Summer in the North Atlantic was much more pleasant than winter. Days were longer, seas were calmer, and the sun was brighter. Lon Menefee tanned. Sam reddened and burned and wore his hat whenever he went out on deck. He exchanged resigned looks with the handful of sailors who came close to being as fair as he was.
Nobody on the destroyer escort was eager to run into the Royal Navy. Britain’s fleet didn’t have the worldwide reach it had enjoyed before the Great War. Where it still went, though, it remained a highly capable outfit.
A destroyer off on the other side of the flotilla heard, or thought she heard, a submersible lurking in the sea. She prosecuted the sub with a shower of ashcans. There was no triumphant signal showing the enemy boat—if it was an enemy boat—had gone to the bottom. Sam didn’t much care. As long as the sub couldn’t launch torpedoes, he stayed happy.
He began haunting the wireless shack, as he’d done aboard several other ships, he’d served. He noticed he wasn’t the only one; all the officers and chiefs seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But he was asleep in his cabin when it did. The clatter of running feet on the steel of the corridor floor woke him a split second before someone pounded on the door. “It’s open!” he called, turning on the lamp and sitting up in his narrow bed. He didn’t have two more sailors right over his head, the way he did when he first put to sea.
Yeoman van Duyk burst into the cabin. “They’ve gone and done it, sir!” he said, his voice cracking with excitement.
“Who? The Germans?” Sam asked around a yawn. A hot flask full of coffee stood on the steel nightstand. He grabbed for it—he didn’t think he’d need to worry about sleep any more tonight. “London?”
“Yes, sir.” Van Duyk nodded. “And Brighton, and Norwich—all at the same time, or close enough.”
“Sweet Jesus!” Sam exclaimed. As he poured from the hot flask, he found himself wanting to improve the coffee with a slug of medicinal brandy. He didn’t, not with the rating standing there. “Did they get Churchill? Did they get the King?”
“I took this off the German wireless, sir, so they don’t know,” van Duyk answered. “No word from the BBC yet.”
“All right. Thanks.” Sam’s guess was that the Prime Minister and King Edward and his family would have got out of London even before the RAF hit Hamburg. They had to know the Kaiser would land a superbomb there sooner or later. “What else did the Germans say?”
“That they had more where those three came from, and that they were ready to knock England for a loop if that was what it took to get the limeys out of the war.”
“Jesus!” Sam said again. “How much of this poor, sorry world’s gonna be left if we keep blowing chunks of it off the map?”
“Beats me, sir,” van Duyk said. “I better get back to the shack.” He sketched a salute and disappeared.
“And I better get my ass up to the bridge,” Sam said, even though nobody was there to hear him. He put on his shoes and jacket; he’d slept in the rest of his clothes. He’d look a little rumpled, but the world wouldn’t end.
The exec had the conn when Carsten came in. “You heard, sir?” Menefee asked.
“You bet I did,” Sam answered. “Three at once? They must be turning those bastards out in carload lots.”
“They’re lucky they didn’t get one of their bombers shot down.”
“Damn right they are. I bet they snuck ’em in as part of a big raid. That way, the limeys couldn’t know which machines to go after. Maybe they had fighters flying escort, too—with the Y-ranging sets they’ve got nowadays, you can see what you’re going after even at night.”
“Makes sense.” The exec nodded. “You’ve been thinking about this.”
Sam gave him a crooked grin. “Didn’t know it wasn’t in the rules. But you’re right—I have. I figured the Kaiser had to hit back. If I was him, how would I go about it?”
“What will England do now?” Menefee wondered.
“Depends on how many bombs she’s got, I suppose,” Sam said. “If she has more, she’ll use ’em. If she doesn’t…How can she go on?”
“Beats me,” Menefee said.
“Hell, if it wasn’t for Churchill, I bet England would have quit already,” Sam said. “Him and Featherston—the other side’s got the stubborn so-and-sos.”
“Now we hope he’s dead,” the exec said.
