Blowing the dry dock. That could not be allowed to happen.
They raced along, closing with the ship houses, beside which Bowater knew the dry dock lay. Two hundred yards away, the heat seemed unbearable, but they ran on and Bowater wondered if the heat would discharge the rounds in his pistol. He shifted his holster so the barrel was pointing away from any part of himself.
The smoke from the burning building rolled over them, and they slowed their pace, coughing and staggering forward. Bowater felt as if his skin was on fire, as if it would start peeling and blistering, but they staggered on.
Thirty yards away, a gang of men hurried along, moving in the opposite direction, like specters, barely seen through the smoke, but they did not seem to notice the men from the Cape Fear, or if they did, they did not care who they were or what they were about.
Then, right ahead, Bowater could see gleaming in the light the long line of bollards and the small capstans that ran the length of the dry dock, and beyond them, the black pit of the empty dry dock itself.
“Taylor!” Bowater called, shouting over the roar of the flames, then paused for a fit of coughing. “Take…Babcock and go that way.” He pointed toward the river end of the dry dock. “See if you can see if the dock is mined. McNelly, come with me! The rest of you, station yourselves here, keep a weather eye out.”
Taylor hurried off and soon disappeared into the smoke, and Bowater and McNelly raced off in the opposite direction. They inched toward the edge of the dry dock and peered down. The bottom was in deep shadow; they could not see if there was anything there, powder kegs or such.
“Sir!” McNelly shouted, pounded him on the shoulder. Bowater looked up, looked in the direction that McNelly was pointing. Through the smoke, silhouetted by the burning ship houses, he could see two men, one standing, one kneeling, concentrating on some job at hand.
Bowater stepped forward, waved McNelly after him. He picked up his pace, reached under the flap of his holster, pulled the Colt free.
Then he was up with the two men in the smoke. He tightened his grip on the pistol, held it away from his body, stepped boldly forward.
One of the men, the one standing, noticed him at last. He turned until he was facing Samuel straight on, took a step forward, put a hand on his holster, paused.
Bowater stopped five feet from the man. He was framed against the wall of flame that was the ship building, and Samuel could barely look at him, could see little beyond a black shape against blinding red, yellow, and white.
The man crouching paused in what he was doing, looked up, and for a moment it was a stalemate, like the moment with the marines. And then the standing man took another step and said, “Lieutenant Bowater? Samuel Bowater?”
Bowater coughed, squinted at the man. His eyes were sore and running with tears from the smoke and he brushed them away. “John Rogers? Is that you?”
The man stepped forward, hand outstretched, and he materialized into Lieutenant John Rogers.
“Lieutenant…!” Bowater shook Rogers’s hand, glanced at his shoulder boards. “Forgive me, Commander!” Bowater had been fourth lieutenant and Rogers second aboard Wabash five years before.
“Good to see you, Samuel,” Rogers yelled. Bowater could see the sweat streaking through the grime on his face. “Hell, I thought you’d gone secesh!”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Sure! What are you doing here?”
“Came to see about the dry dock!” This reunion in the smoke only added to the dreamlike, unreal quality of the night.
“She’s set! See there?” Rogers pointed down at the ground. Through the smoke Bowater could see the sparking flames of a powder train, racing toward the edge of the dry dock. Lighting the powder train, that was what the kneeling fellow had been doing.
“Two thousand pounds of powder!” Rogers shouted. “Gonna blow this son of a bitch to Kingdom Come!”
“Then shouldn’t we get the hell out of here?”
“It’d be a good idea. Got five minutes till it blows, maybe less!”
Bowater felt the salty sweat running down his face and burning his eyes. He wiped a sleeve over his forehead. “I have men down there!” He pointed toward the river. “I have to go get them!”
“Be quick about it!” Rogers turned to the other man. “Captain Wright! Let’s go!”
“Which way?” the other shouted. Bowater looked at him for the first time. He wore the uniform of a captain of Army Engineers.
Rogers looked around, unsure. “Boat’s that way!” Rogers shouted, pointing past the burning ship houses. “Don’t know if we’re going to make it through!”
“Best try!” Bowater shouted. “Go on, I’ll follow behind!”
“All right! But get out of here, quick!”
John Rogers gave Samuel Bowater a fraternal slap on the shoulder, and Bowater saw the eyes follow the hand, saw the absence of shoulder boards register on Rogers’s face.
“Let’s go!” Bowater shouted to McNelly and turned away from Rogers, and Rogers let the question go. He and the other man stumbled off into the smoke and the shadows and the brilliant glare of the flames. Bowater watched them until their dark silhouettes disappeared.
“Let’s get the hell out of here, sir!” McNelly shouted, but Bowater shook his head.
“We’ve got to put out the powder train!” he shouted and started running. At the edge of the dry dock the cobbles gave way to smooth granite stones. Bowater approached the edge of the dry dock carefully, peering through the smoke, trying to see the powder train and avoid falling over the edge.
“Sir!” McNelly whined. “It’s gonna goddamned blow…”
“Shut up, sailor!” Bowater shouted, staring down through the smoke.
He saw it at last, a bright dancing light, crawling along near the bottom of the dry dock, moving toward the unseen barrels of powder. “Go find Chief Taylor, tell him I’ve gone down to put the powder train out!”
He turned to see if McNelly had heard him, but the sailor was nowhere to be seen, and Bowater could do no more than hope he had run off to obey the order.
Samuel Bowater raced along the length of the dry dock, his eyes moving between the burning train and the edge of the dock. The dry dock was constructed in a series of great granite steps or ledges angling down to the bottom, like a long, narrow coliseum. Bowater took the first, three feet high, and the next, climbing fast to the bottom of the dry dock, trying not to slip or tumble on the granite ledges.
It was black in the dry dock, and many degrees cooler, as he climbed down and down, and the flames of the shipyard were now no more than an orange glow overhead, and the omnipresent roar.
Down, it seemed a terribly long way, and then his foot came down in water and he stepped down another step and another and the water rose around him. It had not occurred to him that the dry dock could be partially flooded, but if the water was over his head he would have to swim for it, and he was none too sure of his ability to do so.
Another step down and his foot hit the slick, granite floor of the dry-dock. The water was up to his waist. He pushed forward, breasting the water, which dragged at him and slowed him down as he tried to race for the distant moving flame.
The powder train, he could see, had been laid along the far side of the dry dock. He would have to push his way through the water and reach it before it reached the powder. He forced his legs to work harder.
Goddamned…damned…nightmare… Bowater pushed on through the blackness and the water. It was just like one of those hellish dreams, in which he would run harder and harder from some nebulous evil and get nowhere.