Return Engagement (51 page)

“I noticed that.” Shaking his head, Tom found an empty table and sat down. The man behind the bar plainly didn’t feel degraded by his work. A white Confederate would have.
You’re not in the CSA any more is right,
Tom thought. That was true.

A couple of other officers came in and ordered drinks. One of them nodded to Tom. “Haven’t seen you before,” he remarked. “Just get in?”

“That’s right,” Tom answered. “Nice, friendly little town, isn’t it? I always did enjoy a place where I could relax and not have to look over my shoulder all the time.”

The officer who’d spoken to him—a major—and his friend—a lieutenant-colonel like Tom—both laughed. After they’d got their whiskeys, the major said, “Mind if we join you?”

“Not a bit. I’d be glad of the company,” Tom said, and gave his name. He got theirs in return. The major, a skinny redhead, was Ted Griffith; the other light colonel, who was chunky and dark and balding, was Mel Lempriere. He had a pronounced New Orleans accent, half lazy and half tough. Griffith sounded as if he came from Alabama or Mississippi.

They started talking shop. Aside from women, the great common denominator, it was what they shared. Ted Griffith was in barrels, Lempriere in artillery. “We caught the damnyankees flatfooted,” Lempriere said. “It would’ve been a lot tougher if we hadn’t.” Actually, he said
woulda,
as if he came from Brooklyn instead of the Crescent City.

“Reckon that’s a fact,” Griffith agreed. “Their barrels are as good as ours, and they use ’em pretty well. But they didn’t have enough, and so we got the whip hand and ripped into ’em.”

“Patton helped, too, I expect,” Tom said. He got to the bottom of his highball and waved for a refill. The bartender nodded. He brought over a fresh one a minute later.

“Patton drives like a son of a bitch,” Lempriere said. “Sometimes our guys had a devil of a time keeping up with the barrels.” He and Major Griffith both finished their drinks at the same time. They also waved to the barkeep. He got to work on new ones for them, too.

Once Griffith had taken a pull at his second drink, he said, “Patton’s a world-beater in the field. No arguments about that. If the Yankees hadn’t had their number-one fellow here, too, we’d’ve licked ’em worse’n we did. Yeah, he’s a damn good barrel commander.”

He didn’t sound as delighted as he might have. “But . . . ?” Tom asked. A
but
had to be hiding in there somewhere. He wondered if Griffith would let it out.

The major made his refill disappear and called for another.
Dutch courage?
Tom thought. “Patton’s a world-beater in the field,” Griffith repeated. “He does have his little ways, though.”

Mel Lempriere chuckled. “Name me a general officer worth his rank badges who doesn’t.”

“Well, yeah,” Griffith said. “But there’s ways, and then there’s ways, if you know what I mean. Patton fines any barrel man he catches out of uniform, right down to the tie on the shirt underneath the coveralls. He fines you if your coveralls are dirty, too. How are you supposed to run a barrel without getting grease and shit on your uniform? I tell you for a fact, my friends, it can’t be done.”

“Why’s he bother?” Tom asked.

“Well, he likes everything just so,” Griffith answered, which sounded like an understatement. “And he likes to say that a clean soldier, a neat soldier, is a soldier with his pecker up. I suppose he’s got himself a point.” Again, he didn’t say
but.
Again, he might as well have.

Lieutenant-Colonel Lempriere laughed again. “You know any soldier in the field longer’n a week who
hasn’t
got his pecker up?”

That brought them around to women. Tom had figured they’d get there sooner or later. He asked about the local officers’ brothels, and whether the girls really did steer clear of cures for the clap. Lempriere denied it. He turned out to be a mine of information. As Tom had, he’d been in the last war. Ted Griffith was too young. He listened to the two lieutenant-colonels swap stories of sporting houses gone by. After a while, he said, “Sounds like bullshit to me, gentlemen.”

“Likely some of it is,” Tom said. “But it’s
fun
bullshit, you know?” They all laughed some more. They ended up yarning and drinking deep into the night.

W
hen the USS
Remembrance
sortied from Honolulu, Sam Carsten had no trouble holding in his enthusiasm. The airplane carrier wasn’t going any place where the weather suited him: up to Alaska, say. She could have been. The Tsars still owned Alaska, and Russia and the United States were formally at war. But they hadn’t done much in the way of fighting, and weren’t likely to. The long border between the U.S.-occupied Yukon and northern British Columbia on the one hand and Alaska on the other was anything but the ideal place to wage war.

