s up at the ceiling of the chapel through half closed eyes and thanks
God for having sent him what is obviously a German spy and an angel of mercy
rolled into one adorable package.
When it's finished, he opens his eyes again and takes a deep breath of
cold Atlantic air. He is seeing everything around him with newfound clarity.
Clearly, Margaret is going to do wonders for his productivity on the
cryptological front if he can only keep her coming back.
Chapter 29 PAGES
It has been a long time since horses ran at the Ascot Racetrack in
Brisbane. The infield's a commotion of stretched khaki. The grass has died
from lack of sun and from the trampling feet of enlisted men. The field has
been punctured with latrines, mess tents have been pitched. Three shifts a
day, the residents trudge across the track, round back of the silent and
empty stables. In the field where the horses used to stretch their legs, two
dozen Quonset huts that have popped up like mushrooms. The men work in those
huts, sitting before radios or typewriters or card files all day long,
shirtless in the January heat.
It has been just as long since whores sunned themselves on the long
veranda of the house on Henry Street, and passing gentlemen, on their way to
or from the Ascot Racetrack, peered at their charms through the white
railing, faltered, checked their wallets, forgot their scruples, turned on
their heels, and climbed up the house's front stairs. Now the place is full
of male officers and math freaks: mostly Australians on the ground floor,
mostly Americans upstairs, and a sprinkling of lucky Brits who were spirited
out of Singapore before General Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya and the
conqueror of that city, was able to capture them and mine their heads for
crucial data.
Today the old bordello has been turned upside down; everyone with Ultra
clearance is out in the garage, which thrums and roars with the sound of
fans, and virtually glows with contained heat. In that garage is a rusted
steel trunk, still spattered with riverbank mud that partially obscures the
Nipponese characters stenciled on its sides. Had a Nipponese spy glimpsed
the trunk during its feverish passage from the port to the whorehouse's
garage, he would have recognized it as belonging to the radio platoon of the
20th Division, which is currently lost in the jungles of New Guinea.
The rumor, shouted over the sound of the fans, is that a digger an
Australian grunt found it. His unit was sweeping the abandoned headquarters
of the 20th Division for booby traps when his metal detector went nuts along
the banks of a river.
The codebooks are stacked inside as neatly as gold bars. They are wet
and mildewed and their front covers are all missing, but this is mint
condition by the standards of wartime. Stripped to the waist and streaming
with sweat, the men raise the books out one by one, like nurses lifting
newborn infants from the bassinette, and carry them to tables where they
slice away the rotten bindings and peel the sodden pages off the stacks one
by one, hanging them from improvised clotheslines strung overhead. The
stench and damp of New Guinea saturate the air as the river water trapped in
those pages is lifted out by the rushing air; it all vents to the outside
eventually, and half a mile downwind, pedestrians wrinkle their noses. The
whorehouse's closets still redolent of French perfume, powder, hairspray and
jism, but now packed to the ceiling with office supplies are raided for more
string. The web of clotheslines grows, new layers crisscrossing above and
below the old ones, every inch of string claimed by a wet page as soon as it
is stretched. Each page is a grid, a table with hiragana or katakana or
kanji in one box, a group of digits or Romanji in another box, and the pages
all cross referenced to other pages in a scheme only a cryptographer could
love.
The photographer comes in, trailed by assistants who are burdened with
miles of film. All he knows is that each page must be photographed
perfectly. The malarial reek practically flattens him the moment he walks in
the door, but when he recovers, his eyes scan the garage. All he can see,
stretching as if to infinity, are pages dripping and curling, turning white
as they dry, casting their grids of information into sharp relief, like the
reticules of so many bomb sights, the graven crosshairs of so many
periscopes, plunging through cloud and fog to focus, distinctly on the
abdomens of Nipponese troopships, pregnant with North Borneo fuel, alive
with burning steam.
Chapter 30 RAM
"Sir! Would you mind telling me where we are going, sir!"
Lieutenant Monkberg heaves a deep, quivering sigh, his rib cage
shuddering like a tin shack in a cyclone. He executes a none too snappy
pushup. His hands are planted on the rim, and so this action extricates his
head from the bowl, of a toilet or "head," as it is referred to in this
context: an alarmingly rundown freighter. He jerks down a strip of abrasive
Euro bumwad and wipes his mouth before looking up at Sergeant Robert
Shaftoe, who has braced himself in the hatchway.
