Walk in Hell (46 page)

Softly, under his breath, he let out a snort. “As if they’d hand this assignment to Ralph Briggs.”

“Sir?” his executive officer said.

“Never mind, Tom,” Kimball answered. “Woolgathering, that’s all. And maybe there’s more to old Ralph than I give him credit for, anyway.”

He’d never expected to see Briggs back in the CSA till the war ended, not when he’d had his submersible torpedoed out from under him and been fished out of the drink by the damnyankees who did him in. But Briggs had managed to break out of the prisoner-of-war camp where they’d stowed him and to make it through enemy lines (or rather, to make it through some country so broken, it had no real front line) and back into Confederate territory. If he could run a submarine as well as he’d run his own escape, he might yet make a captain to be reckoned with.

Tom Brearley coughed, calling Kimball’s attention back to the here-and-now. “Sir, we’re passing between Smith Island and Crisfield.”

“Thank you, Tom,” Kimball said. “I guess we’ll have to start paying attention, then, won’t we?” Even in the midnight darkness, his grin and Brearley’s answering one were broad and white.

The USA had run steel-mesh nets from Point Lookout on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay over to Smith Island, and then again from the island to Crisfield on the Bay’s eastern shore, precisely to keep Confederate raiders like the
Bonefish
from coming up and making nuisances of themselves in the Bay’s upper reaches. They backed up the nets with minefields and patrol boats.

From everything the Confederacy had been able to learn, though, the damnyankees had concentrated their efforts on the wider stretch of water west of Smith Island. Their ruling assumption seemed to have been that nobody was crazy enough to try to run a boat through Tangier Sound. Up at the northern end of the sound, only a mile or two of water separated the mainland from Bloodsworth Island. The nets would tangle a submersible that dove, and the guns would put paid to one that didn’t.

Kimball whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Do I look like a crazy man to you, Tom?” he asked.

“No more so than usual—sir,” Brearley answered, which made Kimball laugh out loud.

“Best way to run through the nets,” he said, “is to take ’em on the surface and slide through halfway between two buoys.” He peered through his clandestinely imported German binoculars, trying to spot the buoys to which the nets were attached, and laughed again. “This is a trick we’ve learned from the Huns, mind: it’s how they slip through the English obstacles in the Channel.”

Brearley didn’t have binoculars, but he did have sharp eyes. “There, sir!” He pointed ahead and to starboard. Sure enough, a buoy bobbed there in the light chop.

Kimball swept the binoculars to port till he found the next buoy supporting the net. He grunted in satisfaction. “Won’t even have to change course,” he said, and then called down the hatch: “All ahead full!”

“All ahead full—aye aye, sir!” The diesels that powered the
Bonefish
roared as the submarine sped up. Kimball hoped they didn’t roar so loud as to draw the attention of guns and searchlights on the shore or on Smith Island. His lips pulled back from his teeth. Maybe the Yanks weren’t so far wrong when they figured only a crazy man would try Tangier Sound.

“Through!” Brearley said, his voice rising in triumph. Kim-ball felt triumphant himself, with one set of buoys behind him.

At his order, the diesels throttled back. Now that he was in the Sound, the trick, he figured, was to act as if he owned the place. “All right, we’ve got the minefield coming up next,” he said. “We have to steer along the chain of islands here, right close to shore. We’ll be in good shape then.”

If the damnyankees hadn’t done any minelaying since the CSA got their latest reports, and if no mines had come loose and drifted into her path, the
Bonefish
would be in good shape. Kim-ball had to take the channel slowly, though, to give himself the chance to stop and withdraw if he or a sailor at the bow spotted a spiked sphere bobbing in the sea. That meant the submersible hadn’t passed the Bloodsworth Island gap by dawn.

“Shall we dive, sir, and spend the day on the bottom?” Brearley asked. “That won’t be much fun, but—”

“We’ll do nothing of the sort,” Kimball declared. “I want you to take down the naval ensign, Mr. Brearley, and go to the flag locker for—”

“A U.S. flag, sir?” the exec said in some alarm. “Going under false colors is—”

“Technically legal, if we run up the true ones before we start to fight,” Kimball said. “But that’s not what I want, Mr. Brearley. I want you to replace the naval ensign with the national flag. And then I intend to go through the channel as if I had every right to do so. I’ll bet you a Stonewall the damnyankees see what they expect to see, not one thing more.”

