The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  Each basin was ringed by deepwater berths, railroads, and warehouses. The sky, bluer here than above the chemical fumes of Europoort, was seen through silvery thickets of piping, forests of cranes, and clouds of black cables.

  The harbor was a fountain of movement, a switching station where goods were delivered, stacked, stored, and sorted. Gigantic yellow railroad gantries plucked containers off gray, green, and black freighters from Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Floating pneumatic grain elevators surrounded bulk carriers and drank their dry cargo. Pontoon cranes transferred bales and pallets from anchored ocean vessels to coastal steamers, and bluff-bowed river barges off-loaded sacks and boxes from the Continent.

  Hardin’s sailboat, an angry white sliver frosted dull by the North Sea’s salt spray, sliced between the ships and painted boats like a shark that shunned the beauties of a coral reef for the scent of distant prey. He stood in the cockpit, the harbor chart at his knees, heedless of the color, indifferent to all but obstacles.

  A tug cut across his bows and nosed against a freighter. He threw his engine into reverse and waited while a docking pilot in an immaculate uniform climbed a ladder to the freighter. Before the tug backwatered out of his way, he spotted a torn cargo net floating beside him. It looked useful. He hauled it aboard with a boat hook and spread the knotted manila over the coach roof to dry.

  He motored past Rotterdam, into the Noord and then the Merwede River, then the Waal. The broad, diked rivers offered long, clear views down upon an orderly green land as flat as the sea. As the sun set behind a distant evenly spaced single row of feathery trees, he turned off the river into a small canal, moored alongside the earthen bank, ate some cheese and fruit, and fell asleep to the land sounds of cars and trucks on a nearby road.

  He woke to the incongruous combination of the boat rocking and the earthy smells of a rural June morning. A glance out the fore hatch showed the cause of the motion. A barge had passed, its bluff bow raising a gentle wake. He washed, drank coffee, cooked eggs, and consulted his charts.

  The diesel muttered awake and moved the Swan smoothly from the bank, back into the Waal, toward the River Rhine and the German border. Hardin lounged at the wheel, steering the straight easy course, enjoying the beauty of the flat land and the warmth of the sun.

  She would have loved this. They had stopped in Amsterdam on a quick trip years ago, but hadn’t had the time to see the Dutch countryside. He thought of her sitting next to him. His throat tightened with an awful feeling. What had she looked like?

  What in the name of God had she looked like? He dashed into the cabin and started to search his wallet for her picture before he remembered that everything he had was new, bought after LEVIATHAN had killed her.

  At nightfall he tied up outside Wesel and the next day drove a rented BMW to Frankfurt. He bought an old Army field jacket, checked into the Schlosshotel Kronberg—a secluded castle-hotel in a northwestern suburb—and slept.

  He awakened in the evening, drove twenty miles southeast to Ashaffenburg, parked his car on the outskirts of the garrison town, and walked to the raucous section of bars and nightclubs that serviced the nearby encampment of the United States Seventh Army’s Second Regiment.

  German hookers eyed him speculatively from dark, narrow alleys lighted by blinking neon. He bought drinks for people in bars where lonely soldiers sipped three-dollar beer while they waited for something to change, and he learned that the Second was a three-in-one-out. One week a month, the infantrymen arrived in Aschaffenburg with three weeks’ pay in their pockets and three weeks’ field maneuvers to forget. That explained, said a bespectacled ordnance corporal, the enormous MP presence. The corporal asked if Hardin wanted to buy some hash.

  The MPs stopped him on the crowded sidewalk. He had tried to steer clear of the patrols, but they were on him suddenly, each man a head taller than he, their short billies looped menacingly to their wrists. A sergeant with a brusque military drawl demanded his papers.

  He’d made a mistake choosing a field jacket that fit as snugly as if it had been tailored for him. He’d meant to blend in with the soldiers to put them at ease. Instead he looked neither soldier nor tourist, but something in between that interested the MPs.

  He hesitated, and that made them curious. Two who had been scanning the street over his head now watched him instead, the glimmerings of excitement lighting their eyes. What had they found?

