Harry Turtledove - Cayos in the Stream

You are proud of the disguised bomb. Well you might be, since you thought of it. It is the ace up your sleeve, if you can get close enough to use it. If. You hope the U-boat will lie alongside the Pilar to take away your catch. You hope so, but you do not know that for a fact. If the U-boat does not, you are in trouble. Bad trouble. It has a deck gun, and a machine gun. It has torpedoes. It can smash you at a range where you have not a prayer of touching it.

You go hunting anyhow. Anything is better than staying in the house and picking fights with Martha. No problem finding a crew. Your friends are as crazy as you are. And once or twice, when you have them, you take your sons along.

Your friends are almost as crazy as you are. One of them says, “You know, Ernie, this kind of reminds me of the dog that’s chasing the Buick. What will the son of a bitch do if he catches it?”

“Bury it like a bone,” you answer. Your eyes go to the dummy extinguisher. It sits on the cabin wall next to the real one. You know the difference. With luck, the Germans will not until too late.

With luck. Always with luck.

Your friend backs down. You are the top dog around here. “Take an even strain,” he says. “I was just asking.”

“Well, I just obscenity told you,” you rasp. You glance over at the explosive again. It is your best weapon. But a Type VII U-boat is a steel cigar almost 220 feet long. Next to the small, friendly Pilar , it might as well be a car next to a dog.

So is a bomb disguised as a fire extinguisher a good enough weapon? That is not the same as being your best one. Too bad. Too bad!

You tell yourself you are not alone on the Gulf Stream when you take your fishing boat out after dragons in the sea crueler than any marlin. To a degree, this is true. The Pilar had an ordinary radio set. Because you can pull strings, now the boat has Huff Duff, too.

That is the fancy rig. Huff Duff. HFDF. High frequency direction finder. It is a secret weapon. You are not supposed to know about such things. But you do-more strings. So now you have a Huff Duff set of your own.

It picks up any message a U-boat sends out. It does not necessarily read the message. It does give you a precise bearing. Pick up the same message on two Huff Duff sets and you can plot two bearings. Where they meet, there is your U-boat.

Even if only one Huff Duff gets a bearing, that is better than nothing. You can sail along it and hunt the U-boat yourself. Or you can radio your position and the bearing to the U.S. Navy. Warships, airplanes, and blimps will all go after the submarine then. That may not make you a hero. If it sinks a U-boat, it is. . almost as good.

Meanwhile, the Huff Duff set fills up all of the Pilar ’s little head. You and your crewmates have to go over the side of the boat. It is funny for a little while. Everyone makes the same stupid jokes. They get stale in a hurry, like fish on a hot day. So does hanging your ass out over the Gulf Stream, but you have got to do it.

Your ass also hangs out another way. You have to sign a receipt to get the Huff Duff set. If you ruin it, you are stuck for the bill. That bill will be upwards of thirty grand. Upwards of thirty grand is no chump change, even for a world-famous writer who is not broke.

You go out. You and your crewmates fish. You drink. You do not drink to the point where you get drunk and stupid. That is for the bars ashore and for after the fights with Martha. The Pilar and her merry men are part of what they call the Hooligan Navy. The regular Navy is dry, dry as the desert. It is an important difference.

Once, the ocean boils a hundred yards from the boat. “Jesus!” someone says hoarsely. Your mouth goes dry. This is what you were waiting for. Part of you-a big part of you-wishes you could wait a while longer.

And you can. The boiling in the sea is not a U-boat surfacing. It is only a whale coming up to blow. The whale is longer than the Pilar . Barnacles scab its smooth gray hide.

Only a whale. Thinking of a U-boat can make a whale into only a whale. You have trouble imagining anything else able to do that.

“Well,” one of the fellows says, “now we have a fish story to top every fish story since Jonah put to sea.”

You shake your head. “A whale isn’t a fish. It wouldn’t need to blow if it were a fish.”

“Thank you, Encyclopaedia Britannica,” he answers. Everybody else laughs. After a beat, you join in. Things will not stay smooth if you do not. And you know too well that Americans cannot stand intellectuals. To most of them, an intellectual is anyone who knows anything they do not. Your crewmate goes on, “What I want to find out is, how heavy a test line would we need to reel in that baby?”

“They don’t make test line measured in tons,” you say. “I’m goddamn sure they don’t make test line measured in that many tons.”

Now your crewmates laugh with you, not at you. You have to make them do that if you aim to lead them. You are no Navy officer. You have no shoulder boards or gold stripes above your cuffs. Come to that, you have no cuffs. If they are going to obey, it must be because of the man of you, not on account of rank. Leading like that is magic. But it is a magic you know how to use.

The whale slides under the sea again. As its front end goes down, its tail rises for a moment. The flukes go higher than your perch on the flying bridge. Then they slap the blue water. A wave circles out from the slap. A few seconds later, it kisses the Pilar ’s wooden flank.

“Damn,” someone whispers.

“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” you say. You win another laugh. It is a small one, but it will do. You add, “I wonder how far away hydrophones will pick that up.”

When everything goes just right, a U-boat’s hydrophones can reach out past thirty miles. They can pick up the sound of a ship’s engine, and of its screw turning through the sea. A good operator can tell the difference between a fishing boat and a freighter and a warship. Does a surfacing whale sound like a surfacing submarine? You do not know for sure. You have done a pile of things in your time, but going below is not one of them.

Everything does not always go just right, either. The border between the warm Gulf Stream and the cooler waters to either side will throw hydrophones off. So will other things. Even the submariners do not understand them all. Sometimes, though, they do not know they have company until too late.

No U-boat skipper will fear your boat. Whether he hears it thirty miles away or sees it in his periscope from as close as the whale was does not matter. Fear is for important things. The only way the Pilar can be important to a U-boat skipper is as a fish market-one he does not have to pay. That is your big hope in going out on patrol to begin with. If you find a U-boat, you have a chance to surprise it.

A chance. If you find one. And if you and your friends can carry on the way you are supposed to. A whale coming up for air was enough to turn all the spit in your mouth to dust. What will you be like when you find a U-boat? If you find one.

Cuba is a big island off the shore of the American mainland. Smaller islands lie off the shore of the Cuban mainland. Some of the smaller islands have smaller islands still lying off their shores. Some of the smaller islands still have rocks lying off them. Some of the rocks have pebbles. Some of the pebbles. .

So, naturalists observe, a flea

Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;

And these have smaller still to bite ’em

And so proceed ad infinitum.

When you get to talking about the islands off the Cuban coast in a bar, you cannot resist quoting Jonathan Swift. People like it. They whoop and holler. It is pretty drunk out, of course.