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 a year on the sidelines.”
“That’s good advice. I’ll make a note of it.” Stone really did make as if to write it down.
“You’re a good fellow, Percy,” Moss said, laughing. Stone, a photographer in civilian life, had been his observer when he was piloting a reconnaissance aeroplane in 1915. They’d been put together as much because of the way their names matched as for any other reason, but they’d always got on famously—till Stone stopped a machine-gun bullet. For a long time after that, Moss had thought he was dead, but he’d proved to be very much alive, and wearing a pilot’s two-winged badge instead of the one wing that marked the observer.
He raised his glass on high. “To hell with the Sopwith Pup!” he declared now.
Everyone who heard him drank with him. Only a handful of the new British machines had got to this side of the Atlantic, but they made every American who met them wish that handful were none at all.
Having lost friends who flew outmoded Martin one-deckers against Pups that could outclimb, outdive, outrun, and outmaneuver them, Moss poured down his own drink. He’d flown a Martin one-decker himself, from the day he’d gone from observation aeroplanes to fighting scouts until he came here to train on the new machines that were supposed to be able to contend on even terms with the best the limeys and Canucks had to offer. He got up, walked rather unsteadily to the bar, and bought himself another drink. With the glass of whiskey in his hand, he lifted it and said, “Here’s to the new biplanes that’ll tie tin cans to the Pups’ tails.”
That toast drew both cheers and laughs. He went back to the table. When he sat down, Percy Stone’s long-jawed, handsome face was thoughtful, even worried. In a low voice, Stone asked, “Do you think they’ll really be able to do the job? They’re a hell of a lot peppier than anything I ever flew before, but I’ve been out of circulation for quite a while.”
He patted his side. What with the entry and exit wounds of the bullet that had got him and the incisions the surgeons made to patch him up, he owned as spectacular a collection of scars as anyone could want—a more spectacular collection of scars than anyone in his right mind would want.
“We ought to have a good fighting chance,” Moss answered with a ponderous deliberation fueled by both thought and alcohol. “This new two-decker can climb with anything ever made, and it’s maneuverable as all get-out. I don’t think it’s quite as fast a bus on the straightaway as the Pups are, but damn close. How fast you can turn counts for more in a dogfight a lot of times, anyhow.”
“That’s what everybody’s saying, sure enough.” Stone nodded. “Now the next interesting question is, will we get a chance to fly our birds before they’re obsolete, too, and the War Department decides to train us up on the next new model, whatever that turns out to be?”
“Take that one up with the chaplain, or maybe take it straight to God. Weather’s not my department,” Moss said. Then he slowly started thinking again. “Wouldn’t be surprised if these two-deckers are damn near obsolete in Europe. That’s where the real air action is. Our new buses are just copies of the ones Albatros makes for the Germans.”
That had been true through most of the war. Maybe because they were in a tougher fight in the air, German manufacturers kept cranking out new and improved models, of which the Albatros biplane was but one. Some of the plans made the journey by submersible to the USA (some got sunk trying to make the journey, too, which was why the new fighting scout was slower getting out of the blocks than it should have been), just as the British did their best to keep the Canadians in aeroplanes and fresh plans.
A lot of fliers wore their pocket watches on wrist straps when in the air; bulky flying clothes made a watch impossible to check otherwise. Like some others Moss knew, Percy Stone had taken to wearing his on his wrist all the time. Looking at it now, he yawned and said, “I think I’m going to hit the hay. I’ll pretend tomorrow will be a bully day for flying, even though I know damn well it’ll snow and it’ll be colder than a witch’s tit.”
“Duty,” Moss said approvingly. “Responsibility. Remembrance.”
He looked down into his own glass. “And whiskey. Don’t forget whiskey.” He made sure the glass had no whiskey left in it to forget, then rose and accompanied Stone to the tent they shared with the other two men in the flight, Pete Bradley and Hans Oppenheim.
An iron stove glowed red-hot in the middle of the tent. That meant the four cots, all piled high with thick, green-gray wool blankets, were cold to sleep in, but didn’t quite feel as if the North Pole had moved down to a couple of miles north of the aerodrome. This was Moss’ third winter in Ontario. So far as he knew, nobody in the world could strip down to his drawers and slide under the covers faster than he could.
