Breakthroughs (34 page)

In a certain sense, that was even true. He hadn’t screwed so much on his honeymoon down in Mobile. Emily had done everything he wanted. Emily had done more than he’d imagined. He’d wakened one night to her sucking him hard and then pulling him over onto her. She’d been wet and waiting. He’d worn himself out by then, and hadn’t thought he could come, but he’d been wrong.

Bedford Cunningham had made himself scarce, too. After that first dreadful moment, Jeff hadn’t seen him at all. That suited Jeff fine. If he never saw Bedford again, that would suit him even better.

But now he was back here, somewhere east of Lubbock. Bedford Cunningham remained in Birmingham, remained next door to Emily. What were they doing now that Jeff was gone? Was she rubbing her breasts in his face? Was she teasing his foreskin with her tongue? Was she groaning and gurgling and urging him on, her legs folded around his back tight as a bear trap’s jaws?

Every filthy picture in Pinkard’s mind made him wish he were dead, and Cunningham, and Emily. And, at the same time, every filthy picture in his mind made him wish he were back in Birmingham, so Emily could do those things to
him
.

“Yeah, a hell of a time,” he repeated. Rodriguez plainly didn’t believe him.
Well, too damn bad, Hip,
Jeff thought.

He wrapped himself in his blanket, more to keep the mosquitoes away than for warmth, and did his best to sleep. Images of Emily naked and lewd made him sweat harder than the hot, muggy weather could have done by itself. At last, despite them, he dozed—and dreamt of his wife, naked and lewd. Whether awake or asleep, he could not escape her…except when he fought.

Sergeant Cross shook him awake at midnight. For a moment, he thought the hand on his shoulder was Emily’s. When he realized it wasn’t, he also realized he was liable to be killed inside the next hour. He scrambled eagerly to his feet. “Let’s get moving, Sarge,” he said.

“Keep your britches on, Jeff,” Cross answered. “Some of our buddies are still sawing wood. We got to wait on the artillery, too. They’re gonna lay down a box barrage for us, keep the Yanks from bringing reinforcements into the stretch of trench we hit.”

“That sounds pretty good,” Pinkard said. “They want us to bring back prisoners, or are we supposed to come back by ourselves?”

“Nobody told me one way or the other,” Cross said. “Reckon we’ll have to play that one by ear when we get over there.” Seeing Pinkard yawn, he went on, “Grab yourself some coffee. Pot on a little fire just down the way.”

The coffee was thick and tasted like dirt and was strong enough to strip paint, but it made Pinkard’s heart beat faster and his eyes open wide. He gulped it down, swearing as it burned his mouth. Several of his comrades took cups, too. Pretty soon, the pot was empty.

Sergeant Cross passed out burlap sacks of grenades. Jeff took one. The little round bombs—British style, not the potato-mashers the Yanks and the Huns used—were fine for trench fighting. Bayonet and entrenching tool were even better, as far as Pinkard was concerned.

One by one, the men in butternut climbed out of the trench and crawled through the few pathetic lengths of wire that passed for a belt. Cross said, “This here wire reminds me of a bald fellow combin’ about the last three strands he’s got across his shiny old dome and pretendin’ he’s got hisself a whole head o’ hair. He may be fooled, but ain’t nobody else who is.”

Several soldiers chuckled in low voices. Pinkard didn’t, but he nodded at the aptness of the comparison. Because they had any barbed wire at all, the Confederate commanders in Texas often seemed to think they had great thickets of the stuff, as was true in Virginia and Tennessee—not that, from the news coming west, it had done the CSA a whole lot of good there, either.

A little to the north, a flare rose from the Yankee lines. It burned in the sky, a fierce white point of light. Under its glare, the advancing Confederate soldiers froze. Pinkard pressed his face into the dirt. It smelled of dust and of dead bodies. That stink of rotting flesh never left his nostrils; even more than cordite and coffee and tobacco, it was the definitive odor of the front, as hot iron was the definitive odor of the Sloss Foundry.

After what felt like forever, the flare finally faded. Jeff crawled on. He skirted shell holes when he could, but was always ready to dive into one if the U.S. soldiers opened up on the raiding party.

Cross muttered discontentedly: “Sure as hell, goddamn artillery’s gonna open up too goddamn soon. They ain’t gonna figure out we had to wait for the flare. Goddamn artillery can’t figure out to grab their asses with both hands, anybody wants to know.”

