Du Bouvard swore again, with more feeling than ever, as the sharp, distant pop of gunfire came to him. The American motor boats were too far away for him to see details very well, but he could clearly see one of the uniformed Marines firing at something in the water with one of the up-time pistols.
Laguia, he thought. During their practice dives, the Spaniard had demonstrated an unfortunate tendency to become disoriented and come to the surface and look around in order to check his bearings. But even Laguia should have known better than to poke his head up that close to one of the American patrol boats!
Be fair, Anatole, he told himself harshly as the Marine fired again and again. The poor bastard's got to be half-frozen, despite all the grease you could slather onto him. No wonder his brain isn't working very well.
Unlike quite a few of his contemporaries, Leberecht Probst had discovered that he was actually an excellent shot with a pistol. The revolver, a .38 Smith & Wesson Model 15 with a four-inch barrel, wasn't the most powerful of weapons to have come back through the Ring of Fire, but it was comfortable in his hand, and his target jerked up out of the water with the third shot.
It was definitely a human head, he noted, amazed by the steadiness of his own hand as the fact that he was shooting at another human being was confirmed. In fact, the head was attached to the rest of a human body, and he saw a sudden blossom of crimson on the side of the swimmer's neck as he fired a fourth time.
His target rolled over, and the glassy plate of the diver's swimming mask turned towards him like a Cyclops' accusing eye. Then the man he'd just shot submerged once again.
It didn't look like an intentional dive.
"Take us over there, Kjell," Probst heard his own preposterously calm voice saying to Halvorsen. "And report to the flagship that we've definitely sighted at least one scuba diver."
Du Bouvard's jaw tightened as the pistol fire stopped and the boat from which it had come swept around in a sharp turn. Whether it had been Laguia or not, the combination of no more shooting and purposeful movement suggested that something unpleasant had happened to the Marine's target. And the fact that one of his divers had been sighted had just reduced the other swimmer's already minute chances of success to virtually nothing.
"What do we do now?" Olier asked.
"There's damn-all we can do," du Bouvard replied flatly. "Except get the hell out of here before they get around to sending parties ashore to find out just where those divers came from."
"That sounds like an excellent idea to me," Olier said fervently, and started barking orders at the rest of their party.
"Is there any confirmation?" Simpson asked.
"No, sir." Halberstat shook his head. "If it was a diver, he either dove again or just sank, and the water's so muddy you can't see anything two feet below the surface. But young Probst's a reliable man. If he says he saw someone in the water, I believe him."
"So do I," Simpson admitted. "And Achates' problems may actually let the lunatics succeed. Mind you," he smiled thinly, "I wouldn't be willing to risk any money betting on the probability, but Murphy doesn't play favorites."
Halberstat nodded. Before joining the navy, he'd never heard of the "Murphy" so many of the up-timers invoked, but he'd been eminently familiar with the concept Murphy enshrined.
"What are your orders, sir?" he asked.
Simpson thought for a moment, gazing down from the bridge wing at one of the mitrailleuses as the weapon poked out of its firing port and swung restlessly back and forth. He knew that some of the army's officers—like Frank Jackson—thought that his insistence on the more sophisticated and expensive mitrailleuses instead of the simpler Requa-style volley guns the army had adopted was simply one more example of his mania for "bells and whistles." And, he knew, they deeply resented the priority he'd gotten for allocations from the primers various up-time firearm reloaders had brought back with them.
But there were sound reasons for the successful, bitter campaign he'd waged in favor of the navy's mitrailleuses. The army's volley guns were an all-or-nothing proposition. Their cartridge cases had no individual primers, only touch holes, and were set off in a rapid-fire chain by a single powder train. In twentieth-century terms, they weren't "selective fire" weapons; when one shot was fired, every shot was fired. Even worse, in many ways, they were mounted as artillery pieces. The weapons were cumbersome, large, and impossible to traverse. When they fired, they delivered all of their rounds virtually simultaneously into a very small, relatively speaking, target area.