For an instant, while he pulled up his breeches and readied his trusty Zippo, he contemplated the arbitrary nature of fate. There was no guarantee that anybody on the other side of the partition had anything to do with, well, anything. That was a shame. Naturally, he’d have preferred that only the guilty suffer, but in a battle like this, there was bound to be collateral damage. It was regrettable, but that was just the way it was. Word would spread that certain pranks were beyond the pale, and a disproportionate response must be expected. Taking the ship model, a crudely shaped thing, but obviously meant to resemble one of the great Grik ironclads, he quickly lit the four cigar-shaped protuberances arranged like the smokestacks on the enemy ships. These were made of a different kind of wood than the rest of the vessel—gimpra wood, to be precise. And the dried sap inside caused the little stacks to blaze like signal flares. Carefully setting his little dreadnaught in the torrent of water, he let it go, and as nonchalantly as possible, retraced his steps.
* * *
“You wanted to see me, Skipper?” Silva asked when Chief Gray practically shoved him into the pilothouse. He was suddenly on edge. There were several officers on the bridge, including that weasel, Herring.
“No, but she does,” Matt said, nodding at Lieutenant Tab-At, who stood beside the chart table, her tail rigid with fury. By the hint of scorched fur wafting through the bridge, she’d been one of those on the “Dames” side of the partition, and Silva cringed slightly. He hadn’t expected that. He had nothing at all against Tabby and knew she’d suffered some pretty bad steam burns before. That was likely to make her a little extra sensitive to his stunt.
“I want that . . . fiend . . . in the brig!” Tabby demanded, her voice hard as granite.
“We don’t have a brig,” Matt mildly reminded, then turned to his talker. “Anything on what the scout planes saw yet, Minnie? Does Mr. Fairchild have anything on his scope?” He really didn’t have time for this right now. Something screwy might be stalking his little fleet at that very moment. Chances remained it was nothing to worry about, though, and he had to stifle the very real problem brewing on his ship before it escalated, as such things were liable to do. He suspected he needed to make time to deal with this at once.
“Nothing yet, Cap-i-taan. Mr. Faar-child reports ‘no contact.’”
“Tell him to keep at it. The fleet’s catching up.”
“Ay, ay,” Minnie replied.
Matt looked back at Silva.
“Then chaineem up in the bilge,” Tabby insisted. “He ain’t fit to be around people!”
“That may well be,” Matt replied reasonably. “Silva? Just what is it that’s wrong with you? Chasing sea monsters, terrifying the snipes. How can anybody be such a credit to the Navy one minute, and such a disgrace the next? I thought you’d improved.”
Dennis never even considered lying to Captain Reddy; nor did he contemplate one of his convoluted justifications. One of the few things that really mattered to him was Captain Reddy’s trust. He wasn’t exactly sure how he’d endangered it—he’d just been being himself, after all—but apparently there really was a line he shouldn’t cross. He’d expected to have to account for himself at mast, or something, but this public, “drumhead” chastisement—particularly in front of strangers like Herring—was a surprise, and just a bit ominous. “I have improved, Skipper. Honest. And I don’t know what got ahold o’ me.” He glared at Tabby. “Somethin’ needed doin’ about certain things, an’ I guess I’ve got sorta used to doin’ things that need doin’.”
“Setting fire to people in . . . that situation needed doing?” Tabby demanded, almost shrill. “Somebody could ’a got hurt baad!”
“Nuh-uh,” Silva denied, “not the way I set it up. Not past a little scorched fur, anyway. You think I ain’t seen that same stunt a thousand times? It’s one of the oldest standbys in the book.” His jaw clenched. “Though maybe some folks had a little indignification comin’!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tabby growled.
“Ask Pam—I mean, Lieutenant Cross, what’s the commonest aggravations the deck apes’ve been seein’ her about!”
Matt looked at the Bosun, who grimaced but nodded. “He’s right. The ‘butt blisters’ ain’t hit the chiefs or officers’ heads, but there’s been a rash—s’cuse me, Skipper—o’ complaints from those that frequent the aft crew’s head.”
“A rash!” Silva practically choked.
