Louise's Crossing Page 17

  ‘Bombs!’ a seaman shouted as he ran past us. We looked up and saw death tubes falling from the sky. Our anti-aircraft guns blazed, their sound overwhelming even the siren. I paused for a second, watching the contrails soaring into the sky. I couldn’t see Tom and the five-inch gun anymore – we’d moved too far forward – but the three-inch gun and the twenty-millimeter rapid-repeating guns fired relentlessly. Adding to the conflagration were the bigger guns booming from the Evans, and, in the distance, more gunfire from the other warships in our convoy. I’d seen battle footage in countless newsreels, and I’d survived a torpedo attack, but I wasn’t prepared for the deafening noise and chaos of battle. I was afraid. In my mind’s eye I could see all of us dead, floating in the ocean among the remnants of our ship.

  The noise alone was enough to challenge one’s sanity.

  Blanche and I fell through the door. Ronan and the kids were there, flattened up against the outside bulwark. ‘See?’ Ronan said to Bruce. ‘Here they are. We all need to get below!’

  ‘Mama!’ Corrie screamed. ‘I want Mama!’

  ‘Your mam will find you as soon as she can,’ Ronan said, dragging her to the staircase.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Don’t go below!’ If our ship got a fatal hit, our berths could become our coffins. ‘We should stay above deck, in case we have to abandon ship,’ I said. ‘Head for the wardroom.’

  ‘I’m going back outside,’ Bruce said, with fourteen-year-old bravado. ‘I want to fight the Nazis!’

  ‘Oh, Mother of God,’ Ronan muttered, grabbing Bruce by the waist and throwing him over his shoulder.

  The rest of our company was already in the wardroom. Mrs Smit, sobbing, rushed over and hugged a tearful Corrie. Even Alida had tears streaming down her cheeks.

  Gil stood at a porthole. He turned away from what he saw and slid to the floor. ‘The sky is full of airplanes. And bombs falling. They look like bees swarming.’

  An enormous explosion filled the air, rocking the Amelia Earhart with the concussive force of the blast. None of us could keep our footing, dropping to the tilted floor and sliding across it, slamming into the bulwarks. Something whizzed past us and pierced the bulwark. Then another one. It was pure luck that they missed us.

  ‘Get under the tables,’ Olive said. ‘Hold on tight to the legs.’ The metal wardroom tables were bolted to the floor, offering some security.

  We waited, huddled under the wardroom tables, listening for the siren’s signal to abandon ship. The order never came, and the ship righted itself.

  Bruce crawled to the porthole and pulled himself up. ‘I think the bombs missed us and hit another ship,’ Bruce said.

  ‘Can you tell which one?’ Ronan asked.

  ‘No, there’s too much smoke,’ the boy answered. ‘And now it’s on fire.’

  Mrs Smit muttered a prayer under her breath.

  ‘Please don’t let it be one of the destroyers,’ Gil said. All the convoy ships had some kind of defensive weaponry, but only the two destroyers and the sloop were made for warfare. If we lost one, we’d be in dire shape.

  The ten of us crouched under the metal tables of the wardroom, clinging to each other, afraid of imminent death. And all of us knew that the munitions our ship carried made our survival less likely. For the time we spent together crouched on the floor, we were the dearest of friends.

  The cacophony of warfare seemed to diminish a little. Bruce pulled away from Ronan and scrambled over to a wardroom porthole. ‘Wow,’ he shouted. ‘I just saw a plane crash! And another one!’ Our anti-aircraft guns must have hit their targets.

  Bruce ran for the mess hall before anyone could stop him. He made for the window, which was shaped like a large oval porthole. ‘I see two ships sinking! And fire on another one!’ he said. ‘And there’s just the tail of a plane sticking out of the ocean. There’s a swastika painted on it!’

  Ronan reached him and dragged him back to the wardroom. ‘No wonder your parents sent you away,’ he said to the boy. ‘You’re a handful!’ He shoved Bruce back under the table, where Blanche gripped his arm with both hands to keep him there.

  Then we heard a different humming sound. As if more airplanes were coming.

  ‘You stay here,’ Gil ordered Bruce. And he crept, staying low, into the messroom and over to the window. Then, to our horror, he crept along the bulwark and edged outside. A couple of minutes later he was back inside in one piece. ‘Allied airplanes!’ he shouted to us. ‘Spitfires!’ I didn’t know I’d been holding my breath in, but now I let it out.

