Walk in Hell

XVII

Private Ulysses Hansen looked around. “Once upon a time, probably, this was real pretty country,” he said.

“Not any time lately,” another private-Sergeant Gordon McSweeney couldn’t see who-answered. The whole squad, with the exception of McSweeney, chuckled.

“Silence in the ranks,” McSweeney said, and silence he got: all proper and according to regulation. He looked around at what had been a northeastern Arkansas pine forest and was now a wasteland of jagged stumps and downtumbled branches. That it might once have been beautiful hadn’t occurred to him. He hadn’t particularly noticed how hideous it was at the moment, either. It was country that had once held the enemy but was now cleared of him, that was all. No, not quite all: it was country that led to land the enemy still infested.

Captain Schneider came bustling along past the company as the soldiers trudged south and east. Schneider nodded toward Gordon McSweeney. “Not so pretty as it used to be, is it, Sergeant?” he said.

“No, sir,” McSweeney answered stolidly. The company commander outranked him, and so could say whatever he pleased, as far as McSweeney was concerned.

Schneider went on, “Trouble is, the damn Rebs knew we were coming, so they baked us a cake. A whole bunch of cakes, as a matter of fact.”

“Sir?” McSweeney said: when his superior spoke directly to him, he had to answer. He regretted the necessity. Ever since their clash over the need to enforce all regulations to the fullest-gospel to him, but evidently not to Schneider-he’d feared the captain was trying to seduce him away from the straight and narrow path he had trodden all his life.

“Toward Memphis,” Schneider amplified. “They fortified all this delta country in eastern Arkansas to a fare-thee-well, and so here it is two years after the damn war started and we’re only getting to Jonesboro now.”

“Oh. Yes, sir,” McSweeney said. Matters military he would willingly discuss with his superior, even if Schneider was sometimes profane. “And, of course, since we stand on the far side of the Mississippi, we get half the resources of those east of the river. General Custer’s First Army, I recall-”

“Don’t talk about any of that,” Schneider broke in. “It hurts too much when I think about it. We’re not going to have an easy time up ahead, either.”

“At Jonesboro? No, sir, I don’t expect we will,” McSweeney said. He could see the Confederate strongpoint without any trouble. Why not? None of the timber was tall enough to block his view, not any more. The town sprawled along the top of Crowley’s Ridge, in most places not a feature worth noticing but here in this flat country high ground to be coveted. “What’s the altitude here, sir?”

“At Jonesboro? It’s 344 feet,” Captain Schneider said. “That’s 344 too many, you ask me. And we lose even what little cover these woods-or what’s left of ’em-give us, too, because it was farming country out to three or four miles in front of the town.”

“I see that also, sir,” McSweeney answered. He raised his voice to call out to his men: “Give way to the right for the column coming back.”

The column coming back was made up of soldiers returning from the front line, soldiers for whom McSweeney’s squad, Schneider’s company, were among the replacements. They looked the way any soldiers coming away from the front line looked: dirty, haggard, exhausted seemingly past the repair of sleep, some managing grins as they thought about what they’d do now that they’d finally got relieved, others shambling along with blank stares, as if they hardly knew where they were. That happened to some men after they’d taken too much shelling. McSweeney had seen as much, though he didn’t understand. How could a man whom the Lord had spared be anything but joyful?

One of the soldiers leaving the front pointed to the tank of jellied oil he bore on his back. “Rebs catch you with that contraption, pal, they won’t bother sendin’ you to no prison camp. They’ll just cut your throat for you and leave you for the buzzards.”

“They shall not take me alive.” McSweeney spoke with great assurance. He generally spoke with great assurance. The soldier who’d presumed to remark on the flamethrower stared, shrugged, and kept on marching.

Noncoms left behind guided the company into the section of trench they would inhabit till taken out of line themselves. “I don’t like this for hell,” Captain Schneider said. “Not for hell I don’t. We’re right out in the open, with whatever guns the Rebs have up on that ridge looking straight down our throats.”

“And the men who were here before us were not careful enough about that, either,” McSweeney said. For once, he needed to give his squad no orders. Seeing the same thing he did, every man jack of them had taken out his entrenching tool and was busy improving the shelter with which they had been provided. McSweeney turned to Schneider. “I would wager the barbed wire will be as weak.”

“You’re likely right, Sergeant,” Schneider answered, “but I’m not going to stick my head up to find out, not in broad daylight I’m not. Come tonight, we’ll send out a wiring party-if there’s any wire to be had.”

“Yes, sir,” McSweeney said. “I sometimes think Philadelphia cares not at all whether the war on this side of the river is won or lost. Utah mattered to the powers that be, because it was on the rail line to the Pacific. Here-” He shook his head. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

“You’ll get a lot of people who do the real fighting to tell you the fools back in Philadelphia are out of their minds,” Schneider said with a grin. When McSweeney didn’t grin back, the captain frowned. McSweeney wondered why.

The wiring party did not go out that night: a wiring party without wire was nothing but wasted effort. Ben Carlton cooked up a stew inedible even by his own standards, which were low. “The enemy seeks to wound us,” McSweeney told him. “You should not.”

Carlton gave him a resentful stare. “Ain’t like you could do better.”

“I admit it,” McSweeney said.

“You do?” The cook stared again, this time in a different way. “Ain’t never heard you admit nothin’ before.”

“However,” McSweeney went on implacably, as if Carlton had not spoken, “I was not assigned to cook. You were.” Resentment returned to Carlton’s face. McSweeney ignored it, as he always did, confident in his own rightness and righteousness.

No new wire came up to the front. Captain Schneider swore. McSweeney sent Carlton out to see if he could come up with any: the man was a menace as a cook, but an inspired scavenger. When Carlton had no luck, McSweeney concluded there truly was no wire to be had. He went up and down the line, making sure the machine guns were well sited. Only after that was done did he wrap himself in his blanket and go to sleep.

Rebel artillery made sure he did not sleep late. Those guns up on top of Crowley’s Ridge started shelling the U.S. position a couple of hours before dawn. “Gas!” somebody screamed in the middle of the unholy din. McSweeney donned his gas helmet as calmly and quickly as if he were practicing in front of a mirror.

“Be ready!” he yelled as soon as the first light showed in the sky. Not five minutes later, Confederate machine guns added their racket to the crashes from the artillery.

Shouts rose up and down the trench: “Here they come!” “Here come the goddamn motherfucking sons of bitches!” Beneath the gas helmet, McSweeney’s face set in disapproving lines. He’d never find out who had committed the obscene blasphemy. And then a shout rose that made him forget to worry about discipline and propriety: “Barrel! Jesus, the Rebs have a stinking barrel!”

He stuck his head up over the top of the parapet. Sure enough, one of those tracked traveling fortresses was slowly rumbling and clanking straight toward the U.S. line-straight toward him, it looked like. The U.S. machine guns went from raking the soldiers in butternut advancing with the barrel to aiming their fire exclusively at it, trying to knock it out of action before it could get into the trenches.

