He exaggerated, but not by much. C-47s flying off Tern Island delivered some supplies to Midway by airdrop. More, though, came by sea. A freighter would fill up a landing craft with food and fuel and whatever else the leathernecks needed. The crew would hop into a launch and go back to the mother ship. A motorboat would bring a replacement crew out from the island to bring in the landing craft. The scheme worked, but more and more big square boats crowded the beach.
“We can afford that,” the guy in the white coat said. “As far as the whole war goes, it’s just pocket change.”
“Yeah, that’s what they treat us like, sure as hell,” Pete said. “Pennies, maybe nickels if we’re lucky. Not dimes. Dimes are worth a little something.”
The doctor shrugged and walked away. If being marooned here bothered him, he didn’t show it. Maybe he couldn’t get it up. Maybe he played with himself all the time. Or maybe he was a fairy, and spending months on an island with a bunch of Marines was hog heaven for him.
Pete had no way of knowing about that. All he knew was how much he wanted to get back to Honolulu and Hotel Street. Any place with no booze and no babes wasn’t worth living in. None of the landing craft had brought in hooch yet, not even the horrible unofficial stuff that got cooked up on every warship ever launched. Life wasn’t fair, dammit.
It was warm. It was a little humid. Every so often, it rained for a while. Pete didn’t need long to get bored. He smoked like a chimney-they did have enough sense to send plenty of coffin nails. He fished in the lagoon and on the beach. What he caught tasted better than the rations they brought in.
He played poker. Everybody played poker except for the guys who shot dice and the handful of eggheads who played bridge instead. The eggheads insisted bridge stayed interesting even when you didn’t bet on it (though they did). Pete thought playing cards where no money changed hands was about as much fun as kissing your mom.
He won a little more than he lost. He was no human slide rule, able to figure odds like an insurance salesman. But he’d played a lot. He knew good hands, not-so-good hands, and hands that looked good but would let you down like a cheating cocktail waitress. And, most important of all, he knew how to lie with a straight face.
“Fuck you, McGill,” another leatherneck grumbled when Pete raked in a pot. “I can’t tell when you’re bluffing, and I’m sick of getting my ass burned on account of it.”
“Aw, gee, Edgar, you say the sweetest things,” Pete lisped in shrill falsetto. He batted his eyelashes at his victim. That broke up the whole table (though actually they were sitting on a couple of blankets). For some reason, nothing on God’s green earth seemed funnier than an unshaven, smelly Marine mincing like a fruit.
Even Edgar laughed, though he looked pained when he did it. “Whose deal is it, anyway?” he asked, trying to shift attention away from himself and Pete.
The game went on. Pete didn’t win all the time-nowhere close. The cards wouldn’t let you. The trick was to win as big as you could when you won and not to throw away too much when you lost. And Edgar might have been disgusted, but Pete disguised the truth when he delivered it fairy-style. If Edgar admitted he couldn’t read Pete, that gave Pete a serious edge.
Not everybody came equipped with a poker face. Pete had played against one guy whose eyebrows jumped every time he got a hand worth betting. The guy didn’t know he was doing it, which didn’t help him. Good cards made another fellow turn pink, as if he’d got caught peeking down a girl’s blouse. Pete didn’t think even a doctor could keep anyone from blushing. But that fellow’s color changes cost him money.
You studied the people you played against. You tried not to show you were doing it, but you did. You knew they were casing you, too, casing you like a bank vault. You gave away as little as you could by the way you acted and by the way you played.
If you were a sucker, if you bled money the way a bayoneted Jap gushed blood, the smartest thing you could do was get the hell out of the game. Some guys had the sense to see that. They threw a baseball around or read magazines. Others wondered where this month’s pay had disappeared to, and last month’s, and next month’s, too.
No Japanese planes bombed them. Bettys from Wake Island could have reached them, but the slanties didn’t bother. They had to realize they might not hang on to Wake much longer, either.
Then what? Not back to where they’d started, not with Guam and the Philippines still in Japanese hands to shield the Home Islands and the Dutch East Indies. But at least Honolulu would be able to take a deep breath and not worry so much about coming down with anthrax if it did.
No. The Marines on Midway were the ones who had to worry about that. Which was one big reason they couldn’t get off Midway, dammit.
CHAPTER 17
Julius Lemp wished the U-30 were out patrolling in the North Sea or the North Atlantic. He even wished his U-boat were hunting Russian freighters and warships in the Baltic. Any time a man wished he were out in the Baltic, he had to hate wherever he was.
Where he was was Kiel. He and his men remained confined to the naval base. The powers that be didn’t trust them to attack the enemy. The powers that be also didn’t seem to trust them not to attack their own comrades.
After a lot of wire-pulling, Lemp finally secured another audience with Admiral Dönitz. The commander of the German U-boat fleet gave him a stony stare. “I hope this will be interesting,” he said.
“So do I … sir,” Lemp answered. “Do you really think that if you turn us loose we’ll head up the Rhine and start sinking barges and tugboats? Or shell our own fortifications here?”
“Certain people … have wondered about these things,” Dönitz said, plainly choosing his words with no little care. “The political situation is, ah, increasingly delicate.”
“Is it?” Lemp said. The radio and the newspapers admitted no such thing-but then, they wouldn’t. No one in the officers’ club admitted any such thing, either. But then, you had to be an idiot to speak freely in the officers’ club these days. By now, Himmler’s various security services had swept up most of the fools who couldn’t dog their hatches.
“It is.” Dönitz spoke with chill certainty. “There are at the moment certain, ah, unfortunate disagreements over some policies between the Führer and, ah, a faction within the General Staff. And if you tell anyone I told you that, I will call you a liar to your face and I will make sure you envy the fate of a destroyer that hits a mine. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” Lemp replied. “You have a way of making yourself very plain, sir.”
He hoped to make the admiral smile. No such luck. Dönitz’s eyes stayed as cold and gray as the North Sea at this season of the year. “And you and your men have a reputation for raising trouble, here and up in Norway. So is it any wonder some people don’t want to let you out of port in a U-boat stuffed with torpedoes and 88mm shells?”
The unfairness of that took Lemp’s breath away. “Sir,” he said stiffly, “the only reason the lads kicked up their heels a little in Namsos was that it made an impossible liberty port. No girls, hardly any beer … You know what a U-boat patrol is like, sir. You know how the men want to blow off steam afterwards.”
“They almost blew up the town,” Dönitz said. “Twice.”
Lemp had wondered whether that would come back to haunt him. He’d never dreamt it would come back to haunt him like this. “Sir, what happened in Namsos had nothing to do with politics,” he insisted.
“And, no doubt, you will also tell me your desire to keep on your boat an electrician’s mate the SS found unreliable had nothing to do with politics, either.” Dönitz was, or affected to be, implacable.
“Nehring was a good electrician’s mate. He was the best one in the boat, in fact. I didn’t want some thumb-fingered idiot screwing with my batteries. Was it his fault he came from Münster?”