He wasn’t betting a five-dollar Confederate goldpiece. He was betting his life and the lives of the boat’s complement. But Tom Brearley, once he got the idea, didn’t argue any more. Down came the naval ensign, which, like the Confederate battle flag on land, displayed St. Andrew’s cross in blue on red. Both looked as they did for the same reason: the CSA’s Stars and Bars too closely resembled the USA’s Stars and Stripes for them to be readily distinguished at any distance. Normally, that confusion was dangerous. Every once in a while, it could be exploited.

Flying the Stars and Bars, the
Bonefish
made for the narrow passage between Bloodsworth Island and Maryland’s eastern mainland. Kimball made no effort to avoid being seen. On the contrary. He sailed along as if he had every right in the world to be where he was. Field glasses were surely trained on him from the land. Guns could have been, at a moment’s notice.

No one fired. He crossed the net as he had the one before, but with even greater panache. “This is astonishing, sir,” Tom Brearley breathed.

Kimball shrugged. “They see a submersible out in the open. They look at the flag. They see red, white, and blue. Nobody’d be stupid enough to do what we’re doing. And so—”

He looked north, toward the mainland. He saw a few gun positions, close by the shore, and there were surely others he didn’t see farther inland, ones mounting bigger guns. The horizon dipped and swooped as he swung the field glasses around to examine Bloodsworth Island. The day was rapidly lightening. He could see men in white U.S. uniforms close by the edge of the sea. He waved in their direction. One of them was peering at him with field glasses, too. The fellow waved back.

“You know what it’s like?” Kimball said, chuckling. “It’s like seducing a woman.” He thought of Anne Colleton; for a moment, warmth tingled through his loins. Then he returned to the subject at hand: “You let her see that there’s any doubt in your mind about what you’re going to do, all that happens is, you get your face slapped for your trouble. But if she’s sure you’re sure, hell, her corset’s off and her legs are open before she worries about whether it’s right or wrong or purple.”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley said, nothing but reverence in his voice. They were past the nets now. The sun came up, red as fire in the east. All the guns that could have turned them to crumpled, smoking metal lay silent, silent.

“Go below, Tom,” Kimball said, following his exec down into the
Bonefish
a moment later. He dogged the hatch after him. “Take us down to periscope depth,” he ordered Ben Coulter, his voice relaxed and easy. To the rest of the crew, he went on, “We’ll go down nice and slow. No rush about submerging now. It’s going to be like we’re putting on our show for the damnyankees out there—this is how a submersible dives, boys.”

“Of course I’ll always love you, darling,” Tom Brearley said, sounding very much like a successful seducer sliding out the door.

Kimball laughed out loud and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re learning, Tom. You’re learning.” The sailors didn’t quite know what their officers were talking about, but it sounded dirty. That was plenty to get them laughing, too.

The
Bonefish
slid away from the dangerous narrow waters of Tangier Sound, out into Chesapeake Bay. Here behind the nets and the minefields, everything was clear. Kimball saw plenty of fishing boats through the periscope, but didn’t waste fish on them or rise to sink them with gunfire. He wanted bigger prey—he hadn’t taken these risks for fishermen.

And he got his reward. Steaming along came an ocean monitor, a bigger version of the river craft the USA and CSA both used: basically, one battleship turret mounted on a raft. It couldn’t get out of its own way, but in these confined waters was deadly dangerous to anything those big guns could reach. Sneaking up on it was hardly tougher than beating a two-year-old at football.

The first torpedo, perfectly placed just aft of amidships, would have been plenty to sink the monitor. The second, a couple of hundred feet farther up toward the bow, made matters quick and certain. “Too easy, sir,” Brearley said as the long steel tube echoed with cheers.

“You gonna make us throw her back, then?” Kimball demanded.

“No, sir,” the exec answered. “Hell no, sir.” He didn’t ask how Kimball planned to extricate the
Bonefish
from Chesapeake Bay now that, belatedly, the Yankees knew she was there. He might have done that before, but not now. He figured Kimball would find a way.

