The Great War: Breakthroughs

by Harry Turtledove

  He shifted on the hard second-class seat. He was hard himself, and hoped the little old lady reading a sentimental novel next to him didn’t notice. He couldn’t help getting hard when he thought about Emily. Christ, she loved to do it! So did he, with her. When he’d got short leaves in Texas, he hadn’t felt any great urge to visit the whorehouses that did not officially exist. But Emily—Emily was something very special in the line of women.

  She’d probably kick his legs out from under him as soon as he walked in the door. She’d gone without as long as he had. From her letters, she might have missed it even more than he did. “Very special,” he muttered. The woman beside him looked up from her novel, realized he hadn’t been talking to her, and began to read again.

  Pinkard had the seat closer to the window. He found the Mississippi countryside more interesting than a book. Here, away from the front, the war seemed forgotten. He’d seen that as soon as the first train he’d boarded got more than an hour’s travel away from the trenches. Farmers were plowing in the fields. Actually, more farmers’ wives were in the fields than he would have seen before the war. That was a change, but only a small one when set against the absence of trenches and shell holes and artillery pieces. Everything was so green and fresh-looking, the way a landscape got to be when it wasn’t drastically revised every few days or every few minutes.

  When the train rolled through a town, factory smokestacks sent black plumes of smoke into the air. The first time Jeff saw those plumes, he was alarmed; they put him in mind of fires after bombardments. But he quickly stopped worrying about that: industry got to seem normal in a hurry.

  Past Columbus, Mississippi, and into Alabama the train rolled. Here and there, Pinkard did note scars on the landscape in this part of the countryside, half-healed ones from the Negro uprisings the year before. This was cotton country, with many Negroes and few whites.

  Somebody a couple of rows in front of Pinkard said, “I hear tell the niggers is still shootin’ at trains every now and again.”

  “Ought to do some shootin’ at them with the biggest guns we got,” the stranger’s seatmate answered.

  Remembering his own train ride into Georgia and the bullets that had slammed into the cars from out of the night, Pinkard understood how that fellow felt. He’d been a new, raw soldier then, his uniform a dark, proper butternut, not faded to the color of coffee with too much cream. The fire from the Red Negroes had seemed intense, deadly, terrifying. He wondered what it would seem like now. Probably not so much of a much.

  Darkness fell as the train rattled through the central-Alabama cotton fields. Jeff revised his thinking. If black diehards had fired a couple of belts of ammunition at this train, he would have been terrified all over again. If somebody was shooting at you and you couldn’t shoot back, terror made perfect sense.

  He leaned back in the hard, uncomfortable seat and closed his eyes. He was only going to relax for a little while. So he told himself, but the next thing he knew, the conductor was shouting, “Birmingham! All out for Birmingham!”

  He pushed past the gray-haired woman, who was going on farther east. As soon as he stepped out on the platform, he knew he was home again. The smoky, sulfurous air that poured from the foundries mingled with the fog that so often stole through Jones Valley to yield an atmosphere with density and character: damp and heavy and smelly, a mud bath for the lungs.

  Flame poured from the tops of the chimneys of the Sloss Works, out toward the eastern edge of town. Back before the war—back before the Conscription Bureau had dragged him out of the foundry and into the trenches—he’d thought of that sight as hell on earth. Now that he’d seen war, he knew better, but the memory lingered.

  Before he could get off the platform, he showed his papers to a military policeman who had to be counting his blessings at having a post hundreds of miles from the real war. The fellow inspected them, then waved him on. Trolley lines ran close by the station, taking travelers wherever they needed to go in the city. Pinkard stood at the corner and waited for the Sloss Works car he could ride out to the company housing—yellow cottages for white men and their families, primer-red for Negroes—surrounding the Sloss Works themselves. He yawned. He was still sleepy despite the nap, but figured the sight of Emily would wake him up in short order when he got home.

  The trolley driver—who’d leaned crutches behind his seat and had one empty trouser leg—worked the brake and brought the car squealing to a halt at the edge of the company town. He nodded to Jefferson Pinkard as the soldier got off. Jeff nodded back. He felt the driver’s eyes on him as he walked away. Did the fellow hate him for his long, smooth strides? How could anyone blame him if he did?

