But when I got to him, the screaming stopped. I held his hand and wiped his face clean. His eyes were closed, clenched tightly shut. He’d been hurt really bad. I couldn’t even recognize him. But as dazed as I was, I just didn’t want him to be alone, even though there wasn’t anything I could do for him. There wasn’t anything anybody could do. I said a prayer.
That’s where I was when Straub found me, still sitting there, cross-legged, holding the dead man’s hand. “Come on, Danny,” Straub said, taking hold under my arms and lifting me up. “We have to get off the ship. It’s going down.”
I couldn’t put any weight on my wounded leg. When I looked down I saw a jagged piece of metal that had stabbed into my thigh. For some reason I barely felt it, even though I could tell it went in pretty deep. I reached for the metal, but Straub stopped me. “You’re in shock. Don’t pull it out. You’ll bleed too much. You just have to leave it until we get on the lifeboat. We’ll get something to bandage you up there.”
I couldn’t speak, so I just nodded as he half carried me across the sloping deck. Some members of the crew were lying on the deck, not moving. Others were busy grabbing supplies, weapons, medical kits, blankets, radio equipment.
“There’s just the one lifeboat,” Straub said. “The other one got destroyed. We’re all going to have to get in. I don’t know how many guys are left.”
I struggled to say a name but could barely get it out. I must have inhaled a lot of smoke in the explosion. “Woody?”
Straub wouldn’t look at me. He just kept going to the side of the ship.
“What about Woody?” I asked, though it felt as if something was tearing inside my throat.
Straub shook his head. “The second explosion. It was the engine room. Nobody could get down there to help them.”
We were at the rail now, and other members of the crew helped Straub lower me into the lifeboat. Chief Kerr was there giving orders, though his face was burned. He had them lay me in the bow, took a look at my leg, and ordered a guy sitting nearby to make sure nobody bumped into me.
I squeezed my eyes closed as tight as I could. I never wanted to open them again. I didn’t want to see anymore. I didn’t want to hear anymore. I didn’t want to know anymore.
But it didn’t help. Instead, I saw a picture of Woody in my mind, that last time, just before everything happened, down in the engine room, grinning, telling me he’d never had pals like me and Straub, and me telling him the same.
* * *
Our ship didn’t give up easy. We’d seen cargo ships that got torpedoed go down in minutes, but our PC held on for a long time, as if refusing to quit until every member of the crew who was still alive could climb or be carried onto the lifeboat. There were so many of us crammed on it that it was hard to believe we’d lost anybody in the attack. But I knew we had. I’d seen them on the deck. And I knew no one had escaped from the engine room. Lieutenant Talley was dead, too.
Chief Kerr did a count once we were all settled, guys practically sitting on top of one another. There were thirty of us. The lifeboat was designed to hold twenty.
We finally shoved off from the ship, guys who were able paddling hard to get some distance in case there was another explosion, and to avoid the danger of a whirlpool pulling us under with it when the ship went down.
Chief Kerr was going man to man to check on injuries. One side of his face looked like burnt hamburger, but he didn’t seem to even notice. When he got to me he pulled a roll of gauze, sulfa packets, a needle and thread, and a syringe out of a medical kit.
“Two of you boys hold him down,” he ordered the guys squeezed in next to me. He didn’t hesitate, just immediately stabbed me in the arm with the syringe. “This is morphine. It’ll help you not feel too much.”
He waited a few minutes, then turned his attention to the metal shard sticking out of my leg. It was maybe the size of his hand, but it was impossible to tell how much was buried.
“It’s gotta come out,” he said, and once again didn’t hesitate. He pulled quickly and the metal slid right out. I threw up from the pain as blood gushed from the wound. Chief pressed gauze over it and held it there as tight as he could, which hurt almost as bad as when he pulled out the metal shard. I thought I was going to throw up again and I struggled to get away, but the two guys kept their tight hold on me and wouldn’t let me up.
