“Good,” Moose had said, voicing everyone’s opinions. “I hate those guys.”
“We’ll go in on the step,” Cole had said, rubbing the end of a pencil over his bottom lip in thought. His eyes traveled over the chart, lingered on the enemy convoy’s supposed path, and narrowed in concentration. DeLong watched the Skipper and saw the questions forming in the man’s brain. On the step — flank speed, hard-chinned hull out of the water, bow up, hungrily looking for the enemy — the only way that Cole operated.
“You guys are sure about this, huh?” Cole had finally said.
“We’re sure,” Edland returned quickly. His confidence eased their concerns.
“Sure as shootin’,” Tommy Turner had confirmed to himself. Harry Lowe laughed and smiled broadly at Turner. It was fun to make Harry laugh, to drop a curse in the middle of a perfectly innocent sentence and catch Harry off guard. Harry didn’t smoke or drink, and the only curse words he knew were mild — hell or damn — and even then, when he said them they really didn’t sound like cussing. “Hell, man,” DeLong had said after they’d known each other for a while, “you’re not for real.” He was good-natured, and the pictures of his wife showed an exquisite blonde flanked by a couple of kids. Harry and Cole were close — Harry the leavening to Cole’s sometimes harsh moods — Harry there to bring reason to Cole’s occasional outbursts. Harry the guy Cole went to when his own unidentified emotions had him wrapped so tightly that anything, everything, anyone did was wrong.
Harry Lowe, the guy who turned to Cole when the E-boats that weren’t supposed to be there slid out from behind the enemy transports with a strange, stricken smile that said: I’m going to die.
Harry Lowe’s matinee-idol good looks and his Clark Gable mustache disappeared in a flash of red as a 20mm shell blew his skull into a thousand pieces, covering the bridge, Cole, and DeLong with an obscene spray of flesh, blood, and brains.
“How far out, Barney?” Cole said into the microphone. DeLong was no longer in Bastia.
“Just about ten miles, Skip.” Barney was navigating from the auxiliary compass and had the advantage of the radar set tucked into the starboard corner of the chart room. He also had a light when he needed it to consult the charts that led them to Edland’s inlet.
“Can you make out Bill and Dean?” Cole asked DeLong.
“One sixty-eight is just abeam of us, to port,” Edland said from the darkness. “Dean is off our starboard quarter. Both about eight hundred yards out.”
“Good eyes,” DeLong whistled softly in appreciation.
“I’ve been watching them for some time,” Edland said, moving closer. “I’m sure that your radar man will confirm their position.”
“Throttle back to twenty,” Cole said, ignoring Edland. “Bill and Dean should pick up the speed change on radar. When we’re five miles out, drop to ten and we’ll ease her in. I’ll put Rich in the bow with a lead line.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Edland said. “It’s deep water all the way to the cliff face.”
“Keep an eye on everything, will you, Randy?” Cole said. “Commander, let’s take a walk.”
Edland followed Cole aft to a midway point of the Day Room canopy.
“This is about as private as we get on a PT boat,” Cole said, his voice low and his features obscured in the darkness. “I’ll forget all the niceties that come with rank and tell you if you ever again interfere in me running this boat, I’ll give you another scar to add to that one.”
“All I said…”
“I don’t give a fuck what your reason is and I sure don’t give a fuck about any of your opinions.”
“I thought we agreed…”
“We agreed that you may run the show but I run the fucking boats. That’s what we agreed on. You want an E-boat. I want to get out of this mess without getting my ass shot off, or piling the boats on some uncharted shoal, because when we’re high and dry fifty feet from a bunch of Krauts, a simple ‘Gee, I’m sorry as hell’ won’t mean a fucking thing.”
The figure facing Cole in the darkness was silent for a moment. The PT boat pitched gently in the calm sea, the deep rumble of the engines vibrating throughout the deck planking. The passing water hissed playfully against the hull.
“Okay, Lieutenant,” Edland said in a measured tone. “You’ve made your point. You’re the captain.”
“Yeah,” Cole said, turning.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Edland said.
Cole stopped.
“It wasn’t my fault. Your boats and your men.”
Cole didn’t bother to face Edland when he said: “No, it wasn’t. It was mine for believing you.”
Chapter 11
Matrose Willy Hellwig had been aboard S-204 for nearly a year. He was the youngest member of the crew of twenty-eight, a loader on the forward MG C/38 2cm Oerlikon gun, and not well liked by the other members of the crew. Especially Leutnant Meurer. No, Bootsmannmaat Janzen despised him even more than Meurer. Meurer simply held Hellwig in disdain.
It wasn’t Hellwig’s fault. He was only nineteen and he was not very comfortable around the doorknocker, and when it went off, the loud, constant bang startled him so that he nearly forgot to feed the shells into the hopper atop the gun. Then Janzen would curse Hellwig’s stupidity, his mother’s idiocy for giving birth to such a dolt, his village — he was from Cloppenburg, and the rest of the crew found that somehow very amusing — and finally the Kriegsmarine for allowing itself to come to such a sorry state that it had to settle for imbeciles like Matrose Willy Hellwig.
So the end of each patrol brought a sense of tense relief to Hellwig as well as the first sliver of dawn that announced that it was time to seek the shelter of the S-boat pens in Cherbourg, where S-204 was safe from the Allied bees and Hellwig was safe from the boxing that Janzen gave his ears.
What a war.
They had seen nothing all night; the wind had been calm and the sea so mild that even the canvas dodgers that kept the sea from slipping over the low freeboard were dry. There was no Victory Pennant bearing the tonnage of destroyed enemy ships to fly just below the Reichskriegflagge — the State War Flag — but that suited Hellwig. That meant that his ears were safe from the stinging blows of Janzen or the constant ringing that he endured after the guns had ceased firing.
They had been on a Lauertatik, simply loitering around possible enemy convoy routes in hopes of sighting a target, with another Schnellboot — S-209 — but sometime in the night S-209 had gone off on some unidentified mission and left S-204 alone. This intensified Hellwig’s anxiety, but he kept his concerns to himself. Better to suffer in silence than give that brute Janzen an opportunity to slap him.
It had been a nightmare for Hellwig since leaving the Schnellbootsschuleflotille at Swinemunde. The training had been sparse and the instructors belligerent and Hellwig had been certain that he would be killed almost immediately when he got to the front. He had hoped that things would be much better at Cherbourg and S-Boot Flotilla 5. To his great surprise he hadn’t been killed, but the abuse that he had suffered, this time at the hands of his comrades, had been worse than at Swinemunde. He realized that he had merely exchanged one level of hell for another.
What a war.
Liebs, the gun captain, ducked into the gun well and lit a cigarette, reemerging amid a cloud of smoke.
“Almost home, Willy,” he said, relaxing as he enjoyed the minor luxury.
Hellwig coughed into the back of his hand, trying to avoid the smoke. He didn’t like cigarettes and he was certain that the men surreptitiously blew smoke in his direction to torment him.