Return engagement sa-1

by Harry Turtledove

  "Chris got one in the leg," George said. "And the Cookie's dead." He touched his own chest to show the hit Hatton had taken.

  "At least one dead and one wounded," the skipper said. "We are returning to port if we can. Out." He set the microphone back in its cradle, then looked at-looked through-George. "Jesus Christ!"

  "Yeah," George said.

  "See who else is still with us, and what kind of shape the boat's in," Albert told him. "I don't know what the hell the owners are going to say when we get back like this. I just don't know. But I'll be goddamn glad to get back at all, you know what I mean?"

  "I sure do, Skipper," George answered. "You better believe I do."

  Somewhere out in the western North Atlantic prowled a British airplane carrier with more nerve than sense. The USS Remembrance and another carrier, the Sandwich Islands, steamed north from Bermuda to do their damnedest to send her to the bottom.

  Sam Carsten peered across the water at the Sandwich Islands. She was a newer ship, built as a carrier from the keel up. The Remembrance had started out as a battle cruiser and been converted while abuilding. The Sandwich Islands' displacement wasn't much greater, but she could carry almost twice as many airplanes. Carsten was glad to have her along.

  Repairs still went on aboard the Remembrance. The yard at Bermuda had done most of the work. In peacetime, the carrier would have stayed there a lot longer. But this was war. You did what you had to do and sent her back into the scrap. It had been the same way aboard the Dakota during the Great War. Sam wondered whether the battleship's steering mechanism was everything it should be even now.

  Destroyers and cruisers ringed the two carriers. That reassured Sam less than it had before the raid on Charleston. The screening ships hadn't been able to keep land-based aircraft away from the Remembrance. Would they and the combat air patrol be able to fend off whatever the limeys threw at this force? Carsten hoped so. He also knew that what he hoped and what he got were liable to have nothing to do with each other.

  He rubbed more zinc-oxide ointment on a nose already carrying enough of the white goo to resemble one of the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies. He only wished the stuff did more good. With it or without it, he burned. Without it, he burned a little worse.

  Up at the top of the Remembrance's island, the antennas for the wireless rangefinder spun round and round, round and round. The gadget had done good work off the Confederate coast, warning of incoming enemy airplanes well before the screening ships or the combat air patrol spotted them. As the carriers got more familiar with their new toy, they said Y-range more and more often. The whole name was just too clumsy.

  Some of the cruisers also sported revolving Y-range antennas. They used them not only to spot incoming enemy aircraft but also to improve their gunnery. Y-ranging gave results more precise than the stereoscopic and parallax visual rangefinders gunners had used in the Great War.

  A signalman at the stern wigwagged a fighter onto the deck. Smoke stinking of burnt rubber spurted from the tires. The hook the airplane carried in place of a tailwheel snagged an arrester wire. The pilot jumped out. The flight crew cleared the machine from the deck. Another one roared aloft to take its place.

  "You're in unfamiliar territory, Carsten," said someone behind Sam.

  He turned and found himself face to face with Commander Dan Cressy. "Uh, yes, sir," he answered, saluting the executive officer. "I'm like the groundhog-every once in a while, they let me poke my nose up above ground and see if I spot my own shadow."

  The exec grinned. "I like that."

  Sam suspected Cressy would have a ship of his own before long. He was young, brave, and smarter than smart; he'd make flag rank if he lived. Unlike me, Carsten thought without rancor. As a middle-aged mustang, he had much slimmer prospects of promotion. He'd dwelt on them before. He didn't feel like doing it now, especially since all of them but getting the junior grade removed from his lieutenant's rank would take an uncommon run of casualties among officers senior to him.

  "Glad you do, sir," Sam said now. He sure as hell didn't want the exec to catch him brooding.

  "Damage-control parties have done good work for us," Cressy said. "The skipper is pleased with Lieutenant Commander Pottinger-and with you. You showed nerve, fighting that five-inch gun when the Confederates hit us off Charleston."

  "Thank you very much, sir," Sam said, and meant it. The exec usually did Captain Stein's dirty work for him. The skipper got the credit, the exec got the blame: an ancient Navy rule. Winning praise from Cressy-even praise he was relaying from someone else-didn't happen every day.

