“Why!”
“Orders,” Barty said with more than a little pleasure. “I am tasked with finding our saboteur. I want to know who rewired the machine, and my guess is that he’s on his way here right now.”
Andrew felt trapped like a rat. In an ironic reversal, Barty actually did look like a rat, but he wasn’t acting trapped at all. Someone hit the door from behind and it swung open, slamming into the bulkhead.
Standing in the doorway, holding a pistol in each hand, in night pants and shirtless, revealing a shocking number of tattoos, stood the last person Andrew expected to see.
Captain Maxwell.
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The Captain did not lower his weapons. Neither, Andrew noticed, did Barty. Maxwell looked back and forth between them. “Explanation. Now,” he said.
Barty lowered his pistol. “Orders, Captain,” he said. “From before we left Pennsylvania. We cannot complete our mission without at least a handful of combat-ready ground assault troops.”
Maxwell’s temper flashed. “Do you think I don’t know that, Lieutenant?”
Maxwell frowned and spent a long, tense moment in decision. “Colson or Willoughby?”
“Rear Admiral Willoughby sent me, sir,” Barty replied. “Admiral Colson’s loyalty to the Navy exceeds his loyalty to us.”
“Why should I believe that?”
“Admiral Willoughby said you’d know it was him because, well…” Barty cleared his throat. “Sir, I’m only repeating this as he said it. ‘You tell that cocky son-of-a-bitch Maxwell that if we went through Manila Bay together and he still thinks he can wipe his goddamn nose without my help, then he’d better get his dumbass killed on this one or I’ll have him eating the assholes out of dead whales until he retires.’ Again sir,” Barty added, “I’m only repeating it as he said it.”
Andrew had to admit, that did sound like Admiral Willoughby.
“Authorization?” Maxwell asked.
“Blevins-Sparrow,” Barty replied quickly. He said it as if it was some sort of password.
Then and only then did Maxwell lower his weapons. The precision of the movement reminded Andrew that Captain Maxwell had been, in his younger days, one of the best marksmen in the Navy. Even with short barreled pistols, Maxwell could probably have put a bullet through both of their hearts at the same time.
Maxwell repeated Barty, but with disgust, “Blevins-Sparrow.”
Andrew’s complete inability to follow what had happened was making him painfully aware of just how little he knew about their mission. The admirals Willoughby and Colson were both well respected, but if either of them was aware of what was going on, then that meant word of their plans had gotten much deeper into the Navy than Andrew would have suspected. In their absence, this might have grown from a private little insurrection to a full blown coupe de eta.
Barty returned to fingering the wire. “I must say sir,” he offered. “I’m disappointed to see it was you. I was hoping for a more revealing turn.”
“Not, I imagine,” Maxwell said, “as disappointed as I am to see the two of you.”
The phone in the captain’s stateroom, Andrew realized miserably. This is what it was for. Andrew felt like a traitor. “Captain… I—I don’t know what to say. We should have come to you with—”
“Stop talking, Commander.”
Andrew stopped instantly. Despair welled up in him. He knew he should be at attention, but he couldn’t hold his head up in front of Maxwell. The Captain ignored him as if he was no longer relevant. After shutting the door, Maxwell crossed the room, leaned over the table and unplugged the third wire from the left. He reached beneath the table, peeled loose a wire which had been hidden there, and plugged it into the vacant receptacle.
He uprighted the chair and sat. “Sooner or later,” Maxwell said, plainly angry, “our saboteur would have gotten desperate enough to try the wireless to report our position. Then I would have had him. Instead, all I got was the two of you.” He placed the headset on his head and said, “Lieutenant Bartram, adjust this damn thing for me.”
Barty did, and for once, even he looked humbled.
“Kearsarge to Agamemnon,” Maxwell said. Then a moment later, “Dawkins, it’s Maxwell. Were you able to secure the prisoners?”
