“I’ll be damned if he thinks we’re anywhere around, sir,” Bevacqua said, and then, “Whoops-take it back. He’s heard us. He’s picking up speed and heading for the surface.”
“Let’s get him,” Sam said. “Tell me when, and I’ll pass it on to the guys who toss ash cans.”
“Will do, Skipper.” Bevacqua waited maybe fifteen seconds, then said, “Now!”
“Launch depth charges!” Sam shouted through the PA system-no need to keep quiet anymore.
During the Great War, ash cans had rolled off over the stern. The state of the art was better now. Two projectors flung depth charges well ahead of the ship. The charges arced through the air and splashed into the ocean.
“All engines reverse!” Cooley said. Sam nodded. Depth charges bursting in shallow water could blow the bow off the ship that had launched them. Carsten recalled the pathetic signal he’d heard about from a destroyer escort that had had that misfortune befall her: I HAVE BUSTED MYSELF. If it happened to him, he’d be busted, too, probably all the way to seaman second class.
Even though the Josephus Daniels had backed engines, the ash cans did their damnedest to lift her out of the water. Sam felt as if somebody’d whacked him on the soles of his feet with a board. Water rose and then splashed back into the sea. More bursts roiled the Atlantic.
Somebody at the bow whooped: “She’s coming up!”
“Searchlights!” Sam barked, and the night lit up. He knew the chance he was taking. If C.S. planes spotted him before he settled the sub, he was in a world of trouble. Have to settle it quick, then, he thought.
Men spilled out of the damaged submersible’s conning tower and ran for the cannon on the deck. It was only a three-inch gun, but Carsten’s destroyer escort wasn’t exactly a battlewagon. If that gun hit, it could hurt.
“Let ’em have it!” Sam yelled. The forward gun spoke in a voice like an angry god’s. The antiaircraft cannon at the bow started barking, too. They were more than good enough to tear up an unarmored target like a sub. The enemy got off one shot, which went wild. Then men on that deck started dropping as if a harvester were rumbling down it.
“White flag!” Three people shouted the same thing at the same time.
“Cease fire!” Sam yelled through the intercom, and then, “If they make a move toward that gun, blow ’em all to hell!” He turned away from the mike and spoke to Cooley: “Approach and take survivors.”
“Aye aye, sir,” the exec said. He had a different worry: “I hope to hell she’s not one of our boats.”
“Gurk!” Sam said. That hadn’t even crossed his mind. It wasn’t impossible in these waters, one more thing he knew too well. They wouldn’t just bust him for that. They’d boot him out of the Navy.
As the Josephus Daniels drew closer, he breathed again. The shape of the conning tower and the lines of the hull were different from those of U.S. boats. And the sailors tumbling into life rafts wore dark gray tunics and trousers. They were Confederates, all right.
A last couple of men popped out of the hatch atop the conning tower. The submersible startled rapidly settling down into the sea. They opened the scuttling cocks, Sam realized. He swore, but halfheartedly. In their place, he would have done the same thing.
“Watching them will be fun,” Cooley said. “We haven’t got a brig. Even if we did, it wouldn’t hold that many.”
“We’ll keep them up on deck, where the machine guns will bear,” Sam answered. “I don’t see how we can make our cruise with them along, though. I’ll wireless for instructions.”
As soon as the prisoners were aboard, he doused the searchlight. The pharmacist’s mate did what he could for the wounded. Sam went down to the deck and called for the enemy skipper. “Here I am, sir,” a glum-sounding man said. “Lieutenant Reed Talcott, at your service. I don’t thank you for wrecking us, but I do for picking us up.” He tipped a greasy cap he’d somehow kept on his head.
“Part of the game, Lieutenant,” Sam said, and gave his own name. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been sunk, too.”
“Not one damn bit,” Talcott said promptly.
Sam laughed. “All right. Can’t say as I blame you. We’ll put you somewhere out of the way, and then we’ll get on with the war.”
Not for the first time, Clarence Potter thought that Richmond and Philadelphia were both too close to the C.S.-U.S. border for comfort. When war came between the two countries-and it came, and came, and came-the capitals were appallingly vulnerable. They got more so as time went by, too: each side developed new and better-or was worse the right word? — ways to punish the other. For all practical purposes, the damnyankees had abandoned Washington as an administrative center. It just made too handy a target.
At the moment, though, Washington wasn’t the first thing on Potter’s mind. He stood behind a sawhorse in Capitol Square, one of at least a dozen that had red rope strung from them to form a perimeter. Signs hung from the rope: WARNING! UNEXPLODED BOMB! If that wasn’t enough to get the message across, the signs also displayed the skull and crossbones.
Even so, a woman started to duck under the ropes to take a shortcut to the Capitol. “Get the hell out of there, lady!” a sergeant shouted at her. “You want to get your stupid ass blown off?”
“Well!” she sniffed. “Such language!”
The sergeant sighed and turned to Potter. “It ain’t like she hasn’t got enough ass so she couldn’t use some of it blown off,” he said. The Intelligence officer chuckled; indeed, the woman hadn’t missed any meals. The noncom, a member of the Bomb Disposal Unit, went on, “Jesus God, sir, you wouldn’t reckon people could be so stinking stupid, though, would you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Potter said. “That kind of thing rarely surprises me. A lot of people are damn fools, and there’s not much you can do about it, except maybe try to keep them from killing themselves.”
“Ugly bitch wouldn’t have been that much of a loss.” The sergeant sighed again. “Still and all, I expect you’re right. I just wish the Yankees were damn fools.”
Potter pointed toward the hole in the ground where the sergeant’s colleagues were working. “If they made better ordnance, that would have gone off,” he said, though he knew Confederate munitions factories turned out their fair share of duds, too.
But the sergeant shook his head. “It ain’t necessarily so, sir. Some of these fuckers-uh, excuse me-”
“I’ve heard the word before,” Potter said dryly. “I’ve even used the word before.”
“Oh.” The sergeant eyed the wreathed stars on either side of his collar. “I guess maybe. Anyways, though, like I was saying, some of ’em have time fuses, so they go boom when people aren’t expecting ’em. You’ll have heard about that, won’t you?”
“I sure have,” Potter said. “So you have to get them out of there before they go off. I’d be lying if I said I envied you.”
“Sometimes we get ’em out. Sometimes we have to defuse ’em where they’re at,” the BDU sergeant said. “And that’s what I meant when I said I wished the damnyankees were fools. Some of their time fuses’re just time fuses. Then we race the clock, like. Some of ’em, though, some of ’em are booby-trapped, so they’ll go off when we start messing with the time fuse. They’ll put those on ordinary bombs, too, so they’ll explode if you tinker. Sons of bitches want to kill us off, see, so then more of their time bombs’ll work.”
“That’s… unpleasant,” Potter said. “How do you handle those?”
“Carefully,” the sergeant answered.
Potter laughed, not that the younger man was kidding. Here was a glimpse of a cat-and-mouse game he hadn’t imagined before. Of course the Yankees wanted to blow up the people who got rid of unexploded bombs. It made perfect military sense-but it was hard on the men of the BDU. He asked, “Do we do the same thing to them?”