And Shaftoe does need some serious bracing, because he is carrying
close to his own weight in gear. All of it was issued to him thoughtfully
prepacked.
He could have left it that way. But this is not how an Eagle Scout
operates. Bobby Shaftoe has gone through and unpacked all of it, spread it
out on the deck, examined it, and repacked it.
This allowed Shaftoe to do some serious inferring. To be specific, he
infers that the men of Detachment 2702 are expected to spend most of the
next three weeks trying as hard as they can not to freeze to death. This
will be punctuated by trying to kill a lot of well armed sons of bitches.
German, most likely.
"N N N Norway," Lieutenant Monkberg says. He looks so pathetic that
Shaftoe considers offering him some m m m morphine, which induces a mild
nausea of its own but holds back the greater nausea of seasickness. Then he
comes to his senses, remembers that Lieutenant Monkberg is an officer whose
duty it is to send him off to die, and decides that he can just go fuck
himself sideways.
"Sir! What is the nature of our mission in Norway, sir?"
Monkberg unloads a rattling belch. "Ram and run," he says.
"Sir! Ram what, sir?"
''Norway."
"Sir! Run where, sir?"
"Sweden."
Shaftoe likes the sound of this. The perilous sea voyage through U boat
infested waters, the collision with Norway, the desperate run across frozen
Nazi occupied territory, all seem trivial compared with the shining goal of
dipping into the world's largest and purest reservoir of authentic Swedish
poontang.
"Shaftoe! Wake up!"
''Sir! Yes, sir!"
"You have noticed the way we are dressed." Monkberg refers to the fact
that they have discarded their dog tags and are all wearing civilian or
merchant marine clothing.
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"We don't want the Nuns, or anyone else, to know what we really are."
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"Now, you might ask yourself, if we're supposed to look like civilians,
then why the hell are we carrying tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges,
et cetera."
"Sir! That was going to be my next question, sir!"
"Well, we have a cover story all worked out for that. Come with me."
Monkberg looks enthusiastic all of a sudden. He clambers to his feet
and leads Shaftoe down various passageways and stairs to the freighter's
cargo hold. "You know those other ships?"
Shaftoe looks blank.
"Those other ships around us? We are in the middle of a convoy, you
know."
"Sir, yes sir!" Shaftoe says, a little less certainly. None of the men
has been abovedecks very much in the hours since they were delivered, via
submarine, to this wallowing wreck. Even if they had gone up for a look
around they would have seen nothing but darkness and fog.
"A Murmansk convoy," Monkberg continues. "All of these ships are
delivering weapons and supplies to the Soviet Union. See?"
They have reached a cargo hold. Monkberg turns on an overhead light,
revealing crates. Lots and lots and lots of crates.
"Full of weapons," Monkberg says, "including tommy guns, grenades,
demolition charges, et cetera. Get my drift?"
"Sir, no sir! I do not get the lieutenant's drift!"
Monkberg comes one step closer to him. Unsettlingly close. He speaks,
now, in a conspiratorial tone. "See, we're all just crew members on this
merchant ship, making the run to Murmansk. It gets foggy. We get separated
from our convoy. Then, boom! We slam into fucking Norway. We are stuck on
Nazi held territory. We have to make a break for Sweden! But wait a second,
we say to ourselves. What about all those Germans between us and the Swedish
border? Well, we had better be armed to the teeth, is what. And who is in a
better position to arm themselves to the teeth than the crew of this
merchant ship that is jam packed with armaments? So we run down into the
cargo hold and hastily pry open a few crates and arm ourselves."
Shaftoe looks at the crates. None of them have been pried open.
"Then," Monkberg continues, "we abandon ship and head for Sweden."
There is a long silence. Shaftoe finally rouses himself to say, "Sir!
Yes, sir!"
"So get prying."
''Sir! Yes, sir!"
"And make it look hasty! Hasty! C'mon! Shake a leg!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
Shaftoe tries to get into the spirit of the thing. What's he going to
use to pry a crate open? No crowbars in sight. He exits the cargo hold and
strides down a passageway. Monkberg following him closely, hovering, urging
him to be hastier: "You're in a hurry! The Nazis are coming! You have to arm
yourself! Think of your wife and kids back in Glasgow or Lubbock or wherever
the fuck you're from!"
"Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, sir!" Shaftoe says indignantly.
"No, no! Not in real life! In your pretend role as this stranded
merchant son of a bitch! Look, Shaftoe! Look! Salvation is at hand!"
Shaftoe turns around to see Monkberg pointing at a cabinet marked
FIRE.
Shaftoe pulls the door open to find, among other implements, one of
those giant axes that firemen are always carrying in and out of burning
structures.
Thirty seconds later, he's down in the cargo hold, Paul Bunyaning a
crate of .45 caliber ammunition. "Faster! More haphazard!" Monkberg shouts.
"This isn't a precise operation, Shaftoe! You are in a blind panic!" Then he
says, "Goddamn it!" and runs forward and seizes the ax from Shaftoe's hands.
Monkberg swings wildly, missing the crate entirely as he adjusts to the
tremendous weight and length of the implement. Shaftoe hits the deck and
rolls to safety. Monkberg finally gets his range and azimuth worked out, and
actually makes contact with the crate. Splinters and chips skitter across
the deck.
"See!" Monkberg says, looking over his shoulder at Shaftoe, "I want
splinteriness! I want chaos!" He is swinging the ax at the same time as he's
talking and looking at Shaftoe, and he's moving his feet too because the
ship is rocking, and consequently the blade of the weapon misses the crate
entirely, overshoots, and comes down right on Monkberg's ankle.
"Gadzooks!" Lieutenant Monkberg says, in a quiet, conversational tone.
He is looking down at his ankle in fascination. Shaftoe comes over to see
what's so interesting.
A good chunk of Monkberg's lower left leg has been neatly cross
sectioned. In the beam of Shaftoe's flashlight, it is possible to see
severed blood vessels and ligaments sticking out of opposite sides of the
meaty wound, like sabotaged bridges and pipelines dangling from the sides of
a gorge.
"Sir! You are wounded, sir!" Shaftoe says. "Let me summon Lieutenant
Root!"
"No! You stay here and work!" Monkberg says. "I can find Root myself."
He reaches down with both hands and squeezes his leg above the wound,
causing blood to gush out onto the deck. "This is perfect!" he says
meditatively. "This adds so much realism."
After several repetitions of this order, Shaftoe reluctantly goes back
to crate hacking. Monkberg hobbles and staggers around the hold for a few
minutes, bleeding on everything, then drags himself off in search of Enoch
Root. The last thing he says is, "Remember! We are aiming for a ransacked
effect!"
But the bit with the leg wound gets the idea across to Shaftoe more
than Monkberg's words ever could. The sight of the blood brings up memories
of Guadalcanal and more recent adventures. His last dose of morphine is
wearing off, which makes him sharper. And he's staffing to get really
seasick, which makes him want to fight it by doing some hard work.
So he more or less goes berserk with that ax. He loses track of what is
going on.
He wishes that Detachment 2702 could have stayed on dry land preferably
dry warm land such as that place they stayed, for two sunny weeks, in Italy.
The first part of that mission had been hard work, what with humping
those barrels of shit around. But the remainder of it (except for the last
few hours) had been just like shore leave, except that there weren't any
women. Every day they'd taken turns at the observation site, looking out
over the Bay of Naples with their telescopes and binoculars. Every night,
Corporal Benjamin sat down and radioed more gibberish in Morse code.
One night, Benjamin received a message and spent some time deciphering
it. He announced the news to Shaftoe: "The Germans know we're here."
"What do you mean, they know we're here?"
"They know that for at least six months we have had an observation post
overlooking the Bay of Naples," Benjamin said.
"We've been here less than two weeks."
''They're going to begin searching this area tomorrow."
"Well, then let's get the fuck out of here," Shaftoe said.
"Colonel Chattan orders you to wait," Benjamin said, "until you know
that the Germans know that we are here."
"But I do know that the Germans know that we are here," Shaftoe said,
"you just told me."
"No, no no no no," Benjamin said, "wait until you would know that the
Germans knew even if you didn't know from being told by Colonel Chattan over
the radio."
"Are you fucking with me?"
