Gone to Soldiers (49 page)

He was startled, for he associated the soft curves of her body, its slightly flattened hips, the purplish beige nipples, with the scent of sandalwood. He could not imagine her smelling differently, whereas she considered her scent temporary. For the duration.

Some of their best times were talking shop. The light from the bedside lamp she had for once not turned off while they made love shone on her black hair, loose on the shoulders of her kimono. It dipped low at her shoulder as she sipped the last of the chocolate, exposing her fine skin. He could not understand why Japanese were popularly supposed to be yellow. He thought of her skin as dark ivory. It had little pink in it, but no yellow either. Her face in repose had always an air of sadness, but now it was animated.

“… and so I had to go to the Pentagon, which they have just opened, and I could not believe it. It goes and goes and goes and goes. I thought I'd never find my way in and then I thought I'd never find my way out.” She giggled behind her hand. “After the war, what will they do with it? They could use it for a prison. No one could get out without help.”

“After the war. We all keep saying that, as if things will slip back as they were, automatically. Do you really expect that?”

“You mean, you think my father won't get his nursery business back?”

“Do you believe the people who have been running it will let go?”

“But it's not fair.”

He put his arms around her. “No. It's not fair. But I was thinking more along the lines of the Pentagon and Washington itself. Sometimes I suspect that those who are running things might grow addicted to power. Secrecy's essential in wartime, but once in place, will it ever be removed?”

“Why not? Who would we be hiding anything from? Besides, nobody's going to be willing to spend all this money on the Army in peacetime.”

“I don't know if what we called normal before the war will ever seem normal again. This town is full of men growing used to the sensations of power. When someone has wielded power, especially self-righteously, especially with a sense of necessity, will he ever relinquish? In 1940, when the Dutch army surrendered to the Germans, our Army moved up to seventeenth worldwide in size. Do you think we'll ever again be willing to be ranked seventeenth in weapons?”

“I worry more whether all my life I'll be stigmatized. Belonging nowhere. Nowhere accepted. Each half of me at war with the other half. I never used to feel this way. Now I wonder if it's permanent. I can't stand to think of my whole life like this, a war without, a war within.”

He held her and for a moment he thought she would weep, but she rubbed her eyes, sniffling, and asked him to make more cocoa. Tonight she reminded him of a Chinese garden. He realized, as he tried to verbalize his appreciation to her, that he was thinking of Soochow, a beauty spot west of Shanghai, a city of canals lined with willows, of whitewashed houses and famous gardens, where rocks and water and structures were as important as the plants, everything arranged and soothing. That led him to describe excursions out of the city, before the Japanese had surrounded it, with his uncle Nat or Chinese friends. In mid-reminiscence, he looked into her eyes and saw them glazed over with boredom. His China ramblings alienated her.

“Do you ever imagine our counterparts?” she asked him. “Somewhere in Tokyo, somewhere in Berlin, a couple is sipping saki or beer and gossiping, and when they go to work, they deal with our codes.”

“I don't think the Japanese are reading our codes. They certainly have been running traffic analyses on us, but I don't see evidence of more.”

She laughed. “Remember the Japanese embassy reassuring Tokyo that they saw no evidence we were reading their codes, back when we were reading the Purple code regularly?”

He did not remind her he had not yet been in the office in the pre-Pearl Harbor days, when she had first come. “On the other hand, I'd be surprised if the German B-Dienst, our German counterparts, were not reading some of our mail. You could make a case they're reading naval or merchant marine codes, because they seem to know exactly where our ships are going to be in the Atlantic, for instance.”

“I thought your friend Friedman had set up impervious codes.”

“He isn't my friend. That's like talking to the last violinist and asking him about his friend Toscanini. He never set up naval codes. A lot of naval operations use old codes.”

“Battles in the Pacific are going better than what they call the Battle of the Atlantic, aren't they? It seems to me every day I read about a bunch more vessels down.”

She was inviting him to explain the war to her, her dark gaze expectant. She considered it appropriate he should act as the expert, although in truth he knew no more than she did. With her aunt employed at State, she might conceivably know more. Still she waited for him to structure the world.

