Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to put the launch in the water,” said Jake. “Morales is going to get our gear, and you’re going to hustle your sorry ass up into the light to see what heading they’re taking. What the hell did you think?”

  He’d been lucky with the tide, Richard thought. If it had been low when he was going and coming through the maze of island channels, he would have had to use a light. Not that there were any houses near his water route to see it, but there was the possibility of coastal pickets wandering around on the populated islands, and using a light would have added to his jitters. Coming around the northern head of Barter Island, he took a bearing on the white splashing of the surf on the rocks, and pointed his bow out into the wide darkness of the open sea beyond. He pushed the throttle to twelve knots, turned slightly south to ninety-eight degrees, and in the soft quicksilver light on the open deck, set his stopwatch.

  With a grim smile, he remembered the cold sweat and sudden weakness he’d suffered that first night when he’d come around the head to find that the Mt. Desert Light was out. He’d been sure that it had been darkened because of him, that they knew about the meeting and had laid a trap. Even so, he had kept on his azimuth, cussing the moonlight, and had waited four hours at the rendezvous point, signaling at precisely timed intervals. All the while he was expecting the hum of a Civil Air Patrol plane or the approach of a cutter that could outrun and outgun him. Twice—fooled by the moonlight flashing on a swell—he had thought he’d seen the blink of a return signal from the east. All that night, idling alone on the gentle swells, he’d sweated in doubt and fear: Maybe he’d waited in the wrong place. Maybe he’d been seen in the harbor adding extra cedar sheathing to disguise his boat’s house. Maybe he’d got the message wrong, or the message itself was part of an elaborate trap. He hadn’t known then—and still didn’t on this, the last of the “three consecutive nights”—where the return signal would be coming from. He assumed it would be from the conning tower of a U-boat, and the image still made him shiver in apprehension.

  Richard was calmer tonight than he had been on the first two runs, maybe because he was bone tired but more likely because this was the last run, no matter what happened. If there was no meeting tonight, no “transfer of package,” it would not be his fault. He had checked his calculations a dozen times and was sure of them; he hadn’t been seen by anyone—unless you counted Lump, which he didn’t. He had waited out there, alone with only his iron will for company, as faithfully as any man could. Richard would have done his duty, risked his life to make his contribution to victory. He almost allowed himself to wish that they wouldn’t show up tonight, that there would be no “further orders for phase two,” but he brought that hope to heel. Instead, he reminded himself of the godlike efficiency of the German war machine and imagined himself exchanging salutes with a white-capped captain on the bridge, responding to the officer’s apologies for being late with a gift of rum and a show of quiet, selfless courage.

  Since there couldn’t be a full case, he thought there might just as well be two bottles missing and brought one up to stiffen his tea. Maybe they’d invite him aboard for a little drink. How they’d laugh when he described the coastal defenses: fuzzy old men in rowboats who could be bought off with a quart; drunken ghost chasers tumbling off cliffs; women and children; Mexicans, for Christ’s sake, with binoculars. No, he’d say, aber nicht, he wanted no reward or recognition for his service, only the Right to Prevail. When England was starved and subdued, and America was isolated and brought to terms, then he and the others who now worked in secret would be appreciated. The proud ones, the ones that sneered, might not like him then any more than they ever did, but they would have to admit respect for his courage and persistence. It wouldn’t be Low Green with a bullet through his head that they’d talk about, but poor Homer Topp, stripped and blindfolded, facing a firing squad of his fellow Americans. Then they would see; even she would. Richard couldn’t remember the German word for prevail just then, but he knew it would come to him when he needed it.

  Wiltzius’s sister Romi, in a shimmering black skirt and high heels, stood in the pantry with her back to him. She was talking to her husband in what sounded like French, almost as though she was softly singing to him. Though Wiltzius couldn’t see it, he knew she was patting him on the chest with her palm, tapping out a slow, repetitive message that they both understood. In the doorway, facing Wiltzius, little Frankie—all in white wool— opened and closed her hand to him in a wave, while taking plums from the basket on the shelf and dropping them to the floor one at a time. Behind her, in a ghastly gray window gallery, two skull-like Slavic faces with brittle noses watched the scene within—Hansel and Gretel peeking into the witch’s house.

