Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

Rainy almost stops herself from saying more, but cannot. “There are women under German bombs in Poland and in Holland and in the Soviet Union. And more than a few in England. They never got to shoot back.”

Alger takes Rainy’s arm and propels her gently down what Rainy has come to think of as the obstacle course and guides her into his cabin. It’s as close to private as any space on the sub.

Without preamble he says, “You know, of course, that this mission is absolutely mad.”

Rainy frowns and says nothing.

“It’s hardly unique. War is a series of foolish enterprises and a study of history is not reassuring on that score. I will tell you that this may be the most foolish. Sending a young woman with an unstable gangster—”

“I don’t believe my sex has—”

He cuts her off with an abrupt chop of his hand. “I’m not talking about your sex, if you were an equally young man in the identical position I would still say that this is a reckless and foolish mission.”

Rainy actually takes a step back, which brings her up against a cabinet. Even commanders have cramped quarters in a sub. She starts to defend her mission, but she can’t do it honestly. Alger is right.

That’s the damned thing: he’s right.

“Of course it is understood that I am not referring to the admiralty when I say this,” Alger says with a hint of irony. “But not everyone in this war has his eye equally fixed on the larger objective, or on the lives of the men—or women—under their command. Many officers are more interested in their careers.”

She nods slowly and she agrees, but she is not ready to agree openly. She’s a soldier on a mission. She has orders. She has no choice now, no easy way out.

He nods briskly. “Well, we shall submerge shortly and—”

Several things happen at once. The klaxon brays. A young officer sticks his head in the cabin, excited. “Contact, sir!” Alger spins away, and Rainy follows him back to the bridge, drawn by the excitement.

“Commander!” The sonar operator pulls one headphone back and half turns. “Screws closing fast!”

Rainy is instantly forgotten.

“Bearing?”

One lookout is already sliding down the ladder, the second just behind him as Alger raps out orders to dive. Within seconds the deck begins to tilt down by the bow.

The lookout says, “Looked like a spotter plane, Skipper, but it was just a glimpse.”

The conclusion is obvious. A spotter plane has called their position in to either the Italian or German navy. Or both. The sonar operator confirms that he’s hearing screws of a speed and type to indicate a destroyer coming on fast on an intercept course.

The periscope is sent up and Alger peers intently. “She’s that Greek capture, the Hermes, if I am not mistaken. Take her down to ten fathoms and come around. Sergeant Schulterman, see to your charge.”

Rainy spins away and runs up the corridor to find that the torpedo room crew has already taken Cisco’s hammock down and the gangster has been made fast to a vertical bit of pipe.

It is a good thing he’s tied because within minutes things go from merely claustrophobic to catastrophic.

The first salvo of depth charges explodes.

Rainy has seen a movie called We Dive at Dawn, which purported to show a depth charge attack. In the fictional submarine there had been a sound like distant thunder. Then lights had flickered, and the actors had swayed back and forth, and there had been a sound of galley pots rattling.

The reality bears almost no resemblance to that.

The exploding depth charges do not sound like distant thunder; the pressure wave hits like a hammer, like some angry god is hurling great boulders at the Topaz. A gigantic aquatic beast is kicking the sub, and with each kick the bulkheads and deck and every gauge, wheel, bolt, and section of pipe strike at Rainy, as if the walls around her are trying to batter her to death.

The floor beneath her punches up at the soles of her feet, collapsing her knees. She falls sideways against the legs of one of the torpedo room crew. Somehow in the midst of what seems to Rainy like the end of the world, the crew is hauling on a length of cable, drawing a massive long torpedo toward its launch tube.

And suddenly the explosions stop.

Rainy climbs to her feet, muttering an apology to the man she’d fouled. There’s blood coming from her nose, which feels numb.

The cessation of the catastrophic noise of the depth charges allows Rainy to hear Cisco. He is screaming, screaming, all self-control gone, scre