The Company of the Dead

by David Kowalski

  The Germans had been reduced to two carriers and two squadrons of fighters, and were still waiting on a fuel convoy.

  Merkur said, “I am going to issue a communication to Danzig and Houston. My report will state that my men were overpowered and three Confederate renegades stole the captain’s boat. Do you understand?” He paused, and when he received no answer, said, “You are now an enemy of the North, the South, and the German Empire. May God have mercy on your soul.”

  Boarding the Parzifal—aptly named—Hardas had felt as if he was walking out of a Wagner opera mid-act—which was sometimes the wisest choice. They might have been lowering him from the Flying Dutchman rather than the Prince Bismarck. Merkur wore his doom like a laurel wreath. A dismal chorus of German navvies waved them off in silence.

  Hardas was alone on deck now. He’d found a pea jacket in one of the lockers, and wore the collar up and the cuffs low over his wrists so the cold only snapped at his fingers and seared his cheeks. He’d sent Newcombe below but asked him to let Morgan rest a while longer. It looked like Morgan might have a fever. His wound was haloed with a scarlet rim of inflammation. They’d need antibiotics. They’d need fuel sooner.

  He returned to the business at hand. Betrayal and treachery. One way or another, Newcombe had to go. He would have sold them to the Germans already, given half a chance. It was a matter of striking first.

  I could go below deck now and make it look like self-defence.

  Morgan would never buy it. Did that matter?

  He lit a cigarette and observed the finer stream of smoke twirl within the release of each fogged breath. He wasn’t Shine. There would be other ways to deal with Newcombe before they reached Savannah. Something Morgan said last night had stirred the seed of an idea. A way to get fuel and take care of Newcombe to boot.

  Red Rock and beyond. Each destination more distant, more nebulous, and everything else spiralling out of control. He thought about Kennedy, Lightholler and Shine; somewhere under these stars, and making for the carapace.

  V

  April 24, 2012

  New Mason-Dixon Line, Kentucky—Tennessee border

  Lightholler retraced his steps as if trying to evoke a lost path. Hansel in the forest; Theseus in the labyrinth; Dante on the road to Hell. There was no trail of breadcrumbs for him though; no trace of Ariadne or her ball of string; and certainly no Virgil to act as his guide.

  Kennedy sat by his side, immersed in his own thoughts or maybe just dozing. Watanabe sat with an arm dangling out the window and his eyes propped at half-mast, watching everything.

  Lightholler retraced his steps. The stretch of highway leading into Long Branch, where they’d left their pilot, Tucker, a good deal richer than when they’d met him. On to Trenton and a boxcar through the delights of Fairless Hills, Willow Grove, Norris Town, Modena and Gap. A night under the stars before Lancaster and York. A nameless river crossed in a stolen boat to Harrisburg. Talk of heading west to Colorado, but instead they’d kept to the numbered roads through Bedford and Wheeling. Avoiding a chain gang on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, then standing in a washroom in Cincinnati, watching Kennedy run black dye through his hair while he examined his own barely recognisable visage in the mirror’s peeling face. Then Bowling Green, Memphis Junction... Each mile had drawn him further away from the world he knew.

  The road they were on now, leading up to the low wire fence that marked the new Mason–Dixon Line, was lined with vehicles, a log jam caused by at least five lanes of cars massed on a road built for two. There were pack horses and carts too. Children chased each other around parked or abandoned vehicles, racing in and out of the circles thrown by spotlights on the perimeter wire. A trader strolled from car to car offering hot dogs and sandwiches. A woman led an older man through the crush, desperately calling out that her husband was a diabetic.

  Japanese border officials worked their way through the crowd. Watanabe beckoned one over and within ten minutes a pathway had been created through the throng as vehicles were towed or driven off the road.

  Then a slow crawl to the gates.

  The new Mason-Dixon Line ran true here, an old border reestablished. With the Second Secession there had been a reshuffling of “North” and “South”, as new allegiances were forged in the aftermath of war with Mexico and the Depression. Kentucky had been a part of the Union before, yet her sons had been divided in the Civil War. Here at the crossing, Lightholler could see the consequence of that legacy in the faces of the frontier guards.

