Such thoughts went by the board in a hurry when, turning the periscope, he saw another destroyer running straight for him. His fierce joy curdled and went cold in the twinkling of an eye. "Dive!" he shouted. "Take us down to 150, Tom, and make it snappy!"
"Aye aye, sir, 150 feet," his exec answered. Compressed air bubbled out of the buoyancy chambers; seawater gurgled in to take its place. Up on the surface, those bubbles would help the Yankee sailors figure out where he was, though they were liable to have a pretty good idea already, what with the course their fellow boat had been making and the way it had tried to escape his fish.
With more and more of the North Atlantic piled atop it, the hull of the Bonefish creaked and squealed. There were a couple of little drips where the seams weren't perfectly tight, but they were in the old familiar places. Kimball didn't worry much about them.
Through the hull, the noise of the engine and screw up above them was perfectly audible. No-engines and screws. Two boats were moving back and forth up there. "Leveling off at 150, sir," Tom Brearley said, straightening the diving planes. In the dim orange light, his grin was almost satanic. "They aren't what you'd call happy with us."
"Ain't been happy with them since we went to war," Kimball replied, "or before that, either, you get right down to it. Them and us, we don't-"
He broke off abruptly. Through the pounding drone of the destroyers' engines, he'd heard another sound, the noise that might have come from a garbage can full of cement being flung into the ocean.
"Depth charge," Ben Coulter said hoarsely. The veteran petty officer tried to make light of it: "Those damn things, most of the time they don't work for beans." A moment later, another splash followed the first.
"Give me eight knots, Tom, and change course to 270," Kim-ball said.
"Changing course to two-seven-zero, sir, aye aye, and eight knots," Brearley acknowledged, a certain amount of doubt in his voice. Kimball didn't blame him. Eight knots used up battery power in a hurry, cutting deeply into the time the Bonefish could stay underwater.
Without much humor, Kimball tried to make a joke of it: "When the boys on top start throwing things at you, Tom, it's time to get out from under 'em."
"Well, yes, sir, but-" Brearley didn't get any further than that, for the first depth charge exploded just then.
It was, Kimball supposed, something like being in an earthquake. It was also like standing inside a metal pipe while giants pounded on the outside of it with sledgehammers. Kimball staggered and smacked the side of his head against the periscope mounting. Something wet started running down his cheek. It was warm, not cold, so he supposed it was blood rather than seawater.
Men stumbled and cursed. The lights flickered. A few seconds later, the other depth charge went off. It was farther away than the first one, so it only felt like a big kick in the ass from an angry mule.
"Sir, on second thought, eight knots is a right good idea," Brearley said.
"Everything still answer?" Kimball asked.
Brearley nodded. "Seems to, sir."
"We got a new leak back here, sir," one of the men in the black gang called from the engines toward the stern. "Don't seem too bad, though."
"It had better not," Kimball answered. "Tom, take her down to 200. I want to put some more distance between us and them."
"The leaks will get worse," Brearley said, but that was more observation than protest. The bow of the Bonefish slanted down. If the leaks got a lot worse, Kimball knew he'd have to rise. No one shouted in alarm, so he kept quiet till Brearley said, "Leveling off at 200."
Splash! Splash! Two more depth charges went into the water. Where they went into the water was the key factor, and the one Kimball couldn't gauge till they detonated. All he could do was hope he'd picked a direction different from the one the Yankees had chosen. Even with the Bonefish going flat out submerged, those destroyers had better than three times his speed. The only thing he had going for him was that they couldn't see him. Hydrophones gave only a vague clue about his direction, and they had to guess his depth.
Wham! Wham! Explosions rocked the submarine. They were both closer than that second one had been, but not so close as the first. All at once, he grinned. "All stop," he snapped to Brearley.
"All-stop," the exec answered. He looked back over his shoulder at Kimball. "You're not going to-?"
"Bet your balls I am, son," the skipper of the Bonefish said. "The damnyankees guessed with me, far as direction goes. They know how fast we are. What do you want to bet they keep right on that track, pounding away? They must have some new kind of charges, too, on account of I don't think they've tossed any duds at us."
"Isn't that wonderful?" Brearley said. Along with most of the crew, Kimball chuckled. The life of a submariner had never been easy. By what the damnyankees were throwing at the Bonefish, it had just got harder.
Splash! Splash! With even the quiet electric motors running only enough to power lights and instruments, the noise the depth charges made going into the ocean was all too audible. In his mind's eye, Kimball saw them twisting slowly down through the green-gray waters of the Atlantic (almost the color of a Yankee soldier's uniform), looking for his boat. He cursed himself for an overactive imagination.
Wham! Wham! He staggered. A tiny new jet of seawater sprayed coldly down the back of his neck. As they had with the first attack, the lights flickered before steadying.
"Those were in front of us, sir," Tom Brearley said.
"I know," Kimball answered. "Here we sit." He could feel eyes boring into him, as he had when he'd taken the Bonefish up the Pee Dee River looking for Red rebels. Then, though, the watchful eyes had belonged to the Negroes in the swamps along the riverbank. Now they were the eyes of his own crew.
He understood exactly why, too. The previous spread of charges had been aft of the submersible, this one in front. If that meant the U.S. destroyers up there had somehow located him…the next pair would go off right on top of his conning tower.
"One thing, boys," he said into the drip-punctuated quiet. "If it turns out I'm wrong, we'll never know what hit us." If water at seven atmospheres' pressure flooded into the Bonefish, it would smash everything in its path, surely making no exceptions for flimsy human beings.
"Sir," Brearley asked, "if you have to, how deep will you take her?"
"I'd go to 300 without blinking an eye," Kimball answered. "It gets wet fast down that deep, but odds are you'll come back up from it. Nobody really knows how deep you can go if you're lucky enough. I've heard stories of 350, even 400 feet, when the sub was damaged and couldn't control its dive till it touched bottom." He grinned wryly at his exec. "'Course, the ones who go down that deep and never surface again-you don't hear about those."
Sailors chuckled. He looked round at them: a grimy, unshaven crew, all the more raffish in the orange lighting. They fit here, the same as he did. They would have been-some had been-outcasts, frequent inhabitants of the brig, almost outlaws, in the gentlemanly world of the Confederate States surface Navy. As far as he was concerned, they'd done the cause more good than ten times their number aboard fancy battleships.
Splash! Splash! Everyone involuntarily sucked in a long breath of the humid, fetid air. In a very little while, Kimball would find out whether his training and instincts had saved their bacon-or killed them all.
In casual tones, Coulter remarked, "Wish I had me a beer right now."
"We get back to Charleston, I'll buy everybody here all the beer you can drink," Kimball promised. That was liable to be an expensive promise to keep, but he didn't care. Getting back to Charleston would make being poor for a while afterwards worthwhile and then some.