Return Engagement (12 page)

“I say I’m a middle-aged man with a wife and a son,” O’Doull answered. “I say that if you think I’m going to try to keep them going on a captain’s pay, or even a major’s, you’re out of your mind.”

Quigley blew another smoke ring, even more impressive—and even smellier—than the first. He steepled his fingers and looked sly. “They aren’t Americans, of course,” he said. “They’re citizens of the Republic of Quebec.”

“And so?” O’Doull asked.

“And so the Republic, out of the goodness of its heart—and, just between you and me, because we’re twisting its arm—will pay them a stipend equal to your average income the last three years, based on your tax records. That’s over and above what we’ll pay you as a major in the Medical Corps.”

You do want me,
O’Doull thought. And the USA had set things up so the Republic of Quebec would pay most of the freight. That seemed very much like something the United States would do. O’Doull laughed. He said, “First time I ever wished I didn’t have a good accountant.”

That made Jedediah Quigley laugh, too. “Have we got a bargain?”

“If I can persuade Nicole,” O’Doull answered. His wife was going to be furious. She was going to be appalled. He was more than a little appalled himself. But, for the first time since the war broke out, he also felt at peace with himself. At peace with Nicole was likely to be another matter.

G
eorge Enos, Jr., scanned the waters of the North Atlantic for more than other fishing boats, sea birds, and fish and dolphins. He’d heard how a Confederate commerce raider had captured his father’s boat, and how a C.S. submersible had tried to sink her, only to be sunk by a U.S. sub lurking with the boat. He hardly remembered any of that himself. He’d been a little boy during the Great War. But his mother had talked about it plenty, then and afterwards.

He bit his lip. His mother was dead, murdered by the one man she’d fallen for since his father. That Ernie had blown out his own brains right afterwards was no consolation at all.

Inside of a day or two, the
Sweet Sue
would get to the Grand Bank off Newfoundland. Then George wouldn’t have the luxury of leisure to stand around. He’d be baiting hooks with frozen squid, letting lines down into the cold, green waters of the Atlantic, or bringing tuna aboard—which always resembled a bout of all-in wrestling much more than anything ordinary people, landlubbers, thought of as fishing. He’d barely have time to eat or sleep then, let alone think. But the long run out gave him plenty of time to brood.

Under his feet, the deck throbbed with the pounding of the diesel. The fishing boat was making ten knots, which was plenty to blow most of the exhaust astern of her. Every so often, though, a twist of wind would make George notice the pungent stink. The morning was bright and clear. The swells out of the north were gentle. The Atlantic was a different beast in the wintertime, and a much meaner one.

George ducked into the galley for a cup of coffee. Davey Hatton, universally known as the Cookie, poured from the pot into a thick white china mug. “Thanks,” George said, and added enough condensed milk and sugar to tame the snarling brew. He cradled the mug in his hands, savoring the warmth even now. Spin the calendar round half a year and it would be a lifesaver.

Hatton had the wireless on. They were beyond daytime reach of ordinary AM stations in the USA or occupied Canada and Newfoundland, though they could still pull them in after the sun went down. Shortwave broadcasts were a different story. Those came in from the USA, the CSA, Britain, and Ireland, as well as from a host of countries where they didn’t speak English.

“What’s the latest?” George asked.

Before answering, the Cookie made a production of getting a pipe going. To George’s way of thinking, it was wasted effort. The tobacco with which Hatton so carefully primed it smelled like burning long johns soaked in molasses. Old-timers groused that all the tobacco went to hell when the USA fought the CSA. George didn’t see how anything could get much nastier than the blend the Cookie smoked now.

Once he’d filled the galley with poison gas, Hatton answered, “The Confederates are pounding hell out of Columbus.”

“Screw ’em,” George said, sipping the coffee. Even after he’d doctored it, it was strong enough to grow hair on a stripper’s chest—a waste of a great natural resource, that would have been. “What are we doing?”

“Wireless says we’re bombing Richmond and Louisville and Nashville and even Atlanta,” Hatton answered. He emitted more smoke signals. If George read them straight, they meant he didn’t believe everything he heard on the wireless.

