Wreckers' Key (36 page)

God, how she missed him. After all these months, she thought of him almost daily. Even the steady morning rain outside the café window reminded her of the falling ash.
 
Down in the islands, it had covered everything – been impossible to wash away. It had blanketed her boat’s decks, clogged her nostrils, turned her sails gray.
 

But that was more than six months ago. Now she was back in France, in Normandy, watching as another shower battered the awning in front of the café where she sipped from a soup-sized bowl of
café au lait
, thinking of all the dead – and tasting ash.
 

Tossing some euros onto the table, she abandoned her coffee and pushed back her chair. She pulled on her yellow foul weather jacket. The rain had stopped abruptly so, when she reached the sidewalk, she left her hood down and glanced up at the gray sky. A last fat raindrop caught her in the eye. She brushed the back of her hand across her wet cheek. Not today. No tears.

From behind, someone grabbed her arm. Her fists flew up as she spun around, then she yanked her arm out of the grip of that hard hand. Adrenaline shot through her system and her pulse roared in her ears. The man in the black slicker and ball cap stood behind her. He grunted and held a cardboard sign in front of his chest. Words scrawled in black marker stated that he was both deaf and dumb, a veteran of
la guerre l’Indochine
.
 

 
She lowered her hands and examined him. His face was partially covered by wraparound sunglasses. Was he blind as well? Scraggly whiskers framed his yellow teeth, and beneath the slicker she saw layers of torn and dirty clothes. He bent down and picked up a crutch; his left leg was wrapped in bandages. Long strands of wet gray hair trailed out from under his cap. Riley inhaled a whiff of day-old garbage, and she saw the look of disgust on her own face reflected in the large mirrored lenses. He reached out a grimy hand, offering her one of several small brown paper bags of roasted chestnuts.

He
had
been watching her — but only because she was a tourist, a likely mark.
 

She swallowed the sour taste in her throat and dug into her bag. He was a soldier. Or had been. Like her. She placed a ten euro note in his palm and his fingers closed around hers.
 

All the nerve endings in her fingers lit up as his hot flesh squeezed her hand tight. Her heart ricocheted in her chest as she tried to pull free, and she felt the flush travel from her hand to her face. She gulped several shallow breaths. What was going on? The Marine Corps had trained her not to react, to be a stone-faced sentry, and she’d been damn good at it.
 

Then he pulled her fingers open and started to place the brown bag in her hand. She yanked her hand free. Waving off the bag, she backed away. Not certain if he could see her, she mumbled, “
Non, non
.”
 

She turned and started walking.

The man hobbled after her, grunting with insistence. He shook the brown paper, and she heard the sound of the nuts clicking together. She saw that she would have to take the bag to make him leave her alone.

“
Merci
,” she said as she stuffed the paper bag into the pocket of her rain jacket, careful not to touch him again. She turned and marched down the street, not knowing where she was going, but only that she had to get away.

When she’d put enough distance between herself and the old man, she stopped and leaned against the wet stones of a small church. What was that about? Her reaction hadn’t been fright – but what was it?

Thinking about the past was making her jittery. But that was why she was there. Riley pulled out the small map the hotel concierge had given her. She found her way to the yacht basin, circled the marina to the outer jetty.
 

It was important to arrive first. She didn’t know what she’d say to him, but she wanted to have a chance to see the meeting place and to think.
 

From the sea, the
Surcouf
memorial was designed to look like a submarine’s periscope. The large bronze plaque on the face of the monument had weathered so green from battling years of sea spray, it was difficult to read. Riley ran her fingers over the names of the dead.
Speak to me
. She listened for their voices on the gusting North Atlantic wind but heard nothing aside from the
whoosh
of the waves breaking on the jetty and the cries of the gulls swooping behind a fishing boat chugging out to sea. Just because her brother Michael spoke to her on occasion, it didn’t mean all the dead would.
 

So many names. There were one hundred and thirty of them.
 
LAMOREAUX - CLAIRMONT - MICHAUT - GOHIN, and on and on, including the three British Royal Navy men: MCKAY - MULLINS - WOOLSEY. Column after column like the stark white crosses in a military cemetery.
 
