At that moment, the Sweet Sue gave a sudden, violent lurch to starboard, and then another one, just as sharp, to port. “What the hell?” George exclaimed as coffee slopped out of the mug and burned his fingers.
Then he heard a new noise through the chatter on the wireless and the diesel’s deep, steady throb: a savage roar rising rapidly to a mechanical scream. It seemed to come from outside, but filled the galley, filled everything. George got a glimpse of an airplane zooming toward them—and of flames shooting from its wings as it opened up with machine guns.
Bullets stitched their way across the fishing boat. One caught the Cookie in the chest. He let out a grunt—more a sound of surprise than one of pain—and crumpled, crimson spreading over the gray wool of his sweater. His feet kicked a few times, but he was plainly a dead man. A sudden sharp stench among the good smells of the galley said his bowels had let go.
Screams on the deck told that the Cookie wasn’t the only one who’d been hit. George saw right away that he couldn’t do anything for Hatton. He hurried out of the galley. Chow’ll be rotten the rest of the run went through his mind. Then he realized that was the least of his worries. Getting home alive and in one piece counted for a hell of a lot more.
Chris Agganis was down on the deck clutching his leg. Blood spilled from it. George was used to gore, as anybody who made his living gutting tuna that could outweigh him had to be. But this blood spilled out of a person. He was amazed how much difference that made.
“Hurts,” Agganis moaned in accented English. “Hurts like hell.” He said something else in syrupy Greek. This was his first time on the Sweet Sue. The skipper’d hired him at the last minute, when Johnny O’Shea didn’t come aboard—was probably too drunk to remember to come aboard. Agganis knew what he was doing, he played a mean harmonica, and now he’d been rewarded for his hard work with a bullet in the calf.
George knelt beside him. “Lemme see it, Chris.” Agganis kept moaning. George had to pull the Greek’s hands away so he could yank up his dungarees. The bullet had gone through the meat of his calf. As far as George could see, it hadn’t hit the bone. He said, “It’s not good, but it could be a hell of a lot worse.” He stuffed his handkerchief into one hole and pulled another one out of Chris Agganis’ pocket for the second, larger, wound.
He was so desperately busy doing that—and fighting not to puke, for hot blood on his hands was ever so much worse than the cold stuff that came out of a fish—that he didn’t notice how the shriek of the airplane engine overhead was swelling again till it was almost on top of the fishing boat.
Machine-gun bullets dug into the planking of the deck. They chewed up the galley once more, and clanged through the metal of the smokestack. Then the fighter zoomed away eastward. The roundels on its wings and flanks were red inside white inside blue: it came from a British ship.
“Fucking bastard,” Chris Agganis choked out.
“Yeah,” George agreed, hoping and praying the limey wouldn’t come back. Once more and the fishing boat was liable to sink. For that matter, how many bullet holes did she have at the waterline? And how many rounds had gone through the engine? Was she going to catch fire and burn right here in the middle of the ocean?
The engine was still running. The Sweet Sue wasn’t dead in the water. That would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along.
And she still steered. That meant the skipper hadn’t taken a bullet. George got to his feet and went back into the galley. He knew where the first-aid kit was. Shattered crockery crunched under the soles of his shoes. The air was thick with the iron stink of blood, the smell of shit, and the nasty smoke from the cheap pipe tobacco the Cookie had lit a couple of minutes before he died.
George took a bandage and a bottle of rubbing alcohol and, after a moment’s hesitation, a morphine syringe out to Chris Agganis. The fisherman let out a bloodcurdling shriek when George splashed alcohol over his wound. “You don’t want it to rot, do you?” George asked.
Agganis’ answer was spirited but incoherent. He hardly noticed when George stuck him with the syringe and injected the morphine. After a few minutes, though, he said, “Ahhh.”
“Is that better?” George asked. Agganis didn’t answer, but he stopped thrashing. By the look on his face, Jesus had just come down from heaven and was patting him on the back. George stared at him, and at the syringe. He’d heard what morphine could do, but he’d never seen it in action till now. He hadn’t imagined anybody with a bullet wound could look that happy.
With Chris Agganis settled, George could look over the Sweet Sue. Chewed to hell but still going seemed to sum things up, as it had before. Captain Albert had swung her back toward the west. With one dead and at least one hurt man on board, with the boat probably taking on water, with the engine possibly damaged, what else could the skipper do? Nothing George could see.
But heading west produced a painful pang, too. They’d get into Boston harbor with nothing on ice except the Cookie, and they couldn’t sell him. What the hell would they do without a paycheck to show for the trip? What the hell would Connie say when George walked into the apartment with nothing to show for his time at sea?
She’ll say, “Thank God you’re alive,” that’s what, George thought. She’d hug him and squeeze him and take him to bed, and all that would be wonderful. But none of it would pay the rent or buy groceries. What the hell good was a man who didn’t bring any money with him when he walked through the front door? No good. No good at all.
He went up to the wheelhouse. The fighter hadn’t shot that up. The skipper was talking into the wireless set, giving the Sweet Sue’s position and telling a little about what had happened to her. He raised a questioning eyebrow at George.
“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 burne
d 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 lon
g. 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.
Settling Accounts Return Engagement: Book One of the Settling Accounts Trilogy Page 11