“Amen.” Sam and Thad Walters spoke at the same time. They looked at each other and grinned.
But Churchill wasn’t dead. He went on the BBC about half an hour later. Van Duyk called Sam down to the wireless shack. The British Prime Minister was speaking from “somewhere in the United Kingdom.” He sounded furious, too. “If the Hun thinks we are beaten, let him think again,” he thundered. “We shall avenge this monstrous crime. Even now, the Angel of Death unfolds his wings over a German city I do not choose to name. With weeping and repentance shall the Kaiser rue the day he chose to try conclusions with us.”
“Wow!” Sam said. “Too bad he’s not one of the good guys—he gives a hell of a speech.”
“Yes, sir.” Van Duyk turned the dial on the shortwave set. “Sounds like the Germans are going to get hit right about now. Let’s see what they have to say.”
He found the English-language German wireless. “There is a report of what may have been a superbomb explosion between Bruges and Ghent, in Belgium,” the announcer said, only the slightest guttural accent betraying his homeland. “One of our turbo-engined night fighters brought down a British bomber in approximately the same location. If the Angel of Death sought to spread his wings over Germany tonight, he fell short by a good many kilometers.”
Van Duyk whooped. “Up yours, Winston!” Sam said. He hurried up to the bridge to spread the news.
“Oh, my,” Lon Menefee said. “Well, how many more cards do the limeys have?”
“We’ll find out,” Sam said. “Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of ‘As the World Goes up in Smoke,’ brought to you by the Jameson Casket and Mortuary Company. Our slogan is ‘You’re going to die sometime—why not now?’”
“Ouch!” Lieutenant Walters said.
“Lord, it’s the way things look,” Carsten said wearily. “This can’t go on much longer—can it?” He sounded as if he was pleading—and he was.
“Ask Featherston. Ask Churchill,” Lieutenant Menefee said. “They’re the ones who have to quit.”
“Can’t happen soon enough,” Sam said. “It’s pretty much pointless now. We know who won. We know who lost. Only thing we don’t know is how many dead there are.” He paused. “Well, maybe Churchill has enough bombs left to force a draw. Doesn’t look like Featherston does.”
“I just don’t want to see a bomber coming over us at thirty thousand feet, that’s all,” Walters said.
“Yipes!” Ice walked up Sam’s spine. “I didn’t even think of that.” He made as if to look at the sky. No CAP at night. It wouldn’t be flying anywhere near so high, anyway. Who’d ever imagined you might need to? But a superbomb didn’t need to score a direct hit to ruin a warship. He wanted to turn around and run for home. But he couldn’t, and the Josephus Daniels steamed on.
This is going to hurt a little.”
Michael Pound had come to hate those words, because a little always turned into a lot. He’d never imagined changing dressings on his burned legs could hurt so much. And, at that, there were plenty of guys who had it worse than he did. Some of the badly burned men—pilots and other aircrew, most of them, and a few soldiers from barrels with them—needed morphine every time they got fresh bandages. He didn’t, not any more.
He missed the stuff now that he wasn’t getting it, but not enough to make him think he’d turned into a junkie. It did do more against pain than whatever else they had; codeine wasn’t much stronger than aspirin by comparison. He could bear what he had to live with, though. When he heard other men howling, he understood the meaning of the phrase it could be worse.
The military hospital
was somewhere near Chattanooga. Formidable defenses kept snipers and auto bombs at bay. From what everybody said, holding the CSA down was proving almost as expensive as conquering the damn place had been. That wasn’t good, but Pound couldn’t do anything about it.
He got his Purple Heart. He got a Bronze Star to go with his Silver Star. He didn’t particularly think he deserved one, but nobody asked him. He got promoted to first lieutenant, which thrilled him less than the brass who gave him a silver bar on each shoulder strap probably thought it would. And he got a letter from General Morrell. Morrell wasn’t just an old acquaintance—he was a friend, despite differences in rank. And he’d been wounded, too. A letter from him really did mean something.
