Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Comment: publishers@cox.net

Go to Chapter:  
 1    2     3     4     5     6     7     8     9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25  
26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44  

Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

37.

July 15, 1945

Tim burst into the apartment and knew immediately something was wrong.

There was an emptiness, a coldness, that had not been here before.

He listened for a moment. His shadow fell across the fine wooden floor, head bowed, as he listened to a distant piano music whose plaintive notes fell, one by one, like raindrops into the moonlight that played on the boards. “Meg?” He knew she was gone, but he rushed to her room anyway. He noted the drawers hanging partially open, half empty. He noted that her suitcases were gone, her perfume table half empty. The place still smelled faintly of her—the Chanel No. 19, the Shalimar, the Matchabelli—but it was a faint essence, as if she’d gone weeks or even months ago.

He looked in the bathroom, the living room, everywhere, and her effects were gone. She must have left in a hurry, perhaps under duress, for she’d taken only the essentials. His book was gone, as was Corie’s favorite doll. Another shadow fell across the doorway. Mutsev/Malone/Jaguar, the man of a thousand identities? No—Ivor Crane. “Looking for someone, Nordhall?”

“Yes.”

“She’s gone, Tim.” Crane lit a cigarette without effort despite the prosthesis, ever so carefully, snapping the lid on the flat silver case shut and slipped it in a pocket. He clicked the Zippo open so a blue ethanous flame licked around the tip of his cigarette. He clicking the lighter shut and let it sink beneath the waves of his pale flannel pocket. He exhaled a long grayish flume that curled in midair and dissipated in wan overhead light.

“I know,” Tim said feeling beaten. Without her, it seemed of little use to go on. He stood with his head lowered and his fists balled at his sides.

“The FBI will be coming for you now.”

“I don’t care.”

“Oh, but there is still Corie. You should come with me. I have a safe place for you.”

“Let me get a few things.” He picked out his kit bag, the small one that resembled a bowling ball bag. He threw his shaving gear, some underwear, a few essentials in it. He took her smallest perfume bottle for the memory, the Shalimar that had been nearly empty for so long it seemed bone dry, but it still smelled of her. And there was a little keepsake of Corie, a tiny silver spoon she’d had as a baby; he took that too.

“Hurry,” Crane said.

Tim paused in the doorway, taking a last look. He knew this was a place he could never return to. Even if he spent his last years building clocks in a drafty warehouse down in New Haven Harbor near the Quinnipiac Pier, that would be less painful than ever facing this again.

He switched off the light and pulled the door shut. The walk down the stairs took forever, it seemed, and like life itself was over before he’d begun to fully be aware of its happening.

They walked down together, through the courtyard that smelled of jasmin, and to his car parked at the curb with an official U.S. Army tag in the window so no cop would think to ticket him.

They drove down the cobblestone streets in silence, slipping a little on the damp trolley rails. Crane lit another cigarette. He chewed gum at the same time, and slouched lazily in his seat, American style, the Yank casual style that the world loved so much now, which said goodbye to all that seriousness that had just cost a hundred million innocent lives in two world wars caused by megalomaniacs of the meaningless past.

Soon they arrived in the harbor, at a checkpoint outside a tall wire fence guarded by MPs with rifles and dogs. It was foggy, and a slight drizzle moved in. He could hear the stealthy, cat-like rattle of tiny drops on the glass and the roof as he got out. Crane threw his cigarette aside and came around the car. He stood looking at Tim, who held his lapels together and stood looking back. Crane extended his good hand. “Goodbye, Tim. Good luck.”

Tim reached out and shook the other man’s surprisingly strong, dry grip. “Thanks. Who knows—we might even bump into each other some day.”

Crane smiled thinly. “I doubt it, Tim. But it’s been swell.” He looked up at the ship’s huge black steel rear. Shadows and light played under the snappy brim of his hat. “The U.S.S. Indianapolis, Tim. She’s going to carry the fissionable material to an island not far from Japan. Technicians will put together those two bombs. A uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb.”

