Walk in Hell

"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 A

A rifle cracked in the thick undergrowth. A bullet ricocheted off the side of the co

"Hose 'em down!" he shouted to the men at the machine guns. Both guns started hammering away in the general direction from which the shots had come. The greenery by the riverbank whipped back and forth, as if in a hailstorm rather than a hail of bullets. Whether that hail of bullets was doing anything about getting rid of the uprisen Negroes who'd fired on the Bonefish was another matter. Kimball didn't know enough about fighting on land to guess one way or the other. He suspected he would acquire more of an education in that regard than he really wanted.

"Wouldn't it be fine, Tom, if we could land a company of Marines and let them do the dirty work for us?" he said.

"It surely would, sir," Brearley answered. He looked up and down the length of the Bonefish. "It would be nice if this boat could hold a company of Marines. For that matter, it would be nice if this boat would hold all of us."

"Hey, don't talk like that. You're an officer, so you've got a bunk to call your own, and a good foot of room between the edge of it and the main corridor," Kimball said. "You sleep in a hammock or triple-decked in five and a half feet of space and you'll find out all about crowded."

"Yes, sir," Brearley said. "I know about that from training."

"You'd better remember it," Kimball told him. Another reason he'd joined the submersible service was that you couldn't be an aristocrat here-the boats weren't big enough to permit it.

He was about to say something more when the man at the bow cried out and tumbled into the Pee Dee. The fellow came up a moment later, splashing feebly. Around him, the muddy water took on a reddish cast.

Then one of the sailors working the co

For a moment, that didn't mean anything to Kimball. Then another bullet cracked past his head, and he realized the fire was coming not from the northern bank of the Pee Dee, the one the machines guns were working over, but from the southern bank.

"Christ, we're caught in a crossfire!" he exclaimed. The Pee Dee was no more than a couple of hundred yards wide. The Negroes hiding in the bushes had only rifles (he devoutly hoped they had only rifles), but they didn't need to be the greatest shots in the world to start picking off his men. He thought about turning the deck gun on the southern riverbank, but that would have been like flailing around with a sledgehammer, trying to smash a cockroach you couldn't even see.

"What do we do, sir?" Brearley asked.

Without waiting for orders, one of the men from the deck gun crew had leaped into the river after the wounded leadsman. He hauled the fellow back up onto the deck. It might have been in the nick of time. Kimball thought he saw something sinuous moving through the water toward the submersible, then going away. Did alligators live in the Pee Dee? Nobody had briefed him, one way or the other.

He didn't have a doctor on board the Bonefish, or even a pharmacist's mate. He knew a little about first aid, and so did one of the petty officers who kept the diesels going. He wished again for a river gunboat, one with its guns housed in protective turrets against just this sort of nuisance fire. It would have been nuisance fire against such a gunboat, anyway. Against the vessel he commanded, it was a great deal worse.

"All hands below!" he shouted. The sailors on deck scrambled up the ladder to the top of the co

Kimball waited until he and the wounded machine gu

"Don't worry about me, sir," the sailor answered. "What the hell good am I like this?"

"Lots of people in your shoes now," Kimball told him. "That's a fact-goddamn war. They'll figure out plenty of things for you to do. And the wheelchairs they have nowadays let you get around pretty well."

Nichols groaned, maybe in derision, maybe just in pain. Kim-ball ignored that. As carefully as he could, he slid the wounded sailor toward the hatch. When Brearley had secure hold of Nichols' feet, he guided the man's torso through the hatchway, then hung on to him as they descended.

The petty officer-his name was Ben Coulter-was already bandaging the leadsman's arm. His jowly, acne-scarred face twisted into a grimace when he saw how Nichols was dead from the waist down. "Nothing I can do about that, sir," he told Kim-ball. "Wish there was, but-" He spread his hands. He'd washed them before he got to work, but he still had dirt ground into the folds of his knuckles and grease under his nails.

"I know," Kimball said unhappily. Then he burst out, "God damn it to hell, we're not built to fight close-in actions. We have any sheet metal or anything we can use to shield our gu

"Maybe we could do something like that, sir," Coulter said. He hesitated. "You mean to go on after this?"

"Hadn't thought of doing anything else," Kimball answered. He looked from the petty officer to Tom Brearley to the rest of the crew packed together in the cramped chamber under the co

"You mean here, among the niggers?" somebody asked. Lucky for him, he was behind Kimball, who couldn't tell who he was.

"Hell, yes, I mean here among the niggers," the submersible commander said. "Anybody who thinks I'm going to back off and let those black bastards-those Red bastards-take my country away from me or help the damnyankees whip us had better think twice. Maybe three times." He looked around again. If anybody disagreed with him, it didn't show. That was the way things were supposed to work. He nodded once, brusquely. "All right. Let's get to work and figure out how to do what needs doing."

Tiny Yossel Reisen woke up and started to wail. When he woke up, everyone in the crowded apartment woke up with him. Flora Hamburger opened her eyes. It was dark. She groaned-softly, so as not to disturb anyone who, by some miracle, might still have been asleep. This was the third time her baby nephew had awakened in the night. Her parents and siblings had to get up too early to go to work as things were. When a howling baby cut into what little sleep they got, life was hard.