Breakthroughs (48 page)

He handed Cincinnatus a nickel. Looking down at the coin that sat in the pale palm of his hand, Cincinnatus said, “Sure as hell you won’t go broke spendin’ your money like this here, Mr. Bliss.”

“You’re a funny one,” Bliss said. “You better get on home now—here comes the trolley. And if I ever figure out how you got to be so funny, I’ll come round again and see if you’re still that way after I take you to pieces.” He tipped his hat and went on his way, smooth as a snake. Cincinnatus threw the nickel in the trolley car’s fare box. He didn’t want it in his pocket. It might have been listening to him.

The SS
Pocahontas, Arkansas
lay alongside the USS
Ericsson
. Staring at the supply ship, George Enos said, “If that’s not the stupidest name for a steamboat I ever saw in all my born days, I don’t know what is.”

Carl Sturtevant looked sly and smug. “I know why it’s got that name.”

“All right, I’ll bite,” George said. “Somebody doesn’t know that Pocahontas ended up marrying a Pilgrim?”

“Hell, till this minute I didn’t know she ended up marrying a Pilgrim,” Sturtevant answered. “Nah, that hasn’t got anything to do with it.”

“Come on, then—cough it up,” George said.

“Pocahontas, Arkansas, is this little no-account town a few miles south of the U.S. border,” the petty officer said. “During the Second Mexican War, the Army took the place and held it for a little while. Outside of Montana, there wasn’t much glory for our side in that war. Whatever there was, they pasted onto whatever would take it, and so we’ve got a freighter named for a Rebel whistle stop.”

“All right.” Enos waved a hand. “You got me there. I knew about the real Pocahontas, but not about that town down there named for her. I’ll tell you something else I know, too.” He looked around nervously. “I know I don’t like sitting here in the middle of the goddamn Atlantic while we take on supplies. I don’t like it for hell.”

Sturtevant raised a mocking eyebrow. “You don’t like us to have fuel so we can keep on patrolling? You don’t like fresh vittles? I don’t know about you, but I’m damn sick of kraut and beans. You don’t like getting mail? You got a wife, ain’t that right?”

“Yeah, I got a wife,” George Enos answered. “Mail’s fine, but I want to get home to Boston in one piece when the war’s finally over, too, and if I’m sitting here not moving, that damn Rebel submarine’s going to put a torpedo into our side somewhere right between the number two and number three stacks.”

“We sank that damn Rebel submarine,” Sturtevant said. “Wasn’t one of Lieutenant Crowder’s pipe dreams that time, neither. You blew the captain to pieces when he was pitching their secret papers, and then the
Bonefish
went under again, and she ain’t never comin’ up no more.”

Enos exhaled angrily through his nose. “You should have been a lawyer, not a sailor. You figure the Confederate Navy’s got only that one submersible in it? They build those bastards by the netful. If there isn’t already another one out here to take the place of that boat, there will be in a few days.”

Like George, Carl Sturtevant looked older than he was; sun and wind and spray had tanned his skin, turned it leather, and wrinkled it, too. He looked older still as he contemplated Enos’ words. “Well, you’re right, God damn it,” he said at last. “Now I’m going to worry, too.”

Sailors hauled sides of beef and hams and sacks of potatoes and endless cans from the
Pocahontas, Arkansas
to the
Ericsson
. They chattered at one another in English and a variety of foreign languages that seemed to consist mostly of consonants. Fuel oil gurgled through a hose connecting the hold of the
Pocahontas, Arkansas
to the
Ericsson
’s engine room.

As Sturtevant had said, it all promised that the destroyer would be able to keep on steaming and keep on feeding the crew for the next couple of weeks—provided she lived through the next couple of hours. Somewhere out there, a submersible—all right, not
the
submersible, but
a
submersible, sure as hell—was cruising along looking for something to send to the bottom. Maybe that sub was fifty miles away. On the other hand, maybe it was somewhere under the surface, trying to sneak in from a mile to half a mile to make sure it sank the
Ericsson
, which was as sitting a duck as had ever been hatched.

You couldn’t outrun a torpedo. You couldn’t outrun a torpedo at flank speed. A fish had at least ten knots on a destroyer. But, if you were cruising along when one of those bastards tried to shoot you in the back, you did have a chance to dodge.