  Everything was quiet as Jeff headed home. Most of the cottages were dark, with men away for the war or working the evening shift or asleep if they worked days or nights. Here and there, lamplight yellow as melted butter spilled out of windows. A couple of dogs barked as Pinkard passed their houses. One of them, chained in the front yard, rushed at him, but the chain kept the big-mouthed, skinny brute from reaching the sidewalk.

  Jeff turned onto his little lane. He felt swept back in time to the days before the war. How many times he’d walked this way with Bedford Cunningham, his next-door neighbor and best friend, both of them tired and hot and sweaty in their overalls after a long day’s work. Alabama had been dry for a few years, but home-brew beer never got hard to come by. A couple of bottles out of the icebox went down sweet, no doubt about it.

  There stood the Cunningham house, dark and still. Pinkard sighed. Bedford had gone to war before he did, and had come back without an arm, as the trolley driver had come back without a leg. A one-armed man could do a lot of things, but going back on the foundry floor probably wasn’t one of them. Bedford and Fanny had hard times. Jeff wondered how long they’d be able to stay in company housing if Bedford wasn’t in the Army and couldn’t work for the company any more.

  Lamplight shone from the curtained window of Pinkard’s own house, just past the Cunninghams’. He kicked at the sidewalk in mild disappointment. He’d expected Emily would already be asleep; come morning, she’d have to head downtown toward her munitions-plant job. He’d hoped he could take off his uniform in the front room, slip naked into bed beside her, and startle her awake the best way he knew how.

  Even knowing she was awake, he went up the walk on tiptoe. If he couldn’t give her the best surprise possible, he’d still give her the biggest surprise he could. His thumb and palm closed on the doorknob. Gently, gently, he turned it. The door swung open without a squeak. He was glad Emily had kept the hinges oiled. In Birmingham, anything that didn’t get oiled rusted.

  The lamplight glinted off Emily’s shining hair. Seeing that before he saw anything else, Jeff began, “Hey, darlin’, I’m…home.” What had started as a glad cry ended as a hiss, like air escaping from a punctured inner tube.

  Emily half sat, half knelt on the floor in front of the divan. On the divan, his legs splayed wide, lolled Bedford Cunningham. Neither of them wore any more than they’d been born with. Her face had been in his lap till she pulled away at the sound of Jeff’s voice. A thin, bright line of saliva ran down her chin from a corner of her lower lip.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Cunningham said. “Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ.” The short stump of his right arm jerked and twisted, as if he’d tried to make a fist with a hand he’d forgotten he didn’t have. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  “Close the door, Jeff,” Emily said. Her eyes were wide and staring. She sounded eerily self-possessed, like somebody who’d just staggered out of a train wreck.

  Mechanically, Pinkard did. He was stunned, too, and said the first thing that popped into his mind: “You sneak out of Fanny’s bed to come over here, Bedford?”

  Cunningham shook his head. “She’s workin’ second shift these days.” His face was pale as skimmed milk. Before he was hurt, he’d been as big and strong and ruddy and bold as Pinkard. Now he looked thinner, older, his face lined
as it hadn’t been when he was a whole man.

  Jeff’s wits began to work. “Get your clothes on. Get the hell out of here. I ain’t gonna lick a crippled man.” He didn’t say a word about what he’d do, or wouldn’t do, to Emily.

  Bedford Cunningham put on drawers and trousers and shirt one-handed with a speed that showed both practice and desperation. He hadn’t been wearing shoes. He darted out the door. A few seconds later, the door to his own cottage opened and closed.

  “Why?” Jefferson Pinkard asked the age-old question of the husband betrayed.

  Naked still, Emily shrugged. Her breasts, firm and pink-tipped, bobbled briefly. She was, Jeff saw, over the jaundice that troubled some munitions workers who handled cordite too much. “Why?” she echoed, and shrugged again. “You weren’t here. I missed you. I missed it. Finally, I missed it so much I couldn’t stand it any more, and so—” Yet another shrug.

  “But Bedford—” My best friend! was another husbandly howl as old as time.

