Through Waters Deep Page 12

  Down on the main deck, two guns on the bow and two on the stern craned their barrels skyward. Rings of orange fire, belches of gray smoke, a thunderous noise, and the deck beneath Jim’s feet heaved. Better than the Fourth of July.

  Except now he didn’t have Mary Stirling next to him in a red dress, her eyes lit up by the fireworks over the Charles River, her narrow waist begging for his arm to circle it. He’d come close. His heart keeping tempo with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, Jim had placed his hand on the small of Mary’s back to guide her through the crowd at the Hatch Shell. But then he’d let go, unsure whether embracing her would be suave or foolish or welcome.

  He shook his head and counted the eight seconds it should take the target projectile to reach the barge. Maybe Dan was right about women distracting an officer from his work.

  Through the slewing sight, he followed four orange tracers streaming behind the projectiles and converging on the barge. Spouts of water rose, about one hundred yards short.

  “Up one-double-oh, bearing true.” Jim wiped sweat from his upper lip. Firing a naval gun required skill. Both the destroyer and its target could change location, speed, and direction—and the motion of the sea constantly altered the angle of the guns. The Mark 37 gun director had a mechanical computer and a stable element to compensate for all the variables, but gunnery remained as much an art as a science.

  “Mr. Avery, we have a new solution,” Reinhardt said on the intercom.

  “Thank you.” Jim eyed that old barge, determined to land a sand-filled projectile right on top. “Commence firing.”

  The guns fired their shots.

  Jim planted his hand on the steel wall of the enclosure so he wouldn’t lose his balance, and then he trained his sight on the target and counted off the seconds. Plumes of water, just aft of the barge, about five degrees.

  He made a face. “Right zero-five.” In today’s drill, the Atwood maintained the same speed and bearing, the target was stationary, and the weather was sunny and mild. They wouldn’t have conditions like that in battle.

  And battle loomed nearer each day. Only a week earlier, US Marines had occupied Iceland, relieving the British troops guarding the strategically vital island from German invasion, and the US Navy had taken joint responsibility with the Royal Canadian Navy in escorting convoys from Canada to Iceland.

  The veil of neutrality was fraying.

  Jim wiped sweat from under his eyes. The three portholes and three overhead hatches didn’t admit much of a breeze, and the sun beat on the metal enclosure.

  Through his headphones, he could hear Reinhardt barking at the computer operators in the plotting room. Poor fellows. Just doing their jobs as best they could.

  Jim spread an encouraging smile around the cramped space. “Come on, men. Let’s sink that old barge. I know we can do it.”

  The crew nodded, engrossed in their jobs. These men had trained hard in this technical work and didn’t need pats on the back. They also didn’t need Reinhardt’s verbal haranguing. Hadn’t Reinhardt learned anything from Nehemiah? The importance of everyone working together, side by side, the leaders acknowledging everyone who helped, from the greatest to the least?

  “Do we have a new solution?” Jim said.

  “Yes, Mr. Avery.”

  Jim braced himself. “Commence firing.”

  Another set of booms and rumbles and shakes. Eight seconds ticked by. No plume of water, but the barge rocked. “I think we hit it.”

  “Yes, sir. We did.” The range-finder operator lifted his head and grinned. A red rim circled his eyes from the rubber gasket of the eyepiece.

  Jim put on his best Western accent. “Good shootin’, cowboy.”

  One hit out of three. Reinhardt had done worse. He’d done better too, but he’d done worse.

  “Okay, men. Let’s clean up shop and get some fresh air.”

  The second shakedown cruise seemed to be going well. The constant drills annoyed some of the men, but most saw the worth. They were faster, smoother, and better coordinated. A few more weeks of this, and they should be ready for any crisis.

  Then back to Boston. Jim stuck his face in the square porthole and inhaled fresh cool air. Arch had invited Gloria, Jim, and Mary for a sailing weekend at his parents’ seaside Connecticut estate. Partly for fun, and partly to test Gloria again. How she reacted to the mansion, the yacht, and the lush grounds on her return visit would determine the fate of their relationship.

  Poor girl didn’t stand a chance. Jim saw the way she ogled the wares in the windows of Boston’s finest shops.

