“There are fans,” Michael said lamely. “When they’re turned on.”
Wesshauser stood up. “Listen to me!” His voice was urgent, because he’d realized that here might be—might be—a way out. “Do you have a machine shop? A welding station?”
“Yes. Both.”
“No shortage of steel.” Wesshauser was talking to himself. Then, to Michaeclass="underline" “Machine parts, did you say? Of what nature?”
“You’d have to ask the captain. Even he might not know.”
“All right, all right.” Wesshauser ran his fingers across his mouth. “Let’s say a watertight casing can be made and the machine parts would be suitable to form a detonator. Wait…wait!” He shook his head. “No. Ridiculous! There’s no possible way to deliver the weapon. No torpedo tube, no way of aiming the thing.” His hand crept up and his forefinger beat against a vein at his right temple as if to wake up a sleeping part of his brain. “Mathematics,” he said. “There’s so much mathematics involved in aiming and delivering a torpedo. And even so…the odds are that the weapon will not hit its target. This ship…there’s no possible way to send a torpedo from this ship to strike the Javelin. I could make a dozen torpedoes, if I had the time and materials, but without a delivery device—”
Wesshauser stopped speaking. He blinked suddenly, as if startled by a flash.
“You’re carrying logs,” he said. “What length are they?”
“Varied lengths. Five to ten meters. Why?”
“Herr Gallatin,” said the German, “we need to see Captain Beauchene. Now.” They climbed the stairs into the wounded bridge, where fog swirled in through the opening where the glass had been. A single low lantern illuminated Sofia’s master, who clung to the wheel of the drifting vessel with one hand and held in the other a fresh—or nearly, since it was again half-empty—bottle of brandy.
“What the fuck do you two want?” he growled.
In Beauchene’s cabin, revealed by the lantern’s candle, Wesshauser leaned over the desk and on a piece of fly-specked paper drew a diagram with a fountain pen.
“Very well, I understand the torpedo part,” Beauchene said as he and Michael watched the diagram take shape. “I understand about the fertilizer.” The document signed by the cargo master indicated the presence of ammonium nitrate in the black oildrums. “I understand about making a casing and a detonator and all that…but what are you scribbling?”
“A design,” Wesshauser explained, with the candle’s glow in his glasses, “to make this ship the aiming and delivery device. Look here,” he said, and tapped with the pen’s point. “The bow. We need a steel socket attached to the bow at the waterline. Something with clamps that can hold a ten-meter-long hardwood log. If you have saws, the log itself should be squared off from end to end and reinforced with steel on all sides to keep it rigid. Then…here…you see?”
“I’m looking, but I’m not seeing. Yet,” Beauchene added.
“Here, at the far end of the log, another steel socket should be inserted. That should also have clamps to hold the torpedo steady. The torpedo will be underwater, at a depth of possibly a meter or so. You see what I’ve drawn?”
“A ramming device,” Michael said.
“An aiming device,” Wesshauser corrected. “A torpedo on the end of a steel-reinforced beam, secured to the ship’s bow. With any luck, the detonator makes contact with Javelin under the waterline, and sends an electrical spark into the explosive packing. Add to the packing a payload of ball bearings, and the potential for damage to Javelin is further increased. It’s going to be at best an uncertain proposition, because of the imperfect working conditions…but if I can find the right elements on board, I believe I can make this torpedo.”
Beauchene frowned. “There is one small problem here, sir,” he said dryly. “Un peu de pas. We would have to be, as I calculate with my great brain, less than ten meters from Javelin to make this work. As you gentlemen may recall, Javelin has large fucking guns. So how, sir, do we get within ten meters of Javelin without being blown to pieces?” He finished his question with an eye-watering swig of brandy.
“We have to become the hunters,” Michael spoke up, seeing the plan. “We have to seek out Javelin and go on the attack. It’s the only way.”
“In this fog?” Beauchene asked. “How do we find a ship in this? And if it clears as we’re charging for her, won’t she just speed out of danger?”
“We have to hope the fog holds, then,” said the German. “No one on Javelin will be expecting our surprise. Herr Gallatin is correct; it’s the only way.”
“If they can’t find us—and God, I hope they can’t—then we can’t find them.”
“That may not be entirely true,” Michael said. “The continuous jamming signal. Can the radioman determine the direction that’s coming from?”
“I have no idea.” The radioman had been released from duty for the night, and the radio shut down even as the jamming cacophony shrieked on. “Maybe he could twiddle his dials and his thumbs and make an educated guess, I don’t know.”
He’s a Russian, Michael thought. He remembered a saying from his life in the circus: Russians know from which way the wind blows and from which way the shit flows.
“An educated guess might do,” he said.
Beauchene looked from Michael to Wesshauser and back again, searching for either sanity or hope. He took another long drink. “It’ll be dawn in five hours,” he told the German. “What do you need to get started?”
Twelve
Dead Ahead
Lamps hung from Sofia’s bow. By their fog-dimmed glow, men worked from three lifeboats in the swells. A cable snaked down to an air-powered rivet gun, which made a tremendous racket in use. The work was charged with tension, because if a watch on Javelin heard that noise and the ship followed it, for most men dawn might never come.
A steel cage-like apparatus with a pair of claw-shaped clamps had been riveted in position just at the waterline. Now, moving ponderously and slowly, the men in the boats guided what appeared to be a ten-meter-long gray steel beam into the cage. The clamps were shut down upon it and fastened tight with wrenches. A smaller version of the cage-like device was already bolted to the far end of the squared-off log that masqueraded as a steel beam. There was a groove within the cage for a cylindrical object to be inserted and seized by the second pair of clamps.
A wooden seat descended between a pair of ropes. Dylan Custis came down with a bucket of yellow paint and a brush. He began to paint upon the bow a pair of female eyes complete with eyelashes, as below him the other men watched and waited.
Custis had approached Captain Beauchene in Michael Gallatin’s presence.
You know, cap’n, Custis had said, this ship, she doan got much sense. Doan got what she needs to live, cap’n. Now if she’s gone be taking a big fish in her teeth and she ain’t got but the one chance, doan you think she better have some eyes to see with? Beauchene had agreed that, yes, Sofia did need a pair of eyes to see with.
I’ll make ’em so pretty, Custis had promised, you’ll fall in love with her all over some more.