Calling

By Storm

Chicago - September 2, 1954

The Chicago patrol officer leaned his elbows on the top of his car as he watched the deepening night along Lakeshore Drive. The moon was rapidly sinking in the west, following the sun that had set a couple of hours earlier, but despite the hour and the fact that is was a Thursday night, a somewhat festive crowd was gathering. That was one of the reasons he was here. The other was that in a few moments the police would shut down the lakefront thoroughfare to all traffic for the rest of the night.

All that is, except one very special vehicle.

The cop turned his gaze from the crowd towards the east side of the road. There, looming under the harsh glare of spotlights, was the reason for all the excitement.

The brooding hulk sent a shiver down his spine as he considered it’s lean and deadly form. A U-boat captured at sea by the US Navy during WWII, the U-505 sat in a special cradle waiting to be carried across the road to it’s final home, the Museum of Science and Industry. He reflected that it had taken months to get the boat here. First the city and museum had had to raise the money to pay for shipping and refurbishing; even though the Navy had agreed to give the boat to the museum, they had refused to either move it themselves or pay to have someone else do it. As a consequence, it had taken over a year to get to this point. But now, once the U-boat crossed Lakeshore Drive, it would be irrefutably committed to spending the rest of it’s days land-bound. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He’d done a tour of duty in the Navy, yet he had to admit to mixed feelings about this particular boat. As a former destroyerman he had no particular love for submarines. As a sailor though… ships belonged at sea, not sitting on dry land.

Movement in the shadows caught his eye. He looked closer, then relaxed as he recognized the tall blond boy. It was that firefighter’s kid. Somehow the thirteen year old had managed to be here for at least a few minutes almost every day since the sub had arrived back at in late June.

The cop shook his head, half in admiration, half in exasperation. The boy’s father had no plans to have a sailor in the family, something he’d made very loudly plain from the first day when he’d come to drag the kid home. Yet the youth had defied his father to continue to come see the boat - though he had become considerably more discrete about it. It was quite clear to those observing the standoff between father and son that the harder the old man pushed, the more stubbornly the boy dug his heals in. One of the other officers, wondering if they had a budding juvenile delinquent on their hands, had done some discrete checking. The Morton boy was a model student, a Boy Scout and as far as anybody was able to discern, an all-round good kid. But he did have a bit of a stubborn streak. And it looked like from where the cop stood, the kid was bound and determined to go to sea on a submarine.

He gave a small shudder - you couldn’t pay him enough to shut himself up in a vessel that wasn’t much more than an over-sized sewer pipe! One would hope that the kid eventually saw reason… The cop let his gaze wander back over to the kid, studying his expression.

Nope. Hopelessly entranced.

Officer Brooks just hoped the kid survived the experience.