“Shut up, you!” Gray seethed.
Minnie suddenly interrupted the testimony. “Mr. Farr-child has a underwater contact beareen seero eight seero, relaa-tive!” she cried. “Range two t’ousands! It jus pop up there, he say.”
Matt whipped his gaze to starboard, but saw nothing but the mild sea. Whatever was out there had somehow managed to slip past Wallace Fairchild’s sonar gear and was still headed toward the fleet! No mountain fish had ever done that. “Right standard rudder,” Matt barked. “Steady on course zero four zero. All ahead full. Sound general quarters.” Amid the raucous cry of the general alarm, Matt turned back to Minnie. “Signal to Admiral Keje on Big Sal that we’ve got an unidentified target on an intercept course with the fleet. We’re preparing to engage.” Just like that, the “contact” had become the “target.”
“What kinda signal . . . TBS?” Minnie asked.
Matt took a breath. Chances still were it was no big deal, and fleet lookouts would’ve been alerted by Walker’s sudden maneuver. They’d be watching her. “Flags and Morse lamp, but make it snappy.”
Silva and Tabby started to bolt for their stations, but Matt stopped them. “One second. Silva, I don’t know what it is with you, but you can’t keep acting like this. People look up to you, damn it! You think I won’t bust you? Think again. One more stunt like this—or anything else your creepy brain cooks up—I’ll bust you to third class . . . and I’ll throw you off my ship. Is that clear?”
Silva didn’t care about the rank, but leave Walker? He couldn’t believe his ears. But the Skipper was serious this time; there was no doubt about it. He gulped. “No, sir—I mean, aye, aye, sir. And no, sir, it won’t happen again!” Matt glared at Tabby. “And you. You’re an officer now, damn it! Keep control of your division, or I’ll find somebody who can.”
Tabby was equally stunned and blinked furiously, her big eyes beginning to fill.
“Now get out of my sight, both of you,” Matt practically whispered, and man and ’Cat bolted for the ladder aft.
“Kinda hard on ’em, weren’t you, Skipper?” Gray asked quietly as Matt raised his binoculars, looking for what? A fin? A periscope, God forbid? “At least on Tabby,” Gray pressed.
“No, Boats, I wasn’t,” Matt replied. “Morale’s one thing, and rivalries aren’t all bad, but stuff like that can get out of hand. If this mission isn’t for all the marbles—and maybe it is—it’s for a hell of a lot of them any way you slice it. I will not tolerate anything that pits one half of the crew against the other right now, no matter how silly or innocent we’ve treated such things before. This job’s just too big for silliness. Period. You’ll make sure of that, won’t you?”
“Of course, Skipper.”
“Sound’s losin’ the taagit,” Minnie warned. “We go too fast.”
“What’s the last Wally had on the target?”
“Range twelve hundreds an’ closin’. Down doppler. Taagit course estimated one two seero, speed five knots!”
Matt had hoped to get around in front of whatever it was, but it must’ve surged ahead for a while before slowing back down. Walker had come up behind it. “Estimated range between the target and the closest DD screening the fleet?”
“Ah, eleven t’ousands,” Minnie replied after repeating the question to Sonny Campeti on the fire-control platform above the bridge.
“Make your course one two zero,” Matt instructed Chief Quartermaster and acting First Lieutenant “Paddy�
�� Rosen, who’d quietly taken the helm.
“Making my course one two zero, aye,” Rosen replied. “My course is one two zero,” he said a few moments later.
“Very well. Slow to two-thirds. See if Wally can find the target again. Y-gun crews will stand by to throw a couple of eggs out in front of it. That should chase it away,” he added to Gray.
“You think it’s a baby mountain fish after all?” Gray asked a little worriedly, and Matt looked at him. Apparently, the rogue-sub scuttlebutt was gaining currency.
“I sure hope so, Boats. We don’t know much about the little ones. Maybe they’re extra curious, or aren’t as susceptible to our sonar. I guess we’ll find out.”
