“Give me course 090,” Kimball told the helmsman, and then spoke to the rest of the crew: “Ready the torpedoes in the two forward tubes.”
The Bonefish crept east. The U.S. destroyer was doing most of the work, coming right across his bow, leaving itself wide open for a shot-if it didn’t pick up speed and steam past the submersible before the latter was in position to launch its deadly fish.
“I want to get inside twelve hundred yards before I turn ’em loose,” Kimball remarked, more as if thinking out loud than talking to Tom Brearley. “I’ll shoot from a mile if I have to, though, and trust to luck that I’m not carrying any moldies.”
“Yes, sir,” Brearley agreed; duds were the bane-and often the end-of a submariner’s existence. The executive officer went on, “Are you sure you want to shoot from such long range, sir? A miss will bring the U.S. fleet after us full bore.”
“Just because they’re after us doesn’t mean they’ll catch us,” Kimball said smugly. “So yes, I’ll take the chance, thanks.” He grinned. “After all, if I sink that destroyer, that’ll bring the U.S. fleet after us, too.”
“Yes, sir.” Brearley sounded as if he was smiling, too; Kimball didn’t look away from the periscope to see. A good kid, he thought absently. A little on the soft side, but a good kid.
And here came the destroyer, fat and sassy. He’d have lookouts peering in all directions for periscopes, but some of those fools would have seen enough periscopes that weren’t there to make officers leery of taking their reports too seriously. They wouldn’t be expecting Confederate company quite so far out to sea, either; the Bonefish was well past her normal cruising radius. But she’d picked up fuel from a freighter not long before, and so…“We’ll give you damnyankees a surprise,” Kimball muttered.
He wasn’t going to get a shot off at twelve hundred yards. The electric engines were too puny to get him close enough fast enough. But he would be inside a mile. Any time you could split the difference between what you really wanted and what you’d settle for, you weren’t doing too bad.
“Depth?” he asked quietly.
“Thirty-five feet, sir,” Brearley answered after checking the gauge.
“Give me a couple more degrees south, Coulter,” Kimball said. “A little more…steady…Fire number one!” Fearsome clangs and hissings marked the launch of the first torpedo. A moment later, Kimball shouted, “Fire number two!”
He studied both tracks with grave intensity. They looked straight, they looked good. The destroyer had less than a minute to react, and momentum that kept her from reacting fast. She started to turn toward the Bonefish, presenting the smallest area for the fish to reach.
Kimball couldn’t tell whether the first torpedo passed under her bow or hit and failed to explode. He hadn’t snarled more than a couple of curses, though, when the second one caught her just aft of amidships. “Hit!” he screamed. “Hell of a hit! She’ll go down from that, damn me to hell if she don’t.” The destroyer lay dead in the water, and bent at an unnatural angle. She was already starting to list. Some of the Yankees aboard would make her boats, Kimball thought, but some wouldn’t, too.
Rebel yells ripped through the narrow steel tube in which the Bonefish’s crew lived and worked. The men pounded one another on the back. “Score one for the captain!” Ben Coulter whooped. Everybody pounded Kimball on the back, too, something unthinkable in the surface Navy.
“Give me course 315,” Kimball told the helmsman. Heading obliquely away from the path of the torpedoes was a good way not to have your tracks followed. “Half speed.” He’d have mercy on the batteries.
After an hour, he surfaced to recharge them. Foul, pressurized air rushed out of the Bonefish when he undogged the hatch. All the stinks seemed worse, somehow, right at that moment. He went up onto the conning tower. To his relief, now, he spied no smoke plumes on the horizon.
“Good shooting, sir,” Tom Brearley said, coming up behind him.
“Thanks,” Kimball said. “That’s what they pay me for. And speaking of pay, we just made the damnyankees pay plenty. We done licked ’em twice. They’re stupid enough to think we can’t do it three times running, no matter what our niggers try doin’, they can damn well think again.”
“Yes, sir!” Brearley said.
“Snow in my face in April!” Major Irving Morrell said enthusiastically. “This, by God, this is the life.”