"Orders," Benjamin said, and handed Shaftoe the deciphered message as
proof.
As soon as the sun came up they could hear the observation planes
crisscrossing the sky. Shaftoe was ready to execute their escape plan, and
he made sure that the men were too. He sent some of those SAS blokes down to
reconnoiter the choke points along their exit route. Shaftoe himself just
laid down on his back and stared up at the sky, watching those planes.
Did he know that the Germans knew now?
Ever since he'd woken up, a couple of SAS blokes had been following him
around, staring at him. Shaftoe finally looked in their direction and
nodded. They ran away. A moment later he heard wrenches crashing against the
insides of toolboxes.
The Germans had observation planes all over the fucking sky. That was
pretty strong circumstantial evidence that the Germans knew. And those
planes were clearly visible to Shaftoe, so he could, arguably, know that
they knew. But Colonel Chattan had ordered him to stay put "until positively
sighted by Germans," whatever that meant.
One of those planes, in particular, was coming closer and closer. It
was searching very close to the ground, cutting only a narrow swath on each
pass. Waiting for it to pass over their position, Shaftoe wanted to scream.
This was too stupid to be real. He wanted to send up a flare and get this
over with.
Finally, in midafternoon, Shaftoe, lying on his back in the shade of a
tree, looked straight up into the air and counted the rivets on the belly of
that German airplane: a Henschel Hs 126 (1) with a single swept
back wing mounted above the fuselage, so as not to block the view downwards,
and with ladders and struts and giant awkward splay footed landing gear
sticking out all over. One German encased in a glass shroud and flying the
plane, another out in the open, peering down through goggles and fiddling
with a swivel mounted machine gun. This one did all but look Shaftoe in the
eye, then tapped the pilot on the shoulder and pointed down.
The Henschel altered its normal search pattern, cutting the pass short
to swing round and fly over their position again.
"That's it," Shaftoe said to himself. He stood up and began walking
towards the dilapidated barn. "That's it!" he shouted. "Execute!"
The SAS guys were in the back of the truck, under a tarp, working with
their wrenches. Shaftoe glanced in their direction and saw gleaming parts
from the Vickers laid out on clean white fabric. Where the hell had these
guys gotten clean white fabric? They'd probably been saving it for today.
Why couldn't they have got the Vickers in good working order before? Because
they'd had orders to assemble it hastily, at the last possible minute.
Corporal Benjamin hesitated, one hand poised above his radio key.
"Sarge, are you sure they know we're here?"
Everyone turned to see how Shaftoe would respond to this mild
challenge. He had been slowly gathering a reputation as a man who needed
watching.
Shaftoe turned on his heel and strolled out into the middle of a
clearing a few yards away. Behind him, he could hear the other men of
Detachment 2702 jockeying for position in the doorway, trying to get a clear
view of him.
The Henschel was coming back for another pass, now so close to the
ground that you could probably throw a rock through its windshield.
Shaftoe unslung his tommy gun, pulled back the bolt, cradled it, swung
it up and around, and opened fire.
Now some might complain that the trench broom lacked penetrating power,
but he was positive he could see pieces of crap flying out of the Henschel's
motor. The Henschel went out of control almost immediately. It banked until
its wings were vertical, veered, banked some more until it was upside down,
shed what little altitude it had to begin with, and made an upside down
pancake landing in the olive trees no more than a hundred yards distant. It
did not immediately burst into flame: something of a letdown there.
There was perfect silence from the other men. The only sound was the
beepity beep of Corporal Benjamin, his question now answered, sending out
his little message. Shaftoe was able to follow the Morse code for once this
message was going out plaintext. "WE ARE DISCOVERED STOP EXECUTING PLAN
TORUS."
As their first contribution to Plan Torus, the other men climbed onto
the truck, which pulled out from its hidey hole in the barn and idled in the
trees nearby. When Benjamin was finished, he abandoned his radio and joined
them.
As his first task of Plan Torus, Shaftoe walked around the premises in
a neat crisscross pattern echoing that of the searching reconnaissance
planes. He was carrying an upside down gasoline can with no lid on it.
