Andrew had to resist the urge to pound his fist on the Captain’s table out of frustration. Captain Maxwell was everything to Andrew, but Maxwell was making less and less sense the further they went. Andrew was starting to fear that Maxwell was losing his mind. And that was making Andrew afraid that he was losing his mind.
Andrew begged for a reason, for a single word of explanation or reassurance. “But sir, please tell us why you don’t want to see it. Is it false? What if someone else dies at the saboteur’s hands?”
“That is a nonissue, Commander.”
Barty was scrutinizing the Captain openly. Maxwell was ignoring him, but letting him do it.
“A nonissue?” Andrew echoed, unable to believe he’d heard the words. “But sir!”
“Thank you gentlemen, you’ve both done well,” Maxwell said, turning and rising from the table. “That will be all.”
For the first time, Andrew was slower to obey his captain’s command than Barty. But after a moment of sitting at the Captain’s table, lost, Andrew also rose and went to the door.
Barty raised a leg to step across the facing, but paused. He turned back. Behind them, Maxwell had shucked his uniform top, revealing a purple and black contusion covering most of his right side. It looked like a large purple flatfish was growing under his skin. He’d admitted to Andrew that he’d broken at least three ribs when the conning tower was hit. Andrew was sure Maxwell had internal injuries too, but he refused to see the doctor. No doctor. No time. End of discussion.
However, Barty was not looking at the bruises. He stared at the back of Maxwell’s head for five heartbeats. For once his eyes were not narrow, but open. They were wide with something Andrew had never before seen from Barty.
Respect.
“You…” Barty began. “You already knew, didn’t you sir?”
Maxwell was pouring whiskey into a water glass. He did not respond.
Andrew looked from Captain Maxwell to Lieutenant Bartram.
“Sir,” Lieutenant Bartram said politely but earnestly. “May I ask how you found out sooner than I did?”
“Andrew,” Maxwell said without turning. “No one else will die at the saboteur’s hands. I have made certain of it. Good night, gentlemen.”
W
Garret had ransacked most of the lower bow of the ship. He had moved through it harder and faster than normal because, with each passing room, he was trying to stay ahead of the growing fear that Fishy might have thrown himself overboard. Garret had even checked ridiculous places like the sails and awnings storage room.
Only one place remained, and Garret didn’t want to check it. He had to, though. Somebody had to. Garret moved through the door into the hold.
The electric lights overhead were bright, but despite that, and despite the stadium-like expansiveness of the hold, it always seemed like the dimmest place on the ship. Maybe it was because the hold was all the way at the bottom of the ship that Garret imagined he could feel the weight of the countless tons of Kearsarge pressing down from above. Maybe the dimness was due to the cyanide crates themselves, their dark green paint and black skull-and-cross-bones motif soaking up the light as a hard day’s work wicks a man’s strength.
Garret hesitated, stopped by an instinctual check of some kind. He looked up, up, up at the stacks of crates rising to all heights above him. They were banded securely, strapped and tied with all manner of lashings. Furthermore, crewmen were sent every day to check each and every strap to make certain none had come loose.
Even so, it seemed as though an odor hung in the air, barely within the perceptive range of Garret’s human nose. It was a mildew/moldy scent, like wet hay which had lain too long. Perhaps he was just imagining it because Twitch had told him that was what cyanide smelled like.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective, there were spaces between the rows of crates for access and lashing. Garret would have to check them one at a time. Moving carefully and trying not to touch any of the crates, Garret began to wind his way back and forth down the rows. Whoever had stacked the crates originally hadn’t known a damn thing about stowing cargo. No wonder Captain Maxwell sent several crewmen to check the straps every day. It was like a maze down here, and—
Garret slowed down at the end of a row. He’d heard a sound that didn’t belong. It was so out of place that he didn’t realize what it was until he stepped around the end of the row.
Fishy was there, halfway down the next row, and he wasn’t alone. There was a sandy blond-haired guy with him. The guy was heavily freckled across his shoulders. Garret could see that because the guy wasn’t wearing a shirt. Neither was Fishy.