“Yes, sir.” Captain Charlie Hall had rather less joy in his voice. “Snow in your face about eight months a year hereabouts.” The snow blowing in his face and Morrell’s obscured the Canadian Rockies for the moment. Morrell didn’t mind. He’d seen them when the weather was better. They were even grander than they were in the USA. They were even snowier than they were in the USA, too, and that was saying something.
“I hope you don’t mind my telling you this,” Morrell said to Hall, “but I think you’ve been going at this the wrong way. Charge straight at the damn Canucks, and they’ll slaughter you. You’ve seen that.”
Hall’s face twisted. He was a big, bluff, blond man, bronzed by sun, chapped by wind, with a Kaiser Bill mustache he kept waxed and impeccable regardless of the weather. He said, “It’s true, sir. I can’t deny it. We sent divisions into Crow’s Nest Pass and came out with regiments. The Canucks didn’t want to give up for hell.”
“And they were waiting for us to do what we did, too,” Morrell said. “Give the enemy what he’s waiting for and you’ll be sorry a hundred times out of a hundred. The Canucks made us pay and pay, and what did we have when we were done paying? Less than we’d hoped. They just stopped running trains through Crow’s Nest Pass and doubled up in Kicking Horse Pass.”
He pointed ahead. U.S. forces had been slogging toward Kicking Horse Pass for the past year and a half. He didn’t intend to slog any more. He was going to move, and to make the Canadians move, too.
“And when we finally take this one, they’ll go on up to Yellow-head Pass,” Hall said. “This war is a slower business than anyone dreamt when we first started fighting.”
“If we drive enough nails into their coffin, eventually they won’t be able to pull the lid up any more,” Morrell said.
“I like that.” Hall’s face was better suited for the grin it wore now than for its earlier grimace. A couple of Morrell’s other company commanders joined them then: Captain Karl Spadinger, who for looks could have been Charlie Hall’s cousin; and First Lieutenant Jephtha Lewis, who would have seemed more at home behind a plow on the Great Plains than in the Rockies of Alberta. With them came Sergeant Saul Finkel, who had a dark, quiet face and the long, thin-fingered hands of a watchmaker-which he had been before joining the Army.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Morrell said, pointing to the Canadian position ahead of them and then to the map he took from a pouch on his belt. The view was better on the map; the snow didn’t obscure it. “We’ve got this fortified hill ahead of us. I will lead the detachment advancing to the west. Sergeant Finkel!”
“Sir!” the sergeant said.
“You and one machine-gun squad from Lieutenant Lewis’ company will cover the ridge road up there”-he showed what he had in mind both through the blowing snow and on the map-“and block the Canadians from coming down and getting in our rear. I rely on you for this, Sergeant. If I had to make do with anyone else, I’d leave two guns behind. But your weapon always works.”
“It will keep working, sir,” Finkel said. Morrell looked at his hands again. Anyone who could handle the tiny, intricate gearing of watches was unlikely to have trouble keeping a machine gun operating, and Finkel, along with being mechanically ept, was also a brave, cool-headed soldier.
Morrell pointed to Captain Spadinger. “Karl, you’ll take the rest of your company and open the hostile position on the eastern side of the slope. Hold your fire as long as you can.”
“Yes, sir,” Spadinger said. “As you ordered, we’ll be carrying extra grenades for when actual combat breaks out.”
�
�Good,” Morrell said. Spadinger’s efficiency pleased him, which was why he’d given him the secondary command for the attack. He went on, “Captain Hall, your rifle company and Lieutenant Lewis’ machine-gun company, less that one squad I’m leaving with Sergeant Finkel, will accompany me on the main flanking thrust. If we can chase the Canucks off this hill, we’ve gone a long way toward clearing the path to Banff. Any questions, gentlemen?” Nobody said anything. Morrell nodded. “We’ll try it, then. We advance as rapidly as possible. Keep speed in your minds above all else. We move at 0900.”
In the fifteen minutes before they began to move, he checked his men, especially the teams manhandling the machine guns across country. They were good troops; in grim Darwinian fashion, most of the soldiers who didn’t make good mountain troops were dead or wounded by now.
