a pair of shoes. They were not broken-in and not his size, but he was grateful.

  “You got a message from a Major Adams while you were gone,” Wickman said. “He got the court-martial pushed back at least until mid-May, and Lowell got those original statements to him.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  “Also, Sinnott heard you had a dust-up with that guy Kerr from the embassy.”

  Harkins, who had not thought about the investigation for twenty-four hours, studied his partner.

  “It’s all he talked about on the way down here this morning,” Wickman said.

  “Did Kerr tattle on me?”

  “Somebody did. Anyway, Sinnott now wants to know all about how chummy Kerr is with the Soviets.”

  “I’d like to know that myself,” Harkins said.

  “Got any theories?”

  Harkins rolled his head on his shoulders, touched the knot on his skull. He was beginning to hurt
now that the ordeal was over. His ribs were sore where he’d rolled down the side of the ship, and he’d aggravated an old shoulder injury while towing the unconscious sailor who’d lost a leg.

  “That’s all I got,” Harkins said. “Theories.”

  Wickman shoved his hands in his pockets, looked at the ground, and said, “I’m really glad you’re okay.”

  “Thanks. Me, too.”

  Another truck pulled up to the morgue. Two privates jumped out of the back and lifted big bundles of what looked like folded cloth out of the back.

  “Body bags,” Wickman said. “There are probably body bags stashed all over Britain, just waiting for the invasion.”

  “I almost ended up in one this morning.”

  “Beverly found the Eighth Air Force logs,” Wickman said. He looked around for Sinnott. “The ones we talked about, for classified stuff. She’s really sharp, you know.”

  “So I gathered,” Harkins said. “She’s a big fan of yours, too.”

  Wickman didn’t say anything, but he was clearly delighted with this bit of gossip.

  A jeep pulled up on the other side of the street. The two men inside set up a chow line, pulling insulated cans from a trailer, probably getting ready to feed the Graves Registration soldiers. Harkins was suddenly famished. Except for a few pieces of the shared loaf of bread, he hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours.

  “What did she find?” Harkins asked as the two officers moved toward the chow line. If there was food left over when the enlisted men had eaten, maybe they’d get a meal.

  “Our friend Captain Gefner submitted a report for classification the day after you found Cushing with those papers.”

  “I think I love Beverly,” Harkins said.

  “I definitely love Beverly,” Wickman said. When Harkins looked at him, he wore a silly grin, an embarrassed schoolboy who’d just admitted a crush.

  “Anyway, there’s more. The Eighth’s logs of reports waiting to be classified also list titles and authors, where appropriate. The title was something like, ‘Bombing Campaign Effects on Manufacture of War Materiel.’ And the author was listed as ‘H. Batcheller.’ There was a space in the log for the author’s agency, but that was left blank.”

  “Adams was right. They know they’ll never make the murder charge stick, so they’re planting evidence about mishandling secret documents. They’ll get Cushing on that.”

  “You think Sinnott is helping them?” Wickman asked.

  “Looks that way.”

  “What’s his next move?”

  “Good question,” Harkins said. “Seems like things will be easier for him and Gefner if I’m not around.”

  “You almost weren’t.”

  Harkins looked at the taller man.

  “Around, I mean.”

  “Right.”

  * * *

  The news about Harkins’ dust-up with Kerr made Major Richard Sinnott think his luck was improving, although it had been a terrible day for the First Engineer Brigade and the U.S. Navy.

  “We’re up to about four hundred or so bodies,” an army captain with a harried look told him. Sinnott found the clearing center for victim identification inside a village chapel on the road to Plymouth. The team had set up some field tables in the sanctuary, where a dozen clerks banged away at typewriters. Not for the first time, Sinnott wondered what would happen, after the war, to all the millions of pages of reports, the endless lists, the duty rosters and charge sheets and court-martial transcripts.

  “Jesus,” Sinnott said. “How big was this exercise?”

  “Looks like three LSTs were hit. One burned for a good long time before sinking, one capsized within a few minutes, and one had its rear end shot off—a torpedo, the navy guys say—but managed to make it to the beach under its own power, if you can believe that.”

  It was no small miracle that Harkins had survived when so many others didn’t.

  Sinnott went back outside and found a jeep with no one in it. He climbed in, pushed the starter, and drove off, heading back toward the coast, toward where he left Harkins and Wickman.

  “Goddamn Harkins almost got himself killed,” he said aloud as he drove. “Just when I figured out I need him.”

  After his meeting with Sechin—the cheap bastard had given him all of one hundred thirty British pounds—he realized that his biggest problem wasn’t the threat of being unmasked by the OSS as some sort of collaborator; the biggest danger lay in Sechin deciding he was no longer useful, or—worse—that Sechin and his spy-recruiting operation would be safer if Sinnott could never speak to anyone, ever, about the Soviets’ flimsy network of moles and spies.

  Sinnott needed leverage to stay alive, and Harkins had found it for him.

  Lionel Kerr.

