Return Engagement (29 page)

Off not far enough in the distance, artillery rumbled. The noise came from the north, which meant the guns belonged to the USA. Armstrong hoped that was what it meant, anyhow. The other possibility was that the Confederates had badly outflanked U.S. forces, and that Armstrong and his comrades were cut off and in the process of being surrounded. There were times when sitting out the rest of the war in a Confederate prison camp didn’t seem so bad.

That was one thing Armstrong didn’t say. Everybody who outranked him was awfully touchy about defeatism. You could grouse about why the Army wasn’t fighting back as hard as it might have; that was in the rules. But if you said you’d just as soon not be fighting at all, you’d gone too far. He didn’t know exactly what happened to soldiers who said such things. He didn’t want to find out, either.

Overhead, shells made freight-train noises. They flew south, south past the U.S. lines, and came down somewhere not far from Astoria. That was Confederate-held territory now, which meant those were U.S. guns firing, and that the soldiers in butternut and their swarms of barrels hadn’t broken through.

Counterbattery fire came back very promptly. It might be dark, but the Confederates weren’t asleep. Those shells flew over Armstrong’s head, too, roaring north. As long as the guns traded fire with one another, he didn’t mind too much. When the Confederates started pounding the front line, that was something else again.

That was trouble, was what it was.

Armstrong rolled himself in his blanket and went to sleep. He’d discovered he could sleep anywhere when he got the chance. All he needed was something to lean against. He didn’t have to lie down; sitting would do fine. Sleep, in the field, was more precious than gold, almost—but not quite—more precious than a good foxhole. Whenever he could, he restocked.

Corporal Stowe shook him awake in the middle of the night. Armstrong’s automatic reaction was to try to murder the noncom. “Easy, tiger,” Stowe said, laughing, and jerked back out of the way of an elbow that would have broken his nose. “I’m not a goddamn infiltrator. Get your ass up there for sentry duty.”

“Oh.” Now that Armstrong knew it wasn’t kill or be killed in the next moment, he allowed himself the luxury of a yawn. “All right.” He pulled on his shoes, which he’d been using for a pillow. “Anything going on? Those bastards poking around?”

“That’s why we have sentries,” the squad commander answered, and Armstrong really wished that elbow had connected. Stowe went on, “Seems pretty quiet. You run into trouble, shoot first.”

“Bet your ass,” Armstrong said. “Any son of a bitch tries to get by me, he pays full price.”

When the war first broke out, Stowe would have laughed at him for talking like that. But he’d lived through more than a month of it. Not only that, he’d shown he was one of the minority of soldiers who did the majority of damage when fighting started. The corporal thumped him on the shoulder and gave him a little shove.

He got challenged by the man he was replacing. Gabby Priest hardly ever said anything that wasn’t line of duty. He and Armstrong spoke challenge and countersign softly, to keep lurking Confederates from picking them off—another drawback to a war where both sides used the same language.

Gabby went back the way Armstrong had come. Armstrong settled himself as motionlessly as he could. He listened to chirping crickets. They didn’t know anything about war, or how lucky they were to be ignorant. An owl hooted. A whippoorwill called mournfully.

Armstrong listened for noises that didn’t belong: a footfall, a twig breaking under a boot heel, a cough. He also listened for sudden silences that didn’t belong. Animals could sense people moving even where other people couldn’t. If they stopped in alarm, that was a good sign there was something to be alarmed about.

He heard nothing out of the ordinary. Somebody fired off a burst of machine-gun fire over to the west, but it had to be at least half a mile away. As long as nothing happened any closer than that, he didn’t need to worry about it.

He yawned. He wished he were back under the blanket. After another yawn, he swore at himself in a low whisper. One of the things they’d made very plain in basic training, even before the war started, was that they could shoot you if you fell asleep on sentry duty. That didn’t necessarily mean they would, but he didn’t care to take the chance. If the Confederates broke through because he was snoring, his own side wouldn’t be very happy with him even if he survived—which wasn’t particularly likely.

Some guys carried a pin with them when they came on sentry duty, to stick themselves if they started feeling sleepy. Armstrong never had. From now on, though, he thought he would.

