Walk in Hell (71 page)

He walked up into the cottage. Anne followed him. He tossed the saddlebags and bedroll onto the floor next to the iron-framed cot on which he’d sleep. Looking around, he shook his head. “It’s not the way it was any more,” he said, half to himself. “Nothing is the way it was any more.”

“No,” Anne said. “It’s not. But—I talked with President Semmes not so long ago. He’s worried, yes, but not
that
worried.” She checked herself; if the president hadn’t been
that
worried, would he have introduced the bill calling for Negro troops? Trying to look on the bright side, she pointed to Tom’s tunic. “That was a victory, there in the valley.”

“And it makes one,” her brother answered bitterly. “I pray to God we can hold the ground we gained, too. We need every man in the CSA at the front, and we need every man in the CSA working behind the lines so the men at the front have something to shoot at the damnyankees. If everybody could be two places at once twenty-four hours a day, we’d be fine.”

“That’s why the president wants to give the blacks guns,” she said.

“I understand.” He sounded impatient with her, something he’d rarely done…before the war, that endlessly echoed phrase. “We’ve put them in the factories to make up for the white men who’ve gone. Maybe we can put enough women in to make up for the niggers. Maybe.”

She didn’t want to argue with him any more. “Supper soon,” she said. “Come over to my cottage and we’ll talk more then. Get yourself settled in for now.”

“For now,” he repeated. “I’ve got to catch the train day after tomorrow.” He sighed. “No rest for the weary.”

Supper was fried chicken, greens, and pumpkin pie, with apple brandy that had no tax stamp on it to wash down the food. “It’s not what I would have given you if things were different,” Anne said, watching with something like awe as the mountain of chicken bones on her brother’s plate grew and grew. “No fancy banquets these days, though.”

“It’s nigger food,” Tom said, and then held up a hand against the temper that sparked in her eyes. “Wait, Sis. Wait. It’s good. It’s a hundred times better than what I eat at the front. Don’t you worry about it for a minute.” He patted his belly, which should have bulged visibly from what he’d put away but somehow didn’t.

“What are we going to do?” she said. “If this is the best we can hope for once the war is over, is it worth going on?”

“Kentucky is a state in the United States again,” Tom said quietly. “The Yankees say it is, anyhow, and they have some traitors there who go along with them. The best may not be as good as we hoped when we set out to fight, but the worst is worse than we ever reckoned it could be.” He yawned, then got up, walked over to her, and kissed her on the cheek. “I’m going to bed, Sis—can’t hold ’em open any more. You don’t have to worry about anything tonight—I’m here.” He walked out of the cottage into the darkness.

Julia took away the dishes. Anne got into a long cotton nightgown, blew out the lamps, and lay down. Off in the distance, an owl hooted. Off farther in the distance, a rifle cracked, then another, than a short volley. Silence returned. She shrugged. Ordinary noises of the night. As always, her pistol lay where she could reach it. She even carried the revolver when she needed to go to the outhouse instead of using the pot, though it was no good against moths and spiders.

Did she feel safer because her brother was here? Yes, she decided: now there were two guns on which she could rely absolutely. Did she feel he was taking on the job of protecting her, so she wouldn’t even have to think of such things as long as he was nearby? Laughing at the absurdity of the notion, she rolled over and went to sleep.

George Enos was swabbing the deck on the starboard side of the USS
Ericsson
when shouts of alarm rang out to port: “Torpedo!” He jumped as if someone had stabbed him with a pin. As klaxons began to hoot, he sprinted toward his battle station, a one-pounder antiaircraft gun not far from the depth-charge launcher at the stern of the destroyer. Someone, by some accident, had actually read his file and given him a job he knew how to do. The one-pounder wasn’t that different from an outsized machine gun.

“Torpedo!” The shouts grew louder. The
Ericsson
’s deck throbbed under Enos’ feet as the engines came up to full power from cruising speed. Thick, black smoke poured from the stacks. The smoke poured back toward him. He coughed and tried to breathe as little as he could.