Rooted to the spot, Garret stared. Fishy and the other guy were kissing. Open mouthed kissing. Tongues, going as deep as they could into each other. That was the sound Garret had heard.
The blonde guy broke off the kiss and knelt, running his hands down over Fishy’s ribs as he went. Fishy just stood there and closed his eyes. Only then did Garret notice the wet streaks tracking down Fishy’s face. He wasn’t crying anymore, but he had been within the last few moments. His expression was as broken as Garret had felt when he had thought the creature was going to kill Sarn and Molly.
The blonde guy reached around Fishy’s waist to the laces that held his uniform pants up, and started untying them. The bottom of Fishy’s uniform dropped a moment later, revealing his hairy legs and his underwear, which the other guy pulled down.
The guy took Fishy in his mouth. A fresh tear, just one, ran down Fishy’s left cheek.
Garret suddenly came to himself. He uprooted his feet and stumbled away as quickly as he could, bumping into a crate on the way. He had to get away before Fishy saw him.
W
Kearsarge bore them forward day after day. She was in pain. Garret felt it through her creaking beams and her crackled planks. She struggled to plough through the water, and they struggled with her, so few of them now that they worked their guts out just to keep her moving. Most of a sailor’s life was the eternal cycle of coaling and cleaning, but now, hardly a thought was given to how dirty they and their ship were getting. Garret had earlier crept by two officers who looked ready to strike each other over which portholes should be replaced and which should not. There weren’t enough spares to replace them all. There weren’t enough spares for anything.
Garret had spent too much time in engineering. His hands stank of oil no matter how many times he washed them. He’d worked as an oiler for two days now, filling the gravity feed oil cups that dangled from everything, dipping his hands in vats of the stuff and running them over the hard parts of the engines even as they were moving, making sure nothing was too hot to the touch.
Then he’d spent most of a day pounding on hatches with sledgehammers. Several of the hatches on the starboard side wouldn’t seal no matter what they did. There were mutters that the battle damage had simply bent the ship from stem to stern, and there were some things that would never fit right again. A few of the hatches that were close to the shell explosions wouldn’t even fit in their frames. Garret couldn’t see any damage to them, but they wouldn’t close. Garret and a couple other guys had beat on them for a while anyway. They had no choice, really. Watertightness on the inside of a battleship was everything. Without it, a single hull breech could sink them all.
A thrust bearing failed two days after the battle with Audacious. The thrust bearing was the giant helical steel shaft through which Kearsarge’s engines fed their power to the screws. Garret had been part of the crew who kept it lubricated, so he knew that wasn’t the problem.
Garret and dozens of other men were requisitioned to help replace it with the spare. The engineer mourned and wailed as he directed the backbreaking process. The bearing looked more to Garret like a thirty-five hundred pound screw. As they tried to lower it, a crewman had slipped in the carriage and his leg had been crushed beneath it. That was one more injured man who couldn’t work.
&n
bsp; The engineer had sobbed about flexural stresses and how something in the driveline must have gotten bent in the battle. He said most of the damages from the battle wouldn’t be known until they drydocked her, assuming that ever happened.
And that was how Kearsarge felt overall to Garret. She felt sick, as if her wounds were festering.
They’d shoveled coal the next day, as hard as they could go. At one point, Velvet had paused long enough to mutter what they were all thinking. “Captain Maxwell’s running her too hard. This would be too much strain if she was good as new, let alone with all the damage.”
It seemed Velvet was right. Anytime Garret went past the boilers, the engineer’s mates were crawling all over them, inspecting seams and rivets, checking and rechecking the water tubes and safety valves. Oddly, the most stressed-out looking guy was the guy who didn’t seem to have anything to do. Not that Garret could see anyway. He just stood there at his post, hour after hour, staring at the boiler pressure gages and sweating as the needles pushed into the red zone, whatever that meant.
Everyone aboard ship took turns shoveling coal. They worked no more than an hour at a time because they had to shovel at a strenuous pace to keep up with the fires that drove the injured Kearsarge forward.