He was right. The Confederate soldiers hadn’t reached the Yankee wire—thicker than their own, but not much—when the three-inch guns behind the C.S. line started barking. Shells rained down on the U.S. position, making the sides and back of a box that isolated a stretch of the forward trenches.

Like the rest of the men in the raiding party, Pinkard wore a wire-cutter on his belt. He could crawl under most of the wire the damnyankees had laid, and snipped his way through the few places where he had trouble crawling. Somebody in the U.S. trench fired. Jeff didn’t think it was an aimed shot. He wanted to thank the Yankee for it; it told him exactly where the trench line was.

He yanked a grenade out of the sack, pulled off the ring, and chucked the bomb into the trench, as close to the Yankee rifleman as he could put it. The report was loud and hard and short. He threw more grenades. So did the rest of the raiders. Then, with a yell, he scrambled forward and leaped down into the U.S. trench.

“Hey there, you—” The words were spoken in a sharp Yankee accent. Jeff didn’t reach over his shoulder for his rifle. Faster to yank the entrenching tool off his belt and swing it in a short, flat arc. The shovel blade struck flesh and bit deep. The U.S. soldier went down with a groan. Then Pinkard unslung the Tredegar and ran along the firebay.

A potato-masher grenade hurled from a traverse exploded eight or ten feet in front of him. A fragment bit the back of his hand. Another tore through his tunic without grazing him. He dashed past the place where the grenade had gone off and into the traverse. A Yankee yelled and fired. He missed. Pinkard lunged with the bayonet. He grunted as it penetrated the U.S. soldier’s flesh, almost as he sometimes grunted when he penetrated Emily’s flesh.

The damnyankee shrieked and crumpled. Jeff fired and stabbed, stabbed and fired, till three or four more Yankees were down and none left on his feet in the traverse. He grunted again, an oddly sated sound.

Somebody touched him on the shoulder. He whirled, and would have spitted Hip Rodriguez if the Sonoran hadn’t beaten the bayonet aside with his own rifle. “We got to go back, Jeff,” Rodriguez said. “The sergeant, he blow the whistle. You no hear?”

Consumed in his orgy of killing, Pinkard hadn’t heard anything. He shook his head like a man coming out of a dream. “All right, Hip,” he said meekly. “I’ll come back with you.”

Rodriguez looked down the length of the traverse. Muttering, “Ten million demons from hell,” he crossed himself. To Jeff, he said, “You fight like a crazy man,
amigo
.”

“Yeah,” Pinkard said. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

U.S. artillery pumped shells into no-man’s-land as the Confederate raiders crawled and scrambled back to their own line. One man took a splinter in the leg. One man hadn’t come out of the trench. Even so, Sergeant Cross reported to Captain Connolly with considerable pride: “Sir, we whaled the stuffing out of the sons of bitches. Pinkard here, he was worth a regiment all by hisself.”

“Good news, Sergeant,” the company commander said. “Well done, Pinkard.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jeff answered. His voice was dull, far away. The red mist of slaughter had retreated from his mind. He felt spent and empty. Emily cavorted once more behind his eyes.

Four fat freighters slowly steamed south. Watching them from the deck of the USS
Ericsson
, George Enos sighed and said, “I don’t know why they bother painting themselves in camouflage colors. A big bull’s-eye with
SINK ME
alongside it in big letters would be more like the straight story.”

Carl Sturtevant chuckled. “You aren’t looking at the world with the proper spirit, George,” he said, for all the world like a chaplain.

Enos snorted. “And you aren’t looking at the world like any petty officer I ever heard of,” he retorted. “You’re supposed to go ‘Goddamn right’ when I say something like that.”

The chief of the depth-charge projector crew laughed. “I never do what I’m supposed to if I can help it.”

“All right.” Enos chuckled, too. The ships wallowed along, painted in stripes and patches and gaudy colors that were supposed to make it hard for the skipper of a submersible to gauge either their range or their course. Whether the camouflage job did that or not, George couldn’t have said. It made the freighters ugly as sin, though. There he was certain.

Stripes zigzagged jaggedly over the
Ericsson
, too, in an effort to break up her outline and make her seem to be moving in the direction of her own stern. She and a sister ship scurried around the freighter like sheep dogs around sheep, doing their best to keep the flock safe from the wolves that lurked under the surface of the sea.

