The Company of the Dead (34 page)

He was telling Morgan things he already knew, but he listened anyway. In the absence of Major Kennedy, Hardas was opening up just a little, making a pleasant change from their usual interactions.

“Despite stratolite deployment the carrier continues to be the centrepiece of the forces necessary for
forwards presence
.”

Morgan nodded.

“And you can bet your boots that, when this shit went down, Emperor Ryuichi was yelling, ‘Where the fuck are the German carriers?’”

“Maybe not those exact words.”

“Okay, maybe not those exact words.” Hardas had chuckled briefly and then his face had gone smooth. Grey smudges remained under the eyes but the lines of laughter faded. “That puts us in either the safest or most dangerous place on the planet right now. But soon as Merkur gets here we should be fine to leave. I have a little leverage with him.”

“You think so?” Morgan said.

“If he’s the same man I knew three years ago. Either way, he’ll take us where we want to be.”

“How do you figure that?”

Hardas smiled through his teeth. “Merkur’s assuming command when he arrives. The Brandenburgs hold Manhattan. They’ve got commando units that will disperse across the East Coast. There’s a lot of options there: troop movements, fuel dumps, unit headquarters and so on. Multiple targets. Ship’s talk is that Merkur’s going to make a run south once he’s united the battle groups, then link up with the confed fleet off Savannah and return in force.”

And if four carriers aren’t force
, Morgan wondered silently,
what the hell is?

“What’s happening on the mainland?” he asked.

“There’s been a skirmish between the Canadians and japs on the northern border, but so far no American troops have been involved. Merkur’s stuck till something happens. He can’t deposit three divisions of Confederate troops anywhere till he knows whether they’re going to fight or shake hands with our northern cousins.”

“They won’t fight,” Morgan said with little certainty as they entered the hangar.

The scout had been refuelled. Additionally, someone had remounted a twenty-millimetre cannon on the gun rest by the co-pilot’s seat.

Hardas examined the cargo hold. “No luck,” he said. “When we dumped the cargo on that Fuck You, we lost everything.”

They were both still wearing the faded blue coveralls supplied by the German crash and salvage crew who’d welcomed them the previous night. It was all they’d have till they reached Savannah—if that was where they were headed.

A lookout and the boatswain’s mate caught them as they emerged from the hangar bay.

“Commander Hardas, the duty officer wishes to ask you again about the two vessels you saw engaging the
Titanic
.”

They were led towards the bridge. In the operations room, someone handed Hardas some photographs.

“That’s them alright, battle cruisers, Yamamoto class.” Hardas handed the photographs back. “Where are they?”

“Close enough.”

Two hours later, back on the flight deck, Newcombe rejoined them. They stood by two naval officers who were passing a pair of binoculars back and forth between them.

One said, “I’ll wager the one on the right is the
Tokiwa.
”

Two ships had been sighted fifteen minutes earlier, escorting a small flotilla of surface ships.

“Nonsense. It’s a destroyer or at best a cruiser,” the other replied.

“No,” Hardas said quietly. “I’ve seen them before. They’re both battle cruisers.”

Morgan had the binoculars. He could see two German dreadnoughts and a destroyer in the distance. The Japanese task force lay further back, receding into the distance.

“They don’t like it much when someone’s expecting them,” Newcombe said. “This ain’t Pearl Harbor.”

“They were expected at Pearl Harbor,” Hardas replied. “Astor just didn’t bother letting his troops know.”

You’re both wrong,
Morgan thought, saying nothing.

Hardas took the binoculars. “They’re targeting the port-side ship. Here goes.”

Morgan saw it before he heard it. Towering spouts of water erupted between the two battle cruisers. Then the muffled sound of cannon fire rolled over them.

“Commander?” It was the boatswain’s mate again. “Please return with me to operations.”

Morgan didn’t know whether to remain by the deck’s edge or wait outside the ops centre. Planes were lifting from the other carrier’s deck, and soon the decision was made for him in a jostling exchange of piecemeal English. He was led to the bridge, thinking he should have gone below.

“We’re in trouble,” Hardas said, encountering him on the stairway that led up to ops. He was crammed between two sailors, both of whom were wearing side arms. Their uniforms were a darker shade of grey. Morgan knew a police officer when he saw one.

