Return Engagement (55 page)

His calm answer had to fight its way through the shouts—some wordless, others filled with extravagant obscenity—from the other pilots in the squadron. A flaming fighter tumbled toward the lake far below. Moss couldn’t tell if it bore the eagle and crossed swords or the Confederate battle flag. Like the USA and the CSA, their fighter aircraft bore an alarming resemblance to each other.

Bombs rained down from the Razorbacks. The bombers had no target—all they’d kill were fish. But they were faster and less likely to go up in a fireball if they got rid of their ordnance. As soon as they’d done it, they streaked for the deck. In a dive, they were damn near as fast as a fighter.

Damn near, but not quite. Moss picked his target. Once he heeled over into a dive, he stopped worrying about the Hound Dogs. They couldn’t catch him from behind. The dorsal and portside machine gunners on the Razorback opened up on him. He respected their tracers, but didn’t particularly fear them. They had to aim those single guns by hand. Hits weren’t easy.

He, on the other hand, needed only to point his Wright’s nose at the Razorback’s wing root. The bombers carried fuel in their wings. Confederate self-sealing gas tanks were as good as the ones the USA used, but they weren’t perfect. No tanks were. Put enough armor-piercing and incendiary bullets through them and they’d burn, all right.

This one did. Fire licked back from the wing. The portside engine started burning, too. “You nailed his ass!” Rolvaag shouted as the Razorback’s pilot lost control and the bomber spiraled down toward the water.

“Yeah,” Moss said. As long as he was in his dive, he didn’t have to worry about Hound Dogs. Once he came out . . . Once he came out, he was down here, and they could dive on him.

You traded speed for altitude. To gain speed, you had to give up altitude. That was why fights that started three miles up in the sky often finished just above the ground. To get the altitude back, you had to give up speed. You were vulnerable to the fighters that hadn’t dropped so low.

Another bomber plunged down toward Lake Erie. A moment later, so did the U.S. fighter that had shot it down. Moss eyed it, hoping the pilot could get out before it went into the water. No such luck. The squadron leader swore. Another one of the bright, eager youngsters he commanded wouldn’t be coming home.

The Hound Dogs were a little slower down to the deck than the U.S. Wrights. Once they got there, though, they got between the U.S. fighters and the fleeing Razorbacks. By then, the Razorbacks were streaking towards occupied Ohio. The Confederates had brought up what seemed like all the antiaircraft in the world. Going after the bombers, especially down low like this, was liable to prove expensive.

Moss got on the all-squadron circuit: “Let’s head for home, boys. We did what we were supposed to do. Those Razorbacks won’t bother our shipping for a while.”

“Some of those bastards won’t ever bother it again,” somebody said. Moss thought that was Red Geoffreys, who had every ounce of the killer instinct Marty Rolvaag was a hair short on. He couldn’t be sure, though. There was a lot of other wireless traffic, and the earphones didn’t reproduce anybody’s voice real well.

A few pilots grumbled, but no one complained very much when he swung back toward the west. The Hound Dogs followed the Razorbacks down to the south. They were content to let the Wrights go. Moss nodded to himself. That was always a sign the guys on the other side had had enough of you.

He’d seen two Razorbacks go down. He knew his own squadron had lost at least one fighter. As the Wrights went back to their airstrip, the men made their claims about enemy aircraft shot down. To listen to them, the Confederates had lost half their Razorbacks and at least half a dozen Hound Dogs. Moss had heard—and made—enough excited claims to take all of them with a grain of salt. If you didn’t see an airplane crash, you couldn’t be sure it was really downed. Even if you did, two or three guys were liable to think they were the one who’d shot it out of the sky.

Rolvaag came on the element-only circuit: “Looks like we’re down two, Major.”

“Shit,” Moss said. His wingman had done the count before he’d had the chance to. He wondered how many U.S. fighters the Hound Dogs would claim once they got back to
their
airstrip. If it were only two, he would have been amazed.

How much punishment could the Confederates take over Lake Erie before they decided their attacks cost more than they were worth? How much damage were they doing to U.S. shipping? How much to the U.S. airplanes that opposed them? Moss had no idea. He wondered whether anybody on either side did.

