The Hunter From the Woods (16 page)

Custis had approached Captain Beauchene in Michael Gallatin’s presence.

You know, cap’n
, Custis had said,
this ship, she doan got much sense
.
Doan got
what she needs to live, cap’n
.
Now if she’s gone be taking a big fish in her teeth and she ain’t got but the one chance, doan you
think she better have some eyes to see with
? Beauchene had agreed that, yes,
Sofia
did need a pair of eyes to see with.

I’ll make ’em so pretty
, Custis had promised,
you’ll fall in love with her
all over
some more
.

They waited on deck for the torpedo that was being put together in a bulb-lit room where the welding torch burned bright blue and a grinding machine thinned small metal parts to nearly perfect specifications. But perfect enough? No one could say.

Michael stood on deck, watching the work at the bow with a group of other men.

Beauchene leaned over the side. There was no need to bark orders because the men knew they were fighting for their lives; perfection in this case might be an impossibility, but the work was going to be damned good enough.

Dawn was about an hour away.

Beauchene went below to find out if the shark had teeth yet.

Michael heard the girl coming. No one even looked in her direction; she was one of them by now. Marielle stood beside him, peering over the dented gunwale. When he glanced at her, she gave him a quick nervous smile and he answered with a nod. Then he noted Billy Bowers come up on her other side, and Billy also leaned over the gunwale to watch. 

Michael thought that three was a crowd. He stepped back, and when he did he saw Billy silently slide his hand into hers, and she just as silently accepted it, and Michael wondered at how shipboard romances could even happen on a freighter in a sea chase. Maybe a spark had been thrown from Vulcan’s forge, he thought. Falling all that way to earth it had flared with uncanny light, and drifting down upon the
Sofia
it illuminated a boy carrying a girl in his arms to safety. Perhaps, he thought, a future for two people could be sealed with the touch of a crippled god’s fire. He hoped it was so.

As dawn began to lighten the fog, the torpedo was brought up on a handcart.

Following behind the men who pushed it forward were Captain Beauchene, Paul Wesshauser, the two engineers, the mechanics, the electrician, the pump operators, the able seamen and the ordinary seamen. The torpedo was a little over three meters in length and possibly half a meter around at its midsection. From its bullet-shaped tip protruded a trio of metal prongs. Its steel skin was mottled yellow and black, but words were written in white upon the evil-looking hide. Not just words, Michael realized in another moment, but
names
. Everyone who’d worked on the torpedo had written his name on it in white paint, probably waterproof, and it appeared that all the men who followed behind the handcart had added their names as well.

“Come on!” Beauchene told the crew on deck. “Come sign your names!” He was holding a can of white paint with a small brush resting in it, and this he set down on the handcart beside the weapon.

They came. The brush scrawled name after name, until at last Beauchene offered it to Michael.

“Sign it,” he said.

It was an order.

Michael dipped the brush into the paint and found a clean place to sign. He noted the names of the wounded and dead written along the torpedo’s length. He noted also a particular name:
Enam Kpanga
.

He wrote
Michael Gallatin
, and then he gave the paint can and the brush to the captain, who added the final name up near the detonator.

A portable hoist on lock-down wheels was set at the bow. Heavy cables supported the torpedo, which Michael figured probably weighed in the neighborhood of five hundred pounds. If anything went wrong lowering the torpedo over the side to the men in the boats, the dangerous fish would slide directly to the North Sea’s bottom. It was going to be a tricky operation, because if that thing got out of balance and started swinging on the cables its weight could break bones and shatter the lifeboats. Also, nobody wanted the detonator to hit
Sofia
, though Wesshauser had already told Beauchene and Michael that it would be calculated to explode from an impact at a speed of five knots or above.

“Easy, easy!” Beauchene cautioned as a winch turned and the torpedo went down to meet the upraised arms. “Play out the cables!” he said to the hoist’s operator. Then, louder: “Christ! Not so
fast
!”

The torpedo, still cabled to the ship, was placed across two boats and ferried over the swells to the business end of the steel-reinforced beam. Some of the men from the third boat slipped into the cold sea. Two of them wore frogmen’s masks and fins, used for clearing the props and working beneath the hull. The insertion of the torpedo into its groove and the closing of the clamps to grip it would have to be done a meter underwater.

The hoist operator kept letting the cables play out to give the workers enough slack.

Then the two boats were in position. Working slowly and methodically, the crewmen manhandled the weapon into the water, where its natural inclination was to sink to the mud seven hundred meters below. The winding in of slack in the attached cables by the hoist operator prevented that disaster.

The frogmen guided the torpedo into its steel socket. Tools were passed down from the boats to tighten the clamps. When that was done and a ‘success’ signal shown by an upraised fist, the cables were unhooked. The torpedo stayed fixed in place in its cage and clamps, its detonator almost precisely a meter underwater.

The frogmen and the other helpers climbed back aboard the third boat. The lifeboats came back alongside and the crew, abandoning their craft to the whim of the sea, ascended on rope ladders. The cold and wet were given blankets and hot coffee.

It was a job well done, Michael thought.

Sofia
was ready to be a huntress.

Paltry streams of gray light were beginning to pierce the fog. Beauchene told the crew to take their stations and be ready for action. He asked Michael to come with him to the bridge. In the wheelhouse, he rang up
All Ahead Standard
on the engine telegraph. The ship began to move through the waves, gradually gaining speed. In the radio room, the Russian was listening to the jamming signal and according to the slight changes in volume trying to triangulate a position of origin.

Michael saw nothing ahead but fog and sea.

“Port, thirty degrees,” the radioman called. Beauchene repeated the call and made the course correction. Then, after a few minutes: “Starboard, twelve degrees.” “Starboard, twelve degrees,” Beauchene called back. The wheel was turned to the right, and Michael watched the needle of the ship’s binnacle-mounted compass move.