He pointed out where he’d left Newcombe and the two of them were marched back across the deck.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Hardas said. “We’re just confined to quarters for the moment, is all.”

Yet police—military or otherwise—brought to mind Camelot and a trail of agents’ corpses. The Germans might have put a call through to Houston. The CBI’s reach extended pretty far these days.

To sea, Morgan could make out the German dreadnoughts, but the haze near the horizon’s edge obscured all sight of the Japanese. There was more smoke than he would have expected.

A cluster of fighters, presumably from the other carrier, was winging away in tight formation; an arrow loosed into the void. Nearby, an elevator was just levelling with the deck, bearing two more fighters that were hastily wheeled towards one of the catapults.

Newcombe seemed to have no trouble reading the situation. He ignored Hardas’s attempt to explain the change in circumstances and sang his plea to the Germans. The two naval officers began to distance themselves from what was obviously trouble, but the military police weren’t so easily satisfied. When one reached for his holster, Morgan almost wished he’d do something,
anything
, to their fair-weather friend.

A klaxon wailed, interrupting the dispute, and men came running across the deck. Crash and salvage teams, mobilising.

Morgan scanned the skies. A speck in the distance grew fast. One of the police spoke and Morgan translated. “It’s German, but not part of the carrier group.”

Newcombe ceased resisting, possibly relieved to find a reason to obey the Germans, who were urging them away from the flight deck. The plane was coming in low and fast. Morgan stole quick glances, looking for signs of damage—flames or smoke—and saw nothing.

They’d reached one of the anti-aircraft emplacements when the Germans, pistols drawn, urged them to get under cover.

Morgan looked up. “Isn’t that fighter coming in too fast?”

“He has to be at full throttle just before he strikes the arresting cables,” Newcombe explained. “In case he misses them and ends up in the drink.”

Hardas said, “This guy’s been on after-burner since first sighting.”

And he
was
coming in fast, through a haze of heated air. And behind that haze Morgan thought he saw something else.

Hardas was a sudden blur. “
Down!
” he screamed in Morgan’s ear, bowling him over.

One moment the German fighter appeared to float, suspended in midair. The next, a fireball pummelled them in searing waves. There was a shower of fragments that might have been metal and might have been bone.

Morgan’s head pounded.

Hardas’s mouth moved soundlessly.

There was no sound but the slosh of blood behind Morgan’s bruised eardrums. He was shoved up against the thick metal wall as more bodies swept in. He tried to look up, but Hardas forced his head back down. Newcombe’s knees were in his face.

The metal point of a booted foot propelled Morgan away as hands clawed for ammunition feeds and someone started swinging the anti-aircraft gun skywards. There was gunpowder, sweat and the reek of gasoline everywhere.

A gunner yelled at one of the policemen, pointing to the emplacement’s edge. Morgan felt arms slung beneath his damp armpits and was lifted, thinking
fuck this
, but unable to resist the eviction.

He was back on deck with Hardas and Newcombe and they were running again, side-stepping pilots who were still fastening belts, adjusting helmets, streaming to where others clambered below. The deck shuddered as two fighters catapulted past and screamed into the sky. Towards its edge a gaping fissure exposed the carrier’s entrails. Sunlight fell where it shouldn’t on the wreckage of craft caught in the hangar below. Morgan thought crazily,
That’s a big hole
, then recalled what he’d seen within the hot trail of the crashing plane.

A second plane
.

Suddenly he was caught in a swift shadow. Looking up, he saw the plane plummet. Looking side-ways at Hardas and Newcombe running beside him and then leaping sideways, rolling, rolling, with them beneath and above him and then nothing.

When the first waves of narcotic-fuelled dreams parted he’d found himself in the infirmary, Hardas at the foot of his bed.

“Finally,” Hardas had said, and smiled.

A dull ache beat its way through the haze. Morgan’s eyes shifted to the crude bandage wrapped around his leg.

He spent that afternoon in the infirmary. Hardas explained what had happened. How a second fighter had crashed into the deck. How Morgan had grabbed and hurled both Newcombe and Hardas from its path.

