invade? That would explain why he’d come through in the middle of the night—didn’t the Japanese always sneak ashore before dawn?
Don’t be ridiculous, he thought. It’s too cold to be the South Pacific. So cold his legs were beginning to cramp. He rubbed them and then stretched them out. And jammed his foot against something hard. He jerked it back instantly. Had that been one of the metal struts of a tank trap? They sometimes had mines balanced on top, set to topple and explode at the slightest motion.
He scrambled to his knees and leaned forward, feeling cautiously along the sand to the base of whatever it was. Rock, he thought, relieved. Rock rising straight up out of the sand. The cliff? No, when he patted up its side, it was only slightly higher than his head and no more than four feet wide. It must be one of those freestanding rocks that occurred on beaches, the kind tourists climbed on. He maneuvered around to sit with his back against it and straightened his legs again, cautiously this time.
It was a good thing, since he hit another rock. This one stood at an angle to the first one and was much wider and thicker. When he climbed up to feel how tall it was, the sound of the waves became suddenly louder, which explained why the drop site was here. The rocks could hide him—and the shimmer as the drop opened—from the beach.
But if they had, there wouldn’t have been any slippage. The drop must be at least partly visible, either from the water or from the beach. Or somewhere above it. Civilian coastwatchers had been posted all along the eastern coast, and one of them might have their binoculars trained on the beach right now. Or would at 5 A.M., which was why he’d been sent through earlier.
Which means I’d better be careful when it begins to get light. If he didn’t die of hypothermia first. Jesus, it was cold. He was going to have to put his jacket back on. He wished he had the one Wardrobe had given to Phipps. It was a lot warmer than this one. He stood up, legs protesting, put it on, and sat down again. Come on, he thought. Let’s get this show on the road.
Centuries crawled by. Mike took his jacket off and draped it over him blanket-style. He burrowed into the rock, trying to get warm, trying to stay awake. In spite of the cold, he could hardly keep his eyes open. Isn’t sleepiness the first sign of hypothermia? he thought drowsily.
It’s not hypothermia, it’s time-lag. And the fact that you’ve been up all night and the night before that trying to get ready for this damned assignment. All so he could sit here in the dark and freeze to death. I not only could have memorized the ships, I could have memorized the names of all the small craft, too, all seven hundred of them. And the names of all three hundred thousand soldiers they rescued.
When the sky finally began to lighten several geologic ages later, he thought at first it was an illusion brought on by staring into the darkness too long. But that really was the outline of the rock opposite him he was seeing, tar black against the velvet black of the sky, and when he stood up and peeked cautiously over the other rock toward the sound of the waves, the darkness was a shade grayer. Within minutes he could make out the line of white surf and behind him a looming cliff, ghostly pale in the darkness. A chalk cliff, which meant he was in the right place.
He wasn’t between two rocks, though. It was a single rock, with a sand-filled hollow carved out of the middle by the tide, but he’d been right about its hiding him—and the shimmer—from the beach. He looked at the Bulova on his wrist. It said eleven-twenty. He’d set it for five just before he came through, which meant he’d been here more than six hours. No wonder he felt like he’d been on this beach for eons. He had.
And he couldn’t see any particular reason why. He’d assumed someone had been in the vicinity at five, but there were no boats offshore or footprints on the beach. There weren’t any beach fortifications either, no wooden stakes along the waterline to slow landing craft, no barbed wire. Jesus, I hope the slippage didn’t send me through in January.