He felt the men’s eyes on him, too. This would be the first real action they’d faced with him commanding them. He didn’t suppose they knew about his having had to leave the General Staff-he hoped they didn’t, anyhow-but they had to be wondering about what he and they would be able to do together. Well, they were finding out he didn’t care to huddle in trenches.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Spruce and fir and swirling snow helped screen the men in green-gray from the Canadians above. No firing broke out off to the right, which relieved Morrell to no small degree. He grinned, imagining Spadinger’s men rounding up sentries and poking bayoneted rifles into dugouts, catching the Canucks by surprise.
His own men scooped up a fair number of prisoners, too. One of them, brought back to Morrell, glared at him and said, “What the devil are you bastards doing so far from where the fighting is?”
“Why, moving it someplace else, of course,” he answered cheerfully, which made the Canuck even less happy.
Morrell’s leg tried to protest when he pushed up to the very head of his force, but he ignored it. It’s only pain, he told himself, and, as he usually did, managed to make himself believe it. He reached the lead just in time to help capture a machine-gun position the Canadians had blasted out of the living rock of the hill, again without firing a shot.
“This is wonderful, sir!” Captain Hall exclaimed. “We’ve got the drop on the Canucks for sure this time.”
“So far, so-” Morrell began. Before good got out of his mouth, a burst of fire made him whip his head back toward the direction which Captain Spadinger and his company had gone. It sounded as if they were heavily engaged. “We appear to have lost the advantage of-” Morrell didn’t get to finish that sentence, either. Machine guns from atop the hill opened up on his detachment before he could say surprise. That was a surprise to him, and not a pleasant one.
“Dig in!” he shouted. “Do it now! Sweat saves blood!” As the riflemen began to obey, he turned to Lieutenant Lewis. “Get those machine guns set up. We’ve got to neutralize that fire.”
The machine-gun crews mounted their heavy weapons on top of the even heavier tripods in time that would have kept a drill sergeant happy on the practice field. It wasn’t for prestige here; it was for survival.
Morrell cursed as one of his men slumped over, briefly kicking in a way suggesting he’d never get up again. “Advance on them!” he yelled. “Shift to the northeast, so we can take that hilltop and support Captain Spadinger’s company. Move, move, move!”
It wasn’t the fight he’d wanted, but it was the fight he had. Now he had to make the best of it. Keeping everything as fluid as possible would also keep the Canucks confused about how many men he had and what he intended to do with them. Since he suspected he was outnumbered, that was all to the good.
Back where this movement had originated, Sergeant Finkel’s machine gun started hammering. Morrell nodded to himself. The Canucks wouldn’t be getting into his rear. Now he had to see if he could get into theirs. “Hold fire as much as you can as you advance,” he called to the riflemen. “Let them think Spadinger has the main force. If they concentrate on him, we’ll make them regret it.”
“Aren’t you telling the men more than they need to know?” Captain Hall shouted as the two of them ran to a boulder and flopped down behind it side by side. Bullets whined away from the other side of the stone, then went elsewhere in search of fresh targets.
“Just the opposite, Captain,” Morrell answered. “This way, if I go down, the attack will go forward, because they’ll know what I expect of them.” Hall didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t argue with his commanding officer, either. If Morrell’s methods didn’t work, odds were he’d end up dead and so beyond criticism. Morrell raised his voice: “Keep the machine guns well forward, Lieutenant Lewis!”
Lewis and his machine gunners, bless their hearts, didn’t need that order. They treated the machine guns almost like rifles, advancing at a stumbling run from one patch of cover to the next they saw-or hoped they saw.
Even so, Morrell was worried, and worse than worried. From the sound of the fighting off to the east, Spadinger’s men weren’t withholding fire. On the contrary; it sounded as if every man was in the line, fighting desperately to stay alive. If the forces they’d run into could crush them, those forces would swing back on him and smash him up, too. “Hold on, Karl!” he whispered fiercely. “Make them pay the price.”
One of the Canuck machine guns up at the crest of the hill fell silent. Morrell whooped as he ran forward. The Canadians were used to facing slow, carefully set up attacks, not to this sort of lightning strike with things hitting them all at once from every which way.