It was a British-style machine, with cannon mounted in sponsons on either side. One of those cannon spat fire. A machine gun fell silent. The barrel clattered forward once more. Its own machine guns sprayed bullets at the U.S. soldiers.

The glass portholes in McSweeney’s gas helmet were fogged on the inside and streaked with dust on the outside. That did not keep him from noticing a couple of men running away from the barrel. “Halt!” he roared at them. It did no good. At last, the men had discovered something they feared worse than they feared him.

Boom! The barrel fired again. Another machine gun abruptly stopped shooting at it. Ricochets whined off the steel armor, striking sparks but failing to penetrate. McSweeney wondered how many more barrels that he could not see were moving forward.

He shrugged. If he couldn’t see them, he couldn’t do anything about them. He could see this one. He bent and, careful not to disturb his gas helmet, shrugged over his shoulders the straps to the metal tank that fueled his special weapon. Then he waited. Bullets seemed unable to hurt the barrel.

Here it came, grinding its way through and over the few strands of wire protecting the U.S. trenches. Having thicker belts out there wouldn’t have stopped it. More soldiers in green-gray fled the machine they could not stop.

It crushed the parapet and stood poised up there above the edge of the trench, triumphant, like a great bull elephant. As it began its plunge into the U.S. works, McSweeney sent a stream of flame in through one of the machine-gun ports. An instant later, he did the same with the other port on the right side of the barrel, thereby making sure neither of those guns would bear on him.

Through the shelling, through the firing going on all around, through the coughing roar of the barrel’s engine, he heard screams inside the metal hull. Hatches flew open on top of the barrel. Men started scrambling out. Smiling behind the canvas of the mask, McSweeney burned them down. They tumbled back into the machine, black and shrunken and flaming, like insects that had flown into the flame of a gaslight.

Smoke poured from the barrel. Ammunition started cooking off in it. McSweeney regretfully moved away, that hard, tight grin still on his face. A Confederate soldier sprang onto the parapet. He fired from the hip at McSweeney-and missed. He never got a second chance. A tongue of flame licked over him. He tumbled back, burning, burning.

A grenade flew down into the trench. The blast was deafening. A fragment bit McSweeney’s leg. But when a Rebel followed the grenade, he too became a torch. No more Confederate soldiers tried coming down into the U.S. trenches, not anywhere the flame could reach. The sight of the blazing barrel took the heart out of their attack.

“You’ll get a medal for this!” someone shouted: someone in captain’s bars. Schneider hadn’t run, then. That was something. The company commander went on, “A Medal of Honor, if I have anything to do with it.”

“Thank you, sir.” McSweeney was as unflinchingly honest about himself as about everything and everyone around him. “I earned it.”

The envelope with the familiar handwriting had caused a small stir when it got to Scipio’s apartment house. Any time mail arrived there was a small occasion, for only a few of the Negroes in the building were able to read and write. “Who it from?” asked the apartment manager, a plump black fellow named Demosthenes. “Sho’’nuf write pretty.”

Scipio had professed ignorance; the imperturbable mask a butler had to be able to don at will was proof against Demosthenes’ curiosity. Behind that mask, he’d been trembling. How did Miss Anne find out where I was living? he wondered. The war had made people forget about registering newly arrived blacks, and in any case he was but one Nero among many Negroes by that name in Columbia.

In his haste to find out what his former mistress wanted, he’d ignored yet another inviting glance from the widow Jezebel, ignored it so flagrantly that he knew he’d offended. He hadn’t cared.

The message, as was Anne Colleton’s way, was to the point. Come to Marshlands Sunday before noon, she’d written. If you do, no harm will come to you. If you do not, I shall not answer for the consequences.

And so, early Sunday morning, Scipio, not doubting her word for a moment, had hopped aboard the beat-up Negro car of a train at Confederacy Station, traveled southeast and then southwest around two sides of a triangle to reach St. Matthews (no direct rail route on the third side existing), and then trudged out of town down a muddy road that got muddier as a chilly drizzle came down, heading west toward the plantation where he’d lived his whole life till the past year.

Marks of the Negro uprising still scarred the countryside: burnt-out houses and barns, cotton fields gone to weeds, trees shattered by the artillery that had done more than anything else to break the Congaree Socialist Republic. Despite the scars, Scipio had the feeling he was walking back into his own past. He wondered if Anne Colleton would have a brass-buttoned tailcoat waiting for him when he got back to the plantation.

All things considered, he preferred life as a laborer, which had more freedom to it than he’d ever imagined. Very few people, though, had ever cared about what he preferred. He hiked through the forest where he’d killed Major Hotchkiss. If anyone ever found out about that, none of Miss Anne’s promises would matter in the least.

Coming up the familiar path, turning onto it, and seeing the Marshlands mansion in ruins brought home to him how much things had changed. The Negro cottages still standing alongside those charred ruins brought home to him how much things hadn’t.

A battered, filthy, rusty Ford was parked next to one of those cottages: no sign anywhere of the fancy motorcar Miss Anne had driven. None of the field hands would have had an automobile, though, no matter how battered. That had to be where the mistress was staying. As Scipio approached the cottage, a chill ran down his back. Before the uprising-the revolution that had failed-that had been Cassius’cottage. Scipio wondered if Anne Colleton appreciated the irony.

A few children were playing outside in spite of the drizzle. In his city clothes, he was a stranger to them. Strangers, these days, were objects of fear, not curiosity. “What you wan’?” asked one of the boys, a chap who would have been just too young to fight in the revolutionary army, which had had more than one twelve-year-old carrying a rifle.

“I wish to speak with the mistress of Marshlands, Ajax,” Scipio answered. “Will you be so good as to tell her I have arrived?”

Ajax and the other children stared at him, not expecting that kind of language to come from the mouth of a black man wearing a frayed, collarless shirt and a pair of dungarees with patches at the knees, a cloth cap on his head against the rain. Then the youngster recognized him in spite of the unfamiliar habiliments. “It Scipio!” he yelped. “Do Jesus, Scipio done come back!”

That shout brought faces to windows and made several doors come open so the inhabitants of those cottages could gape-or could warily study-the returned prodigal. One of the opening doors was that of the cottage formerly Cassius’. Out came Anne Colleton, who ignored the nasty weather. “Good morning, Scipio,” she said, almost-but not quite-as she might have done before the revolt. “You were wise to come.”

“Ma’am, I thought so myself, which is why I did,” he answered.

She stood aside. “Well, come in,” she said. “I have coffee waiting, and cold chicken, and sweet-potato pie. You’ll be hungry, I expect.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said again. He went into the cottage, pausing only to wipe his feet on the jute mat in front of the door. The cottage hadn’t boasted a mat when Cassius had lived there. It hadn’t boasted an icebox, either, or a small stove to supplement the fireplace. Nor had it held a bookcase, even if the titles on the shelves were worn secondhand copies like the ones he bought for himself. But there had been literature here: Marx and Engels and Lincoln and other Red and near-Red writers. Cassius, though, had had to keep all that hidden.

