Authors: Island of Dreams
Hans was quicker than Michael in getting to his knees, but then Hans was a street fighter and wasn’t impeded by an injured leg. His fist went into Michael’s stomach as Michael tried to rise, but one of Michael’s hands caught Hans around the neck, and they fell back on the floor together. The two men rolled over on the floor, each pummeling the other with one fist while seeking to keep the other man from reaching the gun which lay on the floor.
Michael felt the blows rain down on him, tasted blood as it spurted from his nose and a split lip. Yet filled with rage and frustration, he was doing an equal share of damage. Blood was also pouring from several places on Hans’s body, and his opponent’s breath was coming in heavy gasps.
Despite his long hospitalization, Michael knew he was in better shape than Hans. His daily swims and walks, the bicycling, had increased his stamina, and he’d always been quick, while Hans was heavier and slower. He permitted himself a quick glance over at Meara. She had indeed found the knife, and he saw that she had freed her hands and was now working on the ropes around her ankles. In seconds she would be free and possibly out the door. He couldn’t let that happen. Not yet.
His momentary distraction was treacherous. He felt a heavy blow to his face and, stunned, he released Hans. Hans dived for the pistol. Through the corner of a bloodied eye, Michael saw that Meara had reached the weapon first and had it in her hand. As Hans grabbed for it, the pistol went off, and Michael heard Hans grunt, then fall to the floor.
As Michael painfully rose to his knees, the gun was once more pointed at him, but Meara held it now. He wondered whether the shot had been heard. He doubted it. The air was cold, and the wind was blowing. Windows were closed. And they were far from the clubhouse. But still, it was possible.
Cautiously eying the gun in Meara’s hand, Michael got to his feet and leaned painfully against a wall. “Are you going to shoot me?” he said finally, his voice neutral, almost as if he were asking about the weather.
Her hand shook, but it didn’t waver. She started to open her mouth, but clamped it shut. Michael very slowly and carefully leaned down and touched his fingers to the pulse in Hans’s throat. Feeling nothing, he straightened up again.
“Is he…?” Meara’s voice was trembling, her face white with shock.
“Yes,” he said simply, wishing desperately he could take back these hours, these days. He wanted to move over to her, to take her in his arms, to wipe the horror and shock from her face. And he could do none of those things. He could only make her hate him.
Everything about her was frozen. Her hands, her eyes, her posture. Michael was afraid to move, afraid that she might suddenly shatter and the gun would fire.
“What are you going to do?” he said finally, keeping his voice calm and cold.
“Who were you trying to radio?”
“One of our submarines.”
She swallowed. “You really are…”
“German. Yes.”
“Everything was—?”
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. She took it for an admission of guilt.
“A spy? A German spy.” Her voice was disbeliving still, but it was getting stronger. “My God. You can’t…”
Michael was silent.
“Dear God, you used me,” she cried again, and this time her voice was only an agonized whisper, a sound more devastating to Michael than hatred. Her hands tightened on the trigger. “It was easy, he told me. He said it was so easy.” Her voice broke, and her body shook as if she were freezing. Michael’s throat constricted until he couldn’t breathe. His heart shattered as he saw the bitter betrayal register in her face, watched the brilliant eyes dim with understanding. He screamed silently inside, wanting to die himself, but he still had others to protect. God help him, dying would have been easy now.
As he stood there silently, watching realization take full hold of her, he knew that living would never get easier, that he would live with this moment the rest of his life. It was worse than anything he had ever imagined, or could imagine. He died slowly inside, much slower than Hans had.
And yet he stood. A living dead man.
He watched her, the lips which were quivering ever so slightly, the eyes filled with hurt and disillusionment and remnants of horror every time she looked at him and down at the body of Hans Weimer.
Yet neither of them moved.
It was as if, he thought, they were both caught in a photograph, each frozen forever with emotions and passions so strong that they were incapable of movement or decision or even words.
Michael knew every moment he remained was dangerous. The shot might have been heard. If not, he would soon be sought when he didn’t appear at his dinner engagement. Someone might check his room and find Evans. Yet he couldn’t take his eyes from her, from the dawning understanding of all that had happened these past two weeks, what she thought she understood.
“You bastard,” she said in a cold, brittle voice that belied the calmness.
He took a step toward her.
“Don’t,” she said with a strained voice, and he stopped. “Are there any more of you?” she asked.
Any more of you. He and Hans. Spies. Enemies. He hadn’t known the pain could get worse, but it did. “No,” he said quietly.
“And the sub.”
“Without the radio transmission, it won’t come in.”
“Why should I believe you?”
He had to make her hate him, to believe he was no better than Hans, who would steal children. Perhaps he wasn’t. He moved closer to her and saw her hand waver. He took another step.
“No,” she said.
“You won’t shoot me,” he said in an emotionless voice.
“Yes.”
But then he was directly in front of her, and his hand whipped out, knocking the gun from her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice suddenly soft. He tried to keep gentleness from it, but he couldn’t. It was there, but he realized she didn’t hear it. She only heard what she wanted to hear now.
“It’s over now,” he continued. “You’ve won. I’ve lost.” He hadn’t meant to, but he bent his head and his lips touched hers, his mouth violent with need against her unyielding one. When he finished and released her, her hand went back and she slapped him as hard as she could, the impact echoing in the small room.
He smiled crookedly, as he had that first day on the club cruiser, and then he whirled out the door. She followed, staring as he moved quicker than she’d thought possible toward the dock. She knew she should run for the clubhouse and alert them, but her legs wouldn’t move.
