“Well, that’s why I’m here. There’s a cliff up that path that I’m going to climb.” She cocked an eyebrow that was so pale as to be almost invisible. “Did you follow me here?”
“What?” Lakewood flushed and began to stammer. “No, I-”
Katherine Dee laughed. “I’m teasing you. I didn’t mean you followed me. How would you even have known where to find me? No, it’s a perfect coincidence.” Again she cocked her head. “But not really… Do you remember when we talked at the clambake?”
Lakewood nodded. They hadn’t talked as much as he would have liked to. She had seemed to know everybody on the captain’s yacht and had flitted from one person to another, chatting up a storm. But he remembered. “We decided we both liked to be out of doors.”
“Even though I have to wear a hat for the sun because my skin is so pale.”
More pale skin had been visible that summery day. Lakewood remembered round, firm arms bared almost to her shoulders, her shapely neck, her ankles.
“Shall we?” she asked.
“What?”
“Climb the rocks.”
“Yes! Yes. Yes, let’s.”
They started along the path, brushing shoulders where it narrowed. Every time they touched, he felt an electric shock, and he was thoroughly smitten by the time she asked, “Do you still work for the captain?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I seem to recall that you told me something about cannons.”
“They call them guns in the Navy. Not cannons.”
“Really? I didn’t know there was a difference. You said ‘they.’ Aren’t you in the Navy?”
“No, I work in a civilian position. But I report to Captain Falconer.”
“He seemed like a very nice man.”
Lakewood smiled. “ ‘Nice’ is not the first word that comes to mind for Captain Falconer.” Driven, demanding, and daunting came closer to the mark.
“Someone told me he was inspiring.”
“That, he is.”
She said, “I’m trying to remember who said that. He was very handsome, and older than you, I think.”
Lakewood felt a hot stab of jealousy. Katherine Dee was talking about Ron Wheeler, the star of the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport who all the girls fell over. “Most of them are older than me,” he answered, hoping to get off the subject of the handsome Wheeler.
Katherine put him at ease with a heartwarming smile. “Well, whoever he was, I remember that he called you the ‘boy genius.’ ”
Lakewood laughed.
“Why do you laugh? Captain Falconer said it, too, and he was a hero in the Spanish-American War. Are you a Boy Genius?”
“No! I just started young, is all. It’s such a new field. I got in at the beginning.”
“How could guns be new? Guns have been around forever.” Lakewood stopped walking and turned to face her. “That is very interesting. But, no, guns have not been around forever. Not like they are now. Rifled guns can fire tremendous ranges no one ever imagined before. Why, just the other day I was aboard a battleship off Sandy Hook and-”
“You were on a battleship?”
“Oh, sure. I go out on them all the time.”
“Really?”
“On the Atlantic Firing Range. Just last week the gunnery officer said to me, ‘The new dreadnoughts could hit Yonkers from here.’ ”
Katherine’s pretty eyes grew enormous. “Yonkers? I don’t know about that. I mean the last time I sailed into New York on the Lusitania it was a clear day, but I couldn’t see Yonkers from the ocean.”
The Lusitania? thought Lakewood. Not only is she pretty but she’s rich.
“Well, it’s hard to see Yonkers, but at sea you can spot a ship that far. The trick is, hitting it.” They resumed walking, shoulders bumping on the narrow path, as he told her how the invention of smokeless powder allowed the spotters to see farther because the ship was less shrouded in gun smoke.
“The spotters range with the guns. They judge by the splashes of shot whether they’ve fallen short or overshot. You’ve probably read in the newspaper that’s the reason for all big-guns ships-all the guns the same caliber-so firing one in fact aims all.” She seemed much more interested than he would expect of a pretty girl and listened wide-eyed, pausing repeatedly to stop walking and gaze at him as if mesmerized.
Lakewood kept talking.
Nothing secret, he told himself. Nothing about the latest range-finding gyros providing “continuous aim” to “hunt the roll.” Nothing about fire control that she couldn’t read in the papers. He did boast that he got interested in rock climbing while scrambling up a hundred-foot “cage mast” the Navy was developing to spot shell splashes at greater distances. But he did not say that the mast builders were experimenting with coiled lightweight steel tubing to make them immune to shell hits. He did not reveal that cage masts were also intended as platforms for the latest range-finding machines. Nor did he mention the hydraulic engines coupled to the gyro for elevating turret guns. And certainly not a word about Hull 44.
“I’m confused,” she said with a warm smile. “Maybe you can help me understand. A man told me that ocean liners are much bigger than dreadnoughts. He said that Lusitania and Mauritania are 44,000 tons, but the Navy’s Michigan will be only 16,000.”
“Liners are floating hotels,” Lakewood answered, dismissively. “Dreadnoughts are fortresses.”
“But the Lusitania and Mauritania steam faster than dreadnoughts. He called them ‘greyhounds.’ ”
“Well, if you think of Lusitania and Mauritania as greyhounds, imagine a dreadnought as a wolf.”
She laughed. “Now I understand. And your job is to give it teeth.” “My job,” Lakewood corrected proudly, “is to sharpen its teeth.” Again she laughed. And touched his arm. “Then what is Captain Falconer’s job?”
Grover Lakewood considered carefully before he answered. Anyone could read the official truth. Articles were devoted daily to every aspect of the dreadnought race, from the expense to the national glory to gala launchings to flat-footed foreign spies nosing around the Brooklyn Navy Yard claiming to be newspapermen.
“Captain Falconer is the Navy’s Special Inspector of Target Practice. He became a gunnery expert after the battle of Santiago. Even though we sank every Spanish ship in Cuba, our guns scored only two percent hits. Captain Falconer vowed to improve that.”
The steeply sloped face of Agar Mountain loomed ahead. “Oh, look,” said Katherine. “We have it all to ourselves. No one’s here but us.” They stopped at the foot of the cliff. “Wasn’t that crazy man who killed himself blowing up his piano involved with battleships?”