Was that . . . ? He tensed, sleep forgotten as ice walked up his back. Was that the clatter of barrel tracks, the rumble of engines? Or was it only his imagination playing tricks on him? Whatever it was, it was either just above or just below his threshold of hearing, so he couldn’t decide how scared he ought to be.

If those were barrels coming forward, the Springfield he clutched convulsively wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good. He could shoot it at a barrel till doomsday, and he wouldn’t hurt a thing. He listened as he’d never listened before—and still couldn’t make up his mind whether he’d heard anything. He didn’t hear any more. That meant the barrels weren’t coming any closer, anyhow, which suited him fine.

The artillery duel between U.S. and C.S. guns started up again, each side feeling for the other in the night. Listening to death fly back and forth overhead was almost like watching a tennis match, except both sides could serve at once and there could be more than one ball in the air at the same time.

One other difference belatedly occurred to Armstrong. Tennis balls weren’t in the habit of exploding and scattering deadly shell fragments, or perhaps poison gas, all over the court. Artillery shells, unfortunately, were.

Armstrong longed for a cigarette. It would make him more alert and help the time pass. Of course, a sniper who aimed at the coal could blow his face off. Even someone who didn’t spot the coal could smell smoke and know he was around. He didn’t light up, but let out a soft snort of laughter. Somebody might smell
him
and know he was around. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bathed. Of course, any Confederate sneaking up was liable to be just as gamy as he was.

He crouched in the foxhole, peering into the night, hunter and hunted at the same time. With trees overhead, he couldn’t even watch the stars go by and gauge the time from them. Little by little, though, black gave way to indigo gave way to gray gave way to gold gave way to pink in the east.

Soft motion
behind
him. He whirled, swinging his rifle toward the noise. “Halt!” he called. “Who goes there?”

“Nagurski,” came the response: not a name but a recognition signal.

“Barrel,” Armstrong answered. Any U.S. football fanatic knew the hard-pounding Barrel Nagurski. The Confederates had their own football heroes. With luck, they didn’t pay attention to muscular Yankee running backs.

Yossel Reisen came out into the open just as the sun crawled over the horizon. “Anything going on?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Armstrong answered, and told him of what he thought he’d heard. He finished, “They’ve been quiet since then. I
am
sure of that. Whether they were there at all”—he shrugged—”who the hell knows?”

Reisen started to say something. Before he could, he and Armstrong both looked to the sky. Airplanes were coming up out of the south, motors roaring. At the same time, the Confederate bombardment not only picked up, it started falling on the front line and not on the U.S. artillery. The foxhole Armstrong stood in wasn’t really big enough for two. Yossel Reisen jumped in anyhow. Armstrong said not a word. He would have done the same thing.

Screaming sirens added to the engine roars: dive bombers stooping like hawks. “Mules!” Reisen yelled, at the same time as Armstrong was shouting, “Asskickers!” He hoped the Confederate artillery shells would shoot down their own airplanes.
Wish for the moon while you’re at it,
went through his mind. It was a one-in-a-million chance at best.

Bombs began bursting, back a few hundred yards where the other men in the squad rested. Some of the shells came down much closer to the foxhole. Fragments snarled past, some of them bare inches above Armstrong’s head. He yelled—no, he screamed, and was unashamed of screaming. Yossel Reisen probably couldn’t hear him through the din. And Yossel’s mouth was open, too, so he might have been screaming himself.

Armstrong’s father went on and on about the day-long bombardments he’d gone through during the Great War. He had a limp and the Purple Heart to prove he wasn’t kidding, too. Armstrong had got sick of hearing about it all the same. Now he understood what his old man was talking about. Experience was a great leveler.

This bombardment didn’t go on all day. After half an hour, it let up. “We’re in for it now,” Armstrong said. Reisen nodded gloomily.

Confederate soldiers loped forward, bent at the waist to make themselves small targets. Armstrong and Yossel both started shooting at them. They went down—hitting the dirt, probably, rather than dead or wounded. Sure as hell, some of them began shooting to make the U.S. soldiers keep their heads down while others advanced.

“We better get out of here before they flank us out,” Armstrong said. Yossel Reisen nodded. The two of them scrambled back through the trees, bullets snapping all around them.