Frozen. She was frozen with incomprehension. A play. It must be only a play. A play of blood and death and betrayal. German. My God. Judas goat. Whispered words, tender touches. Judas goat. My God. Dear God in heaven.
She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t move. She couldn’t feel. Anything. She didn’t think she would ever feel anything again.
The gun. She looked around for the gun, but her eyes, dazed from shock and swimming with tears, couldn’t find it at first, but still she tried. She finally caught sight of it under some pipes. She would have to step over the dead man. The man she killed. Killed. Dear God.
Somehow she forced herself to do it, to lean over and pick up the gun, and she turned back to the opened door. She could still see his shape moving toward the dock. She aimed toward the moving figure, but her hands stilled on the trigger; she couldn’t pull it. Damn it, she couldn’t.
He was a spy. A German spy. If he were captured he would be executed. He had used her to betray her country. Why should she care? Why?
She ran out the door, but she could no longer see him. And then she saw Sanders Evans rushing from the clubhouse. She screamed at him, and he turned in her direction.
“The dock,” she said. He had a gun in his hand and he started loping toward the dock, Meara behind him. It was raining heavily now, but she didn’t feel the pelting drops. She didn’t feel anything, only a numbness.
Just as Sanders reached the dock, they heard the start of a motor. Sanders continued running, across the wooden boards now, his shoes echoing in the night. Meara watched him kneel, pointing his gun toward the sound. There were no running lights, no lights at all, even the club lights were out. Meara heard several shots and then the river and the sky seemed to explode into an inferno. She reached Sanders, and they both looked out to where the last sound of the boat had been heard. There was nothing, only drifting pieces of fire falling from the sky. Meara’s legs suddenly collapsed under her.
“Michael,” she screamed as she started to fall, and she felt Sanders catch her and hold her close as sobs racked her body.
The commander of the U-boat, Klaus Hasser, had been standing tensely beside his radio for the past thirty minutes. They were three miles from the entrance into Jekyll Creek, and the sub had surfaced for the transmission. Hasser had blessed the weather. The night was inky, and rain came down in torrents, making it impossible to see more than several feet. He tapped his foot impatiently, willing the transmission to come through. He was not to enter Jekyll Sound without it.
By eight, he knew something was wrong, but still he hesitated. The mission was vitally important. Then he heard an explosion and saw a brief fireball in the distant darkness.
Others would have heard it too. He could no longer afford to wait. He gave the orders to submerge and set course for open sea.
C
HRIS
C
HANDLER
’
S HANDS
tightened compulsively over the spilled contents of the envelope as his gaze moved unseeing across the rich paneling of his office to the bank of windows overlooking the bay.
His office had once been his sanctuary. He had designed it that way. A tranquil place to keep memories at bay.
But no more. Not even pretense could make it so. Fear grasped at him, just as it had twenty-odd years ago. Twenty-one years, in fact. Twenty one years and two months. He could even calculate the days and hours.
He did not fear for himself. God knew he had lived with worse things. Guilt. Regret. Loneliness. Always the loneliness. And phantoms. Phantoms which followed him everywhere, from a glimpse of red hair on the street to nightmare-plagued nights.
Chandler leaned back in the swivel chair, his gaze returning to the newspaper article he had torn from the paper that morning, and the sheaf of papers still clutched in his fingers.
Some part of him, he realized, had been waiting for this. Waiting all these years. An excuse to go back, to recover something that had been lost, something he had always felt was meant to be his: Meara, and the feelings he had never known prior to those weeks, nor since. He had tried to bury those memories. Knowing with terrible certainty that he had, deliberately and consciously, destroyed any possibility of recovering her, he had tried, instead, to create a new life. He knew now he had simply marked time, had existed for this moment. The years wrapped up in this room had not been life but penance. Empty years. Solitary years.
He had once believed he’d had no choice in what had happened. But now he realized a man always had choices. And he had made poor ones. Except for the last, the most painful of all.
Chris ran fingers through his crisp sandy hair as he always did when thinking or worried. With his other hand, he straightened out the newspaper clipping. It was coincidence that he had found it just minutes after reviewing the thick packet that had arrived from Europe. He usually scanned the paper after opening the mail, but the contents of the envelope had so disturbed him that he had almost failed to pick up the morning paper.
He’d glanced restlessly over the headlines. Most of them involved the civil rights demonstrations in the South, the the conflict in Vietnam, and President Kennedy’s upcoming trip to Europe. June 15, 1963. Nothing very unusual. He started to lay it down again but habit was strong, and after he’d made a mental note to try anonymously to contact Sanders Evans and tell him of the contents of the European package, he’d picked the paper back up again, scanning it rapidly, only to find Evans’s name staring up at him from one of the pages.
Now he read the article for the third time, although his mind had already memorized the contents.
The story briefly told of the death of FBI Agent Sanders Evans in a shootout with extremists who had robbed a Wells Fargo armored car and killed two guards. The robbery apparently was intended to provide funds to bomb public buildings in protest of the growing conflict in Southeast Asia. Violence to stop violence. Nothing really surprised Chris anymore. He had been a part of the greatest idiocy and criminality of all history.
Agent Evans had left a wife, Meara, and a daughter, Lisa. There were no photos, of course. It was the violent death that was news, not the personal tragedy left in its wake. There was nothing of the grief of a wife and daughter, or one of those intrusive photos of personal pain newspapers seemed to like so much.
Chris wondered about them now. Meara and her daughter. Did Meara’s eyes still sparkle like the sun hitting the ocean waves? Did Lisa have the same glow, the same wonderful sense of adventure, the same honest courage, as her mother?