Steven Wilson
Between the Hunters and the Hunted
Remember that your life’s vocation, deliberately chosen, is War: War as a means of Peace, but still War; and in singleness of purpose prepare for the time when the Defence of this Realm may come to be in your keeping.
Chapter 1
Louis Hoffman walked up the slight grassy knoll leading to the large swimming pool, removing his sweat-drenched jacket and undoing his tie. He’d already unbuttoned his vest and taken off his battered hat, but it was still too damned hot for a civilized man to be out in this uncivilized country. His suit, which always looked as if he slept in it, was as limp as the damp hair that plastered the back of his neck.
Hoffman was irritated, which was a natural state of affairs for the diminutive aid to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was hot and he was disgusted that he’d had to travel from Washington down to this godforsaken country because Franklin told him to come to Warm Springs as quickly as he could because it was “important.” Everything with Franklin was important because Franklin made everything important, and when anyone around the president exhibited the least bit of consternation over the endless barrage of edicts, Franklin would flash that patented smile of his and airily wave off any concerns.
That is, to anyone but Hoffman. Louis Hoffman was the only one who ever told the president, “Franklin, you’re full of shit,” and could get away with it. Hoffman was granted that privilege because he and Roosevelt were ambitious, brilliant, and implacable. They shared one other similarity: physically they were broken men, but neither accepted that as a detriment to achievement.
Hoffman didn’t like to travel and he didn’t like to leave Washington and he had a rotten cold anyway. Most people made the mistake of considering him inconsequential, a disgusting gnome who had somehow insinuated his way into the patrician Roosevelt’s good graces. They were mistaken. “I don’t like you very much, Mr. Hoffman,” Eleanor Roosevelt had said to him in her very cool and cultured voice, making it seem as if it were his fault, “but Franklin thinks well of you and I suppose that I shall have to be satisfied with that.”
Franklin thinks well of me, Hoffman snorted as he reached a cluster of wooden deck chairs scattered around the pool. Nobody, including me, knows what Franklin is thinking. I take what he tells me on faith because I have to and Franklin takes what I tell him on faith because there are too many two-faced sons of bitches fluttering around him who wouldn’t tell him the truth if it meant their lives. A coughing spasm overtook Hoffman and he quickly pulled a stained handkerchief from his back pocket and pressed it over his mouth. He could taste the phlegm as it shot out of his lungs and filled the handkerchief, and he felt his chest burning with the eruption. He would be weak after the attack, he knew that, and short-tempered, others knew that all too well, but he would be able to breathe better. For a while.
“Louis!”
Hoffman looked up to see a strange shape floating on the pool, distorted by the rays of the sun flashing across the water. He held his hand up to cut down the glare. It was the torso of a man. The man was waving at him.
“Louis,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt called again in that famous vibrant voice that never seemed to lack confidence or calm authority. “Good of you to come.”
Hoffman jammed the handkerchief in his back pocket and dropped heavily into a deck chair. “You ordered me to,” he said, curtly. He watched as Roosevelt maneuvered the floating chair through the water, his powerful shoulders, arms, and chest, white against the blue water, driving him closer. Hoffman knew that the president’s legs, crippled by polio, dangled uselessly below the surface.
Roosevelt’s chair, a unique cork and canvas and web device, bumped up against the edge of the pool. The president stuck out his big hand and beamed. “Good to see you, Louis.”
Hoffman pulled a cigarette from a pack and lit it. “I hate this fucking place.” He stuck the cigarette in Roosevelt’s ebony holder and handed it to the president.
Roosevelt threw his head back and laughed heartily. “We do need to get you out of Washington more often, my old friend.”
“How about Times Square and Second Avenue?” Hoffman said, lighting a cigarette for himself. “Where’s a guy get a drink around here?”
“Ring the bell, Louis,” Roosevelt said, pointing to a small bell on a table next to the chair. “When Charles comes, order whatever you like. I’ll have iced tea, lots of lemon, unsweetened.” He pushed himself away from the edge of the pool and clamped the holder in his teeth at a jaunty angle. “I’ve got two more laps and then we’ll talk. Go to the lodge and get refreshed. I’ll meet you in an hour. In your room is a folder with the latest dispatches from England.” He was almost shouting as he neared the center of the pool. “No improvements, I’m afraid, but we’ll talk about that later. Oh, and, Louis?”
Hoffman looked up.
“Try not to be unpleasant to the staff, will you? They don’t understand you the way I do.”
It was two hours before the president was wheeled into his tiny office. By that time Hoffman had showered, changed, drunk three scotch-and-waters, smoked a dozen cigarettes, and read the cables in the folder. His disposition hadn’t improved.
A servant took Hoffman to Roosevelt’s office. The president, dressed in lightweight slacks, a knit shirt, and canvas deck shoes, motioned Hoffman to a chair next to him.
“Louis,” the president began thoughtfully, sliding a cigarette into a holder, “we’ve a problem.”
“Is this a one-drink problem or a two-drink problem?” Hoffman asked.
“Hear me out and you can decide for yourself.” Roosevelt moved the wheelchair closer to Hoffman. “I don’t think England can last much longer on her own. Adolph is too strong. The British rescued the bulk of their army at Dunkerque but left their supplies on the beach. No tanks, artillery, or trucks. They might as well be a nineteenth-century army. Mr. Hitler’s U-boats are starving her. Her convoys see fifty or sixty percent losses. Whatever is getting through is not enough. We have given her fifty old destroyers and whatever else we can spare short of going to war ourselves.” He examined the end of the glowing cigarette. “I’m afraid, and I mention this only to you of course, that Great Britain is dying.”
“Franklin,” Hoffman said irritably, “you’re giving me a laundry list of headlines over the past six months. I know this, and you know that I know this, and we’ve talked about all of it until the cows come home. Now if you’re preparing me for something, just say it.”
“Britain needs more help than we’ve given her to date.”
“Yeah,” Hoffman said, tossing the folder onto Roosevelt’s desk. “I think they need a miracle, Franklin. You’ve done all you could do without declaring war on Germany. And that is a bird that isn’t going to fly right now. You just don’t have the support. Every time I turn on the radio some idiot from the American First Party is giving you hell about something or other. If I had my way, I’d deport every single one of them to Germany. But there’s no other way to say it — they want your blood. You put one foot over the line, and I mean the line that says what you should do versus what we can legally do, and you’ll have a hell of a lot more time to listen to the birds singing on that godforsaken island.”