Silver Stars

by Michael Grant

  A passing sailor summons Rainy, who is just finishing dinner in the petty officers’ (NCOs’) mess. It is an amazingly cramped little room of upholstered benches completely dominated by a table, so seating oneself at the table requires a fair bit of twisting and squirming.

  Rainy finds Cisco cursing a blue streak and threatening sailors who are entirely unimpressed but willing to kill some of the boredom by listening to him rant.

  “Get me the fug out of these ropes!” Cisco demands in a roar.

  “If you calm down, we can let you go,” Rainy says.

  “I’ll cut your fugging balls off!”

  “Shall I quiet him down for you, miss?” an eager blond-bearded seaman asks, brandishing a large wrench.

  “Cisco, you need to get control of yourself,” Rainy says. “They really don’t like panic around here.”

  “Panic? Who’s panicking?” He makes an effort to quiet down. The effort does not alter the murderous look on his face, but he stops kicking and squirming. At a nod from Rainy, the sailor with the wrench reluctantly unties him.

  “Limey sons of bitches,” Cisco snarls as he rolls out and stands up. But he does not threaten anyone further, and the gaggle of onlookers, disappointed not to have a fight, return to their duties.

  Lieutenant Commander Alger appears, weaving his way with casual grace through the veritable thicket of forehead-smashing pipes, brackets, gauges, and waterproof doors. Rainy has already smacked her head twice, and she’s a foot shorter than the commander.

  Rainy has noted that no one salutes aboard the Topaz, but training compels her and she snaps a salute.

  “Now, now, none of that,” Lieutenant Commander Alger says mildly, returning her salute. He’s in young middle age, with a jagged scar that crosses his lips and gives him a piratical air. His beard, neatly trimmed, is brown, like his hair. He has an impressive bent pipe of wonderfully rich polished wood. From time to time he emits a small cloud of sweet bluish smoke that Rainy would normally find nauseating but which at the moment is masking the strong body odor smell of the red-haired rating behind her. Lieutenant Commander Alger’s expression and speech are alert, active, curious, and focused.

  An intelligent man.

  “We find the confined space really doesn’t allow for a lot of saluting and snapping to attention,” Alger says in a drawl that manages to be both upper class and casual. Then, with a sudden flash of wit, he adds, “You are also free to grow a beard and mustache.”

  Rainy smiles. “Thank you, Commander. I have a great-aunt who would take you up on that.”

  He’s surprised by her quickness and nods in acknowledgment of her riposte. “How are you making do? Did you dine?”

  “I did, sir, and very well. The pineapple for dessert was wonderful.”

  “I’m afraid the Azorean wine is not the very best, and the shops were plumb out of Madeira. How then is our civilian passenger?”

  Rainy looks at Cisco, who is either intimidated by the captain’s rank or by his posh English accent and remains momentarily passive. He takes the captain’s outstretched hand, but scowls as he does it.

  “He’s less than thrilled, sir,” Rainy says.

  “Oh? Not yet enamored of the submariner’s life?”

  “Are we underwater? Right now are we underwater?” Cisco demands, an edge of panic speeding his syllables and raising his voice to a near squeak.

  “May I take it that you suffer from a touch of claustrophobia?”

  “I just want to know, are we underwater?” The urgency is unmistakable and almost excuses the rudeness. Cisco is a frightened man, and Alger has dealt with frightened men before this.

  “Not a bit,” Alger says airily. “We are making eleven knots on the surface, with light cloud cover, intermittent rain, and moderate swell. If we were submerged, you would not be feeling that rising and falling of the deck.”

  “I want to get out. I need some air,” Cisco says, eyes bulging and darting in every direction, a cornered animal looking for an escape.

  “You may certainly climb up to the superstructure, the conning tower or con, I believe it’s called in the American service, for a moment or two, once you have been briefed on our procedures.”

  “I don’t give a damn about your procedures!”

  The commander’s pleasant informality evaporates in a heartbeat. The man with the mild expression, the diffident air, and the relaxed stance disappears, replaced by a taller, sterner, unsmiling officer with distinctly chilly blue eyes.