  They eyed Watanabe with a mixture of fear and disdain. The soldier who’d taken his money stamped their papers in silence. He may have been a veteran or he may have been one of Watanabe’s regular customers. Border guard equalled jailor, so despite the transaction it was with some show of reluctance that the car was allowed to pass through the gateway.

  There was twenty yards of no-man’s-land to cross, a concavity formed where the wire fence had separated into two boundaries. The border’s pregnant bulge had birthed a region that was neither North nor South.

  They reached the second checkpoint. A week ago there might have been two or three men here who would inspect the vehicle for fresh food or livestock. Now there were two small towers that had been erected in the interim, three guards per post. One with binoculars, another to check the ammo feed, a third hunched over the newly assembled machine-gun emplacement. There was an odd stillness here as well; the hushed expectation that follows a bolt of lightning or precedes the executioner’s blade.

  Watanabe said, “Tagitsu se no naka ni mo yodo wa ari cho wo.”

  Kennedy provided a translation. “They say there is a still place even in the heart of the rushing whirlpool.”

  Watanabe ordered the driver to slow down. He turned back to Kennedy and said, “If you are ready.”

  It was hard for Lightholler to tell if he felt more frightened or foolish as he followed Kennedy’s lead. Kennedy flashed him a thumbs up before allowing the gangster to lower the seat cover over him. Lightholler glanced up at the tinted window before crawling into the smuggler’s cache beneath his own seat. His last vision was Watanabe’s gleaming smile as the yakuza sealed the crawl space from above.

  The metal floor was unprotected. Unintended for human cargo, it made an excellent conduit for the engine’s heat. Lightholler felt the sweat bead and roll down his forehead, felt it pooling beneath his shirt and at the back of his legs. The car continued its slow progress and he swore he could feel every speck of gravel as it crunched under wheel. Beneath probing fingertips he felt grooves in the floor, told himself they were made by boxes of contraband that had scraped these floors countless times. By gun muzzles and ammo boxes, paint tins and food crates. He imagined a car jack or an overturned toolbox, its contents scratching and abrading into the floor. Imagined anything that didn’t resemble fingernails clawing the hot metal.

  He looked up to where the bottom of the seat and the cache’s roof met. There was a seam of light and then nothing.

  VI

  April 24, 2012

  Quebec City, Free Quebec

  Shine spun around to see Rose standing in the shadows. He scanned the darkness.

  Rose said, “I’m alone.”

  “I know.” Shine slid his thumb away from the knife’s trigger. He replaced the blade.

  Rose missed the manoeuvre. He said, “You left the flight schedule on your dressing table.” His glance fell on Shine’s suit. He flicked an imaginary mote from his own rumpled jacket.

  “You’ve been paid in full. What more do you want, Mr Rose?”

  “That German or jap money you’re giving away so freely?”

  The pilot’s life was as forfeit as anyone else’s unfortunate enough to be born in the world Wells had generated. Shine decided to grant him a few more days.

  He said, “If I was working for the Germans, I would have stayed in New York. If I was working for the Japanese, I would have stayed on the Shenandoah. That’s all you need to know. The money’s clean. Walk awa
y, and you’ll have the chance to spend it.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Look at my face.”

  Rose fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “They were looking for you, back at the hotel.”

  Shine made to push past the pilot.

  Rose blocked him. “They’re looking for you in there too.” He indicated the airport. “Looking for both of us.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “If I’m not in Baton Rouge by Tuesday, I’m AWOL. I’m AWOL, and there’s no point being anywheres.”

  Shine recalled his training. The ghost dancers spoke of spurs and reins along life’s journey. This man had aided his escape from New York. What more could he offer? Shine asked him again, “What do you want from me?”

  “I know where the scout is. They shipped it to the Three Rivers yesterday. They plan on using it for a paper run to the Union, before sending it back down south.”

  “I thought there were no flights south,” Shine said.