  He had no choice. Quickly, he handed over his passport wallet. If the sergeant wrote his name in his notebook, he would leave Aschaffenburg immediately. The sergeant grunted his surprise.

  “What are you doing here, Doc?” he asked with the automatic respect Americans give physicians.

  “Traveling around Germany.”

  “This ain’t Germany. This is a piss hole.”

  “I got homesick,” Hardin smiled. “I wanted to hear States talk.”

  The sergeant grinned. “Yeah, I know what you mean.” He handed back the wallet. “Watch your ass. It’s a tough town.”

  “Any place you recommend against?”

  The sergeant snorted. “Off-limits joints. And a few others. You can tell looking at ‘em. And stay out of the Florida Bar if you don’t want something social that itches where it hurts.” He tossed a mock salute and herded his men back into the street.

  Hardin continued walking, searching, dodging the MPs. He saw nothing that surprised him, nothing he hadn’t seen years before on shore leave in the Philippines or Japan. Here the teenagers peddling drugs and eyeing the streets with bitter envy were fair and blond, like their sisters in the bars, but excepting the color of the camp followers, Aschaffenburg was like every town outside every American military base in the world, and if the girls’ arms were plumper than in the Orient, the needle tracks looked the same.

  Around midnight he found the Florida Bar—aptly described by a group of soldiers who passed it as “a real creepo joint”—on a dimly lighted street beside a burned-out building with boarded windows and old off-limits signs. It stank of spilled beer, hamburger grease, and cigarettes. Liquor prices festooned its filthy mirrors. In addition to a long bar, it had small round tables and a swing door in the back with a diamond window that showed a lurid red light in another room.

  Most of the Florida’s customers were drinking beer and shots. They looked like lifers, twenty-year men, their faces hollow with the empty shadows of trouble and ignorance, their eyes dull with drink and stupidity, their brains roiled with murky fears of what would happen when their hitches were up.

  Hardin knew them well. As a navy doctor he had bandaged their contusions, stitched their stab wounds, and picked broken glass out of their bodies every night his ship gave shore leave. And even before then he had known them from his intern nights in the emergency rooms of New York hospitals.

  He took a spot at the bar near the door and ordered beer. The enormous bartender smacked a bottle onto the dirty Formica and demanded nine marks. Hardin paid with a hundred-mark note. Offered no glass, he drank from the bottle, his change stacked conspicuously beside him.

  He drew attention immediately. The younger customers began shuffling past, muttering offers to sell drugs. Hardin ignored them. Some of the more persistent laid their wares on the bar. Hardin was surprised by the amount of heroin offered. The bartender approached, glowering menacingly, and they hurried away. Hardin ordered another beer.

  A weasely-looking corporal, a forty-year-old lifer with gray skin and trembling hands, sidled up to him. Manufacturing a labored smile of rotted, broken teeth, he mumbled, “Hey, Buddy.”

  Hardin nodded.

  The soldier eased tentatively onto the next stool. His faded sleeve bore darker marks where lost chevrons had once adorned his uniform. “How you doing?”

  “Great,” said Hardin. “How you doing?”

  “Name’s Ronnie.” He pawed some crumpled bills and loose change from his pocket and counted it hazily on the bar. “Buy you a beer?”

  Hardin pushed his own money at the
bartender. “On me, Ronnie.”

  The corporal took it hungrily, downing half before he stopped, apparently remembering his original intention. “What are you doing in Germany?” he asked.

  “Business.”

  Ronnie nodded and drank some more. Hardin watched him closely, waiting, fascinated by the man’s pretense to nonchalance while his face worked like a small wary animal sniffing the wind. Suddenly, he blurted, “I got a forty-five automatic.”

  “Got or can get?” Hardin asked quietly.

  Ronnie’s eyes lighted. “I got it stashed right outside. Fifty bucks.”

  “Anything bigger?”

  “Sure.” He wet his lips. “I can get a M sixteen. Seventy-five bucks.”

  Hardin shook his head. Wrong man.

  “Sixty.”

  “No, thanks, Ronnie. Not interested.”