Nothing was left of the encampment except shell holes and what looked like a butcher’s waste. As the two U.S. soldiers fell back farther, they fell in with other survivors. Nobody seemed interested in anything but getting away. They didn’t find anything like a line till just in front of Fostoria. No one there asked them any questions. The position farther south had plainly been smashed. Now, would this one hold? With no great optimism, Armstrong hoped so.

VIII

W
ith the bulk of the Americas in the way, getting from the Atlantic to the Pacific was a long haul for a U.S. warship. For many years, people in the USA and the CSA had talked about cutting a canal through Colombia’s Central American province or through Nicaragua. No one had been able to agree on who would do the work or who would guard it once done. The United States had threatened war if the Confederate States tried, and vice versa. And so, in spite of all the talk, there was no canal.

The
Remembrance
and her accompanying cruisers and destroyers and supply ships steamed south toward Cape Horn and Tierra del Fuego. She kept her combat air patrol constantly airborne. The Empire of Brazil was neutral. When they got as far south as Argentina, on the other hand, she was on the same side as England and France, which meant the same side as the CSA.

Sam Carsten had seen in the last war that land-based airplanes could be hard on ships. He knew from the raid on Charleston that they could be a lot harder now. The CAP also kept an eye out for British, Confederate, and French submersibles—maybe even Argentine ones, for all Sam knew.

Even in wartime, though, some rituals went on. Carsten had crossed the Equator several times. That made him a shellback, immune from the hazing men doing it for the first time—polliwogs—had to go through. Officers suffered along with ratings. They got their backsides paddled. They had their hair cut off in patches. They got drenched with the hoses. They had to kiss King Neptune’s belly. The grizzled CPO who played King Neptune had a vast expanse of belly to kiss. To make the job more delightful, he smeared it with grease from the galley.

Everybody watched to see how the polliwogs took it. A man who got angry at the indignities often paid for it later on. If you went through things with a smile—or, better, with a laugh and a dirty joke for King Neptune—you won points. And the suffering polliwogs needed to remember that they were turning into shellbacks. One of these days, they would have the chance to get even with some new men.

Commander Dan Cressy came up to Carsten as he watched the hijinks. “Well, Lieutenant, what do you think?” the exec asked.

“Damn good show, sir,” Sam answered. “Szymanski makes about the best King Neptune I’ve ever seen.”

“Can’t argue with you there,” Cressy said. “But I didn’t mean that. A lot of officers just do their jobs and don’t worry about anything outside them. You look at the bigger picture. What do you think of our move to the Pacific?”

“Thank you, sir,” Sam said. That the exec should ask his opinion was a compliment indeed. After a moment, he went on, “If we have to go, it’s probably a good thing we’re going now. That’s how it looks to me: we’re grabbing the chance while it’s still there.”

“I agree,” Cressy said crisply. “With Bermuda lost and the Bahamas going, we’ll have a much tougher time getting a task force into these waters once the Confederates and the British consolidate their positions.” He looked unhappy. “They snookered us very nicely to draw us out of Bermuda so they could hit it. We shouldn’t have fallen for the lure of the British carrier—but we did, and now we have to live with it.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said. “Other thing that occurs to me is, will this task force be enough help for the Sandwich Islands?”

“Damn good question,” Cressy said. “We have to try, though, or else we’ll lose them, and that would be a disaster. You see the difficulty we face, I presume?” He cocked his head to one side like a teacher waiting to see how smart a student was. The impression held even though Sam was the older man.

“I think so, sir,” Sam said, and then spluttered as water splashed off a luckless polliwog and onto him. He wiped his face on his sleeve and tried to remember what he’d been about to say. “We have to be strong in the Atlantic and the Pacific, because we’ve got enemies to east and west. The Japs can concentrate on us.”

Commander Cressy brought his hands together, once, twice, three times. They made hardly any sound at all. Even so, Sam felt as if he’d just got a standing ovation from a capacity crowd at Custer Stadium in Philadelphia. “That is the essence of it, all right,” the exec said. “And the Japs have a running start on us, too. Since they gobbled up what was the Dutch East Indies, they’ve got the oil and the rubber and a lot of the other raw materials they need for a long war. Going after them starting from the Sandwich Islands will be hard. Going after them from the West Coast would be impossible, I think.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said, “Especially if—” He broke off.

He hadn’t stopped soon enough. “Especially if what?” Cressy asked—and when he asked you something, he expected an answer.