Anne Colleton closed the door behind them. “Help yourself to anything,” she said. “I don’t want anyone but the two of us hearing what we have to say to each other.” That explained why she had no servant present. And for her to serve him had undoubtedly never once crossed her mind. She was, after all, a sort of commingling of feudal landlord and capitalist oppressor. Scipio had read Cassius’ books, too.

Unless he planned on killing her and then fleeing, he had to do as she said for the moment. He’d thought about that, walking out from St. Matthews. But even if the field hands didn’t try stopping him as he ran, she would have put aside a letter or something somewhere to point the finger at him. She was not the sort to miss such a trick.

As if to underscore that, she pulled a pistol out of her handbag. “In case you were foolish,” she remarked. “I didn’t really expect you to be, but one never knows these days.”

“I have no intention of being foolish,” he answered gravely. She’d put out two coffee cups. He poured one for her, one for himself. Since she’d set out only one plate, he assumed she’d already eaten. The food was plain, nothing like the fancy banquets she’d served in the days before the war, but good enough. Since he’d had nothing but a slice of bread before leaving for the train station, he ate his fill now.

With more patience than she usually showed, his former mistress let him finish before saying anything. When he was done, she began without preamble: “I want you to tell me how my brother Jacob died.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He made his voice as flat as he could, a fitting complement to the features he schooled to stillness. Her face and voice were similarly chary of giving him clues. How much did she know? How much did he dare lie? After no more than a heartbeat, he decided that anyone who lied to her was a fool. The truth, then, as much of it as he could give. “Ma’am, he perished most courageously.”

“I wouldn’t have expected anything else,” she answered. “Courage Jacob always had. No brains to speak of, but courage. That wench Cherry would have played a part in it, wouldn’t she?”

“Ma’am, if you know the answers, what need have you to question me?” Scipio asked.

“I am in a position to question you,” Anne said. “You are not in a position to question me. She would have used her charms to soften him up, wouldn’t she?” That was not a question; she sounded wearily sure she knew whereof she spoke. “And Cassius. He’s still stealing things hereabouts, you know.”

“So I have heard, yes,” Scipio said. The more he talked about Cassius now, the less he would have to talk about what had happened a year before.

“He still has a price on his head, too,” Anne said. “If he comes round here”-the pistol twitched in her hand-“I shall kill him.” She studied Scipio, as if deciding whether to butcher a hog now or to wait. “And, of course, you still have a price on your head as well.”

“You said no harm would come to me if I visited you here,” Scipio said quickly. If she hadn’t had the pistol, he would have thought about trying to kill her. Living with her, serving her, had taught him how devious she was.

But when she said, “And I meant that,” he thought she was telling the truth. She went on, “You and Julia are the only members of the house staff I’ve been able to find. She and the field hands deny knowing anything. I’ve made my investigations, but you are the only eyewitness to what happened I’ve been able to…find.”

Catch was what she meant. Wherever she’d learned whatever she’d learned, she knew a good deal. Scipio had not defied Cassius when the Red leader made it plain his choices were cooperation and death. The stuff of defiance was not in him. Maybe it never had been; maybe his servile upbringing had trained out whatever he’d once owned.

He told the whole story, from Cherry’s claim of abuse to the gun battle in which Jacob Colleton had defended himself so well to the storming of the bedroom door behind which Anne’s gassed brother had barricaded himself. “Three or four men did that,” he said. “They rushed past me so fast, I do not know for certain who they were. I do not know which of them fired the fatal shot, either. Ma’am, you may do with me what you will, but I am being truthful in this regard.”

“I believe you,” Anne said, which caught Scipio by surprise. Sitting where she sat, he wouldn’t have believed himself. She went on, “The reason I believe you is that, if you were lying to me, you would have come up with a better story. The truth, I’ve found, is usually confused.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Now-” Her voice sharpened. “Who burned the Marshlands mansion?”

“That was Cassius, ma’am,” he answered, adding, “I wish he had not done it. Many beautiful things were lost.”

“In five words, you’ve just given the story of this war,” she said. “I know you had a role in the so-called Congaree Socialist Republic. From what I’ve heard, you usually did what you could to stop its excesses. I suspect your reasons had as much to do with what would happen after the uprising was put down as they did with any special milk of human kindness in your veins, but only God can look into a man’s heart, and I’ve found out that, whatever else I may be, I am not God.”

Not knowing what to say to that, Scipio kept quiet. If Anne Colleton hadn’t thought she was God before the Red revolt, she’d done a fine job of concealing the fact. He wondered what she’d gone through. He didn’t have the nerve to ask. He didn’t have the nerve for a lot of things. In a nutshell, that was the tale of his life.

Wearily, Anne said, “Go back to Columbia. Go back to your work. Once we win the war, that will have been enough. Don’t ever come here again, unless I summon you.”

“Ma’am, on that you may rest assured.” Scipio wondered if he was talking like an educated white man for the last time in his life. In a way, he would miss it if that proved so. In another way, giving up what had been imposed on him was a sort of freedom in itself.

He rose, half bowed to Anne, and left the cottage. Field hands and children stared after him. He didn’t look back. As he got to the forest where he’d killed Major Hotchkiss, he decided he needed a new apartment, a new job, a new name. The widow had wanted to go to bed with him. He sighed. It wouldn’t happen now. “Odder chances,” he said aloud. “Dey is odder chances.” He kept walking toward the train station.

Brakes squealing, the train pulled into the station. “Cincinnati!” the conductor shouted. “All out for Cincinnati!”

Men, most of them in uniform, and a scattering of women rose from their seats so they could depart. Irving Morrell stayed where he was. So did Heinz Guderian beside him. “How far now from Cincinnati to Philadelphia?” Guderian asked in German.

Morrell visualized a map. “Six hundred miles, maybe a little less,” he answered in the same language. Seeing Guderian look puzzled, he amplified that: “About 950 kilometers.” He moved back and forth between one system of measurement and the other readily enough, but had learned the German found it harder.

Sure enough, Guderian twitted him about it: “How many feet in a mile? It is 5,280, nicht wahr? What a foolish number to have to keep straight every time you need to make a calculation.”

Before Morrell could defend the American system, the conductor leaned over and said with a smile, “Wir willen winnen der Krieg.”

Guderian stared at him, not because he spoke German so badly (he’d said “We want to win the war,” not “We will win the war,” which was what he’d probably meant, and he’d botched his article and his word order, too), but because he spoke it at all: he was a black man with a mouth full of gold-crowned teeth. “Ja!” Guderian managed at last, and the conductor, smiling still, headed down the central aisle. To Morrell, the German General Staff officer said, “I had not realized just how popular my country was in the United States.”

“Oh, yes,” Morrell said with a nod. “Good thing we weren’t speaking French, or he’d have probably thought we were spies. A classmate of mine at the Academy, Jack Lefebvre, changed his name to Schmidt after the war started. It was either that, he told me, or kiss promotion good-bye. And I happen to know his people have been in the USA since before the War of Secession.”

