Drive to the East (77 page)

Waves and spray made the Y-ranging gear much less reliable than it would have been in better weather and calmer seas. Thad Walters looked up from his screens and put the best face on things he could: “Well, sir, the damn limeys’ll have just as much fun finding us as the other way round.”

“Oh, boy,” Sam said in hollow tones. “They’ll find Newfoundland. They’ll find the Maritimes. They’ll find trouble for the USA—find it or make it.”

“That’s the name of the game for them, sir,” Lieutenant Cooley said.

“I know. But the name of the game for me is stopping them if I can,” Sam answered.

“Sir, with that gunship to our credit we’re still a long way ahead,” the exec answered.

“No.” Sam shook his head. “That’s ancient history. Anything that happened yesterday is ancient history. What we do today matters. What we’re going to do tomorrow matters. Forget the old stuff. We’ve still got a big job ahead of us.”

The Y-ranging officer and the exec exchanged glances. “Sir, I’m sorry you didn’t go to Annapolis,” Cooley said. “To hell with me if you wouldn’t have flag rank. You’ve got more killer instinct than anybody else I know.”

“What I haven’t got is the brains to make an admiral,” Sam said. “You know it, I know it, and the Navy Department sure as hell knows it. I’m damn proud I’ve come as far as I have.”

“You’ve got plenty of brains, sir. You’ve got as many as any officer I’ve served under,” Cooley said. “It’s just too bad you had to start late.”

“Well, thank you very much, Pat. That’s white of you,” Carsten answered. He knew the exec meant it; whatever else the younger man was, he was no brown-noser.

A wave crashed over the
Josephus Daniels
’ bow. White water cascaded back. No sailors manned the ship’s antiaircraft guns. They would have gone overboard in a hurry if they’d tried. No carrier-based aircraft could fly or hope to land in weather like this, either, so things evened out.

“Boy, this is fun,” Lieutenant, J.G., Walters said, raising his eyes from the electronic display for a moment.

“This time of year, the weather’s a worse enemy than the limeys and the frogs and the damn Confederates all rolled together,” Sam said. “When spring finally comes around, we’ll all get serious about the war again.”

“Sub drivers are always serious,” Cooley said.

“That’s a fact. And they’ve got it easy once they submerge—that’s another fact,” Sam agreed. “But God have mercy, I wouldn’t want to be a submersible skipper here and now, not even a little bit. They have to get into position on the surface, remember. They’re way too slow underwater to do it there. I’ll tell you one thing—
I
wouldn’t like to be a sub captain trying to stay up with us here.”

“Wouldn’t be a whole lot of fun, would it?” the exec allowed after a moment’s contemplation.

“Not hardly.” Sam thought about the wave his ship had shrugged off. He thought about the captain of a submarine standing on top of the conning tower when a wave like that washed over his boat. He thought about that skipper either washed out to sea or, if held in place by a line, doing his best imitation of a drowned puppy. He thought about Lord only knew how many gallons of the North Atlantic going down the hatch and into the submersible. He was glad to be thinking about such things as the captain of a destroyer escort. They couldn’t happen to him. They sure could to a sub driver.

Somewhere out in the North Atlantic, such things probably were happening to several submarines from both sides right this minute. Sam hoped no enemy boats were within a hundred miles. Then he hoped no U.S. boats were within a hundred miles, either. You were just as dead if your own side sank you as you were any other way. And in weather like this, mistakes were too simple.

Things only got worse. Snow and sleet blew down out of the north, coating the
Josephus Daniels
’ deck and lines and railings with ice. Sam ordered everyone who had to go up on deck to wear a lifeline. Ice made slipping even easier than it had been before.

After leaving the bridge, Sam went down to the wireless shack. One of the yeomen there was telling the other a dirty story. He broke off when his pal hissed. Both ratings sprang to attention.

“As you were,” Sam said. “You can finish that joke if you want to, Hrolfson. Don’t mind me if I don’t laugh real hard—I’ve heard it.”

“It’s all right, sir,” Petty Officer Hrolfson said, not relaxing from his stiff brace. “It’ll keep. What can we do for you, sir?”

“What’s the last weather forecast?” Sam asked.

