Breakthroughs

the Cuban coast.

“Damn all,” Kimball told him. He put the binoculars back in the case. “I’m going below.”

Tropical sun, calm water, and a mild breeze smelling of the salt sea made the top of the conning tower a pleasant, even a delightful, place to stand and pass the time. Going down into the long steel tube of the Bonefish was like descending into another world, perhaps one found in the infernal regions.

Instead of the illimitable confines of the ocean, Roger Kimball found himself in confines as severely limitable as any in the world, confines where space for machinery was a sine qua non and space for men a distinct afterthought. He banged his head on a pipe fitting he hit about every other day, and he was not an especially tall man.

Dim orange-tinted electric lamps replaced bright sun. Slowly, slowly, Kimball’s eyes adjusted. He knew he would squint like a blind thing when he went topside again.

Hardest of all, though, was the transition from fresh sea air to the horrible stuff inside the Bonefish. Even with the hatches open, even with a refit in Habana, she stank: an unforgettable mixture of bilgewater and diesel fuel and food and sweat and the reek of the heads. Kimball knew what she would be like when she came back from her cruise: like this, only magnified a hundredfold. A landlubber boarding a submersible just into port was like as not to add vomit to the reek. Kimball didn’t like the stink, but held it in wry affection. It was the smell of home.

Ben Coulter had the helm. “Steady on 075, sir,” the veteran petty officer said in response to Kimball’s unspoken question. “Listen to her. Doesn’t she sound good? Those greaser mechanics did a hell of a job.”

Kimball cocked his head to one side. The engine did sound unusually smooth. “Greasers are loyal,” he said. “It’s the goddamn niggers you got to watch out for.”

“Not in Cuba,” Coulter said. “Niggers didn’t hardly rise up at all in Cuba, what I hear tell. Never was so many Reds in Cuba like there is back home.” The unlit cigar he clenched between his teeth twitched as he talked.

“Sad state of affairs when the greasers keep their niggers quiet and white men can’t do it,” Kimball said. “Sad state of affairs when they think they’ve got to give niggers guns or the whole country goes under, too. Anybody wants to know, President Semmes is out of his goddamn mind.”

Ben Coulter nodded. So did most of the other crewmen within earshot. And then Kimball remembered that Anne Colleton had favored creating Negro military units, and also favored making Negroes Confederate citizens after their service. He thought as much of her brains as he did of her body, which said a great deal. If, after what she’d gone through at the hands of the Reds, she still thought the CSA needed Negro troops…She’s still wrong, dammit, Kimball thought.

The Bonefish moved steadily east toward the rectangle on the chart through which the submersible was supposed to sweep till her patrol was done. Kimball drilled the crew hard, regaining whatever edge they’d lost in the fleshpots of Habana. When the boat slid below the surface of the Atlantic in less than thirty seconds, he pronounced himself satisfied-privately, to Tom Brearley. As far as the crew was concerned, he was never satisfied.

Navigating aboard a submersible wasn’t easy, but repeated sights and hard work with the tables-much of it by Brearley, who had a fine head for mathematics-brought the Bonefish into the box between fifteen and seventeen degrees north latitude, thirty and thirty-three degrees west longitude, her assigned area for this patrol. Kimball chafed at working a set zone instead of hunting freely. Back and forth, back and forth the Bonefish prowled, like a shark in a tank.

“This isn’t what war is supposed to be about,” Kimball grumbled to his executive officer. “This is hide-and- seek, nothing else but.”

“Orders,” Brearley said placidly. As far as he was concerned, that made everything right. He had more imagination than a fence post, but not a whole lot. If he ever got his own boat, Kimball was sure he would command it competently. He was also sure his exec would never do anything spectacular.

Kimball was frustrated not least because he doubted whether any Yankee ships would come into his search zone. A patrol with a log book essentially empty of action was not what he had in mind.

