“Yes, yes,” Custer said impatiently, though Dowling wouldn’t have bet more than half a dollar that he’d been sure where in the line MacArthur’s formation did belong.
“We have found to our cost how strong the Confederate defenses due south and southwest of our position are,” MacArthur said. Custer nodded, those peroxided curls flapping at the back of his neck. MacArthur continued, “Aerial reconnaissance suggests, though, that the Rebels’ line is weaker toward the southeast. If we strike in that direction, toward Gallatin, we can set our men to taking lines less formidably manned, thereby giving them the opportunity to swing back toward Nashville, cutting in behind the entrenchments that have delayed them so long.”
Custer sucked at something between two of his false teeth. Abner Dowling scratched his chin. “Sir,” he said, “it’s not a bad scheme.” He suspected he sounded surprised. He didn’t much care for MacArthur, having seen in Custer what the passage of years was likely to do to such a man.
Custer studied the map a while longer. MacArthur had used bright blue ink to show exactly what he wanted to do. “No,” Custer said at last, “it’s not.” He sounded imperfectly enamored of it, but seemed to recognize it was a better plan than any he’d come up with. Since most of his plans amounted to nothing more than finding the enemy and attacking him (not necessarily in that order), that did not say as much as it might have otherwise.
Unlike the general commanding First Army, MacArthur did his homework ahead of time. The map was not the only sheet of paper lurking in his breast pocket. Handing Custer a typewritten list, he said, “Here are the additional artillery requirements for the assault, sir, and other ancillaries as well.”
“See what you think of this, Major,” Custer said, and passed the sheet to Dowling. Precise control of details had never been his strong suit.
MacArthur puffed and puffed, blowing smoke into Dowling’s face as if it were phosgene gas. Dowling read rapidly through the list before turning to Custer. “Sir, he wants all the heavy artillery concentrated on his division’s front, and he also wants almost all of our barrels for the assault.”
“Moving the heavy artillery will take time,” Custer said, “especially with the roads as muddy as they have been lately. I’m sure we can move some of it, but asking for all asks for too much.”
“Even half the First Army reserve would probably be adequate,” MacArthur said. He was smarter than Custer had ever been, Dowling thought: he knew enough to ask for more than he really wanted, to help assure his getting at least that much. He couldn’t quite keep the eagerness from his voice as he asked, “And the barrels-?”
“Ah, the barrels.” Custer assumed a mournful expression. “I have to remind you, General, that I am under strict orders from the War Department not to concentrate the barrels in the manner you suggest. Approved doctrine requires keeping them widely spread along the entire length of the front.”
“But, sir-” Dowling closed his mouth a split second before it got him in trouble. Custer had argued ferociously for concentrating barrels in a mass. Why was he rejecting the idea when one of his subordinates had it?
After a moment, the major understood: Custer was rejecting the idea because one of his subordinates had had it. If a division-sized attack spearheaded by a swarm of barrels succeed, who would get the credit? Not Custer-Daniel MacArthur.
MacArthur said, “Once you let me proceed, sir, I can show those fools in Philadelphia the proper way to do things.”
Abner Dowling sighed. He was but a major; neither of the exalted personages under the awning even noticed. MacArthur couldn’t have said that worse if he’d tried for a week. Custer, as Dowling knew full well, despised those fools back in Philadelphia as much as any man alive. But when MacArthur said I can show, that meant Custer couldn’t show. Custer wanted victories, yes. Custer wanted Teddy Roosevelt reelected, yes. But, most of all, Custer wanted glory for George Armstrong Custer.
Almost sorrowfully, he said, “I wish I could help you more, General, but my own orders in this regard are severely inflexible. I may be able to furnish you with, oh, half a dozen extra barrels without having some pipsqueak inspector-general calling me on the carpet, but no more than that, I fear.”
“But, sir, nothing ventured, nothing gained,” MacArthur protested.
“I am venturing what I can, General, I assure you,” Custer said icily. “Yours is not the only division in the line. Will you prepare a revised attack plan conforming to the available resources, or will you stand on the defensive?”