  “Come on. Forty,” he pleaded. “I’ll get it in the morning.”

  “Haul ass.”

  The corporal slunk back to his table. Hardin ordered another beer, satisfied that he had the right bar.

  A fat, pretty woman in her thirties looked him over and asked in English thickly accented with German if he wanted some fun.

  “Later.” He pushed more marks at the bartender. “A drink for the lady.”

  She smiled her surprise and asked for schnapps.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Katrin.”

  Hardin nodded at the door with the red diamond. “Got a friend back there, Katrin?”

  She hesitated only a second. If the free-spending American civilian preferred zwei, he would be served. “Ja.”

  “Ask her if she would like a drink.”

  Katrin returned with a wide-eyed Hilda, who also drank schnapps. Sitting between the two women, nodding occasionally at their attempts to make conversation, Hardin watched and waited.

  Men passed in and out of the back room. Once, when three boisterous master sergeants greeted them by name, the women left Hardin with apologies and led the three into the back room. The group emerged in ten minutes. The sergeants plowed out the front door and the women rejoined Hardin at the bar, where each accepted another schnapps and worked unselfconsciously at repairing her lipstick.

  After an hour, during which Hardin was offered more drugs, and a hand grenade by a drunken file clerk, the place started to empty out and he concluded it was a wasted night. He was reaching for the rest of his money when a big, rawboned Spec. 3 with a hawk nose that sat like a meat hook on his bloated face lurched up to the bar and demanded beer in a thick southern drawl.

  He wrapped an immense hand around the bottle and grabbed the rump of the nearest woman. She squealed; the soldier gave Hardin a challenging smirk and watched for his reaction through slitted eyes. Though he was only in his late twenties, alcohol had already pasted his features into a puffy ball and his head was balding as if his hair was fleeing the debauch.

  Hardin put his money back on the bar. He had seen the man’s quartermaster’s insignia. Supply. Pointing at the bartender for another beer, he tipped the stack of bills along the Formica. The soldier eyed the money with puzzlement, then, as if murkily realizing that his challenge had been met with another of a different sort, he slapped a rubberbanded roll of deutsche marks on the bar and ordered another beer, his arm still around the German woman, his fingers digging.

  He chugged the second beer, dropped the bottle on the floor, and asked, “How much?”

  Hilda’s eyes flickered toward the roll on the bar. “Eighty marks.”

  “In a pig’s eye. Fifty.”

  “Seventy.”

  “How ‘bout you?” he asked Katrin, but Hilda seized his arm and steered him toward the back room, saying she would take fifty.

  He was back in ten minutes, alone.

  Katrin cast a nervous eye at the diamond window and moved closer to Hardin.

  “Beer!” yelled the southerner. “Mock shnell! Fuckin’ makes me thirsty.”

  The bartender brought the beer. He too glanced at the diamond window. The private reached in his pocket. His jaw dropped.

  “Friggin’ kraut cunt stole mah roll!”

  He reached clumsily for Katrin, who was already backing away. She screamed. Moving faster, bellowing rage, he slapped her, drawing blood from her mouth, brushed past Hardin, and lurched toward the back room. A pair of waiters tried to intercept him, but he grabbed a beer bottle from a table, broke it on the back of a chair, and slashed the air with its jagged edges.

  A blackjack appeared magically in one of the waiters’ hands. He waited coolly for his chance, then stepped inside an awkward swing and smashed the private’s face.

  The soldier staggered, dropped the bottle, and clutched his nose. The second waiter drove a flurry of hard punches to his stomach and groin until he sagged to the floor. They kicked him a few times, and when he was no longer twitching hefted his limp body between them and lugged him out the door.

  Hardin followed, a full bottle of beer in his hand. The waiters dropped the soldier in front of the burned-out club and returned to their own bar.

  Hardin cast a wary eye for the MPs. The street was empty, the racket of the earlier evening stilled, the teenagers gone. He knelt beside the unconscious soldier. There was a military identification card in his pocket. Roscoe Hendersen. Specialist Third. Supply Corps. Second Regiment, Seventh Army. He heard measured footsteps. An MP patrol. He stood quickly and pressed into the shadows, hoping they wouldn’t turn down this narrow street, because if they found Hendersen, they would take him away. They passed on the main street.

