Return Engagement (69 page)

When he stepped from the gangplank to the destroyer, he saluted the colors and the officer of the deck and said, “Permission to come aboard, sir?”

“Granted,” the OOD said, returning the salute. “And you are . . . ?”

“Seaman George Enos, Junior,” George said, and rattled off his pay number.

“Enos.” The OOD looked down at his clipboard and made a checkmark. “Yeah, you’re on the list. Specialty?”

“Antiaircraft gunnery, sir.”

The young j.g. wrote something beside his name. “All right. Gather with the other new fish there, and one of our petty officers will take you to your bunk.”

“Thank you, sir.” About a dozen men stood by the rail. Some were raw kids. Others, like George, had been around the block a few times. Two or three of them had good-conduct hashmarks on their sleeves that spoke of years in the Navy. Part of George felt raw when he saw those. Telling himself he’d been going to sea for years helped some, but only some.

Five or six more men came aboard after him. The OOD stared down at his clipboard and muttered to himself. George didn’t need a college degree to figure out what that meant: a few sailors hadn’t shown up. They were probably out drunk somewhere. George didn’t know just what the Navy did to you for missing your ship. He didn’t want to find out, either.

Finally, still muttering, the officer of the deck called, “Fogerty! Let’s get this show on the road. If they show up, they show up. If they don’t . . .”—he muttered some more, grimly—“it’s their funeral.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Fogerty was a CPO with a big belly and an impressive array of long-service hashmarks. He glowered at the new men as if they were weevils in the hardtack. “Come on, youse guys. Shake a leg.”

The
Townsend
was larger and bound to be faster than the
Lamson,
the Great War relic on which George had trained. She was every bit as crowded as the training ship, though: with her bigger displacement, she carried more weapons and more men. They ate up the space.

George’s bunk turned out to be a hammock. He did some muttering of his own. What fun—he could sleep on his back or fall on his face. And he lay on his belly when he had a choice. No help for it, though. If he got tired enough, he’d sleep if he had to hang himself by his toes like a bat.

“Youse guys know your way around?” Fogerty asked, and then answered his own question: “Naw, of course youse don’t. Come on, if you want to after you all get your bunks, and I’ll give youse the tour.”

When George accompanied him, he got more than he’d bargained for. Fogerty prowled from bow to stern and from the Y-ranging antenna down to the bilges. George hoped he would remember everything he’d seen.

One thing he made sure he’d remember was the OOD reaming out a hung-over sailor who’d shown up later than ordered. He didn’t want that happening to him. And at least one man was still missing, because the officer had spoken of
they
to Chief Fogerty.

With or without the missing man or men, the
Townsend
sailed that afternoon. The
Lamson
’s engines had wheezed. These fairly thrummed with power. Asking one of the men who’d been aboard her for a while, George discovered that she was rated at thirty-five knots, and that she could live up to the rating. The training ship had been a tired old mutt. This was a greyhound.

He got assigned to an antiaircraft gun near the
Townsend
’s forward triple five-inch turret. They made him an ammunition passer, of course; men with more experience held the other positions, all of which took more skill. A shell heaver just needed a strong back—and the guts not to run away under attack.

They steamed south. Men not on duty stood at the rail. Some were watching for submersibles. Others were just puking; the Atlantic in December was no place for the faint of stomach. George took the heaving sea in stride. He’d known plenty worse, and in a smaller vessel.

“Not sick, Enos?” asked the twin 40mm’s loader, a hulking kraut named Fritz Gustafson.

“Nah.” George shook his head. “I was a Boston fisherman since before I had to shave. My stomach takes orders.”

“Ah.” Gustafson grunted. “So you’re a sailor even if you’re not a Navy man.” He let out another grunt. “Well, it’s something.”

“Sure as hell is.” The gun chief was a petty officer called Fremont Blaine Dalby—he described himself as a Republican out of a Republican family. With most of the USA either Socialist or Democrat, that made him a strange bird, but he knew what he was doing at the gun mount. Now he went on, “There’s guys who’ve been in since the Great War who still lose their breakfast when it gets like this. North Atlantic this time of year ain’t no joke.”

“That’s the truth. I’ve been on a few Nantucket sleigh rides myself.” George had been on more than a few, riding out swells as high as a three-story building. He didn’t want to brag in front of men senior to him, though. They were liable to make him pay for it later. That turned out to be smart, as he found out when he asked, “You know where we’re headed?”

Dalby and Gustafson both stared at him. “They didn’t tell you?” Dalby asked.