  Not Mary. She’d exclaimed over how little she spent on her new dress. She’d be satisfied with a modest income. Good. Unlike Arch, Jim wouldn’t inherit wealth.

  Jim pulled off his headphones and followed the crew out the narrow doorway and down the ladder to the bridge.

  “Not bad for your first time, Mr. Avery.” Durant clasped his hands behind his back.

  “Thank you, sir.” Jim squared his cover back on his head. “That was fun.”

  “Glad to see you can take Reinhardt’s place if he’s officer of the deck.”

  Or if Reinhardt became a battle casualty. Every man needed to know more than one job in case of emergency. “Will I get another chance to practice, sir?”

  “We’ll see. We don’t have a lot of target projectiles, but we plan to use them all before we return to Boston.”

  “Good.” They’d have to make more room for live ammunition anyway. Next time they put out to sea, they’d escort a convoy across the North Atlantic, protecting merchant ships and scouting for U-boats.

  Jim headed down to the wardroom to complete his paperwork. Lord, make me ready.

  18

  Boston

  Friday, August 8, 1941

  If only she could catch a breeze. Mary tipped up her face into the muggy air but found no relief. After she fanned herself with her notebook, she crossed a catwalk and stepped down to the main deck of a destroyer under construction.

  A giant crane lowered a section of the superstructure into position as men guided it with ropes.

  Mary kept her distance and made her way toward the stern of the ship, where she thought she’d spied Frank Fiske.

  “Joe DiMaggio, he’s my man,” said a worker—Al Klingman—coiling a cable around his bent arm. “Fifty-six-game hitting streak. Beat that.”

  Ira Kaplan socked Klingman on the shoulder. “Ah, go back to Brooklyn where you belong, old man. You’re in Boston now, and Lefty Grove got his three-hundredth win.”

  Morton Anders swept up a pile of metal shavings. “And Ted Williams is batting over .400. I’d put my money on him over DiMaggio any day.”

  Mary shaded her eyes from the sunshine and gazed around the deck.

  “Hiya, Miss Stirling,” Kaplan said. “Looking for Fiske?”

  “I am. Have you—” Mary gasped. A green-and-yellow bruise surrounded Ira Kaplan’s eye, and a bandage covered his chin. “My goodness. What happened?”

  The friendly smile fled, and his gaze dropped to the side. “Got jumped last weekend by some thugs in brown shirts.”

  Anders cussed, then sent Mary an apologetic look and ran his hand into blond curls at the nape of his neck. “Bunch of good-for-nothing German-American Bund boys.”

  Mary’s stomach twisted. “Oh dear. I’m so sorry.”

  “They beat up this young man. Today’s his first day back, been out all week.” Klingman set a protective hand on Kaplan’s shoulder. “Want to know what else they did?”

  Kaplan shrugged off the older man’s grip. “Come on. That’s enough.”

  “No. People need to know.” Under wiry dark brows, Klingman’s brown eyes pierced more than any tool on the deck.

  “What happened?” Mary asked.

  Anders’s round face turned stormy. “I’ll tell you. Those swine left him for dead and threw pamphlets on top of him. Pamphlets about how America should support Germany. How the Jews are ripping apart our country, driving us
to war. How Christians should unite—”

  “Enough.” Kaplan stuck out one hand and walked away.

  Anders called after him. “I go to mass every Sunday, and I think those pamphlets are a bunch of stinking lies.”

  Mary pressed her free hand to her roiling stomach. How could some Christians forget their own Savior was Jewish? “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah?” Kaplan wheeled around. “I am too. Sorry the FBI isn’t doing its job. Why haven’t they arrested number thirty-four?”

  “Thirty-four?” Mary asked.

  “Heinrich Bauer.” He gestured with his thumb toward the stern, where the welder worked. “The FBI arrested thirty-three Nazi spies in the Duquesne Ring. They missed one.”

  Mary stared into Kaplan’s eyes, one wide, one swollen half shut. “You—you have proof?”

  “Proof? That’s what the FBI wants.” He pointed to his bandaged chin. “How much more proof do you need?”

  Breath raced into Mary’s lungs, pungent with the smell of hot metal. “He was one of the thugs?”

