Return Engagement (67 page)

He held up the sheet of cheap pulp paper—so cheap it was closer to tan than white, with little bits of wood that hadn’t quite been pulped embedded here and there—he’d folded to make individual squares for all twelve problems. “More than half. See?”

“Have you done them
right
?” Chester asked. Carl nodded vigorously. “We’ll check,” Chester warned. “Arithmetic comes in handy all sorts of places. A builder like me needs it every day. Go on and have your snack—but then finish your work.”

“I will, Dad.” And, after Chester had inhaled half a dozen chocolate cookies and a glass of milk, he did buckle down.
Fortified,
Chester thought. His son waved the paper in triumph to show he’d finished.

Rita went over to check it. “This one’s wrong . . . and so is this one.”

“They can’t be! I did ’em right.” Carl stared at the paper as if his answers had mysteriously changed while he wasn’t looking.

“Well, you can darn well do ’em over,” Rita told him. “And you’d better not get the same answers this time, or you’ll be in real trouble.”

“I’ll try.” Carl might have been sentenced to ten years at San Quentin. He erased what he’d done and tried again. When he was done, he pushed the paper across the table to his mother. “There.”

She inspected the revised problems. “That’s more like it,” she said. Carl brightened. But she wasn’t going to let him off the hook so soon. “If these answers are right, that means the ones you got before were wrong, doesn’t it?”

“Uh-huh,” Carl said unwillingly.

“How come you didn’t get ’em right the first time?”

“I don’t know. I thought I did.”

“ ’Cause you were goofing around, that’s why. Are you going to goof around when your teacher gives you a test?” Rita asked. He shook his head. He knew that question had only one safe answer. His mother continued, “You’d better not. I’m going to be looking for that test paper when you come home with it. If you only get a C, I’ll make you sorry. And don’t think you can hide it from me if you do bad, either, ’cause that won’t work. I’ll call up Mrs. Reilly and find out what you got. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mommy,” Carl said in a very small voice. Telephoning the teacher was a parent’s ultimate weapon. Kids had no defense against it this side of running away from home.

“All right, then.” Rita seemed satisfied that she’d bombed him into submission. “Do you have any more homework?” He shook his head again. She ruffled his hair. “Then go take a bath and get into your pajamas, why don’t you?”

A spark of resistance flared. “Do I hafta?”

She ruthlessly squashed it. “Yes, you have to. Go on. Scoot.” Routed, Carl retreated to his bedroom. He came out in pajamas: the garments of surrender.

“Honestly,” Rita said after she and Chester had played with him and read to him and finally kissed him good night. “Getting him to do anything is like pulling teeth.” She scowled at Chester. “Why are men always like that?”

“Because women would walk all over us if we weren’t,” he answered, and tickled her. There was probably something in the Geneva Convention about that, especially since he wasn’t ticklish himself, which meant she couldn’t retaliate in kind.

They did have a more enjoyable way of unknotting such problems than the earnest diplomats at Geneva had imagined. Afterwards, they both smoked cigarettes. Then Chester turned out the lamp on his nightstand. Rita stayed up a while with a mystery. As he rolled himself into a cocoon of blankets—one more Geneva violation—she said, “You do remember Sue and Otis and Pete are coming over for dinner tomorrow night?”

“I do now,” he said, and fell asleep.

He was glad to see his sister and brother-in-law and nephew. Sue had a beaky face much like his. Where he was going gray, her hair remained a time-defying sandy brown. He suspected a bottle helped her defy time, but he’d never asked. Otis Blake had a wide, perfect part along the top of his head—the scar from a bullet crease. An inch lower and Sue never would have had the chance to meet him. Their son was several years older than Carl.

“I’m working with glass again,” Otis said. “When they found out I had plate-glass experience, they put me on cockpits.” Till the war boom started, he’d been in and out of work since coming to California. He’d spent years in a plate-glass plant in Toledo before the business collapse got him along with so many others.

“Good for you, Otis.” Chester meant it. He’d helped out when he could. Otis had done the same for him back in Ohio when Chester lost his steel-mill job there while his brother-in-law still had work.

“You ought to get a war-plant job,” Otis said. “I’m making more money than I ever did before.”

“I’m doing all right where I am,” Chester said. “I like building better than steel, too.”

