Battery Island, under reluctant federal ownership, became an embarrassing footnote to a singularly useless war. Without so much as a caretaker to look after the earthen emplacements, weeds overtook the island, and so things had remained for nearly a hundred years.
With 1917 came America’s first real foreign war, and America’s navy, suddenly faced with the U-boat menace, needed a sheltered place to test its guns. Battery Island seemed ideal, only a few steaming hours from Norfolk, and so for several months in the fall of that year, 12-and 14-inch battleship rifles had crashed and thundered, blasting nearly a third of the island below mean low water and greatly annoying the migratory birds, who’d long since realized that no hunters ever shot at them from the place. About the only new thing that happened was the scuttling of over a hundred World War I-built cargo ships a few miles to the south, and these, soon overgrown with weeds, rapidly took on the appearance of islands themselves.
A new war and new weapons had brought the sleepy island back to life. The nearby naval air station needed a place for pilots to test weapons. The happy coincidence of the location of Battery Island and the scuttled ships from World War I had made for an instant bombing range. As a result, three massive concrete observation bunkers were built, from which officers could observe TBFs and SB2C bombers practicing runs on targets that looked like ship-shaped islands—and pulverizing quite a few of them until one bomb hung on the rack just long enough to obliterate one of the bunkers, thankfully empty. The site of the destroyed bunker had been cleared in the name of tidiness, and the island converted to a rescue station, from which a crashboat might respond to an aircraft accident. That had required building a concrete quay and boathouse and refurbishment of the two remaining bunkers. All in all, the island had served the local economy, if not the federal budget, well, until the advent of helicopters made crashboats unnecessary, and the island had been declared surplus. And so the island remained unnoticed on a register of unwanted federal property until Kelly had managed to acquire a lease.
Pam leaned back on her blanket as they approached, basting in the warm sun beneath a thick coating of suntan lotion. She didn’t have a swimsuit, and wore only a bra and panties. It didn’t offend Kelly, but the impropriety of it was vaguely disturbing for no reason that stood up to logical analysis. In any case, his current job was driving his boat. Further contemplation of her body could wait, he told himself about every minute, when his eyes darted that way to make sure she was still there.
He eased the wheel farther to the right to pass well clear of a large fishing yacht. He gave Pam another look. She’d slipped the straps of her bra down off her shoulders for a more even tan. Kelly approved.
The sound startled both of them, rapid short blasts on the fishing boat’s diesel horns. Kelly’s head scanned all the way around, then centered on the boat that lay two hundred yards to port. It was the only thing close enough to be of concern, and also seemed to be the source of the noise. On the flying bridge a man was waving at him. Kelly turned to port to approach. He took his time bringing Springer alongside. Whoever this guy was, he wasn’t much of a boat handler, and when he brought his craft to a halt, twenty feet away, he kept his hand on the throttles.
“What’s the problem?” Kelly called over the loud-hailer.
“Lost our props!” a swarthy man hollered back. “What do we do?”
Row, Kelly almost replied, but that wasn’t very neighborly. He brought his boat closer in to survey the situation. It was a medium-sized fishing cruiser, a fairly recent Hatteras. The man on the bridge was about five-eight, fiftyish, and bare-chested except for a mat of dark hair. A woman was also visible, also rather downcast.
“No screws at all?” Kelly asked when they were closer.
“I think we hit a sandbar,” the man explained. “About half a mile that way.” He pointed to a place Kelly kept clear of.
“Sure enough, there’s one that way. I can give you a low if you want. You have good enough line for it?”
“Yes!” the man replied immediately. He went forward to his rope locker. The woman aboard continued to look embarrassed.
Kelly maneuvered clear for a moment, observing the other “captain,” a term his mind applied ironically. He couldn’t read charts. He didn’t know the proper way of attracting another boat’s attention. He didn’t even know how to call the Coast Guard. All he’d managed to do was buy a Hatteras yacht, and while that spoke well of his judgment, Kelly figured it had more likely come from a smart salesman. But then the man surprised Kelly. He handled his lines with skill and waved Springer in.
Kelly maneuvered his stern in close, then went aft to his well deck to take the towing line, which he secured to the big cleat on the transom. Pam was up and watching now. Kelly hustled back to the fly bridge and coaxed his throttle a crack.
“Get on your radio,” he told the Hatteras owner. “Leave your rudder amidships till I tell you different. Okay?”
“Got it.”
“Hope so,” Kelly whispered to himself, pushing the throttle levers until the towing line came taut.
“What happened to him?” Pam asked.
“People forget there’s a bottom under this water. You hit it hard enough and you break things.” He paused. “You might want to put some more clothes on.”
Pam giggled and went below. Kelly increased speed carefully to about four knots before starting the turn south. He’d done this all before, and grumbled that if he did it one more time he’d have special stationery printed up for the bills.
Kelly brought Springer alongside very slowly, mindful of the boat he was towing. He scurried off the bridge to drop his fenders, then jumped ashore to tie off a pair of spring lines before heading towards the Hatteras. The owner already had his mooring lines set up, and tossed them to Kelly on the quay while he set his fenders. Hauling the boat in a few feet was a good chance to show his muscles to Pam. It only took five minutes to get her snugged in, after which Kelly did the same with Springer.
