"I wish you luck with your fishing," Anne said. That was true. After what the damnyankees had done to her brother, she wanted every ship flying their flag to go straight to the bottom of the sea. True or not, though, she wished she'd phrased it differently. Kimball would think…
Kimball did think. "Since I'm so close now, I was figurin' on gettin' me some liberty time, and then comin' up there and…" He let his voice fade, but she knew what he had in mind. Since she'd already given herself to him, he thought he could have her any time he wanted.
That she'd made a related calculation about Jacob and her serving women never once entered her mind. What did enter it was anger. "Lieutenant Commander Kimball, my brother just now came from the Western Kentucky front, suffering from chlorine in the lungs. I am not really in the best of positions to entertain visitors"-let him take that however he would-"at the present time."
"I'm very sorry to hear that, Miss Anne," the submariner said after a short silence. Sorry to hear which? Anne wondered. That Jacob's been gassed, or that I won't let you lay me right now? No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than Kimball continued, "That chlorine, that's filthy stuff, by everything I've heard tell about it. I hope your brother didn't get it too bad."
"It isn't good," Anne said, a larger admission than she would have made to someone with whom she was socially more intimate. The physical intimacy she'd known with Kimball was of different substance, somehow; despite it, the two of them remained near-strangers.
"I really do hope he gets better," Kimball said, and then, half to himself, "Nice to know there's somethin' in this war you don't have to worry about aboard a submersible." That brief bit of self-reflection done, he went on, "All right, I won't come up there right away-you'll be busy and all. Maybe in a few weeks, after I make a patrol or two."
His arrogance was breathtaking, so much so that Anne, instead of going from mere anger to fury, admired the quality of his nerve. He had been enjoyable, on the train and in New Orleans, a town made for enjoyment if ever there was one. Thinking about Jacob, she also thought she was liable to need relief from thinking about Jacob. She tapped a fingernail on the telephone case; indecision was unlike her. "All right, Roger, maybe in a few weeks," she said at last, but then warned, "Do telephone first."
"I promise, Miss Anne," he said. She didn't know what his promises were worth, but thought him likely to keep that one. He started whistling before he hung up the telephone. Anne wished she had any reason to be so happy.
George Enos set his gutting knife down on the deck of the steam trawler Spray, opened the ice-filled hold, and threw in the haddock and halibut he'd just finished cleaning. Then he went back to the latest load of fish the trawl had just scooped up from the bottom of Brown's Bank.
The seaman who was helping him clean the fish, a fellow named Harvey Kemmel who spoke with a harsh Midwestern accent utterly unlike Enos' New England dialect, wiped his face on his sleeve and said, "This here fishing for a living, it's damned hard work, you know?"
"I had noticed that, as a matter of fact," George answered dryly as he yanked another squirming halibut up off the deck, slit its belly open, and pulled out the guts. He tossed the fish into the hold and grabbed another one.
Patrick O'Donnell came aft, a mug of the Cookie's good coffee clamped in his right hand. With his left, he slapped the side of the hold. "Nice the boat's so much like the Ripple," he said. "Means I don't hardly have to think to know where things are at."
"Same with me, Skipper," George Enos agreed, "and I heard Charlie say the same thing about the galley. I like it that we're all still together-except poor Lucas, I mean."
"Me, too," O'Donnell agreed. He glanced down at the load of fish Enos and Kemmel were gutting. "We bring those into Boston, we'll make ourselves some pretty fair money off 'em." His gaze swung northward. Brown's Bank lay north and east of Georges Bank, where the Ripple had usually operated. In time of peace, that would have mattered only because it cost them more fuel to reach. Now, with the southern coast of Nova Scotia, some of it still unconquered, not so far away, other concerns also mattered. Under his breath, O'Donnell added, "If we get back to Boston."
Work went on. Work always went on, and there were never enough men to do it. Like Harvey Kemmel, several of the other sailors were working aboard a steam trawler for the first time. That meant O'Donnell and Enos and even Charlie White spent an inordinate amount of time explaining what needed doing, which in turn meant they didn't have as much time as they would have liked to do their own work.
One of the new men, a tall, skinny fellow named Schoonhoven who'd started life on a Dakota farm, was the first to spot the approaching boat. "Skipper," he called, his voice cracking with what might have been alarm or excitement or a blend of the two, "tell me that's not a submarine."
O'Donnell raised a telescope-just like the one he'd had aboard the Ripple — to his eye. "All right, Willem, I'll tell you that's not a submarine," he said, and then, after a perfectly timed pause, he added, "if you want me to lie to you."
Cleaning flatfish forgotten, Enos hurried to the rail and peered out across the Atlantic. It was indeed a submarine, traveling on the surface now because the Spray couldn't possibly hurt it. In case the fishermen hadn't noticed it was there, it fired its deck gun. A shell sent up a plume of seawater a couple of hundred yards in front of the trawler.
Patrick O'Donnell ducked into the cabin, then came out again in a hurry. "Run up the white flag!" he shouted. "Maybe they'll let us take to the boats before they sink the trawler." As the signal of surrender fluttered up below the U.S. flag the Spray was flying, O'Donnell peered once more through the telescope at the submersible. "That's a Confederate boat," he ground out. "The bastards cruise up to Canada and back, same as the Canucks do to their ports."
The submersible closed rapidly. Soon Enos could see the Stars and Bars flying above it, too. A sailor ran out onto the deck of the Confederate vessel and began working the signal lamp. "Abandon-ship." Along with the rest of the Spray's crew, Enos read the Morse as it flashed across the water, letter by letter, word by word. "We-aim-to-sink-her."
"There's a surprise," Charlie White said with a grunt of laughter. "I figured they were going to buy our fish off us."
"Nova- Scotia — coast-100-miles-north," the signal lamp said. "Some-Yank-held-Good-luck-getting-there."
"Thanks a hell of a lot," Enos said. He helped Schoonhoven and Kemmel put the boat over the side. It looked very small, and a hundred miles of ocean enormously large. He glared toward the Rebel submersible, muttering, "And the horse you rode in on, too."
One after another, the crewmen from the Spray scrambled down into the boat. As captain, Patrick O'Donnell came last. "Let's get clear," he said. They worked the oars and moved away from the trawler. If no storm rose, you could row a hundred miles. The boat had food and water and a compass. All the same, Enos hoped they wouldn't have to try it.
Off to the other side of the Spray, he spotted what looked like a length of pipe sticking up out of the water and moving toward the Confederate submarine. He deliberately looked away from it. The Rebs on board the submersible paid it no heed. They were intent on coming right up to the Spray so they could sink her at point-blank range. If you didn't miss, you didn't waste shells. Pay attention to the trawler, he thought at the Confederates. Pay attention to the trawler a little longer.
He'd just started to think that again when three men in the boat who hadn't made themselves not look at that moving length of pipe whooped at the top of their lungs. O'Donnell's whoop had words in it: "The fish is away!"
Everybody stopped rowing. Along with everybody else, George watched the torpedo's wake speed toward the Confederate submersible. He'd never seen anything move so fast in the water. "Run true," he breathed. "Come on-run true."