The Grapple sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  The airplane with the blue-white-red British roundel broke through the clouds. “All guns open fire!” Sam shouted. They did. The racket was impressive. Even the popguns that were the Josephus Daniels’ main armament could fire antiaircraft shells. Black puffs of smoke appeared around the British aircraft.

  Sam nodded to himself in more than a little satisfaction. He was still no great shakes as a shiphandler, no. But gunnery aboard the Josephus Daniels was far better than it had been when he took over the ship. He’d been part of a five-inch gun crew before becoming an officer; he knew what was what there.

  That airplane jinked and dodged like the destroyer escort, though much faster. It had a bomb slung under its belly. It also had floats under the belly and each wing. Despite its maneuvers, it bored in on the Josephus Daniels. The bomb fell free. The airplane raced away. Cursing, Pat Cooley swung the ship hard to starboard.

  With a roar and a great gout of water hurled into the sky, the bomb burst about a hundred yards to port. The airplane vanished into the clouds. For all the shells the gunners threw at it, Sam didn’t think they’d hit it. He hoped no splinters from the bomb casing had sliced into his crew.

  “Nice job, Pat,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir,” the exec answered. “Every so often, this looks like work, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe a little,” Carsten answered. They smiled at each other, both glad to be alive. Sam went on, “Well, we don’t have to worry about a limey carrier, anyway.”

  “Sir?” Cooley said.

  “Oh. I guess you were kind of occupied.” Sam chuckled under his breath. “Son of a bitch was a floatplane. A freighter could catapult-launch it, let it scout around, and then haul it out of the drink with a crane.”

  “Damn. My hat’s off to the pilot,” Cooley said. “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to try putting a plane down on the water in seas like this.”

  “Good point.” Sam hadn’t thought of that, but he nodded. “When I was on the Remembrance, we wouldn’t launch or land aircraft from the flight deck in this, let alone try to get down on the sea. But that’s not my worry… Mr. Walters!”

  “Sir?” the Y-range operator said.

  “You still have that airplane on your screen? What’s his course?”

  “Flying out at 085, sir-going out on the reciprocal of the vector he came at us on.”

  “All right.” Sam turned back to the exec. “Mr. Cooley, bring our course to 080. Let’s see if we can follow him back more or less down his trail and find the ship that sent him out.”

  “Changing course to 080, sir.” Cooley’s smile was predatory. “You’d make a good duck hunter.”

  “Thanks. You’ve got to lead them a little,” Sam said. “The limey’ll still be heading west. If we get close, the Y-ranger will spot him.”

  “Here’s hoping, anyway,” Walters said.

  “You’ve done it before,” Sam said. “If we do find the ship, let’s just hope she’s not loaded for bear like the last one we met.”

  “We’ll be ready this time, anyhow,” Pat Cooley said. Sam nodded. The British had taken to mounting guns on some of their freighters. The Josephus Daniels got a nasty surprise the first time she ran into one of those. She’d outfought the Karlskrona, but Sam still shuddered thinking about what might have happened if one of those big shells had hit his ship.

  He wondered how far that floatplane had come from. If it was a hundred miles, the destroyer escort would never find the ship that had launched it. He wouldn’t have wanted to try to find the ship after flying a hundred miles each way through this kind of weather. He’d seen the limey pilot had guts. But wasn’t there a difference between having guts and being out of your skull?

  He’d sailed east and a little north for about an hour when Lieutenant Walters stirred at his set. “Something?” Sam asked hopefully. The Josephus Daniels was up at the crest of a swell, which let the Y-ranging gear see a little farther.

  “I-think so, sir,” the j.g. answered, and then grimaced. “Gone now.” They’d slid into the trough. He waited till the ocean carried the ship higher again, then nodded. “Yes, sir. Range, eight miles. Bearing 075.”

  “Nice navigating, sir,” Cooley said.

  “Thanks. Change course to 075,” Sam answered. In good weather, he would have seen the stranger’s smoke before he got within eight miles. But the weather wasn’t good, and wouldn’t be for weeks.