“You’re losing money,” his brother-in-law declared.

“Not much,” Chester answered. “We’re getting raises. The contractors know they’ve got to give ’em to us, or else we darn well will quit and start making airplanes or shells or whatever else the war needs.”

“Before too long, I’ll be able to start paying back some of what I owe you,” Otis said. “Haven’t wanted to show my face around here till I could tell you that.”

Chester shrugged. “Hey, I never worried about it. It’s not like you didn’t carry me for a while. If you can do it without hurting yourself, great. If you can’t—then you can’t, that’s all.”

“You’re all right, Chester,” Sue said softly.

Framed on the wall of the front room was a note from Teddy Roosevelt hoping Chester would recover from his war wound. They’d met on one of TR’s tours of the Great War trenches. From that day to this, Chester had never found any words that mattered so much to him. Now maybe he had.

T
he USS
Remembrance
lay at anchor off the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui. The airplane carrier hadn’t come back to Pearl Harbor after her cruise up to Midway. Somebody with a lot of braid on his sleeves had decided that putting an extra ninety miles or so between the
Remembrance
and a Japanese attack from the west would help keep her safe. Sam Carsten wasn’t completely convinced, but nobody except the sailors in the damage-control party cared about his opinion.

His boss wasn’t thrilled, either. “If they bomb us in Pearl Harbor, we sink in shallow water and we’re easy to refloat,” Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger grumbled at a general-quarters drill. “If they bomb us here, down we go, and they never see us again. There’s a hell of a lot of water underneath us.”

“If we can figure that out, how come the brass can’t?” Szczerbiakowicz asked.

“Beats me, Eyechart,” Sam said. “You want stuff to make sense all the time, why the hell’d you join the Navy?”

“You got me there, Lieutenant,” the Pole said. “Why the hell did
you
join the Navy?”

“Me?” Sam hadn’t thought about it for a while. “Mostly because I didn’t want to walk behind a horse’s ass the rest of my life, I guess. My folks had a farm, and I knew that was hard work. I figured this would be better. And it is—most of the time.”

“Yeah, most of the time,” Szczerbiakowicz agreed dryly. Everybody laughed, not that it was really funny. You weren’t likely to run into dive bombers and battleships and submarines on a farm.

When the all-clear sounded, Sam went up to the flight deck. Destroyers and cruisers flanked the
Remembrance
to the west; their antiaircraft guns would help defend the vital ship if the Japs figured out she wasn’t at Pearl Harbor. To the east lay Maui. Lahaina had been the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii till 1845. It had been a boomtown in whaling days. Now it seemed to have forgotten its lively past, and slumbered the days away—until Navy ships anchored offshore, when it perked up amazingly. Sam had seen the enormous banyan tree in the town square, which had to shade an area a couple of hundred feet across. Any town whose main attraction was a tree wasn’t the most exciting place God ever made.

Fighters buzzed high overhead. The
Remembrance
’s Y-ranging antenna swung round and round, round and round.
Nobody’s going to catch us with our pants down,
Sam thought approvingly. But how many carriers did the Japanese have? It was possible—hell, it was easy—to be ready for battle in a tactical sense but to get overwhelmed strategically.

That thought came back to haunt him at supper. He was halfway through a good steak—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a better one—when the intercom suddenly announced, “Midway reports itself under attack by Japanese aircraft. The island has launched aircraft along the vector given by the enemy machines. We are proceeding to lend our assistance.”

No sooner had the metallic words died away than the engines rumbled to life under Sam’s feet. Somebody down the table from him said, “Godalmighty—we’re not wasting any time, are we?”

Commander Dan Cressy had been swearing under his breath. The officer’s remark made him revert to straightforward English: “We’ve wasted more than three hours just by being here instead of in Honolulu. Now we get to find out how much that costs us.”

“We have all the supplies we need, sir?” Sam asked.

“We have enough fuel to get us to Midway, and we have enough aviation gas to fly our airplanes,” Cressy answered. “What more do we need past that?”

Carsten said the only thing he could: “Nothing, sir.” If they had enough fuel to come home from Midway, the exec hadn’t said a word about it. He hadn’t said anything about food, either. They could get there, and they could fight once they did. Past that . . . well, they could worry about everything else afterwards.

