Slave Ship (5 page)

"What? What?" I was a little jumpy, I suppose.

"The Orientals," gloated Semyon. And then, with an abrupt change of pace, utter dejection: "The fools, the fools, the fools! Why do we not hit them from above, eh? Bomb them, shoot them—"

"They're prisoners, Semyon!" I said, shocked.

"A prisoner escaped is scarcely a prisoner, my friend. What is better, to shoot them from above, where they can scarcely do us much harm? Or to sit in the bushes below, and wait for them to come?"

I said uneasily, "The major looks like he knows what he's doing, Semyon." He shrugged a large Russian shrug; and that was all he said. But he carefully checked the clips on his T-gun.

The copters came down in a clearing, and the major jumped on a stump to disperse us. "They're moving slow," he bellowed, "but they're moving. Soon as you see anything, shoot it! They've got some guns, captured from the guards; dunno how many or whether this lot has them. There's upwards of five thousand of them running around, so you'll have plenty of targets. Miller!"

I jumped. Of all the things I might have expected, being called out by name just then wasn't one of them. "Front and center, Miller," bawled the major. "The rest of you disperse and take cover."

But it had an explanation. I saluted the major with more snap than I'd been able to put into a salute for weeks. He clipped: "Miller? You the one that's checked out on a scout torp?"

"Checked out!" I started to blaze; but this wasn't the time for it. I said only, briskly: "Better than eight hundred hours in combat sweeps, with a confirmed—"

"Sure," he said, unimpressed and unheeding. He jerked a thumb and I found myself trudging through the mangrove swamp with a female naval ensign, toward the shore.

We looked at three scout torps lashed to a Churchill dock, bobbing harmlessly in the gentle morning swell. She said bitterly: "Half our complement on leave—understaffed to begin with—the filthy swine!" She didn't make clear whether the "swine" were COMCARIB or the Caodais; but it was perfectly clear that she, as temporary exec officer while the male strength of the torpedo-squadron complement was manning the other torps, was requesting me to take one of the idle scouts out on a sweep. She didn't have to ask me twice.

I slid out on the surface, and two hundred yards from shore checked the sealer telltales, flooded the negative buoyancy tanks and tipped the diving vanes. I leveled off at thirty meters—plenty deep for the continental shelf.

My search pattern was clipped to the board over my scanning port. I flexed the vanes a couple of times to get the feel of the torp; it was good to be home again. All these scouts come off the same assembly lines and are made out of the same interchangeable parts; but it is astonishing how much the "feel" can differ between craft. I set the auto-pilot for the first leg of the sweep; triggered the sonars; and I was off.

Back to
Spruance
! I felt like a fighting man. And there was, in truth, some chance that I might see some action. The girl ensign had filled me in a little bit on the way down to the beach; there really had been ship-to-shore firing—guided aerial torpedoes, mostly—and that meant at least a few Caodai vessels somewhere within range. Of course, "range" was anything up to 12,000 miles, and the only reason it wasn't more is that you can't get more than 12,000 miles away from anywhere and still be on the earth. But she thought, though she wasn't clear why, that they were pretty close inshore.

It was an exciting prospect. I tasted the implications of it, thoughtfully. Both sides in the cold war were being pretty meticulous about respecting the continental masses belonging to the other side. You couldn't say as much for islands, and naturally Europe was respected by no one at all, being a selected jousting field. But even guided-missile attack was very rare. I wondered what on the Florida coast made the Caodais mad enough to shoot.

The blow-off, of course, would be if they attempted a landing.

I remembered what Kedrick had said about expecting trouble from the stockade; the girl had talked as if everyone knew the prisoners were seething for weeks past. How the devil, I demanded of myself, could you be expected to know what was going on when security kept everybody's mouth shut? Was it fair to drag me out of bed when—

Two things stopped that train of thought. One was the faintly shamefaced realization that I was loving every minute of it. The second was the sonar sighting bell loud in my ear. I read the telltales fast: It wasn't a whale or a clump of weed. The microphones had picked up another sonar. And the IFF filters had spotted it instantly as an enemy.