  He drew within a mile of the freighter before he spotted her. The message he blinkered over was hard and uncompromising: HEAVE TO. SURRENDER. ANY FALSE MOVES AND WE FIRE WITHOUT WARNING. Once bitten, twice shy, he thought. Through binoculars, he could see the airplane that tried to bomb the Josephus Daniels stowed aft of the bridge.

  The rustbucket ran up a white flag even as he ordered a shot across her bow. He wasn’t the only man scanning her for anything the least bit wrong. If canvas was thrown aside to clear hidden guns…But it wasn’t, not this time.

  Feeling piratical, he sent across a boarding party armed with rifles and pistols and submachine guns. The British sailors offered no resistance. “’Ow the bleedin’ ’ell did you find us?” their skipper asked when the Americans brought him back to the Josephus Daniels.

  Sam almost told him. Why not? The limey wasn’t going anywhere. But the urge to take no chances prevailed. “Just luck,” he answered, and smiled to himself. “Yeah, just luck.”

  Twice built, twice destroyed. Sergeant Armstrong Grimes strode through the wreckage of Temple Square in Salt Lake City. The Mormons had risen during the Great War, and been brutally smashed. They waited for years. They finally got their civil rights back from President Al Smith. And then, no doubt with Confederate encouragement, they rose against the USA again. And now the Temple and the Mormon Tabernacle were rubble again, perhaps more finely pulverized rubble than they had been a generation earlier.

  Armstrong’s eyes flicked now this way, now that. Since Lieutenant Streczyk got wounded, he’d commanded a platoon. One of these days, a new junior officer might take charge of it. Armstrong wasn’t holding his breath. The war in Utah got what the war against the CSA didn’t need. Since the war against the CSA needed everything, the war in Utah got…hind tit.

  Corporal Yossel Reisen walked through the wreckage, too. Like Armstrong, the Jew from New York City held his Springfield at the ready. Reisen took a drag at the cigarette that hung from the corner of his mouth. “Well, here we are. We’ve liberated Temple Square,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Armstrong looked around. He didn’t see a piece of rock bigger than about two by two. The United States had expended a lot of bombs and shells on this place. “We’ve liberated the living shit out of it, haven’t we?”

  Here and there, Mormon civilians who’d lived through the fighting were starting to come out of their holes. They said they were civilians, anyway. Orders were to treat them as civilians unless they showed signs of being dangerous. Armstrong didn’t know why the U.S. government was trying to win the locals’ hearts and minds. That had been a losing game for more than sixty years now. But he didn’t shoot at people he would have tried to kill not long before.

  That didn’t mean he wanted the Mormons coming anywhere near him. One of the ways they could show signs of being dangerous was by blowing themselves up, along with whatever U.S. soldiers happened to be within range of the blast. Mormons had invented people bombs, and still used them to deadly effect.

  And they weren’t the only ones who did. Plainly, they’d hit upon an idea whose time had come. Blacks in the CSA used people bombs to strike at the Freedom Party. Half a dozen Balkans groups were using them against Austria-Hungary. Armenians blew themselves up to hit back at the Ottoman Turks. In Russia, the Reds had lost a long, brutal civil war to the Tsar. Now their remnants had a new weapon, too.

  Other soldiers in green-gray kept chivvying the emerging Mormons away from them. Most of the civilians were women. That cut no ice with Armstrong Grimes. The first person he’d seen using a people bomb was a woman. And plenty
of Mormon women picked up rifles and grenades and fought alongside their husbands and brothers and sons.

  “You ever…pay a Mormon gal back?” he asked Yossel Reisen.

  Reisen was watching the women, too. He shook his head. “Not like that. You?”

  “No,” Armstrong said. Not many Mormon women let themselves be captured. They had reasons for fighting to the death, too. The revenge U.S. soldiers took was basic in the extreme. Gang-raping captured Mormon women was against orders, which didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

  Off to the north, artillery boomed. U.S. airplanes buzzed overhead, some spotting for the guns, others dropping bombs on Mormon positions. The Confederates would have hacked the lumbering, obsolescent bombers out of the sky with ease. Against enemies who didn’t have fighters and didn’t have much in the way of antiaircraft guns, they were good enough.

  “Blow all the bastards to hell and gone.” Armstrong picked up a chip of granite that might have come from the Temple. “Then we can get on with the real war.” He flung the stone chip away. It bounced off a bigger rock and disappeared in the rubble.