“The Japanese and the British are in the same position, essentially, overpopulated highly industrialized islands that depend on shipping for survival. We're starving the Japanese of oil and the Germans are starving the British of oil, food, weapons, everything.”

“Doesn't it seem crazy to you sometimes? Each side hiding meanings that the other side ferrets out? I wonder if our counterparts are talking about us and trying to guess which of their mail we read, the way we're trying to guess about them.”

“An infinite series of mirrors,” Daniel said. “Can we be truly bold? Your aunt can't possibly get back before Monday. Can I spend the night?”

DUVEY 3

The Black Pit

“The worst winter in fifty years,” Mike said to Duvey. Mike was Boston Irish, a wizened scrappy runt of a man but quick-witted, fast-talking. “The weather's been putting down as many ships as the Heinies. My last crossing, there was only one soul on the whole scow not puking his guts out, and that was the bosun because he was dead already. Of a burst appendix.”

“I like shipping out of New York—it's a great liberty town,” Duvey said. “All those sweet-assed liberty girls shuffling along giving you the eye. Lots of good jazz. You can always find a bar with something hot to listen to.” Seamen weren't wanted at the USO, but he could find his own good times, no problem.

“Well now, I don't care about that myself. My mother says I have a wooden ear. But the ginch, that is something else. Let me tell you what happen to me …”

Duvey never got to hear the end of the story until two days later, because at that moment they cleared the headland and the full force of the storm hit them. This has got to blow itself out soon, Duvey thought, but twenty-four hours later it was worse. The sea would stand above them, fifty feet it had to be, a cliff of boiling water. They were somewhat south and two days east of Newfoundland heading into the storm. At four-thirty it was night.

On March 8 when their ship the
William Eustis
, with a load of tanks, trucks, jeeps and half-tracks, had left New York, there had been a hint of spring in the air, a damp southern wind breathing off the Gulf Stream. The twilight had been lavender, a word, a color, he associated with his mother, to whom he had scrawled a brief note before sailing, stuck in a birthday card embossed with heavy paper roses. He had also sent her a bottle of lavender cologne a buddy claimed was the real French stuff. He hoped he had wrapped it okay. He also sent a postcard to Arty and one to the kid, with the Statue of Liberty on it. “I see this coming and going,” he had written on the back. “It looks prettiest when I'm heading into port.”

In the submarine command post, the makeshift operations room of the Hotel am Steinplatz in Berlin where Admiral Doenitz controlled the tactics of the U-boats, the message came in, the list of boats, their cargoes, their route across the Atlantic. B-Dienst (German intelligence) was on the job reading the BAMS code (British and Allied Merchant Ship code), which they had deciphered years before. Doenitz ordered the twenty-one U-boats of the Raubgraf picket line to meet the two convoys, the slow and the fast. Three hundred and fifty miles ahead of that wolf pack, the twenty-eight submarines of the Stuermer and Draenger groups began to advance west
.

Now the sky was black although the sea was visible enough, a frothy mass that shone from within in its whiteness, alive, a maw of fangs. How the hell were they supposed to see icebergs? The ship would rise on a steep hill of water, hang there on the crest of a wave with icy churning water pouring past and over them and the screws rotating in air, the ship almost shaking apart with the force of the disengaged propeller. Then they would pitch into the trough, landing with a thud that shook his bones loose from their sockets, that slammed the segments of his spine together. Then they would resume that sickening swell up and over, to hang in air and come crashing down. The tanks were the worst, always breaking loose and starting to roll. They had to keep lashing them down and one colored guy had his leg crushed. Deck cargo was a bloody nuisance in a storm.

The convoy straggled out for miles. There was another ahead of them, a slow convoy. The slow convoys usually made about six knots, and the fast convoys like this one made about nine, although as far as he could tell they could be standing still on the same bloody wave just banging to and fro. Although their convoy was made up of thirty-eight merchant ships and their escort, they could have been alone in the sea gone foul and crazy. They could not see another ship. The merchant ships lacked radar anyhow, but Duvey knew that the escorts who had it couldn't get any use out of it in this weather because the aerials froze over and sometimes they just broke.

