Breakthroughs (63 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sir, our orders—” Tom Brearley began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were up above ten thousand feet by the time they crossed the front line just outside of Toronto. That didn’t stop the Canucks and limeys from blazing away at them, nor did it keep some overeager idiots on the American side of the line from sending some Archie their way. Fortunately, the U.S. gunners were no better at what they did than their counterparts on the other side.

Moss bumped his fighting scout to a stop on the rutted grass landing strip outside the little Ontario town. As usual, the groundcrew men clucked at the fine assortment of punctures he’d picked up. “The idea, sir, is to fly an aeroplane, not a patchwork quilt,” Herm said.

“As long as they don’t puncture me or the motor, I’m not going to worry about it,” Moss said.

“Well, well.” Charley Sprague came up to him as he was descending from the cockpit to the ground. “That’s not the sort of instruction you can get in flying school, is it, sir?” Sprague was tall and lean and good-looking, with expressive eyebrows and a Kaiser Bill mustache waxed to a pointed perfection not even the slipstream could ruffle. He had the indefinable manner of coming from a moneyed family.

“Not more than once,” Moss answered, which made Sprague break into a wide grin. More seriously, Moss went on, “After that, the War Department sends your family a wire they’d sooner not have.”

“After what?” Percy Stone asked, his goggles pushed up on top of his head. “After you strafe a Great Lakes battleship? I bet they do. The only thing I can think of that was less fun was when I got shot.”

“Actually, I was thinking of after you train to strafe a Great Lakes battleship,” Moss said.

Stone considered that, then nodded. “You’ve got something there. I knew about as many people who got killed learning as I did fliers who went down against the enemy. Nobody ever talks about it, but it’s true.”

Charley Sprague nodded. “You’re right about that, sir,” he said: even in brief acquaintance, Moss had seen that he punctiliously observed the rules of military courtesy. “I saw half a dozen fellows die while I was learning the game. Some of them were better fliers than I was, but they thought they were better than they were, too, if you know what I mean. And some fell out of the sky for no reason anyone could see.” He spread his hands. “ ‘Time and chance happeneth to them all,’ is what the Bible says about that.”

Last of the flight, Pete Bradley came up in time to hear Sprague’s last couple of sentences. “Ain’t it the truth?” he said, a sentence unscriptural but most sincere. “When your number’s up, it’s up, that’s all.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “I thought all our numbers were up when we made the second run at that damn boat.”

“Worst of it is, they can go right on mounting more machine guns on it, too,” Moss said. “Pretty soon strafing it
will
be suicide, nothing else.”

“Have to bomb at high altitude, then,” Lieutenant Sprague said. “We’ll need better bombsights for that; we couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with the ones we have now. And the bombers will need more guns, to hold off the foe’s fighting scouts. Regular flying fortresses, that’s what they’ll have to be.”

Moss looked at him in admiration. “You’ve got all the angles figured, don’t you, Charley? Sounds like you’re ready for the next war right now.”

“Poppycock!” Sprague said. “What wants doing is plain enough—plain as the nose on my face, which is saying something.” He touched the member in question, which, though long and thin, was not outstandingly so. “How to get from where we are to where we need to be: ay, there’s the rub.”

“That’s Shakespeare,” Percy Stone said, and Sprague nodded. Stone slapped him on the back. He stiffened slightly, as at an undue familiarity. Either not noticing that or ignoring it, Stone went on, “Good to have you in the flight, by God. First the Bible, now this—you give us a touch of class we sure don’t get from our flight leader here.” He jerked a thumb at Jonathan Moss.