Commander Sharpe burst into the charthouse. “The Germans are ready captain. Cutters will be loaded in five.”
“Very good,” Maxwell said. The commander left, then Maxwell ordered, “Port engine, stop. Starboard engine full ahead. Right full rudder.” The rumble of Kearsarge’s steam engines shifted laterally, and she began the slow work of swinging her eleven thousand ton tail sideways. Maxwell was going to open their starboard flank to the Lion, which meant they weren’t running away anymore. Lion would be on them in a matter of minutes.
Twitch was chewing on his lip and trying to stay out of the way until someone gave him something else to do.
Garret was fumbling. Lordy, how many buttons does a jacket need?
Two more enlisted boys showed up, led by the Russian bear of a gunnery officer. The boys looked as confused as Garret felt. They were quickly stripped of their uniforms and made to trade with two more officers.
Garret was trying to fasten the jacket collar without strangling himself when Twitch grabbed him, spun him around, and fixed the collar himself. When Twitch turned him, Garret found himself looking out the starboard side window. A small wake of something just beneath the water was streaking away from the ship.
“Captain, a Whitehead torpedo isn’t good for more than a few hundred yards,” Twitch blurted.
“Get back to your post,” Maxwell ordered. Twitch went.
At what didn’t seem nearly enough distance to Garret, the torpedo detonated, creating a flume out of the ocean. Kearsarge agreed with Garret. A dull sound thumped from her flank, like a grunt, as if she’d been punched in the gut.
“Full stop,” Maxwell barked. “Flood the starboard ballast tank.”
“Sir… just the starboard?” came the response.
“You heard me.”
Maxwell pointed to Garret, and each of the other enlisted boys in turn. “You, you, and you, come with me.”
Out of the charthouse they went and down the ladder, each of them wearing an officer’s uniform, following their captain who was wearing an enlisted uniform.
“The whole world’s ass backwards,” Garret heard one of the other guys mutter.
Kearsarge groaned and began to list to starboard, sloping the decks towards the sea. Far beneath them, her starboard ballast tank was filling with water.
What’s burning? Garret wondered, looking around. Holy shit, he’s set our ship on fire! Just ahead of the flying bridge, the forward turret was cloaked in flames and sending up a column of black smoke that could be seen for miles.
Wait no, it’s just the top of it. How the hell is the top of the turret on fire? It’s just steel armor.
Oh. Pitch and kerosene.
“Hurry up!” Maxwell ordered. They complied, scurrying across the upper deck after him. A motion atop the stern mast caught Garret’s attention. Someone was running up the submarine flag, putting it as high as possible.
A steel beam popped somewhere deep in Kearsarge’s guts as she continued to list.
Commander Sharpe, who was moving so fast and leaning so far forward that Garret thought he was going to fall flat on his face, rejoined them as they crossed the upper deck. “Captain,” Sharpe muttered tensely, “how can we be sure he won’t just finish us?”
“It’s Captain Shearer,” Maxwell replied grimly. “He wants a prize to take home.”
“What prize, sir?”
“Me.”
“So what do we do sir?” Commander Sharpe asked nervously.
“We use that,” Maxwell replied.
A deep groan reverberated through Kearsarge as she continued to list more and more heavily to starboard. The slope of the deck was becoming difficult to walk on. The tops of the cage masts were now overhanging the water.
Garret and the other guys with him scuttled forward across the wooden slope, bending to put a hand down when necessary. Garret was starting to think Kearsarge was going to keep listing until she capsized, when he realized she’d stopped.
Thank God.
They arrived at the center of the upper deck and were met by four more men in enlisted uniforms. It was four of their twelve “prisoners” transferred from Agamemnon. Now that Garret could see them up close, he recognized them as German, but they were all wearing American enlisted uniforms. They were happy, as if looking forward to a day at the county fair. That made Garret even more nervous.
One of the Germans grinned at Garret and said something in German to his compatriots. It sounded derogatory. Garret frowned at them, but they chuckled.
