The Great War: Breakthroughs

by Harry Turtledove

  She clocked out as slowly as she could after the closing whistle blew, to make up a couple of the minutes she’d lost in the morning because the trolley hadn’t got her to work on time. It was late coming to pick her up, too. The celebration on the streets of Boston hadn’t slowed down since she’d last seen it. If anything, crowds were thicker, louder, and better lubricated than they had been earlier in the day.

  When at last she got to George, Jr.’s, school, she found it festooned with red, white, and blue bunting. George, Jr., came pelting over to greet her when she stuck her head into his room. “We won, Ma!” he shouted. “We licked the dirty Rebels, and that means Pa can come home!” He jumped up and down in excitement.

  “I wish it was that simple,” she answered. “Your father’s not home yet, and I don’t know when he’s going to be. For that matter, we’re not home yet, and I don’t know when we’re going to be, either. We still have to get your sister, and everything’s a little crazy today.”

  “We won!” George, Jr., repeated. He wasn’t old enough to know any better. But plenty of people who were old enough to know better were saying the same thing.

  Sylvia led George, Jr., up to Mrs. Dooley’s to get his little sister more than half an hour late. She resigned herself to another lecture from the woman about tardiness. But Mrs. Dooley opened the door with a smile on her face. She smelled of what Sylvia recognized after a moment as cooking sherry. “Hello, Mrs. Enos,” she said. “Isn’t it a grand and glorious time to be alive?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” Sylvia said. “I am sorry I’m late. Everyone seems to be in the streets today.”

  “Nobody will blame anybody for anything today,” Mrs. Dooley said. She turned. “Mary Jane, your mother is here.” By the noises from within, Mary Jane wasn’t the only child whose mother was late today.

  When she came around Mrs. Dooley’s billowing black skirt, she chirped, “We won the war, Mama!”

  “Well, we’re certainly winning,” Sylvia said. That let her state her own opinion without sounding too much as if she was disagreeing with what seemed to be the whole world but for her. “Now we, the three of us, need to go home.” There was an opinion on which she would put up with no disagreement at all.

  They were late getting home, too, of course, which meant they had a late supper. The children were too excited to want to go to bed when they should. Sylvia had known they would be. At last, she got them settled. Then she had to settle herself, too. The trouble she had going to sleep made her wonder whether, down deep, she was exulting over victory, too.

  Lieutenant Brearley stowed the code book in the locked drawer and turned the key. “Here’s what it means, sir,” he said, handing the decoded wireless message to Roger Kimball. “It’s—important.”

  “Give it here,” the commander of the Bonefish said. “I’ll decide how important it is.” He wished the exec hadn’t said anything to draw the crew’s attention to the message. Sailors were curious enough without encouragement.

  He unfolded the paper, read it, and then read it again to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. It still said the same thing the second time: SEEKING CEASE-FIRE ON LAND. END OFFENSIVE ACTIVITY. IF ATTACKED, DEFEND SELF. ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT.

  “You’re sure you decoded it right?” he demanded of Brearley.

  “Yes, sir,” the executive officer said. “Here are the groups they sent.” He made as if to open the drawer again and get out the code book.

  “Never mind,” Kimball said wearily. “I believe you. I believe it. We were getting hammered the last time the Bonefish went into port. It’s just that…aah, God damn it to hell.” His left hand closed into a fist and struck his left thigh, hard enough to hurt. Then, slowly and deliberately, he tore the message into tiny, indecipherable shreds and threw them away.

  “What do we do, sir?” Brearley asked.

  “We acknowledge receipt, as ordered,” Kimball said. “Then we keep right on with the patrol. We weren’t ordered to hold in place. I don’t see a surrender order or anything like it, do you?”

  “Well, no, sir, not when you put it like that,” Brearley admitted. He looked even unhappier than he had already. “I wish they’d have told us more, so we’d have a better idea of what we’re supposed to do.”

  Kimball reveled in commanding a submersible not least because the Navy Department had very few chances to tell him what to do. “The more code groups they send, the better the odds the damnyankees’ll figure out what they mean,” he answered. “Now, you get clicking on the wireless telegraph and acknowledge that we got that order.” He lowered his voice but raised the intensity in it: “And for God’s sake keep your mouth shut afterwards. I don’t want the crew to hear one word about what kind of shape the country’s in. You got that, Tom?”

