Breakthroughs

Dakota inched her way forward. What he saw was endless choppy ocean. The South Atlantic swells were slapping against the battleship’s full armored length, which made her roll unpleasantly.

As if also noticing the motion, Hiram Kidde said, “Don’t nobody puke in here. Anybody pukes in here, he’s in big trouble with me. You got that?”

“Aye aye, ‘Cap’n,’ ” the gun crew chorused.

“I wish we’d put some more turns on the engines,” Carsten said. “That would help smooth things out.”

“Oh, that it would, by Jesus-that it would,” the chief of the gun crew answered. “What’s the matter with you, Sam? You think you could stash your brains in your bunk once they promoted you to petty officer? That ain’t how it works, much as I hate to tell you.”

Carsten’s ears heated. “Have a heart, ‘Cap’n.’ That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“It’s what you said, goddammit,” Kidde said. “Sure, bend some more turns on the engines. Why the hell not? What the hell we got better to do than charge right into the mine belt the limeys and the Argentines laid between Argentina and the Falklands? What’s it cost us so far? Just a cruiser and a destroyer. Why the hell not put a battleship on the list?”

“Maybe we should have swung wide around the goddamn Falklands.” Now Sam’s voice was an embarrassed mumble.

Hiram Kidde, having scented blood, wasn’t about to let him off the hook. “That’d be good, wouldn’t it? Tack an extra six or eight hundred miles onto the cruise. We don’t have that much margin ourselves, and our supply ships have even less. Shit, the Argentines who didn’t dare stir out of harbor against us are going to come right after our tenders and their escorts even now.”

“Look, ‘Cap’n,’ why don’t you forget I ever said anything?” Sam suggested. And believe me, he thought, it’ll be a cold day in hell-a damn sight colder than this-before I open my mouth again. He retreated from the vision slit and went back toward the breech of the cannon. As long as he stayed at his station and kept his mouth shut, nothing too bad could happen to him-he hoped.

To his relief, Kidde started peering out at the Atlantic. Everybody kept doing that, although there wasn’t anything to see but gray-green ocean. The mines hid below the surface. No one would see them till too late.

Luke Hoskins spoke to Sam in a low voice: “Don’t let Kidde get you down. We’re all edgy these days. We’ve been torpedoed, and we came through it, and we’ve been shelled, and we came through that, too. But if we hit a mine, likely we can’t do nothin’ about it-except sink, I mean.”

“Yeah. Except sink,” Carsten said sourly. “You do so ease my mind, Luke.”

But Hoskins was right. The ship was engaged in hard, slow, dangerous work, work in which the men who served the secondary armament could take no direct part. If all went well, they would live. If not, they would die- and which it would be was not in their hands. No wonder tempers flared.

Kidde turned away from the vision slit. “Things could be worse,” he said, perhaps trying to make amends for ripping into Sam. “We could be in one of those destroyers up ahead of us.”

“Amen.” Everyone in the sponson spoke at the same time, more smoothly than the sailors would have responded to the chaplain of a Sunday morning. Sooner or later, somebody was going to say something more than that. Usually, that somebody would have been Carsten. Not this time. Sam, having been raked once, sulked in his metaphysical tent.

Luke Hoskins said what the whole gun crew had to be thinking: “You’ve got to be crazy to clear mines in a destroyer.”

“Nope.” Hiram Kidde shook his head. “All you’ve got to do is get your orders. Then you say ‘Aye aye, sir!’ and do as you’re told.”

“Crazy,” Hoskins repeated. “Only way to clear the mines you’re supposed to get rid of is to steam past ’em without blowing yourself out of the water.”

“You do lose points if that happens, Luke,” Kidde agreed. “Can’t argue with you there.”

“Goddammit, ‘Cap’n,’ it isn’t funny,” the shell-jerker said. “That damn weighted cable between the four- stackers is supposed to catch on the mines’ mooring cables and yank ’em up to the surface so we can shoot the hell out of ’em. But if they find the mines the hard way, or if they miss ’em…”

His voice trailed away. Nobody said anything for a while after that. Sam knew what kind of pictures he was seeing inside his own mind. The rest of the crew couldn’t have been imagining anything much different.

