At the dock, he tied the boat off with the help of several soldiers, and then woke the man in the holds.
Every sound on the fishing boat was familiar. I listened as time passed. I practiced the story I would use if I was found in Yarborough’s RAF uniform once in England. I was shot down over Delfzijl, in Holland. I’d been in hiding and had worked my way back. My parents came to Britain after the Great War. I was born in Holland but grew up in London. That was my first mission, and I bartered with a fisherman to smuggle me offshore.
In the bilge I pushed away the feeling I had become Herbert Yarborough, sentenced to the dark, by convincing myself I was close to fulfilling a promise to my mother and uncle. I was close to escaping. I had to be. I had to believe that.
After the sunset, Fabien came back to the boat. When he cast off, he called for me to come up. He went into the holds and pulled out two oars and leaned them on the stairs heading up to the deck.
“I hope you don’t get me killed, but if I die, I’d just as soon have my pocket full of cash.”
I pulled out the Luger and placed it on my right thigh so Fabien knew I had it. Uncle Martin would have done the same, I thought. Then I gave him the money.
“We will be fine,” I said, knowing all the dangerous submarines flittering along and under the surface of the water.
The boat worked its way east of the island, out of sight of the sentries and their giant searchlights set up to detect RAF raids, then turned north and headed for England. The chop was several feet but the boat handled it well. The inflatable rescue raft was blown up on the back deck with two oars inside. My papers, maps, cash, gun, clothing, and the English airman’s jumpsuit were in my pack. I pressed the jumpsuit out with my hands, then changed into it. It fit, but the sleeves and legs ran below the knobby bones of my ankles and wrists. I put the English airman’s papers in my pocket. I stepped into Herbert Yarborough’s skin.
Back in the wheelhouse, Fabien looked at me and whistled. “You are one impressive young man.” He pointed the bow to a small cropping of lights off in the distance. “That’s where we’re headed. There’s a small town east where I’ll drop you, but I have no idea what it’s like now. I haven’t been there since the war started.”
“Okay,” I said, and turned away from Fabien. I ate the last of my dark bread to have energy for fighting the currents and got into the raft. There was nothing else for me to do. I put on a life jacket and looped a small length of mooring line between my backpack and belt. A small canvas dry bag from Fabien’s holds was filled with all my German soldier’s identifications. I planned to cut it loose from my pack at sea so no one in Britain would find them.
When I was ready, Fabien undid the line, cast it into the boat, and waved.
“Good luck,” he said.
Set loose in the ocean, the rubber floor of the raft was the back of a giant serpent—a huge, pulsating muscle. It was hard to steady myself while feeling separated from the swells by such a thin strip of material. Drifting from Fabien’s boat, I remembered a line from a poem in my father’s study years before. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t remember who had written it. They might have been anonymous, taking on new shapes and forms like me.
And now I am on the wide, wide sea, alone.
The shadow of land was a few kilometers away, and as soon as my oars touched the water, I fought my way toward shore, riding up the side and down the slope of each swell. My back ached fighting the current from sweeping me away, and in my battle I became aware that nothing, not one future moment, was promised to me. A skin of sweat coated my body by the time I heard the surf breaking on the rocks. The white wash and spray of water blasted up and off the shore. The oar blades slapped the water, and the handles rubbed the calluses on my palms raw.
As I splashed through the night, a giant spotlight snapped to life from a bluff and swept over the water so the light engulfed me. It bounced off my body, and I raised an oar over my head and started waving it back and forth, back and forth, then put my hands over my head and started waving them.
The tide pulled me out a bit farther, so I took the oar and started fighting my way back. The light still swallowed me. I slipped the dagger from my boot and cut loose the packet of German papers and dropped them over the side of the raft, away from the spotlight. Then I used my prized Blut und Ehre dagger to cut open a sewn-in pocket inside the backpack to loosen my Knight’s Cross. With the medal in one hand and the dagger in the other, I plunged both hands into the sea and opened my palms. Both fluttered down like golden flashes of fish.
Closer to shore, where the raft was going to smash into the rocks, I jumped. An icy blackness swallowed me. I reached for anything solid, finding only mouthfuls of water, until I wasn’t sure if I was under or above the bitter surface. I felt myself being lifted higher into the blackness on the shoulder of a wave. Rollers slammed me down as I struggled to the surface. Mouthfuls of salt water went down my throat, and my soaked clothes weighed me down into the swirling, black cold. Waxy arms of seaweed wrapped around my feet until the incoming tide freed me and pushed me toward land. I was flotsam—free—sure I was about to die.
Then the waves lifted me up and over the rocks and pushed me in with the breakers. I rolled through the muck by clutching the beach and dragging my body forward. My arms and two stripes of muscles running down each side of my spine were raw and burning from rowing and straining to keep myself from slipping below the surface of the swells. When I crawled out of the surf onto the sand, the spotlight was still sweeping over the water looking for me. With the last of my energy I stood up, grabbed my bag, and ran to a cluster of boulders along the bluff and hid.
Several minutes later there were small flashlight beams walking down the far hillside and combing the beach and the large spotlight went out. I heard British soldiers calling to one another to look for the raft among the rocks. They stayed a long time looking into the water but eventually went back up the hill toward the source of the spotlight. I sat between the rocks in the dark and felt to see if the knobs of cash in the pack were still safe. After waiting a shivering hour, I changed out of the RAF uniform and into civilian clothes between the rocks. I left the RAF uniform and paperwork on the ground like I’d shed another layer of skin, the last remnant of Herbert Yarborough, and crawled in the opposite direction of the soldiers, toward the distant town rising over the bluff.
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