The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  “Anything else?” Franklin Roosevelt asked.

  “How’s the other business doing?” Flora wouldn’t go into detail or name names over the telephone. Lines into and out of Congress and into and out of the War Department were supposed to be extra secure. Some things were too important to entrust to a line that was supposed to be secure, though. She still couldn’t be sure who besides Roosevelt was listening.

  He was equally careful, saying only, “Everything seems to be coming along well enough right now.”

  “That’s good. They’ve made all the repairs they need?”

  “I haven’t heard anything different.”

  “All right. Anything new from the foreign factories?” Flora hoped he would understand she was asking how the Confederacy and Germany and England and France—and Russia and Japan, too, come to that—were faring in their quest for a uranium bomb.

  “I haven’t heard anything new lately,” he replied. “Of course, just because I haven’t heard it, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.”

  “I know,” she said unhappily. That was true even of the Confederates’ project, and they were right across the border and spoke the same language. How much could the USA find out about what the Germans, say, were doing? They were allies, but they were being tight-lipped about anything that had to do with uranium. The Russians and the Japanese were probably behind in the race—Flora hoped they were, anyway—but she didn’t see how her country could learn anything about what they were doing unless they got amazingly careless with their codes.

  “If I hear anything, you’ll know about it,” Roosevelt promised, and then, “Oh, that reminds me.”

  Did he sound a little too casual? Flora thought he did. “Reminds you of what?” she asked, trying not to show it.

  “I’d like to send a team to your office and to your apartment, to sweep them for microphones,” he said. “Don’t want to take chances, you know.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Flora sighed. “All right—go ahead.” Of course, the Confederates—or any other spies—could plant mikes again right after the inspection team finished. A whore might be healthy when a government doctor looked her over, then catch something nasty from her next customer and spread it till she was inspected again. In both cases, though, you had to try.

  “Thanks, Flora. The leader of the team is a master sergeant named Bernstein. If he’s not there, go somewhere else and call the guards.”

  “Will do,” Flora said. “’Bye.” She hung up.

  The team showed up at her office the next morning. She exchanged Yiddish gibes with Sergeant Bernstein. If he was by any chance a Confederate spy, he was a brilliant one. Bertha squawked when he and his men ran their detectors over her desk. “Sorry, lady. Gotta be done,” he said. “Anything, Bob?” he asked the tall, blond soldier who was checking there.

  “Looks like zip, Carl,” the private answered. He towered over his boss, who was little and dark and probably hadn’t combed his hair in three or four days.

  They also didn’t find anything in Flora’s office. “Either you’re clean or the Confederates are smarter than they look,” Sergeant Bernstein declared.

  “Which is it likely to be?” Flora asked.

  “Never can tell,” he said seriously. “Most of their sh—uh, stuff—is just a little behind ours, but they’re mighty good with it. And some of what they use is ours.” He made a sour face. “You can walk into a wireless shop and buy it right on the street, and the bastards do.”

  “Is that the price we pay for being a free country?” Flora asked.

  “Don’t ask me. I’m just a shlemiel with stripes,” Bernstein answered. “But if we stop being free because those mamzrim can steal too easy, that ain’t so good, neither.” He turned to the other soldiers. “Come on, Bob, Dick. We got other places to check.”

  Flora found one more question as the men in green-gray packed up to go: “Secretary Roosevelt said you’d come to my apartment, too. When will that be?”

  Sergeant Bernstein checked some papers in a clipboard. “Day after tomorrow, probably in the morning. You be there?”

  “If I won’t, my son will,” Flora said. “I’ll tell him you’re coming, and that he should let you in.”

  “Oughta work.” Bernstein looked from one of his men to the other. “You guys aren’t ready yet? Watsamaddawidya?” To get that all out in one word, he had to hail from New York City.

  “Well, let me say this—” Dick began.

  Bernstein cut him off. “No, don’t say it. Just come on.” To Flora, he added, “Get him started and he won’t shut up.” Dick’s blackly stubbled face burned with resentment, but the sergeant got him out of there before he could loose any of it.