Chief pulled back the gauze and coated the wound with sulfa powder—“This’ll help with any infection,” he said—and then, when the bleeding let up enough, busied himself putting in stitches to close the cut.
He grinned at me when he finished. “There,” he said. “Good as new.”
“Thanks, Chief,” I muttered. And then I blacked out again.
* * *
When I regained consciousness, the lifeboat was rocking side to side, and a steady spray was coming over and drenching us. The waves had picked up, and the sky was dark gray. Straub helped me sit and gathered a blanket tighter around me to keep me warm and at least somewhat dry.
“Here,” he said, holding up a small cup of water. “You need to drink. Chief says we have to ration everything but that you get extra water since you lost a lot of blood.”
I drank slowly. My tongue felt so thick in my mouth, swollen from smoke or from dehydration—I didn’t know which. Maybe both.
When I finished I felt even thirstier than before, but Straub said that was going to have to be it for now. “Don’t know when somebody will find us,” he said. “We thought one of the PCs would come back for us, but maybe they don’t know where we are. The radio worked for a little while and then stopped.”
I could only nod. And fight off the tears that were pressing against the backs of my eyes, threatening to pour out like somebody opening a faucet. I immediately started thinking about Woody, and what happened to him and the rest of the engine room crew. He’d been my friend since the very first day I showed up for the navy.
Straub must have been able to read my face. “I can’t stop thinking about him, either,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. “And Lieutenant Talley. And the rest of them, too. We lost half the crew.”
“Was it a torpedo?” I managed to ask.
Straub shook his head. “Chief doesn’t think so. He says the Germans—the officers, I guess, or whoever stayed below while the rest of the crew left on their inflatable lifeboat—they blew up their own U-boat, and that’s what sank our ship.” He shook his head as if he just couldn’t believe it.
“They blew themselves up so they could sink our ship and kill all of us,” he said. “It wasn’t a torpedo. It was a suicide.”
Nobody from the convoy came back for us that day. A guy named Diego got the radio working again, and we were able to send out a distress signal and our location, but then it died for good a little while later and we didn’t have any more contact with the world.
“Just have to try to keep to the shipping lane as best we can,” Chief said. “We can navigate by the stars when it’s night.”
Even though I was still feeling numb from the morphine, I could tell he was in a lot of pain when he spoke from the way he couldn’t stop clenching his jaw. Saltwater spray must have stung his burnt face, but he made sure to look away from the crew whenever it got too bad.
Chief and a couple of guys did an inventory of what we had on the lifeboat and it wasn’t much: the first-aid kit, a flare pistol, a couple of hand pumps, buckets for bailing, tarps, binoculars, some fishing lines but no bait. The men who had weapons had brought them on board. And we had enough water cans to last us a couple of days if we were careful. And enough rations for that long, too—hardtack and biscuits and several cans of peaches and that was about it.
“Won’t be able to make it long on this, Chief,” Diego said.
Chief Kerr didn’t answer, and for the next several hours everybody sat quietly, hardly talking to one another. I was in a kind of stupor from the drugs but still couldn’t stop thinking about Woody and the other guys we’d just lost. It was
like losing my dad all over again, with that hollow feeling inside of me, like something big was missing and I knew I’d never get it back.
A couple of times I saw tears streaming down Straub’s cheeks, but he wasn’t making any noise. No crying sounds or sniffling or anything like that. Just the tears. And he wasn’t the only one.
* * *
The waves got rough that night and salt water sprayed over everybody as we huddled together for warmth. Once the sun had set, the temperature plunged, and everybody got chilled and stayed that way. Several got seasick and threw up over the side.
I lay there, shivering, as I stared up at the sky. A half-moon hung there, surrounded by stars, and it was beautiful, but at the same time almost seemed to be mocking us in our misery.
Chief Kerr stirred near the bow and pulled himself up so he was standing over us. Maybe he sensed that we were all slipping into a dark place. Maybe he worried that we would give up hope too quickly.
