“You’d think that we’d be able to scrounge up half a dozen LSTs from somebody, wouldn’t you?” McNamar said, walking back to Edland. “MacArthur won’t give them up. Nimitz can’t part with any. I’ve shanghaied every ship in the Mediterranean I could get my hands on and the goddamned British can’t get theirs ready in time. Jesus. What a fiasco.”
Edland remained silent. It was logistics. Men and materiel delivered to the scene of the battle. Delivered quickly and on time. This was not the part of the war that inspired paintings, songs, or patriotic movies. There were never triumphant poems written about making sure soldiers had beans and bullets — but if they didn’t…
“Those goddamned E-boats,” McNamar said. Edland saw the worry in McNamar’s face. “We can’t get to them, Mike. The British have finally got enough Tall Boys and it’s a damn good thing because any other bomb is just too light. They won’t penetrate the concrete roof of those pens. It’s like throwing spitballs. This is going to be a fucking disaster unless those E-boats are eliminated. That goes for your winged boats as well. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe especially your winged boats.”
“Thermopylae,” Edland said, and then was instantly sorry that he said it. But the word explained everything. A small band of brave Greeks holding off an entire Persian army at a narrow pass.
McNamar looked at him in a flash of anger, but it quickly died. “You think that’s what this is all about?”
“I don’t know, Admiral.”
“Well, isn’t that what we’re paying you for? To know? You’re supposed to be the expert on these things, aren’t you?” McNamar said, his anger rising. “Jesus Christ, Mike, this is a hell of a time for you to plead ignorance. Pretty soon we’re going to have a couple of thousand ships and several hundred thousand men in a hell of a fix and we need to know everything. So don’t give me that ‘I don’t know’ crap. How fast are they? How many do the Krauts have? Where are they? You’ve got to give me something.”
Edland nodded, carefully selecting his words. “Our first encounter with these vessels showed them to be fast, but their fire was inaccurate. Maybe because of the speed. Sixty knots. Some reports gave eighty knots. Lyme Bay was different. The hits were well grouped, very accurate. A torpedo attack was the follow-up. The whole thing took less than three hours by most accounts.”
“Okay,” McNamar said, calming. “Now what? You’re a smart boy, what do you think?”
“I think that there are only a few of them,” Edland said, trying to offer some hope. “A flotilla. Maybe two.”
“But there could be more? Right?”
“Yes, sir. But I don’t think there are. I think if there were more, we’d be seeing more attacks.”
“Maybe the Krauts are holding them for the Sunday punch?”
Edland nodded. It was just as reasonable to suspect that they would be unleashed in swarms, enveloping the invasion fleets by the hundreds.
“Yeah,” McNamar said. “They don’t have to win, do they, Mike? All they have to do is fuck things up. Just foul up things so badly that Ike is forced to call the whole thing off.” He let a moment pass before speaking. Edland could see that McNamar was worn out. The days were too long and the nights were too short, and if he wasn’t faced with emergencies he was pounded by responsibilities. The weight of command, Edland thought. It sounded trite, and maybe someone who hadn’t seen what he had seen could make it sound trite just by saying it. The newspapers. Politicians. But command was a physical thing, a block of iron that good men struggled to keep aloft so that it didn’t crush them, or those they were responsible for. “I saw Ike today. This morning. All he talked about was the goddamned weather. The weather looks lousy. We might have a day or two in early June, if we’re lucky. If Ike wants to give the word. How the hell he keeps from going nuts I’ll never know. I guess reading those Westerns.” He looked at Edland, regaining his composure. “Thermopylae, huh? Well, it’s up to us to keep that from happening.” He seemed to have noticed Edland for the first time and that the lieutenant commander had something on his mind. “Okay. Spill it.”
“I’d like to try again.”
McNamar gave Edland a harsh look. “Hell, no. You’ve done your sea duty and you’re not going out again. That’s not your job. You stick with me and do what you’re supposed to do. I’ll get ahold of Harris and Ramsey. We’ll turn up the heat on those pens.”
“It’s important that we capture one intact, Admiral,” Edland pushed. “Maybe we can learn something from it. A way to fight them.”
“The way to fight them is to blow them out of the water. It may not be fancy or fair, but it’ll work. Christ, Mike. You’re too important to go wandering all over the Channel looking for your white whale.”
Edland tried again. “They might just hold some secrets worth having.”
“You’re carrying your own share of secrets, Mike,” McNamar said angrily. “I can’t chance you falling into the wrong hands.”
“That won’t happen, sir,” Edland said. “I’ll take precautions.”
McNamar understood immediately. “You know what you’re saying? This is no game, Mike. If push comes to shove, you can’t be captured. Is your life worth some half-assed attempt to get one of these boats?”
“Yes, sir. If we move quickly enough we might have a chance to learn their secrets. It could save a lot of lives.”
“That’s a hell of a way to go.”
Edland, despite the subject, was amused that McNamar was unable to bring himself to say the word out loud — suicide. “I always carry a sidearm,” Edland said. “Not as sophisticated as a cyanide tablet but just as effective.”
McNamar shook his head in wonder. “You’re one cold son of a bitch, I’ll give you that. You’d do it, wouldn’t you, just to prove me wrong?”
Edland smiled.
“God help me for being a fool and you for being seven kinds of an idiot,” McNamar said. “I can’t figure you, Edland. You’re no hero and I’m really not sure what you think you can accomplish.” A full minute passed before he said anything, but this time he spoke as if he were a man who’d just come to his senses. “What’s that old expression? ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…’ ” He shook his head slowly. “No can do, Mike. You stay on dry land and that’s an order. No more adventures for you. We clear on that?”
Edland nodded. “Yes, sir. No more adventures.”
Gierek watched the sheets of rain roll across the runway in the false night of an afternoon storm. He was safe inside the hangar, smoking a cigarette, with the comforting sounds of the erks working on the Mosquitoes behind him. He was cold, despite the sheepskin jacket that he wore — the dampness sliding its fingers into his bones until he found himself trembling in its grip. He could have walked away from the entrance of the hangar, sought out the kerosene heater that the erks kept burning near the work shed, but he decided against it. He preferred to be alone, staring out across the gray field, his thoughts suspended — time at a standstill.
He flicked the cigarette into the hard rain and lost sight of it. He bowed his head and lit another and thought of Poland. Sister. Brother. He would not say their names, he vowed when he escaped across the Channel with a battered group of Poles, until he returned home. They would only be Sister and Brother.
Her hair was blond, almost white, because she spent so much time in the garden with her flowers. When Gierek came home on leave before the war he would say: “Sister, tell me what those are?” She would explain the flowers carefully. What they were and how they liked to grow and whether they were annuals or perennials. She would touch the leaves or petals with her frail fingers, caressing each as if from her touch she conveyed her regard for the sanctity of life.