  When Flora got home, she was all set to tell Joshua about the soldiers who would stop by in a couple of days. But that never happened. Her son showed her an envelope. “Look what came today!” He sounded excited about it.

  That particular envelope, as Flora knew too well, hadn’t changed much since the days of the Great War. The Old English typography on the cheap paper was almost the same, too:

  U.S. Army Department of Selection for Service.

  Joshua might be excited. Flora knew nothing but horror. “We can beat it,” she said automatically. “We can quash it.”

  “No,” Joshua said. “This is my country. I’ll fight for it, the same as anybody else would.”

  “It’s not a game, Joshua.” Flora knew she sounded desperate. She felt desperate. “Uncle David walks on one leg. Cousin Yossel never knew his father. If anything happened to you, I don’t think I could stand it.”

  “Nothing will happen, Mother.” At eighteen, Joshua was confident in his own immortality. An uncle? A cousin’s father? So what? Joshua had never known the first Yossel Reisen, either. He went on, “After the war, they’ll ask me, ‘What did you do?’ Shall I say I hid behind your skirts?”

  Yes! Please God, yes! Flora wanted to scream it. Only the certain knowledge that it wouldn’t help kept her quiet. She started to cry instead. That didn’t help, either, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Somewhere out ahead in the Atlantic, the British and French fleets prowled. Sam Carsten kept glancing toward the Josephus Daniels’ Y-ranging screens. Nothing showed up except the returns from the U.S. ships all around the destroyer escort. No enemy airplanes had smelled out where the U.S. fleet lay.

  “This could be the big one,” Pat Cooley said.

  “You’re right—it could,” Sam agreed. “I went through the Battle of the Three Navies, and I never thought there’d be a bigger fight than that. But maybe I was wrong.”

  “This would be a different kind of fight,” the exec said.

  “Oh, just a little,” Carsten said. Southwest of Oahu, U.S. warships had slugged it out with their British and Japanese counterparts with big guns. This time around…“Chances are we’ll never see the fleet that sends airplanes at us, and they won’t see our ships, either.”

  “We’ve got some battlewagons along just in case,” Cooley said, “but I think you’re right.”

  “I know they’re here. The Dakota’s one of ’em.” Sam shivered. “I don’t ever want to go on another wild ride—you can just bet your ass I don’t.” A shell hit had jammed the battleship’s steering, and she sped on a mad arc through the U.S. fleet, ending up much too close to the enemy. She took a lot of hits, but she kept shooting back, too. To this day, both sides claimed victory in that fight near the Sandwich Islands. As far as Sam could tell, they’d both lost.

  Lieutenant, j.g., Thad Walters stiffened in front of the Y-ranging set. “Sir, I’ve got a bogey to the northeast,” the youngster said, his voice quivering with excitement.

  “Give me range and bearing,” Sam snapped. As soon as he had them, he swung the destroyer escort’s blinker light toward the closest cruiser to pass the word. The whole fleet, of course, sailed under wireless silence. Before he started flashing, the cruiser began sending him a signal. As he read it, he laughed.


  So did Pat Cooley. “Well, sir, at least their Y-ranging operator isn’t asleep at the switch.”

  “Swell,” Sam said. The exec smiled. So did Sam, wryly. He couldn’t win, and he knew it. If he said something like swell, he marked himself as an old-timer trying to sound up to the minute. But if he said something like bully, he marked himself as an old-timer not bothering to stay up to date, which had to be even worse.

  U.S. fighters from the combat air patrol streaked toward the foreign airplane. If they let it keep coming, it would find the fleet and pass the word on to the enemy ships somewhere off to the east. If they shot it down before it found the U.S. ships, that would also tell the limeys and frogs something, but not so much. And if they made it try to run before they shot it down, they might be able to use its flight path to get an idea of where the enemy lay.

  Sam watched the fighters till they vanished from sight, then went over to the Y-ranging screens and watched them there. He could tell just when the enemy aircraft spotted them: it broke off its advance and turned away as fast as it could go.

