Sailors hauled sides of beef and hams and sacks of potatoes and endless cans from the Pocahontas, Arkansas to the Ericsson. They chattered at one another in English and a variety of foreign languages that seemed to consist mostly of consonants. Fuel oil gurgled through a hose connecting the hold of the Pocahontas, Arkansas to the Ericsson ’s engine room.
As Sturtevant had said, it all promised that the destroyer would be able to keep on steaming and keep on feeding the crew for the next couple of weeks-provided she lived through the next couple of hours. Somewhere out there, a submersible-all right, not the submersible, but a submersible, sure as hell-was cruising along looking for something to send to the bottom. Maybe that sub was fifty miles away. On the other hand, maybe it was somewhere under the surface, trying to sneak in from a mile to half a mile to make sure it sank the Ericsson, which was as sitting a duck as had ever been hatched.
You couldn’t outrun a torpedo. You couldn’t outrun a torpedo at flank speed. A fish had at least ten knots on a destroyer. But, if you were cruising along when one of those bastards tried to shoot you in the back, you did have a chance to dodge.
How in God’s name were you supposed to dodge when you weren’t even moving? The answer was depressingly simple: you couldn’t. Finishing this resupply depended on not being spotted while it was going on.
George stared out over the tropical Atlantic, looking for a periscope or its wake. Odds were against him. He knew it. Even if he did spot one, it was all too likely to be too late. He knew that, too.
Light chop made the surface dance. In a dead calm sea, the wake from a periscope would have stood out against the background. Here, the background helped hide or mislead, as it did with a camouflaged ship. He wished he were down in the engine room. The only way the black gang found out about a torpedo was when one exploded in their laps.
Finally, after what seemed like forever but couldn’t have been more than the couple of hours Carl Sturtevant had talked about, the Pocahontas, Arkansas disconnected the hose and reeled it back in, leaving a dark smear of fuel oil across the deck for an officer to have conniptions about any minute now. All the freighter’s sailors were back aboard her, too.
The deck began to thrum and vibrate under George’s feet. He let out a long, heartfelt sigh of relief no doubt being echoed all over the Ericsson. They’d got away with it. Danger didn’t disappear now-danger, from everything George had seen, never disappeared-but it diminished.
Coal smoke poured from the Pocahontas, Arkansas ’ stack, too, as the freighter’s wheezy powerplant also began to work harder. The only way the beamy old ship would go faster than about ten knots, Enos thought, was if someone threw her over a cliff. Sooner or later, though, she’d get where she was going. In the end, that was what mattered.
But the Pocahontas, Arkansas did not get where she was going. The notion that she would had hardly crossed George’s mind before her bow blew off right in front of his horrified eyes. A moment later, another torpedo struck her amidships. She might as well have been a bull in a slaughterhouse hit over the head with a sledgehammer. She stopped dead in the water and started to sink.
The Ericsson stopped dead in the water, too, or so it seemed to George. Then he wondered if he’d lost his mind: the hulk of the freighter seemed to be moving forward once more.
While Enos was scratching his head, Carl Sturtevant let out an admiring whistle. “Skipper must have been eating his fish lately,” he said. “You know-brain food. Slam us over to full power astern and we can keep the Pocahontas between us and whoever that son of a bitch out there is. And speaking of which-” He turned and ran toward the depth-charge projector at the stern.
George ran that way, too, toward the one-pounder by the projector. “Hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted. “It is pretty sly, I guess. There’s only one thing wrong with it that I can think of.”
Sturtevant, who wasn’t young and wasn’t skinny, wheezed to a stop by his post. “Yeah,” he said, panting. “We ain’t gonna have a shield much longer.”
“That’s it,” George agreed. The Pocahontas, Arkansas was sinking fast, going down by the bow. Even as Enos watched, another torpedo hit shook the freighter. He shivered. “That one was meant for us.”
“You bet it was,” Sturtevant said. The Pocahontas, Arkansas rolled over and sank. Only a handful of men from her were bobbing in the water when she did, and the undertow she generated when she went down pulled a couple of them with her.
“What do we do now?” George asked. “If we hang around here and pick those guys up, that submersible is liable to put the next one into us. But if we don’t…Hell, I wouldn’t want to be one of those poor bastards.”
“Me, neither,” Sturtevant said. He lowered his voice so Lieutenant Crowder couldn’t hear him before continuing, “Every once in a while-times like this, mostly-I’m glad I’m not an officer. Between you, me, and the bulkhead, I don’t want to have to play God.” Enos nodded without hesitation.
Up on the bridge, the Ericsson ’s skipper made his choice, also without hesitation. Sailors hurled cork life rings toward the men still struggling in the ocean as the destroyer steamed past them. The ship did not stop or even slow to pick up survivors; as Sturtevant had said, the submarine that had torpedoed the Pocahontas, Arkansas was sure to be waiting, its own skipper hopefully licking his chops, for any such move.
A runner came back from the bridge to Lieutenant Crowder. “Sir, captain’s orders are for you to lay down as many depth charges as you can, set for widely different depths, when we reach the position where we reckon the submersible is at. We may not sink the bastard, but we’ll make him keep his head down while we pick up the men from the supply ship.”
“Aye aye,” Crowder said crisply. He turned to the depth-charge crew and started giving orders. Sturtevant ignored some of them as he gave his own instructions to the men who served the projector. When a signal flag waved from the bridge, the crew methodically pumped one depth charge after another into the blue water of the Atlantic. The water soon began boiling and seething from the force of the explosions under the surface.
George Enos eagerly peered astern, looking for leaking oil or a trail of air bubbles that might mark a damaged submersible. He spied nothing of the sort. Neither did anyone else. “We ought to be operating in a flotilla,” Lieutenant Crowder grumbled. “If we had three destroyers after that submersible instead of just our one, we’d sink him for sure.”
If I had a million dollars…, Enos thought.
Abruptly, the Ericsson broke off the attack on the submarine and raced back toward the survivors from the Pocahontas, Arkansas. After hauling the four or five of them aboard with lines, the destroyer hurried away from the spot where the supply ship had gone down.
Carl Sturtevant sighed. “Well, the limey or the Reb down there under the water won that one, damn him to hell and gone.”
“Yeah,” Enos said, his Boston accent making the word come out as Ayuh. “Didn’t get us, though, so I reckon he’s not as happy as he might be. A destroyer is worth a hell of a lot of freighters.”
“I ain’t gonna tell you you’re wrong,” Sturtevant said, “but the game’s not over yet, either. He’s still down there. He’s trying to get us, we’re trying to get him. Wonder if we’ll lock horns again.”
“How will we even know whether we ever fight the same boat again or some different one?” George asked.
Sturtevant chewed on that for a moment before he shrugged. “What difference does it make? Any time one of those bastards shows himself, we’ll go after him, whether he’s this boat or a different one.”
George considered, then nodded. “I won’t tell you you’re wrong,” he said.