  ‘The RAF, bless them,’ Ronan said. We all crowded around the window to watch the Spitfires chase the Germans across the sky toward the mainland.

  FOURTEEN

  Our ship escaped a direct hit but it had been strafed several times. If the Amelia Earhart was a person, she would be one of the walking wounded. One of the cargo winches had been destroyed, collapsing across the deck, strewing busted metal parts, thick cables and struts across the width of the ship, damaging some of the vehicles underneath. Above me I saw that one of the twenty-millimeter anti-aircraft guns had been destroyed. There were two men down at the gunners’ station. As I watched, another gunner, his face black with gunpowder and oil, covered the dead men’s faces. The radio antenna had collapsed with the winch and hung over the side of the bridge deck, where I could see the master shouting orders from his bullhorn.

  A team of seamen wielded hoses, putting out small fires fueled by oil spilled from the gun mounts and damaged vehicles. Water flooded the deck, making moving around treacherous. In this temperature it would freeze quickly.

  I was relieved to see Tom on his feet, but his uniform was covered in blood. It couldn’t be his blood, as he seemed unhurt. He and one of his men were inspecting the five-inch gun on the bow. Then they test-fired it. The sound made my nerves clang.

  And everywhere – on the deck, on the vehicles, on the side of the bridge, and on the bulwark of the level where the mess hall was – were holes and tears made by the German airplanes strafing us. Bruce had stood at the window of that mess hall, and Gil had actually gone outside; either of them could have been killed. Even a few of the lifeboats were punctured. And these holes were three times bigger than any bullet hole I’d ever seen – if you could call a three-inch-long projectile from a German aircraft cannon a bullet. Anyone who received a direct hit from one was a dead man. Including the two gunners who’d been brought down from the gun emplacement, there were seven corpses covered in tarps, lined up in a row on deck.

  I would have given a month’s pay for the emergency siren to stop blaring.

  Only Olive and I were on deck. When the fighting stopped, the Smits took their girls down to their berth. Ronan and Blanche persuaded Bruce to leave, too. No one wanted the kids to see the hell on deck. Gil stayed in the wardroom to smoke. His hands were shaking so much that it took him three tries to get his cigarette lit.

  Olive and I had this notion that we could help, but once we were outside, we stayed out of the way. It was too chaotic for us to even speak to anyone. Until we saw two stretchers carried by seamen coming toward us. The men on them were alive.

  The pharmacist’s mate gripped one end of a stretcher. He stopped when he saw us.

  ‘Ma’am!’ he called out to Olive. She immediately went to the wounded men. I followed her. The first injured man had lost his left arm below the elbow. A tourniquet had stemmed the flow of blood, but his clothes were soaked with the blood he’d already lost. The second man lay on his stomach on the stretcher, unconscious. The back of his shirt was stiff with blood, too. It was Nigel.

  ‘What happened to him?’ I asked.

  ‘Shrapnel in his shoulder, I think,’ the pharmacist’s mate said to me. ‘Deep.’ Then he turned back to Olive. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what to do. There’s a hospital on the Evans, but the launches are busy looking for survivors.’

  ‘This man,’ Olive said, taking the pulse of the seaman from his only wrist, ‘won’t live long
enough to be moved anywhere. We have to do something now. Let’s get him down to the first-aid room.’

  The stretcher-bearers lifted the cruelly injured man on to the gurney in the first-aid room.

  ‘What’s his name?’ Olive asked, rolling up her sleeves.

  ‘Able-bodied Seaman Mike Oleson, ma’am,’ another stretcher-bearer answered. ‘I’m Seaman Andy Davis. He’s my pal. Can you save him?’

  Olive stared directly into the eyes of the pharmacist’s mate. ‘The only possible way to save this man’s life is to take off his arm above the elbow,’ she said. Already pale, the pharmacist’s mate went ghost-white, gripping the edge of the gurney to stay on his feet. ‘Pull yourself together,’ Olive said to him.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he answered. ‘I can do it.’

  ‘Do you have any plasma?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘That’s too bad. What’s his blood type?’

