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“Shhhh,” he said, looking back into her eyes and gently touching his index finger to her lips. “Stop. Don’t. We’re fine. And now that I’m back and certain problems have been solved, I plan to be around for as long as I can.”

Beaming, Ann quickly sat up, and as she did the duvet slipped, exposing her bosom.

Dick smiled and kissed her left breast.

“Promise?” she said softly, modestly pulling up the duvet.

“I go where I’m ordered, Annie. I can’t—”

“Promise?” she repeated, this time more forcefully. “Please?”

Dick took the glass of port and put it beside the bottle, then wiggled under the duvet and wrapped himself around her.

“Promise,” he said softly, knowing sometime—probably soon—he would have to break it.

[ THREE ]

Brooklyn Army Base and Terminal

Brooklyn, New York

0545 26 February 1943

“Tony the Gut” Lucchese, the five-foot-seven, 220-pound gang boss of local 213, International Longshoreman’s Association, stood near the edge of the industrial dock as icy gusts came across the East River.

Son of a bitch! the thirty-five-year-old thought, turning his back to the wind. I’m gonna freeze my fuckin’ nuts off out here.

He took a final puff of what was left of his stub of a cigar, threw the butt into the dark water, then thrust his hands into the pockets of his heavy woolen overcoat, his fat fingers hitting the grip of the .357 caliber revolver he’d put in the right pocket.

Lucchese looked up as an olive drab jeep floated past, hanging from a cable of a loading boom on the dock, then shivered violently and wondered if the shiver had been caused by the bitter cold—or his outright fear.

Seventy percent of the war goods and soldiers shipped to Europe passed through New York area terminals—much of that going through the Brooklyn terminal.

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; The ILA controlled it all.

The union saw to it that the loading went on smoothly round the clock—and on time, like that bastard Mussolini ran his trains—because not only was the shipping critical to winning the war, keeping the pace steady was important to the ILA boys doing the skimming.

The more they moved, the less anyone noticed a container here and pallet there had been “misplaced” in transit.

This was not lost on Lucchese.

It don’t take no Road Scholar to figure out I can get whacked for doing this thing, he thought.

And Lucchese knew that if they didn’t whack him for causing the loading of the ships to slow—or stop—then they’d likely do it for him going behind the ILA’s back and working for Harry Bridges in the first place. The head of the stevedore unions on the West Coast, from Seattle to San Diego, was trying to muscle his way in on East Coast business—and the ILA locals weren’t happy about that shit at all.

Lucchese mindlessly kicked at the snow with the toe of his boot. He still had time to back out of this thing, time to save his ass. Just pick up the phone and call it off.

But…Bridges’s boys would be really pissed, and he would blow this, his big chance to move up when Bridges came in, to be at the front of the line—to be the real player they kept saying he should be.

Lucchese pushed back his round, pressed-steel safety hat. He scanned the lines of railroad flatcars and semi-truck flatbed trailers that waited to off-load tanks and trucks and munitions and medicine and food and more—everything desperately needed to fight and win a war. The lines went back as far as he could see in the dimly lit dockyard.

At the head of the lines, booms on the dock and ships moved like giant fingers lifting the pallets and containers and vehicles into EC2 (Emergency, Cargo, Large Capacity) ships. Each 441-foot-long vessel could transport the same amount as three hundred railroad cars, and a dozen EC2s were moored here, taking on cargo, while a couple dozen more were staged in the bay, waiting for their turn at the dock.

It was no secret that these so-called Liberty ships were being built in record time at U.S. shipyards on the East, West, and Gulf Coasts—and being sunk by enemy torpedoes damned near as fast.

Convoys, each with scores of Liberty ships, rushed eastward across the Atlantic, only to be hunted down by packs of German U-boats. Hundreds upon hundreds of the ships and their crews were blasted into the icy-cold depths—seven and a half million tons of critical cargo lost in 1942 alone.