Then the familiar baritone drawl pierced everything on a sudden rising pitch: “Vampire, vampire, vampire, multiple vampires inbound. November Kilo portside, all ships prepare countermeas—” The explosion rocked her ears. For a moment, Lily thought a Luftwaffe shell had hit the hotel; she nearly fell out of her seat before she realized it had come through the headphones, shrieking into her eardrums with a shattering bang. Bringing her chair down with a thud, she dimly heard the baritone voice through her own ringing ears, shouting now:
“USS Colin Powell is hit, repeat, USS Colin Powell is hit portside amidships, multiple vampire strikes with extensive flooding and loss of multiple primary systems. This is ST1 Jackson reporting on USS Colin Powell—”
Lily’s lips parted to answer him, but she had no transmitter. All she could do was listen.
More explosions.
Then the screams.
Then the dying.
Beginning to end, it took forty-two minutes.
“Baines, it was a silly hoax. Some lads messing about with an illicit broadcast.”
“I don’t think so, ma’am.” Lily’s teeth were still chattering. “The other end of this transmission—I heard the shrieks as water began filling the compartment. I heard the men clawing to get out. I heard the moment they realized they were trapped and were going to die. I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you can fake.”
“Actors die dramatically every night of the week at the Old Vic in London,” Fiddian said, clearly cross now. “I’ll submit a complaint, make no mistake. All transmitters were supposed to be turned in at the start of—”
“Ma’am, please look at my transcription. If you see here, ST1 Jackson was saying—”
“I have looked. ST1 is not a real rank, even among the Americans.”
Lily couldn’t argue with that, but she knew the man named Jackson was a navy petty officer, and so was she, and that meant she owed him a measure of belief. “But as he was saying—”
“Baines, it doesn’t matter what he was saying. You said you heard them give this date in the transmission?” Jabbing a finger at the date Lily had scrawled. “This alone proves it’s all bunk.”
“I know how it looks.” Do I? Lily thought. The date was bunk; every drop of common sense said so . . . but those forty-two minutes of broadband agony kept swirling in her head. She’d been a Y Station listener for over a year, the best in the bunch here at Withernsea. Lily Baines, a petty officer with fingers like a pianist and ears like a bat. Maybe common sense should have balked at the date, but it was long after midnight, near the witching hour when all things were possible, and she’d just heard countless souls die screaming through her headphones.
And it was more than that. The Wimbledon training made you trust your ears, not your ingrained reactions. She knew what she’d heard. “If we can just entertain the possibility—”
“You’re due for a weekend off, Baines. I suggest you take it starting now. You’re clearly beginning to feel the strain.”
Lily argued for another fifteen minutes, but it was useless. Numbly, she stood clutching her sheaf of transcribed notes. If Fist-Face Fiddian wouldn’t take it up the ladder, no one would listen to a humble Wren like Lily. Station X didn’t know her from Adam. Neither did anyone on the Admiralty lines. If she rang her father and tried to get him to use his Foreign Office connections, he’d think she’d gone mad—he loved his daughters, but he thought all young girls had nothing but fluff and feathers between the ears. And wasn’t that what most important men thought? Who was going to listen to a Y Station listener with a story that sounded admittedly, utterly barmy? She could find herself reprimanded, even taken off duty or transferred . . .
Lily reversed out of the parlor, taking the stairs two at a time up to the row of hotel bedrooms that had been converted to billet the Wrens. At the end of the corridor was a telephone—to its right, the room Lily shared with a tart from Epping who snored like a foghorn. She hesitated at the head of the corridor, realizing her teeth were still chattering. She could toss this agonizing, impossible transcription in the bin, head to her room, and sleep till noon.
Or she could make the telephone call she’d been half planning even as she approached Fiddian with her scribbled transcription. Because she’d had to give Fiddian a go, of course she had to, but that didn’t mean she’d thought it would work. It didn’t mean she hadn’t immediately thought of an alternate option.