The deck heeled sharply as the destroyer swung into a tight turn. The turn was to the right, not to the left as he’d expected. “We’re heading into the track,” he shouted.

At the launcher, Carl Sturtevant nodded. “If it misses us, we charge down the wake and pay the submarine a visit,” the petty officer said.

“Yeah,” George said. If it missed them, that was what would happen. But it was likelier to hit them when they were running toward it than if they’d chosen to run away. Enos did his best not to think about that. He was sure the whole crew of the
Ericsson
—including Captain Fleming, who’d ordered the turn—were doing their best not to think about that.

He peered ahead, though the destroyer’s superstructure blocked his view of the most critical area. His fate rested on decisions over which he had no control and which he could not judge till afterwards. He hated that. So did every other Navy man with whom he’d ever spoken, both on the Mississippi and out here in the Atlantic.

Something moving almost impossibly fast shot by the onrushing
Ericsson
, perhaps fifty feet to starboard of her. Staring at the creamy wake, George sucked in a long breath, not caring any more how smoky it was. “Missed,” he said with fervent delight. “Is that the only fish they launched at us?”

“Don’t hear ’em yelling about any others,” Sturtevant said.

Lieutenant Crowder came running toward the stern. “Load it up!” he shouted to Sturtevant and his comrades. “We’ll make ’em pay for taking a shot at us.”

“Yes, sir.” Sturtevant sounded less optimistic than his superior. The depth-charge launcher was a new gadget, the
Ericsson
one of the first ships in the Navy to use it instead of simply rolling the ashcans off the stern. Like a lot of new gadgets, it worked pretty well most of the time. Like a lot of sailors, George Enos among them, Sturtevant was conservative enough to find that something less than adequate.

Like a lot of young lieutenants, Crowder was enamored of anything and everything new, for no better reason than that it
was
new. He said, “By throwing the charges off to the side, we don’t have to sail right over the sub and lose hydrophone contact with it.”

“Yes, sir,” Sturtevant said again. His mouth twisted. George understood that, too. A hydrophone could give you a rough bearing on a submersible. What it couldn’t tell you was where along that bearing the damn thing lurked.

An officer on the bridge waved his hat to Lieutenant Crowder. “Launch!” Crowder shouted, as if the depth-charge crew couldn’t figure out what that meant for themselves.

The launcher roared. The depth charge spun through the air, then splashed into the sea. Carl Sturtevant’s lips moved. In the racket, George couldn’t hear what he said, but he saw the shape of the words.
Here goes nothing
—and it was just as well that Lieutenant Crowder couldn’t read lips. Another depth charge flew. The chances of hitting a submarine weren’t quite zero, but they weren’t good. The charge had to go off within fifteen feet of a sub to be sure of wrecking it, though it might badly damage a boat at twice that range. Since the destroyer and the submersible were both moving, hits were as much luck as in a blindfold rock fight.

As the third depth charge arced away from the
Ericsson
, water boiled up from the explosion of the first one. “Damnation!” Lieutenant Crowder shouted: only white water, nothing more. By the disappointed look on his face, he’d expected a kill on his very first try.

Another charge flew. The second one went off, down below the surface of the sea. Another seething mass of white water appeared, and then a great burst of bubbles and an oil slick that helped calm both the normal chop of the Atlantic and the turbulence the bubbles had kicked up.

“Hit!” Crowder and Sturtevant and the rest of the depth-charge crew and George all screamed the word at the same time. Skepticism forgotten, Sturtevant planted a reverent kiss on the oily metal side of the depth-charge launcher.

More bubbles rose from the stricken submersible, and more oil, too. Peering out into the ocean, George was the first to spy the dark shape rising through the murky water. “Here he comes, the son of a bitch,” he said, and turned the one-pounder in the direction of the submersible. The gun was intended for aeroplanes, but Moses hadn’t come down from the mountain saying you couldn’t shoot it at anything else.

