Breakthroughs

which it had taken shelter from the pounding the Yankee destroyer had given it.

As soon as the periscope lifted above the surface of the Atlantic, Kimball started to curse. “He’s hightailing it out of here,” he snarled in disgust. “Might have got the lousy bastard if I’d surfaced a little faster.” He glowered at his executive officer. “Some people are afraid of their own shadows.”

“Sir,” Brearley said stiffly, and the fetid atmosphere inside the Bonefish got nasty in a different way.

“Be a cold day in hell before I listen to somebody else’s jimjams again, instead of my own plain good sense,” Kimball said. He was growling at Brearley, but was angrier at himself. He hadn’t obeyed his own instincts, and had lost a chance to take out the Yankee destroyer.

Trying to spread oil over troubled waters, Ben Coulter said, “That Yankee four-stacker has a right smart skipper. Way he slid behind the freighter we nailed-who would have reckoned he’d be so sneaky? Never came close to giving us a good shot at him.”

“All the more reason to wish the son of a bitch was down at the bottom of the ocean,” Kimball said. “If that wasn’t the Ericsson, it was another one from the same class. They still think they sank us. One day soon, I’m going to think I sank them, too. Only difference is, I’m going to be right.”

He rotated the periscope through a complete circle. No other Yankee surface ships besides the destroyer were above the horizon, and she wouldn’t be for long, not the way she was scooting. The Bonefish would be able to surface soon. Kimball shook his head. He should have surfaced after a double triumph, the freighter and the warship both.

Presently, the Ericsson or whoever she was vanished from periscope view. Kimball stayed submerged a while longer all the same: the destroyer had a higher observation point and therefore a wider horizon than he did. When he judged the U.S. ship could no longer spot him, he grudged a few words toward Tom Brearley: “Bring us to the surface.”

“Aye aye, sir,” the exec answered. He tried to add a light note: “Time to get some fresh air, anyhow.”

Kimball didn’t answer. He told off Ben Coulter to hold his legs while he opened the hatch at the top of the conning tower. As always, the pressurized air rushing out seemed particularly foul. Kimball already felt like throwing up, but was too stubborn to do it.

He climbed out onto the conning tower and looked around. Nothing but ocean, as far as the eye could see. No smoke on the horizon; the wind had dispersed the plume from the Ericsson or her twin, and no other ship was close enough to be showing. He might have had the whole Atlantic to himself.

And then Tom Brearley came clanking up the steel rungs of the ladder. The executive officer inhaled deeply, then chuckled. “Feels good to breathe in something you can’t taste.”

Kimball didn’t answer. He turned his back so that he stared out at a different quadrant of the ocean. Behind him, he heard Brearley shift his feet on the conning-tower roof. He pretended he didn’t hear. He pretended the exec didn’t exist. He wished the pretense were true.

Brearley was young and earnest and lousy at taking hints. Instead of going below, he cleared his throat. Kimball kept right on ignoring him. But when Brearley began, “Sir, I just wanted to say that-” Kimball couldn’t ignore him any more.

He whirled, so fast and fierce that he plainly startled the exec, and might have frightened him, too. “You jogged my elbow,” he said in a soft, deadly voice. “Because you jogged my elbow, that damn destroyer got away. If you think I am very happy about that, Mr. Brearley, you had better think again.”

“But, sir,” Brearley said, “if he had been sitting there waiting for us, he could have dropped half a dozen ash cans in our lap.”

“Yeah, he could have.” Kimball’s head jerked up and down in a single short, sharp nod. “But he didn’t, on account of he wasn’t sitting there. I didn’t think he’d be sitting there. But you got the whimwhams, and you put my back up, too, and so we stayed down longer than we should have, and so the son of a bitch got away. If you reckon I am very happy with you, you’re wrong.”

Brearley got a stubborn, martyred look on his face. “Sir, it is my duty to advise you on matters concerning the welfare of the boat,” he said stiffly. “I would be failing in my duty if I kept silent. If you choose not to take my advice, that is your privilege as captain. If you do take it, though, the responsibility becomes yours, not mine.”

