John?”
“Yes, sir,” grinned McCrea. “I’ll organize a display you won’t ever forget.”
“Since we’re not actually under attack,” said Arnold, “could we get back to the game?”
But as soon as McCrea had left the cabin, I knocked and spread my cards on the table. “Gin,” I said.
“I’ve got a better idea,” said FDR. “We’ll attach Willard to one of those weather balloons.”
An hour later, when I was more than fifty points ahead, Captain McCrea returned to inform the president that the convoy was stopping to search for a man overboard from the Willie D. Roosevelt looked grimly at the darkness outside the porthole and sighed. “Poor bastard. The man overboard, I mean. Hell of a night to fall overboard.”
“Look on the bright side,” suggested Hopkins. “Maybe it’s the guy who fucked up with the depth charge. Saves a court-martial.”
“Gentlemen,” said Roosevelt. “I think we had better conclude our game. Somehow it doesn’t seem right for us to continue playing gin rummy when a man on this convoy is missing and presumably drowned.”
With the game over, I returned to my cabin to find Ted Schmidt lying on his bunk, apparently insensible, but still holding the neck of the now empty bottle of Mount Vernon rye. I removed the bottle from Schmidt’s pudgy fingers and covered him with a blanket, wondering if his drinking was habitual or occasioned by fear of being abroad on the ocean in a battleship.
The next morning I left Schmidt to sleep it off and returned to “Presidential Country” to watch the barrage display from the flag bridge reserved for Roosevelt’s use during the voyage. Admirals Leahy, King, and McIntire (FDR’s physician) were already on the bridge, and we were soon joined by Generals Arnold, Marshall, Somervell, Deane, and George, as well as some diplomatic personnel I didn’t recognize. Last to arrive were Agents Rowley, Rauff, and Pawlikowski, Rear Admiral Wilson Brown, Harry Hopkins, John McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, Arthur Prettyman, and the president himself. He wore a regulation navy cape with velvet collar and braid frogs and a jaunty little hat with the brim turned up. He looked like a bookmaker going to his first opera.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Roosevelt said brightly. He lit a cigarette and glanced over the rail at the secondary battery detector and the gunfire control station below. “Looks like we picked a nice day for it.”
The ship was just east of Bermuda on a moderate sea with pleasant weather. I was only feeling a little seasick. I trained my binoculars on the escort destroyers. The Iowa had been making twenty-five knots, but the three smaller destroyers-the Cogswell, the Young, and the Willie D. Porter — had found the pace hard going. I overheard Rear Admiral Brown telling the president that the Willie D. had lost power in one of its boilers.
“She’s not what you would call a lucky ship, is she?” observed the president.
Hearing a loud metallic clunking noise, I glanced down to see, immediately beneath me, one of the Iowa ’s nineteen 40-millimeter guns being loaded. A little further to my right, in front of the first uptake, a sailor was manning one of the ship’s sixty 20-millimeter guns. The weather balloons were launched and a minute or so later, when these had achieved a sufficient altitude, the antiaircraft batteries began to fire. If I’d been deaf, I think I would still have complained about the noise. As it was, I was too busy covering my ears with both hands and remained that way until the last of the balloons had been hit, or had drifted out of range toward the escort destroyers. It was then I noticed something unusual to starboard and turned toward Admiral King, a tall, slim- looking man who resembled a healthier version of Harry Hopkins.
“The Willie D. Porter appears to be signaling, sir,” I said, when the noise had finally abated.
King trained his binoculars on the flashing light and frowned as he tried to decipher the Morse code.
“What do they say, Ernie?” asked the president.
I had already read the message. The training at Catoctin Mountain had perhaps been better than I remembered. “They’re telling us to go into reverse at full speed.”
“That can’t be right.”
“Sir, that’s what they’re signaling,” I insisted.
“Doesn’t make sense,” muttered King. “What the hell does that idiot think he’s playing at now?”
