Breakthroughs

Why do we have to go and quit?” Several other men had shouted profane agreement.

Since Kimball felt like that, too, he’d had trouble answering. Tom Brearley had done it for him: “If the damnyankees lick us on land, we have to give in. Otherwise, where do we go home?”

“I don’t give a fuck,” Coulter had answered. “Ain’t had a home but for my boat the past twenty years anyways.”

Kimball chuckled, remembering the startled expression on his exec’s face, as if Coulter had hit him in the side of the head with a sack full of wet sand. The captain of the Bonefish agreed with the petty officer. For that matter, he still wasn’t sure whether or not the Arkansas farm on which he’d grown up remained in C.S. hands. He hadn’t heard from his mother in a long time. And whether it did or not, he didn’t want to go back. The Navy was his life these days…he hoped.

Brearley joined him atop the conning tower. The exec stayed silent for several minutes, accurately guessing Kimball did not care for conversation. But Brearley, as happened sometimes, didn’t keep his mouth shut long enough. “Sir, once we get to port, what are they going to do with us?”

“Don’t know,” Kimball said shortly, hoping the exec would take the hint.

He didn’t. “The damnyankees are liable to make us cut way back on submarines. We’ve hurt ’em bad; they won’t want to give us the chance to do it again.”

“Worry about that if it happens.” But Kimball had already started worrying about it. He’d been worrying for weeks, even since word of the first Confederate peace feelers came to his ears. He was liable to end up on the beach, not because of what he wanted but because of what the United States decreed. He enjoyed that idea about as much as the idea of a kick in the balls.

A fragment of a curse floated up through the open hatch: “-it, we fought the bastards to a draw out here. Hell, ain’t close to fair we have too-”

Brearley broke into it, as he’d broken into Kimball’s silence: “The Yankees could cripple our Navy for years. They could even-”

“Shut up.” Now Kimball spoke in a flat, harsh tone: the voice of command. Brearley stared, his face a white oval in the moonlight. He opened his mouth-a dark circle in the white oval. “Shut up, damn you,” Kimball snapped. He pointed off toward the east, where a ship was suddenly visible against the moon’s track.

He raised binoculars to his eyes. The ship leaped closer. How close? Estimating range at night was as tricky a thing as a submersible skipper could do, but he didn’t think it was more than a couple of miles. And that silhouette, seen against sky and moonlit ocean, was all too familiar.

“Take it easy, sir,” Brearley said as Kimball stared hungrily toward the ship that steamed along unaware he was anyplace close by. “The war’s over for us.”

“Shut up,” Kimball said again, now almost absently. “You know what ship that is, Tom? It’s that fucking destroyer that’s given us nothing but trouble since she came out here.”

“Is it?” Brearley said. “That’s too bad, sir. Shame we didn’t spy her last night instead of now.”

Kimball went on as if the exec hadn’t spoken: “And do you know what else? I’m going to sink the son of a bitch.”

“My God, sir!” Brearley burst out. “You can’t do that! If anybody ever found out, they’d hang you. They’d hang all of us.”

“No doubt about it,” Kimball agreed. “But England’s still in the war. The damnyankees’ll blame it on a limey boat-as long as we can keep our mouths shut. To hell with me if I’m going home with my tail between my legs. I’m going to hit ’em one more lick, and I’m going to make it the best one I know how.”

“You can’t, sir,” Brearley repeated.

“Go below, Mr. Brearley,” Kimball said. “I can and I goddamn well will. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to play. You can lay on your bunk and suck your thumb, for all I care.” He leaned close to the younger man. “And if you ever breathe one word of this to anybody, I don’t know what’ll happen to me, but you’re a dead man. You won’t die pretty, either. Have you got that?”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley whispered miserably.

“Then go below.” Kimball followed the executive officer down into the stinking steel tube that was the Bonefish’s fighting and living quarters. Brearley headed toward the stern: he really didn’t want any part in what Kimball was about to do. Kimball didn’t care. He was going to do it anyway. In conversational tones, he told the rest of the crew, “Boys, we’ve got the USS Ericsson a couple miles off to starboard. Load fish into tubes number one and two and open the water-tight doors. I aim to put a couple right in the whore’s engine room.”

Had the sailors hesitated, they might have made Kimball think twice, too. But they didn’t. After brief, incredulous silence, they let loose with yells and howls so loud, Kimball half feared the Yankees on the destroyer would be able to hear them. He made frantic shushing noises. Discipline returned quickly, discipline and a fierce eagerness for the kill much like his own.

He took the helm himself, sending a sailor up to the conning tower to watch the destroyer while he made his attack approach. “Give me fifteen knots,” he said. “They’re just lollygagging along. I want to get out in front of them and double back for the firing run.”

“We’re in the dark quarter of the sea,” Ben Coulter remarked, as much to himself as to Kimball. He grunted in satisfaction. “They’ll never spot us.”

“They’d damned well better not,” Kimball answered, to which the petty officer nodded. Kimball went on, “We’ll make the firing run coming in at a steep angle, too, so they won’t pick up the reflection of the moon from the paint on the conning tower. And we’ll be going in with the wind at our back, pushing the waves along to help hide our wake in the water.”

“You don’t want to make the angle too steep, though, Skipper,” Coulter said. “Easy to think it’s smaller than it is, and to miss with your fish on account of it. Don’t want that, not now we don’t.”

“Not hardly,” Kimball agreed with a dry chuckle. From the bow, a sailor waved to let him know the torpedoes were loaded into the forward tubes. He waved back, wishing he could be two places at the same time: he wanted to be at the helm and up on the conning tower both. He peered through the periscope, which at night was like making love wearing a rubber, for it took away a lot of the intimacy he wanted.

Despite that annoyance, everything went smooth as a training run in the Gulf of Mexico outside Mobile Bay. The destroyer, which could have left him far behind, kept lazing through the sea. He pulled ahead of the U.S. ship and swung the Bonefish into the tight turn for the firing run. “Bring her down to five knots,” he ordered, not wishing to draw attention to the boat as he closed in.

Like any submarine skipper, he would have made a hell of a pool player, for he was always figuring angles. Here, though, players and balls and even the surface of the table were in constant motion.

He took his eyes away from the periscope every so often to check the compass for the Bonefish’s true course. Gauging things by eye didn’t work at night-too easy to be wrong on both range and angle. He swung the submersible’s course a couple of degrees more toward the southeast. Ben Coulter had been right: if he was going to do this, he couldn’t afford to miss.

The lookout on the conning tower called softly down the hatch: “Sir, I reckon we’re inside half a mile of that Yankee bastard.”

“Thanks, Davis,” Kimball called back. He’d just made the same calculation. Having the lookout confirm the range made him feel good. Inside six hundred yards…Inside five hundred…Inside four hundred…“Fire one!” he shouted. If he couldn’t hit the Ericsson now, he never would.

Clangs and hisses and the rush of water into the emptied tube announced the torpedo was on its way. Even in moonlight, Kimball had no trouble making out the white track of air bubbles the fish left behind it. Maybe somebody on the destroyer’s deck also spotted it. If he did, though, he was too slow to do anything about it. Less than half a minute after the Bonefish launched it, the torpedo slammed into the U.S. warship just forward of amidships.

“Hit!” Kimball screamed, and the sailors howled out Rebel yells. The Ericsson staggered on her course like a poleaxed steer. Water foamed as it poured into the hole better than two hundred pounds of guncotton had blown in her flank. Already she was listing to port and appreciably lower in the water than she had been a moment before.

Up on the conning tower, Davis the lookout whooped for joy. “We-uns is goin’ home, but not them Yankees!”