“Ed?”
“My God!” cried Ed Curry. “We thought you were-”
“Not yet. Ed, can you turn the ship broadside?”
“Sure. We’ll just bleed a little power from the Elbows and-say, are you all right?”
“Yes,” sighed Forte. “I’m all right.”
“Then get out while there’s still time. You’ve won, Will.”
“Not yet.”
“Drop over the side and swim to shore. You can do it, Will.”
“Grell will be back.”
“We’ll fight him from here. The fire-control link is intact. Sacrificing yourself will gain nothing.”
Forte wavered. His eyes were fixed Wearily on the shadowy Russian flagship some miles down the channel. His hand still gripped the firing pickle, and the streams of electronic fire issued from the mouths of the Elbows mounts without cessation, to be dissipated in space long before it could reach the enemy ship. He felt a tremendous languor taking possession of him. He supposed this was the “peace” those with but moments to live experienced at the end. Perhaps it was peace, if peace meant the absence of thought, or desire, or pain. He felt as though he were floating free of the Earth and looking back at himself, imprisoned in that familiar quarter-limbed body, which nevertheless seemed not to belong to him at all, he-
He blinked. The Russian flagship had ceased to shrink. It was growing again. The Karl Marx was coming back.
“Will, get out of there!” Ed Curry said with quiet intensity.
“Later, Ed. Right now . . .”
There was a glint of sunlight in the sky. The glints quickly resolved into trails of fire as the Karl Marx’s salvo of five missiles plunged toward the Texas. Instinctively Forte focused his gaze on the line of projectiles, the stream of particles from his Elbows lancing through the sky to meet them.
One exploded, then another, and a third, in rapid succession. But the fourth streaked down toward the Texas, passed across the old battleship’s bow, and exploded with terrific impact in the water just beyond, a moment before the fifth missile struck the Texas squarely on the fantail.
The twin concussions knocked Forte out. His head fell forward on his chest, and the coupled Elbows, following the inclination of his eyes, bombarded the oily, flotsam-filled water between the Texas and the advancing Russian flagship. A cloud of steam rose between them, obscuring one from the other.
The Russian ship, its launchers reloaded, its missiles aimed by radar, sent its second salvo winging toward the Texas before Gwillam Forte, only slowly coming around, was aware of what was happening. He lifted his head and eyes only in time to see the five silvery fingers of fate coming directly at him.
This time, instinct didn’t preserve him. One missile detonated before it reached its target, but the other four struck in deadly unison, two on the superstructure, the other two at the water line.
Within seconds, the Texas followed Gwillam Forte into the watery corridors of death. Battered beyond recognition, with columns of smoke rising high into the sky from a dozen raging fires, its watertight integrity breached, plates sprung and superstructure flattened and twisted or blown clear away, the old ship settled in the black channel waters and sank out of sight.
The victorious Karl Marx, now but a kilometer away, ceased fire and slowed to avoid ramming the sinking remains of its adversary.
The Texas seemed quite dead-dead and buried, in fact, but in the watery darkness the ship’s heart still beat.
The old ship’s power plant had been encased in ferroconcrete as a shield against radiation if the hull were breached and the reactor-room bulkheads fractured. The reactor rooms were separated from the rest of the ship by watertight doors. These doors had held throughout the battle. Only when the enemy’s missiles slammed into the hull, twisting the frames, did they buckle. Water began to trickle in across the combing.
At the bottom of the ship channel, the dark waters invaded the reactor spaces. There the nuclear engines were pulsating, still producing power at such a tremendous rate that the high-energy-density capacitors became oversaturated. When the water at last penetrated to the reactors themselves, the result was cataclysmic.
The sunken hulk detonated with the force of an atomic bomb.
A column of water shot up from the bottom of the channel. Two hundred meters across, it flung the Karl Marx, at that moment passing overhead, into the Texas sky like a Ping-Pong ball lifted aloft on the jet of a garden hose. The shock wave knocked buildings flat halfway across Houston, and pieces of the Karl Marx were hurled miles across the Texas countryside. . . .