A second or two later all became frighteningly clear. On the underside of the flag bridge, immediately beneath our feet, an enormous public-address system burst loudly to life. “Torpedo on the starboard quarter. This is not a drill. This is not a drill. Torpedo on the starboard quarter.”
“Jesus Christ!” yelled King.
Roosevelt turned to the Negro valet standing behind him. “Wheel me over to starboard, Arthur,” he said with the air of a man asking for a mirror to see himself in a new suit. “I want to take a look for myself.”
Meanwhile Agent Rowley drew his pistol and leaned over the side of the flag bridge as if to shoot the torpedo. I might have laughed if the possibility of being hit amidships and sunk had not seemed so likely. Suddenly the previous evening’s predicament of the Porter ’s man overboard seemed more immediate. Just how long could a man survive in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean? Half an hour? Ten minutes? Probably less than that if he was seated in a wheelchair.
The Iowa, taking evasive maneuvers, increased speed and began turning to port and, a long minute later, an enormous explosion threw up a mountain of water behind the battleship. The ship seesawed underfoot as if Archimedes had sat down in his bath and then got up again to answer the phone, and I felt the spray hit my face hard.
“Did you see that?” exclaimed the president. “Did you see that? It went straight by us. Couldn’t have been more than three hundred yards off our starboard side. My God, that was exciting. I wonder if it’s one sub or several.”
As a display of sangfroid, it ranked close to Jeanne d’Arc asking her executioner for a light.
“If it’s several, we’re screwed,” King said grimly and stormed his way to the bulkhead door, only to find Captain McCrea appearing on the flag deck in front of him.
“You’re not going to believe this, Admiral,” said McCrea. “It was the Willie D. that fired on us.”
Even as Captain McCrea spoke, the Iowa ’s big 16-inch guns were turning ominously in the direction of the Willie D.
“Commander Walter broke radio silence to warn us about the fish,” continued McCrea. “I’ve ordered our guns to take aim at them just in case this is some kind of assassination plot.”
“Jesus Christ,” snarled King, and, taking off his cap, he rubbed his bald head with exasperation. Meanwhile, Generals Arnold and Marshall were making a hard job of not smirking at the now obvious discomfort of their rival service. “That fucking idiot.”
“What are your orders, sir?”
“I’ll tell you what my goddamn orders are,” said King. “Order the commander of the Porter to detach his fucking ship from the escort and make all speed for Bermuda. There, he is to place his ship and his whole fucking crew under close arrest pending a full inquiry into what just happened here today, and a possible court-martial. And you can tell Lieutenant Commander Walter personally from me that I consider him the worst fucking naval officer commanding a ship I’ve come across in more than forty years of service.”
King turned toward the president and replaced his cap. “Mr. President. On behalf of the navy, I should like to offer you my apologies, sir, for what has happened. But I can assure you that I intend to get to the bottom of this incident.”
“I think we all nearly got to the bottom,” Marshall said to Arnold. “The bottom of the ocean.”
Back in the cabin I found Ted Schmidt sitting crapulously on the edge of his bunk, wearing his life vest and clutching a new bottle of rye. What do you do with a drunken sailor, I asked myself wearily. Giving him a taste of the bosun’s rope end, shaving his belly with a rusty razor, and even putting him in bed with the captain’s daughter were, all of them, solutions that came musically to mind.
“What’s happening?” hiccuped Schmidt. “I heard firing. Are we under attack?”
“Only by our own side,” I offered, and explained what had happened.
“Thank God.” Schmidt collapsed back on his bunk. “It would be just my luck on top of everything else that’s happened to get killed by my own side.”
I took the bottle from Schmidt and poured myself a drink. After the cold air of the flying bridge I needed something warm inside of me. “Would you care to talk about it?”
Schmidt shook his head, miserably.
“Look, Ted, this has got to stop. Getting tight is one thing. Getting shit-faced is quite another. Maybe the Russians at the Big Three will forgive you smelling like a bootlegger’s glove, but I don’t think the president will. What you need is a shave and a shower to scrub the sideboard off your breath. Every time you whistle I swear I’m