Turn and turn about: four hours on, four hours off. When the other crew replaced Carsten and his comrades, he hurried to the galley and shoveled down pork and beans and fried potatoes and sauerkraut and lemonade and coffee. He was amazed how much he ate these days, to hold cold and exhaustion at bay. The coffee wouldn’t keep him from sleeping. Nothing would keep him from sleeping, not even the highly charged air in the cramped bunkroom after everybody had been messing on pork and beans and sauerkraut.

Climbing out of his bunk was more like an exhumation than anything else. He shook his head in bewilderment. Hadn’t he just lain down? He put on his shoes and cap, grabbed the peacoat he’d set on top of his blanket, and staggered blank-faced toward the galley for more coffee to help him remember who he was and what the hell he was supposed to be doing.

He went up on deck to let the chilly breeze clear some more cobwebs from his poor befogged brain. Walking forward, he nodded to the two mine-hunting destroyers that cleared the way for the Dakota. So far, they’d done their job perfectly: they hadn’t blown up, and neither had the battleship.

That thought had hardly made its slow way through Sam’s still-fuzzy thoughts when one of the destroyers did go up, in a great dreadful gout of smoke and fire. Across half a mile of water, the roar was loud enough to stagger him.

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” he moaned. Half of that was simple horror. The other half was guilt for jinxing the destroyer by thinking how well she’d been doing her job.

She was sinking fast now, going down by the bow, her stern rising higher and higher until, only a couple of minutes after she was hit, she dove for the bottom of the sea. She never had a chance to lower boats. A handful of heads bobbed in the cold, cold water. In water like that, a man might stay alive for an hour, maybe even a little more if he was very strong.

“Rescue party to the boats!” a lieutenant shouted.

Sam stood not twenty feet from one. He was in it, along with several other men, and dangling his way down toward the surface of the Atlantic less than two minutes later. He plied an oar with a vigor that made him sweat even in that nasty weather. His was not the only boat in the water; the Dakota had launched several others, as had the destroyer’s partner. They all raced to pick up the scattered survivors.

“Back oars!” Sam called as the boat drew near one feebly paddling man. He dropped his own oar, leaned out, and caught hold of the sailor’s hand. The fellow almost pulled him into the water, but a couple of other men in the boat grabbed him around the waist and also helped him pull in the survivor.

“Thank you,” the sailor said through chattering teeth. “Christ, I reckoned I was dead.”

“I believe you,” Sam said. “Saw you go up. Godawful thing. One second you were just going along, and the next one-”

“Felt just like somebody took a two-by-four and hit me in both feet,” the sailor said. Grimacing, he went on, “Bet something’s busted in there, ’cause they sure as hell hurt. Saw we didn’t have a prayer. Everybody was screaming, ‘Abandon ship!’ Made it to the rail-I was half walking, half crawling. Made it over the side and started swimming hard as I could, on account of I didn’t want to get sucked under when she went down. And I didn’t, not quite. Figured my ticket was punched, but you’ve got to keep trying, you know what I mean?”

“Here, pal. Try this.” Somebody pressed the bottle of brandy the boat carried-nothing near so fine as what Rear Admiral Fiske drank-into the sailor’s hands.

He took a long pull. “Marry me!” he exclaimed blissfully. His rescuers laughed.

He raised the dark bottle to his lips again. “Don’t drink it all,” Sam warned. “We’re going to try and get some of your pals, too.” He pointed toward a man floating on his back not far away, then grabbed up his oar and helped pull the boat toward the other sailor.

The man wasn’t moving. When they got to him, they saw he was dead. “Poor bastard,” somebody said quietly. It was all the memorial service the sailor got.

Sam stood up in the boat to see farther. One of the boats from the other destroyer was already heading toward the last swimming man he spied. The others had either been picked up or had sunk beneath the waves