Andrew stood there dumbly staring at his Captain’s bare back. As long as he’d known the man, he’d never seen the Captain without his uniform. Maxwell was currently wearing only a standard issue pair of sleep pants from ship’s stores; the same simple, sturdy fare that most of the starboard watch were probably wearing in their hammocks at the moment. At the thought of catching the saboteur in the act of using the radio, Maxwell hadn’t grabbed anything other than his pistols.
Andrew took in the variety of tattoos covering Maxwell’s torso. His back itself was lean and sinewy, not carrying a scrap of fat that Andrew could see. Every muscle fiber was visible when he moved. It made Maxwell look lean and dangerous, but not in an entirely healthy way, like a mountain lion that ranged miles for its food, growing hard and thin from overexertion and lack of nourishment.
But as Maxwell conversed over the wireless, Andrew saw the reason that no one ever saw Maxwell without a shirt. The tattoos looked randomly arranged, but they weren’t. The blue images of dancing girls, anchors, eagles, etc. were placed, distorted, even overlapped to hide the winding, crisscrossing scars.
Maxwell’s back was covered with them. They weren’t knotted or irregular like combat trauma would leave. Every scar was thin and white and clean, the kind left by a surgical blade. But they were not surgical. They could possibly have been from a number of knife fights, but they weren’t the straight or semi-arced slashes usually inflicted in a fight; they curved and snaked over his body as if he’d been carved up by a sadistic artist.
Strangely, it didn’t make Andrew wonder how it happened. It made Andrew think of Maxwell’s wife, Helen. She was quiet, kind, always quick with a warm smile. There was no guile about her. But she had slept with this man many times. Whatever this was, she knew about it, and she hadn’t told a soul.
It was then that Andrew began to suspect that he really didn’t know why they were on this mission at all.
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Far below the water line, in the deepest darkest part of Kearsarge’s belly, Garret and Burl shoveled. It was the wee hours of the morning, and shoveling coal was starting to seem like the only thing Garret and Burl had ever done. A handful of other guys were with them. Despite the relative vastness of the boiler room, it felt cramped because the boilers essentially filled it. They were tall as houses, and Garret felt squeezed between the bulk of their black iron sides and the coal bins right behind him.
All of the coal bunker hatches were open, and the narrow area between the bunkers and the boilers was covered with coal, pouring from the hatches, heaped against the bunkers and covering the deck. It filled every crevice and was piled so thickly around them that working on the “black gang” felt like being buried alive. The fight to dig one’s way back to the sun was endless. There was always more coal. Garret and Burl were all black. Everything was black. Not much was visible other than flames, eyes, and teeth when someone smiled.
Garret pushed his shovel into the coal again and lifted. His back punished him, sending spikes and twinges down all the way into his feet. It was getting worse with each passing day. At the bottom of his heart, he knew why. The wolf was dead, and he wasn’t sorry at all, but without it, he could no longer shift. Joseph had tried to explain it to him many times, but Garret never quite understood it. Something about how, when he shifted from man to beast and back again, his body was taking advantage of the rearrangement to repair things that were injured, or in the case of his back, degrading. In other words, his body used the shifts to heal things that were hurt.
Garret’s back had been worse than hurt. It had been broken, his spinal cord severed. The feeling of paralysis, or lack of feeling, as it were, was one he would never forget. He would alway
s remember pulling himself across Dr. Grey’s floorboards with his hands, feeling his legs slide as dead weight, his kneecaps catching on the uneven boards, his pants snagging on splinters.
He didn’t want to shift. The thought of doing it made him sick, but it wouldn’t have mattered either way. He’d lost the ability. And without it, his back was coming apart. He remembered how he’d cheated paralysis the first time, and it was something no person should ever have tried. He didn’t remember much about the actual process, just blurred images and groans, and sweat, and of course the agony. The pain was always there.
Why so much pain? he wondered.
His body, his mind, his heart, his soul: at least one of those parts, and usually more than one, was constantly in pain. He looked around the boiler room at the other guys, all about his age. One of them grunted something to his partner about manning up so the ladies would like him. His buddy laughed and flung another shovelful into their boiler. They would complain of aching muscles at the end of this watch, but none of them were in pain like Garret. None of them would lay in their hammock this night, unable to sleep because of the burning nerve pain in their legs and the pieces of metal embedded deep in their chest and abdomen.