“This business of everyone coming from elsewhere or having parents or grandparents who came from elsewhere is very strange to me,” Guderian said. “In Europe, we have been where we are since the Volkerwanderungen of a thousand years ago and more.”

Passengers were boarding the train as well as leaving it. Some of them came from elsewhere, too, speaking with accents plainly sprung from the CSA. A couple of those fellows, looking prosperous with big bellies, expensive black suits, and homburgs, sat down across from Morrell and Guderian. “It’ll be right strange,” one of them said to the other with a ripe drawl, “but I reckon we can do it.”

Shifting to English, Morrell leaned over and asked, “Who are you people, anyway?” Talk about spies-!

The man sitting closer to him stuck out a plump hand. “Major, I’m Davis Lee Vidals, lieutenant governor of Kentucky-of the United State of Kentucky, I make haste to assure you.”

Morrell reached out and shook the proffered hand, being careful not to squash it. He gave his own name. “That’s wonderful news!” he said. “Welcome back to the country where you belong.”

“Thank you very kindly, Major Morrell,” Vidals said. “That fellow sitting beside you-is he a German?” His voice was half dread, half awe: he might have been one of the people helping to bring Kentucky back into the USA, but he didn’t seem to know how to feel about U.S. allies who had been enemies of the Confederate States.

“Ja, I am a German.” Guderian spoke English with a heavy accent, but was fluent enough. He grinned at the Kentucky politician. “You would not expect to find an American officer traveling with a Frenchman, would you?” He’d paid attention to the story of Jack Lefebvre, now Schmidt, all right.

“Good God almighty, I hope not!” Vidals exclaimed. “Gentlemen, let me introduce to you my friend and colleague here: this is Luther Bliss, chief of the Kentucky State Police. We’re both on our way to Philadelphia to settle arrangements for electing congressmen and senators next month.”

Bliss leaned across his traveling companion to shake hands with Morrell and Guderian. He was hard-faced and sallow, with a scar seaming one cheek. His eyes were a light, light brown, about the color of a hunting dog’s. Morrell wouldn’t have cared to let the Kentuckian stand behind him; he was the sort of man who looked to have a stiletto stashed up his sleeve. Kentucky State Police, Morrell suspected, was a euphemism for Kentucky Secret Police.

“How did Kentucky go about applying for readmission to the United States?” he asked. The curiosity was more professional than personal. Administering conquered territory and bringing it under the control of the USA was something that might be part of his responsibilities one day.

The train started rolling as Davis Lee Vidals started talking. Morrell quickly discovered the train was more likely than the lieutenant governor to slow down. “We convened a gathering of distinguished Kentuckians eager to renew their historic ties to the United States of America,” Vidals began, “and discussed ways and means by which this might be accomplished. We-”

“How many Kentuckians?” Morrell asked.

Vidals began another speech. It went on for some time, and told Morrell nothing. When the politician paused to inhale-which took a while-Luther Bliss interjected, “Couple hundred.” His superior-his nominal superior, at any rate-gave him a dirty look and started talking again.

Several well-modulated paragraphs of rhetoric later, Morrell asked, “Did you need any soldiers to make sure things went the way you had in mind?”

Davis Lee Vidals waxed indignant, eloquently indignant, at the very idea. He didn’t, however, say no. He also didn’t say yes. He did say, and say, and say. Presently, he paused again, this time to light a cigar. In that brief interval of silence, Bliss got another chance to open his mouth. “Couple regiments,” he said, and fell silent again.

Morrell nodded. That told him everything he thought he needed to know about the new state government of Kentucky: without massive help from the U.S. Army, it wouldn’t exist. But Heinz Guderian spoke up, in German: “This is not so bad as it may sound, Major. When, forty-five years ago, we annexed Alsace and Lorraine from France, many of the people there resented and resisted us. There remain some who do, but those provinces also remain a part of the German Reich, and grow more accustomed to our rule with each passing day.”

Vidals’ eyes got wider with every guttural he heard, and wider still when Morrell answered in German. He might have been bringing Kentucky back into the USA, but he was also bringing a lot of ideas from the Quadruple Entente with him. Luther Bliss, by contrast, listened quietly. Morrell wouldn’t have bet against his understanding every word that was said.

The only thing that finally slowed Vidals down was sleep. No matter that he was sitting in a seat that didn’t recline. He set his homburg in his lap, put his head back, and snored like a thunderstorm in training. That he was so aggressively asleep meant everyone else in the crowded car had trouble joining him.

Outside, the countryside was dark as the tomb. That hadn’t been so farther west, but here in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Confederate bombing aeroplanes remained a nuisance. The enforced darkness after sunset made it harder for them to find worthwhile targets.

Morrell had finally drifted into a fitful doze when the train pulled into Philadelphia at a little before four in the morning. He grunted and groaned and rubbed his eyes. Across the aisle, the lieutenant governor of Kentucky kept on snoring till the conductor shouted out the arrival. Luther Bliss didn’t look to have slept a wink, or to have needed sleep, either.

When the doors opened, a brass band started blaring “The Star-Spangled Banner.” There on the platform stood President Roosevelt. When the Kentuckians got out, he folded them into a bearhug. “Welcome back, prodigal sons!” he cried, while photographers’ flash trays went off with almost as much smoke and noise as an artillery bombardment. “A new star joins the flag; a new star shines in the firmament!” The band switched to “My Old Kentucky Home.”

Let’s see what Senator Debs can do to match that, Morrell thought; bringing Kentucky back into the USA before the election had to be worth thousands of votes. Soldiers weren’t supposed to have politics. Such politics as Morrell did have were Democratic.

Waiting for him and Guderian was not the president of the United States but Captain John Abell of the General Staff. “Welcome, Captain Guderian,” the clever, almost bloodless officer said in excellent German. He turned to Morrell and returned to English: “General Wood has ordered me to extend his personal greetings to you, Lieutenant Colonel.”

“Lieut-” Morrell didn’t get any further than that, because Guderian was pounding him on the back. Cutting off the Canadian railroad that ran through Banff had earned him a promotion, and evidently got him forgiven for the difficulties the USA had had in Utah. If Captain Abell was pleased at that, he hid it very well.

He said, “As you know, you are assigned to duty here in Philadelphia once more, Lieutenant Colonel. I assure you, I look forward to working with you in every way.”

A liar, but a polite liar, Morrell judged. Guderian said, “See, my friend? You have won a victory, and they have put you back behind a desk. It almost tempts one to lose, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Morrell said. “Almost.”

“Lord, I wish Emily was here.” Jefferson Pinkard stabbed himself with a needle, about the fourth time he’d done that.

Hipolito Rodriguez gave him an amused look. “Most of the time, amigo, you say you wish you was with your esposa. Now you want her here with you. You no can make up your mind?” He waved around at the bleak west-Texas prairie. “I think she rather you home with her.”

Pinkard snorted. “Yeah, I’d rather I was home with her, too. But she can do this a hell of a lot easier’n I can.” Stubbornly, he kept sewing the single chevron to the sleeve of his uniform tunic. “If I’d known it was gonna be so blame much trouble, maybe I wouldn’t have let ’em promote me.”