  “Let me explain it this way, Mr. Smith.” He uses the transparently false name Cisco’s traveling under. “Should we spot a German plane or ship I will order the boat to dive. The men under my command know their places and how to reach them by the most expeditious means possible. A straggler, a civilian, blundering about on deck once we have begun our dive is quite likely to find the hatches battened and his shoes getting very wet indeed.”

  “You wouldn’t—”

  “Shut your bleeding mouth when the commander addresses you,” a petty officer who is more grizzled beard and hair than face snaps in unfeigned outrage. “Pardon, sir,” he adds, nodding slightly at the commander.

  Alger takes no notice of his petty officer’s outburst. “Rather than risk my men, I will, with the greatest regret, watch through the periscope as you attempt to swim to land,” Alger says. Then, he is all casual friendliness again. “Sergeant Schulterman, may I have a moment? Jones, you will keep an eye on our passenger, won’t you?”

  Jones, the hairy petty officer—a sergeant by any other name—flashes teeth through his beard. “Oh yes, Commander, that I will.”

  “If he becomes unruly you may wish to place him into one of the tubes until he calms down.”

  Petty Officer Jones manages with some difficulty to avoid laughing in gleeful anticipation. Rainy follows the captain back toward the control room amidships.

  The control room is hardly the roomy expanse Rainy has seen in war movies where officers have plenty of space to rush about yelling. The control room of a T-class submarine is the size of a long, narrow bedroom or parlor, a room where every square inch of wall (bulkhead) or overhead is festooned with an astounding array of equipment. It’s as if some ambitious shopper has ordered every sort of pipe, dial, wheel, gauge, handle, cathode tube, switch, meter, or valve ever created by the human species and welded them onto every square inch of possible space. It’s like being inside an explosion at a junkyard. There are spots where it seems to Rainy’s bewildered eye that gauges have been attached to other gauges, which are themselves attached to still more gauges, with the entire assembly positioned carefully to make human movement dangerous to the point of impossibility.

  Half a dozen sailors sit stiffly, facing outward or forward, eyes glassily focused on the slow sweep of a radar beam, or listening intently within headphones the size of coffee mugs. Others stand poring over a bright-lit chart on a sort of table not large enough to comfortably hold a tea service. As discreetly as possible the sailors look up from their stations to take in the fact that there is a female—an actual living, breathing female—aboard. Looks are exchanged, heads are tilted, eyebrows rise. But there are no whistles or catcalls—she’s with the commander, after all. Alger checks in with one of his officers, perhaps his number two, Rainy is far from sure, then turns to Rainy and says, “Do you believe your passenger can be managed?”

  “Sir, I barely know him.”

  “And yet you were chosen to accompany him.”

  “I follow orders, Commander, I don’t write them.”

  He likes that answer well enough and forms a crookedly wry smile made more engaging by the scar that causes one side of his mouth to rise more easily than the other. “As do we all. As do we all. Well, Sergeant, you’ll be bunking in the chief’s room, hot-bunking as they say, meaning that the cot is yours when he pulls a watch. Then you should take what leisure you can in the petty officers’ mess.”

  “I’ll be fine, sir, thank you.”

  “It�
�s important that you find a . . . a comfortable place.”

  Rainy grins. “You mean stay out of the way.”

  “I should never wish to be so blunt, but yes, in effect. There are sixty-one officers and men aboard the Topaz, and we are far from being a roomy craft.” He starts to say something more, then stops himself and looks at her with frank curiosity, head back a little so he seems to be looking down his nose. “We do not have women in our service.”

  “It’s pretty new for us as well.”

  “And how are you finding it?”

  “At the moment very comfortable, sir.”

  “Is this your first operational assignment?”

  “No, sir. I was in North Africa prior to this.”

  “Not in the action, surely.”

  Rainy smiles, recalling vivid memories. “Actually, I was in a battle, but purely as . . . well, as baggage, I suppose, kind of like I am now. But I was with a unit that comprised a number of women soldiers who performed very well.”