“Grab those buckets, some of you men,” he said. “Start bailing. Five-minute shifts, then hand your bucket to the next man.”
Water kept sloshing over the sides as the waves rocked us harder for a couple of hours. But at least there was something to do. Nobody slept, not even me, and deep into the night the morphine started to wear off and the pain set in. My leg throbbed and felt hot to the touch. I must have moaned, because Straub noticed.
“Chief, Danny needs more meds,” he said. Chief Kerr nodded to the crew member who was holding the first-aid kit, and he climbed over several guys, squeezed in next to me, and gave me another shot of morphine. I didn’t feel anything else the rest of that first night.
* * *
Just before dawn the ocean got calm again, and as the sun climbed in the sky we dried out and warmed up. Guys who’d been sitting with their legs stretched out bent their knees and drew their legs in so that the men who’d been cramped up for the past few hours could have their turn to stretch out.
Another guy and me near the bow were the only ones who’d been lying down. I felt guilty and so pulled myself up to a seated position. The other guy—Donaldson—couldn’t do that because he had died during the night.
I didn’t realize it until Donaldson’s buddy, who’d been holding him the whole time, broke down. “Easy, son,” Chief Kerr said in as kind a voice as I’d ever heard him use. “At least he isn’t suffering.”
I wanted to pull myself away from Donaldson’s body and felt myself trembling—from the cold, and from the terrible realization that I’d been lying next to someone who had been dead for hours.
Diego led us all in saying the Lord’s Prayer, and then they eased Donaldson’s body over the side and let him go.
Probably to distract us all from the deep sadness that hit everybody again, Chief ordered the morning’s rations, which amounted to a mouthful of hardtack and a couple of swallows of water. Straub tried to give me his, but I wouldn’t let him.
“I think I’m better,” I said, which might have been true. My leg wasn’t burning as much, and the pain hadn’t come all the way back as the morphine wore off. I decided I would wait as long as I could before asking for any more.
“Okay, men,” Chief Kerr said, struggling to stand in the bow so he could see us all while he spoke. “I should have set this up last night, but we were all feeling pretty low from losing our shipmates.” He paused, and added, “From losing our friends.”
He paused again and ground his teeth as it looked like a wave of pain passed over him from his burnt face. Then he continued. “I’ll be designating all you men for two-hour watches throughout the day and night. Just because we’re no longer on our ship doesn’t mean there’s no danger from U-boats, or from a stray freighter that might come up on us and not know we’re here. It’s happened plenty of times before—that the ship somebody thinks is coming to their rescue ends up doing just the opposite. And if you haven’t noticed, we’re being followed.”
Several guys jumped up to look off the stern. I swiveled around and pulled myself up to look, too, and saw a half dozen black fins in the water behind us.
Sharks.
“The good news is that means there are other fish in the water and we might luck into catching some,” Chief said. “Meanwhile, if you’re the praying kind, you’ll want to be praying for rain. We’ll open the tarps to catch as much as we can. It’ll be salty but not as salty as seawater. We can strain it through our shirts, and we’ll use a couple of the buckets to hold it in. We can hold on without food for a couple of weeks. Can’t go but a couple of days without water.
“We also need to take extra care of the weapons on hand and protect our ammunition. I want every weapon cleaned twice a day and ammo properly stored.”
Right away I could tell guys felt a little better. Once again they had a job to do, whether it was keeping watch, praying for rain, or cleaning the weapons we had on board. Everybody seemed to sit up straighter, and conversations broke out here and there as guys for the first time started talking about what had happened the day before with the U-boat, and about our friends who we’d lost.
For the next couple of hours, sharks kept bumping the boat and that gave us something to talk about, too. Could a shark do serious damage to the lifeboat? Should we try to shoot them? Nobody seemed to have any clear answers, but that didn’t stop everyone from discussing it for the next couple of hours.
