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“Inside? While they’re shooting?”
“While the cat’s away the mice will play. The senior captains are circumnavigating the world with the Fleet. My boys are right there, learning their trade.”
Powerful beams of light bristled into the sky.
“Searchlight exercise,” said Falconer. “Battleships hunting destroyers, destroyers hunting battleships.”
Sweeping sky and water, the searchlights suddenly converged on a battleship, previously invisible in the dark, and lit bright as noon a low-slung white hull hurling spray.
“Look! That’s just what I’ve been telling you about. That’s New Hampshire. She wasn’t yet commissioned when the Fleet sailed. Just finished her shakedown. Watch what happens to her foredeck.”
The searchlights showed seas breaking over the battleship’s bow and deluging her forward guns.
“Decks awash in light seas! Guns underwater! Told you paint will be the easy part. We need higher freeboard and flared bows. Our newest capital ship has a ram bow, for God’s sake, like we’re going to war with Phoenicians!”
Bell saw a wave strike her anchor billboard and scatter in blinding clouds.
“Now, watch her on the roll. See that armor belt rising?… Now, watch it disappear as she rolls back and submerges it. If we don’t extend our armor to protect the ships’ undersides when they roll, the enemy will draft small boys to sink them with peashooters.”
A searchlight swung their way, probing the dark like an angry white finger.
“Goggles!”
Bell covered his eyes with the black goggles just in time. An instant later the light that caught Dyname would have blinded him. Through the blackened glass he could see clear as day.
“Searchlights are as powerful as big guns,” Falconer shouted.
“They’ll completely disorient every man on the bridge and blind the spotters.”
“Why are they aiming at us?”
“It’s a game we play. They try to catch me. Good practice. Though once they get your range it’s impossible to shake them loose.”
“Oh, really? Hang on, Captain!”
Bell yanked back on the throttle. Dyname stopped as if she had hit a wall. The searchlight beam soared ahead in the direction they had been steaming. Bell spun the helm with both hands. The light was coming back for him. He nudged the throttle lever as he steered the yacht at a right angle, waited for the propellers to bite, then rammed it forward.
Fire belched from the stack. Dyname took off like an Independence Day rocket, and the searchlight beam skittered away in the wrong direction.
“O.K., Captain. You’ve told me why and you’ve shown me why. But you still haven’t shown me what.”
“I’ll lay a course for the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”
A NEW DAY WAS LIGHTING the tops of the Brooklyn Bridge towers as Dyname sliced into the East River. Bell was still at the helm, and he steered under the bridge and bore right, toward the navy yard. From the water he could see numerous ships under construction on the ways and in the dry docks. Falconer pointed to the northernmost way, which was isolated from the others. He called down the voice pipe to the engine room to disengage the propellers. The tide was slack. Dyname drifted on her momentum to the foot of the way, where its rails angled into the water. Above her soared a gigantic skeletal frame partially sheathed in steel plate.
“Hull 44, Mr. Bell.”
Isaac Bell drank in the noble sight. Even with her frames awaiting more armor, there was a majesty to her flaring bow, an eagerness to join the water, and a promise of power as yet unleashed.
“Keep in mind she doesn’t even officially exist yet.”
“How can you hide a six-hundred-foot ship?”
“It resembles a hull that Congress authorized,” Captain Falconer answered with an almost imperceptible wink. “But, in fact, from her keel to the top of her cage mast she will be chockful of brand-new ideas. She will have all the latest in turbines, guns, torpedo protection, fire control. But most important, she is uniquely designed to continue improving by swapping new innovations for old. Hull 44 is far more than one ship. She’s the model for entire classes to be built, and the inspiration for ever-more-innovative, ever-more-powerful super-dreadnoughts.”
Falconer paused dramatically. Then he intoned in a hard, grim voice, “And that is why Hull 44 is targeted by foreign spies.”
Isaac Bell raked Captain Falconer with a cold eye.