  Hardin waited until he couldn’t hear them anymore, then poured his beer onto the soldier’s face. He revived, moaning. His head lolled on the cobblestones. He blocked the flow of beer with his hands, sputtering, and when Hardin stopped pouring, his meaty fingers moved gingerly to his nose. Hardin knelt beside him.

  “Don’t touch it.”

  “Shit. Hurts like a sumbitch.” He pawed at his swelling cheeks. Suddenly he struggled to stand. Hardin helped him until he had him on his feet, swaying against the building.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked, pulling away. “Oh, yeah, you was in there. Big fuckin’ help you were.”

  “Not my fight.”

  “Yeah. Shit.” He shrugged Hardin off and lurched toward the Florida.

  “Where you going?” asked Hardin.

  “Gotta get mah money.”

  “She’s gone.”

  “I’ll get it outa the rest of them bastards.”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “I need it.”

  “Hold it,” said Hardin. “Just stop. Right there. How much did she get?”

  “Three hundred bucks. And some kraut change.” His rough, slurred voice took on a worried note. He said, quietly, “I owe these guys some money. They want it tomorrow.”

  Hardin shook his head in amazement. It looked like the “new army” was drawing on some of the same basic material that had fueled the old. Where did they come from? The Supply Corps was the road to riches for anyone with half a brain and the larcenous instincts of a four-year-old in a candy shop. How did this fool get in debt to loan sharks?

  “How long you been in, soldier?”

  “Six years,” Hendersen mumbled.

  Hardin nodded; somebody had to move boxes.

  Hendersen tried to brush past him. Hardin hooked a foot behind his ankle and shoved the bigger man’s chest with his open palm. Hendersen sat down hard and bellowed his anger. Hardin stood just outside his reach.

  “You’re too shit-faced and busted up to go back in.”

  “I need mah money,” Hendersen said doggedly. He licked at the blood trickling down his upper lip.

  “How much do you owe them?” asked Hardin.

  “I told you. Three hundred bucks. These guys don’t fuck around. They’ll kill me if I don’t pay ‘em.”

  That was the last thing the loan sharks would do. Instead, they would make Hendersen their man in Supply. Until the ser
geants found out. Then they would kill him.

  Hendersen started to stand again.

  “Stay there,” said Hardin. “I want to talk to you.”

  Hendersen dropped back. He cupped his hands around his nose and watched Hardin over his fingers. “What about?”

  “Maybe I can replace some of that money.”

  Slowly, Hendersen lowered his hands. “Yeah? How?”

  “I’m looking for some ordnance. It’s worth a couple of hundred bucks.”

  “What kind of ordnance?”

  “Something I can carry. What can you get?”

  “Maybe a mortar.”

  “No.”

  Hendersen stared. “How big you want? You think I can just carry any old thing off the base?”

  “I know you can.”

  “What do you want?”

  “A Dragon.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Four hundred dollars for an M forty-seven Dragon.”

  “Four hundred bucks? Jesus Christ!”

  For a second, Hardin thought he hadn’t offered enough, but Hendersen’s next question assured him he had.

  “What the hell do you want a Dragon for?”

  “Four hundred bucks. Delivered outside the base tomorrow.”

  Hendersen struggled to his feet, pulling his way up the side of the building. He looked down at Hardin with a crafty expression. His swollen face was yellow in the glow of the single streetlamp. “You really need it, don’t you?”

  “Right.”

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  “Good-bye, Roscoe.” Hardin turned away and walked briskly toward the main street. The private lumbered after him.

  “Okay, okay. Wait. Just wanted to . . . you know.”

  Hardin stopped. “Can you get it?”

  “Sure I can get it. We been pulling a whole shipload of the fuckers in from the field. Gotta ship ‘em to NATO depot for dismantlin’.”

  Hardin had read that the Dragon was being phased out. He said, “I want it operable.”

  “It’ll work.”