Return Engagement (68 page)

Even in the bowels of the carrier, Sam heard the ships around the
Remembrance
start shooting. Then her guns started banging away, too. Her engines revved up to emergency full. She started twisting and dodging for all she was worth. How much
was
she worth, though? Compared to an airplane, she might have been nailed to the surface of the Pacific.

A bomb burst in the water nearby, and then another. Szczerbiakowicz worked a set of rosary beads. Sam wondered if he knew he was doing it. And then a bomb hit near the bow, and he stopped worrying about things that didn’t matter. “Let’s go!” He and Pottinger shouted it in the same breath.

Another bomb hit, also well forward, as the damage-control crew rushed to do what they could. The engines kept running, which meant they had power for hoses and pumps. “Gotta get the flight deck fixed,” Pottinger panted while he ran. “If our aircraft can’t land and take off, we’re screwed.”

Then a bomb hit near the stern, and all the fire alarms started going off. That was where they stored the aviation fuel. Ice ran through Carsten. They were liable to be screwed any which way.

When he got up on deck, he saw they were. The two hits at the bow were bad enough. The
Remembrance
didn’t have enough steel plates to cover those gaping gaps. But the fierce flames leaping up through the hole in the stern were ten times worse. If they didn’t get a handle on that fire right now, it would roar through the whole ship.

Sam grabbed a hose, careless of Japanese fighters whizzing by low overhead and spraying the flight deck with machine-gun bullets. “Come on!” he shouted to a couple of his men, and ran back toward the flames.

But even high-pressure seawater at a range close enough to blister his face wasn’t enough to douse that inferno, or to slow its spread very much. “Back!” somebody shouted. Sam ignored him. Then a hand grabbed his arm. He shook it off. “Back, Lieutenant Carsten! That’s an order!” He turned his head. There was Commander Cressy. Even as Sam started to yell a protest, the pressure in the hose went from high to zero. “You see?” the exec said grimly. “We aren’t going to save her. The abandon-ship order went out five minutes ago.”

“It did?” Sam stared in amazement. He’d never heard it.

“Yes, it did. Now come on, God damn your stubborn, two-striped squarehead soul, before you cook.”

Only when Sam was bobbing in the Pacific did he realize he’d also been promoted. A j.g. was addressed as a lieutenant, yes, but wore only one and a half stripes. Carsten grabbed a line flung from a surviving destroyer. Five minutes after he’d clambered up onto her deck, the
Remembrance
went to the bottom. He burst into tears.

“
M
ail call!”

That was always a welcome sound. Dr. Leonard O’Doull looked up from the little chessboard over which he and Granville McDougald sat hunched. “I resign, Granny,” he said. “You’d get me anyway.”

“Quitter,” McDougald said. “You’re only down two pawns.”

“Against you, that’s plenty.” O’Doull won some of the time against the other man. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have kept playing him. But if McDougald got an edge, he wasn’t the sort to give it up. “Besides, mail’s more interesting.”

“For you, maybe.” McDougald had been in the Army a long time. He didn’t have anybody on the outside who wrote him very often. This was his life. To O’Doull’s way of thinking, it wasn’t much of a life, but Granny didn’t lose sleep over what he thought.

Eddie carried a fat wad of envelopes into the tent. “Got three for you, Doc,” the corpsman said. “One for you, too, Granny.” He passed the rest out to the other medics.

“Holy Jesus,” McDougald said. “Somebody must have decided I owe him money.” He opened the envelope, unfolded the letter inside, and sadly shook his head. “See? I knew it.”

“What is it really?” O’Doull asked. His letters stood out from the rest. They bore bright red stamps from the Republic of Quebec. These all showed General Montcalm fighting bravely against the British during the French and Indian War. His bravery hadn’t done him a damn bit of good. He’d lost and got killed, and Quebec had spent the next century and a half as a sometimes imperfectly willing part of British-created Canada.

“Letter from an old-maid cousin of mine in Pittsburgh,” Granville McDougald answered. “She complains about everything to everybody, and my number happened to be up. Prices are too high, and there isn’t enough of anything, and bombers are annoying when they come over, and why don’t I fix all of it? Trudy’s kind of stupid, but she makes up for it by being noisy.”

