The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  Once the corpsmen got him off the stretcher, it was Granville McDougald’s turn. “Take it easy, Granny,” Eddie said as they lifted him.

  “Well, how else am I going to take it?” McDougald answered.

  He rolled off the stretcher once they got it up to the level of the top of the trench. Morphine or not, that made him say several pungent things. They got out of the trench themselves, put him back on the stretcher, and carried him into the aid tent.

  Sharp, jagged steel fragments had done a good job of ventilating the tent. A big one was stuck in one of the operating table’s front legs. It was only about a foot from the cylinder of ether and oxygen up there. If it had punched into that…O’Doull was just as glad it hadn’t. Maybe the tent would have gone up in flames, or maybe it would have just gone up—halfway to the moon.

  “Well, Granny, I’m going to put you under so I can do a proper job on this,” O’Doull said, reaching for the mask connected to the cylinder.

  “Sure, Doc. Do what you gotta do.” McDougald had anesthetized God only knew how many men himself. But when the mask came down over his nose and mouth, he tried to fight it, the way a lot of wounded soldiers did. It was reflex, nothing more; O’Doull knew as much. Eddie and another corpsman held McDougald’s hands till he went to sleep.

  O’Doull cleaned the wound, closed off some more bleeders, and then sutured things firmly and neatly. He nodded to himself. “He’ll be all right, won’t he, Doc?” Eddie asked. “He’s a good guy.”

  “You bet he is,” O’Doull answered. “And yes, he ought to do fine. But he’ll need at least a couple of months before he’s back on the job.”

  “We’ll be getting a new number-one medic, then.” Above the mask he’d put on, Eddie blinked. “That’s gonna be weird.”

  “Boy, no kidding.” O’Doull had come to take Granny McDougald’s unflustered competence very much for granted. Now he’d have to break in somebody else, somebody who’d probably be half his age and who wasn’t likely to know anywhere near as much as McDougald did. O’Doull muttered under his breath. He and McDougald had got on fine living in each other’s pockets for most of two years. It wasn’t a marriage, but it was intimate enough in its own way. Could he do the same with a new guy? He’d damn well have to.

  They took McDougald away, still unconscious. O’Doull washed his hands and his instruments. He shook his head all the time he was doing it. He’d imagined himself getting hurt plenty of times. McDougald? He shook his head again. No, not a chance—he’d thought. The veteran noncom seemed enduring as the Rockies.

  Which only went to show—you never could tell. O’Doull was still fine, not a scratch on him, and McDougald was lucky he hadn’t lost a leg. O’Doull thought about that, then shook his head. The medic was unlucky to have been wounded at all. But it could have been worse. With all O’Doull had seen himself, he knew how much worse it could have been.

  U.S. fighter-bombers roared by overhead, flying south to pound the Confederate positions outside of Chattanooga. O’Doull didn’t look forward to that fight. He couldn’t imagine how taking the enemy bastion would be easy or cheap. More work for me, he thought. But he could do without more work. His ideal day was one where he sat outside the aid tent reading a book and smoking cigarettes. He hadn’t had an ideal day since putting the uniform back on. He didn’t expect to have one till the war finally ended. But every man, even a military doctor, deserved his dreams.

  One way not to have to patch up wounded soldiers was to get hit himself. He looked down at his hands. He didn’t have Granville McDougald’s blood on them any more. He thought about the replacement medic or a surgeon farther behind the front trying to patch him up. He’d seen too many wounds. He didn’t want one of his own.

  What he wanted might not have anything to do with the price of beer. Only fool luck Granny stopped that fragment and he didn’t. He wondered how—and whether—to tell Nicole that McDougald was injured. He talked about Granny in every letter he wrote. She would notice if he suddenly stopped. But she would flabble if he came right out and said his friend and colleague had got hurt. If it happened to Granville McDougald, she would say, it could happen to him, too.

  And she would be right.

