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“You wouldn’t—”
“Shut your bleeding mouth when the commander addresses you,” a petty officer who is more grizzled beard and hair than face snaps in unfeigned outrage. “Pardon, sir,” he adds, nodding slightly at the commander.
Alger takes no notice of his petty officer’s outburst. “Rather than risk my men, I will, with the greatest regret, watch through the periscope as you attempt to swim to land,” Alger says. Then, he is all casual friendliness again. “Sergeant Schulterman, may I have a moment? Jones, you will keep an eye on our passenger, won’t you?”
Jones, the hairy petty officer—a sergeant by any other name—flashes teeth through his beard. “Oh yes, Commander, that I will.”
“If he becomes unruly you may wish to place him into one of the tubes until he calms down.”
Petty Officer Jones manages with some difficulty to avoid laughing in gleeful anticipation. Rainy follows the captain back toward the control room amidships.
The control room is hardly the roomy expanse Rainy has seen in war movies where officers have plenty of space to rush about yelling. The control room of a T-class submarine is the size of a long, narrow bedroom or parlor, a room where every square inch of wall (bulkhead) or overhead is festooned with an astounding array of equipment. It’s as if some ambitious shopper has ordered every sort of pipe, dial, wheel, gauge, handle, cathode tube, switch, meter, or valve ever created by the human species and welded them onto every square inch of possible space. It’s like being inside an explosion at a junkyard. There are spots where it seems to Rainy’s bewildered eye that gauges have been attached to other gauges, which are themselves attached to still more gauges, with the entire assembly positioned carefully to make human movement dangerous to the point of impossibility.
Half a dozen sailors sit stiffly, facing outward or forward, eyes glassily focused on the slow sweep of a radar beam, or listening intently within headphones the size of coffee mugs. Others stand poring over a bright-lit chart on a sort of table not large enough to comfortably hold a tea service. As discreetly as possible the sailors look up from their stations to take in the fact that there is a female—an actual living, breathing female—aboard. Looks are exchanged, heads are tilted, eyebrows rise. But there are no whistles or catcalls—she’s with the commander, after all. Alger checks in with one of his officers, perhaps his number two, Rainy is far from sure, then turns to Rainy and says, “Do you believe your passenger can be managed?”
“Sir, I barely know him.”
“And yet you were chosen to accompany him.”
“I follow orders, Commander, I don’t write them.”
He likes that answer well enough and forms a crookedly wry smile made more engaging by the scar that causes one side of his mouth to rise more easily than the other. “As do we all. As do we all. Well, Sergeant, you’ll be bunking in the chief’s room, hot-bunking as they say, meaning that the cot is yours when he pulls a watch. Then you should take what leisure you can in the petty officers’ mess.”
“I’ll be fine, sir, thank you.”
“It?
?s important that you find a . . . a comfortable place.”
Rainy grins. “You mean stay out of the way.”
“I should never wish to be so blunt, but yes, in effect. There are sixty-one officers and men aboard the Topaz, and we are far from being a roomy craft.” He starts to say something more, then stops himself and looks at her with frank curiosity, head back a little so he seems to be looking down his nose. “We do not have women in our service.”
“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.