  The pharmacist’s mate checked the man’s dog tag. ‘Type A, ma’am.’

  Olive turned to the stretcher-bearer who was the injured man’s friend. ‘Andy,’ she said, ‘go find someone with type-A blood and bring him back here right away. Someone big and young. Don’t let anyone stop you.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, leaving immediately.

  Meanwhile, I was cutting the man’s clothes off, finding a blanket to warm him and dripping water from a sponge into his mouth.

  ‘We need anesthesia and an amputation kit,’ Olive said. ‘I sure hope you have them.’

  ‘We’ve got ether and a kit,’ the mate said, opening the storage cabinet door. But when he brought out the amputation kit and opened it, the collection of saws and knives sent a frigid chill down my spine. My legs felt as if they would give way. Olive noticed me sinking.

  ‘Louise,’ she said, ‘go outside in the hall and sit down. Monitor Nigel. If his vitals change at all, call me.’

  I tried not to stagger when I left the room. Just as I did, Andy came down the hall dragging a burly seaman with him and went into the first-aid room. I collapsed next to Nigel and took his pulse. It seemed steady to me, although he was still unconscious. The wound in his shoulder was small and circular. Maybe something like a bolt head had been driven into him.

  Popeye came striding down the hall. He stopped and knelt next to me. ‘He OK?’ he asked about Nigel.

  ‘He seems stable,’ I said. ‘He has a piece of shrapnel in his shoulder. Olive is going to remove it when she’s done with the other guy.’

  ‘What other guy?’ he asked.

  ‘Mike Oleson,’ the other stretcher-bearer said. ‘His left hand and lower arm were blown off.’

  ‘He’s still alive?’ Popeye asked. ‘He didn’t bleed to death?’

  ‘No,’ I answered. ‘Someone got a tourniquet on him. Olive is going to amputate his arm. And his friend found a blood donor.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ Popeye answered. ‘Does she know what to do?’

  ‘Olive has been an operating-room nurse for years,’ I said.

  ‘Then I hope she succeeds. Seaman,’ he said to the stretcher-bearer, ‘you stay here. Anything Miss Nunn and Mrs Pearlie need, you find it for them.’

  ‘Chief,’ I asked, ‘how many dead are there?’

  ‘Ten, so far,’ he said, ‘and there are more bodies floating in the ocean. The Evans sent both launches to look for more, and survivors, if there are any.’

  ‘The convoy?’ I asked.

  ‘Three cargo ships lost. And the Robin.’

  An hour passed. It seemed to me that Nigel wasn’t as deeply unconscious. When I spoke to him, he turned toward me, and once he opened his eyes.

  The door to the first-aid room opened and the pharmacist’s mate and Oleson’s pal brought Oleson on a stretcher out into the hall, followed by Olive wearing a blood-stained apron. Oleson was breathing. His lower left arm was missing and a massive bandage padded the stump.

  ‘You did it!’ I said to Olive.

  ‘It’s early days yet,’ she said. ‘Find a bunk for him,’ she said to the pharmacist’s mate. ‘Take Andy with you. Keep a close watch on the patient. Any change and I want to know. If he starts to stir, he’ll need morphine. Then see if he’ll take some fluids.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ the pharmacist’s mate said.

  The burly seaman who’d been commandeered to donate blood appeared in the doorway. He held on to the jamb. ‘You took too much blood from me,’ he said to Olive. ‘I don’t feel right.’

  ‘Trust me, you’ll live,’ Olive said. ‘Drink lots of liquids and rest for a couple of days. You’ll make more blood.’ She spotted the seaman that Popeye had left behind to help us. ‘Help our blood donor to his bunk,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he answered. ‘But the chief said I was to stay here to help you and Mrs Pearlie.’

  ‘Well, then, come back when you’ve finished.’

  That left Olive and me in the hall with Nigel. ‘Think you can help me carry the stretcher into the first-aid room?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘he’s skinny.’

  Nigel opened his eyes. He lay on his stomach, his face turned toward me. We’d stripped off his shirt so Olive could clean the area surrounding his wound. Nigel winced. ‘That hurts,’ he said.