  "You were on this ship when you were a rating, weren't you?" Cressy asked.

  "Yes, sir, I sure was, just after she was built," Sam said. "I had to leave her when I made ensign. There wasn't any slot for me here. When I came back, they put me in damage control. If I'd had my druthers, I'd have stayed in gunnery, or better yet up here with the airplanes." He knew he was sticking his neck out. Grumbling about an assignment he'd had for years was liable to land him in dutch.

  Commander Cressy eyed him for a moment. "When you're so good at what you do, how much do you suppose your druthers really matter?"

  "Sir, I've been in the Navy more than thirty years. I know damn well they don't matter at all," Sam answered. "But that doesn't mean I haven't got 'em."

  That got another grin from Cressy. Sam had a way of saying things that might have been annoying from somebody else seem a joke, or at least nothing to get upset about. The exec said, "Well, fair enough. If we ever get the chance to give them to you… we'll see what we can do, that's all."

  "Thank you very much, sir!" Sam exclaimed. It wasn't a promise, but it came closer than anything he'd ever heard up till now.

  "Nothing to thank me for," Cressy said, emphasizing that it was no promise. "There may not be anything to do, either. You have that straight?"

  "Oh, yes, sir. I sure do," Sam said. "I can handle the job I've got just fine. It isn't the one I would have picked for myself, that's all."

  Klaxons began to hoot. "Now we both get to do the jobs we've got," Commander Cressy said, and went off toward the Remembrance's island at a dead run. Carsten was running, too, for the closest hatchway that would take him down to his battle station in the carrier's bowels.

  Closing watertight doors slowed him, but he got where he was going in good time. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger came down at almost exactly the same moment. "No, I don't know what's going on," Pottinger said when Sam asked him. "I bet I can guess, though."

  "Me, too," Sam said. "We must've spotted that British carrier."

  "I can't think of anything else," Pottinger said. "Their pilot was probably stupid, shooting up that fishing boat."

  "One of ours would've done the same thing to their boat off the coast of England," Sam said. "Flyboys are like that."

  In the light of the bare bulb in its wire cage overhead, Pottinger's grin was haggard. "I didn't say you were wrong. I just said the limey was stupid. There's a difference."

  The throb of the Remembrance's engines deepened as the great ship picked up speed. One after another, airplanes roared off her flight deck. Some of those would be torpedo carriers and dive bombers to go after the British ship, others fighters to protect them and to fight off whatever the limeys threw at the Remembrance and the Sandwich Islands.

  As usual once an action started, the damage-control party had nothing to do but stand around and wait and hope its talents weren't needed. Some of the sailors told dirty jokes. A petty officer methodically cracked his knuckles. He didn't seem to know he was doing it, though each pop sounded loud as a gunshot in that cramped, echoing space.

  Time crawled by. Sam had learned not to look at his watch down here. He would always feel an hour had gone by, when in fact it was ten minutes. Better not to know than to be continually disappointed.

  When the Remembrance suddenly heeled hard to port, everybody in the damage-control party-maybe everybody on the whole ship-said, "Uh-oh!" at the
same time. If the antiaircraft guns had started banging away right then, Sam would have known some of the British carrier's bombers had got through. Since they didn't…

  "Submersible!" he said.

  Lieutenant Commander Pottinger nodded. "I'd say the son of a bitch missed us-with his first spread of fish, anyhow." He added the last phrase to make sure nobody could accuse him of optimism.

  Not much later, explosions in the deep jarred the Remembrance. "They're throwing ashcans at the bastard," one of the sailors said.

  "Hope they nail his hide to the wall, too," another one said. Nobody quarreled with that, least of all Sam. He'd seen more battle damage than anybody else down there. If he never saw any more, he wouldn't have been the least bit disappointed.

  Another depth charge burst, this one so close to the surface that it rattled everybody's teeth. "Jesus H. Christ!" Pottinger said. "What the hell are they trying to do, blow our stern off?"