And then he whooped again, for men in khaki scrambled out of their trenches and ran down-to the southeast, toward Captain Spadinger’s embattled company. They gave Morrell’s men the kind of target soldiers dreamt about. “Now!” he shouted. “Give ’em everything we’ve got.”
Again, the men did not need the order. They loosed a storm of lead at the Canadians, who shouted in dismay at taking such fire from the right flank and rear. Yelling with glee, the U.S. soldiers dashed forward to take out the foes giving their comrades so much trouble.
Half an hour later, Morrell stood on the height he’d intended to bypass. A long file of dejected prisoners, many of them roughly bandaged, stumbled back toward what had been the U.S. line. “You don’t fight fair,” one of them shouted to Morrell.
“Good,” Morrell answered. The Canuck scowled. His own men laughed. They felt like tigers now. For that matter, he felt on the tigerish side himself. Things hadn’t gone exactly as he’d thought they would, but they seldom did. One thing both real war and the General Staff had taught him was that no plan long survived contact with the enemy.
He looked around. The view was terrific. He’d taken the objective. He hadn’t taken crippling casualties doing it. How he’d taken it didn’t matter. That he’d taken it did. He looked around again. A new question burned in his mind-what could he do next?
Jefferson Pinkard looked down at himself. His butternut uniform was so full of stains from the red dirt of southern Georgia, it might as well have started out mottled. He smelled. By the way his head itched, he probably had lice. Emily would have thrown him in a kettle, boiled him, and shampooed him with kerosene before she let him into the house, let alone into her bed.
He didn’t care. He was alive. He’d seen too many different kinds of horrible death these past few weeks-he’d dealt out too many different kinds of horrible death these past few weeks-to worry about anything past that. The Black Belt Socialist Republic was dying. When he’d set out, he’d supposed that would make everything worthwhile. Did it? He didn’t know. He didn’t care much, either.
He detached the bayonet from his Tredegar and methodically cleaned it. It was clean already, but he wanted it cleaner. It had had blood on it, a couple of days before. He couldn’t see that blood, not now, but he knew it was there.
“Damn niggers ought to give up,” he muttered under his breath.
“What you say?” That was Hip Rodriguez, a recruit from down in Sonora. He didn’t speak a whole lot of
English. Most of what he did speak was vile. Up till the Conscription Bureau nabbed Jeff Pinkard, he’d thought of Sonorans and Chihuahuans as one step above Negroes, and a short step to boot. But Rodriguez had saved his life. If that didn’t make him a good fellow, nothing ever would.
And so, instead of barking, Jeff repeated himself, adding, “They’re licked. They damn well ought to know it.”
Rodriguez shrugged. “We keep licking they, they quit-one way or t’odder.” He carried a thoroughly nonregulation knife on his belt, and a whetstone to go with it. When he honed that blade, it made a vicious little grinding sound. He smiled, enjoying it.
“That’s true,” Pinkard admitted. “No two ways around it, I guess. Question that keeps comin’up in my mind, though, is what happens afterwards. They gonna be pullin’ knives like yours out o’ their hip pockets and stabbin’ white men twenty years from now when they think they got the chance? That’s a hell of a way to try and run a country, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Rodriguez shrugged again. “They try that, they get killed. Is no big never-mind to me.” He flashed a big, shiny grin at Jeff. “In Sonora, we don’t have no mallates-no niggers-till you Confederates, you buy us from Mexico. You bring in the problem. You should ought to fix it, too.”
With some amusement, Pinkard noted that Rodriguez looked down his nose at Negroes, too. In a way, it made sense: if not for them, he would have been on the bottom himself. But the blacks were on the bottom. That made putting them down harder, because they had so little to lose from their rebellion.
Off to one side, a field piece began barking, throwing shells into Albany, Georgia. Captain Connolly looked up from his tin cup of coffee and said, “All right, boys, now we go and take their capital away from ’em. About time, I’d say. And doing that’ll just about put the last nail in the coffin. Can’t hardly claim they’ve got a country when they haven’t got a capital any more, can they?”
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