How in God’s name were you supposed to dodge when you weren’t even moving? The answer was depressingly simple: you couldn’t. Finishing this resupply depended on not being spotted while it was going on.

George stared out over the tropical Atlantic, looking for a periscope or its wake. Odds were against him. He knew it. Even if he did spot one, it was all too likely to be too late. He knew that, too.

Light chop made the surface dance. In a dead calm sea, the wake from a periscope would have stood out against the background. Here, the background helped hide or mislead, as it did with a camouflaged ship. He wished he were down in the engine room. The only way the black gang found out about a torpedo was when one exploded in their laps.

Finally, after what seemed like forever but couldn’t have been more than the couple of hours Carl Sturtevant had talked about, the
Pocahontas, Arkansas
disconnected the hose and reeled it back in, leaving a dark smear of fuel oil across the deck for an officer to have conniptions about any minute now. All the freighter’s sailors were back aboard her, too.

The deck began to thrum and vibrate under George’s feet. He let out a long, heartfelt sigh of relief no doubt being echoed all over the
Ericsson
. They’d got away with it. Danger didn’t disappear now—danger, from everything George had seen, never disappeared—but it diminished.

Coal smoke poured from the
Pocahontas, Arkansas
’ stack, too, as the freighter’s wheezy powerplant also began to work harder. The only way the beamy old ship would go faster than about ten knots, Enos thought, was if someone threw her over a cliff. Sooner or later, though, she’d get where she was going. In the end, that was what mattered.

But the
Pocahontas, Arkansas
did not get where she was going. The notion that she would had hardly crossed George’s mind before her bow blew off right in front of his horrified eyes. A moment later, another torpedo struck her amidships. She might as well have been a bull in a slaughterhouse hit over the head with a sledgehammer. She stopped dead in the water and started to sink.

The
Ericsson
stopped dead in the water, too, or so it seemed to George. Then he wondered if he’d lost his mind: the hulk of the freighter seemed to be moving forward once more.

While Enos was scratching his head, Carl Sturtevant let out an admiring whistle. “Skipper must have been eating his fish lately,” he said. “You know—brain food. Slam us over to full power astern and we can keep the
Pocahontas
between us and whoever that son of a bitch out there is. And speaking of which—” He turned and ran toward the depth-charge projector at the stern.

George ran that way, too, toward the one-pounder by the projector. “Hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted. “It is pretty sly, I guess. There’s only one thing wrong with it that I can think of.”

Sturtevant, who wasn’t young and wasn’t skinny, wheezed to a stop by his post. “Yeah,” he said, panting. “We ain’t gonna have a shield much longer.”

“That’s it,” George agreed. The
Pocahontas, Arkansas
was sinking fast, going down by the bow. Even as Enos watched, another torpedo hit shook the freighter. He shivered. “That one was meant for us.”

“You bet it was,” Sturtevant said. The
Pocahontas, Arkansas
rolled over and sank. Only a handful of men from her were bobbing in the water when she did, and the undertow she generated when she went down pulled a couple of them with her.

“What do we do now?” George asked. “If we hang around here and pick those guys up, that submersible is liable to put the next one into us. But if we don’t…Hell, I wouldn’t want to be one of those poor bastards.”

“Me, neither,” Sturtevant said. He lowered his voice so Lieutenant Crowder couldn’t hear him before continuing, “Every once in a while—times like this, mostly—I’m glad I’m not an officer. Between you, me, and the bulkhead, I don’t want to have to play God.” Enos nodded without hesitation.

Up on the bridge, the
Ericsson
’s skipper made his choice, also without hesitation. Sailors hurled cork life rings toward the men still struggling in the ocean as the destroyer steamed past them. The ship did not stop or even slow to pick up survivors; as Sturtevant had said, the submarine that had torpedoed the
Pocahontas, Arkansas
was sure to be waiting, its own skipper hopefully licking his chops, for any such move.

A runner came back from the bridge to Lieutenant Crowder. “Sir, captain’s orders are for you to lay down as many depth charges as you can, set for widely different depths, when we reach the position where we reckon the submersible is at. We may not sink the bastard, but we’ll make him keep his head down while we pick up the men from the supply ship.”

