“How on earth can they tell that?” Abe asked, regretting it immediately. “No, no, don’t tell me!”
His head was already so full of secrets already he hardly needed to know any more!
Abe’s wristband tingled.
“Here this! Here this! Attack Stations! Attack Stations!”
Nothing much seemed to happen except a few men tip-toed past the open bulkhead door.
Some twenty minutes later there was another electric tingling.
“Attacking! Attacking!”
It was all very unreal.
When Abe had dive bombed the former Kaiserliche Marine light cruiser Karlsruhe there had been fire, smoke, chaos. His Sea Fox had pulled up and flown through the fumes spewing from the warship’s funnel; he had seen the Achilles’s other two aircraft shot to pieces, and the wreckage of one of them crash into the side of the Karlsruhe.
But the Surprise was fighting a distant, remote, antiseptic war that felt almost like cold-blooded murder; and it offended Abe’s hunter’s soul not to be literally, or even metaphorically, looking one’s foe in the eyes.
His wrist tingled.
“REMEMBER BRAVE ACHILLES!”
There was a short pause.
“FLUSH TUBE ONE!”
Neither man definitively recognised the moment the Mark XX semi-passive homing torpedo left its tube over two hundred feet away. That there was a very subtle tremor throughout the submarine was hydrodynamically undeniable; however, the injection of a small quantity of compressed air, instantly trapped by baffles at the mouth of the torpedo tube as the munition was launched, was to all intents, undetectable other than by a seismograph aft of the torpedo room bulkhead.
“This is really cold, Ted,” Abe said quietly.
Less than three weeks ago, the two men had gone to war in an obsolete biplane launched off an old ship, the last of her class, on her last commission. Achilles had been beaten into submission by two newer, bigger cruisers, and he and Ted had been shot down by modern high-performance aircraft; and that they had survived had been nothing short of a miracle.
But those men on that small, diesel-electric submarine in the Surprise’s sights were helpless, dead men walking.
The intercom circuit was live.
“FISH ZERO-ONE HAS ACQUIRED BANDIT ONE. TARGET LOCK CONFIRMED. BANDIT ONE CONSTANT BEARING. REPEAT CONSTANT BEARING.”
The deck beneath their feet inclined as the submarine turned to port, her bow dipping downward.
“TARGETTING TELEMETRY… NOMINAL. TIME TO IMPACT…”
“TEN SECONDS…”
“FIVE SECONDS… FOUR… THREE… TWO… ONE…”
“BINGO! CONFIRM BINGO!”
Abe and Ted Forest looked at each other.
Waiting.
The faraway rumbling was barely audible, unfelt.
And that was it.
“PLEASE BE AWARE. THE BOAT WILL RUN DEEP. THE BOAT WILL RUN DEEP. STAND DOWN FROM ATTACK STATIONS. ALL PERSONNEL TO CRUISING STATIONS. REPEAT. ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO CRUISING STATIONS!”
“How many guys are there on a Type II boat?” Abe asked, dully.
“Twenty, maybe twenty-five.”
Ted punched his friend’s arm playfully, knowing Abe had killed many, many more Dominican sailors and marines on Little Inagua with a long rifle, and when he had run out of ammunition, with a bayonet, or the hatchet he had retrieved from the wreck of the Sea Fox.
“It’s a damned good thing the Spanish haven’t got boats like this one,” Ted Forest observed, trying to sound cheerful.
Abe shook his head.
“Until a couple of weeks’ ago, I had no idea we were capable of building a thing like this!” He retorted, waving his arms about him.
Ted Forest shifted a little uncomfortably.
Abe frowned concern.
“My bloody leg is itching,” his friend complained. “Can’t bloody scratch it with the bally cast on it!”
In a way this was an apt metaphor for their present situation: they were aboard a top secret vessel that was not supposed to exist, would both much rather have been ashore and yet their lives, and their careers were on hold until… well, they did not know that either, and there was nothing they could do about it. It had also occurred to each man, separately, that given the Surprise and the project which had created her was so secret, and that – like it or not – they both now knew so much about it that, whatever their heroics and adventures, that they might actually be something of an embarrassment to the Empire.
In fact, it might be more convenient for everybody if they simply disappeared, either temporarily, or… for good.
How hard would that be to arrange?
After all, everybody back home already thought that they were dead…
Abe shook his head.
The Empire did not do that sort of thing!
“I think that knock on the head I took back on Little Inagua is still playing tricks with my thinking,” he admitted, sheepishly.
“Yes, well, I definitely need my head examining if I ever go flying with you again!” Ted Forest chided him.
“Oh, yeah of so little faith. Let me tell you that that last landing turned out a lot better than I thought it was going to five seconds before we hit the ground!”
Ted was encouraged by the fact his friend had not completely lost his sense of humour. He well understood that Abe must be going through a mental wringer knowing that Kate had to think he was dead. It was bad enough for Ted himself; he might not be married but he had made a goodly number of friends since he arrived in New England, and they would, presumably, been a lot cheerier had they discovered that news of his death was premature. What made it worse, and guiltily nagged at their souls, was that nobody would tell them how many of their crew mates had gone down with the Achilles, or what else was going on in the world. Not that the average crew member on board was any better informed.
The Spanish have torpedoed a couple of our ships. There are half-a-dozen enemy submersibles at large in the Gulf of Spain and the Atlantic…
But which ships had been torpedoed?
Like the majority of the Surprise’s crew the two fliers had no idea where the ship was, or had been, at any time after she submerged off the north coast of Little Inagua.
Abe and Ted were prisoners, albeit captives in a gilded technological cage which in other circumstances would have been like an Aladdin’s Cave.
Abe went back to his reading.
Ted Forest tried to make himself more comfortable and to have a nap.
A few minutes later their wristbands tingled.
“Mister Lincoln and Mister Forest report to the Captain’s cabin at your earliest convenience!”
Chapter 14
Saturday 29th April
Imperial Concession, Guaynabo, San Juan, Santo Domingo
Hans von Schaffhausen stepped onto the deck of the SMS Weser and clambered up to the bridge. The wreckage had been cleared away, and the blood hosed off the planking since his first visit to the ship but the constant clanking of the pumps told their own, sad story.
Commander Peter Cowdrey-Singh, RN, had greeted the German Minister informally at the head of the gangway; Leutnant zur see Kemper, the boyish captain of the crippled merchant raider crisply saluted von Schaffhausen.
The three men stepped to the bridge wing to view the big cruiser cautiously edging into the poorly marked deep-water channel of San Juan Bay, fighting the tide to turn to starboard, so as to safely pass inshore of the San Miguel, the ancient Dominican ironclad still pointing her guns at the Weser.