“Ours or theirs?” Hrolfson said. The USA and the UK both sent predictions to their ships. The United States had broken the British weather code. The limeys had likely broken the American code, too; it wasn’t a tough cipher. Both sides had weather stations in Greenland and Newfoundland and Labrador and Baffin Island to keep an eye on conditions as they developed. Sam had heard quiet, deadly warfare went on up there in the northernmost reaches of the world.

“Whatever you’ve got,” he said now.

“Well, sir, the limeys figure the storm’s good for about another three days. Our guys figure it’ll blow out sooner than that,” Hrolfson said.

Sam grunted. “I’d bet on the Englishmen.” He usually did when their reports disagreed with the ones from the Navy Department. And the blow he was in now felt strong enough to last a long time.

“We’ve got more stations up there than they do,” Hrolfson said. “How come their forecasts are better than ours?”

“More experience, I guess,” Sam answered. “They’ve been doing this a long time, and we didn’t get serious about it till the war.” The ship plunged down into a trough. He steadied himself without even knowing he’d done it. “What else have we got besides the weather reports?”

“Well, the BBC says England won a big battle against the Germans in the North Sea,” Hrolfson told him. “The Kaiser’s English-language news station says Churchill’s full of shit.”

Sam sighed. “That figures, I guess. Nobody who wasn’t there will really know what’s what—and the people who were there won’t be sure, either. I still couldn’t tell you who won the Battle of the Three Navies.”

“You were there, sir?” said the other yeoman, whose name was Lopatinsky. “My uncle was there, too. He used to say the same thing. He was in the
Dakota
when the hits jammed her steering and she made that circle through the fleet.”

“Son of a—gun!” Sam said. “I was in the
Dakota,
too. What’s your uncle’s name?”

“Kruk, sir,” Lopatinsky answered. “Jerzy Kruk—people call him Jerry most of the time.”

“Son of a bitch!” This time, Sam didn’t sanitize it. “I knew him. Kind of a big gut, eyes green like a cat’s, ears that stuck out, and a go-to-hell grin. He fought one of the one-pounders topside, right?”

“That’s him,” Lopatinsky said. “His gut’s even bigger nowadays, but he’s still got that damn grin.”

“What’s he doing these days?” Carsten asked.

“Coal miner. We’re a family of miners, down in West Virginia,” Lopatinsky said. “I went down below myself for a couple of years, but I figured there’s got to be a better way to make a living.”

“That’s how I got off the farm,” Sam said. “Take it all together and I expect I was right.”

“I feel the same way, sir,” the yeoman said. “Yeah, we get shot at, but so what? At least we can shoot back. The roof comes down or the mine floods, what can you do about it? Not much.”

“Here’s something, sir.” Hrolfson had been listening intently to whatever was coming in through his earphones. “Our wireless says we’ve sent the Confederates in Pittsburgh a messenger under flag of truce. He’s asking for their surrender.”

“That
is
good news,” Sam said. “What are the Confederates doing?”

Hrolfson listened for a little while longer before shrugging. “They don’t say anything about that, sir.”

“Ha!” Lopatinsky said. “That means the Confederates told ’em to fold it till it was all corners.” Carsten nodded. That was his guess, too. If you listened to the wireless much these days, you had to learn to sift through the crap to get at the few nuggets of truth the broadcasters were, as likely as not, trying to hide.

“If they don’t give up pretty soon, we’ll kill all of them.” Hrolfson sounded as if he looked forward to it.

So did Sam. Even so, he said, “Depends on how many of our guys they can take out before they go down. If they hurt us bad enough, then it’s not a bad bargain for them even if they do buy a plot.”

“Think they can do that, sir?” Lopatinsky asked anxiously.

“I hope not, and that’s the best answer I can give you.” Sam tapped the two broad gold stripes on his sleeve. He was proud he’d got them. He hadn’t dreamt of coming so far when he scrambled up the hawse hole into officers’ country. “I know a little something about what we do on the water. Land fighting—the only thing I know is, I’m glad I’m not in it. It’s a nasty, bloody business. When we go into action here, it’s usually over in a hurry, anyhow.”

“Yes, sir,” Lopatinsky said. “How long did we need to knock that limey out?”

“I didn’t look at my watch, but it wasn’t long.” Sam let it go at that. If one of the
Karlskrona
’s big shells had hit the
Josephus Daniels,
the fight might have been over even quicker, with the wrong side winning. That bastard carried big guns, even if she had no armor and only a freighter’s engines.

