“We will be transferring our operations. Those explosions in camp have made it unsafe to stay here. Tonight the Beavers will be loaded onto trucks, and you will be transported with them to the west in the morning. Your mission will be to set out, protect our shores, and engage any Allied vessels you encounter. You will have thirty-six-hour rotations in your vessel, which includes going out and coming back. We will leave at 0700 for your new base.”
We were silent as the major spoke. I kept my eyes on him and nodded as he talked, but heard only scraps, as my real thoughts circled like carrion birds. When he straightened his head and looked at me, I was afraid my disgust shone through like my skull was made of old rags, thin cloth.
In my bunk that night, I took out my uncle’s gear and went to the desk and spread out the escape paraphernalia, starting with the passport papers and even vouchers from my navy command unit. The navigation and tide charts layered on top of one another covered most of the desk. I marked an x on the maps where Major Oldif had planned our routes once we cleared the German naval blockade. I ran my finger over the map and found a spot where there wasn’t supposed to be much German military presence along the shoreline, not far from where we were supposed to set out in the subs. I drew a new route on the map that would have me leaving from the push-out port of Hamburg, where the trucks would take us. I lay the Knight’s Cross on the desk. It would be so much easier to continue following orders.
The lamplight made the Knight’s Cross glow in front of me. It was something I could be proud of for the rest of my life, the major had told me when he handed it to me.
On one of the false passport papers there was a blank line to write who my next of kin was. My mother was dead. My father had slithered off and may very well have bled out somewhere, and the current had swallowed my brother. I could put my uncle, but there was no telling how much longer he would be alive or which side of the war effort his name would place me on. So I left the line blank.
I stuffed Herbert Yarborough’s passport papers and my own Knight’s Cross into the pocket of the Englishman’s rolled-up flight jumpsuit and packed it into the bottom of Uncle Martin’s backpack. On top of that, resting against the side zipper for easy access, was the dead German officer’s Luger and the one Uncle Martin had given me with a spare clip of ammunition. I loaded my own gear and charts in a plastic watertight bag, maps of the North Sea and North Atlantic, ten days’ worth of dried food and canned meat, four canteens full of water, and a bottle of energy pills before closing the pack.
When I had finished, I took Herbert Yarbrough’s barter kit and walked across the compound to the medic’s office. Pauwel was still unconscious. The wounds in his intestines had become infected, and his temperature had risen the day before. There was no waking him up. No getting him to come with me. I took his hand in mine and slipped the three gold rings from the barter kit around his left ring finger and tucked that hand under the covers.
“I hope to see you again,” I whispered, then left the room, walked back across the compound, and waited on my cot for our departure.
In the morning, I was still exhausted from the series of events since the party that I only wanted to sleep. The line of trucks with the Beavers had been covered with mesh camouflage so the loads looked like a giant cropping of alder bushes. There were twenty-eight Beavers being transported to Hamburg where they would deploy. My sailor’s duffle bag with Martin’s backpack inside was stored behind the seat in the cockpit of the truck that had my sub. I rode in the truck’s cab with the boy driver. He was younger than me and had a lopsided face like he’d had a bad birthing. His right eye sat lower than his left, which made his eyebrows slope toward his right ear.
We split the convoy into three so as not to attract as much attention from marauding Allied fighters intent on shooting anything that looked military.
On the outskirts of the city we passed bombed-out buildings. A bus had driven into a crater. Its back end angled out of the dirt, and I imagined it full of people driving deeper and deeper into the earth.
“A shame looking at all that, isn’t it?” my driver said. “I hate looking at rubble. Can’t wait to trade this hunk of wheels in for a plane to get some payback. Maybe even take up one of these odd little boats you’ve got back here.” He lifted his hand and tapped his knuckles against the truck wall behind him. He smiled at me with those big round eyes and crooked teeth. Of all the faces I’ve seen since, his somehow has managed to stay in my mind, that young boy driving a truck for his country. Happy to be a small part in the machine he never asked about. He smelled of sweat, cabbage, and diesel fumes, and never stopped talking.
We passed a shot-up lorry pushed off the side of the road and a burnt-out munitions train car striped with bullet holes on its side next to the tracks.
“You hear those bastards buzzing around sometimes, but they haven’t bothered me yet,” the driver said. “Those guys get flak-happy after a while. It takes them the longest, but they all snap. They go mad up there and buzz around shooting whatever looks funny to them. I don’t blame them. They’re in a world of hurt if they get shot down. Soldiers race out to find the RAF men and tie them to the back of their motorcycles and drag them behind. The road peels them like bananas.” He bounced around in his seat like he was trying to unstick each butt cheek from the leather. He hunched over the steering wheel so his back arched into his neck and his torso looked like a thick, angled stump. “Our boys who go down over England, they don’t catch them like that. Some of them carry razors in the cuff of their pant legs to cut their own wrists so they won’t be tortured into giving up any information. One pilot chewed through his own veins to avoid having to tell the Brits anything.”
As we drove, the boy’s voice washed over me until I was deaf to him, and only let little bits of what he said sink in. I was so tired. Along the road, boulders encrusted with gray-green lichen blurred past.
“You know, the snipers take you out on your third drag of a cigarette. You light it and they find you. Your second drag they scope you and let you enjoy your last breath, and on your third they blow your head off.”
We passed a long row of German panzers heading east. A coal barge cut the thin fog and passed under the bridge trestles. The boy kept talking.
“I’m going to get some time off and go hunt down some of those French girls in Paris. I’ve heard some of the guys talking about them. How you can take them out to be with you for the night. All the guys talk about it. I swear I’ll get there and go crazy. Saving my money for it now. I’ll be happy as a dog with two tails.”