  As Frankie dropped the plums, they rolled, one following the other on the same winding route around his table, through the pantry, and across the kitchen tiles to an intake pipe in the wall beneath the calendar. There they were sucked in, /oop, one at a time.

  Mardsden, a dribble of dried oatmeal in his beard, tapped Wiltzius’s sternum to awaken him.

  “All right, all right,” the ensign responded groggily.

  “The captain wants you on the bridge,” Mardsden said. He was the oldest man on the boat, and his breath smelled like embalming fluid. “He has something he wants you to see. Very good.”

  Climbing the ladder, Wiltzius met the odor of pine and damp earth even before he passed through the hatch and felt suddenly, deeply sad. He stood next to Reising, who clapped him on the shoulder and presented, with a flourish of his hand, the high, dark outline of the North American coast.

  “Not like home, eh, Wiltzius?” Reising asked. “No gentle vineyards and wide river valleys; it’s all rocks and evergreens, but—ah, the smell!”

  One of the forward watchmen said that it looked like the Norway coast.

  “The mountain to starboard is actually two, called Cadillac and Sargent, and they’re on an island.” Reising was delighted. “How like the Americans to name mountains after their cars.” An occasional tiny twinkle on a hillside off the port bow was the only light visible on the dark horizon. U235 was making six knots on one diesel on a bearing that pointed the sub straight toward a smaller island’s mountainous spine, a giant hunchback floating face down in the sparkling sea.

  In a black leather jacket and dark watch cap—his hands and cheeks covered with dark face paint, and his eyes sunk in binoculars—Herr Shaeffer, Das Packet, was almost invisible, as silent as the horizon he scanned. Wiltzius thought that he must be afraid to be going ashore, unarmed and burdened with two bulky cases. But, when Shaeffer lowered the binoculars and nodded to Wiltzius, the man seemed unmoved, his eyes even a little merry. He is a bastard, Wiltzius thought, a self-important fool, but he is unafraid.

  “You air-watch men keep a strain on your eyeballs,” said Reising. “We’ve had reports of small civilian aircraft patrolling the coast; twice in the last week they’ve bombed our boats, though farther south. I want to be steaming out of here as soon as possible. Wiltzius, call up the gun crews, both of them; we’ll take no chances. We can be out of here in an hour, eh, Herr Shaeffer?”

  “In less than that, if my man is on time and in the right place,” Shaeffer said beneath his binoculars. “Don’t worry, captain. We’ll need a strong light up here as well.”

  “I’m not worried,” Reising said curtly. He’d be happy to see the black backside of this son of a bitch. The man was eating up his fuel and soiling his sheets, and he looked and acted as if he’d just jumped off the devil’s shovel.

  “According to the chart, we have a lighthouse ten kilometers to port,” Wiltzius said. “It must be true that they’ve finally turned them off. I’m going to write a letter to Roosevelt and complain about—”

  “There!” said Shaeffer. “There he is. Dead ahead. Four shorts, two longs, repeated.” He turned to the man behind him, who was on his knees, hauling the barrel of the Breda machine gun through the
hatch. “Get me a light up here,” he said. The seaman looked at his captain, who nodded, then called below for the signal light to be passed up.

  Jake raised the collar of his pea coat, turned his back to the wet spray coming over the port side, and strained to see beyond the rising and falling bow of the launch. Morales kept his eyes on the boat and compass, but his mind was on Betty’s soft mounds of joy, whose familiar scent rose from his shirt. He held a course of 350 degrees.

  “There they are!” Jake said, pointing. “Off the starboard bow. Cut her back to half throttle, and let’s keep them in sight.”

  “Half throttle?” Morales asked. “Don’t we want to catch up to them and make them dump those damn barrels? Call them on the radio, and tell them to heave to.”

  “No,” Jake said evenly. “She won’t listen—not now, not to me. If I had seen Amos’s name on the transom sooner or realized that it must have been him who made those depth charges, I wouldn’t have lost my temper like that, I would have understood ...”

