Engineers were busy at Clarksville, Tennessee. As U.S. monitors pushed up the Cumberland toward the town, the Confederates had dropped two railway bridges right into the water. Before the U.S. monitors advanced any farther, the steel and timber and the freight cars the Rebs had run out onto the bridge to complicate their enemies' lives all had to be cleared away.
It was slow work. It was dangerous work, too; every so often, Confederate batteries off to the south would lob some three-inch shells in the direction of the fallen bridges. The engineers didn't have a lot of heavy equipment with which to work. Once they'd cleared the river, the U.S. presence in this part of Tennessee would firm up. Then they could bring in the tools they really needed now. Of course, they wouldn't need them so much then.
"Yeah, that's a hell of a thing," Pitchess said when George remarked on the paradox. "But hell, if you wanted things simple, you never would have joined the Navy."
"I suppose you're right," Enos said. "I joined the Navy so I could give the Rebs a kick in the slats to pay them back for the one they gave me. I was already a sailor, so what the hell?-and I didn't want to get conscripted into the Army. But I never thought they'd stick me here in the middle of the country. You join the Navy, you think you'll be on the ocean, right?"
"Didn't matter to me one way or t'other," his friend answered. "I wasn't making enough to keep a roof on my head and food in my belly when I was fishing. I figured I wouldn't starve in the Navy, and I was right about that." A wry grin stretched across his lean, weathered face. "Maybe I didn't think about getting blown to smithereens as much as I should've."
Men and mules, straining mightily, hauled a freight car out onto the north bank of the river. Pointing, George said, "I expect that'll be the last train to Clarksville for a good long time."
"Yeah," Pitchess said. "Till we get our own rolling stock running through, anyways."
Confederate field guns opened up with another barrage just then. Shells screamed down on the engineers, who dove for cover. Mules weren't smart enough to do that (or, George thought, stupid enough to start a war in the first place). Thin across the water, the screams of wounded animals floated over to the Punishment.
The guns had the bridge zeroed to a fare-thee-well, and could strike at the wreckage or at either bank, as they chose. They didn't have the range for the Punishment down so precisely. That didn't keep them from trying to hit her, though. Shells splashed into the river and chewed up the bushes on the northern bank.
George dove into the shelter the ironwrights had built around his machine gun. A splinter hit the steel and clattered away. He hadn't thought enough about getting blown to smithereens, either.
Growling and grumbling on its bearings, the Punishment's turret swung round so the six-inch guns it carried bore on the field pieces harassing them. On land, six-inch cannon were heavy guns, hard to move at any sort of speed except by rail. On the water, though, they were nothing out of the ordinary, and the Punishment gave them a fine, steady platform from which to work.
They roared. The monitor heeled ever so slightly in the water from the recoil, then recovered. Sprawled out as he was, George felt the motion more acutely than he might have on his feet. Up in the armored crow's nest atop the mast, an officer with field glasses would be watching the fall of the shells and comparing it to the location of the Rebel guns.
More grumbling noises-these smaller, to correct the error in the turret's previous position. The big guns boomed again. Wafting powder fumes made George cough and sent tears streaming from his eyes.
Confederate shells kept falling, too. One of them exploded against the turret. A whole shower of splinters rattled off Enos' protective cage. He'd wondered whether the ironworkers had made it thick enough. Nothing tore through it to pierce him. Evidently they had.
The turret carried more armor than any other part of the Punishment. It was made to withstand a shell from a gun of the same caliber as those it carried. It didn't laugh at a hit from a three-inch howitzer, but it turned the blow without trouble.
And it replied with shells far heavier than those the field pieces threw. "Hit!" shouted the spotter from the crow's nest. "That's a hit, by God!" He whooped with glee. The guns fired several more salvos. The spotter kept yelling encouragement. What encouraged George more than anything else was that, after a while, no new fire came toward either the Punishment or the Clarksville bridges.
He got to his feet, ready to hose down the riverbank with machine-gun fire in case the Rebs, having lost their guns, chose to bring riflemen forward to make the engineers' jobs harder-and perhaps to snipe at the men on the monitor's deck, too. They often tried that after big, waterborne guns smashed their artillery.
Not this time, though. All was calm as the Punishment floated on the Cumberland. The engineers got back to work. The mine-sweeping boat ran right up to the wreckage to pick up a couple of wounded men. On the shore, pistol shots rang out. Soldiers were shooting wounded mules.
Just another day's work, George thought. Noticing that thought brought him up sharply. It was the sort of thought a veteran might have. "Me?" he muttered. No one answered, naturally, but no one needed to, either.
Roger Kimball stood up on the conning tower of the Bonefish. He looked around. All he saw were the cool, gray waters of the North Atlantic. All he smelled was clean salt air-none of the rotting stinks of the South Carolina swamps. He sucked in a long, deep breath and let it out like a connoisseur savoring a fine wine.
His executive officer smiled. "Feels good to be back at sea, doesn't it, sir?" Junior Lieutenant Brearley said.
"Feels better than good, Tom," Kimball answered. "We're doing our proper job again, and about time, too. If I'd wanted to be a policeman and wear a funny hat, I'd have joined the police in the first place."
A wave crashed against the Bonefish's bow. The conning tower and the hatch leading down into the submersible were protected by canvas shields-or so claimed the men who'd designed the shields. Kimball supposed they were better than nothing. They didn't keep him and Brearley from getting seawater in the face. They didn't keep more seawater from puddling under their feet or from dripping down the hatch.
Brearley used a sleeve to wipe himself more or less dry. His smile now was rueful. "Harder to keep the boat dry than it was on the river."
"Price you pay for doing the proper job," Kimball said airily. He could afford to be airy now, up here. When he went below, the diesel-oil and other stenches inside the Bonefish-all produced despite everything the crew could do-would easily surpass those of the swamps flanking the Pee Dee.
Since that couldn't be helped, he put it out of his mind. Wiping the lenses of his field glasses with a pocket handkerchief, he raised the glasses to his eyes and scanned the horizon for a telltale plume of smoke that would mark a ship. The wind quickly whipped away the exhaust from the Bonefish's diesel. Bigger vessels, though, burned coal or fuel oil, and left more prominent signatures in the air.
He spied nothing. The Bonefish might have been alone in the Atlantic. He didn't like that. Letting the binoculars thump down against his chest on their leather strap, he pounded on the conning tower rail with his fist. "Damn it, Tom, they're supposed to be out here."
"Yes, sir," the exec said. That was all he could say. Intelligence had reported the U.S. Navy was gathering for a push against the British and French warships protecting their home countries' merchant vessels. Sending one or two of those Yankee ships to the bottom would make life easier for the Entente powers against the twin colossi of the USA and Germany.