  “What’s that bearing?” he asked Walters.

  “Sir, the course is 105—a little south of east,” the Y-ranging officer answered.

  “So somewhere along that line from where it started, that’s where the ship that sent it out is likely to be,” Carsten said.

  “Well, we don’t know that for a fact, sir—that airplane could be bluffing, trying to throw us off,” Walters said. “But I think it’s a pretty good bet.”

  “Me, too,” Sam said, and then, “Mr. Cooley, is the cruiser reporting that scout aircraft’s course?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then signal it over there, if you please. Chances are they’re checking it themselves, but I don’t want to take even the smallest chance with something this important.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Cooley was faster with Morse than Sam was himself.

  “Sir, we’ve got a hydrophone contact!” That was Chief Bevacqua. The CPO was the best man on the ship at making sense of what came back from the pings the underwater equivalent of Y-ranging sent out. “Bearing 165, range about half a mile. It’s shallow, sir, and the contact feels like a goddamn submersible.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Ice shot up Sam’s back. A sub that close could sink the Josephus Daniels easy as you please. “Change course to 165—we’ll give it the smallest target we can. Man the ashcan flinger! Pat! Signal the cruiser that we’ve got the worst kind of company!”

  “Aye aye, sir!” Cooley said again, but before he could finish the signal the submarine announced its own presence. It cared little for anything as small as the destroyer escort. The light cruiser made a much more tempting target. Two torpedoes slammed into her. As soon as she was hit, the submersible dove.

  By then, though, the Josephus Daniels hovered over the sub. Depth charges splashed into the Atlantic. Down below, the submersible would be doing everything it could to get away, but its underwater electric motors were painfully slow. The skipper down there—British? French? Confederate?—would have heard the ashcans going into the water. Could he get away? Could he get deep enough to avoid and evade?

  Even up on the surface, each burst from the spread felt like a kick in the teeth. Then Sam heard a noise like a slammed metal door—the pressure hull caving in from the explosions. “We got him,” he said soberly.

  “He got us, too,” Cooley said—the cruiser was listing badly.

  “Do they want us to take men off, or does their skipper think she’ll stay afloat?” Sam asked. Rage filled him, rage at himself. Destroyers and destroyer escorts sailed with the fleet to keep submarines away. He hadn’t done his job. Any enemy country would gladly trade a sub for a cruiser.

  “For now, they think she’ll stay up,” Cooley answered. More flashing Morse came from the cruiser. “We get an ‘attaboy’ for sinking that submersible. They heard it cave in over there, too.”

  “Hot damn,” Sam said bitterly. He spoke to the hydrophone operator: “Keep your ears open, Bevacqua.”

  “Will do, sir,” the petty officer replied. “I feel like hell on account of that fucker suckered me. He must’ve snuck in under a warm layer or something. Even so—”

  “Yeah. Even so,” Sam said. “Well, do your damnedest.” He didn’t look forward to the after-action report. He had to hope he lived to write one.

  More airplanes came off the carriers’ flight decks, and more, and still more. They formed up into attacking squadrons above the U.S. fleet, then zoomed off to the east. “I think we’ve found the enemy fleet,” Cooley said.

  “That’s what we came for.” Sam paused. “Of course, they came to find us. If they don’t already know where we’re at, seeing where our airplanes are coming from will kind of give them a hint.”

  “I know the limeys have Y-ranging. From what I’ve heard, theirs may even be better than ours,” Cooley said. “I’m not so sure about the French.”

  “Well, once they see the limeys launching airplanes, they won’t do a whole lot of waiting around after that,” Carsten said, and the exec nodded. Sailors wrestled more depth charges up on deck to replace the ones the Josephus Daniels used to sink the enemy submersible.

  Half an hour went by. Then Thad Walters said, “We’ve got aircraft coming in from the east, sir. They’re not likely to be friendlies.”

  “How far out are they?” Sam asked.