After too much experience with too many wars, he wouldn’t have bet on it. They’d just go on till one side or the other couldn’t stand it any more. Which one that would be, how long the whole bloody business would take . . . There alone in the cockpit, he shrugged. No way to tell, not ahead of time.

He wondered if he’d be around to see the end of it. He shrugged again. He’d got through the Great War in one piece. He hadn’t even been scratched. But what did that prove? Nothing, and he knew it too well.

G
eorge Enos didn’t mind getting bounced out of bed at half past five every morning. He didn’t mind the calisthenics that followed, either. He would have got up earlier and worked harder had he been bringing in cod out on the Grand Bank.

Some people grumbled about the chow. He’d figured out nobody could do anything about that, not when the cooks here turned out meals for hundreds at a time. It wasn’t terrible food, and you could make a pig of yourself, which he did. He poured down coffee with every meal, too. Sometimes he thought he’d have trouble going to sleep without it.

After breakfast came gunnery practice. He’d graduated from a one-pounder like those his father had served to a twin 40mm cannon. That gun probably would have amazed his old man. It sure amazed him. It was a Swedish design, built under license in the USA, and it could put a hell of a lot of shells in the air.

Chief Isbell, the gunnery instructor, was another one of those broad-beamed, gray-stubbled CPOs. The Navy seemed to have a factory that turned them out as needed. They were, if not the brains of the outfit, at least its memory. Behind Isbell’s back—but only behind his back—the raw seamen he taught called him the Bald Eagle: when he took off his cap, which he did as little as he could, he showed the world a wide expanse of shining scalp.

He knew his business, though. “They come after you, you start shooting like a bunch of mad bastards, you hear?” he said one morning. “Start shooting before you really start aiming. Just point it sorta at the fuckers comin’ your way and let fly.”

“What the hell good will that do, Chief?” somebody asked.

Isbell spelled it out like a third-grade teacher working on the multiplication table with a class full of dumbbells: “I’ll tell you what, by God.” He laid an affectionate hand on the barrel of the gun, the way a husband might on his wife’s behind. A stab of longing for Connie pierced George to the root, but only for a moment, for Isbell went on, “For one thing, you’re liable to scare him away. These babies put out muzzle flashes as long as your arm. He sees ’em, he knows you’re going after him. Not everybody’s a hero. Sucker in that airplane may decide he’d rather go home to his girlfriend than press home and maybe get shot down. Even if he does press home, he won’t do it as well as he would have if you weren’t banging away at him. You see what I mean?”

A few would-be sailors nodded.

“You see what I mean?”
Isbell growled.

“Yes, Chief!” the men chorused.

Isbell nodded. “That’s more like it. I spend my breath talking to you puppies, I want to know you’re paying attention. I don’t like wasting my time, you know what I mean?” He paused and lit a cigarette. After his first drag, he made a face. “Damn thing tastes like horseshit.” That didn’t stop him from smoking it down to a tiny butt as he continued, “Other thing you gotta remember is, ammo’s cheap. Ships are a lot more expensive.” He looked the trainees up and down. “You guys might be worth a little somethin’, too, but I wouldn’t count on it a whole hell of a lot.”

So there,
George thought. An old-fashioned two-decker flew back and forth, towing a cloth target at the end of a long line. No matter how long the line was, one eager-beaver group almost shot down the target tug instead of the target. The Bald Eagle waxed eloquent on the shortcomings of the material the Navy had to use these days. That, in its way, was also rather like walking into an unexpected volley of 40mm ammunition.

George’s group did better. He wasn’t sure they hit the target, but they did scare it. “I’ve seen worse,” Isbell declared. From him, that was high praise.

After the session, George went up to the chief and said, “My father used to serve a one-pounder on a destroyer in the last war.”

“Those goddamn things.” Isbell spoke with a mixture of affection and exasperation that George understood from training on such a gun. “You had to be lucky to hit an airplane with ’em, but you sure could make a sub say uncle if you caught it on the surface. What ship, kid?”

George was past thirty. Nobody’d called him
kid
for quite a while. If anyone had the right, though, it was somebody like the Bald Eagle. “He was on the
Ericsson,
” he answered.