The fog remained unbroken.

Twenty minutes passed by on Michael’s ancient pocketwatch. The Russian called out, “Starboard, eight degrees.”

The call was repeated, the wheel turned the rudder and the compass needle moved once more.

Sofia
went on, over rolling waves into a realm of softly-floating sea clouds.

Michael felt the tension throb in the pit of his stomach. He took the revolver from his waistband, just to hold something sturdy. If the Russian miscalculated,
Javelin
could sight
Sofia
first and bring those guns to bear at pointblank range.

“Hold steady,” called the Russian.

“Steady,” said Beauchene. His knuckles were white on the wheel.

Salt wind blew into Michael’s face through the rectangular hole where the windshield had been. In it he smelled the ship: oil, timbers, old grease-stained canvas, the burnt odor of shell damage, the rank unwashed flesh of working men and the higher, more raw scent of their fear.

He thought he was sweating under his red plaid shirt, but then he realized the wolf hairs were coming up across his back and chest. Rising up in arcs and swirls and strange patterns like primeval symbols unknown to any modern man, and then falling back again beneath the itchy human skin. He had a compelling urge to either run or pee, and he was reminded after all this time that he’d felt the exact same way after he’d killed Octavius Zloy. In that instance, he’d left a puddle of piss as he was caught between worlds and squatting on the floor.

There was nowhere to run, and he didn’t think the captain would enjoy watching him stain the boards.

“Yuri!” Beauchene called. “Do you have a distance?”

“Impossible to be exact, sir.”

“Then don’t be exact, just give me your best estimate.”

A silence followed, during which the Russian must have been either listening or calculating. “I’d say…six hundred, seven hundred meters. That’s my best.”

“Straight ahead?”

“Yes, sir.”

Beauchene said to Michael, “Take the wheel.” When Michael had it, Beauchene rang up the command to the engine room:
All Ahead Flank
.

Sofia
drove forward, her torpedo thrust out like an iron fist.

“Move aside,” the captain told Michael as he returned to the helm.

But before the transfer could be made there was a shout toward the stern. Another voice rose up, unintelligible but urgent. Beauchene peered into the fog along the torpedo’s path, his eyes narrowed. Michael kept the wheel steady. The thrum of laboring engines pulsed along Sofia’s length. Down on the portside deck, someone shouted: “
Ship! Dead ahead!
”

They were upon it before Michael could pull in another breath.

It was not there and then suddenly it was. Beauchene gave a strangled cry of alarm.
Javelin
was crossing their bow at a slight angle toward them. Michael saw some of the enemy crewmen at a rail amidships, pointing at
Sofia
. The deck guns, which must have been constantly manned, began to swivel toward the freighter.

But it was going to be too late.

One of the guns got off a shot that blistered paint along the port side of the wheelhouse. And then Beauchene was standing beside Michael and wrenching the wheel to starboard before
Javelin
could slide past. Michael saw the torpedo strike
Javelin
just forward of amidships on the starboard side.

A deadly pair of seconds passed.

Then came the blast.

The forge of Vulcan blazed along
Javelin
’s hull. A huge geyser of white water rose up and spread out, and with it the ear-splitting noise of rending steel, multiple thunders and runaway locomotives smashing together. The shockwave came back upon
Sofia
and hit her against her prow like Neptune’s gigantic shoulder. The entire ship was shoved backward, waves smacking against the hull with the hollow booms of heavy artillery. Beauchene went to the floorboards as Michael clung to the wheel.
Sofia
rose up and pitched downward. Part of the geyser fell upon her deck with enough power to knock men senseless but make them think they were drowning first. Water slammed down on the wheelhouse’s roof. The whipsaw motion of the wheel nearly broke Michael’s wrists as he hung tight, but
Sofia
’s next rise and fall and pitch to starboard jarred him loose and he staggered back and fell as the wheel spun to its own direction.

There was a secondary explosion from
Javelin
. A hot wind shredded the fog. Burning things flew through the air and landed on
Sofia
’s deck. Michael struggled up in time to see
Javelin
’s length crash against
Sofia
, starboard to port, in what might have been a dance of death.

For then all Hell opened.

A white-hot fireball exploded seemingly from beneath
Javelin
’s forward deck. Funnels, flaming rope, parts of bodies and a cannon barrel were blown into the sky. The planking blazed with a violet glow as if from a gas flame. Suddenly the entire forward part of the ship convulsed with a shriek of steel. Bright red and purple objects trailing wakes of sizzling fire began to burst upward through the deck, throwing flame to all sides. They hissed upward into the red-lit fog.

Michael knew. “A spark’s hit the ammo! The incendiary shells are cooking off!”

Beauchene leaped to the engine telegraph and frantically rang for
Back Emergency
.

As the fireballs shot upward from the doomed
Javelin
and spread voracious flames over the wheelhouse and deck, a massive wall of gray smoke erupted from the warship and rolled across
Sofia
. In it, burning men desperately scrambled over the gunwales from one ship to the other. Some of them had guns, were firing and were quickly shot by
Sofia
’s armed crewmen, but others vanished into the murk. Huge flames were shooting up from
Javelin
. There were screams and pleas for mercy. As
Sofia
’s engines began to back the ship off from the conflagration, the gap between the vessels widened and more burning men threw themselves into the sea.

Michael watched, his face drawn and tired. The reflection of flame writhed in his eyes.

He thought, grimly, that the sharks today would not have to search very long for good pieces of meat.

Javelin
was leaning over on the starboard side. She was afire from stem to stern.

Almost out of sheer damned spite, she shot three more incendiaries at
Sofia
that sizzled over the ship and hit the choppy sea, and then the freighter backed off into the fog.

Thirteen

A Good Day’s Work