“What I want to do,” Enos said, “is get the bastard who almost torpedoed us a few weeks ago. Lord knows he’s still hanging around; he would have chewed up that other bunch of freighters if we hadn’t run him off.”

Sturtevant raised an ironic eyebrow. “I swear, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Lieutenant Crowder reported that submersible as probably destroyed, and if you don’t think Lieutenant Crowder knows everything in the world, well, shit, just ask him.”

“Yeah, and rain makes applesauce,” Enos said. They both laughed then; laughing at the pretensions of officers was a sailors’ tradition old as time.

“He’s not too bad a fellow,” Sturtevant allowed in an astonishing display of magnanimity, “as long as you don’t take him too serious. Give him a chance, though, and he’d have half of us up in aeroplanes and the other half down under the water in deep-sea diver suits, tryin’ to catch torpedoes like they were footballs the Rebs were throwing at us.”

“He does like gadgets,” Enos agreed. “At least the depth-charge projector is a pretty good gadget.”

A veteran seaman, Sturtevant had almost as little use for new-fangled devices as he did for young officers enamored of them. When he said, “Yeah, it’s not too bad,” he surely meant it as high praise, and that was how George Enos took it.

Enos stared out across the blue, blue water of the tropical Atlantic, looking for anything that might alert him to the presence of the Confederate submarine that also seemed to make its home in this stretch of ocean. He’d spied the stinking thing once—why not twice?

Ocean, squawking birds, sun standing higher in the sky every day—and far higher now than Enos had ever seen, anyway. Despite that fierce and brilliant light, he didn’t spot anything out of the ordinary.

He kept looking ahead of the freighters, ahead and off to one side. If the submersible did prowl in these waters, that was the direction from which it would attack. It couldn’t move very fast while submerged; it had to take the lead on the surface, then go under and slowly sneak toward its intended prey.

George did his best to think like the skipper of a submersible. One thing he knew: the skipper of the boat that had almost sunk the
Ericsson
had nerve and brains both. He’d pretended to be sunk well enough to fool Lieutenant Crowder, and then he’d gone after U.S. freighters the first chance he got. That was his job, and he was going to do it come hell or high water—in fact, he’d probably prefer high water.

“There ought to be a better way to find a submersible that’s hunting than bare-naked eyeballs,” George said. “What we need”—he glanced over at Carl Sturtevant—“is a new kind of gadget.”

“Here’s what you need.” Sturtevant displayed the middle finger of his right hand. “And for God’s sake don’t say that anyplace where Crowder can hear you. He’ll either order you to invent the damn thing yourself—and by day before yesterday, too, or you’ll be in Dutch—or else he’ll try and do it himself, and that won’t work, either.”

“Yeah, but—” Enos got no further than that. The lead freighter blew up. It was a spectacular explosion; the ship must have been carrying munitions. The report slapped George in the face across a couple of miles of water. “Jesus!” he exclaimed.

Klaxons started hooting men to their battle stations. The
Ericsson
’s deck shuddered under Enos’ feet as he ran. The stacks belched smoke. The destroyer picked up speed.

At the one-pounder by the stern, George peered about. He suspected—he feared—he was likelier to spot a torpedo wake heading straight for the
Ericsson
than a telltale periscope. If he didn’t try to spot a periscope, though, nothing could be more certain than his failure.

A runner came up to Lieutenant Crowder at the depth-charge projector by Enos’ gun and said, “Sir, this is where the bastard—uh, the submersible—is hiding. Captain wants you to shake him up to the surface if you can.”

“We’ll do that,” Crowder said. He turned back to Carl Sturtevant, who did the dirty work of running the projector. “We’ll shake those Rebel bastards or their limey pals right out of their shoes. Give me four charges, Sturtevant; set the fuses for two hundred feet.”

“Aye aye, sir. Four charges. Two hundred feet,” the veteran petty officer repeated tonelessly. That tonelessness was itself a dead giveaway that he did not agree with his superior’s order. Indeed, as the crew loaded the first two charges onto the projector, he went so far as to ask, “Did I hear that right, sir?” If Crowder said no, he could change the order without losing face by having a man of lower rank correct him.

But Crowder, crisply, said, “Yes. I want them deep. After he sank that freighter, the skipper down there will surely have seen us coming to the attack. He will try to place as much ocean between himself and us as he can. Two hundred feet I said; two hundred feet it shall be.”