Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(39)
“It’s pretty new for us as well.”
“And how are you finding it?”
“At the moment very comfortable, sir.”
“Is this your first operational assignment?”
“No, sir. I was in North Africa prior to this.”
“Not in the action, surely.”
Rainy smiles, recalling vivid memories. “Actually, I was in a battle, but purely as . . . well, as baggage, I suppose, kind of like I am now. But I was with a unit that comprised a number of women soldiers who performed very well.”
“Indeed? Well. I hope we are not driven to such desperate measures.” There’s a bit of an upper-class sniff as punctuation, but Rainy takes no offense. She’s seen news reports that more than 80 percent of Americans—including more than 75 percent of women—oppose sending women to war. She doubts that number is any lower in Britain.
After her brief chat with the commander, she and Cisco are instructed by Jones on how to behave in the event of an emergency, the essence being that they are to race without the slightest delay to the POs’ mess and sit there without moving until instructed otherwise. There is a great deal of emphasis on showing them how to move like apes swinging from branches through the forest of obstructions.
“If you smack your head, you keep moving or you’ll be trampled underfoot, d’ye hear me now, lassie?”
Rainy mentally maps the route from the conning tower, down through the control room, and forward to the mess. Cisco scowls and looks furtively around. He keeps touching things, not moving them, just touching them, needing the reassurance of solid steel. There is plenty to touch, but at one point Jones grabs Cisco’s hand in midair. “Not that pipe, my lad, you’d leave a layer of skin behind.”
Cisco pushes to the front, desperate now for air, having used every ounce of his self-control to listen fitfully to Jones. He shoves past men hunched over their screens, spots a narrow steel ladder, and clambers up it. Rainy sees him outlined against gray-black, star-strewn sky above. They emerge into a semicircular space formed by chest-high cowling. Two sailors with massive binoculars scan the sky and the sea in every direction. Three more sailors stand by the four-inch gun just ahead and below them, scanning the horizon as well. They are peering intently at the water for the telltale phosphorescent trail of a periscope, since among the things submarines have to fear is other submarines. The dragon’s snout bow pierces waves and sends foam boiling over the gracefully sloping deck to churn around the base of the superstructure.
“Cold out,” Rainy says, hugging herself and hunching down inside her regulation army wool sweater.
Cisco clutches the steel cowling and breathes hard, like he’s just run a record-fast mile.
“This is bullshit,” Cisco says. “I’d rather take my chances on the streets.” He turns, looking for land, but the night is dark in every direction, with the Azores already far astern.
“Your father disagrees,” Rainy says. “Anyway, you’ll get used to it.” But she herself is far from used to it. It takes the sudden access to cold night air to make her realize just how enclosed and cramped—trapped—she has felt down inside that steel tube.
A tube is what it is: a cylinder. The curves of the ballast tanks, the external tubes, the superstructure, the rudder and the screws and the hydroplanes are all added onto that essential steel tube, which is just a sort of long tin can, really, though built to take far more pressure without collapsing. A long tin can crammed with diesel engines and electric motors, batteries, stores of water and food, sixty-one men—and one woman now—and some rather large and extremely explosive torpedoes.
The trip from the Azores to Sicily is better than 2,200 miles. At a steady eleven knots (just under thirteen miles an hour) they can make it in about a week. Seven days in a steel tube full of men and head-bashing obstacles. Seven days with a panicky gangster. She shudders and tells herself it’s only the cold air.
“I ain’t going back down there,” Cisco says defiantly.
“You’re going to have to,” Rainy says.
“The hell I do. I’m okay up here. Maybe a blanket or—”
A jet of icy spray slaps them both in the face.
“A raincoat. A poncho,” Rainy says, completing his thought. “Look, Cisco, I know you’re scared—”
He snarls. It’s an animal sound accompanying an animal expression of bared teeth. “I’m scared of nothing!” Then he softens it just a bit. “At least no man. And sure as hell no skirt. It’s just . . . I don’t like tight spaces, never have, not since I was a kid.” He finishes in a lower tone, a haunted tone that hints at some past nightmare.
“If you don’t go down peaceably when the commander orders, they will not let you come back up. Consider that.”
“I need a drink. I’ve got a bottle in my things, but that won’t last long. They must have some aboard, right?”
But rum, while served on board Royal Navy ships, is doled out in precise amounts at prescribed times, and does not amount to much more than a single cocktail. The boat’s medical officer has a better solution. After a long while, when it becomes clear that brute force will be required to get Cisco down, the medic climbs to the con and hands Cisco a small glass of amber liquid.
“What’s this supposed to be?”