“Reminds me of puttin’ up hay,” Pun’kin said. He’d grinned through his coal blackened face. “But Mama always brought us lemonade when we were done with that. Ya’ll think the Chief would make us lemonade?”
They all smiled a little, except Fishy. It felt good to smile again, even if Garret immediately felt guilty about it because his friends were dead. Even so, he was more concerned about Fishy. From the furtive glances Fishy got all day, everyone else was too.
Sadly, it helped them to have Fishy to fret about. They couldn’t help the dead, no matter how badly they missed them. They could keep trying with Fishy. Mealtimes were the worst. They sat close together now, but their table felt empty. Each spot was conspicuously open and void. Everyone ate quietly and rarely spoke. Fishy hadn’t cracked a joke since the day Theo died.
Garret had never been so exhausted, but he and all the men aboard Kearsarge labored to keep her ploughing forward every day, though they knew not why.
W
June 13th, 1914. Fifteen days to Vidovdan
Andrew strode past the officer’s ward room towards his own cabin. He tried to look purposeful, but his head was in a fog. His uniform jacket was open over his sweat-soaked shirt. His cover was gone, and at this point, he had no idea where he’d lost it. His right sleeve was torn, and as he reached out to grasp the door handle to his cabin, he caught sight of Midshipman Regar’s blood, still laying in thin red crescents along Andrew’s cuticles.
The battle damage to Kearsarge was catastrophic. Things were still failing. When the stanchion had folded and the pipe burst, it had not only scalded the right side of Regar’s body and fused his uniform into his skin as if the two had melted together, it had also torn chunks out of him. Andrew had dug him out from under the wreckage almost singlehandedly, and then helped the doctor try to restart his heart.
The boy died anyway. He was seventeen years old. Still in a fog, Andrew almost fell into his small cabin when he reached for the handle. The door was already open.
Captain Maxwell stood in the small room, arms crossed, leaning on Andrew’s desk.
Andrew straightened. “Sir.”
“I heard about midshipman Regar.”
Ever so briefly, Andrew faltered. “We couldn’t save him sir.”
“That’s right. You couldn’t. That means you will let this go.”
“Sir, I—”
“We’re coming down to it now, Andrew. I must have you at your best. A split second of divided focus on either of our parts could make this all for naught. You will not dwell on the passing of the dead, and thereby risk the living. Do you understand?”
“I… yes sir.”
“That’s an order, Commander.”
Andrew straightened. “Yes sir!” He barked it.
Captain Maxwell paced around him and out of Andrew’s cabin. He closed the door behind himself without asking.
Andrew stood there at attention, a sweaty, bloody mess for a moment longer, before he slumped. His eyes fell on the paperwork on his desk, pinned under his Naval Academy paperweight. From there his eyes fell on his sidearm. It was a standard issue semiauto .45 Colt 1911. He carried it most of the time aboard ship, even though there was no need. He’d left it in its box today. Andrew leaned on the desk and observed the weapon mutely, hoping for some direction from its clean, uncluttered form. It was standard dark grey steel, with not a single divot or crease that did not serve a purpose. Despite its lethal intent, it was not sinister in design, just simple, purposeful.
Through Andrew’s youth, simple purpose had been his lifeblood. His mind and heart had been uncluttered. His conscience clear. It was getting harder and harder to remember what that had felt like. All the rules were coming apart, not just being broken, but unraveling of their own accord.
The Colt was laid out in a hand polished, velvet lined wooden box. Andrew’s father had made it for him two years ago, barely a month before a sudden heart attack had taken him away. He’d said that no son of his would have a ratty cardboard box to store the thing upon which he relied to save his life. The statement didn’t mean anything; it was just an excuse for Andrew’s woodworker father to make one last thing for him. Somehow, Andrew’s father had known what was going to happen.