  “No passenger flights,” Rose replied. “This is a paper run.”

  “Meaning?”

  “A lot of foreign companies have offices here. Quebec doesn’t share funding codes with Germany or Japan. The only way to move money is on paper.” Rose was rubbing his fingers against his thumb. “The big corporations are offering bigger bucks to move their paperwork across the border.”

  “We get paid to fly out of here?”

  “Nope,” Rose replied. “All of tonight’s flights will have been contracted out. But I know these types. We offer one of these guys more money to stay, take his place, and we’re gone. Fifteen thousand francs will get us in the air.”

  “You have that.”

  “I may need another pair of hands.”

  “You get me to Arkansas, I’ll foot the entire bill and you can keep your fee.”

  The money in Shine’s bag would be worthless after Red Rock anyway.

  They waited thirty minutes for a cab to pull up. The late-night traffic was sparse. They arrived to find Trois-Rivières airport shrouded in darkness. There was the hint of lamplight in the distance.

  Rose said, “Anyone here’ll be at the operations office or out by the hangars. That runway on the right is the one we’ll use. The other one’s hooked up to an ARCAL system. Airport activated lighting. We want to avoid that.”

  As if suddenly evoked, floodlights poured on the field with blinding radiance. Rose grabbed Shine’s arm and led him away from the lit area.

  “Damn. Now we have to wait an hour before we can move.” Rose had to raise his voice to be heard above the rising drone of an incoming flight. He pointed to a frail-looking tower visible by the paved airstrip. “When those lights up there start flashing, we’ve got fifteen minutes to get airborne.”

  Figures were running across the tarmac in the distance, carrying light sticks.

  Rose nodded towards the distant buildings. “Let’s go.”

  They stopped in a clearing beyond the arced perimeter of the floodlights. A hut squatted close by.

  Shine said, “I don’t recall this part of the plan.”

  “If we don’t pay a cent, we’ll be harder to trace.”

  “You want to steal a plane?”

  “I want to steal our plane.”

  Shine emerged from the hut wearing a pair of dusky overalls. Rose smiled at him with satisfaction. Shine swore under his breath.

  “The scout’s in hangar three,” Rose explained. “The pilot hasn’t arrived, so they won’t have started loading the cargo. We walk in there nice and easy. I’ll distract the operations officer, you start removing the caps from the scout’s air intakes, like I showed you. There’ll be a bunch of containers lying around near the cargo bay. I want you to start loading her up. Soon as I’ve gotten rid of the ops officer I’ll start her up. You climb aboard and we’re gone. Simple as can be.”

  “You keep saying that, but this just keeps getting more complicated,” Shine murmured.

  “It’s not like I do this every day.”

  “Clearly.”

  Five planes were lined up along one edge of the field. Several men were sitting by the first plane, caught up in a game of cards. One of them called to Rose, brandishing a bottle in his hand. It felt like a shanty town. Shadows roamed between the buildings, calling to each other in a mixture of grunts and patois.

  “It’s like catching up with an old friend, isn’t it?” Rose said, pointing towards a building. They headed straight for it.

  The containers were grouped near the cargo door, as Rose had promised. The scout was the only aircraft in the hangar. The ops officer was examining a manifesto pinned to the door.

  “Wonder why this doesn’t happen more often,” Shine said quietly.

  “Easy enough to steal a plane,” Rose replied. “Harder to explain how you got it, once you land.”

  Shine began working on the air intakes while Rose approached the officer. The airfield still basked in the glow of the floodlights. They’d been on for near forty minutes already, and they’d start flashing in five. He hefted up one of the containers and eased it onto the cargo bay’s edge. When he turned around, Rose was standing beside a grizzled-looking man in coveralls and a leather smock.

  “Pourquoi il n’est pas avec les autres noirs?”

  “See,” Rose was saying. “Just like I told you.”

  The officer repeated the question.

  Rose started walking to the cockpit. The officer dogged his heels, shouting at his back. Rose clambered up the fuselage and began working on the securing latches.