“Could she have sunk us if she hit us?” Hrolfson asked, proving ignorance could be bliss.

“You bet your sweet ass she could,” Sam blurted. Hrolfson and Lopatinsky both stared at him. He laughed self-consciously. “You wanted a straight answer. You got one.”

“You usually give ’em, Skipper. That’s good,” Lopatinsky said. Hrolfson nodded. They made Sam almost as proud as knocking out the
Karlskrona
had done.

XX

O
n the women’s side again. In a way, Hipolito Rodriguez had to be more careful there than he did on the other side of Camp Determination. He knew in his gut that the black men were dangerous. With the women, he and the other men in gray could let down their guard. They could regret it if they did, too.

The women tried to make the men set over them let down their guard. They dressed provocatively, and acted provocative. And it wasn’t just an act—a lot of them would deliver. They wanted more food, better food, better quarters. They wanted to stay out of the bathhouses. They hadn’t needed long to realize those were news as bad as it got. The trucks, by contrast, nobody seemed to mind. The
mallates
knew they would be leaving Camp Determination in them, so didn’t worry about climbing aboard. That the trips had no destination, they hadn’t figured out.

“Hello, Mistuh Sergeant, suh.” The black woman who spoke to Rodriguez was falling out of her blouse. “You takes care o’ me, I takes care o’ you. I takes care o’ you real good.” She had only her body to get what she wanted. She used what she had, striking a pose that would have got her arrested on any street corner in the CSA.

Rodriguez just kept walking. He’d found that worked best. If you stopped to talk it over and argue with every colored woman who made advances, you’d never go anywhere and you’d never get anything done all day.

Sometimes nothing worked. “You lousy fairy!” the woman snarled at his back. He ignored her. If he turned around, he could get her into whatever kind of trouble he wanted, up to and including a trip to the bathhouse.

He kept walking anyhow. With or without his help, she’d get hers soon enough any which way. Even if she latched on to some other guard as a protector, she’d get hers before long. Either he’d get bored with her or he’d find somebody else or he’d be off duty when she got picked in a cleanout. He might even be sorry afterwards. She wouldn’t be, not for long.

Another woman came up to him. “Mistuh Sergeant, suh?” None of them ever called him
Troop Leader.
They knew about Army ranks. The ranks Freedom Party guards used might have been in some foreign language for them. Since Rodriguez felt the same way about those ranks, he couldn’t blame the women—not for that, anyhow.

“What you want?” he asked. Unlike most, this one wasn’t trying to act like a slut. The novelty intrigued him. Because it did, he answered her instead of pretending she wasn’t there.

“Mistuh Sergeant, suh, my little boy, he powerful hungry. He only five year old. You got chilluns your ownself, suh?”

“I got children,” Rodriguez said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do nothin’.” Children died fast in the camp. Their mothers often died with them, from trying to share rations that weren’t enough for one.

The Negro woman sighed. “You find him some extra food, Mistuh Sergeant, suh, I do anything you want. Reckon you know what I mean. I don’t want nothin’ for me. But he too little to die like dat. He ain’t done nothin’ to nobody.”

“I don’t want nothing like that. I got a wife, too.” Rodriguez occasionally forgot about Magdalena—temptation would get the better of him. But he didn’t forget more than occasionally.

“You sound like you is a Christian man.” The colored woman sounded surprised.

Almost all
mallates
were Protestants. To Rodriguez, that meant they hardly counted as Christians themselves. He didn’t want to argue with the woman. The less he had to do with the prisoners, the less he had to think of them as people. The job went better when they were just—things—to him. So all he said was, “I try,” and he started to go on with his rounds.

“If you is a Christian man, suh, an’ if you loves Jesus Christ, what you doin’ here?” the woman asked.

He knew what he was doing: reducing population. As far as he was concerned, that needed doing. If it weren’t for the Negroes, the Confederate States wouldn’t have had so many troubles. He’d got his first taste of combat not against the USA but stamping out a Negro Socialist Republic in Georgia. Were blacks any more loyal to the Stars and Bars than they had been a generation earlier? If they were, would the country need camps now?

“Reckon I ax somebody else, then,” the woman said with another sigh. “You seemed like you was a decent fella, but I gots to do what I gots to do to keep my Septimius alive.”