Unhappily, Sam gave him one: “Especially if the Confederates cut us in half, sir, is what I was going to say. That would leave the West on its own, and it just doesn’t make as much or have as many people as they do back East.”

Commander Cressy rubbed his chin. Slowly, he nodded. “This isn’t the first time I’ve thought it was a shame you’re a mustang, Carsten. If you’d come up through the Naval Academy, you’d outrank me now.”

“You do what you can with the cards they deal you, sir,” Sam said. “I joined the Navy when I was a kid. It’s been my home. It’s been my family. Least I can do to pay it back is to work hard. I’ve done that. I’m happy I’ve got as far as I have. When I signed up, being an officer was the last thing on my mind. I figured I’d end up where Szymanski is, except maybe without the grease on my stomach. And I could’ve done a lot worse’n that, too.”

The exec glanced over toward Szymanski, who was bawling obscenities at a lieutenant, j.g., less than half Carsten’s age. “He’s a good man, a solid man,” Cressy said. “The big difference between the two of you is that he’s got no imagination. He just accepts what he finds, while you’ve got that itch to figure out how things work.”

“Do I?” Sam thought about it. “Well, maybe I do. But I could have thrown it into, say, being a machinist’s mate just as easy.”

“So what?
Could have
doesn’t count for anything, not in this man’s navy,” Commander Cressy said crisply. “You are what you are, and I’m damn glad to have you on my ship.” He clapped Carsten on the back and went on his way, dodging the stream from another hose as smoothly as a halfback sidestepping a tackler. Whatever he did, he did well.

And he likes me,
Sam thought.
I’m only a mustang, a sunburned sea rat up through the hawse hole, but he likes me.
That made him feel better about himself than he had since . . . since . . . He laughed. He was damned if he remembered when anything had made him feel better.

A sunburned sea rat he certainly was. Orders had gone out for all hands to wear long sleeves and not to roll them up regardless of the weather. Action had shown that protected against flash burns when shells and bombs burst. Sam had been wearing long sleeves for more than thirty years. That way, he burned only from the wrists down and from the neck up: a dubious improvement, but an improvement nonetheless.

After the festivities that went with crossing the Equator, routine returned to the
Remembrance.
Drills picked up as the ship and the accompanying task force neared Argentine waters. General quarters sounded at all hours of the day and night. It bounced men out of their bunks and hammocks. It pulled them out of the showers. Sailors laughed when their comrades ran to battle stations naked and dripping, clothes clutched under one arm. But they didn’t laugh too much. Most of them had been caught the same way at one time or another. And besides, with the task force where it was, nobody could be sure when a drill might turn into the real thing.

The summer sun receded in the north. Sam still suffered, but not so severely. He might have been the only man aboard who looked forward to rounding Cape Horn in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter. There, if nowhere else south of the Yukon, the weather suited his skin.

One of the destroyers in the task force detected, or thought she detected, a submersible. She dropped depth charges. Down deep in the bowels of the
Remembrance,
Sam listened to the ashcans bursting one by one. They were too far away to shake the ship as they would have at closer range.

“Hope they sink the son of a bitch,” one of the soldiers in the damage-control party said savagely.

“Not me,” Sam said. Everybody looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. He explained: “I hope there’s no sub there at all. I hope they’re plastering the hell out of a whale, or else that the hydrophone operator’s got a case of the galloping fantods.”

“Why?” Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger asked, real curiosity in his voice. “Don’t you want to see the enemy on the bottom?”

“Oh, hell, yes, sir, if that’s the only boat out there,” Sam told his superior. “But they’re liable to hunt in packs. If we get one, there may be more. I’d just as soon there weren’t any.”

Pottinger pursed his lips, then slowly nodded. “You’ve got kind of a lefthanded way of looking at things, don’t you? Can’t say you’re wrong, though.”

They never found out whether the destroyer sank the submersible, or whether a sub had been there at all. The only evidence was negative: no torpedoes streaked toward any ship in the task force. If the sub had been there, and if it had been sunk, it was a lone wolf, not part of a pack.