“You should do very well, Lieutenant,” a doctor told Pound one day. “A lot of third-degree burns are much deeper, and impair function even when they heal well. You’ll have some nasty scars, but I don’t think you’ll even limp.”
“Terrific,” Pound said. “How would you like it if somebody said something like that about your legs? Especially when you were hurting like a son of a bitch while he did it?”
The doctor pulled up the left sleeve of his white coat. His arm had scars that made nasty look like an understatement. “I was in a motorcar crash ten years ago,” he said. “I know what I’m talking about—and now we can do things for burns they didn’t dream of back then.”
“Can you use your hand?” Pound asked.
“Thumb and first two fingers,” the doctor replied. “The tendons and nerves to the others are pretty much shot, but I’ve got the important ones, anyhow. You don’t have that worry—I know your toes work.”
“Uh-huh,” Pound said unenthusiastically. He knew they worked, too; the therapists made him wiggle them. That made him forget about the rest of his pain—it felt as if a flamethrower were toasting them.
“Just hang on,” the doctor said. “It’s a bitch while it’s going on, but it gets better. You have to give it time, that’s all.”
Pound couldn’t even tell him to go to hell, because the other man had been through what he was in the middle of now and had come out the other side. “It is a bitch,” was as much as he thought he could say.
“Oh, I know,” the doctor answered quietly. “I still miss the needle sometimes, but I’ll be damned if I go back to it…and you can take that any way you please.” He nodded and walked on to the next patient.
He looked like such a mild little fellow, too: the kind who slid through life without anything much ever happening to him. Which only proved you never could tell. Michael Pound had seen that plenty of times with soldiers he got to know. He wondered why he was so surprised now.
He wished he could get up and do things, but he was stuck on his back—or sometimes, to stave off bedsores, on his stomach. The therapists said he could put weight on his feet in a couple of weeks. He looked forward to that, and then again he didn’t. Till you’d been through a lot of pain, you didn’t understand how much you wanted to stay away from more.
In the meantime, he had magazines and newspapers and the handful of books in the hospital library. He voraciously devoured them. He also had the wireless. He would have listened to news almost all the time. The other guys in the ward plumped for music and comedies and dramas. Pound endured their programs—he couldn’t try throwing his weight around, not unless he wanted everybody else to hate him. But the news was all that really mattered to him.
Sometimes the other burned men gave in to him, too, especially in the middle of the night when they were all too likely to be awake and when the regular programs were even crappier than they were the rest of the time. And so he was listening to a news program when a flash came in.
“We interrupt this broadcast,” said the man behind the mike. “This just in from the BBC—the Churchill government has fallen. Parliament voted no confidence in the Churchill-Mosley regime that has run the United Kingdom for more than ten years. Pending elections, a caretaker government under Sir Horace Wilson has been formed. Wilson has announced that his first action as Prime Minister will be to seek an armistice from the Kaiser.”
The room erupted. A nurse rushed in to quiet the whoops and cheers. When she found out what had happened, she let out a whoop herself.
“They only had two!” Pound said.
“Two what?” the nurse asked.
“Two bombs,” Pound and two other guys said at the same time. Pound went on, “They had two, and the second one didn’t go off where they wanted it to, and that was it. Now the Germans can blow up their cities one at a time, and they can’t hit back.”
“Wow,” the nurse said. “Are you a general? You talk like a general.”
“I’m a lieutenant,” he answered. “I’ve got gray hair ’cause I was a sergeant for years and years. They finally promoted me, and they’ve been regretting it ever since.”
She laughed. “You’re funny, too! I like that.”
He wished he had a private room. Maybe something interesting would have happened. The ward didn’t even boast curtains around the beds. Whatever they did to you, everybody else got to watch. After a while, you mostly didn’t care. This once, Pound might have.
“Only Featherston left,” said the man in the next bed.
“What do we do when we catch him?” somebody asked.