  “No, but he was behind it. I’m sure of it.”

  Al Klingman crossed arms thickened by decades of manual labor. “Looks like those spies, don’t he? Did you see that two-page spread in Life magazine with those pictures? All just run-of-the-mill types, nothing special. Not like those spies you see in the movies.”

  “I suppose it’s best for a spy to blend in and not be noticed.” That was what Mary depended on.

  Anders tapped his temple. “Yeah, well, we notice Bauer. Keep our eyes on him. Even if Fiske did divide us into the sheep and the goats.”

  Mary allowed a small smile. Last week, the leadingman had divided his crew into isolationists and interventionists, assigning them to separate areas to increase productivity. “Speaking of Mr. Fiske . . .”

  “Oh yeah.” Kaplan’s wide grin reappeared. “Here we are distracting you from your work. He’s over there.” He pointed to the stern.

  There he was, not far from where Mr. Bauer talked to another workman.

  “Thank you, Mr. Kaplan. I’m glad you’re feeling better.” Mary headed aft, smiling to herself that she was thinking in nautical terms.

  Mr. Bauer took an envelope from the workman, and the other man departed. Bauer opened the envelope, read the contents, glared in the workman’s direction, crumpled up the paper, flung it overboard, and strode away.

  The wind tossed the paper back onto the deck behind him, and Mary rushed to pick it up. She smoothed it open.

  Bauer how is yore friend Adolph? Be careful Natsi or something will happen to you. Think about Magda she sure is prety and yore babys to.

  Oh no. Mary dashed to the welder and tapped him on the shoulder. “Mr. Bauer!”

  “Ja? Yes?” He faced her, looked down to the note in her hand, and his long face went slack.

  “How many of these have you received? Have you shown the FBI?”

  His jaw shifted from side to side, and he stared at the note, his blue eyes awash with indecipherable emotions. “The FBI is police, ja? I do not trust them.”

  “But they want to help. They want the truth.”

  “They want—” His features turned to ice. He snatched the note from Mary’s hand and crammed it into his pants pocket. “I want to work. I want to feed my family. Let me be.”

  Her heart kept pace with the riveting gun to her right, and she scribbled down the contents of the threatening note in her book. Regardless of what Bauer said, the FBI needed to know. Why wouldn’t Bauer tell anyone? Did his reticence mean noble restraint—or concealment of guilt? If he was innocent, silence only put him in more danger. Didn’t he realize that?

  Mary looked up. Where had Mr. Fiske gone to now?

  There he was, striding along the port side of the ship.

  Mary passed three men installing a watertight door on the aft superstructure, all isolationists.

  George O’Donnell talked to them as they worked, but why was he down on the docks? Didn’t the draftsman belong in the drafting room . . . drafting? Mary slowed her pace and angled her path to skirt past the group, her notebook and pen poised.

  “Roosevelt lied to our boys.” O’Donnell stuffed idle hands in his trouser pockets. “He promised if they were drafted, they’d only serve one year.”

  Ralph Tucker paused in his work and glanced up at O’Donnell. “You heard the Senate passed the law extending the draft. The House had better shoot it down.”

  “It’ll be close, I heard.” Curly Mulligan adjusted his cap over his namesake hair. “Let’s hope common sense wins out.”

  “Common sense?” O’Donnell jabbed one finger in the sky. “How can we have common sense in America? Our president’s the playground bully, picking fights with the Germans, and now the Japanese. Freezing their assets? Cutting off their supply of oil? He’s asking for it, but we’re the ones who have to pay.”

  Mary took notes as she passed, but their comments on the news were predictable and didn’t shed any light on the sabotage.

  Now where had Mr. Fiske gone? She scanned the busy deck and stepped over an electrical cable. The leadingman stood by one of the ship’s funnels, writing on a clipboard.

  Mary made her way over, ignoring further conversations. Mr. Pennington said she could only sleuth if it didn’t interfere with her work responsibilities, and reports did need to be delivered and collected.

  Frank Fiske spotted Mary, smiled, and waved her over. “Good morning.”