But each name had once been a living, breathing man — a son, a brother, a father.
 

The blustery wind whipped her cotton skirt against her legs, and she tried in vain to keep the stray wisps of hair from blowing into her mouth as she read aloud:

Aux morts

du

Sous-marin Surcouf

Le Surcouf construit et lancé a Cherbourg le 18 octobre, 1929

Disparu en mer le 18 fevrier, 1942 sous le commandement du Capitaine Alain Lamoreaux

The big boat had fled France before the Nazi occupation, assisted Allied convoys in the Atlantic, and finally, left Bermuda bound for Panama just weeks after Pearl Harbor. But she never arrived.

Disparu.
But what disappears
can
sometimes be found. They’d proved that. Riley remembered watching the clear green water, the odd, colorless fish, and feeling the eerie stillness in
Shadow Chaser
’s wheelhouse as they all crowded around the small video screen while Theo steered the remotely operated vehicle into the coral-encrusted hold.
 

Closing her eyes, she tried to banish the images that replayed in her memory like some kind of Mobius filmstrip. She felt her face crumpling but she fought it off, because damn it all, it still hurt too much to see that last image of Cole Thatcher, his mouth grinning impossibly around his scuba regulator, his eyes seeming to look right into hers through the face mask, lens, camera, cable.
 

Like the screen they had been watching that day, she tried to make her mind go blank. Now you see him, now you don’t.
Disparu en mer.

She swallowed hard. No tears.

When it was over, when the searchers had given up, and all but two bodies had been collected, she learned that what disappears cannot always be found. Ashes to ashes.
 

After everything that had happened these past six months, only a few words had drawn her back here to France. She came because this was the birthplace of the submarine that had once been Cole’s love, his passion. Riley came to see the memorial for herself and because she was tired of looking back over her shoulder all the time. She checked her watch for the hundredth time. But most of all, she thought as she gazed back down the pier, she had come to this sea-swept jetty because it was the perfect place for a reunion.

CHAPTER ONE

Royal Naval Dockyard

Ireland Island, Bermuda
 

February 12, 1942

Lieutenant Gerald Woolsey shuffled down the quay, his head bent into the chill wind, his thick arms hugging the wooden crate to his chest as if in a passionate embrace.
 
He had no desire to find out what might happen if he dropped the thing — he was no expert with explosives. Likely wind up nothing more than a red stain, and while that was happening to the rest of his countrymen with a gruesome regularity, he was determined to survive this war. His kind generally did.
 

He stopped and hiked the crate up, lifting the weight of it with his thigh, trying to improve his grip on the rough wood planks.
 

He was counting on the fact that the French sentries aboard the submarine had been doing a lousy job ever since he and the other two Brits, McKay and Mullins, had come aboard. His fellow Brits were a telegraphist and signalman, and Woolsey was the BNLO, British Navy Liaison Officer, assigned to serve aboard the Free French sub because God knows, you couldn’t exactly trust the Frogs with the Allied naval code books these days, not even these Free French sailors who claimed allegiance to De Gaulle instead of Admiral Darlan. Free French or not, this crew didn’t like the English one bit. But then, the feeling was mutual on that count.
 

Most of the time, when he boarded the sub, the sentry, if there was one, merely gave him that Gallic look of disdain they all managed so well.

As he closed in on the massive boat, Woolsey thought again that she looked a good bit better from afar than she did on closer inspection. Her tall conning tower and topsides were painted the same color as the low threatening sky, but her bulbous forward gun turret and aft hangar made her appear almost comical — like she sported some sort of sausage with a tumor. The French had named her
Surcouf
– after an eighteenth century privateer, Robert Surcouf. There were those who referred to her as the “Pride of the French Navy,” but they tended to be either Frogs or politicians. They didn’t know that at 361 feet and 3250 tons, she was the biggest white elephant on the sea.
 