Another raggedy-ass pickaninny with a ten-dollar name. Rodriguez almost asked the woman why she couldn’t have called him Joe or Fred or Pete or something sensible. In the end, he held his tongue. That little kid had nothing left but his fancy name. Why not let him make the most of it for whatever small span of days he had here?

When Rodriguez walked on, the woman didn’t try to stop him. He wondered what her chances of hooking up with some other guard were. She wasn’t anything special to look at. With so many women throwing themselves at the men in gray, it was a buyers’ market. The Freedom Party guards could pick and choose. Ordinary girls got left behind.

Off to the northwest, something that might have been distant thunder muttered. But it wasn’t thunder, not on a day that was fine and bright if chilly. It was artillery. Rodriguez knew the sound—he knew it at much closer range than this. Just the other side of Lubbock, Confederate and damnyankee gunners were doing their best to blow each other to hell and gone.

If the men in green-gray broke through, if they started down the highway toward Snyder and toward Camp Determination . . . That wouldn’t be so good. The guards had orders to get rid of as many Negroes as they could, and then to blow up the bathhouses and escape themselves.

More mutters in the distance. Would the prisoners know what those sounds meant? Some of the men would; Rodriguez was sure of that. Either they’d fought for the C.S. government or against it—maybe both. Any which way, they would know what artillery was. That could mean trouble.

Rodriguez glanced at the young men with submachine guns who accompanied him. They showed no signs of recognizing the far-off rumble. That only proved they’d never seen combat.

Why aren’t you in the real Army?
Rodriguez wondered. The answer wasn’t hard to figure out—they’d pulled strings. This was bound to be a safer duty than facing soldiers in green-gray. The
mallates
here might be troublesome, but they didn’t shoot back. And they definitely didn’t have artillery.

An airplane buzzed over the camp. It was a Confederate Hound Dog; Rodriguez could make out the C.S. battle flags painted under the wings. U.S. warplanes had made appearances, too. If they wanted to bomb or strafe, they could. Camp Determination wasn’t set up to defend against air attack; nobody had ever thought it would have to.

So far, the U.S. aircraft had left the place alone. Maybe the fliers didn’t know what this place was. Or maybe they knew and didn’t care. It wasn’t as if people in the USA loved Negroes, either. They complained about what the Confederates were doing to them, but that struck Rodriguez as nothing but propaganda. If the United States really cared about Negroes, they would have opened their borders to them. They hadn’t. They weren’t about to, either.

Two women got into a catfight. They screeched and scratched and wrestled and swore. Rodriguez and his comrades hurried toward the squabble. The women were shrieking about somebody named Adrian. Was he a guard? Rodriguez couldn’t think of any guards named Adrian, but he might have missed somebody. Was he a black man in the other half of the prison? Or was he somebody they’d known back where they came from?

Whoever he was, he wasn’t worth disturbing the peace for. “Enough!” Rodriguez yelled. “Break it up!”

The women ignored him. They were too intent on maiming each other to care what a guard said. “You whore!” one of them shouted.

“I ain’t no whore!” The second woman pulled the first one’s hair, which produced a shrill scream. “
You
the whore!”

“Break it up!” Rodriguez yelled again. “Punishment cell for both of you!”

Life at Camp Determination was hard anyway. It was harder in a punishment cell. They didn’t give prisoners room to stand up or sit down. They had no stoves—you froze in the winter. In the summer, you baked, but everybody in the camp baked in the summer. You got starvation rations, even skimpier and nastier than the cooks doled out to anybody else.

But the two women really meant this brawl. They wouldn’t stop no matter what a man in uniform said. That was unusual. Rodriguez nodded to the junior guards with him. “Take care of it,” he said.

They did, using the butt ends of their submachine guns. Some of the models that went up to the front were of all-metal construction, so cheap they’d fall to pieces if you dropped them on the sidewalk. But the guards got better-made weapons with real wooden stocks. One reason they did was for times like this. Even if you didn’t want to shoot somebody, you sometimes had to knock sense into an empty head.

Now the women shrieked on a different note. Back when they first got half the camp to themselves, some of the guards were reluctant to clout them. No more. Familiarity had bred contempt.

“Didn’t you hear the troop leader yell for you to break it up?” one of the guards panted. “He tells you to do something, you cut the crap and you do it, you hear?”

