“Not bad for your first time, Mr. Avery.” Durant clasped his hands behind his back.
“Thank you, sir.” Jim squared his cover back on his head. “That was fun.”
“Glad to see you can take Reinhardt’s place if he’s officer of the deck.”
Or if Reinhardt became a battle casualty. Every man needed to know more than one job in case of emergency. “Will I get another chance to practice, sir?”
“We’ll see. We don’t have a lot of target projectiles, but we plan to use them all before we return to Boston.”
“Good.” They’d have to make more room for live ammunition anyway. Next time they put out to sea, they’d escort a convoy across the North Atlantic, protecting merchant ships and scouting for U-boats.
Jim headed down to the wardroom to complete his paperwork.Lord, make me ready.
18
Boston
Friday, August 8, 1941
If only she could catch a breeze. Mary tipped up her face into the muggy air but found no relief. After she fanned herself with her notebook, she crossed a catwalk and stepped down to the main deck of a destroyer under construction.
A giant crane lowered a section of the superstructure into position as men guided it with ropes.
Mary kept her distance and made her way toward the stern of the ship, where she thought she’d spied Frank Fiske.
“Joe DiMaggio, he’s my man,” said a worker—Al Klingman—coiling a cable around his bent arm. “Fifty-six-game hitting streak. Beat that.”
Ira Kaplan socked Klingman on the shoulder. “Ah, go back to Brooklyn where you belong, old man. You’re in Boston now, and Lefty Grove got his three-hundredth win.”
Morton Anders swept up a pile of metal shavings. “And Ted Williams is batting over .400. I’d put my money on him over DiMaggio any day.”
Mary shaded her eyes from the sunshine and gazed around the deck.
“Hiya, Miss Stirling,” Kaplan said. “Looking for Fiske?”
“I am. Have you—” Mary gasped. A green-and-yellow bruise surrounded Ira Kaplan’s eye, and a bandage covered his chin. “My goodness. What happened?”
The friendly smile fled, and his gaze dropped to the side. “Got jumped last weekend by some thugs in brown shirts.”
Anders cussed, then sent Mary an apologetic look and ran his hand into blond curls at the nape of his neck. “Bunch of good-for-nothing German-American Bund boys.”
Mary’s stomach twisted. “Oh dear. I’m so sorry.”
“They beat up this young man. Today’s his first day back, been out all week.” Klingman set a protective hand on Kaplan’s shoulder. “Want to know what else they did?”
Kaplan shrugged off the older man’s grip. “Come on. That’s enough.”
“No. People need to know.” Under wiry dark brows, Klingman’s brown eyes pierced more than any tool on the deck.
“What happened?” Mary asked.
Anders’s round face turned stormy. “I’ll tell you. Those swine left him for dead and threw pamphlets on top of him. Pamphlets about how America should support Germany. How the Jews are ripping apart our country, driving us to war. How Christians should unite—”
“Enough.” Kaplan stuck out one hand and walked away.
Anders called after him. “I go to mass every Sunday, and I think those pamphlets are a bunch of stinking lies.”
Mary pressed her free hand to her roiling stomach. How could some Christians forget their own Savior was Jewish? “I’m so sorry.”
