James Burke - Dixie City Jam

Clete fired twice. Part of the double-ought buckshot razored lines of paint off the bulkhead like dry confetti, then the man in the canvas coat was knocked backwards as though he had been jerked by an invisible cable wrapped around his chest.

Clete ejected the spent easing onto the deck, pumped a fresh round into the chamber, then pressed two more shells into the magazine with his thumb.

'Three down,' he said. 'Streak, you and Lucinda go around the bow. I'll come up the other side. Watch the bridge. Don't let 'em get behind you.'

He didn't wait for an answer. He moved toward the stern, bearlike, his shotgun back at port arms, his scalp showing white in the wind, his utilities stiff with salt.

Lucinda glanced down at the cabin cruiser, which was rolling in the swells while Zoot kept gunning the engines to keep the stern from swinging into the salvage ship's hull.

'He's all right,' I said. 'My dad used to always say, "Don't ever treat brave people as less than what they are."'

'Cover your own ass,' she said.

We moved toward the bow. I could feel the deck vibrating under me from the machinery roaring on the other side of the ship. I paused at the steps that led onto the pilothouse, worked my way up them until I could see inside, then moved quickly through the open hatch.

I looked at the shape in the corner and lowered my rifle. I heard Lucinda behind me.

'Oh God,' she said.

'Check the starboard side,' I said, and knelt next to Brother Oswald. He lay on top of an oil-grimed tarp, his poached, round face filled with the empty, stunned, disbelieving expression that I had seen once in the faces of villagers who had been killed by airbursts in a rice field.

A switchblade knife, a made-in-Korea gut-ripper that you can buy for five dollars in Laredo, had been driven to the hilt just above his right lung. He had pressed a rag around the wound, and the rag had become sodden and congealed as though it had been dipped in red paint. I put my ear to his mouth and felt his breath touch my skin.

'We're going to medevac you out of here, partner,' I said. 'You hear me? We're going to secure the ship, then have you on a chopper in no time.'

His tongue stuck to his mouth when he tried to speak. I leaned down close to his face again. His breath smelled like dried flowers.

'… after the wrong one,' he whispered.

'I don't understand,' I said.

'Hit's the woman… She can speak in tongues… I heard her talk on the radio…'

'Who did this to you, Reverend?'

His lips moved, but no sound came out. His pale eyes looked like they were drowning.

'I can't see anybody on the starboard side,' Lucinda said.

I raised Brother Oswald's head with my palm, bunched up the tarp like a pillow, then turned his head sideways so his mouth could drain. I picked up the AR-15. The plastic stock felt cold and light and smooth in my hands.

'You know how to get the Coast Guard on the radio?' I said to Lucinda.

'Yes.'

'Tell them we're thirty miles south of Grand Isle. Describe the two oil platforms, and they'll know where to go.'

She nodded toward Brother Oswald, the question in her face.

I don't know , I said with my lips.

A moment later I crossed the deck in front of the pilothouse. I stepped out into the open, the iron sights of the AR-15 aimed at whoever might be standing between me and the stern.

But there was no one, except Clete Purcel, who was on one knee, his back toward me, amid a tangle of hoses, ropes, scuba and acetylene tanks, and salvage nets in pools of water. Two giant side booms towered above him, their cables almost bursting with the great weight anchored to them. Then beneath the sliding waves, the foam curling off the stern, the clouds of seaweed in the swells, glowing dimly under a bank of underwater lamps, I saw the long, tapered outline of the U-boat. It looked like the top of an enormous sand shark that had been torn out of the silt. I could see the forward deck gun shaggy with moss and crustaceans, air bubbles stringing from the torpedo tubes in the bow, the crushed steel flanges at the top of the conning tower, and the indistinct and dull glimmer of a swastika painted on the plates.

Clete's right arm was working furiously at a task that his body concealed from view. Then I saw the gasoline-powered generator and the air compressor just beyond where he was crouched on the deck, and I realized what he was doing.

I ran toward him, the rifle hanging loosely from my hand. With his single-bladed Case knife he had already sawed halfway through the air hose and the safety rope attached to it. The escaping pressure had blown a bare spot on the deck like a clean burn.

'Don't do it, Clete!'

'Too late, mon. Buchalter is about to do the big gargle.' He stood erect, ripped his knife through the remainder of the hose, and flung it like a severed snake into the water.

I stared over the side. Framed in silhouette against the bank of underwater lights, just aft of the conning tower, was a steel-mesh diver's platform, held aloft by a cable. In the middle of the platform, a diver in canvas suit, weighted boots, and hard hat was looking upward frantically, while a forgotten acetylene torch bounced like a sparkler across the sub's deck and the severed air hose spun limply downward into the darkness.

I dropped the rifle to the deck and tried to work the levers on the winch and spool that controlled the cable to the platform. I pushed the levers the wrong way, then corrected them and felt the engine buck into gear and start to retrieve the diver from below.

'Sorry, Dave, but this is one time you're wrong,' Clete said, pulling a fire ax from the wall above me. He tore all the connecting wires out of the winch's engine. Suddenly the spool locked in place, and the cable squeaked and oscillated slightly from side to side at the tip of the boom and trembled rigidly at the waterline. Then he swung the ax overhand into the spool and sheared the cable as neatly as you would coat hanger wire. It whipped free from the pulley on the boom and disappeared beneath the waves.

'It's homicide, Clete.'

'The hell it is. There's still at least one guy loose. All I did was keep a player off the board.'

But the story under the waves wasn't over. The platform had tipped sideways before it plummeted to the bottom, and the diver had managed to land on the deck, just behind the conning tower. I could see the brass helmet, the face glass, and the white hands waving in the tidal current, like a cartoon figure struggling at the bottom of a well.

I stripped off my field jacket, picked up a scuba tank and diving mask off the deck, checked the air gauge, and slipped my arms through the straps. I tied one end of a rope to the winch and the other around my waist.

'When I jerk, you pull us up,' I said.

'Big mistake,' Clete answered.

'I'll live with it. Don't let me down, Cletus.' He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. I fitted the air hose into my mouth and went over the side.

The coldness was like a fist in the stomach, then I felt currents tear at me from several directions and I heard metal ringing, cable clanging on steel, plates grinding, perhaps a long-silenced propeller gouging a trench in packed sand, and I realized that the storm in the south was already destabilizing the sub's environment and was twisting the keel against the cables that Buchalter's crew had secured to the bow and stern.

I had no weight belt or flippers and had to struggle to gain depth. I blew the mask clear and swam deeper into the vortex of gold and brown light and spinning silt until I was only five feet away from the drowning figure in the diving suit. My head was aching with the cold, my teeth locked on the rubber mouthpiece to keep them from chattering, my ears pinging from the water pressure.