He was right. By the book, he was right. By everything Kimball had learned at the Naval Academy at Mobile, he was right. But the way things really worked, especially on a boat as cramped as a submarine, wasn’t exactly the way the book said it was. Kimball snarled something sulfurous under his breath. “You think twice before you open your mouth out of turn again,” he said aloud. “Do you hear me, Mr. Brearley?”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley said in a voice much colder than the weather.

A low buzzing filled Kimball’s ears. For a moment, he thought it was the sound of his own rage. Then he realized it was real, and coming from outside himself. He looked around, as he might have for a mosquito, till he spotted the aeroplane approaching from the northeast. Coming from that direction, it was unlikely to be off a Confederate cruiser or battleship. For as long as he could, he hoped it had been launched from a Royal Navy vessel. That hope vanished when he saw the eagle’s heads on the undersides of the wings and on the fuselage.

The aeroplane had spotted the Bonefish, too, and came in for a closer look at her. Kimball understood that; he’d come to the surface too recently to have run up a Confederate naval jack on the conning tower or at the stern.

Kimball waved to the pilot. The fellow waved back. He was close enough for Kimball to see-and to distrust- his smile. Kimball smiled, too, as he would have at a poker table. Through that smile, he said, “Mr. Brearley, go below, but don’t make a big fuss about doing it. Order the machine-gun crew topside. Tell them to act as friendly toward that goddamn aeroplane as they can-and if he gives them half a chance, even a quarter of a chance, I want them to shoot his ass off.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Brearley said. “Shall I have some other men come up on deck, too, to gawk at the aeroplane and keep the pilot from paying attention to the gunners?”

“Yeah, do that, Tom.” Kimball nodded. Without noticing, he slipped back into the informal address common aboard submersibles. Now that the exec had made a good suggestion, he tacitly forgave him.

Brearley slipped below. If the pilot of that aeroplane didn’t like it, all he had to do was turn around and fly away. He didn’t. He came around for another pass close by the Bonefish: he was still trying to figure out to whose navy she belonged.

Out came the sailors. They pointed at the aeroplane and waved to the pilot and generally acted as much like damn fools as they could. Some of them were alarmingly good at the role. The pilot waved back. He was spiraling higher into the sky now. Maybe he’d satisfied himself that the Bonefish was a U.S. boat. In that case, he was a damn fool. Or maybe, like everybody else in this little charade, he was sandbagging.

Nobody had fired the machine gun aft of the conning tower at a real target since the Bonefish went up the Congaree River to help put down the Red uprising among the Negroes almost a year and a half before. It burst into noisy, staccato life now, tracers drawing hot orange lines in the direction of the U.S. flying machine.

Something fell from between the aeroplane’s floats. Kimball yipped with triumphant glee, thinking the gunners had damaged the Yankee aircraft. A couple of his men cheered, too.

But someone yelled “That’s a bomb!” an instant before it smashed down into the sea and exploded a few yards in front of the Bonefish’s bow. A great column of water and spray rose and then fell, drenching the sailors farthest up the hull and even splashing a little water into Kimball’s face.

He swiped a sleeve across his eyes, then stared up toward the U.S. aeroplane with a new and startled respect. If it had another bomb…He was about to shout orders for a crash dive when the aeroplane flew off in the direction from which it had come.

“That son of a bitch,” he said indignantly. “That son of a bitch. He’d hit us square there, he’d have sunk us.” He shook his fist at the receding aeroplane. “I didn’t know the damnyankees were putting bombs aboard those things these days. Can’t trust anybody any more.”

“I expect we gave him a nasty surprise, too,” Tom Brearley said.

“Hope to Jesus we did,” Kimball said. “But putting a bomb on one of those scout aeroplanes-war just got a little tougher. Having ’em flying around and spying on us is bad enough. If they can hurt us once they spot us instead of sending for their pals on the wireless-well, hell, if they can do that, how are we supposed to do what