Splashing, splashing. A hand grasped his elbow and pulled.
Jim cried out, “Udell! Hadley!”
“Here.” Hadley’s voice came out weak beside him.
“This one first.” Jim shrugged off the hand grabbing him and used his last ounce of strength to swing Udell to the life raft. “Get him.”
The men on the raft hauled Udell up inside, then Hadley, then Jim. Like a flopping, dying fish, he lay on the netting, his back in the water, gulping giant frigid breaths.
He watched the scene from a distance, like a play on stage. The Negro sailors on the raft, paddling to the destroyer. A litter being lowered by a line, Homer Udell being rolled inside, strapped in place, and hauled to the destroyer’s deck. The lines looped around Hadley’s waist, around Jim’s waist, the two flopping fish caught and cast onto the shore of the deck.
Men descended on him, tore off his clothes, all of them, scaling him like the dead fish he was. Somehow he felt warmer naked, then someone threw a blanket around him, and someone else tipped back his chin and forced a cup of rum down his throat, hot, burning, making him cough, making him vomit seawater and fuel oil. Then more rum came down, warm and woozy.
He liked the rum, liked the blanket, liked the warmth.
“These two are fine,” a gravelly voice said, an unfamiliar voice. “Get ’em down to the wardroom to warm up.”
Two men pulled him to standing. Jim’s knees buckled, but he caught himself, forced his granite legs to walk, his naked legs.
How could he go to the wardroom? There was a protocol for how an officer dressed in the wardroom, and Jim found himself giggling like a girl, shaking, laughing at his hairy naked legs. “I’m not dressed for dinner.”
“Told you. He’s fine.”
“Sounds loopy to me.” The men helped Jim forward, down the hatch, down the passageway, and into the wardroom.
Half the room was set up like a medical ward. Homer Udell lay on a table with pharmacist’s mates working on him, and other men lay on cots receiving first aid. The rest of the room was filled with men wrapped in blankets, familiar faces.
“Jim!” Arch grasped him in a bear hug. “Jim, old boy.”
Thank God his friend made it. “You’re not dressed for dinner either.”
Arch burst out laughing. “Neither is Durant, so we’re all right.”
“I have to sit.” Jim’s legs gave way, and he sat on the deck and arranged the blanket around his legs.
Arch sat next to him, then Mitch Hadley.
“Hadley, my buddy.” Jim reached his hand out of the blanket and shook the man’s hand. “Glad you made it.”
Hadley shook his head, his wet dark hair sticking up in all directions. “Blacked out at the last minute. Don’t remember coming on board.”
“But here we are.”
“Yes, here we are.”
“There you are.” Lt. Cdr. Calvin Durant glowered down at Jim.
He would have looked more formidable if he weren’t dressed in nothing but a blanket with his hair sticking out like angel wings on either side of his balding head.
Jim saluted with his free arm. “Ensign James Avery, reporting for my court-martial.”
“I ought to, you know.” Durant’s glare didn’t dim. “I ought to have you keelhauled, run up the yardarm, and flogged for good measure.”
“I agree, sir.” Jim tucked his shivering arm back inside the cozy blanket. “But first, tell me how many of the men survived. Udell? Is he going to make it?”
The captain gazed at the operating table. “They’re amputating both feet, but he should survive.”
“And the others?” Jim glanced around, saw Mack Gillis, Hank.