“This is yours?”
“Sure enough,” Kelly replied. “Welcome to my sandbar.”
“Sam Rosen,” the man said, holding his hand out. He’d pulled a shirt on, and while he had a strong grip, Kelly noted that his hands were so soft as to be dainty.
“John Kelly.”
“My wife, Sarah.”
Kelly laughed. “You must be the navigator.”
Sarah was short, overweight, and her brown eyes wavered between amusement and embarrassment. “Somebody needs to thank you for your help,” she observed in a New York accent.
“A law of the sea, ma’am. What went wrong?”
“The chart shows six feet where we struck. This boat only takes four! And low tide was five hours ago!” the lady snapped. She wasn’t angry at Kelly, but he was the closest target, and her husband had already heard what she thought.
“Sandbar, it’s been building there from the storms we had last winter, but my charts show less than that. Besides, it’s a soft bottom.”
Pam came up just then, wearing clothing that was nearly respectable, and Kelly realized he didn’t know her last name.
“Hi, I’m Pam.”
“Y’all want to freshen up? We have all day to look at the problem.” There was general agreement on that point, and Kelly led them off to his home.
“What the hell is that?” Sam Rosen asked. “That” was one of the bunkers that had been built in 1943, two thousand square feet, with a roof fully three feet thick. The entire structure was reinforced concrete and was almost as sturdy as it looked. A second, smaller bunker lay beside it.
“This place used to belong to the Navy,” Kelly explained, “but I lease it now.”
“Nice dock they built for you,” Rosen noted.
“Not bad at all,” Kelly agreed. “Mind if I ask what you do?”
“Surgeon,” Rosen replied.
“Oh, yeah?” That explained the hands.
“Professor of surgery,” Sarah corrected. “But he can’t drive a boa
t worth a damn!”
“The goddamned charts were off!” the professor grumbled as Kelly led them inside. “Didn’t you hear?”
“People, that’s history now, and lunch and a beer will allow us to consider it in comfort.” Kelly surprised himself with his words. Just then his ears caught a sharp crack coming across the water from somewhere to the south. It was funny how sound carried across the water.
“What was that?” Sam Rosen had sharp ears, too.
“Probably some kid taking a muskrat with his .22,” Kelly judged. “It’s a pretty quiet neighborhood, except for that. In the fall it can get a little noisy around dawn—ducks and geese.”
“I can see the blinds. You hunt?”
“Not anymore,” Kelly replied.
Rosen looked at him with understanding, and Kelly decided to reevaluate him for a second time.
“How long?”
“Long enough. How’d you know?”
“Right after I finished residency, I made it to Iwo and Okinawa. Hospital ship.”
“Hmm, kamikaze time?”
Rosen nodded. “Yeah, lots of fun. What were you on?”
“Usually my belly,” Kelly answered with a grin.
“UDT? You look like a frogman,” Rosen said. “I had to fix a few of those.”
“Pretty much the same thing, but dumber.” Kelly dialed the combination lock and pulled the heavy steel door open.
The inside of the bunker surprised the visitors. When Kelly had taken possession of the place, it had been divided into three large, bare rooms by stout concrete walls, but now it looked almost like a house, with painted drywall and rugs. Even the ceiling was covered. The narrow view-slits were the only reminder of what it had once been. The furniture and rugs showed the influence of Patricia, but the current state of semiarray was evidence that only a man lived here now. Everything was neatly arranged, but not as a woman would do things. The Rosens also noted that it was the man of the house who led them to the “galley” and got things out of the old-fashioned refrigerator box while Pam wandered around a little wide-eyed.
“Nice and cool,” Sarah observed. “Damp in the winter, I bet.”
“Not as bad as you think.” Kelly pointed to the radiators around the perimeter of the room. “Steam heat. This place was built to government specifications. Everything works and everything cost too much.”
“How do you get a place like this?” Sam asked.
“A friend helped me get the lease. Surplus government property.”
“He must be some friend.” Sarah said, admiring the built-in refrigerator.
“Yes, he is.”
Vice Admiral Winslow Holland Maxwell, USN, had his office on the E-Ring of the Pentagon. It was an outside office, allowing him a fine view of Washington—and the demonstrators, he noted angrily to himself. Baby Killers! one placard read. There was even a North Vietnamese flag. The chanting, this Saturday morning, was distorted by the thick window glass. He could hear the cadence but not the words, and the former fighter pilot couldn’t decide which was more enraging.
“That isn’t good for you. Dutch.”
“Don’t I know it!” Maxwell grumbled.
“The freedom to do that is one of the things we defend,” Rear Admiral Casimir Podulski pointed out, not quite making that leap of faith despite his words. It was just a little too much. His son had died over Haiphong in an A-4 strike-fighter. The event had made the papers because of the young aviator’s parentage, and fully eleven anonymous telephone calls had come in the following week, some just laughing, some asking his tormented wife where the blotter was supposed to be shipped. “All those nice, peaceful, sensitive young people.”
