Child of the Journey (41 page)

The Negress healer was huddled before him. She reached up to his chin, wiped away his sweat, licked her fingers.
"Kamadwa."

He lurched off the chair and grabbed it to fend her off as he might a circus tiger. A camera flash flared, and for an instant he experienced red blindness. When the color cleared, he saw Leni who was frantically changing bulbs.

"Kamadwa!"
The woman inched toward Erich and made a crabbing motion with her outstretched hand.
"Kamadwa mastna ha!"

"Get away from me!"

"Calm yourself, Herr Oberst Germantownman," Bruqah said. "She wants to drink your sweat only. She says she has seen your soul." Now he looked at Erich meaningfully. "A jackal's soul, she says."

T
he
Sogne
bellowed her position, plowing through the Cape's gray night and storming sea. A foghorn sounded as if in answer.

Jackal
, Erich thought, clinging to a handle on the wall of the darkened bridge.
You're goddamn right
.

He had been drinking heavily since Lüderitz, but he had always been a heavy drinker. However, unlike his papa, the sullen-drunk,
he
could handle it. When he got tight, he became...he tried to think for a moment.
Logical
. That was it. He would sit straight as an arrow on a stool and be Goddamn Logical. He might reel when he attempted to walk, but as long as he stayed in one place he was Goddamn Logical. Some of his best thinking had come at such times.

Javelin Man, Jungle Man, Jackal Man...Goddamn Logical Man
 
The foghorn seemed to sound it out. Fuck Hitler and Hempel and Papa and Dau. He was Goddamn Logical.

"She's closing, Sir," a seaman said as he shut the bridge's sliding door, muffling only slightly the bellowing of the foghorn and the shrieking of the wind. "Bearing south-southwest at twenty knots, as nearly as I can tell." The seaman shook the water off his listening-horn and set it down in the corner. It looked more like a megaphone than a listening device. One more thing to announce Jackal Man to the world, Erich thought.

"As nearly as you can tell?" Dau removed his pipe from his mouth and lifted a brow.

"Bearing south-southwest and twenty knots, Sir."

Dau smiled wryly, replaced the pipe, and flicked on a tiny light above the maps, which were covered with plastic and fastened down with gold screws. Sweat gleamed on his forehead. "Hold steady," he told the seaman at the helm. "We must appear to be just another freighter fighting a storm."

"Yes, Sir."

Clinging to the rail that bordered the instrument panel inside the darkened bridge, Erich looked over Dau's shoulder. The nautical maps meant little to him, but the oncoming ship, its horn increasingly loud despite the closed door, was an obvious danger. Almost certainly British. A destroyer of the
Hipper
class, the seaman had guessed.

Erich turned to stare again through the spray-washed windows at the windswept seas. I am not afraid, he assured himself. I am not drunk. I am Javelin Man. I am Jackal Man. I am Jungle Man. I am Goddamn Logical. Just seasick, is all. And...tense. It is logical to be tense in such a situation. Goddamn logical. How effective was a soldier, after all, without a little tension?

The scene outside was mesmerizing. Froth spilled across the decks with the ferocity of boarding pirates as the bow disappeared beneath the ocean. As the ship reared again, water cascaded off her sides to the dancing accompaniment of St. Elmo's Fire--balls of static electricity that glowed inside the fog and along the edges of the sea. Despite the transfer of supplies at Lüderitz, the
Sogne
remained heavy with oil and provisions for the
Graf Spee
and for the landing at Nosy Mangabéy. The weight slowed them down, yet did nothing to stabilize the ship against the storm that had the
Sogne
pitching like a canoe.

The seaman again opened the door and stuck the listening-horn outside.

"It's the Jews in the hold," Dau told Erich, having to nearly shout to be heard. "I
knew
they'd bring us ill luck. You must ready your guards to lighten the ship."

"The Jews caused the storm?"
Erich struggled to keep from laughing. "Aren't you according them too much power?"

