The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

“Nah, that sounds about right,” George said.

  “If we go on and blast the crap out of the convoys coming up from South America, then we honest to God did whip the limeys,” Dalby continued, for all the world as if he had an admiral’s broad gold stripe on each sleeve. “If they go on and link up with the Confederates and give us a hard time in our own waters, they walloped us instead.”

  “I got you,” George said. “And if neither one happens—”

  “It’s a push,” Fritz Gustafson put in.

  “There you go.” Dalby nodded emphatically. The empty glass in front of him, and the ones that had preceded it, no doubt had something to do with that emphasis. He put money on the bar, and the man in a boiled shirt and bow tie behind it gave him a full glass and took away the empty one. After a sip, the gun chief went on, “I mean, I think we really are no shit smacking the Confederates around, ’cause we wouldn’t be down in fucking Tennessee if we weren’t. Past that, though…Well, who knows how much to believe?”

  “Who cares?” As usual, Gustafson got a lot of mileage out of a few words.

  “That’s it.” George drained his beer and nodded to the bartender. The man worked the tap but didn’t hand over the beer till he got paid. George sipped, then sucked foam off his upper lip. “We’ve got to keep doing our job no matter what the big picture looks like. We’ll figure out what it all means later on.”

  Down at the far end of the bar, two Marines started slugging at each other. Sometimes, as George knew too well, a brawl like that made the whole joint explode. This time, other young men in forest-green uniforms grabbed the brawlers and sat on them. “Lots of leathernecks in town lately,” Dalby remarked.

  “They train here,” George said.

  Dalby shook his head. “I mean even besides that,” he said. “Something’s up, I bet.”

  “Could be,” George said. “Maybe they’re going to go down and take Baja California away from the Mexicans.”

  “Possible,” Dalby said thoughtfully. “We tried that in the last war, and it didn’t work. Maybe we’d have more luck this time around.”

  “We could blockade the Confederates at Guaymas.” George warmed to the idea—it was his, after all. “If we did, they couldn’t even get their subs out. That would make it like they didn’t have any ports on the Pacific.”

  “I’ve heard notions I liked less,” Fremont Dalby allowed.

  “Me, too,” Gustafson said, which was a solid accolade.

  “If they send the Marines south, I bet we go along, too,” George said. “We could do shore bombardment and keep the submersibles away from the landing craft.”

  Dalby laughed at him. “You tell ’em, Admiral,” he said, reversing the thought George had had a moment before. But that held more admiration than derision, for he turned to Fritz Gustafson and said, “He’s not as dumb as he looks, is he?”

  “Not always, anyhow,” Gustafson said—more praise, of sorts.

  The next morning, George hardly remembered his prediction. You could get hung over on beer if you worked at it, and he’d been diligent the day before. Black coffee and aspirins took the edge off his pounding headache, but left his stomach feeling as if shipfitters were using blowtorches in there. His buddies seemed in no better shape. That was some consolation, but only some.

  Two days later, the Townsend put to sea with several other destroyers, the escort carriers that had raided Baja California before, and a gaggle of slow, ugly landing craft. Surveying them as they waddled along, Fremont Dalby said, “It’s a good thing the Empire of Mexico has a horseshit Navy. A real fleet could sink those sorry wallowers faster than you can say Jack Robinson.”

  George would have argued, except he thought Dalby was right. “I’m glad I’m not on one of those scows,” he said.

  “Amen, Brother Ben!” Dalby exclaimed. “You’d be puking your guts out every inch of the way. I know you’ve got a good stomach—I’ve seen it. But you could put a statue into one of those damn things and it’d barf brass by the time we got down to Cabo San Lucas.”

  They didn’t get down to Cabo San Lucas. The Marines went ashore about halfway down the Baja peninsula. That had Dalby and the handful of other old-timers on the destroyer muttering to themselves. The Army had landed in almost the same spot during the Great War, and had had to pull out not much later. George couldn’t see that it mattered one way or the other. Once you got south of Tijuana, Baja California didn’t have enough of anything except rocks and scorpions—but it sure had plenty of those.

