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.”