  “Indeed? Well. I hope we are not driven to such desperate measures.” There’s a bit of an upper-class sniff as punctuation, but Rainy takes no offense. She’s seen news reports that more than 80 percent of Americans—including more than 75 percent of women—oppose sending women to war. She doubts that number is any lower in Britain.

  After her brief chat with the commander, she and Cisco are instructed by Jones on how to behave in the event of an emergency, the essence being that they are to race without the slightest delay to the POs’ mess and sit there without moving until instructed otherwise. There is a great deal of emphasis on showing them how to move like apes swinging from branches through the forest of obstructions.

  “If you smack your head, you keep moving or you’ll be trampled underfoot, d’ye hear me now, lassie?”

  Rainy mentally maps the route from the conning tower, down through the control room, and forward to the mess. Cisco scowls and looks furtively around. He keeps touching things, not moving them, just touching them, needing the reassurance of solid steel. There is plenty to touch, but at one point Jones grabs Cisco’s hand in midair. “Not that pipe, my lad, you’d leave a layer of skin behind.”

  Cisco pushes to the front, desperate now for air, having used every ounce of his self-control to listen fitfully to Jones. He shoves past men hunched over their screens, spots a narrow steel ladder, and clambers up it. Rainy sees him outlined against gray-black, star-strewn sky above. They emerge into a semicircular space formed by chest-high cowling. Two sailors with massive binoculars scan the sky and the sea in every direction. Three more sailors stand by the four-inch gun just ahead and below them, scanning the horizon as well. They are peering intently at the water for the telltale phosphorescent trail of a periscope, since among the things submarines have to fear is other submarines. The dragon’s snout bow pierces waves and sends foam boiling over the gracefully sloping deck to churn around the base of the superstructure.

  “Cold out,” Rainy says, hugging herself and hunching down inside her regulation army wool sweater.

  Cisco clutches the steel cowling and breathes hard, like he’s just run a record-fast mile.

  “This is bullshit,” Cisco says. “I’d rather take my chances on the streets.” He turns, looking for land, but the night is dark in every direction, with the Azores already far astern.

  “Your father disagrees,” Rainy says. “Anyway, you’ll get used to it.” But she herself is far from used to it. It takes the sudden access to cold night air to make her realize just how enclosed and cramped—trapped—she has felt down inside that steel tube.

  A tube is what it is: a cylinder. The curves of the ballast tanks, the external tubes, the superstructure, the rudder and the screws and the hydroplanes are all added onto that essential steel tube, which is just a sort of long tin can, really, though built to take far more pressure without collapsing. A long tin can crammed with diesel engines and electric motors, batteries, stores of water and food, sixty-one men—and one woman now—and some rather large and extremely explosive torpedoes.

  The trip from the Azores to Sicily is better than 2,200 miles. At a steady eleven knots (just under thirteen miles an hour) they can make it in about a week. Seven days in a steel tube full of men and head-bashing obstacles. Seven days with a panicky gangster. She shudders and tells herself it’s only the cold air.

  “I ain’t going back down there,” Cisco says defiantly.

  “You’re going to have to,” Rainy says.

  “The hell I do. I’m okay up here. Maybe a blanket or—”

  A jet of icy spray slaps them both in the face.

  “A raincoat. A poncho,” Rainy says, completing his thought. “Look, Cisco, I know you’re scared—”

  He snarls. It’s an animal sound accompanying an animal expression of bared teeth. “I’m scared of nothing!” Then he softens it just a bit. “At least no man. And sure as hell no skirt. It’s just . . . I don’t like tight spaces, never have, not since I was a kid.” He finishes in a lower tone, a haunted tone that hints at some past nightmare.

  “If you don’t go down peaceably when the commander orders, they will not let you come back up. Consider that.”

  “I need a drink. I’ve got a bottle in my things, but that won’t last long. They must have some aboard, right?”

  But rum, while served on board Royal Navy ships, is doled out in precise amounts at prescribed times, and does not amount to much more than a single cocktail. The boat’s medical officer has a better solution. After a long while, when it becomes clear that brute force will be required to get Cisco down, the medic climbs to the con and hands Cisco a small glass of amber liquid.