Eight other guys sat and lay on the deck nearby, gasping and kneading their arms as if they’d just run a marathon while carrying a coffin.
Kearsarge’s two steam cutters were waiting for them, engines stoked, tethered to the upper deck railing. “All aboard,” Maxwell ordered, then pulled Commander Sharpe aside. Garret and the other two guys climbed awkwardly into one of the cutters, being careful not to snag their borrowed uniforms on eyehooks or bits.
Something was strapped to the bottom of each of the cutters, held in place with various ropes, straps, and clamps, none of which had been designed for that purpose. The eight guys on the deck were muttering and seemed to be gesturing to whatever was strapped below the cutters. Garret tried to glimpse it as he passed over, but couldn’t. Someone else was already in the boat, a nervous torpedo specialist Garret didn’t know. He nodded to the specialist and sat, not knowing what else to do with himself. The other two fake officers did the same.
The tarpaulins that usually covered the cutters had been pushed to the edge and allowed to hang over the sides. From a distance, if one were looking through a spyglass from the Lion, for example, one might assume they had simply been thrown back and allowed to hang there by slovenly seamen. From Garret’s perspective, they were obviously intended to block the line of sight from whatever was strapped to the bottom of the cutters.
The Germans, still grinning happily, climbed aboard the other cutter, which was also already equipped with its own sweating torpedo specialist. Commander Sharpe jumped into Garret’s cutter and gave the order to cast off.
Being close to Sharpe made Garret feel better. Maxwell might drown them all on a whim, but the commander cared about them, and he was smart and strong. For a moment, Garret wondered what it would have been like to have a big brother. He’d always been so focused on being a big brother that he’d never stopped to think what it might have been like to have one instead.
As Garret untied a line, he reflected that, compared to this, blowing a hole in Mrs. Malvern’s house to rescue Molly seemed like a safe, perfectly reasonable idea. The thought of Molly brought the thought of their baby. Together, Molly and the baby hovered in Garret’s mind, making his hands weaken with missing them.
At Maxwell’s order, the eight gasping men heaved themselves up off the decks and took the ropes, letting the cutters swing out slowly away from Kearsarge’s list so they didn’t swing back and damage themselves against the ship. As they lowered away, Garret’s last sight of Maxwell was him turning and running back towards the conning tower without waiting to see if they made it away. Wait, was that Maxwell or not? Without his uniform, it was hard to tell.
A minute later, both cutters were in the water and steaming away from the monstrous bulk of old Kearsarge, who was lying tilted in the water like a gutted whale. As the gap opened between them, Garret looked back at her, not having seen her in her entirety since the night he and his division ran through the rain to coal her in Philadelphia.
One of the other boys with Garret abruptly figured it out. “Kearsarge is playing ‘possum,” he said.
“Keep your voices down, men,” Sharpe said. Unless it was just the brightness of the Atlantic sun, Commander Sharpe was looking a bit pale.
Sharpe added, “In a moment, I’ll have no talking at all.”
Garret got it too, finally. “Not ‘possum,” he said quietly. “Snapping turtle.”
Sharpe smiled with one corn
er of his mouth, but the other two guys and the torpedo specialist gave Garret a funny look.
“Don’t you have snapping turtles back home?” Garret asked.
One of the guys shrugged. “I’m from Alaska Territory,” he said.
“I’m from New Mexico,” said the other.
“Snapping turtles,” Garret reiterated. “Ma always said they were uglier than a mud fence. They just look like a rotten piece of wood with a tail. Anyway, they’ve got these big jaws that are razor sharp. They lay on the bottom of a pond in the mud with their mouth open, and they’ve got this bright pink tongue that looks like a worm, and they wiggle it. A fish comes along and thinks he’s found a tasty worm and wham!” Garret slapped his hands together like a trap slamming shut. “Fish for dinner.”