  “You ought to call her right now and apologize and ask her to wait for us to catch up,” Morales said. “She would, then.” He tucked his chin for a whiff of essence of Betty. “Tell her again it’s her safety you care about, and maybe even admit that it was jealousy that made you lose your temper, then she’d—”

  “Half throttle,” Jake said. “We’ll watch from a distance, see what they see—if anything. And if there is another boat, we’ll get involved; to hell with her pride.”

  “Gus said that boat was on a heading of ninety-five degrees both times they saw it; that ought to put it about a mile from here. If he’s armed and we’re still this far back when they run into him, the only involved we’ll be is as witnesses to one ungodly explosion. Then you will go to hell, like she suggested.”

  “Two-thirds throttle,” said Jake. He wiped the lenses of his binoculars. “She knows something she hasn’t told us, and now maybe never will. Something to do with what Amos was watching for at the cabin when he fell. She told me then she thought people were coming ashore to use the cabin, and I never even reported it.”

  “I can see them now,” said Morales. “Jesus, she’s low in the water. So now maybe you all of a sudden believe them and don’t think it’s all a figment of their imagination like you said?”

  “I don’t know what I believe any more,” Jake replied.

  “How about the flashing light three points off the port bow,” Morales pointed. “You believe that?”

  Jake swung his binoculars toward land. “Sweet mother of God,” he said.

  He shouldered Morales aside to take the wheel and push the throttle to full. Morales ducked below and came back up with the Springfield rifle and a handful of clips.

  “There’s his answer,” Jake handed Morales the binoculars. “Four shorts, two longs from both of them.”

  “That’s a conning tower,” Morales said. “I can see his periscope. Maggie and Gus have seen him too, and they’re headed straight for him.”

  “Run up that flag, Mister Morales,” Jake said. “Then get on the horn, and call Gooden. Have him report a U-boat in the open at these coordinates.”

  When Richard drew close enough to U235 to see that her deck guns were leveled at him, he stepped out from behind the wheelhouse and waved his arms up and down, up and down.

  Captain Reising handed the bullhorn to Shaeffer. “Tell him to stop doing that and to bring his boat around to run on our starboard side. I’m going to start a turn here.”

  “He looks as if he’s trying to fly,” Wiltzius said. “Strach-meyer, stand by to take his line.”

  When the Lucille was broadside to U235’s deck, not thirty feet away, Shaeffer called to Richard through the bullhorn: “Trenton New Jersey” he boomed. Reising and Wiltzius exchanged a curious glance.

  Richard leaned back from the wheel with one hand cupped to his mouth: “Christmas Eve,” he said.

  “We are turning to port,” Shaeffer told him. “Swing around and come alongside.” He drew a circle in the air for Richard, who saluted in reply and turned hard over to dance in his own wake.

  On the first throw, Richard’s line fell on the deck but washed overboard before Strachmeyer could reach it.

  “Clumsy ass,” said one of the gunners.

  Strachmeyer unhooked his lifeline from the jumping wire to reach Richard’s second toss; he stepped on the snaking line and tied it to the railing.

  “Danke schon,” said Richard in his grandmother’s German.

  Strachmeyer didn’t reply, but reattached himself to the jumping wire and said something to the gunners, words that Richard did not understand. He held the Lucille off the sub’s steep, slippery hull with his gaff and dropped his fenders into place. When he leaned back to look up at the men in the tower, he saw no white cap but saluted the bridge nevertheless. Only Wiltzius, who felt sorry for the man though he couldn’t think why, returned the salute. Reising looked at Richard for a second, then told Shaeffer to make haste.

  “One minute,” Shaeffer shouted to Richard. He gave Wiltzius his binoculars and asked the ensign to have his boxes sent up right away. He saluted Wiltzius formally, shook his hand, and did the same with Reising, who nodded and wished him good luck.

  Shaeffer descended the stern ladder to the deck and— helped along by the gun crew—made his way gingerly toward Richard’s proffered gaff. Reaching down for the pole, he crouched as if preparing to jump onto the Lucille’s deck, but instead he sat down in the wash and slid clumsily into Richard’s arms.

