Walk in Hell

Splash! Splash! Two more depth charges went into the water. Where they went into the water was the key factor, and the one Kimball couldn’t gauge till they detonated. All he could do was hope he’d picked a direction different from the one the Yankees had chosen. Even with the Bonefish going flat out submerged, those destroyers had better than three times his speed. The only thing he had going for him was that they couldn’t see him. Hydrophones gave only a vague clue about his direction, and they had to guess his depth.

Wham! Wham! Explosions rocked the submarine. They were both closer than that second one had been, but not so close as the first. All at once, he grinned. “All stop,” he snapped to Brearley.

“All-stop,” the exec answered. He looked back over his shoulder at Kimball. “You’re not going to-?”

“Bet your balls I am, son,” the skipper of the Bonefish said. “The damnyankees guessed with me, far as direction goes. They know how fast we are. What do you want to bet they keep right on that track, pounding away? They must have some new kind of charges, too, on account of I don’t think they’ve tossed any duds at us.”

“Isn’t that wonderful?” Brearley said. Along with most of the crew, Kimball chuckled. The life of a submariner had never been easy. By what the damnyankees were throwing at the Bonefish, it had just got harder.

Splash! Splash! With even the quiet electric motors running only enough to power lights and instruments, the noise the depth charges made going into the ocean was all too audible. In his mind’s eye, Kimball saw them twisting slowly down through the green-gray waters of the Atlantic (almost the color of a Yankee soldier’s uniform), looking for his boat. He cursed himself for an overactive imagination.

Wham! Wham! He staggered. A tiny new jet of seawater sprayed coldly down the back of his neck. As they had with the first attack, the lights flickered before steadying.

“Those were in front of us, sir,” Tom Brearley said.

“I know,” Kimball answered. “Here we sit.” He could feel eyes boring into him, as he had when he’d taken the Bonefish up the Pee Dee River looking for Red rebels. Then, though, the watchful eyes had belonged to the Negroes in the swamps along the riverbank. Now they were the eyes of his own crew.

He understood exactly why, too. The previous spread of charges had been aft of the submersible, this one in front. If that meant the U.S. destroyers up there had somehow located him…the next pair would go off right on top of his conning tower.

“One thing, boys,” he said into the drip-punctuated quiet. “If it turns out I’m wrong, we’ll never know what hit us.” If water at seven atmospheres’ pressure flooded into the Bonefish, it would smash everything in its path, surely making no exceptions for flimsy human beings.

“Sir,” Brearley asked, “if you have to, how deep will you take her?”

“I’d go to 300 without blinking an eye,” Kimball answered. “It gets wet fast down that deep, but odds are you’ll come back up from it. Nobody really knows how deep you can go if you’re lucky enough. I’ve heard stories of 350, even 400 feet, when the sub was damaged and couldn’t control its dive till it touched bottom.” He grinned wryly at his exec. “’Course, the ones who go down that deep and never surface again-you don’t hear about those.”

Sailors chuckled. He looked round at them: a grimy, unshaven crew, all the more raffish in the orange lighting. They fit here, the same as he did. They would have been-some had been-outcasts, frequent inhabitants of the brig, almost outlaws, in the gentlemanly world of the Confederate States surface Navy. As far as he was concerned, they’d done the cause more good than ten times their number aboard fancy battleships.

Splash! Splash! Everyone involuntarily sucked in a long breath of the humid, fetid air. In a very little while, Kimball would find out whether his training and instincts had saved their bacon-or killed them all.

In casual tones, Coulter remarked, “Wish I had me a beer right now.”

“We get back to Charleston, I’ll buy everybody here all the beer you can drink,” Kimball promised. That was liable to be an expensive promise to keep, but he didn’t care. Getting back to Charleston would make being poor for a while afterwards worthwhile and then some.

How long for a depth charge to reach the depth for which it was fused? The new pair seemed to be taking forever. Maybe they were duds, Kimball thought. The damnyankees couldn’t have come up with a way to make them work all the time…could they?

Wham! Wham! Maybe they could. “Jesus!” Tom Brearley exclaimed. “That took forever!” Kimball wasn’t the only one for whom time had stretched like a rubber band, then. The exec turned to him with a smile as radiant as any worn, greasy man could show in that light. “Well ahead of us, both of ’em, sir.”

“Yeah,” Kimball said, as if he hadn’t just bet his life and won. “Now we sit here for as long as the batteries will let us and wait for our little friends up there to get tired and go away. How long can we wait, Tom?”

Brearley checked the gauges. “It would be longer if we hadn’t tried that sprint after we sank the destroyer, sir, but we’ve got charge enough for five or six hours.”

“Should be enough,” Kimball said jovially. It had better be enough, echoed in his mind. He took a deep breath and made a face. “Things’ll stink too bad for us to stand it any longer’n that, regardless.” That was phrased like a joke and got laughs like a joke, but it wasn’t a joke, and everybody knew it. The longer you sat submerged, the fouler the air got. That was part of the nature of the boat.

Five and a half hours after the Bonefish sank its target, Ben Coulter found he couldn’t keep a candle alight in the close, nasty atmosphere inside the pressure hull. “If we had a canary in here, sir, it would have fallen off its perch a hell of a long time ago,” he said to Kimball.

“Yeah,” the captain answered. His head ached. He could feel how slowly he was thinking. He nodded to Brearley. “Blow forward tanks, Tom. Bring her up to periscope depth.”

A long, careful scan showed nothing on the horizon. Kimball ordered the Bonefish to the surface. Wearily, he climbed the ladder to the top of the conning tower, the exec close behind him to make sure the pressurized air didn’t blow him out the hatch when he opened it.

When he did undog the hatch, his stomach did its best to crawl up his throat: all the stenches so long trapped inside the submersible seemed ten times worse when they rushed out in a great vile gale and mixed in his lungs with the first precious breath of fresh, clean sea air. Fighting down his gorge, he climbed another couple of rungs and looked around. Late-afternoon sunshine felt as savagely bright as it did during a hangover. The ocean was wide and empty. “Made it again, boys,” he said. The crew cheered.

XVIII

Maria Tresca fiddled microscopically with Flora Hamburger’s hat. The Italian woman stepped back to survey the results. “Better,” she said, although Flora, checking the mirror, doubted the naked eye could tell the difference between the way the hat had looked before and how it did now.

“Remember,” Herman Bruck said, “Daniel Miller isn’t stupid. If you make a mistake in this debate, he’ll hurt you with it.”

He looked and sounded anxious. Had he been running against the appointed Democratic congressman, he probably would have made just such a mistake. Maybe he sensed that about himself and set on Flora’s shoulders his worries about what he would have done.

“It will be all right, Herman,” she said patiently. She sounded more patient than she was, and knew it. Beneath her pearl-buttoned shirtwaist, beneath the dark gray pinstriped jacket she wore over it, her heart was pounding. Class warfare in the USA hadn’t reached the point of armed struggle. The confrontation ahead, though, was as close an approach as the country had yet seen. Democrat versus Socialist, established attorney against garment worker’s daughter…here was the class struggle in action.

Someone pounded on the dressing-room door. “Five minutes, Miss Hamburger!” the manager of the Thalia Theatre shouted, as if she were one of the vaudevillians who usually performed here on Bowery. She felt as jumpy as any of those performers on opening night. The manager, who stomped around as if he had weights in his shoes, clumped down the hall and shouted, “Five minutes, Mr. Miller!”