  It made sense for Sechin to recruit someone like Kerr to be a spy. He was ambitious, well-placed, and probably had a bright future ahead of him as a diplomat. He had that Ivy League background the State Department drooled over, and he was checking all the right boxes in London. He’d go over to the continent at the ass end of the fighting, just to get a little mud splashed on him, enough so that he could say he’d done something more than drink at Grosvenor House.

  It was that snotty, stuck-up Annie Stowe who’d come to Sinnott about Harkins harassing Kerr. She’d been in quite a lather, which made Sinnott wonder if she was sleeping with Kerr.

  That’d be a waste of some prime tail, he’d thought.

  According to Stowe, Harkins had all but accused Kerr of being a Soviet agent. If that were true, Sechin would not want Kerr exposed. If Sinnott knew for sure that Kerr had been turned, he could use the threat of revealing him to save his own skin. Life insurance.

  But it was a dangerous game. It was possible that Helen Batcheller was dead because she threatened to uncover one of Sechin’s people, maybe more than one, so Sinnott wasn’t about to do any digging himself. Harkins would do it for him. Sinnott had tried to direct him away from the murder—there were lots of reasons to let Cushing take the fall—including dreaming up this little sojourn to the coast. But now Sinnott needed Kerr’s hide, and he needed it before Sechin made a move, and he needed Harkins to deliver it.

  Sinnott found his way back to the temporary morgue, found Harkins and Wickman at the end of a chow line where the enlisted men from the Graves Registration company were being served a hot meal. He parked the jeep and joined them.

  Harkins looked at the bumper markings on Sinnott’s ride. Some infantry regiment in the First Division was now short one jeep.

  “Nice wheels, sir,” Harkins said as he and Wickman saluted.

  It’s like he just can’t help himself, Sinnott thought.

  “You expect me to walk?” Sinnott said.

  By the time the officers got to the front of the line, they were out of chow. Wickman used one of the big aluminum serving spoons to scrape the insulated containers. Two sergeants brought their mess kits over and gave each of the officers a slice of bread and a bit of gravy, a few chunks of meatloaf.

  “Millions of tons of American supplies stacked in all these fucking depots across the whole goddamned country, and we can’t get a meal,” Sinnott said.

  He laughed, which seemed to surprise Harkins and Wickman, and that amused him even more. He had a plan to get one up on that bastard Sechin, and Harkins—who was going to do the work and take all the risk—hadn’t spoiled it by getting himself killed.

  “Fuck this,” Sinnott said. “We’ve got work to do, then we’re going back to London.”

  “Me too?” Harkins asked. He looked exhausted, still had fuel oil in his hair and on his chest and arms.

  “Of course,” Sinnott answered. “You’re going to investigate Lionel Kerr. See what crawls out when you pick up that rock.”

  27

  30 April 1944

  1700 hours

  It took two more days of looking, but search parties eventually accounted for all ten missing officers who’d been bigoted. Once they were released, Sinnott got seats on a
train back to London for himself, Wickman, and Harkins, who was still walking gingerly and had to hold his ribs when he coughed up oil.

  “So they recovered all of the missing guys?” Wickman asked. They were in a private compartment, but whispered anyway.

  “Yeah,” Sinnott said. “Ike slapped a cover on all this, so don’t breathe a word about anything that happened once we’re back in London.”

  On his last day as part of the search team, Harkins had found Staff Sergeant Jesus Cortizo’s name on a list of recovered remains. He had immediately stepped outside to vomit.

  “Still gagging up that fuel oil, huh?” Wickman had said.

  Harkins had nodded, afraid to say aloud that, in his ignorance, he’d helped kill a man.

  “What about the families?” Harkins asked Sinnott. He sat at the window, head against the cool glass, arm pressed to sore ribs. The swelling above his right ear had gone down, but an area the size of a child’s hand was a deep purple.

  “What about them?”

  “What’ll they tell the families?”

  “I don’t know,” Sinnott said. “Just be happy your family isn’t getting a telegram.”

  Harkins wondered if his mother had hung a gold star in the window for his little brother. His sister Mary had written him two months earlier about seeing the telegram delivery boy turn onto their street ahead of them as they walked back from church. The four women—Harkins’ mother and three sisters—had ducked into a soda fountain while their father went ahead to see if another telegram, another terse death notice, had come to their house. He returned a few minutes later to report that the kid had pedaled out of the neighborhood without stopping.

  “Tell me about your discussion with Lionel Kerr the other night,” Sinnott said to Harkins.

  Harkins recounted the conversation as best he could remember.

  “I want you to find out if he’s been turned,” Sinnott said.

  “Into what?” Harkins asked.

  “The Soviets are recruiting spies and moles in the American mission,” Sinnott said. “Stalin thinks the postwar period will be a struggle between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. to be the world’s most powerful nation. He’s using this time to get ready, plant the seeds for his postwar intelligence apparatus. Kerr is exactly the kind of guy they’d like to recruit. Plus, he’s already sympathetic to their system.”