I figure I will, too,
Kimball thought.
Getting it in is the tough part. Once you manage that, pulling out afterwards is easy
.

Major Irving Morrell wondered why he in particular had been saddled with two officers from America’s allies. Maybe someone on the General Staff back in Philadelphia remembered his service there and reckoned he could show visiting firemen how the war was fought on this side of the Atlantic. And maybe, too, someone on the General Staff—Captain Abell came to mind, among other candidates—remembered his work there and hoped he would wreck his career once and for all by botching this assignment.

If Abell or someone like him had had that in mind, Morrell thought he would be disappointed. Though the German officer belonged to the Imperial General Staff, both he and his Austrian counterpart gave every sign of being good combat soldiers. They seemed very much at home squatting by a campfire, sketching lines in the dirt with a stick to improvise a map.

“I’m glad both of you understand my German,” Morrell said in that language. “We all study it at West Point, of course, but I’ve used it more for reading than speaking since.”

“It is not so bad, not so bad at all,” said Major Eduard Dietl, the Austrian of the duo: a dark man, thin to scrawniness, with an impressive beak of a nose. “Your teacher was a Bavarian, I would say.”

“Yes, that’s so,” Morrell agreed. “Captain Steinhart was born in Munich.”

“Here in the United States, I feel surrounded by Bavarians,” said the German officer, Captain Heinz Guderian. He was shorter and squatter than Dietl, with a round, clever face. He went on, “The U.S. uniform is almost the exact color of those the Bavarians wear.” His own tunic and trousers were standard German Imperial Army field-gray, a close match for Dietl’s pike-gray Austrian uniform. Neither differed much in cut from that which Morrell wore; the German uniform had served as the model for those of the other two leading Alliance powers.

Dietl sipped coffee from a tin cup. “This is such a—spacious land,” he said, waving his hand. “Oh, I know I think any land spacious after Heinz and I crossed the Atlantic by submersible, but the train ride across the USA and up into Canada to reach the front here…amazing.”

“He is right,” Guderian agreed. “West of Russia, Europe has no such vast, uncrowded sweeps of territory.”

“And these mountains.” Dietl waved again, now at the Canadian Rockies. “The Carpathians are as nothing beside them.” He spoke with the air of a man accustomed to comparing peaks one to another: unsurprising, since he wore the
Edelweiss
badge of a mountain soldier himself. Sighing, he went on, “Almost I wish the Italians had thrown away their neutrality. They’ve always wanted to; everyone knows it. But they never have dared. No nerve, damn them. Fighting in the Alps would be like this, I think.”

“Fighting is not a sport. Fighting is for a purpose,” Guderian said seriously. “The idea would be to break out of the mountains and into Venetia and Lombardy below—if there were a war, of course.”

Morrell thought that would be more than Austria-Hungary could manage, still fighting the Russians and the Serbs as she was. But he held his peace. Dietl struck him as a man like himself, happiest in the field. Maybe Guderian had worn red stripes on his trousers a little too long.

And then the German officer said, “Besides, you can’t conduct a proper pursuit in the mountains. Get around the enemy and smash him up—that’s what the whole business is about.” Morrell revised his earlier assessment.

Dietl said, “The problem of pursuit is the basic problem of this entire war. The foe retreats through territory not yet devastated, and toward his own railheads, while you advance over country that has been fought in, and away from your own sources of supply. No wonder we measure most advances in meters, not kilometers.”

“Barrels help this problem by making breakthroughs possible once more,” Guderian said.

“Barrels help, but they’re not enough, not by themselves,” Morrell said. “They’re too slow—how can you have a breakthrough at a slow walk? How can you outrun the retreating enemy when you’re not running? Once the barrels force a hole in the enemy’s defenses, we need something faster to go through the hole and create the confusion that really kills.”

Guderian smiled. “Some people would say cavalry is the answer.”

“Some people will say the earth is flat, too,” Morrell said. He made a quick sketch of a sailing ship falling off the edge. The German and Austrian observers laughed. He went on, “With machine guns and rifles, cavalry’s no answer at all. We need better machines, faster machines.”

“I can see why they called you to Philadelphia, Major,” Guderian said. “You have the mind of a General Staff officer. You impose yourself on the conditions around you; you do not let them impose themselves on you.”