  “What’s this supposed to be?”

  “Laudanum. Tincture of opium. Drink it down, now. It will settle your nerves.”

  Cisco swallows it and grimaces. “Damn, that is bitter.”

  Suddenly a klaxon sounds. A-roooo-gah! A-roooo-gah!

  The loudspeaker comes on with a tense but controlled voice. “Battle stations, battle stations, dive, dive!”

  The men on the gun disappear down their hatch in seconds, but it takes the medic and both lookouts—plus a moderate punch in Cisco’s kidneys from Rainy—to shove Cisco, inconveniently bent in half at one point, down to safety. They close the hatch and spin the lock seconds ahead of a rush of water that gurgles over the hastily closed hatch.

  The crew has already reached battle stations so the corridor is relatively clear as Cisco is dragged, literally kicking and screaming (and cursing), to his hammock.

  Finally the laudanum kicks in and Cisco’s movements become less powerful, less focused, his flow of curses and threats slows, and he offers only ineffectual resistance to being tied down again.

  “This is going to be a very long trip,” Rainy mutters under her breath. “And all of it probably a fool’s errand.”

  Amateur.

  12

  RIO RICHLIN—OFF GELA BEACH, SICILY

  It is not Rio’s first rodeo.

  It’s an expression she has appropriated from Cat Preeling. Ain’t my first rodeo, Cat likes to say when someone, generally a man, explains something in a patronizing tone.

  Ain’t my first rodeo. Ain’t my first amphibious landing on a beach.

  Rio’s landing craft has been loaded and circling for the better part of a half hour. Dawn is breaking ever so slowly it seems, allowing just enough light to see that the boats of the first wave are reaching the beach and disgorging their troops.

  “All right, we’re going in,” the coxswain yells.

  The circling landing craft all line up abreast and race at full speed toward shore, smacking waves and banging their passengers around. The pink of dawn begins to give shape to the island ahead. Its most prominent feature is a steep, singular mountain that dominates the eastern end of the island. There is a small but clear plume of smoke twisting leisurely up from the top, smoke turned orange as the sun peeking over the horizon touches first the highest thing in view. It reminds
Rio of Jillion’s sketch, the curl of smoke at the end of Rio’s rifle.

  “Etna,” Stick says. “It’s a volcano.”

  “Like with lava?” someone asks.

  “The whole island is just cooled-down lava. Etna created Sicily. But I don’t think it’s—”

  The sea explodes around them, a vast gout of water. The defending Italians seem to be taking matters more seriously, and daybreak has improved their aim. Seawater rains down on them, running off Rio’s helmet. Geer curses and urges Miss Lion deeper into his jacket. Everyone flinches as a shell passes overhead, howling like a racing locomotive.

  Just ahead is another landing craft, much like theirs, but seemingly stuck and unable to move though its engines are churning the water into a small bubble bath.

  “We’re going to take some of them aboard,” the coxswain yells down from his squat bridge, chopping his hand in the direction of the stranded boat. He gentles the engine and one of his small crew perches atop the ramp, peering down into the turbulent sea, trying to locate the limits of the sandbar with a length of rope and a lead weight.

  “Looks like thirty feet, Skipper!”

  “Got it.”

  “I make it twenty.”

  “Twenty it is.”

  “Getting hairy here, Skipper!”

  The coxswain has his work cut out for him. He has to bring his boat in close enough to pass a line to the stranded boat, but not let the swell push him up onto the sand or send it crashing into the back of the other boat.

  Geer yells, “It’s a boatful of Nigras!”

  “Throw ’em a line,” the skipper shouts, and his crewman twirls a rope like a lasso before he sends it flying.

  This activity, ever more visible as the sun threatens to leap into view from behind the horizon, attracts small-caliber fire from shore. At least one machine gun chatters away from a pillbox just beyond the sand of the beach, but the rounds splash harmlessly into the sea. They are beyond machine gun range, but not beyond mortar range, and someone with blessedly inadequate skill is firing, dropping rounds to their left, their farther left, behind, ahead, not yet zeroing in.