Walk in Hell (69 page)

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.

Maria Tresca fiddled microscopically with Flora Hamburger’s hat. The Italian woman stepped back to survey the results. “Better,” she said, although Flora, checking the mirror, doubted the naked eye could tell the difference between the way the hat had looked before and how it did now.

“Remember,” Herman Bruck said, “Daniel Miller isn’t stupid. If you make a mistake in this debate, he’ll hurt you with it.”

He looked and sounded anxious. Had he been running against the appointed Democratic congressman, he probably would have made just such a mistake. Maybe he sensed that about himself and set on Flora’s shoulders his worries about what he would have done.

“It will be all right, Herman,” she said patiently. She sounded more patient than she was, and knew it. Beneath her pearl-buttoned shirtwaist, beneath the dark gray pinstriped jacket she wore over it, her heart was pounding. Class warfare in the USA hadn’t reached the point of armed struggle. The confrontation ahead, though, was as close an approach as the country had yet seen. Democrat versus Socialist, established attorney against garment worker’s daughter…here was the class struggle in action.

Someone pounded on the dressing-room door. “Five minutes, Miss Hamburger!” the manager of the Thalia Theatre shouted, as if she were one of the vaudevillians who usually performed here on Bowery. She felt as jumpy as any of those performers on opening night. The manager, who stomped around as if he had weights in his shoes, clumped down the hall and shouted, “Five minutes, Mr. Miller!”

Those last minutes before the debate went by in a blur. The next thing Flora knew, there she stood behind a podium on stage, staring out over the footlights at the packed house: a fuller house than vaudeville usually drew, which was the main reason the manager had rented out the hall tonight. There in the second row sat her parents, her sisters—Sophie with little Yossel in her arms—and her brothers.

And here, at the other podium to her right, stood Congressman Daniel Miller, appointed to the seat she wanted. He wasn’t quite so handsome and debonair as his campaign posters made him out to be, but who was? He looked clever and alert, and the Democrats had the money and the connections to make a strong campaign for whatever candidate they chose.

Up in between the two candidates strode Isidore Rothstein, the Democratic Party chairman for the Fourteenth Ward. A coin toss had made him master of ceremonies rather than his Socialist opposite number. More tosses had determined that Miller would speak first and Flora last.

Rothstein held up his hands. The crowd quieted. “Tonight, we see democracy in action,” he said, making what Flora thought of as unfair use of his party’s name. “In the middle of the greatest war the world has ever known, we come together here to decide which way our district should go, listening to both sides to come to a fair decision.”

Here and there, people in the crowd applauded. Flora wondered how much anything they did here tonight would really matter. The Democrats would keep a strong majority in Congress unless the sky fell. One district—what was one district? But Myron Zuckerman had spent his whole adult life working to improve the lot of the common people. His legacy would be wasted if this Democrat kept this seat to which he had been appointed. Plenty of reason there alone to fight.

“And now,” Isidore Rothstein thundered, a bigger voice than had any business coming out of his plump little body, “Congressman Daniel Miller!” Democrats in the crowd cheered. Socialists hissed and whistled.

Miller said, “Under Teddy Roosevelt, the Democrats have given every American a square deal. We are pledged to an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, to treating every individual as an individual and as he deserves”—the code phrase Democrats used when they explained why they were against labor unions—“to the rights of cities and counties and states to govern themselves as far as possible, and to—”

“What about the war?” a Socialist heckler shouted. Before the debate, the two parties had solemnly agreed not to harass each other’s candidates. Both sides had sounded very sincere. Flora hadn’t taken it seriously, and didn’t expect the Democrats had, either.