No Argentine airplanes came out to harry the
Remembrance
and her satellites. Argentina and the USA were formally at war, but that was because Argentina did so much to feed England and France, and the United States threatened her commerce. The task force was bound for the Pacific. If provoked, though, it might pause. Maybe the Americans had quietly warned they
would
pause if provoked. Sam didn’t know anything about that. As far as he could tell, nobody on the
Remembrance
did. He did know he was glad not to have to fight his way past Argentina.

The Argentines hadn’t unbent enough to let the task force through the Straits of Magellan. The U.S. ships had to go around Tierra del Fuego and through the thunderous seas of Cape Horn. It felt like the devil’s sleigh ride: up one mountainous wave after another, then down the far side. Some of those waves broke over the carrier’s bow, sending sea surging across the flight deck and carrying away anything that wasn’t lashed down and quite a bit that was. A sailor on one of the accompanying destroyers got washed overboard. He was gone before his mates had any chance to rescue him.

Vomit’s sharp stink filled the corridors of the
Remembrance.
The stoves in the galleys were put out; the pitching was too much for them. Chow was sandwiches and cold drinks, not that many men had much appetite. Sam was a good sailor, but even he was off his feed.

What really amazed him was the knowledge that things could have been worse. A hundred years earlier, clippers had rounded the Horn on sail power, going into the teeth of the howling westerly gale. He admired the men aboard those ships without wanting to imitate them. The passage was hard enough with 180,000 horsepower on his side.

And then, at last, they were through. The Pacific began to live up to its name. The stoves were lit again. Hot meals returned. The crew felt good enough to eat them, and to clamor for more. And all the task force had to deal with were the Chileans, who were irked the U.S. ships hadn’t punished their Argentine enemies. After what the
Remembrance
had just been through, mere diplomacy felt like child’s play.

J
onathan Moss spotted a flight of Mules buzzing along above northern Ohio. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a predatory grin. The gull-winged Confederate dive bombers raised hell with U.S. infantry. But they were sitting ducks for fighters. He spoke into the wireless for the men of his squadron: “You see ’em, boys? Two o’clock low, just lollygagging along and waiting for us. Let’s go get ’em.”

He pushed the stick forward. The Wright fighter dove. The squadron followed him down. They’d been trying to do too much with too little for too long. Now they had a chance to take a real bite out of the Confederates. Those damned Asskickers were like flying artillery, pounding U.S. positions ordinary shellfire couldn’t hurt. Take them out and the Confederate ground attack would suffer.

Nobody could say the men who flew the Mules were asleep at the switch. They scattered when they spotted the U.S. fighters stooping on them. Some dove for the deck. Others hightailed it back toward the Confederate lines.

Moss picked his target: a Mule scooting along just above the treetops. The rear gunner saw him, and started shooting. A stream of tracers flew from the back of the Mule’s long cockpit toward him.

His grin got wider and more savage. The Mule had one machine gun. He had half a dozen, and a much steadier gun platform than a jinking bomber. His finger jabbed the firing button on top of the stick. The leading edges of the Wright’s wings spouted flame as the guns hammered away. He held the dive, careless of the enemy’s fire. The best way to knock an airplane down was to do your shooting from as close as you could.

He fired another burst into the Mule. The rear gunner stopped shooting. Moss was close enough to see him slumped over his gun. Flame ran back from the wing root along the dive bomber’s fuselage. The Mule suddenly heeled over and slammed into the ground. Flame and smoke volcanoed upward. The pilot had never had a chance.

“Scratch one bandit!” Moss shouted exultantly, and then clawed for altitude. He wanted more of those Asskickers burning, and he thought he knew how to get what he wanted, too.

But then one of his pilots yelled, “Bandits! Bandits at three o’clock high!” Moss’ exultation turned to cold sweat on the instant.

As his fighters had had the advantage of altitude against the Mules, so the Confederate Hound Dogs had the edge on the Wrights. The C.S. fighters tore into them, guns blazing. Frantic shouts came from Moss’ wireless set. A couple of them cut off abruptly as fighters or pilots were hit.

He’d been late pulling up. Too late. Here came a Hound Dog, diving on him. He twisted to try to meet it. Too late again. Machine-gun bullets and a couple of shells from the cannon that fired through the Confederate fighter’s propeller hub stitched across his machine’s left wing and fuselage. The engine made a horrible grinding noise. Smoke poured from it. Suddenly Moss was flying a glider that didn’t want to glide.