The western end of the chain of Sandwich Islands, now . . .

Midway, a thousand miles north and west of Honolulu, had a U.S. base on it. The low-lying island wasn’t anything much. Aside from great swarms of goony birds, it boasted nothing even remotely interesting. But it was where it was. Japan had seized Guam along with the Philippines in the Hispano-Japanese War right after the turn of the century, and turned the island into her easternmost base. If she took Midway from the USA, that could let her walk down the little islands in the chain toward the ones that really mattered.

Japan didn’t have anyone to fight but the USA. The United States, by contrast, had a major land war against the Confederate States on their hands. They were trying to hold down a restive Canada. And the British, French, and Confederates made the Atlantic an unpleasant place—to say nothing of the Confederate submersibles that sneaked out of Guaymas to prowl the West Coast.

Sam wished he hadn’t thought about all that. It made him realize how alone out here in the Pacific the
Remembrance
was. If something went wrong, the USA would have to send a carrier around the Horn—which wouldn’t be so easy now that the British and Confederates had retaken Bermuda and the Bahamas. The only other thing the United States could do was start building carriers in Seattle or San Francisco or San Pedro or San Diego. That wouldn’t be easy or quick, either, not with the country cut in two.

Most of the crew enjoyed the weather. It was mild and balmy. The sun shone out of a blue sky down on an even bluer sea. Carsten could have done without the sunshine, but he had special problems. Zinc oxide helped cut the burn a little. Unfortunately, a little was exactly how much the ointment helped.

He glanced up to the carrier’s island every so often. The antenna on the Y-range gear spun round and round, searching for Japanese airplanes. Midway also had a Y-range station. Between the two of them, they should have made a surprise attack impossible. But Captain Stein was a suspenders-and-belt man. He kept a combat air patrol overhead all through the day, too. Sam approved. You didn’t want to get caught with your pants down, not here.

Fighters weren’t the only things flying above the
Remembrance
and the cruisers and destroyers that accompanied her. As she got farther out into the chain of Sandwich Islands, albatrosses and their smaller seagoing cousins grew more and more common. Watching them always fascinated Sam. They soared along with effortless ease, hardly ever flapping. The smaller birds sometimes dove into the ocean after fish. Not the albatrosses. They swooped low to snatch their suppers from the surface of the sea, then climbed up into the sky again.

They were as graceful in the air as they were ungainly on the ground. Considering that every landing was a crash and every takeoff a desperate sprint into the wind, that said a great deal.

The other impressive thing about them was their wingspan, which seemed not that much smaller than an airplane’s. Sam had grown up watching hawks and turkey buzzards soar over the upper Midwest. He was used to big birds on the wing. The goony birds dwarfed anything he’d seen then, though.

“I hear the deck officer waved one of them off the other day,” he said in the officers’ wardroom. “Fool bird wasn’t coming in straight enough to suit him.”

“He didn’t want it to catch fire when it smashed into the deck,” Hiram Pottinger said. “You know goonies can’t land clean.”

“Well, sure,” Sam said. “But it shit on his hat when it swung around for another pass.”

He got his laugh. Commander Cressy said, “Plenty of our flyboys have wanted to do the same thing, I’ll bet. If that albatross ever comes back, they’ll pin a medal on it.”

Sam got up and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. He was junior officer there, so he held up the pot, silently asking the other men if they wanted any. Pottinger pointed to his cup. Sam filled it up. The head of damage control added cream and sugar. Before long, the cream would go bad and it would be condensed milk out of a can instead. Everybody enjoyed the real stuff as long as it stayed fresh.

Pottinger asked Commander Cressy, “You think the Japs are out there, sir?”

“Oh, I know they’re out there. We all know that,” the exec answered. “Whether they’re within operational range of Midway—and of us—well, that’s what we’re here to find out. I’m as sure that they want to boot us off the Sandwich Islands as I am of my own name.”

“Makes sense,” Sam said. “If they kick us back to the West Coast, they don’t need to worry about us again for a long time.”

Dan Cressy nodded. “That’s about right. They’d have themselves a perfect Pacific empire—the Philippines and what were the Dutch East Indies for resources, and the Sandwich Islands for a forward base. Nobody could bother them after that.”