  The Mexican coastal garrison held its fire till the landing craft got close, then opened up with several batteries of three-inch guns that were a generation out of date on the big battlefields farther east but that still worked just fine.

  Keeping quiet let those guns escape the fury of the dive bombers that flew off the escort carriers to soften up the landing zone before the Marines went in. As soon as they started firing, all the real warships with the flotilla blasted away with their main armament from ranges at which the smaller land-based guns couldn’t reply. One by one, the Mexican cannon fell silent. They weren’t playing possum this time, either. George wouldn’t have wanted to be on the receiving end of that shellacking.

  But they’d done more damage than anyone on the U.S. side would have expected. A couple of landing craft were on fire, and a couple of more had simply gone down to the shallow bottom of the Pacific. Machine guns greeted the men in those dark green uniforms who splashed ashore.

  The dive bombers returned and pounded the machine-gun nests. So did guns from the Townsend and her comrades. Fighters strafed the rocks just beyond the beach. Peering shoreward with binoculars, Fremont Dalby said, “We’re whaling the crap out of them. Only bad thing is, you can’t hardly see them at all—their khaki matches the landscape real good. The leatherheads stick out like sore thumbs, poor bastards.”

  “Somebody was asleep at the switch, not giving them the right kind of uniforms,” George said. “The Confederates are starting to wear camouflage, for Christ’s sake. Least we could do is have our guys not look like Christmas trees in the desert.”

  “Probably figured we were only fighting Mexicans, so what difference did it make?” Dalby said. “That’s how they think back in Philadelphia. But anybody with a rock in front of him and a gun in his hands is trouble. What are we doing making things easier for him?”

  “Acting dumb,” Fritz Gustafson said, which was all too likely to be true.

  They had the time to gab, because the Townsend didn’t come close enough to shore for them to open up with their 40mm guns. That would have let the Mexicans shoot back. No enemy airplanes appeared overhead. If they had, the fighters from the escort carriers would have dealt with them before the antiaircraft guns could—George hoped so, anyhow.

  He watched the Marines hack out a toehold on the barren Mexican coast. “Boy, if the Confederates weren’t over on the far side of the Gulf of California, I’d say the Mexicans were fucking welcome to this Baja place,” he remarked.

  “You notice the Confederate States didn’t buy it when they picked up Sonora and Chihuahua,” Fremont Dalby said. “You notice we didn’t take it away after we won the Great War. Goddamn Mexicans are welcome to it.”

  George looked at his wristwatch. “Other crew’s coming on pretty soon. They’re welcome to it, too. I want some shuteye.” He yawned to show how much he wanted it. “This watch-and-watch crap is for the birds.”

  “What? You don’t like four hours on, four hours off around the clock?” Dalby said in mock surprise. “You want more than a couple-three hours of sleep at a time? Shit, Enos, what kind of American are you?”

  “A tired one,” George answered. “A hungry one, too. If I eat, I don’t get enough sleep. If I don’t eat, I still don’t get enough sleep, but I come closer, and I get hungry like a son of a bitch. I can’t win.”

  Dalby scraped his index finger over his thumbnail. “There’s the world’s smallest goddamn violin playing sad songs for you. That shows how so
rry I am. You’re not talking about anything I’m not doing.”

  “I know, Chief,” George said quickly. One advantage of Gustafson’s usual silence was that he couldn’t get in trouble by opening his big mouth too wide and falling in.

  When the other crew took over at the twin 40mm, George raced down to the galley and snagged a ham sandwich and a mug of coffee. He inhaled them, then climbed into his hammock. It was hot and stuffy belowdecks, but he didn’t care. The destroyer’s five-inch guns roared every so often, but he didn’t care about that, either. He thought he could have slept on top of one of them.

  He was punchy and groggy when he got shaken awake, and needed a minute or two to remember where he was, and why, and what he was supposed to be doing. “Oh, God,” he groaned, “is it that time already?”

  “Bet your ass, Charlie,” his tormentor said cheerfully, and went on to rout other victims from sleep.