Vaster than a broaching whale, the crippled sub surfaced. English? French? Confederate? George didn’t know or care. It was the enemy. The men inside had done their best to kill him. Their best hadn’t been good enough. Now it was his turn.

Some of the enemy sailors still had fight in them. They ran across the hull toward the submersible’s deck gun. George opened up with the one-pounder before Lieutenant Crowder screamed, “Rake ’em!”

Shell casings leaped from George’s gun. It fired ten-round clips, as if it were an overgrown rifle. One of the rounds hit an enemy sailor. George had never imagined what one of those shells could do to a human body. One instant, the fellow was dashing along the dripping hull. The next, his entire midsection exploded into red mist. His legs ran another stride and a half before toppling.

George picked up another clip—it hardly seemed to weigh anything—and slammed it into the one-pounder. He blew another man to pieces, but most of the clip went to chewing up the submersible’s conning tower. The sub wouldn’t be doing any diving, not if it was full of holes.

As he was reloading again, one of the
Ericsson
’s four-inch guns fired a shell into the ocean twenty yards in front of the submarine’s bow, a warning shot that sent water fountaining up to drench the surviving men who had reached the deck gun. They didn’t shoot back at the destroyer. Their hands went up in the air instead.

“Hold fire!” Lieutenant Crowder said. George obeyed. A moment later, a white flag waved from the top of the conning tower. More men started emerging from the hatch and standing on the hull, all of them with their hands raised in surrender.

Crowder used a pair of field glasses to read the name of the boat, which was painted on the side of the conning tower.
“Snook,”
he said. “She’ll be a Confederate boat. They name ’em for fish, same as we do. Looks like a limey, don’t she?”

Flags fluttered up on the
Snook
’s signal lines. “He’s asking if he can launch his boats,” said Sturtevant, who had far more practice at reading them than did George.

Captain Fleming’s answer came swiftly. Crowder read it before Sturtevant could: “Denied. We will take you off.” He inspected the dejected crew of the submersible. “I don’t see their captain, but they’re all so frowzy he may be there anyhow.”

Boats slid across the quarter-mile of water separating the
Ericsson
and the
Snook
. Confederate sailors were already boarding them when one more man burst from the submersible’s hatchway and hurried onto one of them.

“
There’s
the captain,” Sturtevant said, and then, “She’s sinking! The goddamn bastard opened the scuttling cocks. That’s what he was doing down below so long. Ahh, hell, no way to save her.” Sure enough, the
Snook
was quickly sliding down into the depths from which she had arisen. She would not rise again.

Up onto the deck of the
Ericsson
came the glum Confederates. U.S. sailors crowded round to see the men who had almost sunk them. The attitude of the victors was half relief, half professional respect. They knew the submariners could have won the duel as easily as not.

When the Confederate captain came aboard the destroyer, George’s jaw fell. “Briggs!” he burst out. “Ralph Briggs!”

“Somebody here know me?” The Rebel officer looked around to see who had spoken.

“I sure do.” George pushed through the crowd around the Confederates. His grin was enormous. “I’d better. I was one of the fishermen who helped sink you when you were skipper of the
Tarpon
.”

“What? We already captured this damn Reb once?” Lieutenant Crowder exclaimed. “Why the devil isn’t he in a prisoner-of-war camp where he belongs, then?”

“Because I escaped, that’s why.” Briggs stood straighter. “International law says you can’t do anything to me on account of it, either.”

“We could toss him in the drink and let him swim to shore,” Carl Sturtevant said, without the slightest smile to suggest he was joking.

George shook his head. “When he was going to sink my trawler, he let the crew take to the boats. He played square.”

“Besides, if we ditched him, we’d have to ditch the whole crew,” Lieutenant Crowder said. “Too many people would know, somebody would get drunk and tell the story, and the Entente papers would scream like nobody’s business. They’re prisoners, and we’re stuck with ’em.” He pointed to the Confederate submariners, then jerked a thumb toward the nearest hatch. “You men go below—and this time, Briggs, we’ll make damn sure you don’t get loose before the war is done.”