“The British—” Lieutenant Commander Pottinger began.

Sam shook his head at the same time as Commander Cressy did. Cressy noticed; Sam wondered if the exec would make him do the explaining. To his relief, Cressy didn’t. Telling a superior why he was wrong was always awkward. Cressy outranked Pottinger, so he could do it without hemming and hawing. And he did: “If the British give Japan a hard time, they’ll get bounced out of Malaya before you can say Jack Robinson. They’re too busy closer to home to defend it properly. The Japs might take away Hong Kong or invade Australia, too. I don’t think they want to do that. We’re still on their plate, and they’ve got designs on China. But they could switch gears. Anybody with a General Staff worth its uniforms has more strategic plans than he knows what to do with. All he has to do is grab one and dust it off.”

Pottinger was Navy to his toes. He took the correction without blinking. “I wonder how the limeys like playing second fiddle out in the Far East,” he remarked.

“It’s Churchill’s worry, not mine,” Cressy said. “But they’re being good little allies to the Japs out here. They don’t want to give Japan any excuses to start nibbling on their colonies. They make a mint from Hong Kong, and it wouldn’t last twenty minutes if Japan decided she didn’t want them running it any more.”

“Makes sense,” Hiram Pottinger said. “I hadn’t thought it through.”

“Only one thing.” Sam spoke hesitantly. Commander Cressy waved for him to go on. If the exec hadn’t, he wouldn’t have. As it was, he said, “The Japs may not need any excuse if they decide they want Hong Kong or Malaya. They’re liable just to reach out and grab with both hands.”

He waited to see if he’d made Cressy angry. Before the exec could say anything, general quarters sounded. Cressy jumped to his feet. “We’ll have to finish hashing this out another time, gentlemen,” he said.

Neither Sam Carsten nor Hiram Pottinger answered him. They were both on their way out of the wardroom, on their way down to their battle stations below the
Remembrance
’s waterline. Panting, Sam asked, “Is this the real thing, or just another drill?”

“We’ll find out,” Pottinger answered. “Mind your head.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Sam said. A tall man had to do that, or he could knock himself cold hurrying from one compartment to another. He could also trip over his own feet; the hatchway doors had raised sills.

Some of the sailors in the damage-control party beat them to their station. They’d been nearby, not in the wardroom in officers’ country. “Is this the McCoy?” Szczerbiakowicz asked. “Or is it just another goddamn drill?”

He shouldn’t have talked about drill that way. It went against regulations. Sam didn’t say anything to him about it, though. Neither did Lieutenant Commander Pottinger. All he did say was, “We’ll both find out at the same time, Eyechart.”

“I don’t hear a bunch of airplanes taking off over our heads,” Sam said hopefully. “Doesn’t feel like we’re taking evasive action, either. So I hope it’s only a drill.”

The klaxons cut off. The all-clear didn’t sound right away, though. That left things up in the air for about fifteen minutes. Then the all-clear did blare out. Commander Cressy came on the intercom: “Well, that was a little more interesting than we really wanted. We had to persuade a flight patrolling out from Midway that we weren’t Japs, and we had to do it without breaking wireless silence. Not easy, but we managed.”

“That could have been fun,” Sam said.

Some of the other opinions expressed there in the corridor under the bare lightbulbs in their wire cages were a good deal more sulfurous than that. “What’s the matter with the damn flyboys?” somebody said. “We don’t look like a Jap ship.”

That was true, and then again it wasn’t. The
Remembrance
had a tall island, while most Japanese carriers sported small ones or none at all. But the Japs had also converted battleship and battle-cruiser hulls into carriers. Her lines might have touched off alarm bells in the fliers’ heads.

“Nice to know what was going on,” a junior petty officer said. “The exec may be an iron-assed son of a bitch, but at least he fills you in.”

All the sailors nodded. Sam and Hiram Pottinger exchanged amused glances. They didn’t contradict the petty officer. Commander Cressy was supposed to look like an iron-assed son of a bitch to everybody who didn’t know him. A big part of his job was saying no for the skipper. The skipper was the good guy. When, as occasionally happened, the answer to something was yes, he usually said it himself. That was how things worked on every ship in the Navy. The
Remembrance
was no exception. Some executive officers reveled in saying no. Cressy wasn’t like that. He was tough, but he was fair.