They had some escort. The other half of his convoy, which had been split into two parts, had got the best of the available defenders. Their own defense was patched together out of what was available, because the escort ships had been taking the same pounding as the merchant ships. Whenever they finished a crossing, they turned right around and shepherded another convoy across. With so many ships broken up in the winter storms, they were using boats that should have been junked. They had two destroyers,
Volunteer
and
Beverley
, two little corvettes
Anemone
and
Pennywort
, and two ancient class S destroyers that should have been decently retired,
The Witherington
and
The Mansfield
.

He thought whoever in the British Admiralty decided to name corvettes for flowers had a slimy sense of humor. They were rugged little boats that rolled in any sea, even a light one. On his last voyage, he'd seen a Free French corvette ram a sub on the surface and send it down. That time he'd been torpedoed. They hadn't exploded but had sunk with enough time to lower the boats that hadn't been stove in. The rescue ship picked them up maybe twenty minutes later. Almost two thirds of the men from his ship had been saved. When the rescue ship had its act together and when it wasn't torpedoed itself, then a seaman had a chance. But they had no rescue ship in this convoy.

In Bletchley at Hut 8 the Triton codes of the German Enigma machines used by the U-boats were deciphered, as the code had finally been broken in December. From Bletchley the deciphered messages were transmitted by teletype into the Operational Intelligence Centre and the submarine tracking room. From this charting of the movements of the U-boats, warnings flashed to convoys and their escorts and the headquarters of the antisubmarine services. Every morning there was a conference on a three-way telephone link enabling the staff of the Operational Intelligence Centre, Coastal Command and Western Approaches to devise defense strategies for the convoys
.

On 8 March, a signal was decoded at Bletchley indicating that the Triton code (the Enigma code for submarines) was about to change to one involving a fourth rotor, thus multiplying the possibilities astronomically. By March 11, Bletchley had no ears into the U-boats and submarine tracking was blind
.

They imagined that the wolf pack Raubgraf was still located four hundred miles north of where Doenitz, whose eyes and ears of intelligence were still working, had relocated it
.

Finally the seas began to settle to a thumping swell. Snow squalls swept down on them. The superstructure of the ship was thick with ice they had to hack away as best they could. Their elderly escorts were buzzing around the convoy trying to shepherd the stragglers back in. They called it falling out of bed when a ship got left behind; the life of a lone ship was not long. An occasional merchantman might have a gun fitted in her bow, but most had nothing on board but a casual assortment of small arms. They passed into the Black Pit—that's what the seamen had begun to call the Greenland air gap.

March 15. During the storm the convoy passed right through the Raubgraf line without being sighted. They were now between one line of U-boats and the next. There would have been no air gap had there been long-range bombers in Newfoundland, the famous Liberators the seamen loved to see coming over, but Admiral King would release none to protect the convoys. His eyes were on the Pacific. Europe was the Army's war. Churchill's scientific advisor reported to the British War Cabinet that they were consuming three quarters of a million tons more of essential war supplies than they were importing and in two months would run far, far short. The Navy looked westward, but in the Pacific the Japanese submarines did not attack merchant ships, for they held there was no glory in such easy prey, and warships should fight warships
.

March 15 they sailed under a low grey sky. Twice the sun lanced out and blindingly lit the icebergs they passed among. The bergs looked grizzled, ancient. He knew they were mostly underwater, but he could never quite imagine it. Some looked like dirty islands, but one they passed near, too near, Duvey thought, was blue and pocked with caves. Seen from their stinking ship, those caves of ice looked almost inviting, clean and private.

The fuel below had sloshed around so much in the heavy weather that the food reeked and even tasted of oil; the air itself belowdecks felt oily. Everything had got sodden with the seas churning in and over. Now at least they could get warm when they came off watch. They could begin to dry out their clothes. The convoy re-formed neatly and was moving off at a good pace. In spite of the storm, they were signaled they had made good progress. They were right on schedule, closing on the slower convoy still some hundred miles in advance. Duvey mended his sweater, torn on a half-track in the storm.