He left the can about one third full, standing upright in the middle of
the barn. He pulled the pin from a grenade, dropped it into the gasoline,
and ran out of the building. The truck was already pulling away when he
caught up with it and dove into the waiting arms of his unit, who pulled him
on board. He got himself situated in the back of the truck just in time to
see the building go up in a satisfying fireball.
"Okay," Shaftoe said to the men. "We got a few hours to kill."
All the men in the truck except for the SAS blokes working on the
Vickers looked at each other like did he really just say that?
"Uh, Sarge," one of them finally said, "could you explain that part
about killing some time?"
"The airplane's not going to be here for a while. Orders."
"Was there a problem or "
"Nope. Everything's going fine. Orders.
Beyond that the men didn't want to gripe, but a lot more looks were
exchanged across the bed of the truck. Finally, Enoch Root spoke up, "You
men are probably wondering why we couldn't kill time for a few hours first,
before alerting the Germans to our presence, and rendezvous with the plane
just in the nick of time."
"Yeah!" said a whole bunch of guys and blokes, vigorously nodding.
"That's a good question," said Enoch Root. He said it like he already
knew the answer, which made everyone in the truck want to slug him.
The Germans had deployed some ground units to secure the area's road
intersections. When Detachment 2702 arrived at the first crossroads, all of
the Germans were freshly dead, and all they had to do was to slow down
momentarily so that some Marine Raiders could run out of hiding and jump on
board.
The Germans at the second intersection had no idea what was going on.
This was obviously the result of some kind of internal Wehrmacht
communications fuckup, clearly recognizable as such even across cultural and
linguistic boundaries. Detachment 2702 were able to simply open fire from
underneath the tarp and tear them to pieces, or at least drive them into
hiding.
The next Germans they ran into weren't having any of it; they had
formed a roadblock out of a truck and two cars, and were lined up on the
other side of it, pointing weapons at them. All of their weapons looked to
be small arms. But by this time the Vickers had finally been put together,
calibrated, fine tuned, inspected, and loaded. The tarp came off Private
Mikulski, a surly, brooding two hundred and fifty pound Polish British SAS
man, commenced operations with the Vickers at about the same time that the
Germans did with their rifles.
Now when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high school, he'd been slotted
into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes. A certain
amount of his time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces
of wood or metal into smaller pieces. Numerous saws were available in the
shop for that purpose, some better than others. A sawing job that would be
just ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand saw would be accomplished
with a power saw. Likewise, certain cuts and materials would cause the
smaller power saws to overheat or seize up altogether and therefore called
for larger power saws. But even with the biggest power saw in the shop,
Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was imposing some kind of stress
on the machine. It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it
would vibrate, it would heat up, and if you pushed the material through too
fast it would threaten to jam. But then one summer he worked in a mill where
they had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its supply of blades, its spare parts,
maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room. It
was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure. It was the size of a
car. The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight spoked things that
looked to have been salvaged from steam locomotives. Its blades had to be
manufactured from long rolls of blade stuff by unreeling about half a mile
of toothed ribbon, cutting it off, and carefully welding the cut ends
together into a loop. When you hit the power switch, nothing would happen
for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out
of the earth, as if a freight train were approaching from far away, and
finally the blade would begin to move, building speed slowly but inexorably
until the teeth disappeared and it became a bolt of pure hellish energy
stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it. Anecdotes about
accidents involving the bandsaw were told in hushed voices and not usually
commingled with other industrial accident anecdotes. Anyway, the most
noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it
and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but it didn't seem to
notice that it was doing anything. It wasn't even aware that a human being
was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down.
Never heated up.
In Shaftoe's post high school experience he had found that guns had
much in common with saws. Guns could fire bullets all right, but they kicked
back and heated up, got dirty, and jammed eventually. They could fire
bullets in other words, but it was a big deal for them, it placed a certain
amount of stress on them, and they could not take that stress forever. But
the Vickers in the back of this truck was to other guns as the bandsaw was
to other saws. The Vickers was water cooled. It actually had a fucking
radiator on it. It had infrastructure, just like the bandsaw, and a whole
crew of technicians to fuss over it. But once the damn thing was up and
running, it could fire continuously for days as long as people kept
scurrying up to it with more belts of ammunition. After Private Mikulski
opened fire with the Vickers, some of the other Detachment 2702 men, eager
to pitch in and do their bit, took potshots at those Germans with their
rifles, but doing so made them feel so small and pathetic that they soon
gave up and just took cover in the ditch and lit up cigarettes and watched
the slow progress of the Vickers' bullet stream across the roadblock.