"Every major power that's tolerated them since the Diaspora has been destroyed."

"Coincidence."

Dau shook his head. "History's no more random than the sea."

"I understand that storms like this are common off the Cape."

"So is calm. I've stood at Agulhas..." Dau sucked thoughtfully on his unlit pipe. "The southern tip of Africa isn't the Cape of Good Hope, you know. It's Cape Agulhas." He tapped his forefinger against the map. "That's where the Indian meets the Atlantic. I have been there on calm days when there is a perfectly straight line of foam between the two oceans, all the way to the horizon. Uncanny. Makes a man believe in God."

He put his hand on the map. "Care to see where God held the world while He shaped it? Here is the imprint of His thumb." With his pipe stem Dau pointed toward where his own left thumb was, in the gap separating Java and western Australia. "Here, between Burma and India, see the index finger? And here," he indicated the Arabian Sea and the coast of Somalia, "is the impression of His other fingers." He poked Erich gently in the chest with the pipe stem, and smiled. "An old sea dog's musings."

"Instructions, Sir," the seaman asked, shutting the door.

"Maintain course." Dau turned to Erich, his face hardened. "Have the Jews shackled and brought topside, Herr Oberst."

They go overboard over my dead body, Erich thought, but instead of arguing--Goddamn Illogical to argue with an asshole like that--he went below, staggering toward the stairs that led to the maze of corridors and the hold. Slamming against the walls, he lurched up the hall and down the steps, until he found his way to the windlass room.

The trainers were there, seated cross-legged on the floor like a bunch of Indians from an American cowboy film, holding or grooming their charges. The dogs lifted their heads when Erich entered, but other than cursory glances the trainers paid him little heed.

To keep from falling down in front of them, he held onto the handrail, which ran around the room like a ballet barre, but pretended to hold it nonchalantly, as if he did not need its assistance, even in the storm. At his feet, Müller vomited into his puke bucket and went back to ministering to Aquarius, apparently not giving his own seasickness a second thought.

The atmosphere was sullen, sullen as Papa at his sherry. At first Erich could not understand why, or why they continued to ignore him. Then it came to him: all of the trainers had been there during the worst of the storm, tending to their animals. All except Krayller, of course. And him. The only dogs' cages not open were Taurus' and the wolfhound's. Maybe he
had
been drinking a little too much, thanks to that goddamn Dau, always beckoning him to the bridge. Except Dau had not called him up there this time. Or had he?

Erich couldn't quite remember.

He unlatched Taurus' door. She slowly padded out, and lay down again. He sat beside her and maneuvered her head across his lap. Borrowing a rag from Fermi, the little wire-haired trainer he had nicknamed after the Italian physicist, he removed the lid from the water bucket, dipped the rag, and began washing her. Her coat was stiff with vomit.

His own stomach clenched. He wanted desperately to throw up, and, with equal desperation, wanted not to do so in front of the men. It was the usual problem: if he opened his mind to the dog, he would feel her joy...and pain; if the dog were in pain, he had difficulty keeping his mind closed.

"The wolfhound's trainer hasn't been here?" he asked, as usual avoiding using either the man's or the dog's name. He had been forced to allow them into the unit, but he refused to
absorb
them into it. They would remain outsiders until he could rid himself of them.

"Franz comes down fairly often," one of the trainers mumbled.

"Franz? I thought the trainer was--"

"It is the corpsman," another said. "He's the only one of those bastards you can trust. Sturmbannführer Hempel's
man
," the trainer seemed to choke on the word, "hardly ever shows his face around here."

Erich looked at the wolfhound, so sick its muzzle lay in a puddle of bile, and felt like shuddering. Keep your mind closed, he told himself, remembering suddenly what had brought him down here.

He patted Taurus, who responded to the affection by attempting to lick his hand, then he stood up, this time unashamedly holding onto the rail. "Zodiac," he said.

The men continued their grooming.