  Nobody laughed. Such disasters had befallen at least one destroyer. Sam didn't think anybody'd ever screwed up so spectacularly aboard a carrier, but that didn't mean it couldn't happen.

  Then the intercom crackled to life. "Scratch one sub!" Commander Cressy said exultantly.

  Cheers filled the corridor. Carsten shouted as loud as anybody. A boat with somewhere around sixty British or Confederate or French sailors had just gone to the bottom. Better them than me, he thought, and let out another whoop. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger stuck out his hand. Grinning, Sam squeezed it.

  Thuds on the deck above told of airplanes landing. One of the sailors said, "I wonder what the hell's going on up there." Sam wondered the same thing. Everybody down here did, no doubt. Until the intercom told them, they wouldn't know.

  An hour later, the all-clear sounded-still with no news doled out past the sinking of the one submarine. Sam would have made a beeline for the deck anyway, just to escape the cramped, stuffy, paint- and oil-smelling corridor in which he'd been cooped up so long. The added attraction of news only made him move faster.

  He found disgusted fliers. "The limeys hightailed it out of town," one of them said. "We went to where they were supposed to be at-as best we could guess and as best we could navigate-and they weren't anywhere around there. We pushed out all the way to our maximum range and even a little farther, and we still didn't spot the bastards. They're long gone."

  "Good riddance," Sam offered.

  "Well, yeah," the pilot said, shedding his goggles and sticking a cigar in his mouth (he wasn't fool enough to light it, but gnawed at the end). "But that's a hell of a long way to come to shoot up a goddamn fishing boat and then go home."

  "I think they were trying to lure us out to where the submarine could put a torpedo in our brisket," Sam said. "The Japs did that to the Dakota in the Sandwich Islands, and she spent a lot of time in dry dock after that."

  "Maybe," the pilot said. "Makes more sense than anything I thought of."

  "It didn't work, though," Sam said. "We traded one of our fishing boats for their sub-and I hear they didn't even sink the fishing boat. I'll make that deal any day."

  IV

  Clarence Potter's promotion to brigadier general meant inheriting his luckless predecessor's office. Not being buried under the War Department had a couple of advantages. Now he could look out a window. There wasn't much point to one when all it would show was dirt. And now a wireless set brought in a signal, not just static.

  He knew, of course, that Confederate wireless stations said only what the government-that is, the Freedom Party-wanted people to hear. Broadcasters could not tell too many lies, though. If they did, U.S. stations would make them sorry. Unjammed, U.S. broadcasts could reach far into the CSA, just as C.S. programs could be heard well north of the border.

  And so, when a Confederate newsman gleefully reported that the Confederate Navy and the Royal Navy had combined to take Bermuda away from the United States, he believed the man. "In a daring piece of deception, HMS Ark Royal lured two U.S. carriers away from the island, making the joint task force's job much easier," the newscaster said.

  Slowly, Potter nodded to himself. That must have been a nervy piece of work. The Royal Navy must have believed that Bermuda was worth a carrier. It hadn't had to pay the price, but it might have.

  Eyeing a map, the Intelligence officer decided the British were dead right. The game had been worth the candle. With Bermuda lost, U.S. ships would have to run the gauntlet down the Confederate coast to resupply the Bahamas. He didn't think the United States could or would do it. Taking them away from the USA would probably fall to the Confederacy rather than Britain, but it would eliminate a threat to the state of Cuba and make it much harder for U.S. ships to move south and threaten the supply line between Argentina and the United Kingdom. Cutting that supply line was what had finally made Britain throw in the sponge in the Great War.

  And if we take the Bahamas, what will we do with all the Negroes there? he wondered. That was an interesting question, but not one he intended to ask Jake Featherston. If he was lucky, Featherston would tell him it was none of his goddamn business. If he was unlucky, something worse than that would happen.

  He didn't waste a lot of time worrying about it. As Confederates went, he was fairly liberal. But Confederates-white Confederates-did not go far in that direction. What happened to Negroes-in the Confederate States or out of them-wasn't high on his list of worries. Blacks inside the CSA deserved whatever happened to them, as far as he was concerned.