Mikulski hosed down all of the German vehicles for a while, yawing the
Vickers back and forth like a man playing a fire extinguisher against the
base of a fire. Then he picked out a few bits of the roadblock that he
suspected people might be standing behind and concentrated on them for a
while, boring tunnels through the wreckage of the vehicles until he could
see what was on the other side, sawing through their frames and breaking
them in half. He cut down half a dozen or so roadside trees behind which he
suspected Germans were hiding, and then mowed about half an acre of grass.
By this time it had become evident that some Germans had retreated
behind a gentle swell in the earth just off to one side of the road and were
taking potshots from there, so Mikulski swung the muzzle of the Vickers up
into the air at a steep angle and shot the bullet stream into the sky so
that the bullets plunged down like mortar shells on the other side of the
rise. It took him a while to get the angle just right, but then he patiently
distributed bullets over the entire field, like a man watering his lawn. One
of the SAS blokes actually did some calculations on his knee, figuring out
how long Mikulski should keep doing this to make sure that bullets were
distributed over the ground in question at the right density say, one per
square foot. When the territory had been properly sown with lead slugs,
Mikulski turned back to the roadblock and made sure that the truck pulled
across the pavement was in small enough pieces that it could be shoved out
of the way by hand.
Then he ceased firing at last. Shaftoe felt like he should make an
entry in a log book, the way ships' captains do when they pull a man of war
into port. When they drove past the wreckage, they slowed down for a bit to
gawk. The brittle grey iron of the German vehicles' engine blocks had
shattered like glass and you could look into the engines all neatly cross
sectioned and see the gleaming pistons and crankshafts exposed to the sun,
bleeding oil and coolant.
They passed through what was left of the roadblock and drove onwards
into a sparsely populated inland area that made excellent strafing territory
for the Luftwaffe. The first two fighters that came around were torn apart
in midair by Mikulski and his Vickers. The next pair managed to destroy the
truck, the big gun, and Private Mikulski in one pass. No one else was hurt;
they were all in the ditch, watching as Mikulski sat placidly behind the
controls of his weapon, playing chicken with two Messerschmidts and
eventually losing.
By now it was getting dark. The detachment began to make its way cross
country on foot, carrying Mikulski's remains on a stretcher. They ran into a
German patrol and fought it out with them; two of the SAS men were wounded,
and one of these had to be carried the rest of the way. Finally they reached
their rendezvous point, a wheat field where they laid down road flares to
outline a landing strip for a U.S. Army DC 3, which executed a deft landing,
took them all on board, and flew them to Malta without further incident.
And that was where they were introduced to Lieutenant Monkberg for the
first time.
No sooner had they been debriefed than they were on another submarine,
bound for parts unknown or at least unspecified. But when they turned in
their warm weather gear for ten pound oiled wool sweaters, they started to
get an idea. A few claustrophobic days later, they had been transferred onto
this freighter.
The vessel itself is such a pathetic heap that they have been amusing
themselves by substituting the word "shit" for "ship" in various nautical
expressions, e.g.: let's get this cabin shit shape! Where in hell does the
shit's master think he's taking us? And so on.
Now, in the shit's hold, an impassioned Bobby Shaftoe is doing his best
to create a ransacked effect. He strews rifles and tommy guns around the
deck. He opens boxes of .45 cartridges and flings them all over the place.
He finds some skis, too they'll be needing skis, right? He plants mines here
and there, just to throw a scare into whatever German happens along to
investigate this shitwreck. He opens crates of grenades. These do not look
very ransacked, sitting there full, so he pulls out dozens of them, carries
them abovedecks, and throws them overboard. He tosses out some skis also
maybe they will wash up on shore somewhere and contribute to the overall
sense of chaos that is so important to Lieutenant Monkberg.
He is on his way across the upper deck, carrying an armload of skis,
when something catches his eye out there in the fog. He flinches, of course.