“Nope. Just to report aboard.”

Fritz Gustafson grunted again. “Sounds like the Navy, all right. We’re heading for the Sandwich Islands. We get to go around the Horn. You think the waves up here are bad? The ones down there make this look like a dead calm.”

Now it was George’s turn to grunt. He’d heard stories about going around the Horn—who hadn’t? “Have to see what that’s like,” he said. “I’ve been east a ways, but I haven’t been south.”

“So you’re a polliwog, are you?” Gustafson asked with a cynical laugh. Enough fishermen came out of the Navy and had crossed the Equator to let George know what that meant. He nodded. Gustafson laughed again. “Well, you’ll get yours.”

“Rounding the Horn shouldn’t be
too
bad,” Dalby said. “It’ll be summer down there, or what passes for it. Going through in winter is worse. Then it’s just mountains of water kicking you in the teeth, one after another after another.”

“People have been talking about a canal through Central America damn near forever,” Gustafson said. “I wish they’d finally get around to building the fucker.”

“Yeah, but who’d run it?” George said.

Gustafson and Dalby looked at each other. “He’s no dope,” Dalby said. No doubt it was possible to build a canal through Colombia’s upper neck or through Nicaragua. The USA and the CSA had both examined the project. Each had threatened war if the other went ahead with it. It might have happened after the Great War, when the Confederate States were weak, but the United States had been putting themselves back together then, too. And after the bottom fell out of the economy, nobody’d had the money or the energy for a project like that.

The
Townsend
joined three more destroyers and a heavy cruiser that came out of New York harbor. The flotilla also picked up a pair of oilers from Philadelphia. The ships would have to refuel before they swung around the southern tip of South America. The Empire of Brazil was technically neutral, but wasn’t friendly, not when it was getting rich off fees from Argentine, British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese freighters hauling beef and wheat through its territorial waters for the dash across the Atlantic to Dakar in French West Africa. There were no guarantees that U.S. ships would be able to top off there.

My father went this way,
George thought.
He didn’t go around the Horn—I don’t think he did, anyhow—but he was here before me.
He nodded to himself.
I’ll pay ’em back for you, Pa.

“Gonna be a little interesting, sliding past Bermuda and the Bahamas,” Dalby said. “Yeah, just a little. How many ships and patrol airplanes do the limeys and the Confederates have?”

George’s father hadn’t had to worry about airplanes, or not very much. Warships were terribly vulnerable from the air. The loss of the
Remembrance
drove that home, in case anyone had forgotten. “What do we do if they spot us?” George asked.

Fremont Blaine Dalby let his hand rest on the right barrel of the twin 40mm. “Why, then, we give ’em a big, friendly hello and we hope for the best,” he said. “That’s why we’re here, Enos—to make sure they get that big hello.”

“Right,” George said, as nonchalantly as he could. The rest of the men in the gun crew laughed at him. He kept his mouth shut. He knew they’d go right on laughing till he showed what he was worth. He’d had the same thing happen the first time he went out on a fishing run—and, in the days since, he’d jeered at other first-timers till they showed they were worth something.

As the flotilla went down past Maryland and Delaware toward Virginia and the CSA, it swung ever farther from shore, both to avoid Confederate patrol aircraft and to take a course halfway between the Bahamas and Bermuda. The men on the hydrophones worked around the clock. Sailors stayed on deck whenever they could, too, watching for death lurking in the ocean.

They ran between the enemy’s Atlantic outposts on a dark, cloudy midnight. No bombs or bullets came out of the sky. No torpedoes slid through the sea. The farther south they went, the calmer that sea got, too. That mattered less to George than to some afflicted with seasickness, but he didn’t enjoy swinging in his hammock like a pendulum weight when the rolling got bad.

Not that he was in his hammock when the
Townsend
ran the gauntlet. He stayed at his battle station through the long night. When the east began to lighten, Fritz Gustafson let out a long sigh and said, “Well, the worst is over.”

“May be over,” Fremont Dalby amended.

“Yeah. May be over.” Gustafson pointed up to the gray sky. “Long as the ceiling stays low like this, nothing upstairs can find us.”

Having been shot up aboard the
Sweet Sue,
George wouldn’t have been sorry never to see another airplane carrying guns. He said, “Which means all we’ve got to worry about is submarines. Oh, boy.”

“We can shoot subs, or drop ashcans on ’em, or even run away from ’em if we have to,” Dalby said. “Can’t run from a goddamn airplane—looks like that’s the number one lesson in this war so far.”