  There, Anne Colleton would have completely agreed with him. He shook his head. He made a fist. Instead of slamming it down on the desk, he let it fall gently. He still couldn't believe she was dead. She'd been one of those fiercely vital people you thought of as going on forever. But life didn't work like that, and war had an obscene power all its own. What it wanted, it took, and an individual's vitality mattered not at all to it.

  His fist fell again, harder this time. He was damned if he knew whether to call what he and Anne had had between them love. There probably wasn't a better name for it, even if the two of them had disagreed so strongly about so many things that they'd broken up for years, and neither one of them ever really thought about settling down with the other. Anne had never been the sort to settle down with a man.

  "And neither have I, with a woman," Potter said softly. He tried to imagine himself married to Anne Colleton. Even if what they'd known had been love, the picture refused to form. Domestic bliss hadn't been in the cards for either one of them.

  Potter laughed at himself. Even if he'd had a wife who specialized in domestic bliss-assuming such a paragon could exist in the real world-he wouldn't have had time to enjoy it. When he wasn't here at his desk, he was unconscious on a cot not far away. The coffee he poured down till his stomach sizzled made sure he was unconscious as little as possible.

  He lit a cigarette. Tobacco didn't help keep him awake. It did, or could every now and then, help him focus his thoughts. Since the war started, getting instructions to the spies the CSA had in the USA and getting reports back from them had grown a lot harder than it was during peacetime.

  Where was that roster? He pawed through papers till he found it. One of the Confederates who spoke with a good U.S. accent worked at a Columbus wireless station. Potter scribbled a note: "Satchmo's Blues" at 1630 on the afternoon of the 11th, station CSNT.

  The note would go to Saul Goldman. Goldman would make sure the right song went out at the right time from the Nashville wireless station. The Confederate in Columbus listened to CSNT every afternoon at half past four. If he heard "Satchmo's Blues," he made his coded report when he went on the air in the wee small hours. Someone on the Confederate side of the line would hear and decipher it. Potter didn't know all the details, any more than Goldman knew exactly who would be listening for that tune. Someone was listening. Someone would hear. That was all that mattered.

  Sooner or later, some bright young damnyankee would be listening, too, and would put two and two together and come up with
four. At that point, the Confederate in Columbus would start suffering from a sharply lower life expectancy, even if he didn't know it yet.

  Or maybe, if the men from the USA were sneaky enough, they wouldn't shoot the Confederate spy. Maybe they would turn him instead, and make him send their false information into the CSA instead of the truth.

  How would the people who listened and deciphered know the agent had been turned? How would they keep the Confederates from acting on damnyankee lies? Mirrors reflecting into other mirrors reflecting into other mirrors yet… Intelligence was that kind of game, a chess match with both players moving at the same time and both of them blindfolded more often than not.

  Somewhere not far from Columbus, some other Confederate spy would be waiting for a different signal. He would have a different way to respond. If what he said didn't match what the fellow at the wireless station reported, a red flag would-with luck-go up.

  Potter snorted. Without luck, nobody would notice the discrepancy till too late. In that case, some Confederate soldiers would catch hell. It wasn't as if soldiers didn't catch hell all the time.

  Air-raid sirens began to warble. That was what the instruction posters said, anyhow. When the siren begins to warble, that is your signal to take cover. It didn't sound like a warble to Potter. It sounded like the noise a mechanical dog would make if a giant stepped on its tail. howlhowlhowlhowlhowlhowl endlessly, maddeningly repeated…

  The damnyankees had nerve, coming over Richmond in broad daylight-either nerve or several screws loose. Potter locked up his important papers in a desk drawer, then headed for the stairway to the shelters in the War Department subbasement-not far from where he'd formerly worked, in fact. He'd just reached the stairwell when the antiaircraft guns started banging away. "I hope we shoot down all of those bastards," a young lieutenant said.

  "That would be nice," Potter agreed. "Don't hold your breath till it happens, though." The lieutenant gave him an odd look. It was one he'd seen a great many times before. "Don't worry, sonny," he said. "I'm as Confederate as you are, no matter what I sound like."