  Emily got to her feet in a smooth, graceful motion Jeff couldn’t possibly have imitated. She walked up to him and took his hands in hers. He knew what she was doing. He could hardly have helped knowing what she was doing. “He was here, that’s all, darlin’,” she said. “If you’d been here, too, I never would’ve looked at him. You know that’s so. But you was in Georgia and Texas and all them damn places, and—” She shrugged one more time. Her nipples barely brushed the breast of his tunic.

  No, he could hardly have helped knowing what she was doing. That didn’t mean it didn’t work. His breath caught in his throat. His heart thuttered. He’d missed it, too, but he hadn’t realized—he hadn’t had the faintest notion—how much till she stood bare before him.

  She took a step backwards, still holding his hands. He took a step forward, after her. She took another step, and another, leading him back to the divan. When he sat, it was where Bedford Cunningham had sat before him. She sprawled beside him. She had two hands to undo his belt buckle and the buttons of his fly.

  She didn’t kiss him on the lips. That might have reminded him where her mouth had just been. Instead, she leaned over and lowered her head. He pressed her down on him, his hands tangling in her thick hair. She gagged a little, but did not pull away.

  Moments later, he exploded. He let Emily pull back far enough to gulp convulsively. Then, unasked, she returned to what she’d been doing. He stiffened again, faster than he would have believed he could. When he was hard, she got up on her knees and swung her right leg over him, as if she were mounting a horse. She impaled herself on him and began to ride.

  Her cries of joy must have wakened half the neighborhood. Then, throatily, she added, “I never made noise like that for Bedford.” Jeff’s hands clutched her meaty buttocks till she whimpered in pain and pleasure mixed. He drove deep into her, again and again. And, as he groaned and shuddered in the most exquisite pleasure he’d ever known, he wished with all his soul he were back in a muddy trench in Texas, under artillery bombardment from the Yankees.

  Sweat ran down George Enos’ face. The sun stood higher in the sky than it had any business doing at this season of the year, at least to his way of thinking. The USS Ericsson was down in the tropics now, nosing around after the submarines making life miserable for the warships and freighters that were trying to strangle the trade route between Argentina and England.

  “What do you think?” he asked Carl Sturtevant. “Are we after English boats, or are the Rebs out here giving their pals a hand?”

  “Damned if I know,” answered the petty officer who ran the depth-charge launcher. “Damned if I care, either. Knowing who they are doesn’t change how I do my job. We keep them too busy either going after us or trying to get away from us, they aren’t going to be able to do anything else.”

  “Yeah,” Enos said. “Just between you and me, I’d sooner see ’em trying to get away than going after us.”

  Sturtevant looked him up and down. “Any fool can see you ain’t a career Navy man,” he said after a brief pause for thought.

  “Screw you and the destroyer you rode in on,” Enos returned evenly. “I’ve been captured by a Confederate commerce raider, I’ve sailed on a fishing boat that was nothing but a decoy for Rebel subs and helped sink one of the bastards, I was on the bank of the Cumberland when my river monitor got blown sky-high, and I was right here when the damn Snook damn near torpedoed us. To my way of thinking, I’ve earned a little peace and quiet.”

  “Everybody’s earned a little peace and quiet, and in the end everybody gets it, too,” the petty officer said: “nice plot of ground, about six feet by three feet by six feet under. Till then, I want my time lively as can be.”

  Enos grunted, then went back to what he’d been doing: watching the ocean for signs of a periscope or anything else suspicious. Everyone who didn’t have some other duty specifically assigned came up on deck and stood by the rail, scanning the ocean for the telltale feather of foam following a submersible’s periscope.

  A shadow on the water—George’s pulse raced. Was that the top of an enemy conning tower, hiding down there below the surface of the sea? He relaxed, for the shadow was far too small and far too swift to be any such thing. He raised his gaze from the ocean to the sky. Sure enough, a frigate bird with a wingspan not much smaller than that of an aeroplane glided away. Several sea birds—gulls and terns and more exotic tropical types Enos had had to have named for him—hung with the Ericsson, scrounging garbage. They seemed perfectly content hundreds of miles from land in any direction.