  ‘Morphine coming up,’ Olive said. She drew liquid from a vial into a syringe. ‘Here it comes,’ she said to Nigel. She plunged the needle into the area near his wound. ‘I don’t think we’re going to need an anesthetic,’ she said. ‘Once the morphine takes effect, I’ll probe for the shrapnel.’

  ‘Do you remember what happened?’ I asked Nigel.

  ‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘The chief had sent me to check the lifeboats for any damage from the strafing in case we had to abandon ship. I was halfway up the ladder to the boat deck when I felt something slam into my back. I lost my grip and fell. I woke up out there in the hall.’

  ‘I’m going to probe now, so hang on,’ Olive said. She inserted forceps into Nigel’s wound and poked about. Nigel gripped the gurney and grimaced, but Olive was done already. She pulled a small rounded piece of metal out of Nigel’s wound and held it up to the light.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ she said. ‘It’s a bullet!’

  FIFTEEN

  ‘What do you mean, a bullet?’ It was impossible that Olive meant a round from a German aircraft gun. One would have gone right through Nigel and probably killed him. The smashed piece of metal Olive held in the forceps wasn’t any bigger than a button.

  Olive took the so-called bullet over to the sink and washed it off, then handed it to me, still secure in the forceps. I peered at it under the light that hung over the gurney. It was an actual bullet, all right – deformed, but still identifiable as such.

  The meaning of this tiny bit of metal sank in. On a civilian cargo ship, such as the Amelia Earhart, operated by the merchant marine, no one was armed except the members of the Navy Armed Guard. The gunners were in the military; the seamen weren’t. The Armed Guard manned the artillery and wore sidearms to be used in case the ship was boarded by the enemy. During an attack from the air, no gunner would have reason to use his sidearm. On this trip I only saw sidearms drawn when the gunners practiced shooting at a target buoy tossed into the sea.

  I saw from Olive’s expression that she was thinking the same thing. Someone had shot Nigel in the back during the chaos of the air attack.

  Olive rummaged around in a drawer and found a vial she handed over to me. ‘Keep the bullet in there. We’ll need to show it to the master after things settle down.’ I secured the bit of metal in the vial and then tucked it into my bra. I had no intention of losing it. This bullet should prove to the master once and for all that there was a murderer on the Amelia Earhart.

  Our two assistants, the seamen who’d help carry Oleson’s stretcher and the one who’d escorted the blood donor, returned just in time to prevent Olive and me from having to carry Nigel to a bunk somewhere.

  ‘The pharmacist’s mate sent me to tell you that he’
s got Oleson tucked up in a bunk near the galley, and he ain’t dead yet,’ one of the seaman said. ‘He wanted to know if you thought the other guy could get on to the top bunk? That way he could watch them both.’

  Two bunks near the galley – that must be Grace’s empty berth.

  Nigel was sleeping like a baby from the effects of the morphine.

  ‘I think so. Just be careful getting him up there,’ Olive said. ‘Tell the mate I’ll come relieve him soon.’

  Olive and I were left to clean up the bloody sheets and clothes and wash the used surgical instruments in the first-aid room.

  The Amelia Earhart was full of holes, but none of her wounds were mortal. Two days after the air attack, the master, Popeye and the chief engineer agreed she was seaworthy and could continue on course. First stop, Londonderry, where we would drop off Ronan, and then to Liverpool.

  Ten of our seamen wouldn’t be going on with us. One of them was seventeen years old. We gathered for their burial service and then all ten bodies were tipped into the cold sea. There were more dead from the three cargo ships and the sloop that were sunk by the Germans, but many of their crewmembers survived. The bodies of the dead and dozens of cold survivors were picked up by launches from the destroyers. We didn’t know the exact number of the dead, but we could see white-shrouded bodies falling into the sea, like leaves falling in autumn, from the Evans during the burial service that took place shortly after ours.

  Since the destroyers’ infirmaries were packed, Mike Oleson and Nigel remained on our ship, cared for by the pharmacist’s mate, Olive and me. Oleson would live – in fact, he was sitting up and slurping soup. Nigel complained about having to spend his days on his stomach. I rounded up some Western paperbacks to help him pass the time.

  The trash on the deck was slowly cleared away. Seamen with acetylene torches dismembered the collapsed cargo winch and threw the metal remains into the ocean. When the cargo winch fell, it took the radio antenna with it, but Sparks was able to rig a replacement.