  O’Doull knew he couldn’t admit that to her. He didn’t want to admit it to himself. The more you thought about things like that, the less you slept, the more likely you were to get an ulcer, the more likely your hand was to shake when it shouldn’t…

  But how were you supposed to not think about something? If someone said, Don’t think about a blue rabbit, of course nothing else would fill your mind. “You just have to go on,” O’Doull murmured. “You just have to go on.”

  On the bridge of the Josephus Daniels, Sam Carsten said, “I guess maybe we won that fight with the limeys and the frogs after all.”

  Pat Cooley nodded. “Yes, sir. I guess maybe we did,” the exec said. “We wouldn’t be trying to take Bermuda back if we didn’t, would we?” He didn’t sound a hundred percent convinced—more as if he was trying to convince himself, and Sam, too.

  “Well, I hope we wouldn’t, anyway.” Carsten had been aboard the Remembrance when a British attack on U.S. fishing boats lured the carrier north—and left Bermuda vulnerable to amphibious assault. Now the United States were trying to return the favor, if that was the word.

  U.S. surface ships and airplanes and submersibles kept the British from reinforcing or resupplying the outpost in the western Atlantic. But the British garrison wasn’t ready to throw in the sponge. Lots of Royal Marines and soldiers were on the ground. The British had plenty of artillery—some of the heavy pieces big enough to damage a battleship or blow a destroyer escort like the Josephus Daniels clean out of the water. And they had fighters and dive bombers at least as good as the Americans could throw at them, and enough fuel to keep their airplanes flying at least for a while.

  Along with carriers and battlewagons and smaller escort vessels like the Josephus Daniels, troopships and landing craft wallowed toward Bermuda. Sam watched them with a reminiscent smile on his face. “It looked like this in 1914,” he said, “when we landed on the Sandwich Islands.”

  “You were there for that?” Cooley asked.

  “You bet. I was still an able seaman in those days—hadn’t even made petty officer,” Sam answered. “I was on the Dakota. My battle station was at one of her five-inch guns.” He chuckled. “Secondary armament, right? Sure. Bigger guns than we’ve got on this tin can.”

  “We can do what we need to do.” The exec patted the destroyer escort’s wheel, as if to say the ship shouldn’t listen to her skipper’s insults. But he couldn’t help adding, “You’ve seen a lot of action.”

  “I’ve got a lot of miles on me, you mean,” Sam said with another laugh.

  Airplanes roared off the carriers’ decks and flew south and east toward the island. They hadn’t had strike forces like that in the old days. The Dakota had carried a catapult-launched biplane scout that seemed to be made of sticks and baling wire. When it came back—if it came back—it landed on the sea, and the battleship fished it out with a crane. Nowadays, fleets didn’t even see each other. Airplanes did the heavy lifting.

  He hoped they would do the heavy lifting against Bermuda. If they plastered the runways on the island so the British fighters and bombers couldn’t take off…If they did that, his own life expectancy would go up. He’d been lucky in war so far. He’d had a battleship hit and a carrier sunk under him, but he’d barely got scratched. He hoped that would go on—he liked his carcass the way it was.

  Most of the time, Navy men were lucky compared to their Army counterparts. They slept in bunks, or at least in hammocks, not wrapped in a blanket in the mud. They ate pretty good chow, not the canned rations soldiers had to put up with. Most of the time, they were in transit from here to there; except for lurking submersibles, nothing put them in danger minute by minute for days or weeks at a stretch.

  But…There was always a but. When things went wrong for
sailors, they went wrong in a big way. If a ship went down to the bottom, she could take hundreds of men—even a couple of thousand on a carrier—down with her.

  He wished he hadn’t had that thought. He reached out and rapped his knuckles on the wheel. Pat Cooley sent him a quizzical look. “What’s up, sir?”

  “Nothing, not really. Just snapping my fingers to keep the elephants away.”

  The exec looked around. “Nothing but the Atlantic for miles and miles,” he said. “I didn’t know the enemy was issuing heavy-duty water wings.”

  “Gotta watch out for those water elephants,” Sam said gravely. “Next time you see something sticking out of the Atlantic, it won’t be a periscope—it’ll be one of their trunks instead.”

  “No doubt, sir,” Cooley answered. “And the trunk’ll probably be packed, too—with explosives or with bushwah, depending.”

