And then, all at once, the sour expression vanished from his broad, plump, ruddy face. He arranged the piles and waited with perfect equanimity for General Custer to return. Meanwhile, he studied the map. If they could break through at Morehead's Horse Mill, they really might accomplish something.
Custer came back looking absurdly pleased with himself. Maybe he'd managed to get a hand under Olivia's long black dress. "The mail came in, sir," Dowling said, as if reporting the arrival of a new regiment.
"Ah, capital! Let's see what sort of big thing it brings us today," Custer said grandly, hauling out a piece of slang forgotten by almost everyone since the War of Secession. As Dowling had known he would, he picked up the stack of personal mail first. As Dowling had known he would, he went from grand to glum in a matter of moments. "Oh. A letter from my wife."
"Was there, sir? I didn't notice," Dowling lied. He twisted the knife a little: "I'm sure you must be glad to hear from her."
"Of course I am." Custer sounded like a liar himself. His letter opener was shaped like a cavalry saber. He used it to slit the envelope. Elizabeth Custer was in the habit of writing long, even voluminous, letters. So was the general, come to that, when he bothered to write her at all. Dowling would have bet he hadn't said anything about Olivia in any of them, though.
Custer fumbled for his reading glasses, perched them on his nose, and began to wade through the missive. Suddenly, he turned red, then white. His hand shook. He dropped one of the pages he hadn't yet read.
"Is something wrong, sir?" Dowling asked, wondering if God had chosen this moment to give First Army a new commander.
But Custer shook his head, sending his curls flying once more. "No," he said. "It's good news, as a matter of fact." If it was, no one had reacted so badly to good news since Pyrrhus of Epirus cried, One more such victory and we are ruined! Custer went on, "Libbie, it seems, has secured permission from the powers that be to enter into the war zone, and will soon be brightening my life here in Bremen for what she describes as an extended visit."
"How lucky you are, sir, that you'll have your own dear wife here to help you bear the heavy burden of command." Dowling brought that out with an absolutely straight face. He was proud of himself. None of the delight he felt showed in his voice, either. Having Elizabeth Custer come to Bremen for a visit was better, more delightful news than any for which he'd dared hope.
He wondered what sort of convenient illness Olivia would contract the day before Mrs. Custer arrived, and whether she'd recover the day after Mrs. Custer left or perhaps that very afternoon. By the thoughtful look in his eye, the distinguished general might have been wondering the same thing.
Whatever Custer came up with, that, by God, was not something he could pile onto the shoulders of his long-suffering adjutant. He'd have to take care of it all by his lonesome.
"I'll draft the orders for the push against Morehead's Horse Mill," Dowling said.
"Yes, go ahead," Custer agreed abstractedly. Dowling had been sure he would be abstracted at the moment. Custer had made it plain he had no use for German terminology. Dowling reminded himself not to call the concentration against Morehead's Horse Mill the Schwerpunkt of First Army action. But German was a useful language. English, for instance, had nothing close to Schadenfreude to describe the glee Dowling felt at his vain, pompous, foolish commander's discomfiture.
Despite the many things Lieutenant Commander Roger Kim-ball had thought he might do in a submarine-and his fantasies had considerable scope, ranging from laying a pretty girl in the captain's cramped cabin to sinking two Yankee battleships with the same spread of torpedoes-sailing up a South Carolina river on gunboat duty hadn't made the list. But here he was, heading up the Pee Dee to bombard the revolting Negroes-in both senses of the word-who called themselves the Congaree Socialist Republic.
Diesel smoke poured from the exhaust of the Bonefish at the back of the conning tower on which he stood. The submersible drew only eleven feet of water, which meant it could go farther up the river before grounding itself than most of the surface warships that had been in Charleston harbor when the rebellion broke out.
All the same, Kimball was proceeding at a quarter speed and had a man with a sounding line at the bow. The sailor turned and called, "Three fathoms twain, sir!" He cast the line again. The lead weight splashed down into the muddy water of the Pee Dee.
"Three fathoms twain," Kimball echoed to show he'd heard. Twenty feet-plenty of water under the Bonefish's keel. He turned to the only other officer on the submersible, a junior lieutenant named Tom Brearley, who couldn't possibly have been as young as he looked. "What I wish we had here is a river gunboat," he said. "Then we could haul bigger guns further upstream than we'll manage with our boat."
"That's a fact, sir," Brearley agreed. He wasn't long out of the Confederate naval academy at Mobile, and agreed with just about everything his commander said. After a moment, though, he added, "We have to do the best we can with what we've got."
That was also a fact, as Kimball was glumly aware. His own features, blunter and harsher than Brearley's, assumed a bulldog cast as he surveyed the weaponry aboard the Bonefish. The three-inch deck gun had been designed to sink freighters, not to bombard land targets, but it would serve that purpose. For the mission, a machine gun had been hastily bolted to the top of the conning tower and another one to the deck behind it. Take all together, the three guns and the vital sounding line used up everyone in the eighteen-man crew who wasn't required to stay below and keep the diesel running.
The hatch behind Kimball was open. From it wafted the reek with which he had become intimately familiar in three years aboard submersibles, a reek made up of oil and sweat and heads that never quite worked in the manner in which they'd been designed. Here, at least, as opposed to out on the open sea, he didn't have to keep the hatch dogged if he didn't want to flood the narrow steel tube inside which he and his men did their job.
"Three fathoms twain!" the sailor with the lead sang out again.
"Three fathoms twain," Kimball repeated. His eyes flicked back and forth, back and forth, from one side of the Pee Dee to the other. Most places, forest-or maybe jungle was a better word-came right down to the riverbank. He didn't like that. Anything could be hiding in there. He felt eyes on him, though he couldn't see anyone. He didn't like that, either.
Here and there, plantations had been carved out of the forest. He didn't know what they grew in these parts-maybe rice, maybe indigo, maybe cotton. He was from the hills of northeastern Arkansas himself. The farm where he'd grown up turned out a little wheat, a little tobacco, a few hogs, and a lot of strapping sons. Some Confederate officers looked down their noses at him because of his back-country accent. If you were good enough at what you did, though, how you talked mattered less.
But that wasn't why he growled whenever they passed a plantation. The mansions in which the Low Country bluebloods had made their homes were one and all burnt-out shells of their former selves. "I wonder if that happened to Marshlands, too," he muttered.
"Sir?" Tom Brearley said.
"Never mind." Kimball knew how to keep his mouth shut. It was none of Brearley's business that he'd been in the sack with the mistress of Marshlands at a cheap hotel when the Negro uprising broke out. He hoped Anne Colleton was all right. Like him, she had a way of running straight toward trouble. That was probably a good part of what had attracted the two of them to each other. It made for a good submarine commander. In a civilian, though, in what might as well have been the middle of a war…
A rifle cracked in the thick undergrowth. A bullet ricocheted off the side of the conning tower, a yard from Kimball's feet. He felt the vibration through the soles of his shoes. The rifle cracked again-or maybe it was another one. The round slapped past his ear.