Reveille came at half-past five, which was, in his opinion, a couple of hours too early. His head pounded. He dry-swallowed a couple of aspirins—American imitations of aspirins, actually. They worked well enough. And, when he poked his head out of the tent, he blinked and whistled in surprise.
It was cold. The breath he exhaled whistling made a little frosty cloud in front of his face. But it was clear. In the east, the sky glowed salmon. Before too long, the sun would rise. In December, it hardly showed its face. Now that February was here, it began to remember it did have some business up in Canada after all.
He stuck his head back inside. “I think we may be able to get some flying in after all.”
“That would be good,” Oppenheim said seriously. He seldom was anything but serious. “When they sent us up from London after they trained us on these new two-deckers, the idea was that we should fly them. We are, after all, an operational squadron.” His parents had come from Germany. He didn’t have an accent, but the language he’d spoken around the house as a kid influenced the way he put his sentences together.
The fliers went to the mess tent and shoveled down bacon and eggs and pancakes and bad coffee. The squadron commander, Major Julius Cherney, nodded to them. “Can we go up along the line, sir, and see if the limeys send anyone out against us?” Moss asked.
“Well, why the hell not?” Cherney said. “Meteorology says everything looks good for the next few hours.” He grunted. “Yeah—I know—that and five cents buys you a beer.” He clapped Moss on the back. “Good hunting.”
Men with shovels and horses and mules with scoops made the airstrips usable. Bigger aerodromes had tractors with blades mounted in front of them to clear snow. Arthur boasted no such amenities.
Moss reveled in the way his aeroplane leaped from the ground. The streamlined fighting scout from the Wright works in Ohio—a copy of the Albatros D.II—climbed at close to a thousand feet a minute, a hell of a lot faster than his old Martin could have managed.
And all the sky in front of him was empty. He led the flight now, with Percy Stone behind him on the right and Oppenheim and Bradley on the left. They flew east till they came to the trench line that scarred Ontario between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. West of the trenches, the snow could not hide the devastation of the land the Canadians and their British allies had fought so bitterly to hold. East of them—or, at least, east of artillery range from them—it was simply snowy country in winter. The dazzle of sun off endless miles of white made Moss blink back tears behind his goggles.
Here and there, down in the Canucks’ trenches, muzzle flashes showed that soldiers were taking potshots at him and his flightmates. He laughed, and the chilly slipstream blew his mirth away. Rifle and machine-gun fire reached up to about two thousand feet. He was high above that danger.
Then Canadian antiaircraft guns opened up. Black puffs of smoke appeared in the sky, as if by magic. When one burst a couple of hundred yards below Moss’ fighting scout, the aeroplane bucked like a restive horse. He began changing his speed and course and altitude more or less at random, so the gunners could not calculate just where to place their shells. The sky, thank heaven, was a big, wide place. He respected antiaircraft fire without fearing it.
He led his flight south and east along the line, in the direction of Toronto, daring enemy aeroplanes to come up and fight. Every so often, he would glance at his fuel gauge and his watch. Like most other fighting scouts, the new Wright machines could stay in the air for about an hour and a half. If he and his comrades found no challengers, they would have to go home.
When more antiaircraft shells burst in the sky south of Moss, they drew his eye toward the aeroplane at which they were aimed: one of the Avro two-seat biplanes the Canadians had been using for reconnaissance work since the beginning of the war.
Moss sped toward the Avro, followed close by his flightmates. The Canuck pilot hadn’t changed course despite the Archie bursting around him; he was letting his observer take the photos he needed. Moss knew about that from his work with Stone. Having four U.S. fighting scouts on this tail was a different business for the Avro driver. He corkscrewed away from the Wrights in a spinning dive.
Sometimes speed did matter. Moss and his comrades had better than twenty miles an hour on the Avro. They closed quickly. The observer started shooting at them. They shot back from four directions at once. Four streams of tracers converged on the desperately dodging Avro.
Then it dodged no more, but plunged toward the ground. One of those streams of machine-gun bullets must have found the pilot and left him dead or unconscious. The observer kept firing till the American fighting scouts pulled away from their stricken foe. A moment later, the Avro slammed into the frozen ground and burst into flame.