  George peered and peered. A man could only watch the ocean for a couple of hours at a stretch. After that, his attention started to wander. He saw things that weren’t there, which wasn’t so bad, and didn’t see things that were, which was. Miss a periscope and the sea birds would pick meat from your bones after your corpse floated up to the surface.

  What was that, there off the port bow? More likely than not, far more likely than not, it was just a bit of chop. He kept watching it. It wasn’t moving in the same direction as the rest of the chop, nor at quite the same speed. He frowned. He’d spent as much time on the ocean as any career Navy man. He knew how far from smooth and uniform it was. Still—

  He pointed. “What do you make of that?” he asked Sturtevant.

  The petty officer had been looking more nearly amidships. Now his gaze followed Enos’ outthrust finger. “Where? Out about a mile?” His pale eyes narrowed; he shielded them from sun and glare with the palm of his right hand.

  “Yeah, about that,” George answered.

  “That’s a goddamn periscope, or I’m a Rebel.” Sturtevant started pointing, too, and yelling at the top of his lungs. An officer with binoculars came running. He pointed them in the direction Sturtevant gave him. After a moment, he started yelling like a man possessed.

  At his yells, klaxons started hooting. George Enos and Carl Sturtevant sprinted for their battle stations at the stern of the Ericsson. The destroyer shuddered under them as the engines suddenly ran up to full emergency power. Great gouts of smoke belched from the stacks.

  “Torpedo in the water!” somebody screamed. The Ericsson had begun a turn toward the submersible, which meant that George could not see the wake of the torpedo as it sped toward the destroyer. He couldn’t have done anything about it had he been able to see it, but being ignorant of whether he would live or die came hard.

  Time stretched. The torpedo couldn’t have taken more than a minute—a minute and a half at the most—to speed from the submersible to the destroyer. But how long was a minute or a minute and a half? With his heart thudding in his chest, every breath a desperate gasp, Enos had no sure grasp.

  Tom Sturtevant pointed, as Enos had when he spotted the periscope. “There it goes, the goddamn son of a bitch!” Sturtevant shouted. Sure enough, the pale wake of the torpedo stretched out across the blue, blue water of the tropical Atlantic. Sturtevant stepped over to George beside his one-pounder and slapped him on the back hard enough
to stagger him. “If you hadn’t spotted the ’scope, the bastard would’ve been able to sneak in closer for a better shot. You made him fire it off too quick.”

  “Good.” Enos patted the magazine of nicely heavy shells he’d loaded into the one-pounder. He remembered what they’d done to the conning tower of the Snook, and to a couple of Confederate sailors who’d got in the way of them. “Now we’ve got the ball.”

  “Yeah,” Sturtevant said as the Ericsson slowed not far from the point whence the torpedo had been launched. “Now we start dropping ash cans on his head, and see if we can put him out of business for good.”

  At the side of the depth-charge launcher, Lieutenant Crowder said, “Let’s give him a couple, shall we, Mr. Sturtevant? Set them for a hundred and fifty feet.”

  “A hundred and fifty feet. Aye aye, sir,” the petty officer answered. He commanded the rest of the men at the launcher with effortless authority. A depth charge flew through the air and splashed into the Atlantic. A moment later, another followed.

  Somewhere down under the ocean, a boatful of men who’d just done their best to sink the Ericsson were listening to those splashes. George felt a weird sympathy for the submersible’s crew. The only thing a submersible had going for it was stealth. It couldn’t fight on the surface against a warship. It couldn’t outrun a warship, either. All it could do was sneak close, try for a kill, and then try to sneak away if that didn’t work.

  Sympathy had nothing whatever to do with whether George hoped the submariners would be able to sneak away after trying to kill him (and, in his own mind incidentally, everyone else on the Ericsson). He didn’t. “Come on, you bastards,” he said while the depth charges sank. “Come on.”

  Fifty yards below the surface of the Atlantic, the depth charges went off, one after the other, a few feet apart. Water on the surface bubbled and boiled. After the explosions, though, nothing more happened: no rush of air bubbles proclaiming a ruptured pressure hull, no oil slick telling of other damage, no boat hastily surfacing before it sank forever.