“Lookout says there’s screwy fishes, er somethin’, jumpin’ outa the water!” Minnie suddenly cried. Matt raised his precious Bausch & Lomb binoculars. Sure enough, just a few hundred yards ahead, strange creatures were leaping out of the water. From this distance, they looked like giant bullets—battleship shells—with wings. He snorted. “They’re squids! Some kind of flying squids! Look at ’em all!” Spanky had joined them on the bridge. His normal battle station was atop the aft deckhouse, at the auxiliary conn, but there was no reason to expect a surface action and he’d always joined his captain on the bridge unless otherwise directed. “I think you’re right, Skipper!” he confirmed, staring through his own binoculars. “Flyin’ squids! I’ll be damned. Look! They’re glidin’ across the water a pretty good distance before they flop back in it.” He sobered. “Act like somethin’s spookin’ ’em from below!”
“Minnie?” Matt demanded.
“Mr. Faar-child got a contaact—a big one—but he don’t know what it is.”
“Must be a whole swarm o’ them critters underwater,” Spanky speculated, then brightened. “And you know? I bet we’re the ones spookin’ ’em!”
“You think that’s what we’ve been chasin’ all along?” Gray asked. “A big school of creepy squids, cruisin’ along, all bunched up?”
Matt felt the tension ebb. Of course that was what it was. It was far more probable that his recent concerns had been initiated by yet more weird marvels native to this very weird world, than that they were being haunted by an enemy submarine from the old one!
“Secure the Y guns,” he said. “Slow to one-third. No sense in steaming right through that mess. There’s hundreds of them, and they’re big enough to hurt somebody if they hit us.”
“Might even dent our plates,” Spanky agreed.
Walker began to slow, and sure enough, the frantic leaping and soaring of the flying squids diminished—until they suddenly erupted again, even more violently than before.
“What?” Matt muttered, raising his binoculars again.
“Skipper!” Minnie shouted. “Crow’s nest say them, them ‘skids,’ is jumpin’ in a straight, fast line, right toward the fleet!” She held the earpiece to her head under her helmet. “There’s two lines now! Three!”
For just an instant, Matt stood watching for himself. The explosion of squids was following several unnaturally straight and rapid lines of advance, and he could fathom only one explanation. “All ahead two-thirds,” he suddenly barked. “Y guns and aft racks stand by!” He looked at Spanky. “Go aft,” he said bitterly. “Looks like you were right the first time, but now we’ve got torpedoes scaring the squids! Signal Keje that he’s got torpedoes inbound. Multiple torpedoes, from directly in front of our position—use the TBS, damn it.”
“Should I maneuver, Skipper?” Paddy asked desperately.
“No. If whoever’s out there fired at us, we’re better off threading the fish. Tell Mr. Fairchild he better pick something out of that mess below for me to kill right away!” he shouted back at Minnie.
“He say some-teeng comin’ outa the return cloud. Range, seven hundreds. Course one, two, seero. Ten knots, down doppler. He’s startin’ a plot!” Bernie Sandison already had his own plot going on the chart table in the pilothouse, frantically pushing a grease pencil alongside a straight edge while Commander Herring stared at his watch. Minnie’s voice rose. “Lookout gots tor-peedoes comin’ at us! Two tor-peedoes! Ah, they’s four headin’ for the fleet now!”
Matt stared through the windows ahead, watching the panicked squids betray the approach of the mysterious undersea weapons screaming straight at him. “Come right two degrees,” he told Rosen tersely. “Now, steady! Steady as you go.” Suddenly, he stepped briskly toward the starboard bridgewing, just as a gliding flock of big-eyed squids jetted past dodging crewfolk on the fo’c’sle, or ricocheted off the hull. He looked down in time to see a long, sun-dappled cylinder streak by the starboard beam less than a dozen yards away, leading a white, steamy wake.
“That was the close one,” he explained, charging back to stand beside Rosen. “Make your course one one zero, all ahead full. Set depth charges for one fifty!”
“That deep, Captain?” Herring asked, and Matt jerked a nod. “The target will have been at periscope depth to launch,” Herring persisted.
