Authors: David Poyer
The combat center was packed. Five men bent over the tracing table. They looked up as he wedged in. "Looks like we connected, Cap'n."
"Let's not take anything for granted." Galloway bent
too, taking in the situation. The battle would be fought on tracing paper now, a succession of chess moves played with coolness until the violent end.
"USS
Arnold
on the horn for you, sir."
Galloway grunted and took the handset. The Navy can, coming up astern, would have her weapons ready for immediate use. But her sonarmen would need time to find and plot the target. If he vectored them in they could attack immediately, keep the enemy commander reeling. "Tomcat, this is Paramount," he said rapidly. "It's your high-speed snorkeler, all right. I've made one run and got a hit. Will vector you in for immediate coordinated attack. Over."
"Tomcat here." The voice was familiar; he knew
Arnold's
skipper, had gotten drunk with him more than once in the wide-open hell of wartime Norfolk. "Hello there, Lyle; how's my favorite Coastie? Ready for your orders. Now on two-zero-zero, slowing to twelve."
The ensign's pencil flew, plotting the enemy's position every thirty seconds. The U-boat was holding a tight turn to the right. He coached
Arnold
around to follow it. The fixes were inches apart on the paper. "It's a fast son of a bitch under water too," he muttered.
"Seventeen knots," said the ensign. "You know—"
"What?"
"This isn't your standard U-boat. They can't make more than eight knots submerged. This has to be one of the new ones."
"Could be." Galloway remembered the secret briefings. The new submarines had been Germany's last hope for victory. Twice as big as the boats that cried havoc off Hatteras, with three times the range and much higher speeds. He'd heard rumors of designs even more radical, with a breakthrough engine that required no snorkel or battery. If this were one of them it must have escaped at the last moment, running the gauntlet of Allied air and crossing an ocean totally controlled by the British and American navies.
Arnold
reached the drop point and seconds later the rumble of depth charges reached them. "Our turn," snapped Galloway. "Hard right rudder. Hedgehogs to port this time." He picked up the handset and was about to speak when the deck jumped as if a giant had slammed a hammer against the keel.
"What the hell was that?"
"Captain, this is the bridge—
Arnold?
s been hit!"
The deck slammed again as he ran out on the bridge. He looked out to starboard, and stopped, unable to move for a moment.
The other destroyer was burning, an immense column of reddish flame. Secondary detonations boomed out over the water as fireballs burst from her stern, where depth charges were stowed ready to drop. She was still charging forward from her attack, but as he watched her stern began to drag. She settled backward into the water. The bow lifted, exposing the underside of the hull. Then it too disappeared; the fire winked out. That quickly, she was gone. The ocean was empty save for a deep rumbling and cracking, the sea breaking the bones of a ship.
"Torpedoed," breathed the OOD, beside him. "How could that happen? He was
above
the contact!"
"I don't know," said Galloway slowly.
"We've got to stop for them, sir."
"Stay on course," he said tonelessly. "We'll continue the attack."
Russell
plunged onward, over the invisible spot where oil, wreckage, and probably men were bubbling to the surface. Galloway barked orders, and a second salvo thundered into the night. This time two thuds floated back up from the sea.
"All stop," he said. The old destroyer lost way as he brought her around in a turn. Searchlights slid over the water. The barrels of the guns moved uneasily. The men waited, fingers poised on triggers, valves, dials. U-boats were masters at playing possum and stealing away. But three hits ... no sub made could take three hedgehogs and continue to operate. Galloway pulled a carbine from a rack and jammed a magazine into it. He went out on the wing.
Russell,
hove to, began to roll to the easterly swell.
The U-boat broached to starboard, 200 yards away. His shout was lost in a blast from the forward mount that ratded the windows and sent his cap spinning overboard. The lights pinned a dark silhouette: a submarine, deck awash, men spilling from the conning tower and running forward.
Russell's
after three-inch fired at the same moment the machine guns began hammering. Tracers stitched the night, converging on the black shape wallowing in the seas.
A flash, a bang lost in the terrifyingly close scream of a shell ripping past! Just above him, he judged; another few feet aft and it would have gone off in the forward stack, raining fragments where he stood. Another flash! The enemy was well trained. To load and aim that rapidly and accurately under fire...
The U-boats carried deck guns larger than his, though their rate of fire was slower; for a moment it was anybody's battle. Another shell exploded in the dark sea, sending water pattering over the destroyer's hull. Bracketed! Blindly, knowing it was little more than a gesture, he aimed the carbine toward his enemy. Its puny clatter was lost in the roar of heavy guns.
There, a flash as one of
Russell's
rounds hit, paler than the red bloom of gunfire. He glimpsed a belated scrap of white at the conning tower hatch before it vanished in the flash of another solid hit, this time apparently on the hull itself.
The U-boat exploded. This time the flash and roar were simultaneous, and the old ship rang like a struck bell to the shock.
The firing stopped. The last tracers hissed harmlessly into the dark. Searchlight beams, solid in the smoke, swept over an empty sea.
"She's gone," said the jaygee, breathing hard. "The murdering bastards."
Galloway stared into the darkness. "We're not sure of that yet."
"Sir?"
"Ahead full," he said through numb lips. "She may have submerged again, to shake us off. Prepare for depth charge attack."
Her screws thrashing, the old ship moved ahead once more.
"Men in the water, Captain!"
From the bridge he could see them. They waved and shouted, clinging to bits of wreckage. Men who had brought war to his homeland, who had killed his friends. He knew now their ship was gone, settling toward the bottom. By the laws of the sea, by the traditions of the service his family had served so long, he was obligated to rescue them. The old warship swept toward them, gathering speed.