Gustafson shook his head. “Number one lesson in this war so far is, we should’ve been ready for it five years before it started. And we weren’t. And we’re paying for it. We ever make that mistake again . . .” He spat over the rail.

“But Featherston’s a nut,” George said. It wasn’t quite a protest. He answered himself before the others could: “Yeah, I know. It’s not like he didn’t advertise.” Dalby and Gustafson both nodded. George sighed. The
Townsend
steamed south.

XVIII

T
he wind that roared down on Provo, Utah, felt as if it had started somewhere in Siberia. Snow blew almost sideways. Armstrong Grimes huddled behind a wall that blocked the worst of it. Most of the house of which the wall had been a part had fallen in on itself. Armstrong turned to Sergeant Stowe and said, “Merry Christmas.”

Rex Stowe needed a shave. So did Armstrong, but he couldn’t see himself. Snowflakes in the other man’s whiskers gave him a grizzled look, old beyond his years. Armstrong sure as hell felt old beyond his. Stowe said, “The fuck of it is, it
is
a merry Christmas. Goddamn Mormons aren’t shooting at us. Far as I’m concerned, that makes it the best day since we got to this shitass place.”

“Yeah.” Armstrong cupped his hands and lit a cigarette. Arctic wind or not, he got it going first try. He hardly even noticed the blasphemy and obscenity with which Stowe had decked the day of Jesus’ birth. He would have done it himself had the other noncom given him a Merry Christmas before he spoke. He said, “Nice to have a smoke without worrying some sniper’ll spot the coal and blow my head off.”

“Uh-huh.” Stowe nodded. “Truce looks to be holding pretty good. If the Mormons want to make like they’re holier’n we are ’cause they proposed it, I don’t care.”

“Me, neither,” Armstrong said. “Amen, in fact.”

He could even stick his head up over the wall without worrying about anything more than wind and snow. He could, but he didn’t. He knew what the rest of Provo looked like: the same sort of lunar landscape as the part the U.S. Army had already clawed away from the rebellious Mormons.

His old man had talked about how the truce in 1914 almost knocked the war into a cocked hat. At Christmas the next year, both sides had fired endless artillery salvos to make sure it didn’t happen again. The truce here wasn’t anything like that. As soon as the clock hit 12:01 a.m., both sides were going to start banging away at each other again. The only thing either felt for the other was hatred—that and, possibly, a wary respect.

And then that howling wind brought something strange with it: the sound of men singing carols. When Army chaplains talked about the Mormons at all, they insisted the folk who liked to call this place Deseret weren’t really Christians. They tried to make the fight sound like a crusade.

Armstrong had never paid much attention to that. He didn’t feel like a knight in shining armor. He was filthy and fleabitten and probably lousy again. If they would have put him on a train and shipped him home, he wouldn’t even have turned around to wave good-bye. He was here because the Army told him to be here and would shoot him if he bailed out, not because he thought God willed it. God was bound to have better things to do with His time.

But hearing “Silent Night” and then “O Little Town of Bethlehem” gave him pause. “Reminds me of the days when I was a kid and I’d go caroling in the streets,” he said.

“You did that?” Stowe said. “I did, too. I guess there aren’t a hell of a lot of people who didn’t—except for sheenies, I mean.”

“Well, yeah, sure,” Armstrong said, thinking of Yossel Reisen. “But I didn’t think these Mormon bastards had the same songs ordinary people do.”

As if to prove him wrong, the men who’d been trying to kill him sang “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and “Deck the Halls” and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” They were pretty good. Armstrong wondered if any of them belonged to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It had come back to life the minute Mormonism turned legal again, even before the Mormon Tabernacle was rebuilt. By now, Armstrong was willing to bet U.S. bombers had knocked the Tabernacle flat again.

How long would it be before the Army fought its way into Salt Lake City for a firsthand look? Armstrong wished he hadn’t had that thought. It led to too many others. Chief among them were,
How many men will get shot between Provo and Salt Lake?
and
Will I be one of them?
He’d stayed lucky so far. How long could it go on?

Somebody behind Armstrong—a U.S. soldier like him—started singing “Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful.” He and Stowe both joined in at the same time. He hadn’t sung carols in years, and he’d never had what anybody would call a great voice. He sang out anyhow, for all he was worth. It felt good.

He wondered if the Mormons would try to outshout their enemies. They could do it; they had that howling wind at their backs. Instead, they joined in. Tears stung his eyes and started to freeze his eyelashes together. He rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles. He would have been more embarrassed if the hard-bitten Stowe weren’t doing the same thing.