He was in his bunk-which, however tiny and cramped, was the only one the Bonefish boasted, everyone else sleeping in hammocks or in odd places amongst the gear and machinery in the pressure hull-when the lookout on the conning tower spotted a plume of smoke to westward. Roused by the shouts, he put on his shoes and cap (the only items he’d taken off) and hurried up for a look of his own.

His first order was to bring the Bonefish up to fifteen knots so he could approach and get a better idea of what he was hunting. He could do that with little or no risk, because the submersible’s diesels produced less exhaust than the coal-burner up ahead. He shouted a course change down to the helmsman, one that would put the Bonefish in front of whatever ship had presumed to steam south through the territory he patrolled. Submerged, the boat was slow. He needed to be in front to close for an attack.

He peered through the binoculars, willing himself to get a clear look at the vessel making that smoke. If it was a warship, it was dawdling through the water; it couldn’t be making more than eight or nine knots. As he drew near, he made out the dumpy superstructure of a freighter.

Tom Brearley came up alongside him. When he told the exec what he’d found, Brearley asked, “Shall we sink her with the gun, sir?”

Kimball was tempted. The Bonefish carried far more three-inch shells than torpedoes. Gunfire was the cheap, easy way to sink enemy shipping. After a moment, though, he shook his head. “No, we’ll feed her a couple of fish. She’s liable to be one of those gunboat freighters the Yankees fit out to slug it out with submarines on the surface. Why take a chance?”

He shouted the order to dive to periscope depth. Brearley scrambled down the hatch. Kimball was right behind him. The captain of the Bonefish dogged it shut. If he’d waited more than a few seconds longer, he would have let the sea in with him.

He raised the periscope and peered through it. One of the prisms had condensation on it; the image was foggy. “Give me five knots,” he said, and crawled closer on the electric engines that powered the submarine underwater. The freighter had no idea he was there, or that any submersibles might be nearby. It didn’t change speed. It didn’t zigzag. It went on its way, so resolutely normal it made Kimball suspicious as hell.

As he got inside a mile, he and Brearley and Coulter were all working out the torpedo solution: the Bonefish’s course, the freighter’s course, the sub’s speed, the freighter’s, the torpedo’s, and the distance at which he’d shoot all went into calculating the angle at which to shoot. “A couple of degrees to port,” he murmured at about 1,200 yards, and then, murmuring no more, “Fire one! Fire two!”

Compressed air hurled the fish out of the forward torpedo tubes. They took about half a minute to reach the freighter. It tried to turn away from them, but far too late. One struck near the bow, the other near the stern. The rumble of the explosions filled the Bonefish.

The crew cheered. Kimball watched the freighter capsize and sink like a stone. The sailors aboard it had no time to launch boats. A couple of heads bobbed in water unnaturally calm. “She’s leaking a hell of a lot of oil there,” Kimball said. “Likely she was carrying it for the U.S. goddamn Navy. Well, they’ll go hungrier now, and have to go home sooner.”

“Easiest one we’ve had in a while,” Brearley said. “Just like practice.”

“Tom, they won’t make us throw it back on account of it was easy,” Kimball answered. After a moment, he went on with a grim certainty: “Besides, odds are the next one won’t be. Nothing in this goddamn war stays simple long.”

Captain Jonathan Moss’ unit of fighting scouts was doing what it had done through most of the late fall and winter outside the hamlet of Arthur, Ontario: not much. The weather was too bad for flying about six days out of seven, and marginal the seventh. He’d run up an astonishing bar tab at the officers’ club.

Beside him at the table there, First Lieutenant Percy Stone looked down into his whiskey-and-soda. “Nothing in this goddamn war stays simple long. The aeroplanes I trained on are as obsolete as last year’s newspaper, and it wasn’t that long ago.”

Moss had a whiskey-and-soda, too, only the soda being omitted from the recipe. “Next time you want to keep a sense that things do go on steadily instead of by jerks, try not to get shot so you have to spend the better part of