“You’ll have it before the day is out, sir.” MacArthur’s voice held no expression whatever. Like a mechanical man, he saluted, spun, and stalked off.
Very softly, Custer laughed at his retreating back. Dowling stared at the general commanding First Army. Custer, here, knew just what he was doing-and he enjoyed it, too. You bastard, Dowling thought. You sneaky old bastard. Was that admiration or loathing? For the life of him, he couldn’t tell.
Roger Kimball peered avidly through the periscope. The fish was running straight and true. Suddenly, the U.S. destroyer realized it was under attack. Suddenly, it tried to turn away from the creamy wake the torpedo left. Suddenly, the torpedo struck just aft of amidships. Suddenly, a great pillar of smoke and flame rose into the air. The destroyer, broken in half, sank like a stone-like two stones.
Cheers filled the narrow steel tube that was the working area of the Bonefish, drowning out the echoes of the explosion that the water carried to the submersible. “Hit!” Kimball’s own bloodthirsty howl was but one among many.
He brought his eyes back to the periscope. Only a couple of boats bobbed in the Atlantic; the damnyankees hadn’t had time to launch any more. If he’d been a German submarine commander, he would have surfaced and turned the deck gun on them. The Huns played by hard rules. There were times when Kimball, feeling the full weight of the USA pressing down on him and his country, wanted to play that way, too.
Such thoughts went by the board in a hurry when, turning the periscope, he saw another destroyer running straight for him. His fierce joy curdled and went cold in the twinkling of an eye. “Dive!” he shouted. “Take us down to 150, Tom, and make it snappy!”
“Aye aye, sir, 150 feet,” his exec answered. Compressed air bubbled out of the buoyancy chambers; seawater gurgled in to take its place. Up on the surface, those bubbles would help the Yankee sailors figure out where he was, though they were liable to have a pretty good idea already, what with the course their fellow boat had been making and the way it had tried to escape his fish.
With more and more of the North Atlantic piled atop it, the hull of the Bonefish creaked and squealed. There were a couple of little drips where the seams weren’t perfectly tight, but they were in the old familiar places. Kimball didn’t worry much about them.
Through the hull, the noise of the engine and screw up above them was perfectly audible. No-engines and screws. Two boats were moving back and forth up there. “Leveling off at 150, sir,” Tom Brearley said, straightening the diving planes. In the dim orange light, his grin was almost satanic. “They aren’t what you’d call happy with us.”
“Ain’t been happy with them since we went to war,” Kimball replied, “or before that, either, you get right down to it. Them and us, we don’t-”
He broke off abruptly. Through the pounding drone of the destroyers’ engines, he’d heard another sound, the noise that might have come from a garbage can full of cement being flung into the ocean.
“Depth charge,” Ben Coulter said hoarsely. The veteran petty officer tried to make light of it: “Those damn things, most of the time they don’t work for beans.” A moment later, another splash followed the first.
“Give me eight knots, Tom, and change course to 270,” Kim-ball said.
“Changing course to two-seven-zero, sir, aye aye, and eight knots,” Brearley acknowledged, a certain amount of doubt in his voice. Kimball didn’t blame him. Eight knots used up battery power in a hurry, cutting deeply into the time the Bonef
ish could stay underwater.
Without much humor, Kimball tried to make a joke of it: “When the boys on top start throwing things at you, Tom, it’s time to get out from under ’em.”
“Well, yes, sir, but-” Brearley didn’t get any further than that, for the first depth charge exploded just then.
It was, Kimball supposed, something like being in an earthquake. It was also like standing inside a metal pipe while giants pounded on the outside of it with sledgehammers. Kimball staggered and smacked the side of his head against the periscope mounting. Something wet started running down his cheek. It was warm, not cold, so he supposed it was blood rather than seawater.
Men stumbled and cursed. The lights flickered. A few seconds later, the other depth charge went off. It was farther away than the first one, so it only felt like a big kick in the ass from an angry mule.
“Sir, on second thought, eight knots is a right good idea,” Brearley said.
“Everything still answer?” Kimball asked.
Brearley nodded. “Seems to, sir.”
“We got a new leak back here, sir,” one of the men in the black gang called from the engines toward the stern. “Don’t seem too bad, though.”