Captain Stein came on the intercom a little later, urging men who weren’t on duty to go out on the flight deck and keep an eye peeled for periscopes. “We have fancy new sound gear since the last war,” the captain said, “but nothing is perfect. One of you may see something everybody else misses. It’s worth a try.”

Sam would have gone out anyway. If the Japs were attacking Midway, they might well have sent subs out ahead of their fleet to pick off American reinforcements rushing up from the main Sandwich Islands. The
Remembrance
’s anchorage off Lahaina might actually have done the ship and its escorts some good. Submarines would be most likely to prowl the line between Pearl Harbor and Midway. The carrier and her flanking ships would take a different course.

Several sailors called out alarms. None of them came to anything—all they’d seen was an odd wave or a bird diving into the sea or, once, a spouting whale that had three or four men shouting at the same time.

Some sailors stayed on the flight deck even after the sun went down. That wasn’t the worst gamble in the world; a periscope might leave a phosphorescent trail against dark water or might be spotted by moonlight. Sam went over to the wireless shack to see if he could find out what the
Remembrance
was liable to be walking into. But the yeomen didn’t have a lot to say: Midway was under attack from the air, and had launched aircraft against the enemy. That much Sam already knew, and so did everyone else. The men with the earphones wouldn’t tell him on which vector the U.S. airplanes had gone out from Midway. They did allow that no Japanese troops had landed on the low, flat island. That was good news, anyhow.

He decided to hit the sack early. Even at top speed, the
Remembrance
was a day and a half from Midway. When she got there, she’d be busy. Grabbing what rest he could seemed like a good idea. He had no idea how much that would be. An alert or a real attack might bounce him out of his bunk any old time.

Except for shoes and hat, he slept in his uniform. If he looked rumpled when he got up—well, so what? To his surprise, he got most of a full night. He woke at 0400, feeling refreshed and ready for whatever lay ahead. He went to the galley for food and coffee. As with sleep, no telling how soon he’d have a chance for more.

Commander Cressy sat there with a steaming mug in front of him. Sam’s guess was that he’d had no sleep since the
Remembrance
set out. The exec nodded to him. “Midway thinks there are three Jap carriers out there,” he said, as calmly as if he were talking about shoelaces.

“Three?” Sam made a face. “That’s not so good, sir.” He filled his plate with bacon and eggs—real ones, not the powdered kind—and hash browns. “Airplanes from the island do them any harm?”

“They say they did.” By Cressy’s sour smile, he didn’t believe it. After a sip from the thick white mug, he explained why: “The incoming waves haven’t stopped, and they aren’t getting smaller, either. What does that tell you?”

Sam’s smile was sour, too. “No damage to the Jap carriers, sir, or not much, anyway. Uh—where are they?”

“North of Midway, and a little west—about where you’d expect,” the exec answered. “Maybe we can give them a surprise. Here’s hoping.” He raised the mug.

Sam grabbed a nap in the afternoon, and sacked out early in the evening. That proved wise—they went to general quarters about midnight. He ran to his post in his stocking feet and put on his shoes only when he got there. Then it was a long wait for anything to happen. The mess gang brought sandwiches and coffee down to the damage-control party. The men wolfed down the chow.

“Sunday morning,” Lieutenant Commander Pottinger said. “I’d rather being going into Lahaina for liberty. I’d really rather be going into Honolulu for liberty.”

“Three weeks till Christmas, too,” Sam said. “Well, two and a half weeks, if you want to get fancy.”

At just past six, airplanes started taking off from the
Remembrance
’s flight deck. “Must be getting light,” Pottinger said. Down where they were, day and night had no meaning. He added, “Here’s hoping they’ve got good targets.”

An hour and a half went by. The intercom came to life. “Y-ranging gear reports aircraft bound this way, about half an hour out. They are not believed to be friendly. All hands stand by for action.”

Not believed to be friendly . . . They were Japs, for Christ’s sake! Japan didn’t have Y-ranging gear, or the USA didn’t think she did. They’d probably spotted U.S. airplanes coming from the
Remembrance
or her escorting cruisers and flown along the reciprocal of their courses. That was how the U.S. aircraft from Midway had attacked the Japanese carriers. However they’d done it, they meant trouble.