Straub didn’t talk, though. He’d started out doing everything he could to take care of me, to make sure I was comfortable, even to the point of giving up his rations if I’d let him. But now, as the day wore on, he grew quieter. I didn’t have much energy to try to get him to talk, and I got quieter, too, but in a different way than him. I was wounded in my leg. He seemed to be wounded in his heart.
* * *
The sun had been a blessing when it first came up—thawing us out, drying us off, giving us hope that somebody might see us and we might be rescued. But as the sun rose higher and the day got hotter, we were all soon parched and counting down the hours until our next water ration, which wouldn’t be until sundown.
Chief Kerr ordered the cans of peaches opened that night and we each got a couple of slices. And a small sip of the peach juice. Nothing had ever tasted so good to me—to all of us, judging by the slurping and smacking sounds the guys were making. The last ones got to stick their tongues in the cans and lick the sides. The rest of us just looked on with envy, wishing it was us.
And that was just the second day.
The days that followed got worse and worse. First the cold, cold nights, the rough ocean, waves rocking us, salt water spraying us, guys trembling and moaning from the bone-deep chill. Then the heat of the climbing sun. It dried up the salt water but sucked all the moisture out of our skin, which got sunburned, and cracked, and then, the next night, if the waves picked up again and water splashed over us, turned painful. So painful on some of the men that they started crying, only after a few days no tears came. None at all.
And the sharks kept circling, still occasionally bumping the bottom of the lifeboat, their dorsal fins visible in the daytime, shadows at night. They stayed close, letting us know they were there, biding their time, patiently waiting.
The fifth night it started raining and somebody actually shouted, “Well, hallelujah!”
Except for Donaldson, we hadn’t lost anybody else on the boat, and every one of us turned our faces to the sky, opened our mouths, and stuck out our tongues to try to drink the rain.
After a few frustrating minutes of that, we got organized and spread out the tarps and let the rainwater roll down to one end and into a bucket. Once that bucket was full—which took at least an hour—one guy pulled his shirt off and they used it to strain the water into another bucket, meanwhile continuing to collect as much rainwater as possible in the middle of the tarps.
“Double water rations tonight,” Chief announced, and everybody cheered. The water had a strong briny taste, but it was still water and nowhere near the salt of the ocean, so i
t helped with the crippling thirst that was making our tongues swollen and our lips blistered.
The rain only lasted a few hours, but our luck still held that night when a school of mackerel swam close and one of the guys was somehow, miraculously, able to grab one and throw it into the boat.
At first I thought there would be a feeding frenzy, men literally taking bites out of the fish before scaling it and cleaning it or anything. But once again, Chief Kerr stepped in.
“Everybody will get a bite,” he said. “But not like this. We need to use everything. Head, guts, everything. This is more important to us as bait than it is as food.”
I volunteered to clean the fish since I’d been doing it all my life, plus it was something to do to take my mind off this fear that had been growing in me—the possibility that we wouldn’t ever get rescued, and that my mom would never know what happened to me.
They had to pass the fish to me, and one of the knives, since I couldn’t move with my bad leg, and there was no room for anybody to move on the boat anyway. I made short work of it, cutting the meat into bite-size pieces for guys to pass around. It was tough to eat, but we were already out of hardtack and biscuits and peaches—had been for two days—so anything was better than nothing.
Chief Kerr passed out the fishing lines and I baited those, too, with the intestines. Guys caught two more fish that night, and we feasted again the next day. I felt a little better after that, and a little more hopeful. For a while.
* * *
Straub still wasn’t speaking, but after another couple of days, neither were the rest of us. My leg felt okay, but I knew I couldn’t put any weight on it even if I tried to stand. At least there didn’t seem to be an infection. Maybe the nightly drenching in salt water helped with that, though it was terrible on the rest of my body—the rest of all our bodies. Sores broke out on our skin, on our faces, on our tongues, inside our mouths.
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