“It had better not,” Kimball answered. “Tom, take her down to 200. I want to put some more distance between us and them.”
“The leaks will get worse,” Brearley said, but that was more observation than protest. The bow of the Bonefish slanted down. If the leaks got a lot worse, Kimball knew he’d have to rise. No one shouted in alarm, so he kept quiet till Brearley said, “Leveling off at 200.”
Splash! Splash! Two more depth charges went into the water. Where they went into the water was the key factor, and the one Kimball couldn’t gauge till they detonated. All he could do was hope he’d picked a direction different from the one the Yankees had chosen. Even with the Bonefish going flat out submerged, those destroyers had better than three times his speed. The only thing he had going for him was that they couldn’t see him. Hydrophones gave only a vague clue about his direction, and they had to guess his depth.
Wham! Wham! Explosions rocked the submarine. They were both closer than that second one had been, but not so close as the first. All at once, he grinned. “All stop,” he snapped to Brearley.
“All-stop,” the exec answered. He looked back over his shoulder at Kimball. “You’re not going to-?”
“Bet your balls I am, son,” the skipper of the Bonefish said. “The damnyankees guessed with me, far as direction goes. They know how fast we are. What do you want to bet they keep right on that track, pounding away? They must have some new kind of charges, too, on account of I don’t think they’ve tossed any duds at us.”
“Isn’t that wonderful?” Brearley said. Along with most of the crew, Kimball chuckled. The life of a submariner had never been easy. By what the damnyankees were throwing at the Bonefish, it had just got harder.
Splash! Splash! With even the quiet electric motors running only enough to power lights and instruments, the noise the depth charges made going into the ocean was all too audible. In his mind’s eye, Kimball saw them twisting slowly down through the green-gray waters of the Atlantic (almost the color of a Yankee soldier’s uniform), looking for his boat. He cursed himself for an overactive imagination.
Wham! Wham! He staggered. A tiny new jet of seawater sprayed coldly down the back of his neck. As they had with the first attack, the lights flickered before steadying.
“Those were in front of us, sir,” Tom Brearley said.
“I know,” Kimball answered. “Here we sit.” He could feel eyes boring into him, as he had when he’d taken the Bonefish up the Pee Dee River looking for Red rebels. Then, though, the watchful eyes had belonged to the Negroes in the swamps along the riverbank. Now they were the eyes of his own crew.
He understood exactly why, too. The previous spread of charges had been aft of the submersible, this one in front. If that meant the U.S. destroyers up there had somehow located him…the next pair would go off right on top of his conning tower.
“One thing, boys,” he said into the drip-punctuated quiet. “If it turns out I’m wrong, we’ll never know what hit us.” If water at seven atmospheres’ pressure flooded into the Bonefish, it would smash everything in its path, surely making no exceptions for flimsy human beings.
“Sir,” Brearley asked, “if you have to, how deep will you take her?”
“I’d go to 300 without blinking an eye,” Kimball answered. “It gets wet fast down that deep, but odds are you’ll come back up from it. Nobody really knows how deep you can go if you’re lucky enough. I’ve heard stories of 350, even 400 feet, when the sub was damaged and couldn’t control its dive till it touched bottom.” He grinned wryly at his exec. “’Course, the ones who go down that deep and never surface again-you don’t hear about those.”
Sailors chuckled. He looked round at them: a grimy, unshaven crew, all the more raffish in the orange lighting. They fit here, the same as he did. They would have been-some had been-outcasts, frequent inhabitants of the brig, almost outlaws, in the gentlemanly world of the Confederate States surface Navy. As far as he was concerned, they’d done the cause more good than ten times their number aboard fancy battleships.
Splash! Splash! Everyone involuntarily sucked in a long breath of the humid, fetid air. In a very little while, Kimball would find out whether his training and instincts had saved their bacon-or killed them all.
In casual tones, Coulter remarked, “Wish I had me a beer right now.”
“We get back to Charleston, I’ll buy everybody here all the beer you can drink,” Kimball promised. That was liable to be an expensive promise to keep, but he didn’t care. Getting back to Charleston would make being poor for a while afterwards worthwhile and then some.