  “Yes, if a bit warm.” She fanned herself, a futile gesture in such heat and humidity, even in her light blue, short-sleeved linen suit. If only ladies didn’t need to wear slips and girdles and stockings that made them sweat in a most unladylike fashion.

  She exchanged paperwork with Mr. Fiske. “How’s the separation of the sheep and the goats working?”

  He laughed. “I heard that’s what they’re calling it. They disagree on who’s who.”

  Mary smiled. They disagreed on almost everything. “Is it helping?”

  “Fewer fights, that’s for sure, but now they spend too much time gabbing, getting each other riled up.”

  Speaking of getting the men riled up . . . “Do you know why Mr. O’Donnell’s here?”

  Fiske squeezed his eyes shut and groaned. “He’s still here? I’ll have to talk to him. One of my oldest friends, but he’s distracting my men and spreading rumors. What’s he up to?”

  Revealing how closely she listened didn’t seem wise. “I think they were talking about the bill to extend the draft.”

  Eyebrows bunched together over his deep-set eyes. “I don’t blame them. It’s a betrayal.”

  Mary gave him a compassionate look. “Your son would be affected?”

  “He’s the only family I have.” His mouth squirmed. “My parents gone. My wife gone. He’s all I have.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He’s supposed to be out in November. That was the deal. But now . . .”

  “I know.” If the country went to war while his son was still enlisted, he’d be committed for the duration of the conflict.

  Fiske’s expression shifted, and he glanced aft toward O’Donnell and his pals. “I have bigger problems around here than O’Donnell.”

  “Mr. Bauer?”

  He barked out a short laugh. “You sound like the FBI. They won’t leave the man alone, especially since a section he worked on failed earlier this week, looked suspicious.”

  “Oh dear.”

  Fiske flapped his broad hand. “It’s not that simple. I inspected his work the day before. It passed. Then the next day it failed when we fitted it to the next section.”

  Mary’s mind swam. “Do you think he—someone—altered it after the inspection?”

  “I know someone did. And I know who. Found a pair of gloves right there, labeled with a name.”

  “Gloves?” A clue Nancy Drew would love. “Whose?”

  “A man who keeps misplacing his gloves. A man whose mother sewed his name inside.” Fiske leaned clo
ser. “Ira Kaplan.”

  “Oh dear.” Mary glanced over to the tall young man, hard at work with his friends. “Did you tell Agent Sheffield?”

  “He wasn’t impressed. Kaplan did work in that area.”

  Mary’s heart sank. “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “Me too. He’s a good kid, a hard worker. I like the boy, I do, but he and his buddies want us in that war. They don’t care who gets hurt.”

  “Does Mr. Pennington know?”

  “All the details are in the report I gave you.”

  “Thanks.” She headed for the catwalk.

  Heinrich Bauer walked in the same direction, about ten feet in front of her.

  “Hey! Hey, Kraut!”

  Bauer stiffened and stopped, then plowed forward.

  “I’m talking to you.” Ira Kaplan marched over, arms swinging high. “Nazi.”

  Mary hung back, pulled out her notebook, and watched wide-eyed.

  “I am not,” Bauer said.

  “Sure you are. You’re a stinking Nazi.”

  “You know nothing.” His voice was hard and stiff.

  “I know one thing. You stole my gloves.” Kaplan shoved him.

  Mary sucked in a breath. A crowd formed, sheep on one side, goats on the other. Wouldn’t anyone break this up? Where was Mr. Fiske?

  Bauer stumbled, then straightened. “I am not a thief.”

  “You’re a thief and a saboteur, and now you’re trying to frame me.” Panic chased around the edges of Kaplan’s voice. “The FBI’s questioning me, but I know what you did. You stole my gloves, altered your work after Fiske’s inspection, then—”

  “I did not. You know nothing.” Bauer stared him down, then turned for the catwalk.

  “Thief, saboteur, coward!” Kaplan rushed at him, and the men erupted in shouts, urging them on.

  Why wouldn’t anyone help? Mary searched the crowd, pushed her way toward where she’d last seen the leadingman. “Mr. Fiske!”

  He was already on his way, elbowing workmen aside. “Break it up!” He shoved Bauer and Kaplan apart like Moses parting the Red Sea. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”