The Saboteurs (Men at War 5)

Especially when the train station down the street from the store gets hit, too.

Inside the terminal, half a dozen Dallas policemen watched the people walk through.

He saw a freestanding sign that read TO TRAINS and had an arrow with U.S.O. above it. He snugged his hat down on his head, and as he headed for the sign he heard the keening of fire-engine sirens down the street. Three of the cops went running out the door.

He looked at his Hamilton and shook his head in disgust.

Only thirty minutes.

[ ONE ]

Pier 10

Fulton Fish Market

New York City, New York

2025 6 March 1943

Dick Canidy stood on the dock on the East River and watched the taillights of the taxicab with the fishmonger at the wheel disappear into the distance.

He sniffed, then groaned.

Jesus, that’s raw.

The massive timbers of the dock reeked of dead fish, despite the cold temperatures, and this was on top of the heavy odor of diesel fuel that over the years had been spilled and then soaked into the wood. He idly wondered how bad the assault on the senses must be in the summer heat.

Canidy saw that the dock had piers about fifty yards long jutting into the river, most with boats moored to them, and longshoremen on and around the boats.

He looked at the activity out at the end of the wooden finger with the PIER 10 sign. He could make out the shapes of the cargo truck and the big boat there but not much detail.

There was light shining from across the river—from the Brooklyn Terminal, where a line of Liberty ships was being loaded—but there were almost no lights here on the dock and those few that were burning had been masked or otherwise dimmed. Even the Brooklyn Bridge looming in the distance was mostly darkened.

There was of course a reason for this. It had been almost a year since the order had come—in April 1942, as the vicious U-boat attacks off the East Coast continued to escalate—for all unnecessary lighting on the New York waterfront to be turned out.

The wind gusted, and Canidy buttoned up his jacket, then pulled the woolen knit cap from his pocket and pulled it on his head, grateful that he now was dressed for the winter woods of Maine, or at least the New York City equivalent.

As he moved toward the boat, he began to pick out details. What from the distance had been a great bulk of rusty black-painted steel hull rising from the river now had rigging and winches and cables and crew—and a name.

ANNIE was painted in tall, white block lettering high on the black bow.

She was an ocean fishing vessel. Three-quarters of her seventy-foot length, from the stern to just shy of the white pilothouse on the bow, formed a large, flat, open working area with heavy-duty fishing equipment for long-lining (running out miles of baited hooks for hours at a time) and a series of hatches above deep cargo holds. A steel mast towered behind the pilothouse, and its boom, controlled by a series of steel cables, reached from the foot of the tower almost to the back of the boat.

Canidy stopped beside the cargo truck and watched as a guy in a thick, dark woolen sweater and black rubber overalls operated levers that were connected to the winches that moved the boom.

The boom was in the process of lifting a crate—Canidy could now see that it held the iced-down carcasses of large billfish and sharks—from one of the ship holds. Two other men were standing on the back of the cargo truck, waiting to guide the crate onto a stack of other crates already there.

“Watch it, there!” the taller of the two guys on the truck called out

to Canidy.

Canidy turned and looked at him.

“That crate’s gonna swing right over your head,” the guy went on, “and you really don’t want to be there when it does.”

Canidy looked at the crate hanging from the boom cable and saw that a steady stream of what looked like water flowed from its lowest corner. He then took a closer look at the crates on the truck; they were dripping wet, and a slimy liquid ran in rivulets from them, down the truck bed, then drained onto the dock and through the cracks between timber, making, he thought, as it hit the river, a sound similar to the taking of a massive leak.

He stepped back some twenty feet, what he thought was a sufficient distance, and now stood next to the gangplank that led aboard the Annie. From there, he watched the crate swing right over where he had been standing—leaving a very wet trail as it went—and then with a different whine from the winch, be lowered to the truck, where the two men manhandled it into place on a stack of other crates before the cable went slack.