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Rio spins, tries to see who is yelling, tries to spot the plane, head swiveling, Jenou now doing the same. The coxswain hits a klaxon, which echoes across the water and then points in big choppy arm motions toward a sort of black X outlined against a falling afternoon sun.
“Is it coming or going?” Jillion Magraff cries.
“Can’t tell.”
“I think it’s going . . . wait,” Jenou says.
“Shit! It’s coming! It’s coming!” Kerwin yells.
One of the sailors hops onto the machine gun mounted beside the conn, tears off the protective canvas cover, and racks in a belt of ammo.
Cole says, “Everyone down, stay down!”
Rio can hear it now, a high-pitched insect whine.
“Could be one of ours,” she says.
“Could be,” Cole says, “but don’t count on it. Get down. Take cover.”
The plane roars overhead, and there, plain as day, are the black crosses of the Luftwaffe. As it zooms past every machine gun opens up, crisscrossing its wake, missing to the left, missing to the right.
Taka-taka-taka-taka-taka!
Everyone is on their feet now, eyes straining, tentative, praying, shouting impotent threats, shaking irrelevant fists.
The plane is in view for several long minutes, but it does not return. Instead it arcs away to the east again, toward Sicily.
Sergeant Garaman is beside Cole, both men keeping their eyes on the retreating plane.
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p; “Well, they’ve spotted us.”
“That they have.”
“Loot’s not turning back, I don’t suppose,” Cole said.
“I reckon not,” Garaman says. “Not and be called out as a weak sister.”
Rio scans until she spots the British captain’s boat. There is no sign it is turning from its course.
“One hell of a secret mission we got here,” Garaman says. “That Nazi bastard either sends a fighter back after us or radios ahead to the beach.”
“I’ll take a fight on the beach over getting sunk and shot up in the water,” Cole says sourly.
“Six of one.”
The British captain’s boat surges to the front of the pack, and with hand gestures he indicates that everyone is to follow him. He changes course, then gathers speed, back up to the craft’s maximum of nine knots, but not toward home, rather heading northwest toward a peninsula.
“What in hell is he about?” Kerwin wonders aloud.
Sergeant Cole answers. “He figures the Krauts have our course. Figures Jerry pilot radios back to Sicily, they get a plane up in the air in ten minutes, takes that plane maybe half an hour, forty-five minutes to get airborne and cover the hundred and fifty or so miles to where he can intercept our course. So we got half an hour, maybe a bit more, to see if we can’t throw him off the scent.”
“The sun goes down in ninety minutes, after that we’ll be hard to see. So . . .” Garaman shrugs. “He’s got at best thirty minutes on target to find us again.”
As it happens, if a second plane has been launched to locate and destroy them, they never see it. Eyes strain to catch any sight of a plane, and it is a very hard hour, an hour of nervous chatter and whispered prayers, but when darkness falls, the boats turn back south, moving again at safer speed, but now hours behind schedule.
“They’ll be waiting for us when we land,” Tilo says nervously.