I hit the TBS button—and prayed there was someone within range to hear: "Unidentified object, presumed Caodai, sighted at Grid Eight Eighty-Baker-Forty-Two." I read my co-ordinates off the autolog. "Object bearing fifty-five degrees from present position, range extreme, size unknown." That was it.
If
the sonar communicator got as far as someone who could hear—and
if
the understaffed, overworked squadron complement could spare a pair of ears to listen—then I might get reinforcements, possibly even in time to help.

Until then it was up to me.

I fed the coal to the screws and came about, tripping the safeties on the bow tubes. I had four tiny homing missiles to squander; any one of them, small as they were, would probably do the trick if they connected with anything smaller than a cruiser. And they would do their best to connect: Their seeker fuses could tune in on the sound of the enemy screws, the temperature of the enemy hull, the magnetic deflection of the enemy steel, all at once; and if one bearing differed from the other two, they would reject that one. They would do their best; but of course the Caodais would be doing theirs. Their noise-makers would be clattering up the water at acoustic-focal points hundreds of yards away; their "curtain" ports would be dropping thermal flares; their counter-magnet generators would be generating and killing magnetic fields stem and stern by unpredictable turns.

Still—I had four missiles. One would be enough.

I was closing in on them at maximum speed; trying hard to read the indications in the sonar. A little bright pip of light doesn't tell you much, but it got bigger and brighter, and it began to look like something a lot bigger than me.

All of a sudden I was thinking of Elsie, fantastic thoughts: Suppose this Caodai, whatever he was, hit me; and suppose I got free and swam to the surface; and suppose they picked me up as a prisoner; and suppose they interned me; and suppose, just suppose, that I wound up on Zanzibar. . . .

But then I had no time for fantasies. The big, bright splotch in the sonar plate shimmered and spattered into a cluster of dots. For a moment they wavered and tried to converge again—but it was a cluster, all right.

One, two, three . . . I counted, and counted again. But the count didn't make much difference.

I had four missiles, all right, but there were at least eight of them. They were corvettes at the least, by the size of them in the sonar screen. And I was a little thirty-foot torp, with four missiles to fight with. If I got a 4.0 hit with every one of them, that left only four to beat the dubbing out of me.

What is a hero? I didn't feel heroic; I felt scared. But I didn't turn around and run for it either.

They not only had the legs of me, they had the reach of me too. If I ran, they could catch me. If I attacked, they could pound me to pieces before I got within range. If I sat still and prayed, I would at least enhance my dubious prospects of getting to heaven, which would at any rate be something constructive so my last minutes on earth wouldn't be a total loss. But what I did was fight. It was habit and instinct and routine. Full speed forward, turn the navigation over to the auto-pilot. Cut the fire-control remotes in on missile Number One, discriminate, lock, arm, and fire. Cut in on Number Two, fire Number Two. Cut in on Number Three, fire Number Three. Cut in on Number Four, fire Number Four . . . and
then
it was time to cut and run.

In fact, it was past time. They were on course for me and I was on course for them; we had closed to less than five thousand yards. By the time I came about, it was forty-five hundred; and a corvette can catch a scout torp with I a forty-five hundred yard lead in roughly twenty minutes, It is only a matter of relative speeds. Of course, in twenty minutes I could be closer inshore than they would dare to follow.

But they didn't really have to catch me, you see. Their missiles would do the job for them.

I watched the sonar screen with very close attention-it was all I had to do. There were the eight of them, big and ugly by now; there were the four staggered little streaks that were my missiles. And there—yes, there, just before the lead Caodai, were two other little glowing streaks. They weren't mine. They were missiles, but they weren't mine.

I kicked the auto-armor pedal home. My scout was now defensively armed; it was dropping random-sized masses of fine-spun metallic wool into the slipstream, hoping to divert the Caodai missiles. Unfortunately they were doing the same; I saw a mushrooming flare around one of my missiles as it went off, far out of effective range of the enemy craft, triggered no doubt by just such a blob of chaff. And another; and then the sonar screen was awash with light from rim to rim; the pressure-spheres surrounding the exploding missiles confused the sound waves, made them return conflicting images. I scrambled the sonar screen and snapped on the Audic; at least I would know if something big was getting close to me.

