Mississippi. The mines upstream remained too thick for U.S. monitors to make their way down and challenge the Confederate boats. That meant that, wherever the CSA wanted large-caliber guns to deliver their fire, they could- and they did. They’d hurt U.S. forces on the west bank of the river too many times already.
A U.S. field gun down by the riverbank not far from where McSweeney was standing presumed to fire on one of the river monitors flying the Confederate naval ensign. It hit the monitor square on the turret. The C.S. boat, though, was armored to withstand the shells of others of its kind. A hit from a three-inch gun got its attention but did no damage to speak of-the worst of both worlds.
Ponderously, the turret swung so that the pair of eight-inch guns inside bore on the field piece. Flame and great clouds of gray smoke belched from the muzzles of those eight-inch guns. A couple of seconds later, McSweeney heard the roar as the sound traveled across the water to his ear. An instant after that-or perhaps an instant before-the two shells launched from the guns blew the U.S. field piece and its crew to kingdom come. On steamed the gunboat, smug in its invulnerability.
“God have mercy on their souls,” Gordon McSweeney murmured. He said not a word about the bodies of the brave but foolhardy U.S. gun crew. After those shells struck home, the gunners were fit for burial in jam jars; coffins would have been wasted on their remains.
He’d watched that sort of thing happen too many times before. The United States might have finally reached the bank of the Mississippi, but the Confederate States still ruled this stretch of river. Some U.S. mines had gone into the muddy brown water, but McSweeney hadn’t seen them do any good.
“If you want something done properly, do it yourself,” he muttered under his breath. He was no expert with the mines both sides used in ocean and river warfare, but that did not worry him. The methods that sprang to his mind for disposing of a river monitor were considerably more direct.
He wished one of them involved his beloved flamethrower. He could not figure out how to use it without destroying himself along with the monitor, though. He sighed. God did not grant anyone everything he wanted.
If he asked permission to attack a Confederate river monitor, his superiors would surely tell him no. Accordingly, he asked nothing of anyone, save only the Lord. And the Lord provided…with a certain amount of help from Gordon McSweeney.
He already knew how to swim. He knew how to make a raft, too. After a little thought, he figured out that he would be wise to make the raft well upstream, to ensure that the current did not sweep him past the river monitor instead of toward it. If he came out of the Mississippi without having done what he intended to do, he would be in trouble with the U.S. Army. If he came out on the wrong bank of the Mississippi, he would be a prisoner of war- unless the Rebs chose to shoot him, for he would certainly be out of uniform.
“Where are you going, sir?” a sentry asked as McSweeney left the company perimeter.
“To reconnoiter,” he answered, a response that had the virtue of being true and uninformative at the same time.
Another sentry, a man who did not know McSweeney, asked him the same question when he left the battalion perimeter. He gave the same answer, and got by the same way he had with the soldier from his company. The sentry was not inclined to quarrel with an obvious U.S. officer who sounded short-tempered and was armed to the teeth.
McSweeney would have shown just how short-tempered he was had anyone come across the raft he’d hidden behind bushes and underbrush. But there it was when he pulled the brush aside. He stripped off his clothes, loaded his weapons aboard the raft, and pushed off into the river. No one paid any attention to the small splashing noises he made.
The Mississippi was warm. The mud it carried didn’t keep a couple of fish from finding him and nibbling at him. What he would have done if an alligator or snapping turtle had come up to investigate him was a question he was glad he did not have to answer.
He kicked hard, propelling the raft out toward the middle of the Mississippi. One thing he had not taken into account was his small circle of vision with his eyes only a few inches above the water. If he drifted past the C.S. river monitor without spying it, he would feel worse than just foolish.
There it was! That long, low shape, with almost no freeboard, couldn’t be anything else. Someone had described the original
McSweeney hung onto the raft with his fingertips, letting as little of himself show as he could. His scheme would have been impossible had the C.S. vessel’s deck been higher above the waterline. As things were, it was just insanely foolhardy. Gordon McSweeney had been doing insanely foolhardy things since the war began. If God willed that he die doing one of them, die he would, praising His name with his last breath.
He wondered what sort of watch the Confederate sailors kept on deck. He knew they didn’t patrol with electric torches. Had they been foolish enough to do so, U.S. sharpshooters on the western bank of the Mississippi would have made them regret it.
He had to kick hard to keep the raft from gliding past the Confederate monitor and down the river. Grabbing the.45 and the sack of rubberized canvas he’d carried on the raft, he scrambled up onto the monitor’s deck. His bare feet made not a sound on the riveted iron. Somewhere aft, a sentry was pacing; his shoes clanked on the deck.
And here he came. He moved without any particular urgency, but as much on his appointed rounds as a postman might have done. McSweeney had no trouble keeping the turret between himself and the man who strode on through the darkness, never expecting trouble could come on his watch when the Confederate States so dominated this stretch of the Mississippi River.
Whether he expected it or not, trouble shared the deck with him. McSweeney undid the sack and drew from it two one-pound blocks of TNT, twenty seconds’ worth of fuse for each, and a match safe that had stood up to all the rain and mud nearly three years in the trenches had thrown at it. The matches inside rattled. He glared at them, willing them to be silent, then crimped the fuses to the explosive blocks.
Silent himself, he scuttled round the turret to the openings from which the barrels of the monitors’ big guns projected. Once he got there, he reluctantly set down the.45 so he could take a match out of the trusty safe and strike it.
The hiss of the match as it caught was tiny. So was the light that came from it. One or the other, though, alerted the sentry. “Who goes there?” he demanded, his voice suddenly sharp and alert.
“Damnation,” McSweeney muttered, and only saved himself from the blasphemy he so despised by hastily adding, “to the enemies of the Lord.” He lit the fuses attached to the explosive blocks, tossed them inside the monitor’s turret, as far to the back as he could, and snatched up the pistol once more.
“Who goes there?” the sentry repeated. Now his shoes rang on the deck as he hurried to investigate.
McSweeney fired three quick rounds at him. One of them must have hit, for the Reb let out a shriek. McSweeney didn’t care, except insofar as the fellow didn’t get a chance to shoot at him. He threw away the pistol and dove into the Mississippi. He’d cut things too fine, both metaphorically and, with the fuses, literally as well.
He swam away from the monitor as fast as he could. He tried to go as deep as he could. His ears ached in protest. He ignored them, knowing better than they what was about to happen.
No matter how muddy the Mississippi was, suddenly the surface of the water, high over his head, lit up bright as day, bright as hellfire. The explosion behind him sent him tumbling through the water, more than half stunned. Why he didn’t open his mouth and breathe in half the river, he never knew. Either the Lord watched over him or he was simply too stubborn to drown.
After a while, his lungs told him he had to breathe or die. By then, the chunks of iron-some of them bigger than he was-had stopped raining down out of the sky. When he broke the surface, he was amazed he’d swum so far from the Confederate monitor-till he remembered the explosion had given him a big push.
He’d hoped his explosives would touch off the magazine inside the turret, and had they! Had they ever!
Alarm tingled through him when he finally splashed up onto the bank of the Mississippi. What if the current had swept him beyond the limits of U.S.-held territory and into land the Rebels still controlled? Then he would have