“So why are you in such a great mood, Cas?”
“This one goes in the wall safe, Dutch.” Podulski handed over a heavy folder. Its edges were bordered in red-and-white-striped tape, and it bore the coded designator BOXWOOD GREEN.
“They’re going to let us play with it?” That was a surprise.
“It took me till oh-three-thirty, but yes. Just a few of us, though. We have authorization for a complete feasibility study.” Admiral Podulski settled into a deep leather chair and lit up a cigarette. His face was thinner since the death of his son, but the crystal-blue eyes burned as bright as ever.
“They’re going to let us go ahead and do the planning?” Maxwell and Podulski had worked towards that end for several months, never in any real expectation that they’d be allowed to pursue it.
“Who’d ever suspect us?” the Polish-born Admiral asked with an ironic look. “They want us to keep it off the books.”
“Jim Greer, too?” Dutch asked.
“Best intel guy I know, unless you’re hiding one somewhere.”
“He just started at CIA, I heard last week.” Maxwell warned.
“Good. We need a good spy, and his suit’s still blue, last time I checked.”
“We’re going to make enemies doing this, lots of ’em.”
Podulski gestured at the window and the noise. He hadn’t changed all that much since 1944 and USS Essex. “With all those a hundred feet away from us, what’ll a few more matter?”
“How long have you had the boat?” Kelly asked about halfway through his second beer. Lunch was rudimentary, cold cuts and bread supplemented by bottled beer.
“We bought it last October, but we’ve only been running it two months,” the doctor admitted. “But I took the Power Squadron courses, finished top in my class.” He was the sort who finished number one in nearly everything, Kelly figured.
“You’re a pretty good line-handler,” he observed, mainly to make the man feel better.
“Surgeons are pretty good with knots, too.”
“You a doc, too, ma’am?” Kelly asked Sarah.
“Pharmacologist. I also teach at Hopkins.”
“How long have you and your wife lived here?” Sam asked, and the conversation ground to an awkward halt.
“Oh, we just met,” Pam told them artlessly. Naturally enough it was Kelly who was the most embarrassed. The two physicians merely accepted the news as a matter of course, but Kelly worried that they’d see him as a man taking advantage of a young girl. The thoughts associated with his behavior seemed to race in circles around the inside of his skull until he realized that no one else seemed to care all that much.
“Let’s take a look at that propeller.” Kelly stood. “Come on.”
Rosen followed him out the door. The heat was building outside, and it was best to get things done quickly. The secondary bunker on the island housed Kelly’s workshop. He selected a couple of wrenches and wheeled a portable air compressor towards the door.
Two minutes later he had it sitting next to the doctor’s Hatteras and buckled a pair of weight belts around his waist.
“Anything I have to do?” Rosen asked.
Kelly shook his head as he stripped off his shirt. “Not really. If the compressor quits, I’ll know pretty quick, and I’ll only be down five feet or so.”
“I’ve never done that.” Rosen turned his surgeon’s eyes to Kelly’s torso, spotting three separate scars that a really good surgeon might have been skillful enough to conceal. Then he remembered that a combat surgeon didn’t always have the time for cosmetic work.
“I have, here and there,” Kelly told him on the way to the ladder.
“I believe it,” Rosen said quietly to himself.
Four minutes later, by Rosen’s watch, Kelly was climbing back up the ladder.
“Found your problem.” He set the remains of both props on the concrete dock.
“God! What did we hit?”
Kelly sat down for a moment to strip off the weights. It was all he could do not to laugh. “Water, doc, just water.”
“What?”
“Did you have the boat surveyed before you bought it?”
“Sure, the insurance company made me do that. I got the best buy around, he charged me a hundred bucks.”
“Oh, yeah? What deficiencies
did he give you?” Kelly stood back up and switched the compressor off.
“Practically nothing. He said there was something wrong with the sinks, and I had a plumber check it, but they were fine. I guess he had to say something for his money, right?”
“Sinks?”
“That’s what he told me over the phone. I have the written survey somewhere, but I took the information over the phone.”
“Zincs,” Kelly said, laughing. “Not sinks.”
“What?” Rosen was angry at not getting the joke.
“What destroyed your props was electrolysis. Galvanic reaction. It’s caused by having more than one kind of metal in saltwater, corrodes the metal. All the sandbar did was to scuff them off. They were already wrecked. Didn’t the Power Squadron tell you about that?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“But—you just learned something, Doctor Rosen.” Kelly held up the remains of the screw. The metal had the flaked consistency of a soda cracker. “This used to be bronze.”
“Damn!” The surgeon took the wreckage in his hand and picked off a waferlike fragment.
“The surveyor meant for you to replace the zinc anodes on the strut. What they do is to absorb the galvanic energy. You replace them every couple of years, and that protects the screws and rudder by remote control, like. I don’t know all the science of it, but I do know the effects, okay? Your rudder needs replacement, too, but it’s not an emergency. Sure as hell, you need two new screws.”
Rosen looked out at the water and swore. “Idiot.”
Kelly allowed himself a sympathetic laugh. “Doc, if that’s the biggest mistake you make this year, you’re a lucky man.”