‘What do you mean, a bullet?’ It was impossible that Olive meant a round from a German aircraft gun. One would have gone right through Nigel and probably killed him. The smashed piece of metal Olive held in the forceps wasn’t any bigger than a button.
Olive took the so-called bullet over to the sink and washed it off, then handed it to me, still secure in the forceps. I peered at it under the light that hung over the gurney. It was an actual bullet, all right – deformed, but still identifiable as such.
The meaning of this tiny bit of metal sank in. On a civilian cargo ship, such as the Amelia Earhart, operated by the merchant marine, no one was armed except the members of the Navy Armed Guard. The gunners were in the military; the seamen weren’t. The Armed Guard manned the artillery and wore sidearms to be used in case the ship was boarded by the enemy. During an attack from the air, no gunner would have reason to use his sidearm. On this trip I only saw sidearms drawn when the gunners practiced shooting at a target buoy tossed into the sea.
I saw from Olive’s expression that she was thinking the same thing. Someone had shot Nigel in the back during the chaos of the air attack.
Olive rummaged around in a drawer and found a vial she handed over to me. ‘Keep the bullet in there. We’ll need to show it to the master after things settle down.’ I secured the bit of metal in the vial and then tucked it into my bra. I had no intention of losing it. This bullet should prove to the master once and for all that there was a murderer on the Amelia Earhart.
Our two assistants, the seamen who’d help carry Oleson’s stretcher and the one who’d escorted the blood donor, returned just in time to prevent Olive and me from having to carry Nigel to a bunk somewhere.
‘The pharmacist’s mate sent me to tell you that he’s got Oleson tucked up in a bunk near the galley, and he ain’t dead yet,’ one of the seaman said. ‘He wanted to know if you thought the other guy could get on to the top bunk? That way he could watch them both.’
Two bunks near the galley – that must be Grace’s empty berth.
Nigel was sleeping like a baby from the effects of the morphine.
‘I think so. Just be careful getting him up there,’ Olive said. ‘Tell the mate I’ll come relieve him soon.’
Olive and I were left to clean up the bloody sheets and clothes and wash the used surgical instruments in the first-aid room.
The Amelia Earhart was full of holes, but none of her wounds were mortal. Two days after the air attack, the master, Popeye and the chief engineer agreed she was seaworthy and could continue on course. First stop, Londonderry, where we would drop off Ronan, and then to Liverpool.
Ten of our seamen wouldn’t be going on with us. One of them was seventeen years old. We gathered for their burial service and then all ten bodies were tipped into the cold sea. There were more dead from the three cargo ships and the sloop that were sunk by the Germans, but many of their crewmembers survived. The bodies of the dead and dozens of cold survivors were picked up by launches from the destroyers. We didn’t know the exact number of the dead, but we could see white-shrouded bodies falling into the sea, like leaves falling in autumn, from the Evans during the burial service that took place shortly after ours.
Since the destroyers’ infirmaries were packed, Mike Oleson and Nigel remained on our ship, cared for by the pharmacist’s mate, Olive and me. Oleson would live – in fact, he was sitting up and slurping soup. Nigel complained about having to spend his days on his stomach. I rounded up some Western paperbacks to help him pass the time.
The trash on the deck was slowly cleared away. Seamen with acetylene torches dismembered the collapsed cargo winch and threw the metal remains into the ocean. When the cargo winch fell, it took the radio antenna with it, but Sparks was able to rig a replacement.
The vehicles we were transporting didn’t escape damage. The collapsing winch dented jeeps and trucks parked under them. The German strafing left scars on others, including the locomotive. The whole ship was pockmarked like a smallpox survivor. Engineers patched a few holes in the hull. But the tear in the deck didn’t expand, thank goodness. It looked as if we would get to Liverpool in one piece. The chief engineer believed that much of the damage could be repaired once we docked.
We casual passengers, with the exception of Olive, who was busy caring for Nigel and Oleson and any number of other seamen with minor injuries, were respectfully requested to stay below and out of the way. Bruce was so restless, though, that the chief steward put him to work carrying coffee and sandwiches to the seamen working on deck. Olive and I decided to wait to tell the master that Nigel had been shot in the back with a handgun. He looked more and more frail every day.
I spent my time wrapped up in a blanket in my bunk, napping, snacking on Dellaphine’s pralines and making notes about murder.