“String him up!” The answer came from Pound and several other wounded soldiers at the same time. It also came from the nurse. She suggested stringing the President of the CSA up by some highly sensitive parts of his anatomy. Coming from most women, that would have shocked Pound. He’d seen that nurses had mouths at least as raunchy as those of soldiers. It made sense: nurses saw plenty of horrors, too.
“My God,” someone else said. “The war really is just about over.”
Nobody made any snide comments about that. Maybe the other men in the ward had as much trouble taking it in as Michael Pound did. The war had consumed his whole being for the past three years—and before that, when he’d been down in Houston before it returned to the CSA, he might as well have been at war.
He wondered what he’d do when peace finally broke out. Would the Army want to keep a first lieutenant with gray hair? The service needed some grizzled noncoms; they tempered junior officers’ puppyish enthusiasm. But he’d never be anything more than a junior officer himself, and he was much too goddamn old for the role.
If they turned him loose, if they patted him on the back and said, Well done—now we’ll go use up somebody else, what the hell would he do then? He had no idea. The thought was frightening enough. The Army had been his life since he was eighteen years old.
They couldn’t just throw him out…could they?
“Shit,” another burned man said. “This fuckin’ war’s never gonna be over—excuse my French, miss.”
“I’ve heard the words before,” the nurse said dryly.
The soldiers laughed. The one who’d been talking went on, “It won’t be. Honest to God, it won’t. Maybe the Confederate government finally surrenders, yeah, but we’ll stay on occupation duty down here forever. Lousy bushwhackers and diehards won’t start singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ tomorrow, and you can take that to the bank. We have grandchildren, they’ll be down here shooting at waddayacallems—rebels.”
Three or four guys groaned, probably because they thought the burned man was likely to be right. Michael Pound felt like cheering, for exactly the same reason. He didn’t—everybody else would have thought he was nuts. But he felt like it. If the war, or something a lot like the war, went on and on, the Army wouldn’t have any excuse to throw him out on his ear.
Well, it wouldn’t have any excuse except maybe that he’d made himself too obnoxious for the brass to stand. Not without pride, he figured he was capable of that.
“Once we get done licking the Confederates, do we go after the Japs next?” asked the guy in the next bed.
If the General Staff of the burn ward of the military hospital outside Chattanooga had their way, the answ
er to that one was no. Pound wouldn’t have minded seeing the Sandwich Islands, but not as a way station to a battle somewhere even farther off in the Pacific. The Japs had their sphere, and the United States had theirs, and as long as neither side poached on the other that was fine with him.
He did say, “I bet they’re working overtime in Tokyo, trying to figure out how to build a superbomb.”
“Wouldn’t you be?” said the soldier next to him.
“You bet I would,” Pound answered. “As long as we’ve got it and they don’t, it’s a club we can use to beat them over the head. I bet the Tsar’s telling all his scientists they’re heading for Siberia if they don’t make one PDQ, too. If the Germans have one and the Russians don’t, they’re in big trouble.”
He wondered whether Austria-Hungary would try to make one. Berlin was the senior partner there, and had been since the early days of the Great War. Germany had saved Austria-Hungary’s bacon against the Russians then, and again this time around. But Vienna had some clever scientists, too. You never could tell, Pound decided with profound unoriginality.
“Before long, everybody and his mother-in-law’s going to have those…miserable things.” A soldier had mercy on the nurse’s none-too-delicate ears. “How do we keep from blowing each other to kingdom come?”
That was a good question. It was probably the question on the minds of the striped-pants set these days. If the diplomats came up with a halfway decent answer, they would earn their salaries and then some.
Michael Pound thought about the CSA’s rockets. If you could load superbombs onto bigger, better ones, you could blow up anybody you didn’t like, even if he didn’t live next door. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Could you make a rocket shoot down another rocket? Airplanes shot down airplanes…some of the time, anyhow. Why shouldn’t rockets shoot down rockets…some of the time, anyhow? Would that be enough? Pound had no idea, which left him in the same leaky boat as everybody else in the world.
In at the Death Page 45