“Aye aye,” Crowder said crisply. He turned to the depth-charge crew and started giving orders. Sturtevant ignored some of them as he gave his own instructions to the men who served the projector. When a signal flag waved from the bridge, the crew methodically pumped one depth charge after another into the blue water of the Atlantic. The water soon began boiling and seething from the force of the explosions under the surface.

George Enos eagerly peered astern, looking for leaking oil or a trail of air bubbles that might mark a damaged submersible. He spied nothing of the sort. Neither did anyone else. “We ought to be operating in a flotilla,” Lieutenant Crowder grumbled. “If we had three destroyers after that submersible instead of just our one, we’d sink him for sure.”

If I had a million dollars…,
Enos thought.

Abruptly, the
Ericsson
broke off the attack on the submarine and raced back toward the survivors from the
Pocahontas, Arkansas
. After hauling the four or five of them aboard with lines, the destroyer hurried away from the spot where the supply ship had gone down.

Carl Sturtevant sighed. “Well, the limey or the Reb down there under the water won that one, damn him to hell and gone.”

“Yeah,” Enos said, his Boston accent making the word come out as
Ayuh
. “Didn’t get us, though, so I reckon he’s not as happy as he might be. A destroyer is worth a hell of a lot of freighters.”

“I ain’t gonna tell you you’re wrong,” Sturtevant said, “but the game’s not over yet, either. He’s still down there. He’s trying to get us, we’re trying to get him. Wonder if we’ll lock horns again.”

“How will we even know whether we ever fight the same boat again or some different one?” George asked.

Sturtevant chewed on that for a moment before he shrugged. “What difference does it make? Any time one of those bastards shows himself, we’ll go after him, whether he’s this boat or a different one.”

George considered, then nodded. “I won’t tell you you’re wrong,” he said.

Seawater from a new leak dripped down onto Commander Roger Kimball’s cap. The electric motors were running on very low power, just enough to keep the prop turning over and give the
Bonefish
steering way. The roars of exploding depth charges, some well removed from the submersible, others terrifyingly close, put Kimball in mind of a summer thunderstorm back home.

Then the rain of depth charges stopped. Kimball pulled out his watch. He let one minute tick by, two, and then, reluctantly, three. When the third quiet minute had passed, he turned to his exec and said, “Take us up to periscope depth, Tom.”

“Are you sure, sir?” Lieutenant Brearley said. “God only knows where the damnyankees are up there. They’re liable to be waiting around to spot us so they can drop the other shoe.”

Kimball growled discontentedly, deep in his throat. Tom Brearley had a point. But every instinct in Kimball cried out for attack. “I’m blind down here, dammit,” he muttered. “Only way to find out where the damnyankees are is to go looking for ’em.” He pulled out his watch again. After the small second hand went round its dial twice more, he spoke again, this time in tones that brooked no disagreement: “Periscope depth!”

“Aye aye, sir,” Brearley said, though he sent Kimball another reproachful look. The skipper of the
Bonefish
generously failed to let himself notice it. The boat climbed out of the depths in which it had taken shelter from the pounding the Yankee destroyer had given it.

As soon as the periscope lifted above the surface of the Atlantic, Kimball started to curse. “He’s hightailing it out of here,” he snarled in disgust. “Might have got the lousy bastard if I’d surfaced a little faster.” He glowered at his executive officer. “Some people are afraid of their own shadows.”

“Sir,” Brearley said stiffly, and the fetid atmosphere inside the
Bonefish
got nasty in a different way.

“Be a cold day in hell before I listen to somebody else’s jimjams again, instead of my own plain good sense,” Kimball said. He was growling at Brearley, but was angrier at himself. He hadn’t obeyed his own instincts, and had lost a chance to take out the Yankee destroyer.

Trying to spread oil over troubled waters, Ben Coulter said, “That Yankee four-stacker has a right smart skipper. Way he slid behind the freighter we nailed—who would have reckoned he’d be so sneaky? Never came close to giving us a good shot at him.”

“All the more reason to wish the son of a bitch was down at the bottom of the ocean,” Kimball said. “If that wasn’t the
Ericsson
, it was another one from the same class. They still think they sank us. One day soon, I’m going to think I sank them, too. Only difference is, I’m going to be right.”