"Zodiac," he repeated, with greater emphasis. One by one they looked up at him, their faces registering shock that he was serious about the command.

"
Now
?" Holten-Pflug asked, his face so white that even seasickness could not account for the pallor.

"Impossible...Sir," Fermi said. "The dogs are too sick."

Perhaps, Erich thought, he had trained his trainers too well. The need to question orders, if the dogs' welfare were at stake, had been a top priority with him, though such preaching had gone against everything he had been taught--if not everything upon which the entire German army and the very character of the country was built.

Dau's earlier words, though, overrode all other considerations:
You must ready your guards to lighten the ship. Have the Jews shackled and brought topside
."

The order, not meant to be questioned, was insanity. They were
his
goddamn Jews, and no goddamn sea captain with barnacles for brains was going to tell him what to do with them.

"Not a complete Zodiac," he told the men, backing off his original intention. "You go outside the door. I'll see if the dogs take their respective positions."

Reluctantly, the trainers patted their charges, rose to their feet, and filed out.

He would not, Erich decided, use Zodiac unless Dau pushed him to the wall regarding the Jews-overboard issue. He had no intention of obeying that order; it was merely a matter of how far he would go in disobeying it. Zodiac protected, insured him against Dau. The strategy divided a field of battle into a clock, with each of the twelve shepherds securing the position respective to its name. The wolfhound, occupying what had been Grog the affenpinscher's position was the hub, the center of the wheel.

If he thought of the ship as that wheel, the dogs could attack its various parts should Dau insist on carrying out his insane order regarding the Jews. Or, Erich decided, he could call only the bridge the wheel--appropriate, after all--and have the shepherds attach there.
If
they were not too sick to respond at all.

There was only one way he could balance the illness. He must open his mind to them. Not just to Taurus, whose lead they would follow. To all of them. Given the situation, they would need the emotional wherewithal he could provide.

He was Jackal Man. He was one of them.

He gripped the rail and opened his mind, sending out what strength he had left. The dogs resisted. Pathetic, he thought. Pathetic. Like even the best of soldiers under the best of conditions, they needed kick-starting; a kick in the butt.

The dogs stood and shook themselves, as if determined to throw off the seasickness. Erich's stomach roiled. His mind pitched harder than the ship.

Rather than moving to their positions on the imaginary clock, the dogs remained in the middle of the room, close to one another as if for comfort, and looking back at the cages.

Erich concentrated harder, so hard that it was all he could do to maintain his grip on the rail.

The dogs, Taurus among them, turned their heads and looked at the cages as if for guidance.

No, not cage
s
, Erich realized.
Cage
.

They were watching the wolfhound, which had gained its feet.

Erich recognized his error. The dogs were waiting for a signal. They followed Taurus' lead--absorbed Erich's commands through her. But the unit operated as a unit first, single-minded in its purpose, and the hub was its center, its headquarters. A spoken command went to the unit's center; a mental command went to Taurus--and likewise to the unit's center. Grog, by far the smallest of the dogs, had had final approval of all human commands, but had been loyal almost to a fault, forever happy to please.

The wolfhound had loyalty to none but itself.

The realization, combined with the dogs' seasickness, so wrenched Erich that he lost his grip and collapsed against the wall. Pain shot through his shoulder socket.

The door opened.

"You're not to!--" Erich started to say to whichever trainer dared enter before the exercise was over, but it was Otto Hempel who stepped inside.

"Captain Dau sent me down to see how you're progressing with the Jews," he said. "I had some of my men start bringing the cargo out into the ladder well, for easier shackling." He smiled slyly. "Not that you wouldn't have done it yourself."

Erich crowded by Hempel and, shoving past the trainers who were waiting to return to the dogs, went hand-over-hand along the corridor rail. The light from the nearest ladder revealed Jews huddled in the well, looking up as if both wanting to climb, and being petrified to do so. He squinted down against the dimness, but could not see Solomon.