  Yossel’s expression changed. He bent and picked up a bit of stone, too. Tossing it up and down, he murmured, “I wonder what Jerusalem is like these days.”

  “Huh?” Armstrong knew what Jerusalem was like: a sleepy Ottoman town full of Arabs and Jews where nothing much had happened for centuries.

  But his buddy said, “We had our Temple destroyed twice, too.”

  He didn’t usually make a big deal out of being a Jew, any more than he made a big deal out of being a Congresswoman’s nephew-and not just any Congresswoman, but one who’d also been First Lady. “You guys are real Americans,” Armstrong said. “Hell, you’re a gentile here-just ask a Mormon.”

  “I know. I think it’s a scream,” Yossel Reisen said. “Yeah, we’re real Americans-or we try to be, anyhow. But we sure didn’t make real Romans a couple of thousand years ago. That’s why the Second Temple got it.”

  “I guess.” Except for what little Armstrong remembered from a high-school history class and from Julius Caesar in English Lit, ancient Rome was a closed book to him.

  “We think the Mormons are nuts, and we treat ’em that way, and what happens?” Yossel said. “Bang! They rise up. We treat Jews all right, and they’re happy and quiet. The Romans thought my ancestors were nuts, and they treated ’em that way, and what happened? Bang! The Jews rose up.”

  “Bunch of bullshit, if you want to know what I think,” Armstrong said. “We were nice to the Mormons right before the war, and what did we get for it? They kicked us anyway, soon as we got busy with Featherston’s fuckers.” He might not know ancient history, but he remembered the end of the occupation of Utah. Fat lot of good ending it did anybody.

  “Yeah, there is that,” Yossel allowed. “Maybe you just can’t make some people happy.”

  “Better believe you can’t,” Armstrong said. “These bastards have spent the last God knows how long proving it, too.” He was some small part of what the U.S. government had done to Utah, but that never entered his mind. Neither side, by then, worried much about who’d started what and why. They both knew they had a long history of hating, mistrusting, and striking at each other. Past that, they didn’t much care.

  Yossel Reisen pointed to another corporal trudging through the wreckage of Temple Square. He nudged Armstrong. “You recognize that guy?”

  Armstrong eyed the two-striper. He looked like anybody else: not too young, not too old, not too big, not too small. But he didn’t look like anybody Armstrong knew, or even knew of. Maybe that didn’t mean anything. Now that Temple Square had finally fallen, it drew its share of gawkers.

  But maybe it did mean something. The USA had trouble fighting the Mormons just because they looked so ordinary. They had no trouble getting U.S. uniforms, either. Down in the CSA, the Freedom Party knew who was a Negro and who wasn’t. Here…Armstrong unslung his Springfield. “Let’s go check him out.”

  The corporal wasn’t doing anything to draw notice; he ambled around with his hands in his pockets. Once he bent down and picked up a bit of rock and stowed it away. To Mormons, pieces of the Temple were sacred relics. But to U.S. soldiers who’d gone through hell to get here, they made good souvenirs. Carrying one didn’t say a thing about what you were.

  “Hey!” Armstrong said, quietly slipping off the Springfield’s safety.

  “You want something, Sarge?” The corporal sounded like anybody else, too. Mormons did.

  “Yeah. Let’s see your papers.”

  “Sure.” The noncom started to take something out of his pocket.

  “Hold it right there!” Yossel Reisen snapped. Armstrong didn’t like the way the stranger’s hand bunched, either. He sure looked as if he was grabbing something bigger than a set of identity documents. “Take both hands out, nice and slow,” Yossel told him. “If they aren’t empty when you do, you’re dead. Got it?”

  “Who are you clowns?” the corporal demanded. “You Mormons trying to hijack me? You won’t get away with it!”

  If he was trying to put the shoe on the other foot, he had balls. Armstrong gestured with his Springfield. “Do like my buddy says.” His own balls tried to crawl up into his belly. If this guy was a Mormon and what he had in there was a detonator…But his hands came out empty.