“How about overseas?” George asked.

“BBC says Cork and Waterford’ll fall in the next couple of days, and that’ll be the end of Ireland,” the Cookie replied. “That Churchill is an A-number-one son of a bitch, but the man makes a hell of a speech. Him and Featherston both, matter of fact. Al Smith is a goddamn bore, you know that?”

“I didn’t vote for him,” George said. “What about the rest of the war over there?”

“Well, the BBC says the French are kicking Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm’s ass. They say the Ukraine’s falling apart and Poland’s rebelling against Germany. But they tell a hell of a lot of lies, too, you know what I mean? If I could understand what’s coming out of Berlin, you bet your butt the krauts would be singing a different tune. So who knows what’s really going on?”

At that moment, the
Sweet Sue
gave a sudden, violent lurch to starboard, and then another one, just as sharp, to port. “What the hell?” George exclaimed as coffee slopped out of the mug and burned his fingers.

Then he heard a new noise through the chatter on the wireless and the diesel’s deep, steady throb: a savage roar rising rapidly to a mechanical scream. It seemed to come from outside, but filled the galley, filled everything. George got a glimpse of an airplane zooming toward them—and of flames shooting from its wings as it opened up with machine guns.

Bullets stitched their way across the fishing boat. One caught the Cookie in the chest. He let out a grunt—more a sound of surprise than one of pain—and crumpled, crimson spreading over the gray wool of his sweater. His feet kicked a few times, but he was plainly a dead man. A sudden sharp stench among the good smells of the galley said his bowels had let go.

Screams on the deck told that the Cookie wasn’t the only one who’d been hit. George saw right away that he couldn’t do anything for Hatton. He hurried out of the galley.
Chow’ll be rotten the rest of the run
went through his mind. Then he realized that was the least of his worries. Getting home alive and in one piece counted for a hell of a lot more.

Chris Agganis was down on the deck clutching his leg. Blood spilled from it. George was used to gore, as anybody who made his living gutting tuna that could outweigh him had to be. But this blood spilled out of a person. He was amazed how much difference that made.

“Hurts,” Agganis moaned in accented English. “Hurts like hell.” He said something else in syrupy Greek. This was his first time on the
Sweet Sue.
The skipper’d hired him at the last minute, when Johnny O’Shea didn’t come aboard—was probably too drunk to remember to come aboard. Agganis knew what he was doing, he played a mean harmonica, and now he’d been rewarded for his hard work with a bullet in the calf.

George knelt beside him. “Lemme see it, Chris.” Agganis kept moaning. George had to pull the Greek’s hands away so he could yank up his dungarees. The bullet had gone through the meat of his calf. As far as George could see, it hadn’t hit the bone. He said, “It’s not good, but it could be a hell of a lot worse.” He stuffed his handkerchief into one hole and pulled another one out of Chris Agganis’ pocket for the second, larger, wound.

He was so desperately busy doing that—and fighting not to puke, for hot blood on his hands was ever so much worse than the cold stuff that came out of a fish—that he didn’t notice how the shriek of the airplane engine overhead was swelling again till it was almost on top of the fishing boat.

Machine-gun bullets dug into the planking of the deck. They chewed up the galley once more, and clanged through the metal of the smokestack. Then the fighter zoomed away eastward. The roundels on its wings and flanks were red inside white inside blue: it came from a British ship.

“Fucking bastard,” Chris Agganis choked out.

“Yeah,” George agreed, hoping and praying the limey wouldn’t come back. Once more and the fishing boat was liable to sink. For that matter, how many bullet holes did she have at the waterline? And how many rounds had gone through the engine? Was she going to catch fire and burn right here in the middle of the ocean?

The engine was still running. The
Sweet Sue
wasn’t dead in the water. That would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along.

And she still steered. That meant the skipper hadn’t taken a bullet. George got to his feet and went back into the galley. He knew where the first-aid kit was. Shattered crockery crunched under the soles of his shoes. The air was thick with the iron stink of blood, the smell of shit, and the nasty smoke from the cheap pipe tobacco the Cookie had lit a couple of minutes before he died.