  “Bushwah—no doubt about it,” Sam said, his face still straight. “An essential wartime ingredient.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” the exec said.

  Carsten studied the charts of the waters around Bermuda. The one thing he was sure of was that he didn’t want to get too close without a pilot aboard who knew them like the back of his hand. There were too many reefs marked, too many names like Cow Ground Flat and Brackish Pond Flats. There were also too many wrecks charted, some from the eighteenth century, some of blockade runners during the War of Secession, and ungodly numbers from the days of the Great War. He wondered how many wrecks weren’t marked. He didn’t want to add the Josephus Daniels to that number.

  “Sir, we’ve got airplanes outbound from Bermuda,” the Y-ranging officer said. “They don’t intend to sit there and take it.”

  “And we’re still a hundred miles offshore,” Carsten said. “Well, we already knew the limeys have their own Y-ranging gear.”

  “Sure looks that way, sir,” Lieutenant Walters said. “Seems like they’re trying to keep us from doing too much to the island.”

  “Can they?” Sam and his executive officer asked the same thing at the same time.

  “No way to tell yet,” Walters answered. He watched the screens for another couple of minutes, then grunted. “That’s funny.”

  “What’s up?” Sam asked.

  “I’m picking up incoming aircraft with a bearing of about 250—a little south of west.” The Y-ranging officer laughed. “Gadget must have the hiccups. It does that once in a while.”

  Sam didn’t think it was funny, not one little bit. He looked at Pat Cooley. The exec was looking back at him, similar consternation in his eyes. “How far is it from Cape Hatteras to Bermuda, Pat?” Sam asked.

  “About six hundred miles, sir,” Cooley answered.

  “That’s what I thought,” Sam said. “If the Confederates wanted to try bombing us, they could, in other words.” He didn’t wait for a reply this time. He just snapped out an order: “Bring the ship to general quarters. Signal the rest of the fleet what we’ve spotted and what we think it means.” Other Y-ranging sets would pick up those airplanes, too, but would the men eyeing the screens know what they were seeing?

  Klaxons hooted. Sailors dashed to their battle stations as if someone had tied torches to their tails. “If the limeys can put up airplanes at the same time as the Confederates, things are liable to get interesting,” Lieutenant Cooley remarked, sounding calmer than he had any business being.

  “Interesting. Yeah,” Sam said tightly. “And I hear that the ocean is wet, and Jake Featherston doesn’t always tell the truth, and you’re liable to get hurt if a .50-caliber slug hits you.”

  Cooley gave an uncertain chuckle, plainly having trouble making up his mind whether the skipper was being sardonic or had just flipped his lid. The blinker on the closest cruiser started sending Morse. Cooley and Carsten both turned field glasses toward the signal. CONFIRM C.S. AIRCRAFT, it said, one letter at a time. PREPARE TO DEFEND. AIR COVER LIMITED.

  That was all, no matter how much Sam waited and longed for more. “Happy day,” he said, and whistled something without much tune. He went to the speaking tube that connected the bridge to the engine room: “Be ready to give me flank speed at my order. We’re facing air attack any minute now.”

  “Flank speed at your order. Aye aye, sir.” Nobody down in the black gang sounded ruffled. They never did down there. They did all they could do, and they didn’t worry about anything beyond the noise and heat of their province. Sam envied them their simplicity. It was the one thing he missed from his days as a rating. Now he had to think about the whole ship and the tactical situation at the same time.

  “One thing,” Cooley said. “The Confederates probably won’t throw Asskickers at us. They don’t have the range to come out this far and make it back to the mainland. That means medium bombers hitting from high altitude, and they aren’t nearly so accurate.”

  “Can Asskickers dive-bomb us and then land on Bermuda?” Sam asked.

  His exec looked quite humanly surprised for a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that.” Cooley sounded less self-assured than usual. He checked some reference books, and didn’t look happy when he closed them. “Probably, sir. They may not be able to carry a full bomb load, but I think they can get here.”

  “One more piece of good news,” Sam said.