“Er—right.” O’Doull recognized Nicole’s handwriting on his envelopes. He made sure he opened the one with the earliest postmark first. By now, he was so used to English that he had to shift gears to read his wife’s French.

Unlike McDougald’s cousin, Nicole had better sense than to complain about how things were back in Rivière-du-Loup. Since Pittsburgh
was
getting bombed, Cousin Trudy had some right to complain—but not to a man who saw at first hand what war did every day and who had to try to repair some of the damage.

Keeping track of her two brothers and three sisters and their families let Nicole ramble for a page and a half before she even got around to town gossip. O’Doull soaked it all in; it had been his life, too, ever since the Great War. Who was putting on airs because she’d got a telephone and who’d knocked over a mailbox because he’d taken his Buick out for a spin while he was drunk was big news in Rivière-du-Loup.

And Lucien sends his love,
Nicole wrote.
He is home for the holidays from the university, and says he did well on his examinations.
O’Doull read that with relief. His son wasn’t always an enthusiastic student, and had dawdled a good deal on his way to a bachelor’s degree. That he was going to college at all made him an object of wonder to his throng of cousins.

The other two letters had much the same theme. Only the details changed, and not all of them: Jean Diderot had assassinated another mailbox by the time Nicole finished her last letter.
Someone should take away his keys before he hurts a person instead,
she wrote indignantly. O’Doull was nodding as he read. He’d patched up plenty of drunks and the people they hit—that wasn’t quite so bad as battle damage, but it came close.

“I wish I were back there,” he said.

“It’s your own damn fault that you’re not, Doc,” Granville McDougald said. “See what you bought for volunteering?”

“You should talk,” O’Doull retorted. “How long have you been doing this?”

“A while,” McDougald allowed. “I hope your news is better than what’s coming out of the Pacific.”

“It is, yeah,” O’Doull said. “We hurt the damn Japs, anyhow. We sank one of their carriers and damaged another one.”

“But they got the only one we had out there, and they got their people ashore on Midway, and that’s what counts,” McDougald said. “Now they’re the ones who can build it up, and we’ll have to worry about getting things through to Oahu. We can’t send a carrier with our ships for protection till we build more or pull one out of the Atlantic and send it around the Horn.”

“If we pull one, that makes things tougher against England and France and the CSA,” O’Doull pointed out.

“I didn’t say it didn’t,” McDougald answered. “But we can fly airplanes out of Honolulu and we can fly them out of San Francisco, and there’s still that space in between that neither bunch can really cover. And if I can figure that out from the map, you bet your ass some smart Jap admiral can do the same thing and stick a carrier up there somewhere to make our lives difficult.”

“Makes sense,” O’Doull said. “That doesn’t mean it’s true, mind you, but it makes sense.” He hesitated, then went on, “Hey, I’ve got one for you, Granny.”

“Shoot,” the medic told him.

“What do you think about what Smith said on the wireless a little while ago—about the Confederates slaughtering their Negroes, I mean?”

Granville McDougald frowned. “Well, I don’t know. In the last war, the limeys told stories about how the Germans marched along with Belgian babies on their bayonets, called ’em Huns, and that was a crock of shit. I figure it’s about even money that he’s trying to whip things up on the home front because the offensive in Virginia isn’t going the way he hoped it would. The Confederates are bastards, yeah, but are they crazy bastards?”

“Featherston is,” O’Doull said, to which McDougald only grunted. O’Doull added, “Smith said he had photos. The limeys never said that about the Germans.”

“I haven’t seen any photos.” McDougald shrugged. “Come to think of it, that Congresswoman—you know, the one who was poor damned Blackford’s wife—said
she
had photos. I didn’t see those, either. I wonder if they’re the same ones. Till I see the evidence with my own eyes, I’m going to keep this one in the, ‘not proven’ column.”

“All right.” O’Doull had trouble quarreling with that, even though he wanted to. As far as he was concerned, Jake Featherston should have been locked up in a loony bin instead of running a country. He struck O’Doull as nuttier than a three-dollar fruitcake, and he’d driven the Confederate States nuts along with him.

