“I still say you’ve got no right to steal my fucking boat,” a voice grated, and Frank turned his head. George stood behind him, glaring up at his expropriated property, and Frank barked a laugh.
“Jesus, George! You’ve had the damned thing in the water—what? twice? three times?—in the entire time you’ve owned it! I can’t begin to imagine what you thought you were doing when you bought it. Except maybe watching reruns of Miami Vice again!”
“If I want to buy a boat, it’s my own frigging business,” Watson shot back belligerently. “And you got no right to steal it from me. You or Mike Stearns!”
Frank didn’t like George Watson, and he never had, even making allowances for the fact that George was a fellow member of the UMWA. Watson was the kind of sour, surly man who, almost fifty years old now, liked to brag that he was a lifelong bachelor—a brag which drew the invariable response that no woman in her right mind would have him.
So he saw no reason to be polite to him. With Watson, being polite was a waste of time anyway. “We didn’t ‘steal’ it,” he said forcefully, “we nationalized it. And we’re gonna use it to save your ass right along with the rest of us, so quit bitching about it.”
“I’ll sue,” Watson threatened. “You see if I don’t!”
“You do whatever you want, George,” Frank said, shrugging. “You’ll get compensated for it by the government. Now, beat it. It’s done. And I’ve got other things to worry about.”
Watson stalked off. Frank turned to another, older man whose hair gleamed like fresh snow under the lights.
“You sure about this, Jack?” he asked more quietly.
“Yeah, sure I am,” Clements replied cheerfully. “Hell, you think I’m going to let anyone else drive my boat?”
“Actually, I’m thinking we’ll probably need you worse for Watson’s Folly, here,” Frank told the man who had once served in the U.S. Coast Guard before coming home to the West Virginia mountains, and jerked a thumb at the massive boat on the flatbed. “You’ve got the most boat-handling experience of anyone we’ve got, and that thing’s gonna be a real handful for whoever gets behind the wheel.”
“Maybe,” Clements said in an unconvinced voice, and Frank chuckled.
“Hell, you’re in the Naaaaavy now, Mr. Volunteer Lieutenant Clements, sir!” He waved in something which could, with a sufficient stretch of the imagination, have been called a salute. “Admiral Simpson’s gonna have his own ideas about how to use you best. And much’s I hate to say it, the prick seems to know what he’s doing, so you listen to him, hear?”
“You say so, Frank,” Clements agreed dubiously, and Frank chuckled again. Then he turned back to his inspection.
Clements’, Watson’s, and Tillman’s were the three boats Eddie had specifically requested. After that, the Grantville boating selection ran down through smaller ski boats to bass boats and simple dories, but Frank had picked out one more as a backup for Eddie’s requests: a sixteen-foot Boston Whaler which had belonged to Harry Rousseau before Harry and his family went to visit his mother in Duluth the day before the Ring of Fire struck. It was on the small size for what they had in mind, but it was the next biggest boat in Grantville, and he wished fervently that he had an entire fleet to send with the four of them.
Hell, while I’m wishing, I might’s well wish for a frigging destroyer—or even an aircraft carrier! he told himself sourly.
He started tugging on the tie-down straps and checking the hull chocks, but left off when he spotted Jerry Yost glaring at him. The truck driver, clearly enough, did not appreciate the interference of an amateur, “General of the Army” or not. Frank gave Yost a half-apologetic smile and moved down the line of trucks. The coal trucks, he decided, would provide him with a safer avenue for venting his overseer reflexes. They were, after all, officially the property of the U.S. Army.
He glanced into the back of the first coal truck. At the moment, it was loaded with additional fuel drums and cans, two deflated rubber Zodiac boats that belonged to Sam and Al Morton, and the odd case of dynamite. The second coal truck, also towing Rousseau’s Boston Whaler on its trailer, would be leaving Grantville for Halle early next morning with its own load of supplies too bulky to be transported by the speedboats themselves—including several hundred rockets and the modified launch frames the machine shops were working frantically to complete even as Frank stood in the dark and worried.