Hooker turned to his group, picked out six officers and ordered them aboard. He could see Sergeant Finney and the boy leaving the bunker and running toward the pier.
‘With the General’s permission, we got to clear this pier fast,’ Leamon yelled.
Hooker nodded curtly and immediately jumped aboard. ‘Lieutenant Grisoglio, you’re senior officer on the second boat. Tell Sergeant Finney to keep an eye on the youngster, please. I’ll bring the lad over here with me when we stop for the night.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Grisoglio, who was shot in the leg and was using a tree limb for a crutch. He threw Hooker a sharp salute.
‘All right, Captain,’ Hooker said to Leamon, ‘move out.’
They backed through the wreckage and Leamon spun the wheel and the PT boat turned in the water and headed out toward the bay and open sea.
Hooker watched as the pier grew smaller and finally saw Bobby and Finney with the rest of the officers. Thank God, he thought. He waved, and the eight-year-old youngster stood erect and threw him a sharp salute and Hooker watched until the smoke obliterated the dock and he could no longer see him. Hooker turned his attention to the second boat, now speeding up through The Sluice, adjacent to the destroyer, dodging the shells.
Coakley was running wide open, adjacent to the destroyer when the shell hit. It tore into the side of his craft. It was a hard hit. The boat shuddered, debris erupted from the deck and was wafted away in the wind. One of the crewmen soared head over heels over the side. Seconds later, a sky bomb exploded over the foredecks. The boatswain was hurled against the main cabin, his chest riddled with flak. The master’s cabin was ripped open like a paper box. Glass showered to the winds. Coakley was hit with a blast of scorching hot air. Hot metal ripped into his side and shoulder. The wheel was wrenched from his grip and he felt himself tumbling across the deck into the railing. He was stunned for a moment and then he realized he was on his hands and knees, staring at his own blood, dribbling onto the deck. He heard a crewman yelling ‘Fire!’ heard flames fanning in the wind. His boat was burning around him.
Coakley got to his feet and grabbed the wheel. He ignored the pain in his body; it no longer mattered. He whipped the stricken PT boat around and headed straight toward the destroyer. Flames twirled in his wake, and sizzled up the side of the boat, but it was still skimming across the water like a zephyr, racing through the smoke and din, straight at the enemy ship.
‘Motherfuckers,’ Coakley screamed. ‘Motherfuckers, motherfuckers, motherfuckers...’
Leamon watched in shock as Coakley’s torpedo boat raced straight into the side of the destroyer. There was a moment when everything seemed suspended in time. Then the torpedoes went, then the big ship’s ammunition holds went. The destroyer lurched and rolled in the water. An orange ball of fire roiled from the hole in her side, and then they heard another explosion and another and another.
‘God, oh God!’ Leamon cried out. He turned to the general, who was standing beside him watching the death throes of the warship. ‘Do we go back, sir, for the rest of your people?’
Hooker looked back at Bastine, but there was nothing to see, just black smoke, endless explosions and flames, billowing up through the black pallor.
‘I have my orders,’ Hooker said. ‘And so do you.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Captain Leamon said and guided his speeding boat away from Bastine.
And now Hooker sat in his study, the tears fresh on his cheeks, and he remembered it was that day, among all the days of his life, that he most wanted to forget.
The box came about four-thirty in the afternoon. It was delivered by a cab driver who had picked it up at the train station where it had been delivered from...
Ad infinitum.
It was always the same story. Impossible to trace. Just a plain white box with holes in it, marked ‘Namamono’ — ‘Perishable.’
The general was seated in the dark when he entered the office.
‘Excuse me, sir?’
‘Come in, Jesse. I was just dozing here. Thinking about the old days.’
‘Bad news, sir.’
‘What is it?’
‘Another present.’
‘God damn!’
Garvey put the box on Hooker’s desk. ‘Want me to open it for you?’
‘I’ll do it.’
He took the letter opener out of his drawer, snipped the string and flipped off the top.
It came out slowly. They always did, searching the air with their tongues, their eyes moving in different directions. Jesus, were they ugly.
He waited until it had dropped over the side of the box and was strolling across the desk. He nicked it in the side, deep enough to pierce the skin. The chameleon squirmed, its tail lashing behind it. It was a small one, no more than nine or ten inches long. He stuck it again.
The chameleon began to thrash in pain. He jabbed it again and again. Then he put the sharp side of the opener on the chameleon’s neck and held it hard against the desk. Its tongue bulged in its mouth, a rolled-up ball of red tissue, trembling in its partly open mouth.
‘Is there a message?’ Hooker said.
Garvey took out a piece of paper. ‘It says: “The fish will eat the fisherman.”