  The sun had set. On the shore, tracers zipped back and forth. The U.S. Marines used yellow or red tracer rounds. Maybe the Mexicans had been buying theirs from the Empire of Japan, because they were ice blue. It made for a bright and cheerful scene—or a scene that would have been bright and cheerful if George hadn’t known that those tracers, along with all the ordinary bullets he couldn’t see, were fired with intent to kill.

  “Looks like we’re holding more ground than we were when I sacked out,” he said.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Fremont Dalby agreed. “Now that we’re holding it, though, what are we going to do with it?”

  “Beats me,” George said. “But I’ll tell you one thing—I’d sooner be fighting Francisco José’s boys than Hirohito’s any old day.”

  “Well, if you think I’ll argue with that, you’re crazier than one man’s got any business being,” the gun chief replied. “The Japs are tough, and their gear is as good as ours. These guys…They’re using stuff left over from the last war, and you have to figure most of ’em don’t want to be here.”

  “Would you?” George said. “It’s got to be hell on earth. Hot sun. Rocks. Rattlesnakes—gotta think so, anyway. Most of those guys probably just want to go back to their farms and make like none of this ever happened.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Dalby said. “If we go home and the Confederates go home, who’s left to fight? See? Piece of cake. They’ll be calling with the Nobel Peace Prize any goddamn day now. Want to split it?”

  “Sure? Why not?” George said. On the barren, desolate coast of Baja California, something blew up with a rending crash. “Hope that was on the Mexican side of the line,” George said. Fremont Dalby nodded.

  A private came up to Chester Martin with a half-grim, half-sick expression on his face. Seeing that, Martin knew what he was going to say before he said it. But say it he did: “Sarge, they found Don. Bushwhackers caught him. It ain’t pretty.”

  “Shit,” Chester said. “This is worse than Kentucky, all right.” Kentucky had gone back and forth between the CSA and the USA. Most people there hated Yankees, but a fair-sized minority didn’t. Even some of the ones who hated Yankees understood they didn’t come equipped with horns and tails.

  Here in central Tennessee, none of the locals seemed to have got the news. They reacted to soldiers in green-gray as if to demons from hell. Some of them ran, while the rest tried to fight back. Civilians weren’t supposed to fight back. If anybody’d told that to the Confederates, it didn’t sink in.

  “What are we going to do, Sarge?” the private asked.

  “I know what I want to do,” Chester answered. “I want to take hostages. And if the bastard who did that to Don doesn’t turn himself in, I want to shoot the son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah!” the private said savagely.

  “I can’t do it on my own,” Chester said. “My ass’d be in a sling if I tried it. But I bet Captain Rhodes can.”

  Hubert Rhodes was newly in command of the company, which had had two COs wounded on back-to-back days before he arrived. Unless he was unlucky, Martin didn’t think he’d be easy to kill. He was tough and skinny, with a thin, dark mustache and gray eyes that seemed to see everywhere at once. He didn’t mind having a noncom head up a platoon, which gave him another good mark in Chester’s book.

  When Chester found him, he was field-stripping and cleaning a captured Confederate automatic rifle. He carried it himself, in lieu of the usual officer’s .45. He put himself where the enemy could shoot at him, and he wanted to be able to answer with as much firepower as he could.

  He looked up before Chester got very close. You couldn’t get close to him without his knowing it. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?” he asked. By the way he talked, he came from somewhere in the Midwest.

  “Damn Confederate bushwhackers just murdered one of my men, sir,” Martin replied. “Murdered him and did nasty things to the body after he was dead. I hope after, anyway.”

  Rhodes’ mouth was never wide and giving. It tightened more than usual now. “What do you want to do about it?” he asked. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Take hostages, sir,” Chester said. “We may not make ’em stop this shit, but we can make it expensive for ’em.”

  Without looking at the weapon he was working on, Rhodes reassembled it. His hands didn’t need his eyes’ help to know what they were doing. He got up and lit a cigarette: also Confederate plunder. “Sounds good. Let’s do it,” he said. “You think ten’s enough, or do you want twenty?”