When they’d assigned him to this boat, his superiors had assured him
Surcouf
was the first of a new class of radically different submarines, an underwater cruiser with her twin eight-inch guns in that waterproof turret, antiaircraft cannons, machine guns, twelve torpedo tubes, and a hangar with her own reconnaissance seaplane. But the truth was, she’d been plagued with bloody French design flaws from the first — even before he came aboard. Everything from her electric motors with faulty armatures, to the batteries spilling sulphuric acid nearly poisoning all the crew, to the hydroplanes that struggled to keep her from rolling when she dove — all had kept this sub returning to shipyards from Portsmouth to Halifax. Though first launched in 1929, she had yet to fire her guns in battle, and the Allies were bloody tired of paying the tab to keep her afloat. Given the number of ships lost to the U-boats the last couple of months, who’d notice one more?

As he approached the dark hull, Woolsey nodded to the sentry who, for the first time he could remember, was standing at the base of the gangplank.
 
He tried to will the hands that gripped the crate to look relaxed, yet still hold tight.
Just a box of radio equipment,
he had told the captain before he left that morning on the launch to Hamilton to go to pick it up. A radio with new frequencies the Germans weren’t on to yet. He’d tried to sound like he knew what he was talking about, all the while being vague enough not to arouse suspicion.

“So long as you are back aboard by this afternoon,” Captain Lamoreaux had told him. They were to sail for Panama on the tide that evening. So he’d promised to shake a leg to make it back to the boat in time. Woolsey smiled at the thought. The captain wanted to make certain he returned to the boat. The fool.

The sentry’s jersey was wrinkled and stained with what looked like coffee, and the red pompom on his cap hung loose by a thread. A cigarette dangled from a corner of the man’s mouth. He glanced at the crate Woolsey carried, but he made no move either to question him or to offer assistance.
 

What was the point of keeping a sentry if the bloke was too lazy to even have a look at a crate of equipment coming aboard? Blithering idiots, the French. They deserved what was coming.

Once on board, Woolsey made his way through the hangar and down one deck to the signal room. He was surprised to discover both the companionways and the radio room were empty. He encountered only one man who opened a door a crack, widened his eyes, then clanged the door shut. The giant sub seemed strangely quiet apart from the constant hum of her generators and fans. Woolsey stepped over the coaming into the cramped compartment, set the crate on the floor and slid the metal door closed behind him.

He leaned against the door for a moment. God, he’d be glad to get away from this stink. Sweat, those damned French cigarettes, and the ever-present smell of diesel fuel combined in a pervasive stench they could no longer wash out of his clothes.

Taking his sailor’s rigging knife from his pocket, he knelt on the deck next to the crate and pried up first one of the wooden slats, then another. The device looked just as lethal as they had told him it would — all tubes and wires on the side of a black box. Carefully, he lifted out the timing pencil detonator and crushed the copper end under the heel of his boot as instructed. This, they’d told him, would release the cupric acid that would then eat through the wire holding back the striker.
 

“You’ll want to get out of there fast as you can,” the chap had said when he showed him how to arm it. “We design them to go off in twenty-four hours, but explosives are funny, ya’ know? They sometimes have a mind of their own.”

Woolsey hadn’t said so aloud, but he didn’t see how blowing oneself to bloody bits could be considered funny.

Twenty-four hours. He consulted his wristwatch. It was half past four. Assuming they did sail in two hours as the captain had promised, that would still leave plenty of time for the massive sub to get well away from the island and other prying eyes. She would be out where they measured the depth in miles instead of fathoms when she disappeared.
 

Without him. Woolsey had no intention of being aboard when
Surcouf
took off on her final voyage.

He tucked everything back in place, not wanting to touch it now any more than he had to. Once he replaced the staves, the crate looked untouched. He stood and folded the blade back into his knife, noticing his palms were wet with sweat. The only one among the French crew who ever ventured in here now was Henri Michaut, their signalman and interpreter, a wiry, scrappy little chap from Normandy. Mullins had nicknamed the man Kewpie because he had a strawberry birthmark on his right cheek in the shape of a heart. Woolsey left a note for Michaut and the two Brits warning them not to touch the crate, that it was fragile radio equipment.