Daniel Miller was certainly ready for the shout. “And to keeping the commitments made long ago to our friends and allies, I was about to say,” he went on smoothly. “For years, the USA was surrounded by our enemies: by the Confederacy and Canada and England and France, even by the Japanese. Germany was in the same predicament on the European continent. We are both reaching out together for our rightful places in the sun. Not only that, we are
winning
this war. It hasn’t been so easy as we thought it would be, but what war is? To quit now would be to leave poor Kaiser Bill in the lurch, fighting England and France and Russia all alone, or near enough as makes no difference, and to guarantee that the old powers will hold us down for another fifty years. Do you want that?” He stuck out his chin. In profile, as Flora saw him, his jawline sagged, but from the front he probably looked most impressively political.

She made her own opening statement. “We are winning this war, Mr. Miller says.” She wouldn’t call him
Congressman
. “If you want to buy a pound of meat, you can go down to the butcher’s shop and get it. If you have to pay twenty dollars for it, you begin to wonder if it’s worth the price. Here we are, almost two and a half years into a fight the Socialist Party never wanted, and what have we got to show for it? Quebec City is still Canadian. Montreal is still Canadian. Toronto is still Canadian. Winnipeg is still Canadian. Richmond is still Confederate. Our own capital is still in Confederate hands, for heaven’s sake.

“And Nashville is still Confederate. Just this past week, the brilliant General Custer, the heroic General Custer, attacked again. And what did he get? Half a mile of ground, moving
away
from Nashville, mind you, not toward it. And what was the cost? Another division thrown away. Three-quarters of a million dead since 1914, two million wounded, half a million in the enemy’s prisoner-of-war camps.
Poor
Kaiser Bill!” Her voice dripped venom.

“And will you have all those brave men die in vain?” Daniel Miller demanded. “Will you have the United States abandon the struggle before it’s over, go back to our old borders, tell our enemies, ‘Oh, we’re sorry; we didn’t really mean it’?” He was sarcastic himself. “Once you’ve begun a job of work, you don’t leave it in the middle. We have given as good as we’ve got; we have given better than we’ve got. The Canucks are tottering; the Confederates are about to put rifles into black men’s hands. We are
winning
, I tell you.”

“So what?” Flora said. The blunt question seemed to catch her opponent by surprise. She repeated it: “So what? What can we win that will bring those boys back to life? What can we win that’s worth a hundredth part of what they paid? Even if we make the CSA make peace instead of the other way round, what difference does it make? Two thousand years ago, there was a king who looked around after a battle and cried out, ‘One more victory like this and I am ruined!’ He could see. He gave up the war. Is the Democratic Party full of blind men?”

“No. We’re full of men who remember what happened in 1862, who remember what happened twenty years later,” Miller shot back. “We’re full of men who believe the United States of America must never be humiliated again, men who believe we must ten times never humiliate ourselves.”

“A man who makes a mistake and backs away from it has sense,” Flora said. “A man who makes a mistake and keeps on with it is a fool. We—”

“Traitor!” came a voice from the crowd. “You’re just a woman. What do you know about what war costs?”

Tight-lipped, Flora pointed to her family. “Sophie, stand up.” Her sister did, still holding little Yossel. “There’s my nephew,” Flora said into sudden silence. “He’ll never know his father, who died on the Roanoke front.” She pointed again. “David, stand up.” The older of her two brothers rose, wearing U.S. green-gray. “Here is my brother. He has leave. He’s just finished his training. He goes to the front day after tomorrow. I know what this war costs.”

The crowd applauded. To her surprise, the heckler subsided. She’d thought the Democrats would have pests more consistent than that fellow.

No matter. She turned to—turned on—Daniel Miller. “You love the war so well,
Congressman
.” Now she did use the title, etching it with acid. “Where are
your
hostages to fortune?”

Miller was a little too old to be conscripted himself. He had no brothers. His wife, a woman who looked to be very nice, sat in the audience not far from Flora’s family. With her were her two sons, the older of whom might have been thirteen. Flora had known the Democratic appointee couldn’t well come back if she raised the question, and she’d been hoping she’d get or be able to make the chance to do it.

And, just for a moment, her opponent’s composure cracked. “I honorably served my time in the United States Army,” he said. “I yield to no one in—”

“Nobody was shooting at you then!” Four people, from four different sections of the hall, shouted the same thing at the same time. A storm of applause rose up behind them. Miller looked as if he’d had one of his fancy clients stand up in court and confess: betrayed by circumstances over which he had no control.