How long for a depth charge to reach the depth for which it was fused? The new pair seemed to be taking forever. Maybe they were duds, Kimball thought. The damnyankees couldn’t have come up with a way to make them work all the time…could they?
Wham! Wham! Maybe they could. “Jesus!” Tom Brearley exclaimed. “That took forever!” Kimball wasn’t the only one for whom time had stretched like a rubber band, then. The exec turned to him with a smile as radiant as any worn, greasy man could show in that light. “Well ahead of us, both of ’em, sir.”
“Yeah,” Kimball said, as if he hadn’t just bet his life and won. “Now we sit here for as long as the batteries will let us and wait for our little friends up there to get tired and go away. How long can we wait, Tom?”
Brearley checked the gauges. “It would be longer if we hadn’t tried that sprint after we sank the destroyer, sir, but we’ve got charge enough for five or six hours.”
“Should be enough,” Kimball said jovially. It had better be enough, echoed in his mind. He took a deep breath and made a face. “Things’ll stink too bad for us to stand it any longer’n that, regardless.” That was phrased like a joke and got laughs like a joke, but it wasn’t a joke, and everybody knew it. The longer you sat submerged, the fouler the air got. That was part of the nature of the boat.
Five and a half hours after the Bonefish sank its target, Ben Coulter found he couldn’t keep a candle alight in the close, nasty atmosphere inside the pressure hull. “If we had a canary in here, sir, it would have fallen off its perch a hell of a long time ago,” he said to Kimball.
“Yeah,” the captain answered. His head ached. He could feel how slowly he was thinking. He nodded to Brearley. “Blow forward tanks, Tom. Bring her up to periscope depth.”
A long, careful scan showed nothing on the horizon. Kimball ordered the Bonefish to the surface. Wearily, he climbed the ladder to the top of the conning tower, the exec close behind him to make sure the pressurized air didn’t blow him out the hatch when he opened it.
When he did undog the hatch, his stomach did its best to crawl up his throat: all the stenches so long trapped inside the submersible seemed ten times worse when they rushed out in a great
vile gale and mixed in his lungs with the first precious breath of fresh, clean sea air. Fighting down his gorge, he climbed another couple of rungs and looked around. Late-afternoon sunshine felt as savagely bright as it did during a hangover. The ocean was wide and empty. “Made it again, boys,” he said. The crew cheered.
XVIII
Maria Tresca fiddled microscopically with Flora Hamburger’s hat. The Italian woman stepped back to survey the results. “Better,” she said, although Flora, checking the mirror, doubted the naked eye could tell the difference between the way the hat had looked before and how it did now.
“Remember,” Herman Bruck said, “Daniel Miller isn’t stupid. If you make a mistake in this debate, he’ll hurt you with it.”
He looked and sounded anxious. Had he been running against the appointed Democratic congressman, he probably would have made just such a mistake. Maybe he sensed that about himself and set on Flora’s shoulders his worries about what he would have done.
“It will be all right, Herman,” she said patiently. She sounded more patient than she was, and knew it. Beneath her pearl-buttoned shirtwaist, beneath the dark gray pinstriped jacket she wore over it, her heart was pounding. Class warfare in the USA hadn’t reached the point of armed struggle. The confrontation ahead, though, was as close an approach as the country had yet seen. Democrat versus Socialist, established attorney against garment worker’s daughter…here was the class struggle in action.
Someone pounded on the dressing-room door. “Five minutes, Miss Hamburger!” the manager of the Thalia Theatre shouted, as if she were one of the vaudevillians who usually performed here on Bowery. She felt as jumpy as any of those performers on opening night. The manager, who stomped around as if he had weights in his shoes, clumped down the hall and shouted, “Five minutes, Mr. Miller!”
Those last minutes before the debate went by in a blur. The next thing Flora knew, there she stood behind a podium on stage, staring out over the footlights at the packed house: a fuller house than vaudeville usually drew, which was the main reason the manager had rented out the hall tonight. There in the second row sat her parents, her sisters-Sophie with little Yossel in her arms-and her brothers.
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