Both sides caroled for half an hour or so. When the singing ended, they gave each other a hand. Armstrong didn’t mind clapping for the Mormons. It was Christmas, after all. And he knew it didn’t truly mean anything. The war might hold its breath, but it wouldn’t go away.

Somebody from the other side of the line called, “You guys sing like you’re nice people. Why don’t you ever just leave us alone to do what we want?” He didn’t even drawl, the way Confederate soldiers did. He sounded like anybody else: he had a vaguely Midwestern accent like half the guys in Armstrong’s platoon. That made Mormons deadly dangerous infiltrators. It also made their uprising harder for Armstrong to fathom. They seemed like people no different from anybody else. They seemed like that—but they weren’t.

“Why don’t you stay here in the USA where you belong?” someone on the U.S. side yelled back.

That brought angry shouts from the Mormons—so angry that Armstrong looked to make sure he could grab his Springfield in a hurry. The truce felt on the edge of falling apart. He also found out a few things he hadn’t known before. Nobody’d ever told him the Mormons had come to Utah before the First Mexican War exactly because they’d wanted to escape the USA even back then, only to find themselves under the Stars and Stripes again whether they wanted to be or not.

“Jesus,” Stowe said: an appropriate comment on the day. Less appropriately, he went on, “These assholes have wanted to secede even longer than the goddamn Confederates.”

“Yeah, well, how can they?” Armstrong asked. “They’re right here in the middle of us. You can’t make a country like that. Besides, they’re a bunch of perverts. They ought to straighten out and fly right.”

“Tell me about it,” Stowe replied with a filthy leer. But then, as the shouting went back and forth between the lines, he added, “I wish to God they weren’t shooting at us. Then we could make a couple of Mormon divisions and throw ’em at Featherston’s fuckers. That would use ’em up in a hurry.” He chuckled cynically.

“Maybe not. They might just mutiny and go over to the CSA,” Armstrong said.

Stowe grunted. “You’re right, dammit. They might. Plain as the nose on your face the Confederates are giving ’em as much help as they can.”

In the end, nobody on either side started shooting in spite of the curses that flew back and forth. It stayed Christmas to that extent, anyhow. And Armstrong went back to the field kitchen without worrying about Mormon snipers. The cooks served ham and sweet potatoes and something that was alleged to be fruitcake but looked as if it came from a latrine. It did taste all right, and it gave the soldiers the chance to razz the cooks. They always liked that.

Once they returned to their positions at the front line, Stowe pulled a flask from his jacket pocket. He brought it to his mouth, then passed it to Armstrong. “Here. Have a knock of this.”

“Thanks.” Armstrong swigged, trying not to be too greedy. Brandy ran down his throat, smooth as a pretty girl’s kiss. “Where’d you come up with this shit? Damn Mormons aren’t supposed to have any.”

“Musta been a gentile’s house,” Stowe said.

“Hope the Mormons didn’t poison it and leave it for us,” Armstrong remarked.

Stowe gave him the finger. “There’s a hell of a thing to go and say. I’ve had hooch poison me a time or three, but I haven’t got enough in here for that.”

Armstrong did his best to look worldly-wise. He’d done some drinking in the Army, but hardly any before. His folks would take a drink every now and then, but they didn’t make a big thing out of it. His father would have walloped the tar out of him if he ever came home smashed. As for the swig of brandy the sergeant had given him, it sent a little warmth out from his stomach, but otherwise left him unpoisoned.

He rolled himself in a down-filled quilt. That was a bit of his own war booty, and a hell of a lot warmer than an Army-issue wool blanket. He used the folded-up blanket for a pillow. As he fell asleep, he wondered when he’d last lain in a real bed. It had been a while.

Some time in the middle of the night, he woke up. There were occasional flurries of gunfire, nothing to get excited about. If he’d let stuff like this bother him, he wouldn’t have been able to sleep at all near the front. Only after he’d wiggled around for a little while did he think,
Oh. It must be after midnight.
Then he went back to sleep. If the shooting picked up, he knew he’d wake again.

What happened instead was that Sergeant Stowe shook him awake. The sun still hadn’t come up, but the sky behind the mountains to the east was beginning to go gray. “Welcome back to the war,” Stowe said.

“Screw the war.” Armstrong yawned. “Screw you, too.”

