If that wasn't an order to head for the officers' club and get smashed, it might as well have been. Moss would have headed there anyway. Dudley and Eaker matched him stride for stride.
News traveled fast through the aerodrome. When the Negro behind the bar saw them come in, he set a bottle of whiskey, a corkscrew, and three tumblers on the bar, nodded, and said not a word. It was almost as if he stood at the bedside of a patient whose chances weren't good.
As suited his station as flight leader, Dud Dudley carried the bottle. Moss picked up the glasses. That left the corkscrew for Eaker, who brought it over to the table as if glad to have something to do.
Dudley used the corkscrew, tilted the bottle, and poured all the glasses full. "Well, here's to Tom," he said, and drained his without taking it from his lips. When it was empty, he let out a long sigh. "I always thought the ornery son of a bitch would be doing this for me, not the other way round."
"Yeah." The whiskey burned in Moss' throat, and in his stomach. He could feel it climbing to his head. "He went out the way you'd figure, if he was ever going to go. He wanted to hit the Canucks and limeys one more lick."
"That's a fact." Dudley filled the tumblers again. "He was a wolf when he drove a bus, nothing else but. Never saw a man who just aimed himself at the enemy and fired himself off like that."
"Best straight-out aggressive pilot I ever saw," Moss agreed. "And Luther was the best technical flier I ever saw. And they're both dead and we're alive, and what the hell does that say about the way the world works?"
"It's a damn shame," Eaker said. The whiskey was already slurring his speech, but he attacked the second glass as single-mindedly as Tom had ever shot up a target. "Not fair. Not fair."
He'd joined the flight as Luther Carlsen's replacement. Now another set of personal goods would have to be cleared from the tent. Somebody else new would be sleeping on Innis'cot. They'd have to point Tom out in the pictures on the wall and explain what kind of a man he'd been. It wouldn't be easy, any of it.
"God damn the Canucks, anyhow," Moss said. "If they'd just rolled over when the war started, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place."
"That's right," Eaker said. "Then we could have thrown everything we've got at the goddamn Rebs, and that would be the war over and done with, right there."
"Yeah, and if the Russians hadn't invaded Germany when things got started, France would have gone down the drain and Kaiser Bill would have won his war, too," Moss said. "But instead, we've got-this."
He waved a hand to encompass this. It was the hand holding the glass of whiskey. Fortunately, he'd already drunk most of it. A little spilled on the table and on his trouser leg, but not much. He started to pick up the bottle to fill the tumbler once more. "It's empty," Dud Dudley said.
"You're right. It is." Moss stared at it. "How did it get empty so fast?" Before he could get up and do anything about that, the bartender brought over a fresh bottle. Moss nodded. His neck felt loose. "That's better."
"How did it get empty so fast?" Eaker echoed. He sounded even more surprised than Moss had, as if there weren't the slightest connection between his stumbling speech and that poor dead bottle.
"It got empty the same way we did," Moss said. "It got empty the same way the whole stupid world did." Rapidly getting drunk as he was, he couldn't tell whether that was foolish maundering or profound philosophy. The next day, hung over and wishing he was dead, he couldn't tell, either, and the day after that, climbing into his one-decker for another flight above the trenches, he still didn't know.
Night lay like a cloak over the Bonefish. "Ahead one quarter," Roger Kimball called from his perch atop the conning tower.
"Ahead one quarter-aye aye, sir," answered Ben Coulter, the helmsman, his voice floating up the hatchway to the skipper.
"If we bring this off, sir-" Tom Brearley breathed.
Kimball made a sharp chopping motion with his right hand, cutting off his exec. "We are going to bring this off," he said. "No ifs, ands, or buts. I don't care how many mines the damnyankees have laid in Chesapeake Bay, I don't care how many shore guns they've got watching from Maryland. We are going to pay them a visit. If they aren't glad to see us, too damn bad."
"Yes, sir," Brearley said, the only thing he could say under the circumstances. After a few seconds, he went on, "It's a shame the USA pushed down so far toward Hampton Roads."
"You're right about that," Kimball said. "If we were holding onto both sides of the mouth of the Bay as tight as we ought to…Things'd look a lot better if that was so, I tell you."
There were, at the moment, any number of ways in which the war could have looked better from the Confederate point of view. Kimball wasted little time worrying about them. They'd given him the job of penetrating as far up the Chesapeake Bay as he could and doing as much damage as he could once he got there, and he aimed to follow his orders to the letter.
Softly, under his breath, he let out a snort. "As if they'd hand this assignment to Ralph Briggs."
"Sir?" his executive officer said.
"Never mind, Tom," Kimball answered. "Woolgathering, that's all. And maybe there's more to old Ralph than I give him credit for, anyway."
He'd never expected to see Briggs back in the CSA till the war ended, not when he'd had his submersible torpedoed out from under him and been fished out of the drink by the damnyankees who did him in. But Briggs had managed to break out of the prisoner-of-war camp where they'd stowed him and to make it through enemy lines (or rather, to make it through some country so broken, it had no real front line) and back into Confederate territory. If he could run a submarine as well as he'd run his own escape, he might yet make a captain to be reckoned with.
Tom Brearley coughed, calling Kimball's attention back to the here-and-now. "Sir, we're passing between Smith Island and Crisfield."
"Thank you, Tom," Kimball said. "I guess we'll have to start paying attention, then, won't we?" Even in the midnight darkness, his grin and Brearley's answering one were broad and white.
The USA had run steel-mesh nets from Point Lookout on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay over to Smith Island, and then again from the island to Crisfield on the Bay's eastern shore, precisely to keep Confederate raiders like the Bonefish from coming up and making nuisances of themselves in the Bay's upper reaches. They backed up the nets with minefields and patrol boats.
From everything the Confederacy had been able to learn, though, the damnyankees had concentrated their efforts on the wider stretch of water west of Smith Island. Their ruling assumption seemed to have been that nobody was crazy enough to try to run a boat through Tangier Sound. Up at the northern end of the sound, only a mile or two of water separated the mainland from Bloodsworth Island. The nets would tangle a submersible that dove, and the guns would put paid to one that didn't.
Kimball whistled tunelessly between his teeth. "Do I look like a crazy man to you, Tom?" he asked.
"No more so than usual-sir," Brearley answered, which made Kimball laugh out loud.
"Best way to run through the nets," he said, "is to take 'em on the surface and slide through halfway between two buoys." He peered through his clandestinely imported German binoculars, trying to spot the buoys to which the nets were attached, and laughed again. "This is a trick we've learned from the Huns, mind: it's how they slip through the English obstacles in the Channel."