Many strafings have turned Bobby Shaftoe into a big flincher. He flinches so
hard that he drops all of those skis on the deck and comes this close to
throwing himself down among them. But he holds his ground long enough to
focus in on this thing in the fog. It is directly in front of them, and
somewhat higher than the bridge of the freighter, and (unlike plunging Zeros
or Messerschmidts) it is not moving fast just hanging there. Like a cloud in
the sky. As if the fog had coagulated into a dense clump, like his mother's
mashed potatoes. It gets brighter and brighter as he stands there watching
it, and the edges get more and more sharply defined, and he starts to see
other stuff around it.
The other stuff is green.
Hey, wait a minute! He is looking at a green mountainside with a big
white snowfield in the middle of it.
"Heads up!" he screams, and throws himself down on the deck.
He is hoping to be surprised by the gradualness, the gentleness of
their collision with the earth's crust. He has in mind the kind of deal
where you run a little motorboat at a sandy beach, cut the motor and tilt it
out of the water at the last minute, and glide up gently onto the cushioning
sand.
This turns out to be a very poor analogy for what happens next. The
freighter is actually going a lot faster than your typical putt putt fishing
boat. And instead of gliding up onto a sandy beach, they have a nearly head
on collision with a vertical granite wall. There is a really impressive
noise, the prow of the vessel actually bends upwards, and suddenly, Bobby
Shaftoe finds that he is sliding on his belly across the ice glazed deck at
a high speed.
He is terrified, for a moment, that he's going to slide right off the
deck and go flying into the drink, but he manages to steer himself into an
anchor chain, which proves an effective stopper. Down below, he can hear
approximately ten thousand other small and large objects finding their own
obstacles to slam into.
There follows a brief and almost peaceful interlude of near total
silence. Then a hue and cry rises up from the extremely sparse crew of the
freighter: "ABANDON SHIT! ABANDON SHIT!"
The men of Detachment 2702 head for the lifeboats. Shaftoe knows that
they can take care of themselves, so he heads for the bridge, looking for
the few oddballs who always find a way to make things interesting:
Lieutenants Root and Monkberg, and Corporal Benjamin.
The first person he sees is the skipper, slumped in a chair, pouring
himself a drink and looking like a guy who just bled to death. This poor son
of a bitch is a Navy lifer who got detached from his regular unit solely for
the purpose of doing what he just did. It clearly does not sit well with
him.
"Nice job, sir!" Shaftoe says, not knowing what else to say. Then he
follows the sound of an argument into the signals cabin.
The dramatis personae are Corporal Benjamin, holding up a large Book,
in a pose that recalls an exasperated preacher sarcastically acquainting his
wayward parishioners with the unfamiliar sight of the Bible; Lieutenant
Monkberg, semireclined in a chair, his damaged Limb up on a table; and
Lieutenant Root, doing some needle and thread work on same.
"It is my sworn duty " Benjamin begins.
Monkberg interrupts him. "It is your sworn duty, Corporal, to follow my
orders!"
Root's medical supplies are scattered all over the deck because of the
collision. Shaftoe begins to pick them up and sort them out, keeping an
especially sharp eye out for any small bottles that may have gone astray.
Benjamin is very excited. Clearly, he is not getting through to
Monkberg, and so he opens up the hefty Book at random and holds it up above
his head. It contains line after line, column after column, of random
letters. "This," Benjamin says, "is the Allied MERCHANT SHIPPING CODE! A
copy of THIS BOOK is on EVERY SHIP of EVERY CONVOY in the North Atlantic! It
is used by those ships to BROADCAST THEIR POSITIONS! Do you UNDERSTAND what
is going to HAPPEN if THIS BOOK falls into the hands of THE GERMANS?!"
"I have given you my order," Lieutenant Monkberg says.
They go on in this vein for a couple of minutes as Shaftoe scours the
deck for medical debris. Finally he sees what he's looking for: it has
rolled beneath a storage cabinet and appears to be miraculously unscathed.
"Sergeant Shaftoe!" says Root peremptorily. It is the closest he has
ever come to sounding like a military officer. Shaftoe straightens up
reflexively.
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"Lieutenant Monkberg's dose of morphine may wear off pretty soon. I
need you to find my morphine bottle and bring it to me right away."
"Sir! Yes, sir!" Shaftoe is a Marine, which means he's really good at
following orders even when his body is telling him not to. Even so, his
fingers do not want to release their grip on the little bottle, and Root
almost has to pry it loose.