Why is my life so fucked up?
Garret flung the shovelful of coal through the round hatch into the boiler, where it was gobbled up by the insatiable fires that brought Kearsarge to life. Burl was Garret’s partner. Over the course of the watch, Burl and Garret had gotten covered with coal dust, so by this point, Burl was little more than a thin smear of moving darkness with eyes. Garret drove his shovel into the heap around them, while Burl threw a shovelful into the boiler. Garret lifted, turned and threw his into the boiler while Burl drove his shovel into the pile.
The pervading sounds were the shoveling, the roaring flames, and the deep overlapping chuffs and hisses of the concert hall-sized steam engines on the other side of the bulkhead. There wasn’t much talking, not because they liked silence, but because Maxwell was running the Kearsarge hard that morning, and her appetite was daunting.
Burl heaved another shovel of black diamonds into the winding flames then looked at the pile and said, “I think we’re almost there.”
White teeth appeared in his black face.
Garret tried to grin back. “Fishy and Theo got to polish brightwork,” he wheezed. “How did we get stuck doing this?”
“We’re just lucky,” Burl grunted as he threw another shovelful into the boiler. The fires were so greedy that they almost seemed to leap towards the coal, as if to consume it in midair.
The other guys in the boiler room had been chatting sporadically, just like Garret and Burl had been doing. Normally, Garret wasn’t the eavesdropping type, but suddenly a sentence caught his ear.
“What do you think happened to Roogie’s body,” the guy asked his buddy in a low voice.
The other guy shook his head, but didn’t answer.
Burl shot a quizzical glance at Garret. Garret shrugged and dug in again, but as quietly as he could.
“Come on,” the first guy prodded. “How the hell does that happen? A body disappears aboard a Navy ship? Just poof, up and gone?”
“We’re not supposed to talk about it,” his buddy hissed back, hoisting a shovel of coal and flinging it into the fires.
“It kept me up last night,” the first guy replied. “I think I know what happened.”
Garret felt a sick flutter in his stomach. There was something about this that was eerily familiar. As if he should know more about it than he did.
“I don’t care what you think happened,” the second guy replied. “We’re not supposed to talk about it. It happened two days ago anyway. Let it go.”
That time frame seemed wrong to Garret, though he had no idea why. If confused him. How could he think the reference was incorrect if he knew nothing about the issue?
“Everybody’s talking,” the first guy hissed back. “There was no funeral. A dead body can’t wait for days.”
Finally the first guy gave a real answer, probably out of annoyance. “They’ll do something soon, even if they just throw an empty coffin overboard and say he was in it.”
After that, the second guy clammed up, so eventually, the first guy gave up. Garret shrugged again at Burl, who was giving him an inquisitive look.
From behind him, Garret heard the sound of a cat’s meow: irritated and cranky. Burl glanced over Garret’s shoulder and burst out laughing.
Garret turned. Behind and above them, Bert was stuck again, half-in half-out of a pipe hole in the bulkhead. He’d tried to worm through the extra space around the pipe, but gotten jammed when he lost his footing and slid to the bottom of the opening, which was smaller. He hung there, ears flat to his skull, green eyes burning with maligned feline dignity. Garret and Burl laughed and laughed.
It was breakfast time, two hours later, before they had a break to get Bert unstuck. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t scratch them, which almost made Garret feel bad for laughing at him. Almost.
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June 6th, 1914. Twenty-two days to Vidovdan
“Ship off the port bow!” came the call from above.
Garret dropped his scraper and stood up. So did Theo. They scanned the ocean to port, but Garret saw nothing other than open water. He looked down at Theo, who shrugged. They both looked down at Twitch. Twitch was still on his hands and knees. He’d continued working as if he hadn’t heard anything.
“Remember basic training,” he said absently as he jammed oakum down between two deck planks. “On the deck, best you can see on a clear day is five or six miles.” He sat back and pointed up the cage masts to the fire control tops where the lookouts were stationed. “From up there, they can see more than twice that far.”
