Thirty minutes later, the Skytrain was cruising west-southwest at five thousand feet.
He peered out a small rectangular window, and as if on cue, the green forests of Venezuela disappeared under dense, unbroken cloud cover that stretched to the horizon.
Bob Thorne—alive.
MacCready turned forward and let out a long breath. What if he’s changed? What if he’s pulled some kind of Kurtz act? He had often wondered what czarist demons had driven a Ukrainian named Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to write about the malarial backwaters of Africa. Very strange . . .
MacCready’s head slowly ratcheted down toward his chest.
very . . . st . . .
Sometime later, the C-47 hit turbulence and MacCready came awake for a few seconds. He’d been dreaming about the summers of his childhood on Long Island’s South Shore. It was a time filled with sun-drenched beaches and books and baseball. And never any talk of Japs or Nazis.
Jesus. Seems like a thousand centuries ago.
As the drone of the engines faded once again, R. J. MacCready had a final thought before drifting back into sleep.
Nazis. How on earth did people turn into Nazis?
For most people, after the age of sixteen, the perception of time’s passage seemed to speed up. Yet for MacCready, the past twelve months were so crowded with new and unprecedented events that it felt to him as if twelve years had passed—maybe twenty. He sometimes wondered if his mind itself, and not just his perception of time, had started to become unhinged.
Nazis, how on earth did people turn into Nazis?
Whenever this question intruded upon him—whether sleeping or awake—the pictures in his head shifted easily backward in time, to childhood summers on rural Long Island. Mac’s two cousins were as innocent as any other children then, and brighter than most. Together with Mac, they were the three stellar children on an Irish-German family tree, each seemingly destined to go far in whatever fields they chose.
Recently, though, it seemed that every time he slept, his wonderful childhood memories morphed into an ever-worsening series of nightmares. His cousins now slithered into his dreams, mutated from boyhood pals into goose-stepping monsters, even as the end of the Nazi parade was within sight. And the face of his little sister flashed brightly, then dissolved to air. With each passing night, it became harder to recall what she looked like.
And the worst horror of all was the never-ending haunting by the two words MacCready wished no one had ever put together: If only.
If only I hadn’t been overseas when my family needed me most.
If only having a son fighting against the Axis had weighed more heavily in Mom’s favor than having nephews who became part of that evil.
No one would have believed, before it actually happened, that the same American president who had damned the Axis powers as “apostles of racial arrogance” was condoning, along the entire west coast, the forceful relocation of almost anyone with Japanese or Italian ancestors. Along the east coast, Italian-Americans received a special dispensation from such intrusion, after Charles “Lucky” Luciano’s crime family volunteered to protect New York City’s waterfront from Axis saboteurs. However, along that same waterfront, German-Americans were not faring much better than west coast Italians.
MacCready, who was German on his mother’s side, had been on an assignment with some indigenous allies in the Solomons. And as he came within a gnat’s breath of losing a leg to a poison-tipped lance, thousands of miles away, rogue elements of the government back home brought unspeakable calamity into the MacCready household.
Ostensibly in the name of “protecting children,” some newly empowered faction of New York’s wartime bureaucracy decreed that any American child adopted into the family of a German-American should be returned to its “natural” family. Mac learned that it mattered not at all that his father was an American veteran who had recently suffocated from the long-term effects of mustard gas—thanks to the Germans he’d fought in World War I. Nor did it matter that his mother had been born and raised on Long Island. During what turned out to be more of a condemnation than a hearing, the court sat idle while Amelia MacCready was referred to as “the Führer.” Soon after, Mac’s thirteen-year-old adopted sister, Brigitte, was removed from their loving home and forced back into the snake pit from which she had been rescued a decade earlier—half-starved, with the fingers of one hand broken. This time, the girl did not survive. Mac’s mother soon followed her down, slowly and agonizingly; and since then, the “if onlys” gnawed at him, day and night.
If only I’d heard of this atrocity in time to return home. To try to stop them from taking Brigitte. To call on favors from the people I knew in high places. To remind Mom she still had something to live for.