They were fire-planes, Hardas had said. Old German fighters, captured from some other conflict—maybe Suez, maybe Vietnam, he didn’t know—but piloted by Japanese warriors strapped in bonds that were never meant to be undone, and bristling with incendiary devices and live ammunition. There’d been fifteen in all. Two had managed to crash into the
Bismarck
before ship’s defence had kicked in. Two more had smashed through the hull of one of the dreadnoughts they’d seen earlier. The others had been shot out of the sky.

Then a flight of Japanese FS-Zs had fallen upon the fleet.

It had been a close call until Merkur’s planes had arrived and the japs had been beaten back.

“Where’s Newcombe?” Morgan asked.

“That shithead’s locked up in the admiral’s cabin. We’d all be in the brig, but I managed to have a quick word with Admiral Merkur after he arrived.”

“You got your leverage?”

“I think so. Our scout’s gone but something else came up. We’re leaving as soon as you’re mobile.”

“I’m just going to be a liability now.”

“Christ, Morgan, you were always a liability.” Hardas fixed him with an appraising eye. “We’ll make do.”

The painkillers had rendered the rest of Morgan’s time with the Germans a muddied void. The fragments of conversation and subsequent events were mercifully unclear. Now sequestered by the smoke of battle and the
Parzifal
’s steady wake, the remnants of the fleet lay beyond the darkened horizon.

Savannah remained a further two days south.

Awake and asleep, Morgan listened.

Thálatta thálatta
: a Greek chorus of sound that pummelled his ears and vibrated through his bones, a cry of woe beating out an ancient and indecipherable code.
Thálatta
: Ancient Greek for ocean, for Homer’s wine-dark sea. The Atlantic, named for Atlas, world-bearing Titan of Greek mythology.

They had spent two days crossing the Sargasso Sea, while sortie after sortie of Japanese aircraft left indelible marks in twisted metal and blood on the flotilla’s decks. Two days crossing the Sargasso, the only sea in the world bordered by ocean currents rather than land. Calm and warm, an ellipsis of water, flowing ever clockwise in an inexorable whirlpool that could sink a continent.

This wide dank sea had spawned so many myths. Here lay Atlantis, bound by the Devil’s Triangle, and here lay ships lost or abandoned. Yes, here lay the
Titanic
. Here lay—

“Why don’t you go below, grab some shut-eye?”

“What’s that?” Morgan’s eyes snapped open.

“You almost fell over the side.” Hardas had to shout above the engines. “Go below.”

Morgan tried to stand, but his leg gave way. Hardas came over and slid an arm beneath his shoulder, taking the weight off his injured limb.

“How you holding up?”

“I’m okay.”

Hardas nodded in the direction of the stairs. “Go below. I’ll send Newcombe to get you when it’s your watch. If you’re up to it.”

“I’m up to it.”

“You’ve got four hours.”

Hardas stayed close by his side as Morgan limped towards the bow of the
Parzifal
.

Up until eight hours ago it had been the property of the German navy; Admiral Merkur’s own private barge. A lightly armed runabout, designed for inter-ship transfers, it had been handed over to Hardas with little ceremony; payback for the intelligence Major Kennedy had provided concerning the Japanese fighters. A last gasp of Camelot’s ties to the Germans.

Morgan had been unable to assist Hardas and Newcombe in provisioning the vessel. His injury confined him to light tasks. Instead, he’d made his own minor contribution. Settling himself near the bow and using a tin of paint he’d found aboard the vessel, he made the ship their own, working the name
Parzifal
onto the side in a spidery scrawl of red. It was the German name for King Arthur’s wise-fool, whose quest had ultimately claimed the Holy Grail and renewed Camelot. A spiritual change that had passed unnoticed in a world reborn.

Newcombe, one hand on the wheel, looked over his shoulder. “How’s our hero?”

Morgan smiled weakly by way of reply.

“He’s doing fine,” Hardas said.

Morgan paused for a moment, resting against the gunnel. The moon had yet to rise; just stars and the play of the
Parzifal
’s lamp on the black waters.
I will be here again
, he thought.
I’m going back.
He glanced at Hardas. We’re
going back. I seem to be forever crossing and recrossing these waters, but I’m closing in on you, Doctor Wells.