Garret leaned back to look all the way to the top of Kearsarge’s cage masts. The height made him dizzy, even though he was on the deck. It was as if Kearsarge had a pair scaled-down Eiffel towers bolted to her upper deck.
“Do you think it’s another American ship?” Theo asked.
Twitch lifted his shoulders in a half-shrug, and the three of them got back to work.
There was no putty aboard, and not enough glue to spare for water tightening the decks. That meant pitch, which in turn meant Twitch was cantankerous. He was always cantankerous when he had to do something that he felt was beneath the pride of the modern Navy.
“I’m using pitch,” he groused. “Pitch on the deck of a battleship. What century is this? I feel like I need an eyepatch and a wooden leg.”
Garret was so happy not be buried in the dark hell of Kearsarge’s bowels, shoveling endlessly, that he probably wouldn’t have complained if they’d been ordered to use manure. He, Twitch, and Theo were kneeling on the main deck, just abaft of the port side forward coal hatch. Kearsarge’s forward double stack turret loomed up over them.
Apparently, one of the lieutenants had been standing on the berth deck, lecturing a young sailor on the proper way to trice up his hammock, when a drop of water fell on the officer’s head from the main deck above. In short, Garret, Twitch, and Theo had been handed a bucket of pitch and a variety of tools not designed for the purpose, and told to pull up all loose sealant and reseal every board on the main deck within a five foot radius of the Water Drop Incident.
Theo was focused intently, the pink end of his tongue just visible between his teeth as he meticulously pried up a long string of putty, wound through with oakum fibers. “Hey, Minnow,” came Fishy’s voice. “Don’t pull that up so far. I don’t want to have to put it all back.”
Theo looked up crossly. It was the first time Garret had seen Theo upset with his brother.
“I’ll put it back,” Theo said.
“Aaaarrrr matey, that you will!” Twitch said in a sarcastic pirate voice as he scooped more pitch into a crack.
Fishy dropped to his knees with them and pulled off his shirt. It wasn’t that hot, in Garret’s opinion. Garret wa
s fraying out the individual fibers of an old rope, laying the strands in the oakum pile he was getting ready to jam down into the crevice he’d just cleared of old putty.
“What are you doing here?” he asked Fishy.
Fishy sighed and dragged a scraper and something that looked like a wide screwdriver towards himself. “I was too good at my job in the galley, I guess,” he said. “How much are we taking up?”
“Five foot radius around here,” Twitch responded, pointing to a spot in their midst, then trading his scraper for a sharpened file. He did it all without looking away from what he was doing. He had his tools laid in a neat row so he didn’t have to look.
Fishy still hadn’t done anything. He was turning random tools over one at a time with an incredulous expression. “What are we supposed to do with these?”
Garret shrugged as he used a broken spade to drive the oakum fibers down into a crack. “Use ‘em, I guess,” he said distractedly. The disappearance of Ensign Roger’s body was bothering Garret more with each passing hour.
Twitch grabbed the pitch bucket and dragged it towards himself. He got more offended every time he had to touch it. They worked for a few minutes in silence until Garret became aware of a couple ensigns standing close by. They were passing a pair of binoculars back and forth and arguing.
“French,” pronounced the ensign with the binoculars.
“That the best you can do?” the other replied. “Gimmie.” He took the binoculars and stared for so long that Garret thought he was going to be able to see the other captain’s nostril hairs before the ensign said proudly, “German, and it’s a battlecruiser.”
Garret, Theo, and Fishy stood and scanned the ocean to the north east. Abnormally, Theo had sidled up to Garret rather than Fishy. Fishy didn’t seem to care.
Garret began, “I don’t see anyth—”
“There,” Fishy said pointing. Garret still didn’t see it. He nodded anyway.
The first ensign snatched the binoculars back again. “That’s not a battlecruiser, it’s a battleship.”
“It is not!” Ensign Number Two made a grab.
Ironclad Page 21