  “Yes, sir,” Brearley answered, and then, “Aye aye, sir,” to show he not only understood but would willingly obey.

  Gloomily, Kendall climbed back up to the conning tower and peered out over the Atlantic. It was a hell of a big place. As far as he could tell, the Bonefish might have been alone in the middle of it. If he spotted no plumes on the horizon, he didn’t have to worry about following the order from the Navy Department.

  But he wanted to spot a smoke plume, there on the edge of visibility. He wanted to send more Yankee ships to the bottom, the same way a hunting dog wanted to tree a possum or a coon. It was what he’d been trained to do, and it was what he enjoyed doing. And, he knew without false modesty, he was damn good at it.

  As he raised the binoculars to his eyes, he knew the secret wouldn’t keep forever. It probably wouldn’t even keep very long. He wished he could blame Brearley for calling him down from the conning tower to read the decoded message, but he couldn’t. It was too important to allow delay. The crew would already be wondering what it was all about, though. One way or another, they’d learn, too. Somehow or other, they always did.

  And what would they do then? Would they cause trouble, saying peace was at hand and they didn’t want to fight any more? Or would they want to keep fighting no matter what happened on land? They hadn’t lost the war, regardless of the failures of the fools in butternut.

  “Miserable bastards,” Kimball muttered, meaning the soldiers, not the crew of the Bonefish. But then a long, grim sigh burst from his lungs, followed by more muttering: “Shit, it doesn’t hardly matter anyhow, not with Brazil in the war on the wrong side.”

  With the Empire of Brazil in the war on the wrong side, all the shipping routes from Argentina that had kept England fed for so long didn’t work any more. And with France out of the fight across the Atlantic, the German High Seas Fleet was liable to pick off any freighters the U.S. Navy missed.

  In that case, why go on fighting? he wondered. The only answer he could come up with was that the C.S. Navy, though battered, did remain unbeaten. As long as he could strike a blow against the enemies of his country, he would do it.

  He scanned the horizon, turning slowly through 360 degrees. Nothing. And then, as he’d learned to do in the past few weeks, he scanned the rest of the heavens, too. Any aeroplane he spotted through his field glasses would belong to the United States.

  Experience paid off, as experience has a way of doing. The aeroplane was too far away for him to hear its engine. Without the binoculars, he might not have seen it at all, or might have taken it for a distant soaring albatross. He started to scramble down the hatch and order a quick dive, then made himself watch and wait. If the aeroplane came closer, he would dive before it could drop a bomb on the Bonefish. If it didn’t, if it turned away…

  Slowly, he smiled. If it turned away, it would be turning away for a reason, or he hoped it would. Sure enough, a minute later the moving speck swung off toward the north. Looking more satisfied than he had any business being, given the state of the war and the state of his orders, Kimball paced the steel roof of the conning tower. The aeroplane had spotted the Bonefish. He was sure of that; it wouldn’t have changed course so abruptly if it h
adn’t. And Kimball didn’t think the pilot thought anyone on the Bonefish had noticed him. No reason he should. Nothing aboard the submersible had changed while he looked it over.

  Kimball kept watching the whole round of the horizon. He would have been a fool to do otherwise, and he had not stayed alive for almost three years in a submarine by being a fool. But he would also have been a fool not to pay particularly close attention to the north. When not one but three smoke plumes came into view, he nodded to himself. He waited till he was sure the ships were destroyers, then waited a little more. Let them think he was a little on the slow side.

  Then he did go back down into the fetid steel tube that was the Bonefish, the real Bonefish, dogging the hatch after him as he did. “Take her down to periscope depth,” he called to the crew. “We’ve got some damnyankees coming to pay us a call.”

  They were coming hard, too, in the hopes of sending the Bonefish to the bottom. Kimball had loitered on the surface a good deal longer than he would have otherwise, to make them think he’d be easy pickings. He slid toward them at five knots, easing the periscope above the surface every minute or two to keep an eye on them.

  Ben Coulter spoke quietly: “Beg your pardon, sir, but we ain’t headin’ toward those sons of bitches so as we can surrender, are we?”

  “Hell, no,” Kimball answered, hiding how appalled he was at the speed with which rumor spread. “You ever hear of submerging before you give up?”

  “No, sir,” the veteran petty officer answered. “I never heard of any such thing, and I’m damn glad of it.” He went back to his post.

  “Sir, our orders—” Tom Brearley began.

  Kimball silenced him with a glare. “I am obeying our orders, Mr. Brearley,” he snapped. “Now you see that you obey mine.” Brearley bit his lip and nodded.

  One of the trio of destroyers went straight for the spot where they’d seen the Bonefish. One went to the southeast of that spot, one to the southwest. Coulter let out a quiet chuckle when Kimball relayed that news. “They reckon we’re runnin’ away, don’t they, sir?”

  “That’s how it looks to me,” Kimball said. He let out a sigh that might have been annoyance. “All these years of fighting somebody, and they don’t know him at all. I bet they don’t know who’s screwing their wives, either.” In the dim lamplight, his sailors grinned at him.

  Just for a moment, he wondered if anybody was screwing Anne Colleton right now. If anybody was, he’d never find out about it, not unless she wanted him to. There in the middle of the stinking steel tube, he nodded respectfully. Say what you would, that was a woman with balls.

  Splash! The sound was very clear inside the pressure hull: a depth charge flying into the Atlantic, followed by several more at short intervals. They were still splashing into the sea when the first one exploded. As best Kimball could judge, it had been set to burst deep.

  He turned to his executive officer. “I’d say we are being attacked,” he remarked. Brearley nodded; a depth charge was not the prelude to an invitation to tea. Grinning, Kimball said, “And now, by Jesus, I aim to defend myself.”

  “Yes, sir,” the exec said. Tom wasn’t stupid; after a while, he was liable to wonder whether his skipper had dawdled on the surface on purpose, to provoke the damnyankees into attacking the Bonefish. But that would be later. For now, they had a fight on their hands.

  Kimball crept closer to the nearest destroyer. Watching ash cans flying off her stern, he grinned again. “Yeah, keep it up,” he muttered. “Good luck with your damn hydrophones while you’re throwing those babies around.” He ordered the two forward tubes flooded; an exploding depth charge covered the noise of inrushing water. Then it was just a matter of sliding in to within eight hundred yards and shooting the fish.

  The destroyer had barely started an evasive maneuver when the first torpedo hit her amidships. A moment later, the second struck the stern. With two fish in her, the destroyer shuddered to a stop and began to sink. The other two U.S. warships turned in the direction of their stricken comrade, and in the direction from which the Bonefish had launched the torpedoes.

  “Dive deep and evade, sir?” Brearley asked.

  “Hell, no,” Kimball answered. “That’s what they’ll be looking for me to do. I want an approach at periscope depth—but only at four knots, because I want to save the batteries as much as I can. I don’t aim to come up for air till after sunset, when the ships and the aeroplanes can’t spy me.”

  He got a good shot at one of the two Yankee destroyers, but her skipper turned tight into the path of the fish, and it sped past her bow. After that, it was the surface ships’ turn. Kimball still refused to dive deep, but staying at periscope depth, where his boat might be spotted from the surface—and from overhead, if that damned aeroplane was buzzing around again—was too foolhardy even for him to contemplate. By the time he’d sneaked far enough away from the depth charges that sent endlessly repeated thunder through the boat to take another look with the periscope, he was too far away to fire off any more fish.

  “Well, we hurt ’em,” he said in no small satisfaction. “If they think we’re giving up and going home, they can damn well think again.”

  That had a salutary effect on the sailors. Rumors of a surrender would be a lot harder to believe now. Kimball noticed Tom Brearley watching him, there in the orange-lit, stinking gloom. He grinned at his exec: a tiger’s smile, or a hammerhead’s. Brearley stayed sober. He was drawing his own conclusions, all right. Too damn bad, Kimball thought. I don’t aim to quit till I have to—and maybe not then.