“I don’t want you. I want a blonde with big tits,” Stowe said. “Only trouble is, the gals like that carry rifles around here. They’d sooner blow my brains out than blow me.”

As it got lighter, bombers came overhead and started pounding the parts of Provo the Mormons still held. The bombers were not only outmoded but flying above the clouds. Thanks to both those things, they weren’t the most accurate bombing platforms God or U.S. factories had ever made. Some of the bombs came down on the U.S. side of the line.

The handful of Mormon antiaircraft guns banged away at the bombers overhead. Firing blind, they didn’t have much hope of hitting them. All the same, Armstrong—who’d got dirt down the back of his neck from a near miss by his own side—snarled, “I hope they shoot those fuckers down.”

“Bet your ass,” Stowe said. “Goddamn bombers can’t hit the broad side of a barn.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Armstrong said. “If they’re aiming at us, they’re pretty good shots.”

“Ha! That’d be funny if only it was funny, you know what I mean?”

“Hell, yes,” Armstrong said. “If I ever run into one of those flyboys, I hope I come as close to killing him as he just came to killing me.”

“Yeah! That’s good!” Stowe said. “If I run into one of ’em, I think I would kill him. It’s what he was trying to do to me. Only difference is, I’m good at what I do, and those bastards aren’t.”

Mortar bombs came whispering down on U.S. trenches and foxholes. The Mormons often tried to repay whatever the USA did to them. After the ordnance the bombers had expended on their own men, the mortar rounds hardly seemed worth getting excited about. Again, Armstrong wondered how long he would take to get out of Utah and if he could somehow do it alive and in one piece.

A
s a lieutenant, junior grade, Sam Carsten had worn a thick gold stripe and a thin one on his jacket cuffs for a long time. A lieutenant wore two full stripes. Carsten didn’t give a damn about the promotion. Some things were too dearly bought. He would rather have been a j.g. aboard the
Remembrance
than a lieutenant waiting for new orders at Pearl Harbor and contemplating a gloomy New Year.

Too many men were gone. He didn’t know what had happened to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger. All he knew was that nobody’d fished the chief of the damage-control party out of the Pacific. Eyechart Szczerbiakowicz hadn’t made it back to Oahu, either. Somebody had said the sailor was wounded going into the drink and hadn’t been able to stay afloat. And Captain Stein, an officer of the old school, had gone down with the
Remembrance.
Word was that he’d got a Medal of Honor for it. Much good the decoration did him.

Gloomily, Sam trudged over to the officers’ club. He intended to see 1942 in smashed. He’d feel like grim death when he sobered up tomorrow morning, but he didn’t care. He was too sorrowful to face the world sober.

Despite the loss of Midway—and of the only U.S. airplane carrier in the Pacific—a lot of officers were living it up. Some of them had wives along, others girlfriends. The band played a bouncy tune that mimicked Confederate rhythms without being too blatant about it.

Here and there, though, sat other gloomy men with slumped shoulders, intent on the serious business of getting drunk. At the bar, one of them waved to Sam. Dan Cressy had four stripes on his sleeves these days. They’d promoted him to captain. By all the signs, that delighted him no more than Sam liked
his
promotion.

“Happy New Year, Carsten.” Yes, if Cressy was happy, Sam wouldn’t have wanted to see him sad.

Carsten sat down by the
Remembrance
’s exec and ordered a shot over ice. Even before the drink got there, he said, “It’s a bastard, sir.”

They made an odd pair: the aging lieutenant and the young, promising captain. They’d been through a lot together, though. Cressy said, “It’s a bastard and a half, is what it is.” He emptied his glass and signaled for a refill. “I’m ahead of you.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Sam answered. “I expect I can catch up.” He got the shot, poured it down, and waved for another.

Both new drinks arrived at the same time. Cressy stared moodily into his. “This isn’t how I wanted to get promoted, God damn it.” He bit the words off one by one.

“No, sir. Me, neither,” Sam said.

“I tried to get him to come away.” Cressy was talking more to himself than to Sam. “I tried. I said the Navy needed him. I said the country needed him. I said . . . Well, it doesn’t matter what I said. He looked at me and he told me,, ‘This is my ship, and she’s sinking. Get off her, Commander. Good-bye and good luck.” So I got off her. What else could I do?”

“Nothing I can see. You got me off her the same way,” Sam said.

“You.” Commander—no, Captain—Cressy seemed to come back to himself, at least a little. He managed a smile of sorts for Sam. “I’d’ve kicked myself for the rest of my days if anything had happened to you.”