“Suh, what they buildin’ out past the wire?” a man asked Rodriguez not long after the gun was recovered.

By chance, the black had picked a guard who knew. The answer would get Rodriguez a promotion as soon as the paperwork went through. But he just scowled at the scrawny prisoner and said, “You find out when the time comes.”

“You don’t got to be dat way, suh.” The Negro’s voice was a sheepish whine he’d no doubt used to talk his way out of trouble before. “I didn’t mean no disrespect. I wasn’t rude or crude or mean or nothin’ like that. I just wants to know.”

“You find out when the time comes,” Rodriguez repeated, and glared at the prisoner. The fellow knew when to back off in a hurry. When the time came, when he found out, that wouldn’t help him a bit.

All ahead one-third,” Sam Carsten called down to the engine room from the Josephus Daniels’ bridge.

“All ahead one-third, sir, aye aye.” The answer came back at once. The destroyer escort picked up a little speed.

Sam read the chart by the dim glow of a flashlight with red cellophane taped over the bulb. That didn’t spoil his night vision and wouldn’t be visible from any great distance. Getting out of Philadelphia Harbor and Delaware Bay was going to be even more fun than escaping Chesapeake Bay.

If the clouds overhead broke… If they did, moonlight would pour down on the U.S. warship while she was still sneaking through the minefields that protected the harbor. That, to put it mildly, wouldn’t be good. Confederate subs lurked just outside, hungry for anything they could catch.

“I wish they would have given us a pilot who really knows these minefields,” Pat Cooley said.

“Me, too,” Sam told his exec. “I asked for one at the Navy yard. Hell, I screamed for one. They wouldn’t give him to me. They said we’d have to stop and lower a boat to let him come back, and that that would make the mission even more dangerous. They said they didn’t have enough pilots like that for us to just go on and take him with us.”

“Well, I can sort of see their point,” Cooley said reluctantly. “Sort of.” In the light of that cellophane-covered flashlight, he looked like a pink, angry ghost. “If we were a battleship or a carrier, though, we would have got one.”

“Now that you mention it, yes.” Carsten gave the younger officer a crooked smile. “Didn’t you figure out we were expendable the first time they gave us a shore-bombardment mission?”

“Sorry, sir. I guess I’m just naive,” Cooley answered. “But I’ll tell you something-I’m sure as hell convinced now.”

“That’s, uh, swell.” Sam had almost said it was bully. To someone the executive officer’s age, that would have smacked of the nineteenth century, if not the Middle Ages. Since Sam was only middle-aged himself-and not always reconciled to that-he didn’t want Cooley to think of him as one with Nineveh and Tyre. Then he stopped flabbling about changing tastes in American slang and went back to worrying about getting blown out of the water if he screwed up. “Come left to 150. I say again, come left to 150.”

“Coming left to one-five-oh: aye aye, sir.” Cooley changed course without question or comment. He was still the best shiphandler on the Josephus Daniels. In a nasty spot like this, the best shiphandler belonged at the wheel. He had to make his course corrections on the basis of what Sam told him, and had to hope Sam was telling him the right thing. If that wasn’t enough to give you an ulcer before you hit thirty, Sam didn’t know what would be.

Even if I do everything right, we still may go sky-high, Sam thought unhappily. Not all Confederate submersibles carried torpedoes. Some laid mines. If they’d laid some that U.S. sweepers hadn’t found yet, that could get-interesting. Or a moored mine might have come loose. If it drifted into their path… Sam would have done everything right, and a fat lot of good it would do him.

He gauged distances and times and speed and ordered other course corrections. Lieutenant Cooley coolly made them. “How am I doing?” the exec asked after a while.

“You’re here to ask the question. You’re standing on a nice, level deck. We’re not burning. We’re not sinking. You’re doing fine. If you hit a mine, I’ll have something to say to you. Till then, don’t worry about it.”

Cooley chuckled. “You’ve got a good way of looking at things, sir.”

“Do I? I don’t know,” Sam said. “This whole business of being in command is new to me. I’m making it up as I go along-and I probably shouldn’t tell you a word of that. Well, too goddamn bad. It’s not like you and everybody else aboard don’t already know it.”

“Don’t worry about it, sir. Everybody knows you’re the Old Man, and everybody feels good about it,” Cooley said.

“Thanks,” Sam said. On the Josephus Daniels, he was the old man literally as well as figuratively. The destroyer escort had a couple of grizzled chiefs with close to his mileage on them, but only a couple. He was old enough to be father for most of the crew. If anything, that might help his position of command. If somebody looked and sounded like your dad, you were used to taking orders from him. Of course, if you were eighteen you were probably convinced your dad was a jerk, so maybe command authority didn’t follow from age after all.

Like his early small worry, that one got submerged in the intricacy and tension of what he was doing. He stayed at it till the gray light of earliest morning grew brighter than the flashlight’s red beam. Then he stood up very straight and allowed himself to look away from the chart and stretch.

“I think we’re through it, Pat,” he said.

“Good. That’s hard work.” The exec also stretched. “I think we handled it about as well as we could.”

“You did the hard part,” Carsten said. “I just told you where to go.” He grinned. “I’m the only man on this ship who can.”

“You’re the only one who can say it,” Cooley replied. “Everybody else just thinks it.” He turned to the bespectacled, extremely junior J.G. in charge of the Y-range gear. “Isn’t that right, Walters?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” Thad Walters replied, deadpan-which, in a perverse way, proved Cooley’s point.

Sam took another look at the lightening sky. He didn’t like what he saw, not even a little bit. “Any sign of those damn Confederate maritime bombers?” he asked, knowing he sounded anxious. Any skipper without air cover of his own-and even skippers with it-had the right to sound anxious in this day and age.

Walters eyed the screen. So did Sam. He didn’t see anything untoward, but would an expert? War was getting to be a business of gadget against gadget, not man against man. Well, that had been true when battleships ruled the seas, too, but the gadgets were a lot subtler these days.

“Looks all right for now,” the young J.G. said.

“Keep an eye peeled,” Sam told him. He spoke into a voice tube: “Anything on the hydrophone, Bevacqua?”

“No, sir,” the petty officer’s voice came back. “Everything’s quiet.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” Another gadget, Sam thought. They’d had hydrophones during the Great War, too. Back then, though, you’d had to stop to listen. If a sub was in the neighborhood, stopping wasn’t the best thing you could do. In the last war, also, the hydrophone could give you a bearing on where a submersible prowled, but not a range.

The boys with the thick glasses and the slide rules had fancied up the device in the interwar years. These days, hydrophones could filter out a ship’s own engine noise, though they still worked better in silence. They could also say just where in the water an enemy submarine hid. The way Vince Bevacqua explained it, new-model hydrophones used sound waves as Y-ranging gear used wireless waves: they bounced them off a target and picked up the reflections.