George took a bandage and a bottle of rubbing alcohol and, after a moment’s hesitation, a morphine syringe out to Chris Agganis. The fisherman let out a bloodcurdling shriek when George splashed alcohol over his wound. “You don’t want it to rot, do you?” George asked.

Agganis’ answer was spirited but incoherent. He hardly noticed when George stuck him with the syringe and injected the morphine. After a few minutes, though, he said, “Ahhh.”

“Is that better?” George asked. Agganis didn’t answer, but he stopped thrashing. By the look on his face, Jesus had just come down from heaven and was patting him on the back. George stared at him, and at the syringe. He’d heard what morphine could do, but he’d never seen it in action till now. He hadn’t imagined anybody with a bullet wound could look that happy.

With Chris Agganis settled, George could look over the
Sweet Sue. Chewed to hell but still going
seemed to sum things up, as it had before. Captain Albert had swung her back toward the west. With one dead and at least one hurt man on board, with the boat probably taking on water, with the engine possibly damaged, what else could the skipper do? Nothing George could see.

But heading west produced a painful pang, too. They’d get into Boston harbor with nothing on ice except the Cookie, and they couldn’t sell him. What the hell would they do without a paycheck to show for the trip? What the hell would Connie say when George walked into the apartment with nothing to show for his time at sea?

She’ll say, “Thank God you’re alive,” that’s what,
George thought. She’d hug him and squeeze him and take him to bed, and all that would be wonderful. But none of it would pay the rent or buy groceries. What the hell good was a man who didn’t bring any money with him when he walked through the front door? No good. No good at all.

He went up to the wheelhouse. The fighter hadn’t shot that up. The skipper was talking into the wireless set, giving the
Sweet Sue
’s position and telling a little about what had happened to her. He raised a questioning eyebrow at George.

“Chris got one in the leg,” George said. “And the Cookie’s dead.” He touched his own chest to show the hit Hatton had taken.

“At least one dead and one wounded,” the skipper said. “We are returning to port if we can. Out.” He set the microphone back in its cradle, then looked at—looked through—George. “Jesus Christ!”

“Yeah,” George said.

“See who else is still with us, and what kind of shape the boat’s in,” Albert told him. “I don’t know what the hell the owners are going to say when we get back like this. I just don’t know. But I’ll be goddamn glad to get back at all, you know what I mean?”

“I sure do, Skipper,” George answered. “You better believe I do.”

S
omewhere out in the western North Atlantic prowled a British airplane carrier with more nerve than sense. The USS
Remembrance
and another carrier, the
Sandwich Islands,
steamed north from Bermuda to do their damnedest to send her to the bottom.

Sam Carsten peered across the water at the
Sandwich Islands.
She was a newer ship, built as a carrier from the keel up. The
Remembrance
had started out as a battle cruiser and been converted while abuilding. The
Sandwich Islands’
displacement wasn’t much greater, but she could carry almost twice as many airplanes. Carsten was glad to have her along.

Repairs still went on aboard the
Remembrance
. The yard at Bermuda had done most of the work. In peacetime, the carrier would have stayed there a lot longer. But this was war. You did what you had to do and sent her back into the scrap. It had been the same way aboard the
Dakota
during the Great War. Sam wondered whether the battleship’s steering mechanism was everything it should be even now.

Destroyers and cruisers ringed the two carriers. That reassured Sam less than it had before the raid on Charleston. The screening ships hadn’t been able to keep land-based aircraft away from the
Remembrance
. Would they and the combat air patrol be able to fend off whatever the limeys threw at this force? Carsten hoped so. He also knew that what he hoped and what he got were liable to have nothing to do with each other.

He rubbed more zinc-oxide ointment on a nose already carrying enough of the white goo to resemble one of the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies. He only wished the stuff did more good. With it or without it, he burned. Without it, he burned a little worse.

Up at the top of the
Remembrance
’s island, the antennas for the wireless rangefinder spun round and round, round and round. The gadget had done good work off the Confederate coast, warning of incoming enemy airplanes well before the screening ships or the combat air patrol spotted them. As the carriers got more familiar with their new toy, they said Y-range more and more often. The whole name was just too clumsy.