Astern of the cutter, Kearsarge lay in the water, listing badly, with her forward turret afire. In reality, the turret fire was merely a smoky combination of pitch and kerosene, burning harmlessly atop the six inch thick steel from which her turret was constructed, but from any distance at all, it would look as if she was burning from the inside out. Magazine fires beneath a turret were incredibly dangerous. They usually blew the ship in half.
Furthermore, listing to starboard like she was, Kearsarge appeared to be taking on tons of water, and not long since, the crew of Lion had seen a torpedo detonate right next to her. Captain Maxwell had pivoted the ship before the torpedo blew, so there was no way for Lion to tell from a distance that the torpedo had been fired from Kearsarge rather than at her. Furthermore, Kearsarge was flying the submarine flag, warning all ships to stay away because a marauding submarine lurked somewhere nearby. To all appearances, Kearsarge had been torpedoed and was floundering in the water, helpless and dying.
But she wasn’t.
“Quiet now, men,” Commander Sharpe said.
Garret grinned foolishly, then faced front. HMS Lion wiped the smile off his face. In the time he’d been explaining, Lion had drawn closer, and their cutters had been running at full speed towards her. Miles of separation had turned into a few hundred yards.
“Fuuuuck me with a flagpole,” one of the guys behind Garret muttered.
“Stow it,” Sharpe said quietly. Then to the crewman wearing Maxwell’s uniform, “Get up here and stand at the bow, sailor. You’re supposed to look like the captain.”
When the big guy squirmed past Garret, he looked more like a sweating schoolboy about to go before the headmaster. But Garret hardly noticed him. Garret was staring at Lion.
She was beyond huge. Beyond enormous. Unthinkably gigantic.
How do people build things like that? Garret wondered. Twitch had said Lion was almost an eighth of a mile long. Somehow, that didn’t do justice to the battlecruiser that sat in the water in front of them. She was blotting out the horizon behind her. For the first time, Garret began to understand how old and obsolete Kearsarge really was. She looked like a toy next to Lion. Kearsarge was an antiquated joke, and not a very funny one.
The men walking around on Lion’s deck looked like ants. Garret had no idea how big her four largest guns were, but they looked like they might be even bigger than Kearsarge’s massive thirteens. And Twitch told me that Kearsarge’s guns were designed before we were born.
As Garret gaped at her, he began to realize that “how” they built her wasn’t the question. God, WHY would people build something like that?
Was it even possible to destroy something that large? Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe that was the point. In a way, she looked like Kearsarge, but reimagined by a hideous intelligence from a world far above Garret’s, a place with no decency or kindness or humanity, only the will to rule. The kind of place the Hollow Man might be.
Garret could only think of Lion one way.
Christ, she looks like the end of the world.
Garret’s stomach flopped as he looked at the enormous barrels, trained on the quaint little Kearsarge. We really are going to die. What in the hell are we doing in this steam cutter? What the hell are we doing out here on the ocean at all?
“Alright men, listen close,” Sharpe said. “I’ll do the talking from here on. Don’t speak unless absolutely necessary. They’re going to suspect us at some point, but we need to be very close before they do. Just sit still, think of the officer on the Kearsarge you hate the most, and try to act like him. We only need them to buy it until we can get within a couple hundred yards.”
Garret and the other guys exchanged scared-shitless expressions and then faced front. They steamed towards Lion, and she continued to grow, filling their field of vision like an entire city, made for death, prowling the ocean, seeking whom she may devour.
At two hundred yards out, Sharpe turned to the torpedo technician, who had his hand on the valve of an air tank he’d hastily strapped to the bottom of the boat.
“Now,” he said.
The technician spun the valve open and slapped loose one of the clamps, which was holding the straps to the cutter. Garret thought he heard a muttered prayer from the technician somewhere under the hissing of air through lines, and the clank of the straps falling away into the water.
The cutter rocked and a wake appeared in front of it, moving rapidly away towards Lion’s stern.
The men on Lion went crazy, but it was too late. The torpedo was far too close for a ship the size of Lion to do anything about it.
“Now!” Andrew yelled at the other cutter. A similar hiss came from the other boat, and another wake pulled away, headed for almost exactly the same point on Lion’s underbelly.
