“I didn’t load it!” Joyce blared loud enough to draw attention from nearby tables. “Hey, you want to go somewhere more private?”
“This is doing just fine. Keep talking.”
“I helped load the bombs, I’ll admit that, but that’s all I loaded. The bunch of us felt like part of history, so it was only right we go out and celebrate ’fore we set out the next morning. Night falls and five of us get lucky and find broads. War freaks these women turn out to be. Figured we could be sure of an easy fuck if we took them to see the ship carrying the atomic bombs.”
“Word treason mean anything to you then?”
“Mister, only word in my vocab that night was horny. What was the harm in it anyway? The women were too smashed to remember a damn thing besides me slamming ’em hot and heavy.”
“Get back to the ship.”
“Yeah, that’s just what we did. Middle of the night, we brought them to the dock. The Indy wasn’t due to set off until dawn. Trouble was, the dock was swarming with people, lots of whom I didn’t recognize and a few others I didn’t want to.”
“Why?”
“Get to that later. Anyway, what I saw was a bunch of guys loading something else on board the ship.”
“Loading what?”
“Cannisters. One at a time. Real careful they were.”
“Describe these cannisters.”
“I don’t know, ’bout the size of scuba tanks I guess. All silver-gray and smooth, marked with some kind of symbol.”
“What kind of symbol?”
“Looked like a funny kind of v. Yeah, I think it was the Greek letter gamma.”
“Get back to those people you preferred not to recognize….”
“Hey, I had good reason. One of them walked with canes in both hands. Even drunk, that’s something you can’t forget. He looked like he was supervising everything, but I’ve never seen a more miserable face in my life. I didn’t see it again until a couple years later, and I don’t mean on no baseball card, either.”
“Go on.”
“His picture was on the front page of the paper. Story was about Nazis, infamous Nazis still at large.”
“Who did the story say he was?” Blaine asked after a long pause.
“A scientist. Went by the name of Bechman. Don’t know anything else about him, ’sides the obvious. We musta needed him for something real big, and whatever it was I figure got placed on the Indy next to the bombs.”
“So you kept your mouth shut.”
“Damn straight. I was plenty scared, too. Here it was we all thought we’d loaded the most dangerous weapon man had ever come up with only to come back at night to see something else being loaded in secret. Shit, at least we knew what the A-bombs were supposed to do. Had no idea what the shit in those cannisters was capable of, and none of us were about to let on we had any idea they were on board. I was the only one knew about the cannisters who made it out of the water alive and I still never told, even after …”
“After what, Bart?”
“I’ve said enough.”
“Not nearly.”
The man’s oversized jowls puckered with fear. He leaned farther over the table and lowered his voice.
“You gotta understand nobody would’ve ever believed me. I had no proof.”
“Go on.”
“Thing was, in the water we got ourselves all linked together in tight circles. Could fall asleep and not drift off that way. We kept regular watch for the sharks. I was right next to the captain himself, dragged him into our circle with my own two hands. A few minutes later the moon pops out and his eyes go all kind of funny. We were facing the same direction so I could see the same thing he did: a conning tower, Mr. Spook, from a submarine.”
“The Indianapolis was sunk by a sub.”
“Sure. Only this one was one of ours.”
Chapter 18
“Do I have to spell it out for you?” Bart Joyce was saying, the floodgates fully open now with his secret released at last. “Fucking American sub sunk our ship. Coulda been an accident, except she surfaced and still left us there. They wanted the lot of us dead, Mr. Spook, and they did everything they could to make sure that was the only way we’d be found. Our own sub, damn it, our own government…”
Joyce’s voice tailed off and Blaine’s mind raced ahead. He was stunned but somehow not surprised. Joyce had supplied the missing piece to his puzzle, and out of the madness came the sense. The Indianapolis had indeed sailed from San Francisco with something other than A-bombs: cannisters only a select few knew about, marked by the Greek letter gamma. Obviously the intention was to unload them at Tinian in addition to, perhaps instead of, the bombs. But equally obvious was the fact that something had happened en route that required a change in strategy. The cannisters had never been unloaded and the Indianapolis had been sunk to conceal their existence.
But why?
The key was Bechman. Joyce remembered him as a Nazi scientist, and it was common knowledge the Nazis were advanced far beyond the allies from a weapons standpoint. The end of the war, in fact, became a battle between the Russians and Americans to gain their services. But with Bechman the Americans must have had reason to jump the gun, and that reason could only have been the gamma cannisters. Whatever they were, their very existence had called for all traces of the Indianapolis and her final mission to be buried forever.
“I never told anyone,” Bart Joyce was saying, “I never—”
Joyce’s head snapped backward suddenly, and a red circle appeared in the center of his forehead. He toppled over as if someone had yanked the chair out from under him. Blaine’s dive took him to the ground ahead of Joyce’s corpse, and ahead of the next burst which shattered the empty glasses on the table top. Blaine brought the table down over him to use for cover while those patrons nearest him scattered screaming. Traveling on a regular flight from Washington with no luggage had made bringing a gun along impossible without attracting undue attention to himself. He had never felt more helpless.
The automatic fire continued to dig chasms out of the table, causing pandemonium through the restaurant and in the cobblestone walkway beyond it. Whoever the shooter was, he was good. He knew enough to keep his concentration on his target through everything. His mistake had been not going for McCracken first.
The bullets ceased thudding into the wood over him, and Blaine stayed low at the feet of the panicked crowd that was rushing everywhere at once. Find the origin of the shots and he would find the shooter. The pyramid-shaped roof of the South Market thirty yards across the cobblestones was the only possible location. Blaine climbed to his feet and scanned the roof-line but found no sign of anyone perched there.
The gunman would be on his way down then, to attempt an escape or perhaps another try at Blaine. McCracken’s eyes swept across the scene at store level and encountered the shape of a small man emerging rather calmly from one of the shops. A second glance told him it was a woman wearing a boyish haircut, tight jeans, and a leather jacket. She seemed unfazed by the panic swarming around her.
Blaine picked up his pace through the crowd, intending to cut the woman off. Sirens were already screaming as she walked briskly toward the Congress Street side of the marketplace. She never so much as gazed back, so Blaine had no chance to meet her eyes as he fought his way through the surging crowd.