“Bunny,” Johnny said. “With your permission I’m going to get screechers tonight.”
Bunny suddenly realized that his entire body ached. He relaxed and lowered the seat. “I took you for a shandy man,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
“Whiskey, Bunny, and lots of it. None of that watery filth for me.”
“You know, fellows…” Peter said, trying to find what was left of his navigator’s instrument panel in the mess that had once been his station. “Oh, look, here’s the bloody compass all shot to pieces.” He threw it on the floor and continued to straighten things up. “We haven’t any reason to celebrate.”
Bunny looked down at the starboard nose compartment entry tunnel that led to the bomb-aimer/ navigator’s position. “Any day that I am not killed is a day for celebration, Bomb-aimer/Navigator.”
“That’s telling him, Bunny,” Johnny said.
“Oh, I agree wholeheartedly, Pilot/Sergeant,” Peter said. “But you’re forgetting the obvious.”
“Yes, I know. We’re not home yet.”
“I have all the confidence in the world that you will get us home. It’s the other thing that bothers me.”
“Now you have my interest, Bomb-aimer/Navigator,” Bunny said.
This time Peter’s voice was subdued. “We didn’t complete the mission, Bunny. Those heartless bastards will send us back out here.”
No one said anything and there was no reason to. Bunny knew that Peter was right. They would have to come back. He unzipped his flight suit and searched for the small plush rabbit safely nestled next to his heart. He squeezed it three times and closed the flight suit. He wondered how many times his talisman would return him to base. How much time that he had left.
Chapter 3
Lieutenant (j.g.) Jordan Cole, United States Naval Reserve, Office of Naval Intelligence, straightened awkwardly and rubbed the stiffness out of the small of his back. He shook his head in disgust at the notion of his only injury in this war coming as a result of hanging over light tables, his eye pressed to a stereoscopic eyepiece, looking for enemy ships hidden in black-and-white photographs. Not even for his own navy either, but for the Royal Navy. He was dispatched as an observer to the Royal Navy, his orders had read, as a part of an exchange program between the two services. That was a lie.
He was dispatched to the Royal Navy, his commander at Norfolk had told him, because: “You wear the uniform of a naval officer but you aren’t a naval officer. You’re a dilettante, Cole. You may be a college professor outside of the navy, but you’re a waste of time in. You’re going to England, my fine young friend, as a special observer, and you’re going to do whatever the Limeys want you to do. Maybe you’ll grow up over there.”
His commanding officer had said other things: comments about the navy not having to settle for officers just because there was a war on, even if it wasn’t their war. Things like that.
Strangely, Cole liked the navy. He liked the regulation and stability, and for some reason he felt protected within the structure of the navy. He didn’t always fit and he sometimes said too much or even just enough at the wrong time. “If you would just learn to keep your goddamned mouth shut!” someone had told him. It couldn’t have been Ruth. He hadn’t heard from her in months.
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and rubbed them gently. He figured out the routine. Take a break, get a cup of tea, swing your arms about, and then get back to the photographs. Bend over the table, adjust the glass, and begin searching. If he found something that looked interesting he circled it with a red grease pencil so that Sublieutenant Richard Moore could look over it. Dickie Moore — all arms and legs with a mass of blond hair that defied control. A good man.
“Active Service,” Moore had informed Cole. “What you Americans call Regular Navy, although I must confess that there is nothing very regular about me. Most irregular, in fact. Thank God my family is filthy rich and my father is rather keen on the navy.”
“Here we are, sir,” Petty Officer Markley said, bringing a bound folder into the photograph analysis room. “Bit of a mess down there, sir. Those blokes aren’t as organized as they should be. Time at sea would cure that right off.” He set the thick folder on the table with a thump. “Raised a lovely protest, sir. I was forced to employ my rating and flex my muscles a bit. If you know what I mean, sir.”
“That should have done it,” Cole said, smiling at the hulking man with the ludicrously large, red moustache that sat perfectly straight on a square face. Markley moved carefully through the strata of the Royal Navy, as any good petty officer should after years in the service. He was here only because a shipboard accident ended his career at sea and forced him to take an assignment in the quiet confines of Photo Analysis Operations. It took him a while to become used to Cole’s relaxed manner of doing things. “I don’t get excited,” Cole had once told the wary Markley, who eyed the young American with suspicion, “until there is blood on the deck.” Now they were — within reason and the restrictions of officer and noncommissioned officer, and cautiously on Markley’s side — friends.
“Indeed it did, sir. Indeed it did. So here they are, After Action Reports.”
“Just the Kattegat. Leka Island.”
Markley straightened as if called to attention. “Not entirely, sir. The place was in a right mess, as I reported, sir. I took it upon myself to hurry the blokes along and in the confusion they gave me everything they had. Sir.”
“I didn’t need everything, Markley. Just those flights pertaining to Leka Island.”
“Exactly my words to those—”
“That means that I’m going to have to have someone help me go through this mess.”
“Sublieutenant Moore is just the man to assist you—”
“Markley,” Cole said. “He isn’t here. He won’t be back for a couple of weeks, if we’re lucky. Take a look around, Markley. You’ll find you, ten thousand photographs, that folder, and me. I want the After Action Reports for reconnaissance flights over Leka Island, and as I always say, call it done when Markley is on it.”
“Yes, sir,” Petty Officer Markley said, rubbing his mustache in disgust. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I haven’t a bit of experience manning these photographs, sir.”
“You’re in luck, Markley. In the U.S. Navy we call this OJT.”
“Sir?”
“On-the-job training. Let’s get cracking.”
“Sir,” Markley said, recognizing his defeat. He pulled bundles of papers out of the folder. “If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, you American chaps are a colorful lot.”
“Practically red, white, and blue, through and through.” Cole opened a drawer from under the light table and produced a fifth of whiskey. “Petty Officer,” he said, and tossed it to Markley. “This might help.”
Markley acknowledged the gesture with a tip of the bottle and: “To your health, sir.”
Cole had the photographs of Leka Island and a one-hundred-square-mile area around it carefully arranged on the table. Some of the photographs were clear, some obscured by haze, and some angled so that the images were distorted. It was detective work, interpreting photographs. Cole laughed to himself and shook his head. No, it was scholarship — some sort of ironic punishment for a failed associate professor of history. Instead of facts and figures, instead of primary and secondary documents, he studied photographs taken thousands of feet above islands, ships, roads, canals, mountains, and railroads. From all of that, with the loyal Dickie Moore at his side and the square-rigged Petty Officer Markley manning the slide projector, he briefed his superiors. He was off to war armed with a pointer, clad in chain-mail armor of reports and memorandums, and mounted on a podium in the darkness of a smoke-filled room cut neatly in half by a shaft of light thrown by the projector. And his audience: relaxed potentates of high command and senior officers who might have once been charged with ambition when they were younger but had since exchanged that attribute for comfort.