If Rodriguez hadn’t had three stripes on his sleeve, he likely would have been nothing but a damn Mexican to the guard. Of course, even a damn Mexican stood higher on the Confederate ladder than a nigger (unless you were a white Texan from down near the Rio Grande). And a troop leader stood infinitely higher than a prisoner in an extermination camp.

One of the women had an eye swollen shut. The other one had blood running down the side of her head. They pointed at each other. At exactly the same time, they both said, “She started it.”

“Nobody cares who start it,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t stop when I say to stop. I say twice, you still don’t stop. Now you pay.” He turned to the guards. “To the punishment cells. They start this shit again, you shoot. You hear?”

“Yes, Troop Leader!” they chorused, their timing almost as good as the women’s.

Rodriguez wondered if the Negroes thought he was joking. If they did, it was the last mistake they’d ever make. Nobody in the Confederate States—nobody who mattered, anyway—would care whether a couple of colored women died a little sooner than they would have otherwise. Far away in the distance, artillery rumbled again. As long as it didn’t get much closer, everything was all right. Rodriguez hoped everything would go on being all right, too.

W
illard Sloan was not a nice man. Scipio listened to him screaming on the telephone: “You call that lettuce? Holy Jesus, only thing it was good for was wiping my ass! What do I mean? I’ll tell you what I mean. It was limper than an old man’s dick, that’s what, and it looked like the bugs ate as much as you sold me. Nobody pulls that kind of shit on me twice, you hear?”
Bang!
Down went the receiver.

Sloan might have been nice before the Yankee bullet paralyzed him from the waist down. Or he might have been a son of a bitch from the start. If he’d ever heard the old saying about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, he didn’t believe it. Maybe he just didn’t like flies.

Most restaurant managers worth their pay had some son of a bitch in them. Jerry Dover sure did. But the new man at the Huntsman’s Lodge took it to extremes. When something made him unhappy, you heard about it, loudly and profanely. Sloan operated on the theory that the squeaky wheel got the grease. He didn’t just squeak—he screeched.

He cussed Scipio out when the black man made mistakes. Scipio did make some—with all the things that went on in a busy restaurant, he couldn’t help it. But he didn’t make many, and Willard Sloan noticed. “Well, looks like Dover knew what he was talking about,” he said one day. “You do know what the fuck you’re doin’.”

“I thanks you, suh,” Scipio said. “You do somethin’, you likes to do it good.”

“Ha!” Sloan said. “Most people”—he didn’t say
most niggers,
for which Scipio gave him credit—“only want to do enough to get by. You show up every day, and you work like a bastard.”

“I does my job bes’ way I knows how,” Scipio said.

“Well, that’s what you’re supposed to do,” the manager said. “Doesn’t happen as often as it ought to, though. I can hire a hundred people who could wait tables kinda half-assed, you know what I mean? Good enough to get by, but not really good. One of you is worth all of them put together. You’re the kind of waiter a place like this is supposed to have. You’re the kind of waiter who makes the Huntsman’s Lodge the kind of place it is.”

“Thank you, suh. Don’t reckon I hear many finer compliments.” Scipio meant it. Willard Sloan didn’t have to waste praise on him. If Sloan did it, he meant it. Maybe hearing that praise made Scipio rash, for he went on, “How much it matter, though, when they kin ship me off to a camp whenever they please?”

As soon as the words were gone, he wished he had them back. Whining to a white man never did a Negro any good. Willard Sloan didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “When I got shot, I was out in no-man’s-land, between our lines and the damnyankees’. A nigger soldier brought me back, or maybe I would’ve died out there.”

“What happen to him afterwards?” Scipio asked.

Sloan sighed. “Xerxes, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know where he’s from. I don’t know his name. I don’t know if he got himself killed next day or next week or next month. I can’t tell you, that’s all. I wasn’t an officer leading colored troops or anything—their sector was next to ours, that’s all. I don’t even know if he was out there already or if he came out to get me. I was in the hospital a hell of a long time after that. I never had the chance to find out.”

“All right, suh.” Thus encouraged, Scipio felt bold enough to add, “If he still ’live now, reckon he either in a camp or worried about goin’ in. Don’t hardly seem fair.”

Sloan sighed again. He spread his hands. “Ain’t much I can do about it. Who pays attention to a guy in a wheelchair who runs a restaurant? Maybe I can help my own people some. I hear tell Dover did. Things are getting tougher all the time. I don’t know if it’ll still work. I aim to try, anyhow.”