“You’ve gone brown.”
Inanna looked up, rather apprehensively. “How does it look Nammie?”
Naamah inspected Inanna’s dyed hair with an authoritative eye. There had been a time when she’d made hair colorings from plant extracts but those days were long gone. “Your eyes don’t match, but there’s nothing you can do about that. I should know.” Naamah’s eyes were a dead, slime-green, frightening to the point of being repulsive. “For the rest, only your hairdresser will know.”
Inanna giggled at the reference to the advertising slogan used by Clairol for their range of home-coloring products. The company held a national competition to select an advertising slogan for their new product. ‘Only your hairdresser will know’ had been the alleged winner. On paper, it was a reference to the quality of the product that could match salon hair products. In reality, a veiled reference to the fact that it offered blonde women a way to look less German. Looking German was neither sensible nor safe. The newspaper on Inanna’s desk proved that. “You heard Tommy Lynch sent in an entry to that competition?”
“Oh no, what did he say this time?”
“It read ‘mix up a double batch and give yourself a matching snatch’. It won too, only the company management vetoed it despite the fact it would have doubled their sales. Does it really look good? Coloring jobs in salons are getting too expensive these days; this way is a little less costly. I thought I’d try it out first and if it works fine, we’ll make sure all the blondes in our family get supplies. We’ll dip into the reserves for it.”
“That bad, Inanna? I knew there was trouble up in Boston and New York but I thought it was confined to there?”
“What do you think?” Inanna flipped a copy of the Boston Globe over to Naamah. The front page picture was a sagging figure, tied to a streetlight post, the head and upper body covered with tar and feathers. “They ripped her coat and blouse off, hacked up her hair and then did that. Nobody bothered to call the police, she was there for twenty minutes in this weather before the cops found her. She’s in hospital; emergency ward. Pneumonia and burns to her face and head. What sort of animals are these people?”
“Frightened, angry, frustrated ones.” Naamah very carefully kept the anger out of her voice. “I’ll bet you any money you like; in normal times, the people who did that would have risked their lives to help a woman in distress. But now, they’re trapped in a situation they can’t understand or control. They want to slaughter the people who are killing our boys over in Russia but they can’t. So they displace that anger onto a scapegoat.” Naamah’s mouth twisted in disgust. “The normal scapegoats are blacks, Jews, any minority. Even having that thought makes people see themselves as being what they hate, being too close to the Nazis. So they pick on somebody else. In this case women with blonde hair. I’ll bet if the FBI picks up the group who did this, they’ll find in the background somebody who had a grudge against this particular victim and got everybody else worked up. Not all brutal sadists are German. They’re everywhere, here as well; you know that. Over the years, we’ve seen them often enough in more than enough places.”
“That’s the line the Globe are following. That the woman was the innocent victim of a personal vendetta and the people who were did it were no better than Nazis themselves. Problem is, look at the other story on the front page. More massacres in Ireland, entire villages in County Limerick just gone. Everybody. Men, women, children, animals, crops, everything. Boston is an Irish-American city. A lot of people had folk back ‘in the auld country’ and they want to hit back any way they can. This country is getting ugly. Nammie, it’s in the big cities now, but it’s spreading. We need to protect our family.”
Naamah nodded. “OK, I’ll talk to Lillith and Nefertiti, they’ll work out how much we need.” She grinned; the picture on the newspaper made it forced and unnatural. “It’s lucky we invested in the aircraft and electronics industries a few years back, isn’t it.” She looked at the picture again and even the forced grin faded. If she ever found the people responsible for that atrocity, she’d take them out for a drink. A very final drink.
Even the big Forties were rolling in the seas. Huge waves; long, swelling ones that rocked the battleship. Every so often there would be intense vibration as the waves exposed the screws aft and caused them to race before plunging into the deep again. Lindemann looked behind him. The second in line, immediately behind Derfflinger, was Moltke. Lindemann watched her drive her bows in, taking green water up to Turret Anton. All eight battleships had the “Atlantic bow,” raked and flared to improve bad weather performance. It was a great improvement on the flat, vertical Taylor bow the German designers had preferred earlier. It wasn’t helping Scharnhorst and Gneisenau though. They were badly overweight, sat much lower in the water than planned and they wallowed badly. Moltke was taking water over her bows, but the two light battleships at the end of the port column never seemed to get their bows out of the green swells. Turret Anton was awash more often than not. As if to hide the two ships’ distress, the rain closed in again, shrouding them from view.
Lindemann sighed and went back to the chart table. According to the weather people, once this storm front was past, the weather should be a lot better. By North Atlantic standards anyway. They’d be close enough by then to close on the big convoy and overwhelm it and its escorts. Then, they’d turn on the carrier group and overwhelm that.
After all, nobody had ever sunk a battleship on the high seas with aircraft. As long as the battleships could maneuver, they could avoid the airstrikes. Once the carriers had shot their bolt, it would be all over. Some were even cautiously talking about the rest of the American fleet, probably pounding England or France, coming to the rescue and being added to the pot. Too much to hope for of course. But they would get the big supply convoy and there was word of another smaller convoy, a fast troop convoy. That would be worth the risk of adding to the bag.
The rain squall eased off a little and the visibility improved again. Lindemann looked out the starboard bridge wings, towards the destroyer screen. He could see Hipper running ahead of the formation. Z-23 was steaming just behind and to starboard of her while Z-24 was clearly in sight, sailing almost parallel with Derfflinger. Behind her, Z-25 was having a much easier time of handling the heavy waves. She should, the designers had finally admitted the heavy twin turret forward on Z-23 and Z-24 was a bad idea and replaced it with a single shielded mount. Four 15cm guns, not five and all the better for that. Lindemann swung his binoculars back towards Z-24. Another one of those great swells was approaching and he watched the destroyer dig her bows in before she was hidden by the mountain of green water. He watched, waiting for her to reappear, waiting to see her fight her way clear of the wave. To his mounting horror she never did. Z-24 had vanished.
Lindemann was frozen, watching the scene through the ghostly shroud of mist, spray and rain. A three and a half thousand ton destroyer couldn’t just vanish. In the background he heard the message from the radio room arrive. ‘Destroyer Z-24 has foundered. No survivors.’ Eventually he forced his voice to work. “How?”