The soldiers on the boat sat among the scatter of lines and nets. By the time the boat was out of sight from land, it was dark, cold, and overcast, with enough cloud cover to keep out any moonlight.
Some of the soldiers looked domestic—soft faces, clean hands, alert, scared eyes. Even the calm seas shook their stomachs as the pallor of their cheeks altered from bright red to dark moss green. Others had clearly been on boats, crossed borders, and fought battles before. They let their bodies move with the motion of the water. Their uniforms had patches over frays on the knees and elbows, their packs were lighter, but wrapped in more ammunition rounds. They seemed content and impatient all at once.
One of the soldiers closest to me had a knife attached to his belt. The knife was the size and shape of the Hitler Youth dagger.
“Do you know what this is?” the soldier asked me when he caught me looking at it.
“I think so. I have one like it,” I said.
“That’s good. You’ve been through the trainings.”
And there was the truth of it—of what my summer in Germany with Ludo and Edwin almost three years before had really been. These soldiers were not that much older than me, and it was clear to me then that the whole camp system must have been one of the most cunning military maneuvers in history. The camps took every boy in a nation, filled them with a passion for their country, the ideas of what their unified country stood for, and under the guise of games, taught them how to become an army. An army that believed wholeheartedly in the Fatherland—an army that worked its way across the channel and encamped on Dutch soil.
Two of the soldiers we were transporting sat on the stern of the boat. One lay on his side and let the other one light a paper candle and hold it up to his ear. The stick of fire burned in a smoky pillar rising from his head.
“What are those two doing, Uncle Martin?” I asked.
“The fire culls the ear wax out and wood ticks if you have them so you can use tweezers to yank them free,” he said.
I felt sorry for these men then. All of them were shipping out to join patrol parties or fortify the western front. I scanned the dark water around the boat and imagined myself in the Nazi uniform, the warm straight wool, the canvas loop of my rifle slung around me, rubbing into my shoulder like some hero running into battle.
“Hello, gentlemen,” Martin yelled in German to the men over the engine noise. “I need you guys to get in the stern for a few minutes while we pass this section. We need to weigh down the back to ride smoothly over the sandbar up here.”
“What is this about?” Aldrich asked.
“There’s a shallow sandbar up ahead. It’s better if there’s more weight in the stern. That’s why all those cinder blocks are there. You too, old Aldrich,” Martin said. When Aldrich and all the soldiers were in the stern of the boat, their flailed helmets in the dark looked like a fistful of obsidian steel balloons. Martin called for me. “Go down in the forward holds and check the manual steering gauges. Watch them until I yell for you to come up.”
I crawled into the holds, undid the floorboard latch, and lifted it off to lower myself into the forward cubby with the steering column axles. The sides of the holds were filled with backpacks similar to the ones the soldiers above decks had. Above the vibration of the engines, Martin yelled to all the Germans, “Now, I’m going to slow down here and you need to look over the aft sides in the back and tell me when you can see the bottom or any sand. It will look light yellow or white. Just call out when you know how much clearance we have. Jacob, are you down in the hold?”
“Yes.”
The mechanical shift of gears changed as the boat slowed down and settled into the soft hum of the lowest gear. I’d been hearing the music of boat engines my whole life and knew the speeds we were going, the weather, and current conditions by the sound of the engines and the hull against the water. Uncle Martin had told Edwin and me when we were younger that we came from a long line of North Sea men. “It’s in your blood, boys. Light and the sea are in your blood. Your ancestors have crawled through the golden guts of fish to give you their seed.” The slowing hum of the engines tucked inside the vibrating steel womb felt comforting to me. But there was no sandbar.
What peace I felt was shattered by the chaotic percussion of automatic gun fire echoing through the hull of the ship. There were two long spurts of a weapon being fired that moved from port to starboard and then back to port. After I ducked down farther inside, there was a brief but heavy flopping of something on the deck above my head. The water lapped at the side of the boat. There was the quick crack of several more lone shots, then the sound of the boat’s engines shifting into neutral. Not knowing what had happen terrified me. I had to do something, so climbed up and stuck my head out of the forward hatch and saw my uncle on the steering deck. He held a long gun out in front of him in his outstretched hands and waved it at the back of the boat. His posture was erect as he fired off another round. The action of the gun shook the muscles of his forearm and bicep, and he was strangely beautiful with the orange flashes shooting from the muzzle. He looked natural up there, as if he’d been practicing his whole life for this uncertain world.
Then Uncle Martin called to me, “Jacob, you can come up now.”
On deck, Martin grabbed the thick black belts of dead soldiers who hung slack over the gunwales and pulled them back to where they collapsed into a heap with the other dead. Aldrich’s head was at my feet, half of it missing, leaving a bright red cleft like a split watermelon rind. Thick bluish red blood poured down his temples and disappeared into his hairline. I kept looking from one body to the next without any real connection in my mind as to what happened.
When Uncle Martin had all of the bodies on the deck of the boat he turned to me. A German magazine-fed MP 40 submachine gun hung from his shoulder. Everything about him seemed electric as he stood above the large pile of bodies. Dead men were draped over the pile of cinder blocks. Several cinder blocks had shattered and dusted the soldiers’ clothing. Martin grabbed me by the shoulders and looked me right in the eye.
“Jacob.” He slapped at my cheek. “Jacob, here’s what I need you to do. Listen very closely. Can you do that?” He touched the side of my face again, “Can you do that?
“Go to the wheel and scan the water for any lights.” When there were none, he called me down to the stern. “Take all the backpacks and weapons off these men and put them below deck, down in the hold with the steering column. Did you see the other packs down there?”
I nodded.
“Good. Put them there,” he said. The quiet, easy control he had over his tone was frightening. “Then, help me go through all their pockets. Get any papers and money that they have, keep anything you think could be valuable or edible. Check to see if they stitched anything extra into the lining of their clothing.”
“There is no sandbar out here,” I mumbled.