“Si, life is easier when you have only yourself to worry about,” Rodriguez agreed with obvious sincerity.

“Hell, Hip, if they reckon you can do the job, how you gonna tell ’em no?” Jeff asked. He could complain about making private first class after the fact; he hadn’t complained when Captain Connolly told him he’d done it. He fought through another couple of stitches, then surveyed his handiwork and found something else over which to complain: “That stripe’s pretty light, isn’t it? Make it easier for those Yankee sons of bitches to spot me.”

“Wait till it rains again and you go through the mud,” Rodriguez told him. “Then your whole uniform the same color again.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Pinkard dug out some cornbread he hadn’t finished at breakfast. It had got hard. He didn’t care. Even when it was fresh, it hadn’t been a patch on what Emily made. Her cornbread and her skill with the needle weren’t what he really missed about her, though. He wanted to be back home in Birmingham to warm her bed-and to make sure nobody else was warming it for him.

He stood up in the trench to put on the tunic to which he’d affixed his new chevron-and a bullet cracked past his head. He threw himself-and the tunic-down flat into the trench. “Got to dig it deeper,” Hip Rodriguez said seriously. “They shouldn’t see you when you get up like that.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said again. “They wouldn’t see you, I don’t guess.” He was several inches taller than the littler Sonoran. This time, he donned the fresh tunic sitting down. It wasn’t so fresh any more; he’d smeared dirt over a good part of it, including the sleeves. He stopped worrying about sharpshooters’ spotting him on account of one stripe.

A few more bullets flew from the U.S. trenches. Here and there, Confederates along the line east of Lubbock shot back. Pinkard didn’t hear any of his countrymen cry out in pain. He didn’t know whether they got any Yankees, either. And if they had hit somebody, so what? Did that mean they would run the U.S. Army out of Texas? He knew too well it didn’t. That was what his regiment had come here to do. How many lives were gone, without the line’s moving one way or the other? Too many, that was sure.

As if to underscore the point, a Confederate machine gun opened up, maybe at a Yankee out of his nice, safe burrow, maybe just for the sake of using up some ammunition. Half a minute later, a U.S. machine gun answered. A couple of hundred yards away from Pinkard, somebody started screaming for his mama.

“Shit,” Hip Rodriguez said, and crossed himself. He shook his head, then got a tobacco pouch out of his pocket and began rolling a cigarette.

After a while, both machine-gun crews decided they’d made their pointless points. They quit firing. Rifles kept banging a few minutes longer, nervous, excited men shooting at what they thought were targets. At last, quiet returned.

“You know what all this here reminds me of?” Jeff said, by then having seen a lot of meaningless fire fights that conformed to the same general pattern. When Rodriguez shook his head, Pinkard went on, “It’s like a rainstorm, ain’t it? First you get a few drops, then it comes down hard for a while, then it tapers off, and it’s all quiet and the sun’s out again.”

“That is clever, what you say.” Rodriguez nodded now. “This time, we don’t get no-” The noise he made could have been thunder rolling or artillery going off. It fit either way.

Up the communications trench into the front line came Stinky Salley. Most times, Pinkard would have been as glad to see him as to encounter a new kind of louse, but Salley had somehow used his civilian career as a clerk to convince Captain Connolly that no one else could possibly match him as the man to pick up and distribute the mail. He carried a butternut canvas bag labeled CSAMPO. “Letters!” he called. “I’ve got letters!”

He needed more than being the bearer of news from home to make him popular with his fellow soldiers, but that didn’t hurt. Men came hurrying over to him, arms outstretched, smiles on their faces. “Come on, Stinky,” somebody said. “Cough ’em up!” But even that wasn’t so peremptory as it would have been had Salley not borne letters.

He took them out of the sack and started reading off names: “Burroughs! Dalton! Pinkard!” Jeff took the envelope with an enormous grin; he recognized Emily’s handwriting. “Captain Connolly, one for you, sir.” To officers, Salley was painfully obsequious. “Pratt! Ambrose! Pinkard again-you lucky dog.” Jeff’s promotion hadn’t quite sunk in on his fellow Alabaman.

“Two in one mail call!” Pinkard exclaimed joyfully as he carried both letters-the second, he saw, also from his wife-away from the crowd around Salley. He sat down beside Hip Rodriguez. Rodriguez never got mail; as far as Jeff could tell, the little Sonoran didn’t know anyone who could read or write, and had only started learning those arts himself since he’d joined the Army. He liked listening to other soldiers read their mail, though, as did anybody who’d drawn a blank in the distribution.

Jeff looked to see which letter had the earlier postmark, and opened that one first. “‘Dear Jeff,’” he read aloud, “‘I am fine. I wish you was home with me, so I could give you a kiss and-’” He skipped most of the next paragraph, at least with his voice, though his eyes lingered on it. Every once in a while, Emily would do something like that. It made him more anxious than ever to get home. Rodriguez grinned at him, probably guessing what he was leaving out.

Coughing a little, he resumed where the spice left off: “‘I am fine, and working hard. I hope so much you are well and have not got yourself hurt. Fanny got herself a telegram from the War Department yesterday that says poor Bedford got wounded, and she is frantic.’”

Turning to Rodriguez, Jeff explained, “I worked with Bedford Cunningham, and him and his wife live next door to me.”

“This is hard,” the Sonoran said. “This is very hard.” He sounded altogether sincere; he had a good deal more sympathy in him than the run-of-the-mill Confederate soldier. “For you, my amigo, and for your, your wife”-he remembered the English word-“and more for your amigo’s wife, and most of all for him. How peligroso-how dangerous-is the wound?”

“Letter doesn’t say,” Pinkard answered. “Reckon Fanny didn’t know, so Emily wouldn’t’ve, either.” Rodriguez pointed to the other envelope. Nodding, Jeff tore it open. He didn’t read it out loud all the way though, but rapidly skimmed through it, looking for news of Bedford Cunningham.

When he found it, his face gave him away. “It is very bad?” Hip Rodriguez asked quietly.

“Right arm”-Jeff held up his own, partly to help Rodriguez’s uncertain English, partly to remind himself he still owned that precious piece of flesh-“gone above the elbow, Emily says. Bedford’s on his way home now. He’ll get better. What’s he going to do, though, with a wound like that? Never get on the floor at the Sloss Works again, that’s certain, and iron’s about the only thing he knew.”

Rodriguez closed his right hand into a fist. He watched it carefully as he did so. Pinkard watched, too: all the marvelous, miraculous interplay of muscle and tendon and bone beneath a sheath of wonderfully unbroken skin. Gone in an instant, Jeff thought. Wonder if a bullet got him, or if a shell came down right next door. Wonder if he knows. Wonder if he cares.

“If this happen to me,” Rodriguez said, “I take whatever money I have, I go to the cantina, and I don’t do nothing but drink from then on. What else am I good for, without my right hand?”