Isbell’s face changed. Every Navy veteran knew about the
Ericsson.
“At the end?” he asked. George nodded. To his amazement, the Bald Eagle set a hand on his shoulder. “That’s rough, kid. I’m sorry as hell.” All at once, the chief’s gaze sharpened. “Wait a minute. You’re Enos. Are you related to the Enos gal who . . . ?”

“Who shot the Confederate submersible skipper? That was my mother,” George said proudly.

“Fuck me.” Isbell made the obscenity sound like a much more sincere compliment than the one he’d given the gun crew. “You want antiaircraft duty, kid? You been making noises like you do. I bet you can have it. Personnel ain’t gonna say no, not to somebody with your last name.”

“I’ve . . . thought about that,” George said. “I don’t want to get anything just on account of who my mother and father were.”

“You’ve got an angle. You’ve got an in. You’d have to be nuts not to use ’em,” Isbell said. “Life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

George had heard plenty of advice he liked less. He said, “Is there any way I can get to sea faster than usual?”

But Isbell just laughed at that, laughed and shook his head. “Nope. Sorry, Enos, but that ain’t gonna happen. You gotta know what you gotta know, and the Navy’s gotta know you know what you gotta know. Nothing personal—don’t get me wrong—but if they put you on a ship before that, you’re liable to be more of a menace than a help, if you know what I mean.”

With a tight, sour smile, George changed the subject. He did know what the Bald Eagle meant, and wished he didn’t. A couple of times, he’d gone on a fishing run with men who didn’t know what the hell they were doing, men who were trying the fisherman’s life for the first time. Even when they were eager to work, they might as well have been so many kittens. They got in everybody’s way and caused more trouble than they were worth.

And then he realized that, once upon a time, he’d been one of those kittens himself. How had the old-timers put up with him when he first started going out to fish? He’d been sixteen, seventeen, something like that: somebody the phrase
green as paint
was made for. The other guys had probably remembered what they were like when they first put to sea. That was the only explanation that made any sense to him. If he saw any of them again, he’d have to buy them a beer and thank them for their patience.

He worked hard on antiaircraft gunnery. He got practice firing bigger guns, too, as he had on the
Lamson.
The men in training didn’t get to handle full-sized big-gun ammunition. The guns had subcaliber practice rounds, which couldn’t do as much harm if something went wrong and which, as the CPO in charge of those guns (a near twin to Bald Eagle Isbell, except that he had a full head of graying hair) pointed out, were a hell of a lot cheaper than the real thing.

And he tried to learn the other things the Navy threw at him. Like anybody who’d made more than a few fishing runs, he was a pretty fair amateur mechanic. He’d fiddled with the
Sweet Sue
’s diesel several times, and made things better more often than he’d made them worse. He’d learned on the
Lamson,
though, that, just as sailing on a fishing boat wasn’t enough to let him go to sea right away on a warship, so fiddling with a diesel didn’t teach him what he needed to know about the care and feeding of a steam turbine.

Some guys bitched about the classwork. Morris Fishbein asked the overage lieutenant who was teaching them, “Why do we need to know this, sir? Most of us aren’t going into the black gang.”

“I know that, Fishbein,” the officer answered. “But if your ship takes a bomb or a shell or a torpedo and they have casualties down there, the men left alive will be screaming for help as loud as they can. And when they get it, they won’t want a bunch of thumb-fingered idiots who don’t know their ass from the end zone. They’ll want people who can actually do them some good. Not all of you will be gunners, either, but you’re learning to handle guns. Well, a ship’s engine is just as much a weapon as her guns are.”

The answer made more than enough sense to keep George happy. And the Navy knew how to ram home what people needed to learn. He wished his high-school teachers had been half as good. He might have stayed in long enough to graduate.

By the time he had both the training and the hands-on work on the
Lamson,
he thought he could have built an engine from scratch. He was wrong, of course, but a little extra confidence never hurt anybody.

Men applied for specialist schools: those who really would go into the black gang, men who’d handle the wireless and Y-ranging gear, cooks. There was a gunnery school, too. George put in for it. He let Bald Eagle Isbell know he had.

“Way to go, kid,” the CPO said. “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll bend a few people’s ears. I know the right ones to talk to. I’d goddamn well better by now, eh? I’ve been at this business long enough.”