We only get to claim a quarter of an aeroplane apiece, Moss thought: no way to tell whose bullet nailed the Canuck. He didn’t care. He needed a moment to get his bearings after the dizzying action. When he knew which way was which, he waggled his wings and pointed northwest, back toward the aerodrome. The flight headed for him. Moss looked back at the burning wreck of the Avro. We’ve earned our pay today, he thought.
Confederate soldiers tramped glumly south through the mud that clogged the roads of the state of Sequoyah. The Red River, which marked the boundary between the former Indian Territory and Texas, was only a couple of miles away.
Private First Class Reginald Bartlett pointed. “What’s the name of that little town there?” he asked. He was a big, fair fellow with a comic turn of phrase that let him get away with saying outrageous things that would have got other men into trouble or into fights.
“That there’s Ryan,” Sergeant Pete Hairston answered. The veteran’s harsh Georgia drawl was far removed from Bartlett’s soft, almost English Richmond accent.
Reggie grinned. “Well, I want to tell you something, Sarge,” he said, making his voice as deep and authoritative as he could. “We’ve got to hold this town. The whole Confederacy is depending on us to hold this town.”
Hairston let out a strangled snort of laughter. “You go to hell, Bartlett, you goddamn smartmouth son of a bitch.”
“Sarge, why you cussin’ out Reggie?” Private Napoleon Dibble asked. “What did he say that was so bad?”
A moment later, First Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll, the company commander, spoke up in deep, authoritative tones of his own: “I want to tell you something, boys—we’ve got to hold Ryan. The whole Confederacy is depending on us to hold Ryan.”
“You son of a bitch,” Hairston said admiringly, and made as if to throw a punch at Bartlett.
“What did he say, Sarge?” Nap Dibble repeated, his eyes wide and puzzled. “He said the same thing the lieutenant said, so why are you getting steamed at him?”
Hairston and Bartlett shared a moment of silent amusement. Dibble was a pretty good fellow, brave and good-natured, but not a fireball when it came to brains. “Don’t worry about it, Nap—everything’s fine,” Bartlett said. He turned back to Hairston. “We’ve got to hang on to any chunk of Sequoyah we can, you know. The Germans still don’t have all of Belgium.”
A moment later, Lieutenant Nicoll delivered the same sentiment in almost identical words. “See?” Dibble exclaimed. “Reggie said just what the lieutenant said, so how come you’re givin’ him a hard time about it?”
“The lieutenant said the
same damn thing in front of Duncan, too, an’ we got run out of Duncan,” Hairston said. “He said the same damn thing in front of Waurika, and we got run out of there. Just on account of we got to do somethin’ don’t have to mean we can do it.”
As if to underscore that point, a shell screamed down and burst a few hundred yards off to one side of the road. It threw up a fountain of dirt. A few of the Kiowas and Comanches who’d attached themselves to the C.S. army in its grinding retreat through southern Sequoyah jumped and exclaimed. Most of them took no more notice of the explosion than did the white soldiers.
“I hear some of these Indian tribes have their own little armies in the field, fighting alongside ours,” Reggie said.
Pete Hairston nodded. “That’s a fact. But those are the Five Civilized Tribes, and they pretty much run their own affairs any which way. They did, anyhow, till the damnyankees landed on ’em. God knows what’s happening to the poor miserable red-skinned bastards now.”
“These Indians here seem civilized enough,” Bartlett said.
Lieutenant Nicoll overheard that (fortunately, he’d missed Reggie’s impersonation of him). “It’s a matter of law, Bartlett. The Creeks, the Choctaws, the Cherokees, and whatnot have legal control over their own internal affairs. The redskins hereabouts don’t.”
Ryan, when they trudged into it, might have once boasted a thousand people. Then again, it might not have. It certainly didn’t have a thousand civilians in it now: most of them had fled across the Red River into Texas. Ryan lay on the edge of the Red River bottomland, with forests of mesquite and tamaracks and swamps with endless little streams winding through them taking the place of the prairie over which Bartlett had been marching for so long.
At Lieutenant Nicoll’s shouted order, his company joined the rest of the Confederate soldiers retreating from Waurika in entrenching in front of Ryan. Flinging dirt out behind him, Reggie said, “Wasn’t like this on the Roanoke front. There, if you went forward or back a quarter of a mile, that was something to write home about. When we pulled out of Waurika, we had to pull back maybe ten miles.”
The Great War: Breakthroughs Page 10