The first torpedo hit, racking Lion’s soft underbelly with a concussion wave. Tons of steel sheered, charring and flying up in a puff of water. It sounded as if the monstrous beast had roared in pain.
The underbellies of warships were soft and vulnerable, but that was nothing compared to the delicacy of the workings within them. The first torpedo ripped a hole in Lion’s stomach. The second torpedo came along a moment later, after the way was already cleared. It was caught in the influx of water and sucked into the wound.
The second torpedo blew up inside the ship. The sound was more contained this time, a heavy thud and a ringing sound, like a giant dead body being slammed against the inside of Lion’s hull.
Garret could only image the chaos within. Dozens dead. Their charred body parts floating around and mingling with the broken pieces of engines and boilers while the living tried to clamber from the water and seal the bulkheads against the ocean which was flooding in, trying to drown them, trying to drag their ship to the bottom.
Oh dear God, Garret thought. What did we just do?
One of the other enlisted boys behind Garret started babbling. His voice was high and strung tight. “Commander, they thought we were coming out here to parlay!”
“Quiet,” Sharpe barked at him.
The boy didn’t seem to hear. He was shaking. “They thought we were coming out here to parlay!”
That’s why Maxwell didn’t come, Garret thought. They’re going to gun us all down like thieves.
“They thought we were coming to parlay!”
“And what would have been the end of that parlay, sailor? They would have taken us all prisoner and the mission would have failed!” Then to the rest of them he said, “Put your hands up men.”
He bent over, snatched a pole off the bottom of the boat, and unrolled what was attached to it, a large white flag. One of the Germans in the other boat was doing the same.
Up on Lion’s decks, all was pandemonium, but by now, the steam cutters had brought them into the shadow of Lion’s edifice-like flank.
Commander Sharpe shouted through the chaos, “We surrender, and we have information vital to your survival. We surrender to the Crown of Britain as prisoners of war.”
Chapter 15
A few minutes later, all of them stood on the deck of HMS Lion—Garret, Sharpe, the guy wearing Maxwell’s uniform, the two other enlisted men, the two torpedo techs, and three
Germans. Three. Not four. Garret didn’t see what had happened to the fourth. Somewhere between nearly being riddled with bullets by the Lion’s enraged crew, and being taken aboard ship alive, the fourth German had disappeared. Garret couldn’t imagine where the man had gone unless he was bobbing around in the water just for fun.
Captain Shearer was a distinguished older man, with a lush white moustache and a grandfatherly paunch. There was, however, nothing grandfatherly about his demeanor. He stood in front of them, surrounded by his officers, all of whom had murder written on their faces. A few yards beyond the officers stood a large semicircle of British enlisted men. As far as Garret could tell, murder was the kindest of their intentions, but for the moment, the Captain had ordered them to stay back.
Under Captain Shearer’s hateful scrutiny, the guy wearing Captain Maxwell’s uniform looked about to piss himself.
“You,” Captain Shearer said in a proper but enraged British accent, “are not the bloody captain.”
“No sir,” Commander Sharpe said, standing as stiffly at attention as if he was standing before his own commanding officer. “He isn’t. But I am Commander Andrew Sharpe.”
Garret’s guts had long since turned to water, but as he stood beside Sharpe and felt the commander’s fear, Garret’s gut-water poured all the way down into his boots. Garret knew fear. He’d fought it in living form. Fought it and lost. More so, he knew fear because it was always inside him. He had thought Commander Sharpe was somehow immune to it. But he wasn’t. Commander Sharpe was afraid. It was leeching from him like a paralyzing fog. And that frightened Garret.
The British Captain stared Commander Sharpe down for a long moment. The air between them drew thin and tight, like the steel of their ships, being stretched by the rotation of the earth.
The Captain gestured towards his enlisted men, who were, despite their orders, milling like angry buffalo, closer and closer. “They want to gut you alive and string you up, like we used to do in the old days.”
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