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junk or something. But she doesn’t fool me for an instant. Mister Lustig, put a shot across her bow, eh? If she heaves to it’ll be a junk and we’ll inspect her for contraband; if she turns tail and runs for it that’ll mean she’s a patrol boat and we’ll blow her out of the water.”
    “Good thinking, Captain,” said the XO.
    “Hey, Shrink, the Captain thinks it may be a patrol boat. He wants you to put a shot across its bow.”
    “One shot across the bow coming up,” said Wallowitch.He drew his sword and pointed it at the target as if he were about to charge.
    “Mount Fifty-one, stand by on the port barrel, I repeat, on the port barrel,” ordered Lustig.
    “Mount Fifty-one starboard barrel loaded and ready,” reported McTigue over the sound-powered phone system.
    “I SAID PORT BARREL, CHIEF.”
    “Jesus shit, Mister Lustig, the port hoist is making grinding noises, so I switched to the starboard. It don’t make no difference, does it?”
    Lustig shrugged.
    A voice came up the voice tube: “Bridge, this is Combat, target tracks dead in the water.”
    “Hey, Larry,” Wallowitch called, “I just thought of something — I don’t know how to put a shot across somebody’s bow. They don’t teach that kind of thing at gunnery school any more.”
    “Listen, Shrink, it’s a snap,” Lustig said. “The target is dead in the water, see. So all you have to do is take a range and bearing to her bow, crank in a small lead angle and shoot, got it?”
    “You mean the shot should go in front of her bow, not actually over it?” Wallowitch asked.
    “Yeah, right, in front of the bow,” Lustig said.
    “Then how come they always tell you to put a shot across her bow?”
    “Come on, Shrink, it’s only a figure of speech. Just do it, will you, before the skipper blows a gasket.”
    “Can I shoot now?” Wallowitch asked.
    “You can shoot anytime you want to,” Lustig said.
    Wallowitch put his sword down, double-checked the range and bearing to the target’s bow, cranked in a small lead angle and picked up the remote control trigger.
    On the open bridge the voice from Combat floated up the voice tube. “Bridge, it’s me again. Belay that last, huh.Someone forgot to plug in the DR bug. The target appears to be moving at, oh, say eight knots.”
    “Eight — Jesus. Hey Shrink, hold off —”
    The starboard gun in Mount 51 fired and recoiled. The brass powder case, hot enough to singe the skin off a man’s hand, kicked out onto the deck and rolled against the railing. Looking like an ad for cigarettes, a perfect sphere of orange smoke emerged from the tip of the barrel. Three thousand yards away the target sailed into the round of VT frag, flared up as if someone had ignited a book of matches and disintegrated.
    The time was exactly 0713.
    For the space of a long breath there was no sound on the Ebersole except the bow wave lapping softly against the sides of the hull. Then, as if a punch line had clicked in his brain, the Executive Officer burst into long rolls of cackling laughter. And Tevepaugh poked his head out of the pilot house to ask Lustig: “D’you think we can say we seen action now?”
    Lustig Strikes It Rich
    “That was fine shooting, my boy,” Jones said, pounding Wallowitch on the back of his tennis sweater when he emerged from the main director hatch. “Fine shooting. Think I’ll have all my officers wear sidearms to GQ from now on, eh? Creates the right kind of atmosphere, isn’t that so, XO?”
    “Good going, Wally,” the XO said, reaching down and pumping the Shrink’s hand.
    “Just call me ‘One Shot,’ ” Wallowitch said shakily.
    As the sun edged over the horizon the Ebersole took aturn around the area looking for survivors. The only thing it found was some chunks of splintered wood, a cork life jacket wrapped around an armless, headless, legless torso, and an empty cardboard box marked “U.S. Government Issue Prophylactics.”
    Jones dispatched an “action report”