  Yossel reached into that pocket and pulled out a pistol: not an Army.45, but a smaller revolver, a civilian piece. Armstrong’s suspicions flared. Then Yossel found the other corporal’s papers. He looked from the photo to the man and back again. He shook his head.

  “Let’s see,” Armstrong said. His pal showed him the picture. It was of a guy noticeably darker and noticeably skinnier than the fellow in the uniform. Armstrong gestured with the rifle again. “Come on. Get moving. You got a bunch of questions to answer.”

  “I haven’t done anything!” the corporal said. One thing he hadn’t done was swear, not even once. Most U.S. soldiers would have. Mormons watched their mouths better.

  “Well, you’ll get the chance to prove it,” Armstrong said. “Yossel, grab his rifle.”

  Carefully, Yossel Reisen unslung the other corporal’s Springfield. “Move,” he told the man.

  Still squawking-but still not cursing-the soldier who might not be a soldier moved. They led him back over the ground for which the Mormons had fought so long and so hard, the ground that was cratered and crumpled and crushed, the ground over which the stench of death still hung. That would only get worse when the weather warmed up. Armstrong wondered if it would ever leave the land, or if the foul, clinging odor would linger forever, an unseen but unmistakable monument to what Salt Lake City had gone through.

  Sentries outside of regimental headquarters popped up out of the foxholes where they spent most of their time-not every sniper had been hunted down and killed. “What the fuck’s going on here?” one of them demanded. He talked the way most U.S. soldiers did.

  “We caught this guy up by the Temple,” Armstrong answered. “Yossel here spotted him.” It didn’t occur to him till later that he might have taken the credit himself. He didn’t want to screw his buddy. “We figure maybe he’s a Mormon. His papers don’t match his face, and he was carrying this little chickenshit pistol-show ’em, Yossel.” Reisen displayed the revolver.

  The sentry eyed the corporal who didn’t seem to be a corporal. “Waddayou got to say for yourself, Mac?” he asked, his voice colder than the weather.

  “They’re full of baloney,” the-maybe-two-striper said. Not shit-baloney. He added, “I don’t like a.45-kicks too hard.”

  “Huh,” the sentry said, no doubt noticing, as Armstrong did, that that-maybe-Mormon didn’t say anything about his papers. The sentry nodded to Armstrong and Yossel. “Bring him on in. They’ll find out what’s going on with him. And if it is what you think it is…” He didn’t go on, or need to. If it was what they thought it was, the fellow they’d captured was a dead man. He wouldn’t die quickly or cleanly, either. Oh, wh
at a shame, Armstrong thought, and led him on.

  Cincinnatus Driver hadn’t been under fire for more than twenty-five years. He’d forgotten how much fun it wasn’t. If he hadn’t forgotten, he never would have volunteered to drive a truck in a combat zone again. He would have stayed back in Des Moines and found work in a war plant or tried to bring his dead moving and hauling business back to life.

  But he’d been flat on his back in Covington, Kentucky, when the state passed from the USA back to the CSA. He supposed he was lucky: the car that hit him didn’t kill him. It didn’t seem like luck while he was recovering from a broken leg and a fractured skull and a smashed shoulder. Even now, almost two and a half years later, he walked with a limp and a cane and sometimes got headaches that laughed at aspirin.

  He was finally exchanged for a Confederate the USA was holding-U.S. citizenship meant something, even for a Negro. It didn’t mean everything; Negroes in the United States couldn’t join the Army, couldn’t pick up rifles and go after the enemies who were tormenting their brethren south of the Mason-Dixon Line. With his age and his injuries, Cincinnatus wouldn’t have been able to join the Army if he were white.

  This was the next best thing. He’d driven trucks for more than thirty years. He’d driven for the USA during the Great War. Here he was, doing it again, part of a long column of green-gray machines hauling ammunition and rations to the U.S. troops trying to drive the Confederates out of western Ohio.

  The state of the art had improved over the past quarter-century. The Chevy truck he drove now had a much more powerful, much more reliable engine than the White he’d used then. It had a fully enclosed cabin, too, and a heater. It boasted a self-starter; he didn’t have to crank it to life. Its headlights were electric, not acetylene lamps. With all-wheel drive, it could get through terrain that would have shaken the White to pieces.