They heard a faint, distant droning sound in the sky. Both men listened. Crane said: “Some of the material is going by plane.” Tim and Ivor Crane looked up as a dark shadow passed noisily through a bright area where the moon poked through between huge dark clouds. “That will be Corie now in her B-29, flying the bullet that you two saved from the Russians in Montana. She’ll be waiting for you when you arrive in Tinian.” He patted his hand against the black hull, which made a bottle-like twanging sound. “This is the only place we can hide you, Tim. You’ll be safe here. This is the only place where the people who took Meg away won’t be able to reach you.”

Tim nodded and stooped to pick up his bag. “So long, then.”

Crane waved, and Tim walked away into the fog.

He could smell the seaweed, the stink of low tide, could hear the water and trash and seaweed slapping against the cruiser’s thick stern keel section as he crossed the gangway. A sailor standing guard with a loaded M-1 saluted. Tim waved his I.D. card and stepped onto the deck.

U.S.S. Indianapolis made record time to Tinian, 5,000 miles in 10 days. Tim spent the time sitting in his cabin, reading, smoking, drinking coffee, pacing, thinking of Meg and Corie. Once or twice a day, he ventured outside, squinting like a mole, walking up and down on the steel decks for a little R&R. Then quickly he’d go back down below where it was warm like in a womb, and he’d read and smoke and pace some more.

Captain McVay came down to see him several times. McVay was pleased with himself for the record speed and the good morale on the ship. The war was winding down, and both Tim and McVay understood the terrifying cargo the ship carried. Good thing it was in the right hands.

Wind tousled McVay’s graying hair as they stood side by side on the bridge. “You are welcome to stay on Tinian.”

“No thanks,” Tim said. “The war will be over soon. I want to go home.”

“Do you have someone waiting for you at home?”

“Maybe. I’ll go home and see. One woman, anyway. There were two.”

“Every sailor worth his sea-salt has at least two.” McVay grinned knowingly, knowing nothing. “Does that special one love you?”

No point explaining the incomprehensible. “Yes.”

“You love her?”

“Yes.”

“Then that should work out just fine.” Faintly puzzled, McVay slapped him lightly on the back. “Sounds like you’d prefer two or three of them.”

“No,” Tim said softly, “that can only happen once in a lifetime.”

While the stevedores and cargo cranes worked through the night to unload the cores for Little Boy (uranium bomb, headed for Hiroshima) and Fat Man (plutonium bomb, headed for Nagasaki), a dark shadow played in the waters around the Marianas.

She was the I-58, a Japanese submarine.

Indianapolis, now serving as a troop ship carrying over 1400 men, many of them wounded, crossed in front of her bow tubes two days out of Tinian. I-58 released her final salvo of the war. The first torpedo blew most of her bow off, severing her radio mast and preventing any more transmissions.

She did get off part of one brief message, a call for distress.

Naval headquarters at Pearl Harbor and other locations thought it was a Japanese hoax and refused to send planes or ships to investigate. Three hundred men went down with the ship immediately. Another 900 bobbed in the sea for over five days. They were hungry, harassed by sharks. The wounded went down first, then the healthier men. Sharks would circle in and pull a man down by his legs from the midst of his mates.

At one time, the men thought they heard the droning of a circling aircraft, but it never landed. Some swore they heard its engine sputtering far away as it flew off. Others said it was merely in illusion. One of many illusions. Some sailors went mad with thirst and drink sea water, which made them die choking in an agonizing death under the blistering sun by day or the cold silver moon by night. Others tried to bite open the necks of living shipmates clinging to flotsam with them, to drink their blood.

After nearly a week, Navy carrier planes spotted the drifting flotsam and survivors. A rescue mission got underway, but only 316 men were pulled from the water alive. Tim Nordhall was not among them.