  The cruiser that had signaled them opened fire with her five-inch guns. A moment later, the Josephus Daniels’ pair of four-inchers opened up, too, and then the twin 40mm guns, and then the .50-caliber machine guns. The racket was terrific, astonishing, deafening. Sam knew he didn’t hear as well as he would have liked. Artilleryman’s ear, soldiers called it. This wouldn’t help.

  Sure as hell, a gull-winged Confederate Mule stooped on the cruiser. Sam saw the dive bomber release the bomb it carried under its belly a split second before a big shell connected with it. The airplane turned into a fireball. Fragments rained down into the Atlantic. But the bomb caught the cruiser just abaft the bridge. The big ship staggered in the water. A great plume of smoke rose from her.

  “Pilot’s a damn fool,” Cooley said. Sam made a questioning noise. The exec explained: “They should be going after the troopships and the carriers. In a fight like this, escorts are chump change.”

  He’d just called his own ship chump change, which didn’t necessarily mean he was wrong. Another burning Asskicker plunged into the sea. The combat air patrol over the fleet was doing something, anyhow. And the guys at one of the forward 40mm mounts started whooping and dancing like men going out of their heads. They’d shot down an enemy airplane, or they sure as hell thought they had.

  More Asskickers pulled out of their parabolic dives and fought for altitude. They were most vulnerable then, since they weren’t moving very fast as they climbed. Several of them got hacked out of the sky. But other ominous smoke pillars rose from the fleet.

  “It’s a big game,” Sam said. “I wish I knew what the score was.”

  “If we get troops ashore on Bermuda, we’re winning,” Pat Cooley said. “If we don’t…If we don’t, the Navy Department had a lousy idea.”

  No sooner had he said that than another destroyer signaled them—the damaged cruiser was no longer close. ADVANCE WITH US TO BOMBARD ISLAND, the other ship’s signal lamp flashed.

  “Acknowledge and tell ’em we’re on the way,” Sam said to Cooley.

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Bermuda was actually made up of several low-lying islands linked by bridges and causeways. The Josephus Daniels’ fire went in against the airstrip in the northeast. The gunners worked their pieces with furious haste, knowing that the more damage they did, the less chance British and C.S. airplanes would have of getting off the ground and striking back.

  Landing boats waddled forward from troopships that stayed out of the artillery range. Hidden gun emplacements opened up on them. Here and there, a boat was hit and went up in flames or simply sank. But most of the landing craft made it to the beach. U.S. bombers and fighters pounded all the enemy positions they could find.
U.S. Army men and Marines swarmed forward. Sam hoped for the best.

  Till Armstrong Grimes got wounded, he’d never been in upstate New York in his life. But a lot of U.S. military hospitals were in that part of the country, because Confederate bombers had to fly a long way to get there. The one where he was recuperating lay somewhere between Syracuse and Rochester. Since he wasn’t sure which town was which, he would have had trouble nailing it down any better than that.

  Lying around doing nothing with nobody to yell at him for it felt strange, almost unnatural. Not worrying about snipers or machine guns felt even stranger. He got plenty of chow—not wonderful chow, but better than the canned stuff he’d been eating most of the time. He got all the cigarettes he wanted, even if they were U.S. barge scrapings instead of Confederate tobacco.

  And the nurses were…nurses. Women. Some of them were tough old battleaxes who’d been taking care of people since the Great War. Others, though, were young and cute and friendly. Armstrong hoped some of them would prove more than friendly. Guys who’d been there a while told stories about nurses who helped soldiers recuperate by hopping into bed with them. But soldiers always told stories about women. Armstrong didn’t see anything like that, no matter how much he wished he would.

  Even so, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been around women who didn’t want to blow his brains out. It reminded him there was a bigger world out there than the one that involved storming the next apartment building full of Mormons or Canucks.

  So did reading newspapers and listening to the wireless. Oh, they were full of things like the reconquest of Bermuda and the U.S. drive aimed at Chattanooga. But that wasn’t all. They didn’t go on about the war twenty-four hours a day. There were stories about crime and scandal and films and a lady in Schenectady who’d had quadruplets.