Thorne heard the approach of the Austin sedan as it drove along the track behind him and came to a halt beside the empty truck. He hurriedly hid the hip flask within the large pockets of his RAF greatcoat as Eileen stepped from the car and began to make her way down the shallow slope toward the pillbox. His uneasiness over her unexpected presence was as clearly visible as the uncomfortable expression on Eileen’s face as Thorne unsuccessfully attempted to hide his misgivings in a thin and insincere smile.
“Enjoying the view?” She ventured hopefully, her own emotions and nerves whirling as she tried to decide on the best way to reveal what was on her mind.
“Something like that,” he replied dully, making no effort to stand as he returned his gaze to the dark waters and gusts of cold wind whipped past them both, whistling about the base of the tower.
“It was the ‘anniversary’ of VJ day the other day,” Thorne spoke softly, almost reverently, as he attempted to control the course of any conversation. “It hasn’t even happened yet…” She crouched down beside him and waited for him to continue. “August 15th… the day of unconditional Japanese surrender… with Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few days before that. All that’s supposed to be five years from now, and odds are it won’t ever happen.”
“Aye,” Donelson agreed, noting the lost tone in his voice. “It’s not an easy thing to come to term with, I’ll grant ye that!”
“We buried men whose families I can never write to: families that in some cases haven’t even been born yet. Every day it’s getting harder to believe we’ve ever lived anything else but ‘here’ and ‘now’.”
“The rest of us have been lucky, I guess,” Eileen mused thoughtfully, nerves fraying further as she sought some way to broach the subject of her visit. “Having plenty to do has made it easier to ignore what’s happening in the ‘big picture’ and concentrate on the day to day stuff… how about you?”
Thorne gave a non-committal shrug. “I could be more active in a physical sense I guess, but being CO means I can’t really avoid having to look at the ‘big picture’.”
She took a deep breath and plunged on in. “Nothing bothering you then, other than the problems at hand?” The question blindsided Thorne in spite of his nerves, and he glanced sharply in her direction, internal defences that until that point had been idling in neutral at the back of his mind suddenly alert and at the forefront of his consciousness.
“Should there be any other problems?” He snapped back curtly, turning his gaze away. “What are you implying?”
“There’ve been discrepancies in the alcohol stocks at the Hindsight Officers’ Mess… particularly the rum: someone’s been drinking an awful lot of it.”
“Really…?” Thorne was almost snarling now. “I wouldn’t know anything about that…”
“Maybe,” Eileen shot back. “But if that’s the case, why can’t you look me in the eyes?”
“Don’t take that tone with me, commander!” Thorne stared her square in the face then as he rose to his feet in an aggressive stance, the words not quite a shout, but close enough.
“Then don’t pull rank on me, mister!” Eileen countered evenly as she stood fully also, lowering the volume of the discussion once more, although there was no lack of anger in her words. “We’ve known each other far too fuckin’ long for you to get away with that!”
“I just said I don’t know what you’re talking about…”
“And I don’t fuckin’ believe you!” Donelson snapped back, letting more of her anger loose. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Max, but if there’s a problem, you need to talk to someone about it. The morning of that first air raid, you barely got that bloody Lightning off the ground without wrecking it! Yesterday you wouldn’t even fly the fuckin’ thing, and pushed Trumbull into it instead! He did a fine job, but he can’t fly that jet like you could have. We need you, Max, but we need you sober and with your shit together!”
“Well thank you for the impromptu therapy session…!” He snarled back, turning at the last remark and stalking off in a rage. “Do you take AMEX, or shall I leave a cheque at reception?” Pure sarcasm dripped from his words, born of desperation.
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Max, cut it out!” Donelson was now shouting almost as loudly as he. “It’s me you’re talking to, not some UN-appointed shrink you can bullshit! I know you! This shit we’ve all been dealing with since we arrived is bad enough without throwing the added pressure of command on you, and all the pain you brought back with you! There’s nothing wrong with grief, but you’ve got to work through it, not bottle it up! Three years is too long to tear yourself apart over something that wasn’t your bloody fault!”
“What would you know about it?” Thorne demanded in fury, tears welling in his eyes as he whirled on her once more and forced her to take a step backward. She’d found the raw, open wound within his mind and he reacted in a completely instinctive manner: with thoughtless retaliation. “What the fuck would you know about it? Twelve God-Damned years married to the fucking navy! What human being did you ever care enough about to be afraid of losing them?” He regretted the words the moment he’d said them… the moment he saw the reaction in Donelson’s face. The tears she’d been holding back began to pour down her cheeks as she stood stock still, momentarily stunned.
“You need to ask me that…?” Eileen hissed at him, acid rising harshly in her voice. “You, of all people…?” The sharpness of the tone plunged a knife through his very core. “I lost the only man I ever cared about years ago, and the only reason I’m even standing here is because I’m not prepared tae fuckin’ go through that again!” She whirled as she spoke those words and strode off the way she’d come, back toward the tower and her car.
“Eileen, wait… please…” He was now completely and utterly deflated and honestly meant to apologise, but she ignored him as she continued up the slope. “Eileen!” He repeated, louder and more forcefully, but again she ignored him. “Fuck!” He added under his breath, and he took off in hot pursuit, the only anger left in him now focussed on his own stupidity.
Involved in reorganising the radar detection systems for Hindsight all day, Alec Trumbull and Evan Lloyd were only just finishing up their work on activating the last of those units: all four of the BRTs had been relocated to render useless any information Klein had passed on to the Wehrmacht regarding their positions. It’d been hard work carting their equipment out of the back of their truck and up to the roof of the Hackness Martello Tower, and it had taken the better part of two hours to set up the unit and its diesel generator, and get it connected to their reinstalled wireless network.
Trumbull enjoyed working with Corporal Lloyd, and he found the man to be an almost inexhaustible source of historical information. The young Australian loved to speak on what he knew of his world’s history, and Trumbull was hungry for as much information as he could accumulate on the world that Hindsight had left behind… history that came from personal perspectives as well the information held on Hindsight’s storage discs and computer hard drives. He very much wanted to understand the motives and ideas of the people he now worked alongside, something that wasn’t easy considering the seventy intervening years of between his world and the one they’d come from.