Breakthroughs (38 page)

“In the ears, looking at you,” Sam said.

“You better watch yourself, Carsten,” Crosetti said, clenching a fist in mock anger. “Pretty soon we’re going to sail far enough north for the sun to remember its first name, and then they’ll stick an apple in your mouth, on account of the rest of you’s gonna look like a roast pig that needs a little more time in the oven.”

“I’d laugh like a damn loon if only that was a joke,” Carsten said, warily eyeing the sky. Here below the equator, fall was heading toward winter. He favored winter, and clouds, and storms.

Before long, the
Dakota
leaned into a long turn that swung her course to the west. The rest of the joint American-Chilean fleet moved with her. Vic Crosetti clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Pilot must have spotted a convoy sneaking along the coast,” he said happily. “I guess we’ll go leave ’em a calling card.”

“I’d say you’re likely right,” Sam agreed. “Using a battleship to sink freighters is like smashing a fly with an anvil, if anybody wants to know what I think, but nobody seems to.”

“I sure as hell don’t,” Crosetti said, grinning as he planted the barb.

When the hooting horns summoned the crew of the
Dakota
to battle stations, Hiram Kidde was grinning from ear to ear as he greeted the sailors who manned the five-inch gun. “Just like shooting fish in a barrel, boys,” the gunner’s mate said. “Fish in a barrel, sure as hell.”

“Fish in a barrel don’t shoot back,” Carsten said. “Fish in a barrel don’t man torpedo boats.”

“That’s right,” Luke Hoskins agreed. “That’s just right. Sam and I were talking about that topside.”

“It’s a risk,” “Cap’n” Kidde allowed. “But it ain’t a hell of a big risk, I’ll tell you that. I’d sooner take my chances against those damn mosquitoes than against a real live battleship any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.”

Nobody quarreled with that. Carsten stepped away from the breech of the five-inch gun and peered out of the sponson through the vision slit. He needed a moment to realize the horizon wasn’t smooth and unbroken, as it was farther out to sea. It had lumps and bumps on it. “We’re within sight of land,” he said in surprise.

“Won’t be much longer before things start happening, then,” Kidde predicted. “If you can see it from here, they’ve seen it from the observation mast for a while now. I wonder if the skipper aims to get in close enough to use the secondaries to sink the freighters, and save the wear and tear on the big guns.”

“That’d be good,” Sam said. “You get close enough to use the secondaries against a battleship and you’re in more trouble than you really want. We found out everything we wanted to know about that and then some in the Battle of the Three Navies—oh, Lord, didn’t we just?”

Heads bobbed up and down as all the men in the gun crew remembered the
Dakota
’s wild and undesired ride toward first the British and then the Japanese fleet. Hoskins said, “What I want to do is, I want to hit a torpedo boat with a five-inch shell. God damn me if there’d be anything left of the bastard but matchsticks and kindling.” The gun crew nodded again. Carsten liked the picture that made in his mind.

As he usually did, Hiram Kidde thought along with the officers in charge of the
Dakota
. Commander Grady, who was responsible for the starboard secondary armament, stepped into the crowded sponson and said, “Boys, they’re going to give us the fun this time. Pick your target, blow it to hell and gone, and then hit the next one. Every time you send a few thousand tons of meat and wheat to the bottom, you push the limeys that much closer to starving.”

“Yes, sir!” Kidde said. “It’ll be a pleasure, sir.”

“Good.” Grady hurried away to pass the word to the rest of the five-inch gun crews on his side of the battleship.

Kidde peered down into the rangefinder. “Inside nine thousand yards,” he murmured, and worked the elevation screw. To the crew, he added, “Let’s get a shell in the gun.”

Hoskins jerked one out of the magazine and passed it to Sam Carsten, handling the sixty-pound weight as if it were nothing. Sam slammed it into the breech and slid the block closed.

“Fire!” Kidde shouted.

Carsten jerked the lanyard. The gun roared and bucked. Stinking cordite fumes filled the sponson. The other guns of the secondary armament were roaring, too. Sam worked the breech mechanism. The empty brass shell casing clattered down onto the steel deck. Luke Hoskins handed him another shell. He slammed it home.

“That one was long,” Hiram Kidde reported, fiddling with the elevation screw again. When he was satisfied, he let out a grunt and shouted “Fire!” again. He grunted once more when the shell hit. “Short this time. All right—we’ve got the bastard straddled. Give me another one.”

“This one should be right on the money,” Sam said as he fired the cannon.