So was that what Andrew had left? Was that what his existence had become: handmade beauty enclosing rude, mass-produced function? It was inside out, wasn’t it? His whole life was turning inside out. With his bloody fingernails and ripped sleeve, Andrew reached over and gently closed the lid on his gun. He let his hand rest there for a while. It steadied him.
W
“But Captain, there’s a man in the water!” Fishy protested.
Fishy was tense, wired, and definitely not in control of himself. Frissons of emotional overload ran up and down his arms. Garret stood nearby, almost as tense as Fishy, and ready to pounce on him if need be. They were on the stern of the upper deck. The broken air intake they’d been mending stood between them, forgotten since the call “man overboard” had come down from above.
Captain Maxwell had denied Fishy’s request to stop the ship and retrieve the man, and only Maxwell’s authority and the weight of his personality was keeping Fishy’s feet pinned to the deck. The master-at-arms and lieutenant Martin were there, wanting to tackle Fishy, but a single look from Maxwell backed them off.
“There’s a man in the water,” Fishy said again, panicky.
“I know that, sailor,” Maxwell said quietly. “And I wish that you, of all the men on this boat, didn’t know that.”
Fishy was shooting desperate glances at a floatation device on a nearby bulkhead. “Sir, just stop the ship, please!”
“I can’t, sailor.”
“He’ll die!”
Maxwell stepped forward and grabbed Fishy by the nape of the neck.
“They will all die, if we stop.” The intensity in Maxwell’s face made Garret’s skin crawl. “Kearsarge is badly damaged and her best speed now is twelve knots.”
“But there’s a man in the water!”
“We will only just make it to the rendezvous as it is.”
“I don’t care! There’s a man in the water! We have to go back!”
Maxwell’s grip tightened until Fishy was wincing. It looked like Maxwell was holding him up with one arm. “If we do not make the rendezvous, hundreds of thousands of people will die. Do you understand me? Hundreds of thousands.”
“But he’s somebody’s brother,” Fishy sobbed. “We have to go back.”
Maxwell was hard and impenetrable as riverbed slate. “We are not going back. That man is going to give his life so that countless others can live.”
Fishy struggled, face contorted. Maxwell’s arm and hand
might as well have been one of Kearsarge’s cranes for all the good Fishy’s struggles did.
Maxwell softened his voice. “This is the way it has to be.”
That was when Fishy snapped. He probably tried to take a swing at Maxwell, but Garret wasn’t sure because Maxwell flung Fishy away as if he was a child. Fishy hit the deck hard. Garret dropped quickly to a knee beside him, hands spread, ready to grab him if he tried to go for Maxwell, but Fishy made no effort to get up. He laid there and cried.
Maxwell hadn’t moved from his place on the deck. “I’m sorry men,” he said, looking at each of them. “This is my burden, and my sin. I made this decision, and there was nothing you could do about it. Never forget that.”
With that, he walked away.
Garret knelt by Fishy. Fishy curled up on the deck and sobbed.
“Get him up,” Chief Greely said quietly to Garret. Then to Fishy, Greely said softly, “Son, you haven’t eaten in more than a day. It’s dinner time, that’s an order.”
Together, Garret and Chief Greely hauled Fishy to his feet. He leaned on Garret, and together, they led him into the citadel. As Garret stepped across the threshold, he thought he heard a high pitched cracking sound, just like that of a rifle, as if Kearsarge was saluting a dead man who hadn’t even drowned yet.
Ten minutes later, Fishy sat at their mess table, his food untouched in front of him.
Garret played with his bread. He looked at Fishy, then to Twitch for help. Twitch was eating mechanically, staring intently at the center of the table as if seeing through it. His expression was unreadable. His injury had been a flesh wound, but it had left a jagged tear. Regardless, Twitch moved and worked as if the bandages weren’t covering anything more than a pinprick. Like he didn’t even feel it.
Pun’kin was cleaning his plate double time, eating with the fast, almost desperate hands of someone who thought they wouldn’t eat again.
“Them’s the best carrots I ever tasted,” Pun’kin said. “Mm-mmm!” He looked hopefully at Fishy while he said it.
Ironclad Page 44