Up at the front, several machine guns started stuttering. Everybody in the tent with the Red Crosses on it swore with varying degrees of imagination. It had been quiet up there for a while. The weather’d been nasty, and both sides were throwing most of their energy into the fighting back East. But now one side or the other had put on a raid—or maybe somebody’d just imagined he’d seen something and opened up on it, which made everybody else open up, too.

“Come on,” Eddie told the other corpsmen. “We better shag ass up there. Sure as hell, somebody’s gonna be bleeding.” Off they went.

“You and me,” Granville McDougald said to O’Doull.

“Let’s hope it stays that way,” O’Doull answered. “My best kind of day here is one where I don’t do a goddamn thing.”

But the first casualty came back about ten minutes later. He got there under his own power, clutching a wounded hand. Trying to encourage him, McDougald said, “It could have been worse—it could have been the other one.”

“Screw you,” the soldier said. “I’m a lefty.”

“Let’s get him under, Granny,” O’Doull said. Looking as nonplused as O’Doull had ever seen him, McDougald nodded. Because it was the man’s skilled hand, O’Doull took special pains to do the best job of patching it up he could. With so many bones and tendons in the palm smashed up, though, he didn’t know how much use the soldier would have when he recovered.
Hope for the best,
he thought.

“That’s very neat work, Doc,” McDougald said when O’Doull finished at last. “I’m not sure I could handle anything that delicate myself.”

“Nice of you to say so,” O’Doull answered. “I don’t know what kind of result he’ll get out of it, though. He’ll just have to wait and see how he heals.” O’Doull himself would probably never find out; the wounded man would be sent farther back of the line as soon as possible.

He and McDougald dealt with three more wounded soldiers in the course of the afternoon, none of them, luckily, with life-threatening injuries. Knowing someone would come back to something approaching full health once he recovered was a good feeling. For a day, at least, O’Doull could pretend he’d won a round against death.

Darkness fell early—not so early as it would have up in Rivière-du-Loup at this season of the year, but early enough. The gunfire died away to occasional spatters. It had never been a full-strength exchange; neither side brought barrels and artillery into it. That strengthened O’Doull’s impression that the firefight had started more by accident than for any real reason.

He was spreading a can of deviled ham over a couple of crackers when a runner stuck his head into the tent. He wasn’t a man O’Doull remembered seeing before. “Get ready to shut this place down,” he announced. “Whole division’s pulling out of the line here and heading for Virginia.”

“Jesus!” O’Doull exclaimed. “Nice to give people a little warning, isn’t it?”

“You’ve got a little warning, sir,” the runner answered. “This is it.” He wasn’t even sarcastic. He meant it. As far as O’Doull was concerned, that made things worse, not better.

“Who’s taking our place?” Granville McDougald asked.

“Two regiments from a new division—the 271st,” the runner said. Two regiments from a full-strength division would match the number of effectives facing the Confederates, all right. Even casual firefights like the one earlier in the day caused casualties, and they happened all the time.

“Why didn’t they ship the 271st to Virginia?” O’Doull asked bitterly. The runner didn’t answer that. O’Doull had no trouble finding his own answers. The obvious one was that they wanted to send veteran troops up against the Confederate defenders. That was a compliment of sorts, but one O’Doull could have done without. If they kept feeding veteran units into the sausage machine, they wouldn’t have any veteran units left before too long.

Nobody cared about a Medical Corps major’s opinion. He looked at McDougald. The Army medic shrugged and said, “Looks like we’ve got to take care of it. I hear Virginia is really shitty this time of year.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” O’Doull agreed. But the other man was right—they had to take care of it.

And they did. It wasn’t as if they had no practice moving the aid station; they’d done it whenever the front went forward or back. They weren’t doing it under fire this time, and, though it was chilly, it wasn’t raining. Things could have been worse. The medics bitched, but O’Doull would have thought something was wrong with them if they hadn’t. He bitched, too; he didn’t like climbing into a truck at two in the morning any better than anybody else. Like it or not, he did it. The truck jounced off down a road full of potholes. He was leaving the war behind—and heading straight towards it.

G
eorge Enos, Jr., slung his duffel bag over his right shoulder. Leaning to the left to balance the weight, he strode up the Boston Navy Yard gangplank to the USS
Townsend.
He felt good about coming home to Boston to get a ship, and felt even better to have a ship at last.