“Don’t know,” Pinkard said. “You couldn’t farm one-handed, any more than you could go back to the foundry. It’s funny,” he went on after a little while. “Just reading this here letter about Bedford hits me harder than seeing some of the people from the company get hurt right in front of my eyes. Is that crazy, or what?”

“No,” Rodriguez answered. “This is a good friend, almost like your hermano, your brother. We are still some of us like strangers.”

“Yeah, maybe.” That still tasted wrong, but it was closer than any explanation Jeff had come up with. “God damn the war,” he muttered. Rodriguez nodded solemnly. A Yankee machine gun started up, the gunner spraying bullets over a wide arc to see what he could hit. “God damn the war,” Jeff said again, and checked to make sure his Tredegar had a full clip.

From under the awning, Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer stared gloomily at the hills above White House, Tennessee. “We have to have a victory,” he said. “We have to. The war requires it, and politics require it, too.”

Cautiously, Major Abner Dowling said, “Joining battle for the sake of politics is a recipe for getting licked, sir. We learned that in the War of Secession, and all over again during the Second Mexican War.”

Custer’s pouchy stare swung from the stalled battlefield toward his adjutant. “Most times, Major, I would agree with you,” he said after what was for him an unusual pause to reflect. “Now, though-do you want that wild-eyed lunatic Debs sitting in the White House come next March? He’s already said he’ll treat for peace with the Rebels and the Canucks if he gets elected. Is that what you want, Major? Is it?”

“No, sir,” Dowling said at once; he was as good a Democrat as Custer.

He might as well not have spoken; once the general commanding First Army got rolling, he kept rolling till he ran down. “God in heaven, Major!” Custer burst out, a rheumy thunderer. “We’re winning on every front-on every front, I tell you-and that crackbrained maniac wants to give it up? And for what? For an honorable peace, he calls it. Honorable!” With his age-loosened, wrinkled skin and enormous mustache, Custer had a formidable sneer when he turned it loose, as he did now.

“I agree with you, sir,” Dowling said, for once telling Custer the unvarnished truth. “We just have to hope the people back home haven’t got too sick of the war to want to fight it through to the finish.”

“They had better not try quitting,” Custer growled. “If Debs calls the troops home, we’ll have a brand-new American Revolution, mark my words.”

Dowling did mark them. They filled him with horror. His head whipped around. After a moment’s panic, he heartily thanked God. Nobody but he had heard Custer. As casually as he could, he said, “Armed rebellion against the government of the United States is treason, sir.”

“I know that.” Custer sounded testy, not repentant. “Still some Rebs left alive who need hanging, by God, unless their own niggers shot ’em for us. Too much to hope for, that, I daresay. Now you listen to me, Major.” Dowling, who had done his share and more of listening, made himself look attentive. Custer resumed: “I don’t want a rebellion, not even a little bit. Do you understand me? What I want is to make a rebellion unnecessary, and that means victory, to give the people the idea-the true idea, mind you-that we stand on the edge of the greatest triumph in the history of mankind.”

“The Rebs are still fighting hard, sir,” Dowling said, in what had to be the understatement of this or any other decade: the front hadn’t moved a mile closer to the White House since the enormous U.S. offensive opened. “So are the Canadians, which forces us to divide our efforts.”

“Teddy Roosevelt bit off more than he could chew, right at the start of the war,” Custer said. This, from a man whose notion of reconnaissance was a headlong charge at an obstacle with everything he had, struck Major Dowling as a curious utterance-which, for once, did not mean it was wrong.

Rather to Dowling’s relief, the debate on grand strategy stopped then, for one of Custer’s division commanders came up, stood under the awning, and waited to be noticed. He waited a while, too; Custer was jealous of his own prerogatives. At last, grudgingly, he said, “Good morning, Brigadier General MacArthur.”

“Good morning, sir.” Brigadier General Daniel MacArthur came to stiff attention, which made him tower even more over both Custer and Dowling. Dowling understood why Custer was touchy around this particular subordinate. MacArthur was, visibly, a man on the rise. At thirty-two, he was the youngest division commander in the U.S. Army. Unlike earlier conflicts, this was one where an officer had a devil of a time making a name for himself by pluck and dash. As far as anyone could do that in an age of machine guns and trenches and barbed wire, Daniel MacArthur had done it.

He made sure people knew he’d done it, too, which was one reason he’d got his division. In some ways, he and Custer were very much alike, though both of them would have angrily turned on Dowling had he been rash enough to say such a thing. Still, as far as the adjutant was concerned, the long ivory holder through which MacArthur chain-smoked cigarettes was as much an affectation as Custer’s gold-dyed locks.

MacArthur said, “Sir, we need a breakthrough. The Army needs one from us, and the country needs one from us.”

“The very thing I was saying to my adjutant not five minutes ago,” Custer replied. He looked up at the young, lean, ramrod-straight officer standing beside him. His smile was cynical and infinitely knowing. Dowling would not have wanted that smile aimed at him. After pausing to cough, Custer went on, “And you wouldn’t mind having a breakthrough for yourself, either, would you, Daniel?”

“The country’s needs come first, sir,” MacArthur answered, and sounded as if he meant it. Maybe he even believed it. But he was still very young. Dowling saw how he tensed, almost as if he’d seen a beautiful woman walk by. Yes, he lusted after a breakthrough, all right.

“We’ve been pounding the Rebs for weeks now,” Custer said. “They haven’t given us anything at all, and we haven’t been able to take much. They know as well as we do that the White House line is the last thing keeping our guns from letting Nashville know the full taste of war.”

“Yes, sir,” MacArthur said, and pulled a map from the breast pocket of his uniform. Unlike Custer, who was old-fashioned enough to relish the epaulets and other fancy accoutrements accruing to his rank, MacArthur wore an ordinary officer’s uniform set apart only by the single silver stars of his rank: ostentatious plainness, as opposed to ostentatious display. He unfolded the map. “I believe I know how to get past them, too.”

Custer put on his reading glasses, a concession of sorts. “Let’s see what you have in mind, General.”

“Misdirection.” Daniel MacArthur spoke the word solemnly, as if it were the capstone of a magic spell. Dowling figured he’d cooked his own goose then and there; Custer had about as much use for misdirection as an anteater did for snowshoes. The dashing division commander (and how many major generals gnashed their teeth at that, when they led only brigades?) said, “As you know, my men are stationed on our far left, in front of Cottontown.”

“Yes, yes,” Custer said impatiently, though Dowling wouldn’t have bet more than half a dollar that he’d been sure where in the line MacArthur’s formation did belong.

“We have found to our cost how strong the Confederate defenses due south and southwest of our position are,” MacArthur said. Custer nodded, those peroxided curls flapping at the back of his neck. MacArthur continued, “Aerial reconnaissance suggests, though, that the Rebels’ line is weaker toward the southeast. If we strike in that direction, toward Gallatin, we can set our men to taking lines less formidably manned, thereby giving them the opportunity to swing back toward Nashville, cutting in behind the entrenchments that have delayed them so long.”