The debate went on. Daniel Miller even made a few points about what a Democratic congressman could do for his district that a Socialist couldn’t hope to match. “Wouldn’t you like to have the majority on your side again?” he asked, almost wistfully. It was not the best question, not in a hall full of Jews. When, since the fall of the Second Temple, had they had the majority on their side? And, after the blow Flora had got in, it mattered little.

At last, like a referee separating two weary prizefighters, Isidore Rothstein came out again. “I know you’ll all vote next month,” he told the crowd. “I expect you’ll vote the patriotic way.” Flora glared at the Democratic Party chairman. He had no business—no business but the business of politics—getting in a dig like that.

Now more like a corner man than a referee, Rothstein led Miller away. Flora had to go offstage by herself. Only when she was walking down the dark, narrow corridor to the dressing room did she fully realize what she’d done. Her feet seemed to float six inches above the filthy boards of the floor.

When she opened the door, Maria Tresca leaped out and embraced her. “It’s ours!” she exclaimed. “You did it!”

Right behind her, Herman Bruck agreed. “His face looked like curdled milk when you reminded people he has no personal stake in watching the war go on.”

“That stupid Democratic heckler gave me the opening I needed,” Flora said. “Rothstein must be throwing a fit in the other dressing room.”

Maria looked at Bruck. Bruck looked uncommonly smug, even for him. “That was no stupid Democrat. That was my cousin Mottel, and I told him what to say and when to say it.”

Flora stared at him, then let out a shriek, then kissed him on the cheek. “Shall we go out and have supper to celebrate?”

She thought she’d meant the invitation to include Maria, too, but Maria didn’t seem to think so. And Flora discovered she didn’t mind. Herman Bruck had just given her the congressional seat on a silver platter. If that didn’t deserve a dinner what did?

Besides, she always had her hatpin, if she felt like using it. Maybe she wouldn’t.

“We’ve got to hold this town, boys,” Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll said. “Below Waurika, there’s no more Sequoyah left, not hardly. There’s just the Red River, and then there’s Texas. The whole Confederacy is depending on us. If the damnyankees push over the river and into Texas, you can kiss Sequoyah good-bye when the war is done.”

“Wish I could kiss Sequoyah good-bye right now,” Reginald Bartlett muttered under his breath. “Wish I was back in Virginia.”

Napoleon Dibble gaped. “You wish you was back on the Roanoke front, Reggie?” He sounded as if he thought Bartlett was crazy.

Had Reggie wished that, he would have been crazy. “No. I wish I was back in Richmond, where I came from.” Dibble nodded, enlightened, or as enlightened as he got. Under his breath, Reggie went on, “The other thing I wish is that Lieutenant Nicoll would get himself a new speech.”

Nap Dibble didn’t hear him, but Sergeant Hairston did. “Yeah,” he said. “We got to hold this, we got to hold that. Then what the hell happens when we don’t hold? We supposed to go off and shoot ourselves?”

“If we don’t hold a place, the damnyankees usually shoot a lot of us,” Bartlett said, which made Pete Hairston laugh but which was also unpleasantly true. The regiment—the whole division—had taken a lot of casualties trying to halt the U.S. drive toward the Red River.

An aeroplane buzzed overhead. Reggie started to unsling his rifle to take a shot at it: it wasn’t flying very high, for gray clouds filled the sky. But it carried the Confederate battle flag under its wings. He stared at it in tired wonder. The USA didn’t have many aeroplanes out here in the West, but the CSA had even fewer.

Hoping it would do the damnyankees some harm, he forgot about it and marched on toward Waurika. The town’s business district lay in a hollow, with houses on the surrounding hills. “We’ll have to hold the Yanks up here,” he said, as much to himself as to anyone else. “We go down there into that bowl, we’re going to get pounded to death.”