Something big was! But not the Caodais—it came from due south, down the coast, and it was big and fast. IFF gave the answer: It was a
Spruance-class
cruiser, coming to the rescue.

They might get me, but Big Brother was going to get them! I snapped open the TBS and yelled excitedly, "Welcome to the party! I'll give you my bearings for cross-check. My grid position—"

But I didn't finish. Audic tinkled and cut out in my earphone; there had been a big, near-by explosion and the filters, designed to keep the wearer from ruptured eardrums, had cut off the amplification. I waited for the smash.

I never heard it, but I felt it. Something hit the side of my head; and that was all, brother, that was all. . . .

But—

"Only the good die young," growled somebody with a Russian accent.

I sat up abruptly. "Semyon!" I said. "What—?"

The heel of his hand caught me in the chest, and I went back down again. "Doctor says to lie still!" he scolded. "You should have been dead, Logan! Don't provoke fortune!"

Well, I was alive, though it took me a while to .believe it. What had hit me had been nothing but concussion, and the torp, though sprung a little at the seams, was still intact. The auto-pilot cut itself off when the hull was breached and, when nobody took the controls, automatically surfaced the vessel—and hydrofoils found it, with me inside. But I was alive.

"Did they get them?" I demanded.

"Get who? The Orientals?" Semyon shrugged. "They did not yet have the courtesy to report to me, Logan. I can only assume—"

"All right. What about the stockade?"

"Ha," he said, sitting up. "Such a struggle, Logan. Through the jungle like savages, screaming and fighting, deadly beyond—"

"
What
about
the
stockade
?"

He pouted. "Is over," he grumbled. "We fought a little bit, and then armor began coming up from the highway, and when the Orientals saw the tanks they ran. Oh, some got through; they will be caught."

So that was that. Well, I thought, leaning back against the pillows of the sick bay and listening to the thumping in my head, it wasn't so bad after all, A free ride in a scout torp—I'd thought I'd never get to pilot one again. A successful, or anyway fairly successful, combat sweep against superior odds. A sure commendation in my file jacket, maybe even a citation from COMINCH. Who knows, possibly a Navy Cross—stranger things had happened. And the whole thing was over, a pleasant interlude in a dull existence.

What I didn't know was that nothing is ever really over.

Semyon said commandingly: "The doctor." I sat up, and he pushed me down again.

The doctor poked me and looked into my eyes and said: "Back on duty in the morning. Meanwhile—"

He reached for a needle. I protested, "But, doctor, I can go to sleep without that!"

"That's good," he said, squeezing the plunger. It worked fast; I saw him going out the door, and then, magically, he was turning around and coming back, only it wasn't the doctor any more. It was Elsie, just the way she had been the day we were married, lovely and desirable and all the wife a man could want. "Darling," I said to her, and she said many things to me. She bent and kissed me, and held me in her arms; and then all of a sudden her left eye blossomed out in a ripple of greenish light, and then her nose; and then she was awash from side to side with light, just like a sonar scope; and the rest of the dream was hardly pleasant at all.

V

THE CAODAI OUTBREAK was contained, and by the next morning I was feeling fine.

It was a taste of action and I welcomed it. I wasn't alone. Half the officers at Project Mako seemed to feel the way I had felt. They were Line officers, fighting officers; they hadn't asked to come here and didn't want to stay, and a touch of combat cheered all of us up. Even Lieutenant Kedrick, that cheerless old maid, gave me the morning off to convalesce—from the doctor's needle, not from my brush with Caodais—and he came in to see me, and actually smiled. "You've got a commendation coming, Miller," he said. "Maybe more."

"Thanks. What happened?"

"Oh—" He shrugged. "Who knows how the Cow-dyes run these things? I guess they thought they could catch us off guard and liberate a few prisoners. Isn't the first time, Miller."

"Oh? I thought the mainland had never been touched."

"Hah." He slapped at the paper I had been looking at, his face wrathful, "What do you call that?"

I glanced at the paper; the headline said: