Down to the Sea

by William R. Forstchen

  “Report to who? The local madam? The fleet’s sailed, sonny, and we missed it.”

  “Still, sir, the orders said the best possible speed.” Petronius crumbled up the telegram and tossed it on the deck.

  “Wrong place at the wrong time, damn it,” he growled. Neither of the pair spoke.

  “Best possible speed then, Mr. Rosovich. And that thing you were going to build up forward, what about that?”

  “The steam catapults,” Theodor replied. “I’ve decided not to.”

  “Pray why?”

  “It would mean tearing up fifty feet of deck. We have the parts, and they would have been installed for the two scout planes, but I don’t want to risk having a deck torn apart and going into action with the job half done. It will have to wait.”

  “This speed that Mr. Rosovich keeps hollering about and the wind. Suppose there isn’t enough wind.”

  “You just said there’d be a blow, Petronius.”

  The admiral glared at him. The rest of the bridge crew went rigid, staring straight ahead.

  “Then see to that damn leaking smokestack. You came along for some purpose or other, make yourself useful.” Both of them, taking his comment as a dismissal, backed out of the bridge and went down the ladder.

  “If I wasn’t interested in seeing what the hell happened to you, Rosovich, I’d get off this boat at the next town,” Theodor announced, shaking his head.

  “He’s just shaken up, that’s all.”

  “Shaken up?”

  “He just found out all his old friends are going down to death or glory, and he isn’t with them.”

  “Death or glory? You think that’s what war is?” With a sigh Theodor walked away.

  The attack came the hour before sunset, catching Abe by surprise. The first wave swarmed up out of the ravine where they had snatched the water a day and a half ago, a position that the Bantag had occupied heavily the following night. Six men had ventured down there last night, but their heads had been found at dawn, carefully placed in front of the redoubt on the west slope.

  In spite of the outrage the sight had triggered, Togo was impressed by the gesture. Usually the Bantag ate the brains of fallen cattle in order to kill their spirits. The return of the heads was meant as a sign of respect to a courageous foe.

  The mounted charge came forward at a gallop. Abe had posted himself by the unit’s best marksman along the north edge of the butte, trying to spot a shot for him. Earlier in the day they had seen the standard of a leader of a thousand in a ravine to the north. Twice the sniper had taken a shot at him and missed. He was just lining it for the third time, a long gamble at six hundred yards, when the cry went up that an attack was under way.

  Abe, crouching low, ran to the west side of the butte and looked down. The charge was already halfway across the six hundred yards of open ground. In a remarkable display of horsemanship, the riders were hanging over the sides of their saddles, keeping the body of their mount between them and any incoming rounds.

  He had less than twenty men watching the west side. Turning, he screamed for half the men on the east side to come over.

  As the charge thundered in, the troopers waited for the range to close. Abe could see that the redoubt at the base of the butte would be overwhelmed. He stood up and leaned over, cupping his hands. “Sergeant Voinov! Get out!”

  The sergeant didn’t need to be told. He already had his detachment of ten men up. The men let loose a single volley, which dropped several riders, turned, and started up the steep slope, while above them their comrades opened with covering fire.

  The charge pressed in, riders swinging up into their saddles for the last fifty yards. More than half of them were armed with bows, and a deadly volley slashed out, catching two of Voinov’s men. Both of them collapsed, rolling back down the side of the butte.

  The rest of the men dodged from rock to rock, firing as they went, several running out of ammunition. Another man was hit, and when a comrade turned to pull him back up, he too was hit, in the chest. Both of them fell, sliding down to the Bantags, who were dismounting and swarming into the redoubt. Screaming, the men disappeared under a swarm of Bantags with drawn scimitars.

  Troopers on the rim of the butte, cursing madly, fired straight down into the seething mass until the attackers finally withdrew, scrambling over the far wall of the redoubt and dropping down behind it.

  “More on the north side!”

  “Keep these bastards pinned down,” Abe cried, and he sprinted back over to the other side.

  A second wave of riders was surging up out of another ravine, riding in the same hidden manner as the first group. The northern slope of the butte was far too steep for a mounted assault, and he instantly knew where they were heading. Running to the east side, he scrambled over the edge and looked down to where the gatling was positioned on a rocky outcrop twenty feet above the plains. The gun had run out of ammunition the morning of the third day.

  The outcrop, however, was their only other way off the butte, and a rock wall had been built up around it with twenty men holding the tiny fort.

  He looked back to the north. The first of the riders was still a quarter mile off but coming on fast. He knew the lieutenant down there would use what ammunition he had left trying to hold it, and he sensed that the Bantag knew it as well.

  “Lieutenant Hamilcar! Get out!”

  “Lieutenant Keane, we can hold it!”

  “Get out, Lieutenant, get out!”

  Hamilcar hesitated for a few precious seconds, then turned, shouting to his men to move. Picking up a rock lying atop the empty ammunition limber, Hamilcar smashed it down on the breech of the gatling and then hammered the barrels several times for good measure. Throwing the rock over the wall of the redoubt, he followed the last of his men up the slope. Covering fire snapped from the northern rim, then rippled around to the east as the charge swept around the base of the butte. One of Hamilcar’s men caught an arrow in the leg before reaching the summit, but he did not stop. Gasping, the men piled over the edge. The sergeant major, by Keane’s side, helped to pull them over. Everyone cursed and ducked as bullets nicked the air, and arrows, aimed nearly straight up by the mounted archers, came clattering down around them.

  Hamilcar, his skin pale and dry, was the last one in. “We could have held it, Keane.”

  “And used the last of our ammunition doing it. Then they overrun us.”

  “Damn it, Keane,” Hamilcar wheezed. “So now what? We can’t get off this Baal-cursed rock with them holding both ways out. Now what?”

  Even as he spoke the last words Hamilcar’s eyes seemed to go unfocused and then rolled up. He silently collapsed.

  “Get him under some shade,” Keane said, looking at two of Hamilcar’s men. They nodded and wearily carried him over to the hospital shelter.

  He’d lost five men to heat stroke, and from the look of Hamilcar he feared he’d lose him as well. From down below he could hear taunting shouts, occasional arrows soaring up and then clattering onto the hard ground.

  He looked around at his men.

  “Holding the redoubts was no longer worth it,” he shouted, slowly turning, looking at each man as he spoke. “They knew our routine, and you saw what happened to Magnus and his men last night.”

  “So now what, sir?” someone cried, and he could hear the resignation in the man’s voice.

  Keane turned to look at him, a ragged-looking trooper with a bandage around his knee. The rag was caked with dirt, and from the look of it, it was covering a leg that was starting to rot.

  “We hold.”

  “I’m down to three rounds, Ishi has only got one left, and I told him to save it for himself.” As the wounded man talked, he pointed at the body of the man lying next to him. Fresh blood was seeping out of a head wound. The trooper was feverish and so near to hysteria that he didn’t even realize that his comrade had been killed in the last firefight.

  From down below the taunting continued. Togo crept up to
the edge and shouted something. It was met with a flurry of rifle shots and cries of outrage.

  “What did you say?” Keane asked, trying to divert the men.

  “I discussed his relationship with his mother,” Togo replied with a caustic grin.

  The joke fell flat, and there was no response.

  Abe was tempted to simply sit down, curl up, and go to sleep. His last sip of water had been doled out at noon, and he felt as if the heat was about to finish him as well. The two canteens of water still left were in the hands of the medical orderly, to be doled out a small cupful at a time to those men he felt he could still save.

  Shading his eyes, Abe looked off to the west, Distant clouds had drifted across the horizon during the day. A lone thunderhead had swollen in the southwestern sky during the afternoon and had passed agonizingly close. For a few minutes there had even been a cooling breeze, but then it had marched on, touching the ground with lightning as it continued on its stately way.

  A mad raving came from the hospital shelter. It was the major again. Either the repeated blows to the head, the heat, or simple fear had driven him over the edge, and he had fallen to alternating bouts of desperate pleading for water followed by wild oaths about court-martials and firing squads.

  Abe felt he was finally losing control of the situation, that he had overstepped his bounds in the first minutes of the battle and now was paying the full price. Perhaps the major had been right all along. They should have gotten the hell out. Now they could be riding under a thunderstorm, soaking up the rain, laughing about their narrow escape.

  “Damn it, Keane, let’s just load, charge, and be done with it,” the wounded trooper cried. As he spoke he tried to get to his feet. As Abe looked around, several of the men stood up in response, and gradually more began to do likewise.

  He looked over at the sergeant major, desperate for some advice, but he could see that he had none. The old Zulu almost seemed detached, as if standing on a parade ground, waiting to see what the young cadet would do next. Togo was sitting on the ground, rifle across his knees, watching and saying nothing.

  What now? What the hell do I do now? He suddenly wished more than anything that his father were there. The Colonel would know what to do. Everyone was always telling him how old Keane always knew what to do.

  And then he started to laugh. The laughter came because of the utter absurdity of the whole situation. He slowly turned, looking at the men who were standing, and continued to laugh. They gazed at him, some startled, some terrified that he had gone mad as well. The rest were just silent, dejected and beyond caring whether the lieutenant was mad or not.

  “Don’t you get it?” Abe shouted. “We’re not going to die out here. I’m the son of the bloody president of the Republic. I’m the only surviving son of Andrew Lawrence Keane!”

  No one spoke and he shouted it again.

  “I’m the son of Andrew Lawrence Keane.”

  “So who the hell cares,” a corporal growled. “It’s over.”

  “Like hell it is,” Abe cried, and to his amazement, tears of moisture were in his eyes, streaking down his face. “The whole goddamn army will be out looking for me. How the hell is General Hawthorne supposed to go back to my old man and say, ‘Mr. President, sir, I’m sorry we lost him. I guess he’s dead. Better luck next time, sir’.”

  As he spoke Hawthorne’s words, he did a fairly good imitation of Vincent’s high tenor voice, and the sergeant major began to grin.

  He stopped laughing almost as suddenly as it had come upon him.

  “I tell you”—his voice dropped and self-consciously he Wiped the tears from his cheeks—“my father will not leave me out here to die. I know him. He’ll say that he won’t do anything special became I’m his son, but that won’t matter. The word will go out to do everything possible.”

  He paused and then shook his head.

  “No, that’s a lie. He won’t do anything special, he’ll do what he would do for any of you men, blood relative or not, Yankee or Chin, and he’ll try to pass that as an order. But those around my father, the men who love him, they’ll take special steps to find us because they do love him.” He fell silent for a long moment and the tears fell again. “That’s why we’ll live, that’s why they’ll find us. It’s because this army will never abandon its own. That was the army my father created. That is why I promise you we’ll survive this day, and the day after until they finally come and get us.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “To go in harm’s way.”

  “Did you say something, Admiral?”

  Bullfinch looked over at his young staff officer and smiled. “No, nothing.”

  He stepped out of the armored cupola and, leaning forward, grabbed the railing of the open bridge. Two observers, glasses raised, struggled vainly to maintain their positions, sweeping the horizon.

  A squall line of rain slashed in, driven on the thirty-knot wind, stinging as it hit. A gust swept off Bullfinch’s oilskin nor’easter hat. It spun across the bridge and went over the railing, disappearing into the foaming sea.

  The bow of his flagship surged onto the crest of a fifteen-foot wave, foam spraying up, tons of water cascading over the deck as the ship corkscrewed down into a trough and then started the climb onto the next wave.

  The sailor to his right lowered his glasses, leaned over the railing, unceremoniously vomited, then raised his glasses again. Bullfinch actually felt pity for the boy. In spite of the warm tropical air, he was actually trembling from sickness and most likely from fear.

  “Anything, sailor?” Bullfinch shouted.

  The boy lowered his glasses and looked over, features a pale shade of green. “Not since we saw that frigate, sir.”

  “Well keep a sharp watch. They are out there, I can feel it, you can smell it.”

  The boy nodded weakly and resumed his watch.

  In fact, they actually had smelled them. A heavy line of squalls had battered the ships throughout the afternoon as they approached the Minoan Shoals. The fleet had moved in line astern of the flagship as they struggled through the Three Sisters, a mile-wide passage that cut through the middle of a chain of islands and sandbars that stretched for more than forty miles.

  With his flagship Antietam leading the way, several of the lookouts had reported that they had smelled coal smoke on the wind, and several minutes later two of them claimed to have seen a frigate-size ship, with an unusual silhouette, sailing two or three miles off, and then disappeared as the next line of rain closed in.

  That was a half an hour ago.

  Turning his back to the wind, Bullfinch reached under his sealskin coat and pulled out his pocket watch. An hour till sunset, but already he could feel the light beginning to fade.

  Five miles past the shoals to leeward, not a good position to ride out a storm at night.

  He leaned over the railing and looked aft. The fleet was still running astern. The last of them had to be through the Three Sisters.

  Come about? Put the Shoals between us and them during the night?

  He felt a terrible loneliness. Suppose they aren’t here? Andrew said they might make a run for the Bantag coast. But nothing was there other than a bunch of savages. No, all doctrine ran toward hitting your opponent’s main base first by surprise, bottling him up, smashing him. Then they’d have the sea and could do as they pleased. If they were coming to Constantine, they would make for these shoals first, and get their bearing, rather than go blundering along an unknown coastline and then give the Republic warning.

  For that matter, had they even arrived yet? Cromwell had said ten knots. Suppose, though, it was eight knots. Bullfinch thought. That would put them a good hundred miles still out. Or twelve knots, then they might very well have rounded the shoals this morning, we sailed straight past each other and even now they are closing to bombard Constantine.

  He had sent scout frigates out at full steam to cover the flanks of each end of the shoals, but no reports. But then again, that could mean tha
t they were already at the bottom of the sea, destroyed before they could return.

  He knew he was tearing himself apart with all the variables and chance errors and decisions that made up a battle at sea. Make the plan as best you can, he realized, then stick to it until you get a solid fact that changes things. You figured they’d run first to the Shoals, perhaps slow there for at least a few hours to bring their fleet together, perhaps even weather the night here, then move along its length to gain a bearing, finally rounding it either to the east or west. We come in through the middle and hopefully hit them by surprise, then get the hell out.

  So it’s here. But where the hell are they? In this storm they could be five miles off to port or starboard. Perhaps they’d already gained the shoals and had turned, running east or west to round them, moving cautiously to avoid running aground.

  He looked back again at his own fleet, less than half of it visible. All of them were running now on engines, all sails furled as they plowed into the teeth of the storm.

  What next, damn it, what next?

  With the light beginning to fade, he had but two choices. Either come about, get to leeward of the shoals, and sit out the night; moving to pounce before dawn. If I do that, it will be a fifty-fifty chance—we either run east or west. Or we move straight on here into the night, gain about ten miles out, then turn either east or west and try to come in from behind.

  Best possible choice, I’ve got to run with that.

  He could sense that everyone inside the cupola was peeking out through the narrow view slit, watching him, knowing he was trying to sort out all the different elements, to come to a conclusion. They most likely knew his every idiosyncrasy, the way he hunched his shoulders and rubbed his scarred face and eyepatch when he was lost in thought. He realized he was doing that, and turned the gesture into wiping the rain from his face.

  Another wave cascaded over the bow, sending up spray bits of spindrift flying back, sweeping the bridge.

  He turned his back to it, saw the men peering at him through the viewing slit.