Custer sucked at something between two of his false teeth. Abner Dowling scratched his chin. “Sir,” he said, “it’s not a bad scheme.” He suspected he sounded surprised. He didn’t much care for MacArthur, having seen in Custer what the passage of years was likely to do to such a man.

Custer studied the map a while longer. MacArthur had used bright blue ink to show exactly what he wanted to do. “No,” Custer said at last, “it’s not.” He sounded imperfectly enamored of it, but seemed to recognize it was a better plan than any he’d come up with. Since most of his plans amounted to nothing more than finding the enemy and attacking him (not necessarily in that order), that did not say as much as it might have otherwise.

Unlike the general commanding First Army, MacArthur did his homework ahead of time. The map was not the only sheet of paper lurking in his breast pocket. Handing Custer a typewritten list, he said, “Here are the additional artillery requirements for the assault, sir, and other ancillaries as well.”

“See what you think of this, Major,” Custer said, and passed the sheet to Dowling. Precise control of details had never been his strong suit.

MacArthur puffed and puffed, blowing smoke into Dowling’s face as if it were phosgene gas. Dowling read rapidly through the list before turning to Custer. “Sir, he wants all the heavy artillery concentrated on his division’s front, and he also wants almost all of our barrels for the assault.”

“Moving the heavy artillery will take time,” Custer said, “especially with the roads as muddy as they have been lately. I’m sure we can move some of it, but asking for all asks for too much.”

“Even half the First Army reserve would probably be adequate,” MacArthur said. He was smarter than Custer had ever been, Dowling thought: he knew enough to ask for more than he really wanted, to help assure his getting at least that much. He couldn’t quite keep the eagerness from his voice as he asked, “And the barrels-?”

“Ah, the barrels.” Custer assumed a mournful expression. “I have to remind you, General, that I am under strict orders from the War Department not to concentrate the barrels in the manner you suggest. Approved doctrine requires keeping them widely spread along the entire length of the front.”

“But, sir-” Dowling closed his mouth a split second before it got him in trouble. Custer had argued ferociously for concentrating barrels in a mass. Why was he rejecting the idea when one of his subordinates had it?

After a moment, the major understood: Custer was rejecting the idea because one of his subordinates had had it. If a division-sized attack spearheaded by a swarm of barrels succeed, who would get the credit? Not Custer-Daniel MacArthur.

MacArthur said, “Once you let me proceed, sir, I can show those fools in Philadelphia the proper way to do things.”

Abner Dowling sighed. He was but a major; neither of the exalted personages under the awning even noticed. MacArthur couldn’t have said that worse if he’d tried for a week. Custer, as Dowling knew full well, despised those fools back in Philadelphia as much as any man alive. But when MacArthur said I can show, that meant Custer couldn’t show. Custer wanted victories, yes. Custer wanted Teddy Roosevelt reelected, yes. But, most of all, Custer wanted glory for George Armstrong Custer.

Almost sorrowfully, he said, “I wish I could help you more, General, but my own orders in this regard are severely inflexible. I may be able to furnish you with, oh, half a dozen extra barrels without having some pipsqueak inspector-general calling me on the carpet, but no more than that, I fear.”

“But, sir, nothing ventured, nothing gained,” MacArthur protested.

“I am venturing what I can, General, I assure you,” Custer said icily. “Yours is not the only division in the line. Will you prepare a revised attack plan conforming to the available resources, or will you stand on the defensive?”

“You’ll have it before the day is out, sir.” MacArthur’s voice held no expression whatever. Like a mechanical man, he saluted, spun, and stalked off.

Very softly, Custer laughed at his retreating back. Dowling stared at the general commanding First Army. Custer, here, knew just what he was doing-and he enjoyed it, too. You bastard, Dowling thought. You sneaky old bastard. Was that admiration or loathing? For the life of him, he couldn’t tell.

Roger Kimball peered avidly through the periscope. The fish was running straight and true. Suddenly, the U.S. destroyer realized it was under attack. Suddenly, it tried to turn away from the creamy wake the torpedo left. Suddenly, the torpedo struck just aft of amidships. Suddenly, a great pillar of smoke and flame rose into the air. The destroyer, broken in half, sank like a stone-like two stones.

Cheers filled the narrow steel tube that was the working area of the Bonefish, drowning out the echoes of the explosion that the water carried to the submersible. “Hit!” Kimball’s own bloodthirsty howl was but one among many.

He brought his eyes back to the periscope. Only a couple of boats bobbed in the Atlantic; the damnyankees hadn’t had time to launch any more. If he’d been a German submarine commander, he would have surfaced and turned the deck gun on them. The Huns played by hard rules. There were times when Kimball, feeling the full weight of the USA pressing down on him and his country, wanted to play that way, too.

Such thoughts went by the board in a hurry when, turning the periscope, he saw another destroyer running straight for him. His fierce joy curdled and went cold in the twinkling of an eye. “Dive!” he shouted. “Take us down to 150, Tom, and make it snappy!”

“Aye aye, sir, 150 feet,” his exec answered. Compressed air bubbled out of the buoyancy chambers; seawater gurgled in to take its place. Up on the surface, those bubbles would help the Yankee sailors figure out where he was, though they were liable to have a pretty good idea already, what with the course their fellow boat had been making and the way it had tried to escape his fish.

With more and more of the North Atlantic piled atop it, the hull of the Bonefish creaked and squealed. There were a couple of little drips where the seams weren’t perfectly tight, but they were in the old familiar places. Kimball didn’t worry much about them.

Through the hull, the noise of the engine and screw up above them was perfectly audible. No-engines and screws. Two boats were moving back and forth up there. “Leveling off at 150, sir,” Tom Brearley said, straightening the diving planes. In the dim orange light, his grin was almost satanic. “They aren’t what you’d call happy with us.”

“Ain’t been happy with them since we went to war,” Kimball replied, “or before that, either, you get right down to it. Them and us, we don’t-”

He broke off abruptly. Through the pounding drone of the destroyers’ engines, he’d heard another sound, the noise that might have come from a garbage can full of cement being flung into the ocean.

“Depth charge,” Ben Coulter said hoarsely. The veteran petty officer tried to make light of it: “Those damn things, most of the time they don’t work for beans.” A moment later, another splash followed the first.

“Give me eight knots, Tom, and change course to 270,” Kim-ball said.

“Changing course to two-seven-zero, sir, aye aye, and eight knots,” Brearley acknowledged, a certain amount of doubt in his voice. Kimball didn’t blame him. Eight knots used up battery power in a hurry, cutting deeply into the time the Bonefish could stay underwater.

Without much humor, Kimball tried to make a joke of it: “When the boys on top start throwing things at you, Tom, it’s time to get out from under ’em.”

“Well, yes, sir, but-” Brearley didn’t get any further than that, for the first depth charge exploded just then.

It was, Kimball supposed, something like being in an earthquake. It was also like standing inside a metal pipe while giants pounded on the outside of it with sledgehammers. Kimball staggered and smacked the side of his head against the periscope mounting. Something wet started running down his cheek. It was warm, not cold, so he supposed it was blood rather than seawater.