  “Twenty,” Martin said. “This isn’t the first man we lost like that. If Featherston’s soldiers shoot us, it’s one thing. We shoot them, too. But these cocksuckers…They think nobody can touch ’em because they’re in civilian clothes.”

  “We’ll do it,” Captain Rhodes said. “Your men up for firing-squad duty if it comes to that? Chances are it will, you know.”

  “Yes, sir,” Chester said without the slightest hesitation. “If it’s a Confederate, they’ll shoot it.”

  “Old men? Boys too young to shave? Maybe even women?” Rhodes persisted. “Won’t be a lot of men of military age in this Woodbury place. The ones who did live there, the war’s already sucked ’em into uniform.”

  “Any Confederate hostages we take, they’ll shoot,” Chester Martin said confidently. “They know damn well the Confederates’d shoot them if they got the chance.”

  “Then let’s round up some soldiers, and let’s round up some hostages,” Rhodes said.

  Rounding up soldiers was the easiest thing in the world. By then, the whole company had heard about what happened to their comrade. Had Captain Rhodes given the order, they wouldn’t just have taken hostages in Woodbury, Tennessee. They would have wiped the place off the face of the earth.

  Woodbury might have held five hundred people before the war started—fewer now, of course. The stores in the center of town were old and weathered; the courthouse—it was a county seat—so shiny and new, it had probably gone up in Jake Featherston’s administration. Slopes north of the courthouse square were given over to crops; those to the south held houses.

  Soldiers formed a perimeter around the houses. Then they went through them and seized twenty men, all under eighteen or over fifty except for one who’d lost his right arm, probably in the last war. They also killed one old man who fired a shotgun at the U.S. soldiers heading up his walk. He must not have taken careful aim: he winged one man in green-gray, but most of the blast went over the soldiers’ heads.

  Once the hostages were taken, Captain Rhodes assembled the rest of the townsfolk in the square. They stared at him with sullen hatred only slightly tempered by the snouts of the machine guns staring at them from sandbagged revetments.

  “We had a soldier murdered by bushwhackers,” Rhodes told the locals. “That kind of cowardice runs dead against the laws of war, and we don’t aim to put up with it. We’ve taken hostages. If the killer doesn’t come forward inside of twenty-four hours, we will execute them.”

  “I did it.” A man with a white mustache stepped forward. “You
can shoot me if you’ve got to shoot somebody.”

  “What did you do to the body after it was dead?” Chester asked.

  The man blinked. “I smoked a cigarette over it, by God. Then I went home.”

  “You’re a liar. You’re brave, but you’re a liar,” Chester said. “Get back where you belong.” Crestfallen, the man went back into the crowd.

  “Anybody else?” Captain Rhodes asked. No one said a word. He looked at his watch. “All right. The clock is ticking.”

  One of the hostages started to blubber. “You got no business doing this to me,” he said. “No business, you hear? I never done nothin’ to nobody.”

  “Too goddamn bad,” said a man in Chester’s platoon. “You wasted a hell of a chance, then, didn’t you?”

  “This won’t bring your soldier back,” another hostage said.

  “That’s true,” Chester said. “But maybe it’ll make somebody else with a squirrel gun and not a hell of a lot of sense think twice. And even if it doesn’t, it pays you people back.”

  “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” Captain Rhodes agreed. “Except we’re taking a whole mouthful of teeth.”

  Confederate artillery came in that evening. Maybe someone managed to slip out of Woodbury and let the enemy soldiers know what was going on. But the shells mostly fell short—the front kept moving south. Chester wasn’t sorry not to be right up on the firing line for a while. He slept in his foxhole with his Springfield beside him. If anybody tried to give him trouble, he aimed to give it first.

  But he slept till sunup, and woke with nothing worse than a stiff back. He didn’t remember being so tight and sore the last time around. Of course, that was more than half a lifetime ago now. He’d been a young man then. He scratched his belly, which was larger these days. No, he wasn’t a young man any more.

  “Anybody come forward?” he asked, opening a ration can.

  “Get serious, Sarge,” answered one of the soldiers who was already eating. “Those fuckers are brave enough to shoot somebody who isn’t looking, but they won’t put their own necks on the line when it counts.”