“Yeah, but Wally’s a good sound man. If he says the target’s making ten knots underwater, I believe him. What’s more, whoever shot at us had to see us, so they have to know what we are and that we’ll come after them. My guess is they’ll go deep, try to get under those squid things. If they do, they’ll get there quick at ten knots!” He pointed at a spot beyond the dark line on the chart. “One fifty, right here.”
“Range four hundreds,” Minnie reported shortly. “Three hundreds . . . We losin’ ’im! We too fast again!”
“Jesus,” Paddy suddenly exclaimed. That’s all he had to say, because everyone on the bridge immediately saw what caused his outburst. Most of the ships of First Fleet South had held their course. Wild maneuvers in such a congested formation were just as dangerous as torpedoes, and there hadn’t been time at any rate. Big Sal had adjusted her course just enough to thread the wakes herself, and though she’d probably been the target, nothing hit her. One of the DDs wasn’t so lucky. A massive plume of dirty spray erupted into the sky, and the ship beneath the rising column simply ceased to exist. A dull boom reached them several moments later, racing across the water with a physical jolt that shook the windows in the pilothouse. Tragic as the loss of the as-yet-unknown ship was, Matt was just beginning to feel a sense of relief that it hadn’t been worse, when two towering columns of water rocketed into the air at the side of Respite Island.
“Keep your eyes on your course, Mr. Rosen!” Matt ordered sharply.
“But . . .”
“Captain Reddy,” Herring interrupted, his voice strained, “there will be people in the water over there! And Respite Island may need assistance!”
“And there’s a whole fleet over there to give it,” Matt snarled. “We have other business first.”
Everyone but Rosen was still looking at the distant cataracts of water collapsing down on the massive SPD. “Here,” Matt snapped, stabbing his finger down on the Plexiglas-covered chart. “Now!” Most heads turned to him. “He’ll wait till we’re nearly on top of him, then turn,” he explained grimly, mostly for Herring’s benefit. “But he won’t be expecting this.” He raised his voice. “Y guns will commence firing! Stern racks, roll four, at three-second intervals.”
The Y guns thundered, and the “Roll one! Roll two! Roll three! Roll four!” was repeated on the bridge. Shortly after, the sea astern spalled and shook, and an opaque white mound of water and smoke convulsed beneath the clear afternoon sky.
USS Walker’s Y guns weren’t exactly like the weapons that inspired their creation but served essentially the same purpose. Improved over the first models, these could each throw two depth charges off either beam, at forty-five and ninety degrees relative to the centerline of the ship. The hefty black powder charge that propelled the (vastly improved over the early model) three-hundred-pound depth bombs could throw them only about a hundred yards, but that was sufficien
t to prevent underwater damage to Walker at any depth, really, although it did leave a large gap directly under the ship. The aft racks took care of that, rolling more charges off the stern directly in the wake. The sinking pattern of explosives, designed to detonate when the water pressure at the preselected depth actuated the fuse, was ridiculously simple, but the addition of the Y gun made it far more effective than the stern racks alone—which was all Walker had been equipped with before. Against the Japanese, she’d had to virtually run right over her target to have a chance of inflicting any damage. The likelihood of that wasn’t great, considering her primitive, glitchy sonar. Now, with the addition of the Y guns, all she had to do was get close. Chief Gray, no supporter of depth charges, said it doubled their chances. But since two times zero was still zero, he wasn’t optimistic. Wallace Fairchild, Bernie Sandison, and even Spanky believed their old chances of damaging a target were more like five or ten percent, depending on the sea’s state, the size and speed of their target, and the skill of the sub’s skipper, of course. If the Y guns doubled their chances, they’d certainly take ten to twenty percent. Captain Reddy wasn’t considered a variable. By now, everyone just assumed that if it could be done, he could do it. Matt would’ve laughed at that confidence, considering his inexperience at ASW.
Whatever the chances, whether it was skill, better weapons, or just insanely good luck, the results of their third pattern, laid just eleven minutes after the first, had a distinct impact on the target. A ghostly return had somehow flashed feebly through all the underwater tumult and columns of water displacing bubbles of smoky gas, across the green-lit cathode ray tube Wallace Fairchild worshipped so intently, and USS Walker mercilessly hammered it.
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