The Battle of the Black Channel, second day, had lasted sixteen minutes, and ended with the extinction of all combatants.
For the rest of the day and the following night, an unearthly silence hung over the city. The song of night birds was stilled, the blast having exterminated them along with townspeople for miles around. Here and there, a candle proclaimed the survival of some hardy soul, but the candles burned without a flicker of movement, like altar candles burned for the dead.
7 JULY 2002
The memorial service on the banks of the Houston Ship Channel was brief, as brief as the occasion it commemorated, the Battle of the Black Channel and the historic defeat of the Russian fleet by the Texas Navy.
Cherokee Tom Traynor’s address to the huge but subdued crowd was the shortest of all that day, but longest remembered.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “Leonidas and his three hundred Greek soldiers sacrificed themselves to delay the advance of the Persian army of 180,000 strong at the Pass of Thermopylae, thus giving Athens and Sparta time to regroup, defeat the Persian invaders, and save Greek civilization for the world. That feat of arms has been justly enshrined for twenty-five centuries as the epitome of martial valor. If this is so, then how long will Captain Gwillam Forte of the Texas Navy be remembered, a triple-amputee of advanced years, who, alone in an ancient battleship, gallantly battled twenty-three modern warships, crewed by twenty thousand highly trained Russian sailors, and left not a single ship afloat or a single enemy alive on the field of battle?
“I shall tell you how long, ladies and gentlemen- forever!”
Later, with bowed head, listening to the benediction, his thoughts drifted off into the world of might-have-been. Had it not been for Forte and the Texas, would the Russians even now be launching their invasion of North America? Would the entire Earth be wrapped in a great radioactive cloud, its hapless inhabitants gasping out their last poisoned breaths in bomb shelters, tombs for the imminent dead? Would a single witness to the Russian will-o’-the-wisp of world domination survive to record this final stupidity of man, a creature who could conquer everything but himself?
But these speculations were philosophical, and being philosophical, futile. More rewarding were thoughts of things as they were, here and now, and considering them broadly, he could find little reason to complain.
The scorched banks of the ship channel had been plowed up, landscaped, and replanted. Now they were a verdant park linking Houston to the sea, trees and grass, young lovers and frolicking children keeping green the memory of Gwillam Forte and his fellow martyrs on that fateful day four years ago. Economically, his people had made a rapid recovery and were on the verge-if one were so naive as to believe economists-of an unprecedented boom. With the closure of the borders to unrestricted immigration, a social and economic equilibrium among the diverse population was finally a beckoning possibility.
His personal destiny, while as blessed as that of his people, wasn’t what he had anticipated seven years earlier, when he had roped in Gwillam Forte to assist his grand strategy for gaining the U.S. Senate and later the White House. He had never got to the Senate. Neither, to be sure, had Ernesto Gallego, although it had been Traynor’s inspiration to rid himself of his rival by sending him to New York in the prestigious but empty post of ambassador to the United Nations. Nor, of course, would Cherokee Tom ever sit in the Oval Office in Washington.
No, being president of the Republic of Texas wasn’t the same as being President of the United States. Certainly not.
It was better.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For 30 years Daniel da Cruz has lived and worked- as a diplomat, teacher, businessman, and journalist-in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
He spent six World War II years as a U.S. Marine volunteer, serving ashore, afloat (in 1941 aboard the Texas), and aloft in the three war theaters. A magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, da Cruz has been variously a census enumerator, magazine editor and editorial consultant, judo master-he holds a second degree Black Belt of the Kodokan Judo Institute, Tokyo-taxi driver, farmer, public relations officers for an oil company, salesman, foreign correspondent, publishers’ representative, vice-president of a New York advertising agency, slaughterhouse skinner, captain of a Texas security organization, American Embassy press attache in Baghdad, and copper miner. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Miami University.