Breakthroughs

A fragment of a curse floated up through the open hatch: “-it, we fought the bastards to a draw out here. Hell, ain’t close to fair we have too-”

Brearley broke into it, as he’d broken into Kimball’s silence: “The Yankees could cripple our Navy for years. They could even-”

“Shut up.” Now Kimball spoke in a flat, harsh tone: the voice of command. Brearley stared, his face a white oval in the moonlight. He opened his mouth-a dark circle in the white oval. “Shut up, damn you,” Kimball snapped. He pointed off toward the east, where a ship was suddenly visible against the moon’s track.

He raised binoculars to his eyes. The ship leaped closer. How close? Estimating range at night was as tricky a thing as a submersible skipper could do, but he didn’t think it was more than a couple of miles. And that silhouette, seen against sky and moonlit ocean, was all too familiar.

“Take it easy, sir,” Brearley said as Kimball stared hungrily toward the ship that steamed along unaware he was anyplace close by. “The war’s over for us.”

“Shut up,” Kimball said again, now almost absently. “You know what ship that is, Tom? It’s that fucking destroyer that’s given us nothing but trouble since she came out here.”

“Is it?” Brearley said. “That’s too bad, sir. Shame we didn’t spy her last night instead of now.”

Kimball went on as if the exec hadn’t spoken: “And do you know what else? I’m going to sink the son of a bitch.”

“My God, sir!” Brearley burst out. “You can’t do that! If anybody ever found out, they’d hang you. They’d hang all of us.”

“No doubt about it,” Kimball agreed. “But England’s still in the war. The damnyankees’ll blame it on a limey boat-as long as we can keep our mouths shut. To hell with me if I’m going home with my tail between my legs. I’m going to hit ’em one more lick, and I’m going to make it the best one I know how.”

“You can’t, sir,” Brearley repeated.

“Go below, Mr. Brearley,” Kimball said. “I can and I goddamn well will. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to play. You can lay on your bunk and suck your thumb, for all I care.” He leaned close to the younger man. “And if you ever breathe one word of this to anybody, I don’t know what’ll happen to me, but you’re a dead man. You won’t die pretty, either. Have you got that?”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley whispered miserably.

“Then go below.” Kimball followed the executive officer down into the stinking steel tube that was the Bonefish ’s fighting and living quarters. Brearley headed toward the stern: he really didn’t want any part in what Kimball was about to do. Kimball didn’t care. He was going to do it anyway. In conversational tones, he told the rest of the crew, “Boys, we’ve got the USS Ericsson a couple miles off to starboard. Load fish into tubes number one and two and open the water-tight doors. I aim to put a couple right in the whore’s engine room.”

Had the sailors hesitated, they might have made Kimball think twice, too. But they didn’t. After brief, incredulous silence, they let loose with yells and howls so loud, Kimball half feared the Yankees on the destroyer would be able to hear them. He made frantic shushing noises. Discipline returned quickly, discipline and a fierce eagerness for the kill much like his own.

He took the helm himself, sending a sailor up to the co

“We’re in the dark quarter of the sea,” Ben Coulter remarked, as much to himself as to Kimball. He grunted in satisfaction. “They’ll never spot us.”

“They’d damned well better not,” Kimball answered, to which the petty officer nodded. Kimball went on, “We’ll make the firing run coming in at a steep angle, too, so they won’t pick up the reflection of the moon from the paint on the co

“You don’t want to make the angle too steep, though, Skipper,” Coulter said. “Easy to think it’s smaller than it is, and to miss with your fish on account of it. Don’t want that, not now we don’t.”

“Not hardly,” Kimball agreed with a dry chuckle. From the bow, a sailor waved to let him know the torpedoes were loaded into the forward tubes. He waved back, wishing he could be two places at the same time: he wanted to be at the helm and up on the co

Despite that a

Like any submarine skipper, he would have made a hell of a pool player, for he was always figuring angles. Here, though, players and balls and even the surface of the table were in constant motion.

He took his eyes away from the periscope every so often to check the compass for the Bonefish ’s true course. Gauging things by eye didn’t work at night-too easy to be wrong on both range and angle. He swung the submersible’s course a couple of degrees more toward the southeast. Ben Coulter had been right: if he was going to do this, he couldn’t afford to miss.

The lookout on the co

“Thanks, Davis,” Kimball called back. He’d just made the same calculation. Having the lookout confirm the range made him feel good. Inside six hundred yards…Inside five hundred…Inside four hundred…“Fire one!” he shouted. If he couldn’t hit the Ericsson now, he never would.

Clangs and hisses and the rush of water into the emptied tube a

“Hit!” Kimball screamed, and the sailors howled out Rebel yells. The Ericsson staggered on her course like a poleaxed steer. Water foamed as it poured into the hole better than two hundred pounds of guncotton had blown in her flank. Already she was listing to port and appreciably lower in the water than she had been a moment before.

Up on the co

Taking his time now, Kimball lined up the second shot with painstaking precision. “Fire two!” he shouted, and the torpedo leaped away. It broke the destroyer’s back and almost tore the stricken ship in two. She went to the bottom hardly more than a minute later. Kimball sca

Ben Coulter spoke earnestly to the sailors: “Remember, boys, this ain’t one where you get drunk and brag on it in a saloon. You do that, they’re liable to put a rope around your neck. Hell, they’re liable to put a rope around all our necks.”

“You do want to bear that in mind,” Kimball agreed. He wished he could tell A