  “See,” he said, lifting the canopy. “Clean as a whistle.”

  The officer reached for a radio at his belt and was putting it to his ear by the time Shine reached him. The blow wasn’t lethal. The officer slipped to the floor.

  Shine gave Rose a dark look. “We’re gone.”

  Rose held the hatch door open for him and gave him a wide berth as he climbed inside. He said, “You’ve done that before.”

  “Clearly.”

  Shine was still adjusting his restraints as Rose sealed the canopy.

  Rose flicked a sequence of toggles on the instrument panel. “Lights are flashing. We’re set. Hold tight.”

  The engines built to a roar. Shine felt a slight lurch as the scout edged out of the hangar. The card players had risen from their game and were racing across the connecting track to the paved runway. One sped onto the tarmac ahead. A pair of headlights flicked on, pouring over the ground before them. The scout listed towards the runway. A pick-up truck rumbled beside them. Two men stood bouncing on the tray.

  There was the flash of small arms fire. It went wide. Rose let out a loud whoop as the turbines roared to life. The scout leapt skywards. There was a spread of low cloud to the north and the moon was a pale sliver. It gleamed balefully.

  VII

  April 25, 2012

  North Atlantic, 33”24’ N, 78”17’ W

  Morgan said, “You should have woken me.”

  “I wasn’t tired,” Hardas replied without looking up.

  “Like hell,” Morgan muttered. His mouth felt gummy. A cigarette might take that away. “Should I go wake Newcombe?”

  “Let him catch a few more Zs. How you doing?”

  “Better, I think.” Morgan put some weight on the injured leg, felt it give slightly, and flinched.

  “I’m going to disable the auto helm. Want to take the wheel while I grab us some chow?”

  Morgan inched over to the seat and took the helm. His fingers slotted into the furrows that Hardas had left in the leather grip. Moisture from Hardas’s palms on his own grimed hands.

  Dawn was a red rim on the aft horizon with the sky growing brighter by the moment; a couple of scattered clouds lay over the west, but otherwise the promise of a clear day.

  “Where are we?” Morgan asked.

  “I make us about thirty nauts off Myrtle Beach.”

  “That’s a lot of water covered.”

 
; “Harder to see our wake by night so I opened her right up. Made some good time. I took a break around three.” As an afterthought Hardas added, “We have half a day’s fuel left.”

  Instinctively Morgan eased back on the throttle. “Will that get us to shore?”

  “It’ll get us somewhere.”

  Morgan frowned, but Hardas ignored him and disappeared down the cabin stairs. When he returned he was carrying two cans of rations and a bottle.

  “Got through to Nevada last night,” he said, placing the food on a drop-tray by the wheel.

  “And?” Morgan asked eagerly, checking the cabin entrance, making sure there was no sign of Newcombe.

  “The major and Captain Lightholler made it to the mainland. Last word is they’re at the border.”

  “Anything on Shine?”

  “We won’t hear zip.”

  “Mind if I ask how you plan on getting us to shore?”

  Hardas outlined his plan over breakfast. Every protest Morgan could think of was met with the same answer: maybe.

  Yes, maybe there would be enough fuel and, yes, maybe jap reconnaissance wouldn’t spot them and, yes, maybe it would be safe to sail onto some secluded beach with Newcombe on board. The accumulation of maybes, however, snowballed into the one question Hardas couldn’t answer.

  “Just how far do you think our luck will take us?”

  Providence was not a factor to be relied upon. Cause and effect had become Morgan’s new creed. Half-remembered splinters of last night’s feverished dream edged their way into his consciousness, and he asked, “Will there be a fight?”

  “We shouldn’t need to fire a single round.”

  VIII

  April 25, 2012

  New Mason-Dixon Line, Tennessee

  Kennedy decided that there was trust and there was faith and there was just plain stupidity.

  I might only need to squeeze off a shot. Maybe two.

  He had his hands clasped together across his chest. The grip of the Beretta carved a tattoo on his palms. He had his back to the cache floor; knees bent against his abdomen, feet close together upon the roof.