“Hit!” Kidde screamed. “That was a hit. Bastard’s burning! Pour a couple more into him, Carsten.”

“Right, ‘Cap’n,’ ” Sam said. “Feels good to do the shooting instead of getting shot at.”

When the first target had taken what Kidde reckoned to be fatal damage, he turned the gun toward another hapless freighter. But before he had the gun laid, he grunted yet again, this time in surprise. “Somebody’s shooting back at us,” he said. “I didn’t spot any flash or smoke, but a good-sized shell just splashed down forward of the bow.”

“Railroad gun somewhere inland?” Carsten asked.

“That’d be sneaky, wouldn’t it?” the gunner’s mate answered. “You got a nasty head on your shoulders, you know?” He peered through the vision slit. “Still don’t see anything, though.”

Guns topside started firing: not the titanic main armament, which Sam would have thought the proper response to a big gun mounted on a flatcar, but the one-pounders that had been bolted into place here and there on deck not long before the war began. Luke Hoskins, who had less imagination than any man Carsten knew, was the one who solved the riddle: “That wasn’t a shell, ‘Cap’n’—bet you anything it was a bomb off an aeroplane.”

Everybody in the gun crew stared at him. “Dip me in shit if I don’t think you’re right,” Kidde said. “Jesus! What do we do about that? Only way you knock down an aeroplane is by dumb fucking luck.” He shrugged. “They don’t pay me to worry about it. They pay me to fight this gun, and that’s what I’m going to do.” He finished turning it to its new target. “Fire!”

Sam jerked the lanyard. The gun bellowed. A moment later came the bellow of another explosion, this one on deck. It was a big explosion, a frighteningly big explosion. Bombs didn’t have to survive being shot out of guns the way shells did, Carsten realized. Not needing thick walls, they could carry a hell of a lot of explosive for their size.

Another blast shook the deck under Sam’s feet. He kept on loading and firing to Hiram Kidde’s commands. As Kidde had said, what else could he do? But then the
Dakota
turned away from the freighters he’d been shelling, away from the Argentine coast, and ran for the open sea. More bombs fell on and around her.

Hiram Kidde stared out the vision slit and then back at his gun crew. His face wore nothing but astonishment. “Aeroplanes!” he said, his voice cracking like a boy’s. “Aeroplanes! And they might have sunk us. What the hell is the world coming to?”

Newspapers in Cuba were printed roughly half and half, English and Spanish. Sipping his morning coffee, puffing on a fine Habana, Roger Kimball suddenly burst out laughing. “What’s funny, sir?” Tom Brearley asked.

Kimball pointed. “Look here. The damnyankees say they sank us.”

His exec scanned the item. He didn’t laugh. He got angry. “Those dirty, lying sons of bitches,” he burst out. “You can never trust what a Yankee says—never. My granddad taught me that, and they’ve proved he was right time after time after time. Hell, they make Jews look honest.”

“Don’t blow a gasket, Tom,” Kimball said. “When we came back here for refit, who took our place in the map box?”

“Hampton Ready’s boat,” Brearley answered at once. “He was in the class ahead of mine at Mobile.”

“Ready’s boat, yeah,” Kimball said: “the
Bonito
.”

Brearley needed a minute to take it in. When he did, he went from angry to grim in the blink of an eye. “You’re right,” he said. “Sure as hell, you’re right. And that means they really did sink him, too. Damn. He was a good sailor, and a good fellow, too.”

“Must have made it to the surface just long enough for the Yanks to get a fast look at the name, and then straight down before they could read it all. Christ.” Kimball shivered. That was a nasty way to go. There weren’t any nice ways to go, not when you jammed yourself down into a tin can and went after real ships. “You all right, Tom? You look green around the gills.”

Brearley didn’t answer, not directly. “Hamp’s wife just had a baby girl maybe six months ago. You know Katie? Little redhead; nice gal.”

“I’ve met her,” Kimball said. “Married man shouldn’t skipper a submersible. Makes you think too much.” But that didn’t solve Brearley’s problem—or Katie Ready’s now. Kimball couldn’t do anything about hers. About Brearley’s, and, he admitted to himself, his own…He waved. A swarthy waiter hurried over. “Two
mojitos, pronto
.”

“
Dos mojitos. Sí.
Yes, sir,” the officers’ club waiter said. He hurried away, not seeing anything in the least unusual about a Navy officer ordering drinks with breakfast. Prohibition might have made strides on the Confederate mainland. It was only a word in Cuba, and a seldom-used word at that.

