A voice spoke. Male. Heavily accented, but it was a kind of American accent I’d never quite heard before. New England, but not. A rough voice, used to yelling in order to be heard.
“Captain, there’s a reef two points off the port bow,” called the voice. “A mile or less. God’s love and we’d have struck ’em if we hadn’t dropped anchor last night.”
I listened for more, but that was it. There and gone.
“Hello!” I yelled, then as I replayed what the man had said, I tried, “Hello the boat.”
Nothing.
“Ahoy the ship.”
I’m not a sailor, but I hoped that was the right thing to say.
Nothing.
I drifted in nowhere.
Maybe I fell asleep. Maybe I just stopped thinking. No way to know, but I was jarred to awareness by the unmistakable sound of something heavy and wooden smashing into something immovable. Men screamed. Many men. I could hear the pop and snap of cloth. Sails? People cursing and calling orders out to shorten this and belay that and plug something else. Lots of nautical terms that I barely understood, and the gushing sound of water rushing in where it wasn’t supposed to be. Even a landlubber like me could figure it out. A ship had hit the reef of the island.
Right?
I remembered seeing the reef on the chart, but the RHIB had hydroplaned over it and Bunny had steered us around the fangs of rock that had jutted out of the water. The destroyer was steel and I doubted they had any wooden boats aboard. Why would they? This was the age of metal, of plastic and rubber.
So what was I hearing?
The men screamed and called out for help, yelled orders, cried out to God and their mothers, and gradually, gradually, the voices faded as if drowned by the sea. But it wasn’t the sea that took the voices away. It was the nothingness in which I floated.
I tried to make sense of it.
Was I dead?
Was I in a coma? Or dreaming? Or, had I finally gone mad? All of those were real possibilities with me.
Sounds came and went. The creak of oars and the splash of the oar blades in the water. Men slogging through surf. Laughing, joking, telling stories. None of it made sense, though. They talked about whales. They talked about the brown-skinned girls of Hawaii, but they spoke of them in the rude exaggerations of simple men to whom such things were rare and magical. Some of the voices were American, though crude and strange; and some were clearly British. One of the men said something about making a legal claim for Queen Victoria, and that made no goddamn sense at all.
Queen Victoria?
Jesus H. Christ.
I slept again.
And woke when someone kicked me in the ribs.
-5-
“Aufstehen!”
The voice growled it as he kicked me again. Harder.
I twisted away and sand shifted under me and all at once there was light. Not much of it. Moonlight spilling down and painting everything around me in silver. I saw two figures standing above me, silhouetted against the moon. Men. Big, young, broad-shouldered. Wearing black skin-diving outfits. Fins and old-fashioned tanks lay on the wet sand.
“We bist du?” said one of them, and all at once I realized two very strange things.
The first problem was that they were speaking German in a tense, secretive whisper. The man who’d told me to get up and asked who I was. I understood it; I’m good with languages.
I was less good with the second thing I realized.
Their equipment was wrong. Very wrong. The one who kicked me held a Gustloff Volkssturmgewehr semiautomatic rifle. It was a classic example of a weapon known as a Volkssturm rifle, a “people’s assault” rifle, a cheap last-ditch kind of gun used in combat in the final months of World War II. The other guy held a Luger. Not the modern P38 used in Germany nowadays. No, that might have made a fraction of sense. This was the older model, the one collectors prized and hundreds of U.S. soldiers smuggled home after the fall of Berlin. A P04 or maybe the P08. Hard to tell because it was dark, I was scared, and there was a cheap-looking silencer screwed into the barrel.
So, here we are. A couple of big blond guys with new-looking antique gear. The wrong moon in the sky. What the actual fuck? At that moment I was pretty sure the world had fallen off its hinges and that I was in deep shit. The two men weren’t tourists. These weren’t gun nuts that got lost at sea. And they weren’t amused to find me.
Crazy as it sounds, crazy as it felt, I was absolutely certain I was a lot more lost than I thought. This may have been Palmyra Atoll, but I was lost.
They were Nazis.
-6-
I smiled my very best I’m not your enemy and the world isn’t bug-fuck nuts smile. They seemed to expect me to raise my hands, so I obliged.
“Wer bist du und was machst du denn hier?” demanded the man with the Luger. He had the officer look, expecting to be answered at once.
Who are you and what are you doing here?
The rifleman gave me an evil look and said, “Amerikanisch.”
They were not happy at all with the thought that I was an American. Although I could speak German, I was pretty sure there was going to be some kind of need for a code word, which I did not have. On the upside I wore no insignia or other markings. Nothing in my pockets other than a folding knife clipped to my inner right-hand trouser pocket, some nonfunctioning electronic doodads, and the SIG Sauer P226 Combat TB snugged into my shoulder rig.
The moment was surreal.
The moon was full and bright, and when all this insanity started it was bright morning. Last night’s moon had been a sickle slash of a crescent. So there was that. The island — what I could see of it in the moonlight — was different. I was on the same part of the beach where we’d stopped by the aloe plant and knot of palm trees. There were plenty of aloe plants, but none of them were the right size or in the right place. The trees looked strange, none of them squaring with my memory of the landscape I’d traversed with Top, Bunny, and Ghost.
The officer ticked his head toward me and barked an order to his companion: “Suchen seine kleidung.” Search his clothes.
The rifleman stepped forward to pat me down. He paused for a moment, staring at the handgun I wore. Even in bad light he had to know it was a model he’d never seen. There wasn’t much I could say that would turn this situation in my favor. These cats were up to no good, and if I played it wrong I was going to die on this beach.
I kept my hands up and tried to look dumber, shorter, and slower than I am. The rifleman switched his gun to his left and reached out to take the SIG while his boss kept the Luger trained on me.
That’s where they made a mistake.
As soon as the rifleman grabbed the polymer grips of the handgun, I pivoted my body real damn fast, clamping his hand to the gun with my left and shoving him hard with my right. It put his body between me and the Luger and I ducked and drove, using his center-mass as both shield and battering ram. The Luger barked twice and I could feel the impact of the bullets punching into the rifleman, knocking wet coughs from him. I rammed the dying man into the officer and they went down hard onto the sand. Unfortunately, I caught a glimpse of my SIG Sauer flying from the rifleman’s hand, turning over and over as it spun through the air and then landing barrel first in the wet sand. Shit.