  Captain Jonathan Moss had flown over Lake Ontario in the early days of the war, when the U.S. Army was slowly—so slowly—battering its way through one fortified belt on the Niagara Peninsula after another. Now here he was again, flying down from the northwest instead of up from the south. As it had then, Archie from Canadian guns filled the sky around his aeroplane with puffs of black smoke. The Wright-built Albatros copy bucked in the turbulence of near misses.

  Now, though, the antiaircraft fire came from inside Toronto, from the city the United States had confidently thought they would overrun in a few short weeks. Moss’ grimace had only a little to do with the wind tearing at his face. “Nothing in this damn campaign has gone the way it should,” he muttered.

  He’d said the same thing out loud—sometimes drunkenly loud—with his flightmates and in the officers’ club. Seeing the slate-blue water of the lake below him brought it to mind again. Nothing in Lake Ontario had gone as it should have, either. Even at the start of the war, a man could probably have walked from shore to shore on the mines laid there. Along with them, the Canucks’ submersibles had meant U.S. Great Lakes battleships—they would have been coast-defense ships on the ocean—hadn’t done a quarter of what they were supposed to.

  Down below him, thunder of a different sort roared, along with huge tongues of fire and clouds of gray smoke. The Canadian Navy still had a couple of Great Lakes battleships in working order behind their mine fields; the ships, these days, were earning their keep by pouring shells from their big guns onto the U.S. infantrymen pushing their way into Toronto.

  “Let’s see how you like this,” Moss said, diving on the behemoth below. Percy Stone, Pete Bradley, and Charley Sprague, who had replaced unlucky Hans Oppenheim on the flight, followed him down.

  He wished he were carrying a bomb fixed to his landing gear, so he could hope to do some real damage to the armored warship below, but consoled himself by remembering that real bombers hadn’t been able to sink her, either. He’d do what he could, that was all.

  Men scurried on the deck of the Great Lakes battleship. It carried its own Archie: guns very much like those used on land. They started hammering away at him. So did machine guns, the long spurts of flame from their muzzles very different from the intermittent flashes from the antiaircraft guns proper.

  His thumb came down on the firing button on top of the stick. The twin machine guns atop the engine chattered into life. He raked t
he deck from bow to stern, buzzing along no higher than the warship’s stack. He was past the ship before he could see how much damage he’d done—but not before a couple of machine-gun bullets pierced the fabric covering his fighting scout.

  He clawed for altitude; if any enemy aeroplanes had spotted his dive, they’d be stooping on him like so many falcons. As he did, he also swung back toward the Great Lakes battleship for another run. His flightmates formed in line behind him. They’d come safe through the heavy antiaircraft fire, too, then.

  Sailors were dragging wounded or dead men to shelter. “Give up, you stupid bastards,” Moss growled. “You and the limeys are the only ones left fighting, and you can’t last long.”

  Strictly speaking, that wasn’t true. Out in the Pacific, the Japanese had given as good as they’d got. But that part of the war was a sideshow for the United States. Down below Jonathan Moss, Toronto lay at its bleeding heart.

  As he started his second pass at the Canadian warship, he thought of Laura Secord, back on her farm near Arthur. Had her ancestor not imitated Paul Revere, Toronto might have belonged to the USA for the past hundred years and then some. He shook his head. If he got to worry about what might have been, he was liable not to worry enough about what was going on, and to lose the chance to worry about what would go on in the future.

  A hail of bullets and shells greeted him when he went into that second dive. He fired back. The sailors on deck were a stationary target, and he wasn’t. There were a lot of them, too, and only one of him. They didn’t do him any harm. He hoped he hurt them.

  The Great Lakes battleship almost shot him down without meaning to. The big guns roared out another broadside, the shells aimed at foot soldiers far away. But blast sent Moss’ flying scout flipping through the air. He had only moments to straighten out before he ended up in Lake Ontario. Shouting curses he hardly even noticed, he fought for control and won it just in time.

  Anxiously, he looked back for Stone and Bradley and Sprague, wondering if the warship’s main armament had accidentally done what the antiaircraft guns could not do on purpose. To his relief, he spied all three of them. He also saw that he was beginning to run low on fuel, and was not in the least sorry to discover it. When he waved back toward the aerodrome by Orangeville, his flightmates followed his lead with what seemed like relief of their own.