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exercised alongside them, out in the middle of the Atlantic, and maybe in the Pacific, too.
    “She’s going to pass close to us,” Enos said. He could see the great gray hull of the ship now, almost bow-on to the
Ripple
. The plume of black coal smoke trailed away behind.
    Captain O’Donnell still had the telescope aimed at the approaching ship. “Imperial German Navy, sure enough,” he said. “I can make out the ensign. Now—is that the
Roon
or the
Yorck
?” He kept looking, and finally grunted in satisfaction. “The
Yorck
, and no mistaking her. See how her cranes are pierced? If she were the
Roon
, they’d be solid.”
    “If you say so, Captain. You’re the one with the spyglass, after all.” Enos’ chuckle suited his wry sense of humor. He took another naked-eye look at the oncoming
Yorck
. The cruiser
was
nearly bow-on. When he spoke again, he sounded anxious: “We see her, Captain, but does she see us?”
    The question was anything but idle. As the
Yorck
drew near, she seemed more and more like an armored cliff bearing down on the steam trawler. The
Ripple
was 114 feet long and displaced 244 gross tons. That made her one of the bigger fishing boats operating out of Boston harbor. All at once, though, Enos felt as if he were in a rowboat, and a pint-sized rowboat at that.
    “How big
is
she, Captain?” Fred Butcher asked. The huge hull and great gun turrets gave him pause, too.
    “At the waterline, 403 feet, 3 inches,” O’Donnell answered with the automatic accuracy of the longtime Navy man he was. “She displaces 9,050 tons. Four 8.2-inch guns, ten 6-inchers, crew of 557. Four-inch armor amidships, two-inch belts at the ends. She’ll make twenty-one knots in a sprint.”
    “If she runs us down, she won’t even notice, in other words,” Enos said.
    “That’s about right, George,” O’Donnell answered easily. He took pride in the strength and speed of naval vessels, as if having served on them somehow magically gave him strength and speed as well. Even so, though, his glance flicked to the American flag rippling atop the foremast. The sight of the thirty-four-star banner rippling in the brisk breeze must have reassured him. “They’ll see us just fine. Here, if you’re still worried, I’ll send up a flare, that I will.” He dug a cigar out of his jacket pocket, scraped a match against the sole of his boot, and puffed out a cloud almost as malodorous as the coal smoke issuing from the
Yorck
’s stacks.
    As if his cigar
had
been a message to the German cruiser, signal flags sprouted from her yards. O’Donnell raised the telescope to his eye once more. The cigar in his mouth jerked sharply upward, a sure sign of good humor. “By Jesus, they want to know if we have fish to sell!” he burst out. He turned to Butcher. “Tell ’em yes, and don’t waste a second doing it.”
    The affirmative pennant went up almost as quickly as the order had been given. The
Yorck
slowed in the water, drifting to a stop about a quarter-mile from the
Ripple
. Then everyone aboard the steam trawler whooped with delight as the German cruiser let down a boat. “Hot damn!” yelled Lucas Phelps, one of the men minding the trawl the
Ripple
had been dragging along the shallow bottom of Georges Bank. “The Germans, they’ll pay us better’n the Bay State Fishing Company ever would.”
    “And it all goes into our pockets, too,” Fred Butcher said gleefully. On fish that made it back to Boston, the crew and the company that owned the boat split the take down the middle. Butcher went on, “We’re light five hundred, a thousand pounds of haddock, that’s not ever gonna get noticed.”
    The happy silence of conspiracy settled over the
Ripple
. Before long, the eight men in the
Yorck
’s lifeboat came alongside the trawler. “Permission to come aboard?” asked the petty officer who evidently headed up the little crew.
    “Permission granted,” Patrick O’Donnell answered, as formally as if he were still in