Men stumbled and cursed. The lights flickered. A few seconds later, the other depth charge went off. It was farther away than the first one, so it only felt like a big kick in the ass from an angry mule.

“Sir, on second thought, eight knots is a right good idea,” Brearley said.

“Everything still answer?” Kimball asked.

Brearley nodded. “Seems to, sir.”

“We got a new leak back here, sir,” one of the men in the black gang called from the engines toward the stern. “Don’t seem too bad, though.”

“It had better not,” Kimball answered. “Tom, take her down to 200. I want to put some more distance between us and them.”

“The leaks will get worse,” Brearley said, but that was more observation than protest. The bow of the Bonefish slanted down. If the leaks got a lot worse, Kimball knew he’d have to rise. No one shouted in alarm, so he kept quiet till Brearley said, “Leveling off at 200.”

Splash! Splash! Two more depth charges went into the water. Where they went into the water was the key factor, and the one Kimball couldn’t gauge till they detonated. All he could do was hope he’d picked a direction different from the one the Yankees had chosen. Even with the Bonefish going flat out submerged, those destroyers had better than three times his speed. The only thing he had going for him was that they couldn’t see him. Hydrophones gave only a vague clue about his direction, and they had to guess his depth.

Wham! Wham! Explosions rocked the submarine. They were both closer than that second one had been, but not so close as the first. All at once, he grinned. “All stop,” he snapped to Brearley.

“All-stop,” the exec answered. He looked back over his shoulder at Kimball. “You’re not going to-?”

“Bet your balls I am, son,” the skipper of the Bonefish said. “The damnyankees guessed with me, far as direction goes. They know how fast we are. What do you want to bet they keep right on that track, pounding away? They must have some new kind of charges, too, on account of I don’t think they’ve tossed any duds at us.”

“Isn’t that wonderful?” Brearley said. Along with most of the crew, Kimball chuckled. The life of a submariner had never been easy. By what the damnyankees were throwing at the Bonefish, it had just got harder.

Splash! Splash! With even the quiet electric motors running only enough to power lights and instruments, the noise the depth charges made going into the ocean was all too audible. In his mind’s eye, Kimball saw them twisting slowly down through the green-gray waters of the Atlantic (almost the color of a Yankee soldier’s uniform), looking for his boat. He cursed himself for an overactive imagination.

Wham! Wham! He staggered. A tiny new jet of seawater sprayed coldly down the back of his neck. As they had with the first attack, the lights flickered before steadying.

“Those were in front of us, sir,” Tom Brearley said.

“I know,” Kimball answered. “Here we sit.” He could feel eyes boring into him, as he had when he’d taken the Bonefish up the Pee Dee River looking for Red rebels. Then, though, the watchful eyes had belonged to the Negroes in the swamps along the riverbank. Now they were the eyes of his own crew.

He understood exactly why, too. The previous spread of charges had been aft of the submersible, this one in front. If that meant the U.S. destroyers up there had somehow located him…the next pair would go off right on top of his conning tower.

“One thing, boys,” he said into the drip-punctuated quiet. “If it turns out I’m wrong, we’ll never know what hit us.” If water at seven atmospheres’ pressure flooded into the Bonefish, it would smash everything in its path, surely making no exceptions for flimsy human beings.

“Sir,” Brearley asked, “if you have to, how deep will you take her?”

“I’d go to 300 without blinking an eye,” Kimball answered. “It gets wet fast down that deep, but odds are you’ll come back up from it. Nobody really knows how deep you can go if you’re lucky enough. I’ve heard stories of 350, even 400 feet, when the sub was damaged and couldn’t control its dive till it touched bottom.” He grinned wryly at his exec. “’Course, the ones who go down that deep and never surface again-you don’t hear about those.”

Sailors chuckled. He looked round at them: a grimy, unshaven crew, all the more raffish in the orange lighting. They fit here, the same as he did. They would have been-some had been-outcasts, frequent inhabitants of the brig, almost outlaws, in the gentlemanly world of the Confederate States surface Navy. As far as he was concerned, they’d done the cause more good than ten times their number aboard fancy battleships.

Splash! Splash! Everyone involuntarily sucked in a long breath of the humid, fetid air. In a very little while, Kimball would find out whether his training and instincts had saved their bacon-or killed them all.

In casual tones, Coulter remarked, “Wish I had me a beer right now.”

“We get back to Charleston, I’ll buy everybody here all the beer you can drink,” Kimball promised. That was liable to be an expensive promise to keep, but he didn’t care. Getting back to Charleston would make being poor for a while afterwards worthwhile and then some.

How long for a depth charge to reach the depth for which it was fused? The new pair seemed to be taking forever. Maybe they were duds, Kimball thought. The damnyankees couldn’t have come up with a way to make them work all the time…could they?

Wham! Wham! Maybe they could. “Jesus!” Tom Brearley exclaimed. “That took forever!” Kimball wasn’t the only one for whom time had stretched like a rubber band, then. The exec turned to him with a smile as radiant as any worn, greasy man could show in that light. “Well ahead of us, both of ’em, sir.”

“Yeah,” Kimball said, as if he hadn’t just bet his life and won. “Now we sit here for as long as the batteries will let us and wait for our little friends up there to get tired and go away. How long can we wait, Tom?”

Brearley checked the gauges. “It would be longer if we hadn’t tried that sprint after we sank the destroyer, sir, but we’ve got charge enough for five or six hours.”

“Should be enough,” Kimball said jovially. It had better be enough, echoed in his mind. He took a deep breath and made a face. “Things’ll stink too bad for us to stand it any longer’n that, regardless.” That was phrased like a joke and got laughs like a joke, but it wasn’t a joke, and everybody knew it. The longer you sat submerged, the fouler the air got. That was part of the nature of the boat.

Five and a half hours after the Bonefish sank its target, Ben Coulter found he couldn’t keep a candle alight in the close, nasty atmosphere inside the pressure hull. “If we had a canary in here, sir, it would have fallen off its perch a hell of a long time ago,” he said to Kimball.

“Yeah,” the captain answered. His head ached. He could feel how slowly he was thinking. He nodded to Brearley. “Blow forward tanks, Tom. Bring her up to periscope depth.”

A long, careful scan showed nothing on the horizon. Kimball ordered the Bonefish to the surface. Wearily, he climbed the ladder to the top of the conning tower, the exec close behind him to make sure the pressurized air didn’t blow him out the hatch when he opened it.

When he did undog the hatch, his stomach did its best to crawl up his throat: all the stenches so long trapped inside the submersible seemed ten times worse when they rushed out in a great vile gale and mixed in his lungs with the first precious breath of fresh, clean sea air. Fighting down his gorge, he climbed another couple of rungs and looked around. Late-afternoon sunshine felt as savagely bright as it did during a hangover. The ocean was wide and empty. “Made it again, boys,” he said. The crew cheered.