Walk in Hell

it was his turn.

Some of the enemy sailors still had fight in them. They ran across the hull toward the submersible’s deck gun. George opened up with the one-pounder before Lieutenant Crowder screamed, “Rake ’em!”

Shell casings leaped from George’s gun. It fired ten-round clips, as if it were an overgrown rifle. One of the rounds hit an enemy sailor. George had never imagined what one of those shells could do to a human body. One instant, the fellow was dashing along the dripping hull. The next, his entire midsection exploded into red mist. His legs ran another stride and a half before toppling.

George picked up another clip-it hardly seemed to weigh anything-and slammed it into the one-pounder. He blew another man to pieces, but most of the clip went to chewing up the submersible’s conning tower. The sub wouldn’t be doing any diving, not if it was full of holes.

As he was reloading again, one of the Ericsson’s four-inch guns fired a shell into the ocean twenty yards in front of the submarine’s bow, a warning shot that sent water fountaining up to drench the surviving men who had reached the deck gun. They didn’t shoot back at the destroyer. Their hands went up in the air instead.

“Hold fire!” Lieutenant Crowder said. George obeyed. A moment later, a white flag waved from the top of the conning tower. More men started emerging from the hatch and standing on the hull, all of them with their hands raised in surrender.

Crowder used a pair of field glasses to read the name of the boat, which was painted on the side of the conning tower. “Snook,” he said. “She’ll be a Confederate boat. They name ’em for fish, same as we do. Looks like a limey, don’t she?”

Flags fluttered up on the Snook’s signal lines. “He’s asking if he can launch his boats,” said Sturtevant, who had far more practice at reading them than did George.

Captain Fleming’s answer came swiftly. Crowder read it before Sturtevant could: “Denied. We will take you off.” He inspected the dejected crew of the submersible. “I don’t see their captain, but they’re all so frowzy he may be there anyhow.”

Boats slid across the quarter-mile of water separating the Ericsson and the Snook. Confederate sailors were already boarding them when one more man burst from the submersible’s hatchway and hurried onto one of them.

“There’s the captain,” Sturtevant said, and then, “She’s sinking! The goddamn bastard opened the scuttling cocks. That’s what he was doing down below so long. Ahh, hell, no way to save her.” Sure enough, the Snook was quickly sliding down into the depths from which she had arisen. She would not rise again.

Up onto the deck of the Ericsson came the glum Confederates. U.S. sailors crowded round to see the men who had almost sunk them. The attitude of the victors was half relief, half professional respect. They knew the submariners could have won the duel as easily as not.

When the Confederate captain came aboard the destroyer, George’s jaw fell. “Briggs!” he burst out. “Ralph Briggs!”

“Somebody here know me?” The Rebel officer looked around to see who had spoken.

“I sure do.” George pushed through the crowd around the Confederates. His grin was enormous. “I’d better. I was one of the fishermen who helped sink you when you were skipper of the Tarpon.”

“What? We already captured this damn Reb once?” Lieutenant Crowder exclaimed. “Why the devil isn’t he in a prisoner-of-war camp where he belongs, then?”

“Because I escaped, that’s why.” Briggs stood straighter. “International law says you can’t do anything to me on account of it, either.”

“We could toss him in the drink and let him swim to shore,” Carl Sturtevant said, without the slightest smile to suggest he was joking.

George shook his head. “When he was going to sink my trawler, he let the crew take to the boats. He played square.”

“Besides, if we ditched him, we’d have to ditch the whole crew,” Lieutenant Crowder said. “Too many people would know, somebody would get drunk and tell the story, and the Entente papers would scream like nobody’s business. They’re prisoners, and we’re stuck with ’em.” He pointed to the Confederate submariners, then jerked a thumb toward the nearest hatch. “You men go below-and this time, Briggs, we’ll make damn sure you don’t get loose before the war is done.”

“You can try,” the submersible skipper answered. “My duty is to escape if I can.” He nodded to George Enos. “I wish I’d never seen you once, let alone twice, but I do thank you for speaking up for me there.”

George looked him in the eye. “If you were the skipper of the damn commerce raider that got my fishing boat when I was still a civilian, you’d be swimming now, for all of me.”

“Get moving,” Lieutenant Crowder said again, and, along with his crew, Ralph Briggs headed for the-

“The brig. Briggs is going to the brig,” George said, and laughed as the Confederates, one by one, went down the hatchway and disappeared.

Standing in Bay View Park, Chester Martin peered east across the Maumee River to the Toledo, Ohio, docks. Mist that was turning to drizzle kept him from seeing as much as he would have liked, but a couple of light cruisers from the Lake Erie fleet were in port, resupplying so they could go off and bombard the southern coast of Ontario again.

Martin turned to his younger sister. “You know what, Sue? This business of watching the war from the far side of the river is a…lot more fun than being in it up close.” The pause came from his swallowing a pungent intensifier or two. In the trenches, he cursed as automatically as he breathed. He’d horrified his mother a couple of times, and now tried to watch himself around his female relatives.

Sue giggled. She’d caught the hesitation. She found his profanity more funny than horrifying, but then she was of his generation. They shared a sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned family look, though Sue’s hair was brown, not sandy heading toward red like his.

She said, “I’m just sorry you had to get hurt so you could come home for a while.”

“Oh, I knew it was a hometowner as soon as I got it,” he said, exaggerating only a little. “Never worried about it for a minute. Now that my arm’s out of the sling, I expect they’ll be sending me back to the front before too long.”

“I wish they wouldn’t,” she said, and took his good right hand in both of hers. She was careful with his left arm, even if he’d finally had it released from its cloth cocoon.

From behind him, a gruff voice said, “You there, soldier-let’s see your papers, and make it snappy.”

Martin’s turn was anything but snappy; it let the military policeman see the three stripes on his sleeve. The MP was only a private first class. He didn’t worry about that, though, not with the law on his side. Martin was convinced the military police attracted self-righteous sons of bitches the way spilled sugar drew ants.

But this fellow wouldn’t be able to give him a hard time. He took the necessary paperwork from a tunic pocket and handed it to the MP. “Convalescent leave, eh?” the fellow said. “We’ve seen some humbug documents of this sort lately, Sergeant. What would happen if I took you back to barracks and told you to show me a scar?”

“I’d do it, and you’d get your ass in a sling,” Martin answered steadily. He looked the private first class up and down with the scorn most front-line soldiers felt for their not-quite-counterparts who hadn’t seen real action. “Why is it, sonny boy, the only time you ever see a dead MP, he’s got a Springfield bullet in him, not a Tredegar?”

Sue didn’t get that. The military policeman did, and turned brick red. “I ought to keep these,” he said, holding Martin’s papers so the sergeant couldn’t take them back.

“Go ahead,” Martin said. “Let’s head back to your barracks. We can both tell your commanding officer about it. Like I say, doesn’t matter a bean’s worth to me.”

A soldier ready to go back to barracks and take his case to the officer of the day was not a spectacle the MP was used to. Angrily, he thrust Martin’s papers back at him. Angrily, he stomped off, the soles of his boots slapping the bricks of the walkway.

“That’s telling him,” Sue said proudly, clutching her brother’s arm. “He didn’t have any business talking to you like that.”

“He could ask for my papers, to make sure I’m not absent without leave,” Martin said. “But when he got nasty afterwards-” He made a face. “He didn’t have any call to do that, except he’s a military policeman, and people