Rum and mint over crushed ice went enormously well with strong coffee and fine cigars. Tom Brearley drank half of his, looked thoughtful, and slowly nodded. “That was the medicine I needed, all right.”

“Steady you down,” Kimball agreed. He took a pull from his own
mojito
. “I grew up drinking whiskey, same as everybody else in Arkansas, but I’ll tell you, I could get used to rum.”

Brearley nodded. “I’m the same way. It’s got the kick, no two ways about it.” He picked up the newspaper, then threw it down on the table, shaking his head. “Hamp Ready. That does hurt. Damn fine fellow.” He poured down the rest of the drink.

Kimball picked up the paper and read further. “Says the boat was sunk by the USS
Ericsson
.” He stiffened. “That’s the destroyer that’s been playing cat and mouse with us, all right. Ready wasn’t ready enough, and they got him.”

“That box on the map doesn’t have a boat in it now,” Brearley said. “We were going to go back and take over for the
Bonito
when she finished her tour. What do you want to bet they send us back fast as they can now?”

“You’re right, goddammit.” Kimball got up, slapped coins on the table, and left. Over his shoulder, he said, “If I don’t have much time to enjoy myself, I’m going to make the most of what I’ve got.”

Instead of heading for one of the many sporting houses that catered to Confederate Navy men, he walked down San Isidro Street, away from the harbor, till he came to a telegraph office. He sent a wire to his mother and the man she’d married after his father died. He hoped they’d get it; last he’d heard, the damnyankees had been close to overrunning the farm on which he’d grown up.

He sent another wire to Anne Colleton. Both read the same:
I
’
M NOT AS EASY TO KILL AS THE YANKEES THINK. HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON. LOVE, ROGER.
To his mother,
hope to see you soon
was a polite sentiment, nothing more. With Anne Colleton…He hoped to see her the very soonest he could, and with the most privacy he could arrange.

Telegrams sent, he hurried back toward the
Bonefish
. A fat commander with the three oak leaves of Supply above the stripes on his sleeve stood on the wharf alongside Kimball’s submersible. Longshoremen, some black, some swarthy like the waiter, streamed into and out of the boat. The officer from Supply checked off items on a clipboard.

“Good to see you here, Skipper,” he said, nodding to Kimball. “We’re stepping things up—as best we can, anyhow. You’ll be going back to sea sooner than you might have hoped when you came into port.”

“Reckoned as much.” Kimball nodded back. “You all will have known about the
Bonito
a while before I worked it out.” He donned an exasperated expression, half genuine, half assumed for effect. “You might have been good enough to let me know my boat would be turning around in a hurry.”

“Oh, we would have gotten around to it, Commander, never fear,” the officer from Supply answered breezily. He did indeed have an impressive belly. He was smoking a cigar that made the one Kimball had enjoyed with breakfast seem a stogie made from weeds. Kimball wondered when he’d last set foot in an actual working vessel of the C.S. Navy. Probably when he’d reported to Havana, whenever that was. He didn’t come from Cuba; his accent said Alabama or Mississippi.

Fixing him with a gaze he might have sent toward a U.S. cruiser through his periscope, Kimball said, “I am like the fellow whose neighbor has a mean dog. I might put up with one bite, but sure as hell I won’t put up with two. If I need to know something, I expect to find out the minute I need to know it, not when somebody gets around to it.”

He didn’t advance on the commander from Supply. He didn’t clench his fist. He didn’t even raise his voice. The commander staggered back as if hit in that comfortable, well-upholstered belly even so. “I’m sure you won’t have any trouble like that in the future,” he said, pasting a wide, placating smile on his face and taking the fancy cigar out of his mouth to make the smile even wider.

“Good.” Kimball still didn’t raise his voice, but the officer from Supply took another couple of steps back. Kimball strode past him and climbed down into the noisome darkness that was the interior of the
Bonefish
.

Ben Coulter had things well in hand there. After a stretch of time with the crew out and the boat cleaned up as much as it could be, the stench had diminished. It was still enough to make most sailors in the surface Navy turn up their toes, or perhaps heave up their breakfasts. To Kimball, it was the smell of home.

“Long as we can keep things fresh, sir, we’ll live like kings,” Coulter said. “Plenty of eggs and meat and fish and greens—some of ’em are these funny Cuban vegetables that look like God forgot what he was doin’ when He was makin’ ’em, but you boil ’em long enough and they all taste the same, sure as hell. Yes, sir, like kings.”