Walk in Hell

torpedoes in the two forward tubes.”

The Bonefish crept east. The U.S. destroyer was doing most of the work, coming right across his bow, leaving itself wide open for a shot-if it didn’t pick up speed and steam past the submersible before the latter was in position to launch its deadly fish.

“I want to get inside twelve hundred yards before I turn ’em loose,” Kimball remarked, more as if thinking out loud than talking to Tom Brearley. “I’ll shoot from a mile if I have to, though, and trust to luck that I’m not carrying any moldies.”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley agreed; duds were the bane-and often the end-of a submariner’s existence. The executive officer went on, “Are you sure you want to shoot from such long range, sir? A miss will bring the U.S. fleet after us full bore.”

“Just because they’re after us doesn’t mean they’ll catch us,” Kimball said smugly. “So yes, I’ll take the chance, thanks.” He grinned. “After all, if I sink that destroyer, that’ll bring the U.S. fleet after us, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Brearley sounded as if he was smiling, too; Kimball didn’t look away from the periscope to see. A good kid, he thought absently. A little on the soft side, but a good kid.

And here came the destroyer, fat and sassy. He’d have lookouts peering in all directions for periscopes, but some of those fools would have seen enough periscopes that weren’t there to make officers leery of taking their reports too seriously. They wouldn’t be expecting Confederate company quite so far out to sea, either; the Bonefish was well past her normal cruising radius. But she’d picked up fuel from a freighter not long before, and so…“We’ll give you damnyankees a surprise,” Kimball muttered.

He wasn’t going to get a shot off at twelve hundred yards. The electric engines were too puny to get him close enough fast enough. But he would be inside a mile. Any time you could split the difference between what you really wanted and what you’d settle for, you weren’t doing too bad.

“Depth?” he asked quietly.

“Thirty-five feet, sir,” Brearley answered after checking the gauge.

“Give me a couple more degrees south, Coulter,” Kimball said. “A little more…steady…Fire number one!” Fearsome clangs and hissings marked the launch of the first torpedo. A moment later, Kimball shouted, “Fire number two!”

He studied both tracks with grave intensity. They looked straight, they looked good. The destroyer had less than a minute to react, and momentum that kept her from reacting fast. She started to turn toward the Bonefish, presenting the smallest area for the fish to reach.

Kimball couldn’t tell whether the first torpedo passed under her bow or hit and failed to explode. He hadn’t snarled more than a couple of curses, though, when the second one caught her just aft of amidships. “Hit!” he screamed. “Hell of a hit! She’ll go down from that, damn me to hell if she don’t.” The destroyer lay dead in the water, and bent at an unnatural angle. She was already starting to list. Some of the Yankees aboard would make her boats, Kimball thought, but some wouldn’t, too.

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.