  As Wiltzius and Praeger attached a line to the handle of the first of Shaeffer’s heavy black boxes, a cry came from below.

  “Two vessels approaching south by east,” said a man in the control room. “One kilometer out; estimated speed ten knots.”

  “God damn it,” spat Reising. The two boats, whoever they were, had to have radios; they would have seen the signal lights and alerted the air patrols. Reising’s decision was a simple one.

  “Gun crews below!” he shouted. “Get that box out of the way. Prepare to dive.”

  The alarm sounded, and the surface crew scrambled to secure their guns and clear the deck. Wiltzius and Praeger balanced the box on the railing to make way for the running men, then lowered it onto the deck.

  “Captain, what are you doing?” Shaeffer shouted from the Lucille.

  “We have two vessels approaching and probable enemy aircraft, Herr Packet,” Reising said. “You are compromised. I advise you and your friend to get out of here as fast as you can.”

  “My boxes!” Shaeffer cried. As U235’s speed increased, the Lucille stretched her bow line and slammed against the huge hull. For three seconds that seemed a half-hour, Richard and his camouflaged companion stood astonished on the deck, then Richard jumped forward to push up his throttle and shouted at Shaeffer to cast off the line when it slackened.

  The last man on the bridge, Wiltzius watched in horror as Shaeffer, standing on the Lucille’s washboard, uncleated the line and clung to it, desperately pulling himself hand over hand up the side of the U-boat, thrashed by the sea as the vessel’s bow began to submerge, his legs flailing for a foothold.

  “Sir, for Christ’s sake!” Praeger yelled from the hatchway. Wiltzius vaulted over the railing and slid down the line that was still attached to the box. Immediately after he reached the deck, a wave knocked him off his feet, but he held onto the line and managed to scramble crab-wise toward Shaeffer and with his right hand catch the collar of the man’s jacket. Wiltzius hauled him onto the deck like a great fish, then ran him up the ladder, his shoulder pushing Schaeffer’s buttocks, and feeding him, head first, into the hatch. Wiltzius then fell through himself in a cascade of sea water, turning quickly to secure the hatch cover as U235 dove and disappeared.

  “Baker One One, this is Baker Six. Do you read me Baker One One? Over.” Maggie stepped back from the little door in the bulkhead, startled by the volume and clarity of Jake’s voice.

  “He sounds like he’s next d
oor,” said Gus, as surprised as she was.

  “Baker Six this is Baker One One,” Maggie answered. “Where are you, Six?”

  Gus told her to say “over,” but she ignored him.

  “We’re off your port side; I’m not sure how far. I’m going to show you a light.”

  “The hell,” said Gus.

  “Baker Six this is One One,” Maggie said. “What are you doing out here? Yes, I see your light. You’re passing us. What are you doing? Did you see what we saw? Over.”

  “Yes we did, One One, and we are in pursuit of the fishing boat. He’s dead ahead of us, on a course for shore. We’ll need your help. Over.”

  “Do you want us to follow you, Baker Six? I don’t think we could keep up with you. Over.”

  Maggie held the handset against her chest and looked at Gus. “I know what’s coming next,” she said. Gus smiled.

  “Then you’ve got to launch your extra weight, One One. Push it overboard now, and you can catch up with me and we can overtake him no problem—”

  “We—”

  “You have to wait til he says ‘Over,’ ” Gus said.

  “One One, are you there? This is Six.”

  “Yes, we’re here. Over.”

  “Please comply, One One,” Jake said. “Promise me you will comply. Please. Over.”

  “Say ‘Willco,’ ” Gus advised.

  “Baker Six, this is Baker One One,” Maggie replied. “Willco. Over.”

  “What now?” Gus asked.

  “We’ll do what we were about to do, and we will comply as well,” she said. “Full speed for five minutes at forty-five degrees, and if he keeps his course and the gods are smiling, we’ll cross right over him. You’ll want to light that cigar.”

  “You take the wheel,” he said. “I’ll cut the fuses first.”

  Gus ducked under the scaffold, untied the striped coils, and with tin snips poised, hesitated.

  “One at twenty, the other at twenty-five?” he asked her. “You’re the expert,” she said. “I have no idea.”