  “Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “All right. Thanks.” It wasn’t, and Sam had no reason to be grateful, but he said the polite words anyway. Then he got on the PA system: “We’re going to have company in a little while. Chances are they’ll go after the airplane carriers and battleships ahead of us, but you never can tell. Any which way, our job is to get as many rounds in the air as we can. Some of them will do some good, I promise. We’ve put a lot of work in on our gunnery. This is where it pays off.”

  “We’re a lot better than we were when you took over this ship, sir,” Cooley said.

  “Thanks, Pat.” This time, Sam did mean it. But he went on, “Better doesn’t count. Are we good enough? Well, we’ll find out pretty damn quick.”

  Some of the ships farther east, at the very forefront of the U.S. fleet, started firing. Black puffs of smoke fouled the blue sky. Peering between the puffs with a pair of field glasses, Sam spotted wings and fuselages glinting in the sun. His belly tightened. His balls wanted to crawl up from his scrotum. He’d been on a ship attacked from the air as early as 1917. He’d been on the Remembrance when the Japanese sank her. Good men were going to die here in the middle of the Atlantic. So would good ships. With luck, more of them would die a couple of hundred miles to the east, out over the curve of the world. Neither side’s ships would see the other’s today.

  With a thunderous roar, the Josephus Daniels’ guns cut loose: .50-caliber machine guns, twin 40mm antiaircraft guns, and the 4.5-inch popguns that were her main armament. Those could reach higher and farther than the lighter weapons, but couldn’t fire nearly so fast. “Evasive action, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. “All ahead flank speed!”

  “Aye aye, sir!” The exec relayed the command to the engine room. He started zigzagging as the ship’s speed built up. It wouldn’t build up enough. Sam wished for the extra six or seven knots a real destroyer could give him. But then, how much difference would they make against an airplane?

  A burning fighter slammed into the Atlantic before Sam could see which side it belonged to. A great black cloud of smoke rose from a stricken ship. He swore. He’d known it would happen, but that didn’t make it any easier to take.

  “We’ve got to keep some carriers,” Sam said, more to himself than to anyone else. “Otherwise, we won’t be able to land our airplanes when they come home.”

  A fighter with a blue-white-red British roundel dove on the destroyer escort, guns blazing. Bullets whined through the air and clanged off metal. Here and there, men sprawled in spreading pools of blood. Sailors got the wounded down to the sick bay. The ship had n
o doctor, only a couple of pharmacist’s mates. They would have to do what they could. When things calmed down, they could transfer the men hurt worst to a bigger ship with a real surgeon or even to a hospital ship.

  Uncounted tracers pursued the enemy airplane, but it got away. Exultant shouts rang out a few minutes later, when a torpedo airplane splashed into the sea. Sailors at the forward 40mm guns jumped and swaggered and pounded their hairy chests like so many gorillas.

  Too much was going on too fast in too many places for Sam to have more than a vague idea of how this end of the fight was going—and he had no way to know what was happening off to the east. If everything here and there went perfectly, the battleships could storm off and pound the enemy ships to pieces…but he didn’t think things were going perfectly. Now several greasy black smoke plumes rose into the clean, salt-scented air.

  “I hope we’re hurting them worse than they’re hurting us,” Pat Cooley said, exactly echoing his own thought.

  After most of an hour, no more enemy aircraft remained overhead. They’d either gone down or flown off toward the east. They might clash with returning U.S. airplanes coming west. As Sam steered the Josephus Daniels toward a listing escort carrier, he realized he might have fought in two great naval battles now where nobody had the faintest idea who’d won.

  “A great naval victory in the Atlantic!” blared the wireless set behind the bar in the sleazy seaside San Diego saloon. “British and French claims of triumph are the spasmodic bleating of frightened sheep!”

  “Baaa!” George Enos said, looking up from his beer. “What do you think, Chief?”

  “Just have to wait and see,” Fremont Dalby answered. “What happens next will tell the story. They said we were licking the Confederates in Ohio, too, when the bastards were really kicking our ass. Or does it look different to you?”