Rebel yells ripped through the narrow steel tube in which the Bonefish's crew lived and worked. The men pounded one another on the back. "Score one for the captain!" Ben Coulter whooped. Everybody pounded Kimball on the back, too, something unthinkable in the surface Navy.
"Give me course 315," Kimball told the helmsman. Heading obliquely away from the path of the torpedoes was a good way not to have your tracks followed. "Half speed." He'd have mercy on the batteries.
After an hour, he surfaced to recharge them. Foul, pressurized air rushed out of the Bonefish when he undogged the hatch. All the stinks seemed worse, somehow, right at that moment. He went up onto the conning tower. To his relief, now, he spied no smoke plumes on the horizon.
"Good shooting, sir," Tom Brearley said, coming up behind him.
"Thanks," Kimball said. "That's what they pay me for. And speaking of pay, we just made the damnyankees pay plenty. We done licked 'em twice. They're stupid enough to think we can't do it three times running, no matter what our niggers try doin', they can damn well think again."
"Yes, sir!" Brearley said.
"Snow in my face in April!" Major Irving Morrell said enthusiastically. "This, by God, this is the life."
"Yes, sir." Captain Charlie Hall had rather less joy in his voice. "Snow in your face about eight months a year hereabouts." The snow blowing in his face and Morrell's obscured the Canadian Rockies for the moment. Morrell didn't mind. He'd seen them when the weather was better. They were even grander than they were in the USA. They were even snowier than they were in the USA, too, and that was saying something.
"I hope you don't mind my telling you this," Morrell said to Hall, "but I think you've been going at this the wrong way. Charge straight at the damn Canucks, and they'll slaughter you. You've seen that."
Hall's face twisted. He was a big, bluff, blond man, bronzed by sun, chapped by wind, with a Kaiser Bill mustache he kept waxed and impeccable regardless of the weather. He said, "It's true, sir. I can't deny it. We sent divisions into Crow's Nest Pass and came out with regiments. The Canucks didn't want to give up for hell."
"And they were waiting for us to do what we did, too," Morrell said. "Give the enemy what he's waiting for and you'll be sorry a hundred times out of a hundred. The Canucks made us pay and pay, and what did we have when we were done paying? Less than we'd hoped. They just stopped running trains through Crow's Nest Pass and doubled up in Kicking Horse Pass."
He pointed ahead. U.S. forces had been slogging toward Kicking Horse Pass for the past year and a half. He didn't intend to slog any more. He was going to move, and to make the Canadians move, too.
"And when we finally take this one, they'll go on up to Yellow-head Pass," Hall said. "This war is a slower business than anyone dreamt when we first started fighting."
"If we drive enough nails into their coffin, eventually they won't be able to pull the lid up any more," Morrell said.
"I like that." Hall's face was better suited for the grin it wore now than for its earlier grimace. A couple of Morrell's other company commanders joined them then: Captain Karl Spadinger, who for looks could have been Charlie Hall's cousin; and First Lieutenant Jephtha Lewis, who would have seemed more at home behind a plow on the Great Plains than in the Rockies of Alberta. With them came Sergeant Saul Finkel, who had a dark, quiet face and the long, thin-fingered hands of a watchmaker-which he had been before joining the Army.
"Here's what we're going to do," Morrell said, pointing to the Canadian position ahead of them and then to the map he took from a pouch on his belt. The view was better on the map; the snow didn't obscure it. "We've got this fortified hill ahead of us. I will lead the detachment advancing to the west. Sergeant Finkel!"
"Sir!" the sergeant said.
"You and one machine-gun squad from Lieutenant Lewis' company will cover the ridge road up there"-he showed what he had in mind both through the blowing snow and on the map-"and block the Canadians from coming down and getting in our rear. I rely on you for this, Sergeant. If I had to make do with anyone else, I'd leave two guns behind. But your weapon always works."
"It will keep working, sir," Finkel said. Morrell looked at his hands again. Anyone who could handle the tiny, intricate gearing of watches was unlikely to have trouble keeping a machine gun operating, and Finkel, along with being mechanically ept, was also a brave, cool-headed soldier.
Morrell pointed to Captain Spadinger. "Karl, you'll take the rest of your company and open the hostile position on the eastern side of the slope. Hold your fire as long as you can."
"Yes, sir," Spadinger said. "As you ordered, we'll be carrying extra grenades for when actual combat breaks out."
"Good," Morrell said. Spadinger's efficiency pleased him, which was why he'd given him the secondary command for the attack. He went on, "Captain Hall, your rifle company and Lieutenant Lewis' machine-gun company, less that one squad I'm leaving with Sergeant Finkel, will accompany me on the main flanking thrust. If we can chase the Canucks off this hill, we've gone a long way toward clearing the path to Banff. Any questions, gentlemen?" Nobody said anything. Morrell nodded. "We'll try it, then. We advance as rapidly as possible. Keep speed in your minds above all else. We move at 0900."
In the fifteen minutes before they began to move, he checked his men, especially the teams manhandling the machine guns across country. They were good troops; in grim Darwinian fashion, most of the soldiers who didn't make good mountain troops were dead or wounded by now.
He felt the men's eyes on him, too. This would be the first real action they'd faced with him commanding them. He didn't suppose they knew about his having had to leave the General Staff-he hoped they didn't, anyhow-but they had to be wondering about what he and they would be able to do together. Well, they were finding out he didn't care to huddle in trenches.
"Let's go," he said.
Spruce and fir and swirling snow helped screen the men in green-gray from the Canadians above. No firing broke out off to the right, which relieved Morrell to no small degree. He grinned, imagining Spadinger's men rounding up sentries and poking bayoneted rifles into dugouts, catching the Canucks by surprise.
His own men scooped up a fair number of prisoners, too. One of them, brought back to Morrell, glared at him and said, "What the devil are you bastards doing so far from where the fighting is?"
"Why, moving it someplace else, of course," he answered cheerfully, which made the Canuck even less happy.
Morrell's leg tried to protest when he pushed up to the very head of his force, but he ignored it. It's only pain, he told himself, and, as he usually did, managed to make himself believe it. He reached the lead just in time to help capture a machine-gun position the Canadians had blasted out of the living rock of the hill, again without firing a shot.
"This is wonderful, sir!" Captain Hall exclaimed. "We've got the drop on the Canucks for sure this time."
"So far, so-" Morrell began. Before good got out of his mouth, a burst of fire made him whip his head back toward the direction which Captain Spadinger and his company had gone. It sounded as if they were heavily engaged. "We appear to have lost the advantage of-" Morrell didn't get to finish that sentence, either. Machine guns from atop the hill opened up on his detachment before he could say surprise. That was a surprise to him, and not a pleasant one.
"Dig in!" he shouted. "Do it now! Sweat saves blood!" As the riflemen began to obey, he turned to Lieutenant Lewis. "Get those machine guns set up. We've got to neutralize that fire."