He stood trembling, unable to speak. He had turned to the lieutenant, about to give the order to slow and take them aboard. Then, borne by the warm wind, what they were shouting came faintly to him.
Hail to the man who lay a cowardly suicide in Berlin.
Heil
to the greatest mass murderer of all time.
He stared down at them. They were adrift, helpless, defeated. He might have disbelieved his hearing. But at that moment the searchlight swept across their faces. Now he could see them, their arms raised from the sea in defiant salute.
He could not let men like this remain in the world with his family, with the son he had held in his arms only once. With all the children, all the innocents. They had failed in their mad attempt at escape. They had refused to surrender. Now he had only to turn his face away from them.
"Fire and amen to this evil
forever," he murmured.
"Sir?"
"I said
fire!"
The charges leaped from bursts of reddish light, and splashed on either side, amid the waving, screaming men.
The sun rose, red and enormous, two hours later. It rose on oil and lifejackets and splayed-out corpses, German and American, drifting side by side in the Stream.
Saved now from time, the steel hull lay in darkness, heeled to starboard on gray sand. Its planes were jammed on hard dive. Oil and the last remnants of air bubbled slowly from ruptured tanks. Bodies bobbed impaled on knife-sharp steel. In the growing light gray forms circled slowly, drawn by the delicious reek of death.
The long wait had begun.
It would not last forever.
TODAY
two
T
HE CORRODING BRASS RING CLAMPED
To
gether sand and asphalt, the silvery planks of the old pier, the calm green water of Pamlico Sound. Somewhere in the gently jostling rows of trawlers and pleasure boats soft rock was playing, underscored by the burble of diesels as a charter fisherman moved by. On its deck middle-aged men tilted cans. It was a normal May morning in a normal year in a corner of the world where the years, though they passed without haste, had always left untouched more than they changed.
Behind the closed porthole a wide-shouldered man with close-cut black hair lifted an inch of liquid topaz into the sunlight. His face and bare chest were burned dark, but circles still showed under his eyes. The hair on his chest was black, that on his arms and head sun-bleached a dull copper. He wore wrinkled and oil-stained work trousers. Through the dimness of the cabin the beam passed dense and dazzling as a shaft of molten glass, teeming with dust motes, angling gradually up and down. The tumbler flashed red and blue fire as stubby fingers turned it in the silent light, the liquor heeling and quivering as the wake of the passing boat reached it.
Or, Tiller Galloway thought dimly, Is it a tremor in my hand?
He had sat there since before dawn, remembering that last time he'd sailed from the Golfo Triste.
To San Rosario in early fall the ganja came down from the mountains in two-hundred-pound bales. Even covered with ripe bananas in the backs of the trucks it sweetened the dusty air along the roads with the autumnal aroma of marijuana.
He'd waited for it that afternoon five years before on a rotting pier under four dead coconut palms. Their stiff dry fronds were clashing to a light, ominous wind, and twice in the last hour the surface of the gulf had rippled briefly with heavy drops like falling bullets. He was watching the men who grunted in the blowing dust, slinging the bales into the deep flared hull.
He had looked at the sweating mulattoes and noted the sway of the palms. He had examined the anvil-shaped thunderheads. Last of all he had glanced at the man in white linen who stood a few yards down the pier, focusing a camera on the jut of land that screened the bay from the Caribbean.
Galloway had decided then he would go for it. The big score. Everything—or nothing.
Years later, years older, the same man turned suddenly from sky and sea and sand and drained the shot glass to the bottom. Drank, then held it for a long second cocked like a grenade in a callused hand.
A moment later the porthole shattered. And into the dimness came a cry. Low and reluctant, muffled by rotting wood and the lapping waves, it lasted for only a moment. Then there was only silence.
At the sound of shattering glass Bernie Hirsch straightened from two steel tanks of compressed air. She looked toward the boat, a few berths down from her, but saw only the red-orange glare of the sun on still water.
Bernice Hirsch's mouth was too wide and her chin too strong for her to be lovely. Her brows were too dark and thick to be refined. But her face was striking; it made men look back at her, and then, some of them, look away. She seemed always a little sad. Seeing nothing amiss down the pier she looked back, toward the marina. She was looking at the lot when the blue-gray BMW pulled in. She paused, watching the man who stopped at the office, stared for a moment at the Closed for Reorganization notice taped to the door, and then approached her with long, swinging strides.
"That looks heavy. May I give you a hand?"
She didn't have to think long about that one. It was a hundred feet from her car to
Victory.
"Well ... all right," she said, lowering the twin tanks to the hot gravel of the lot. "Thanks."
He was tall. Well tanned, with light hair threaded with silver, and striking blue eyes. She smiled again, surprised at finding a man attractive who was easily twice her age. She was suddenly glad she was wearing "visiting clothes"—a dark skirt, sensible heels, blouse and jacket—and that she'd been strict about her diet.
"I'm a little confused. Perhaps you can help me."
"I'll try."
"I was looking for Harry's Dock—"
"I see—"
"Were you looking for someone in particular?"
"Is the
Victory
at this pier?" He rumpled a gray suit as he levered the forty-pound cylinders to his shoulder. "Mr. Galloway's boat?"
"That's right—that is, it was his. Tiller doesn't own it anymore."
"I was mistaken, then."
"No, you're right. He's still in business.
In
fact, he lives aboard. He just doesn't
own
it
anymore."