Benjamin and Monkberg, locked in their dispute, are oblivious to this
little exchange. "Lieutenant Root!" Benjamin says, his voice now high and
trembly.
"Yes, Corporal," Root says absent mindedly.
"I have reason to believe that Lieutenant Monkberg is a German spy and
that he should be relieved of his command of this mission and placed under
arrest!"
"You son of a bitch!" Monkberg shouts. As well he might, since Benjamin
has just accused him of treason, for which he could face a firing squad. But
Root has Monkberg's leg clamped in place up there on the table, and he can't
move.
Root is completely unruffled. He seems to welcome this unbelievably
serious accusation. It is an opportunity to talk about something with more
substance than, for example, finding ways to substitute the word "shit" for
"ship" in nautical expressions.
"I'll see you court martialed for this, you bastard!" Monkberg hollers.
"Corporal Benjamin, what grounds do you have for this accusation?" says
Enoch Root in a lullaby voice.
"The lieutenant has refused to allow me to destroy the codebooks, which
it is my sworn duty to do!" Benjamin shouts. He has completely lost his
temper.
"I am under very specific and clear orders from Colonel Chattan!"
Monkberg says, addressing Root. Shaftoe is startled by this. Monkberg seems
to be recognizing Root's authority in the matter. Or maybe he's scared, and
looking for an ally. The officers closing ranks against the enlisted men. As
usual.
"Do you have a written copy of those orders I could examine?" Root
says.
"I don't think it's appropriate for us to be having this discussion
here and now," Monkberg says, still pleading and defensive.
"How would you suggest that we handle it?" Root says, drawing a length
of silk through Monkberg's numbed flesh. "We are aground. The Germans will
be here soon. We either leave the code books or we don't. We have to decide
now."
Monkberg goes limp and passive in his chair.
"Can you show me written orders?" Root asks.
"No. They were given verbally," Monkberg says.
"And did these orders specifically mention the code books?" Root asks.
"They did," Monkberg says, as if he's a witness in a courtroom.
"And did these orders state that the code books were to be allowed to
fall into the hands of the Germans?"
"They did."
There is silence for a moment as Root ties off a suture and begins
another one. Then he says, "A skeptic, such as Corporal Benjamin, might
think that this business of the code books is an invention of yours."
"If I falsified my own orders," Monkberg says, "I could be shot."
"Only if you, and some witnesses to the event, all made their way back
to friendly territory, and compared notes with Colonel Chattan," says Enoch
Root, coolly and patiently.
"What the fuck is going on!?" says one of the SAS blokes, bursting in
through a hatch down below and charging up the gangway. "We're all waiting
in the fucking lifeboats!" He bursts into the room, his face red with cold
and anxiety, and looks around wildly.
"Fuck off," Shaftoe says.
The SAS bloke pulls up short. "Okay, Sarge!"
"Go down and tell the men in the boats to fuck off too," Shaftoe says.
"Right away, Sarge!" the SAS man says, and makes himself scarce. "As those
anxious men in the lifeboats will attest," Enoch Root continues, "the
likelihood of you and several witnesses making it back to friendly territory
is diminishing by the minute. And the fact that you just happened to suffer
a grievous self inflicted leg wound, just a few minutes ago, complicates our
escape tremendously. Either we will all be captured together, or else you
will volunteer to be left behind and captured. Either way, you are saved
assuming that you are a German spy from the court martial and the firing
squad."
Monkberg can't believe his ears. "But but it was an accident,
Lieutenant Root! I hit myself in the leg with a fucking ax you don't think I
did that deliberately!?"
"It is very difficult for us to know," Root says regretfully.
"Why don't we just destroy the code books? It's the safest thing to
do," Benjamin says. "I'd just be following a standing order nothing wrong
with that. No court martial there."
"But that would ruin the mission!" Monkberg says.
Root thinks this one over for a moment. "Has anyone ever died," he
says, "because the enemy stole one of our secret codes and read our
messages?"
"Absolutely," Shaftoe says.
"Has anyone on our side ever died," Root continues, "because the enemy
didn't have one of our secret codes?"
This is quite a poser. Corporate Benjamin ma