In At the Death sa-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Defeated Confederate soldiers shook his hand and embraced him. Cincinnatus watched them with a little sympathy-but not much. "We done licked 'em here," he said to Hal Williamson. "Now we got to finish it everywhere else."

  XII

  D id taking your own airplanes with you mean a flotilla could operate close to enemy-held land? It hadn't at the start of the war, as Sam Carsten remembered too well. Land-based C.S. airplanes badly damaged the Remembrance when her bombers struck at Charleston.

  Well, all kinds of things had changed since then. Charleston was no more-one bomb from a (land-based) airplane had seen to that. And the fleet approaching Haiti had not one airplane carrier but half a dozen. Only one of those was a fleet carrier, newer and faster and able to carry more airplanes than the Remembrance had. The others were smaller, and three of them slower. Still, together they carried close to three hundred airplanes. If that thought wasn't enough to give the Confederate defenders on the western part of the island of Hispaniola nightmares, Sam didn't know what would be.

  He had a few nightmares of his own. The Confederates still had airplanes on Haiti, in the Bahamas, and in Cuba. They had submersibles and torpedo boats. They had a sizable garrison to hold Haiti down and to keep the USA from using the Negro nation as a base against them in the Caribbean. They had…

  "Sir, they have troubles, lots of them," Lon Menefee said when Sam flabbled out loud. "All those colored folks on these islands hate Jake Featherston like rat poison. Why, Cuba-"

  "I know about Cuba," Sam broke in. "The Josephus Daniels ran guns in there a couple of years ago, to give the rebels a hand."

  "Well, there you go, then." The new exec damn near dripped confidence. "Besides, they may have airplanes, but have they got fuel? We've been pounding their dumps and hitting the shipping from the mainland. We can do this. I honest to God think we can, sir."

  "Hey, here's hoping you're right," Carsten said. It wasn't just that Menefee was a kid, because he was plenty old enough to have served through the whole war. But he wasn't the Old Man. The Josephus Daniels was Sam's responsibility. If anything went wrong, the blame landed squarely on him. Command made you the loneliest, most worried man in the world-or at least on your ship. The poor son of a bitch in charge of the destroyer half a mile away knew what you were going through, though. So did the sub skipper who was trying to send you to the bottom.

  Bombers and covering fighters roared off the carriers' flight decks. Squadron after squadron buzzed off toward the southwest, toward Cap-Haпtien and Port-au-Prince. More fighters flew combat air patrol above the fleet.

  Battleships' guns roared. The battlewagons didn't rule the fleet the way they had when Sam enlisted back before the Great War started. But their big guns still reached far enough and packed enough punch to make them great for shore bombardment.

  Sam's gaze went forward, to one of the Josephus Daniels' pair of four-inch guns. His smile was fond but wry. That gun could shoot at enemy aircraft from longer range than the twin 40mms that had sprouted like mushrooms everywhere there was free space on the deck. For shore bombardment…Well, you'd better be hitting some place where the bad guys couldn't hit back.

  Slow, squat, ungainly landing craft surged forward. The troops on them were going to take Haiti away from the Confederate States. If everything went right they were, anyhow. If the operation went south, every skipper in the fleet and every brass hat up to and including the Secretary of the Navy would testify under oath before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

  "Anything?" Sam asked Thad Walters.

  The Y-ranging officer shook his head. "I've got our aircraft on the screen, sir, but I'm not picking up any bandits."

  "I'll be damned." Sam glanced over to Lon Menefee. "Maybe you're right. Maybe the butternut bastards are further gone than I thought."

  "Sure hope so," Menefee said. "Tell you one thing: when the Marines and the Army guys go ashore, their venereal rate's gonna climb like one of those fighters. Lots of infected people in Haiti, and the gals there'll be mighty glad to see 'em."

  "Well, with the spiffy new pills and shots we've got, it's not as bad as it used to be. Still not good," Sam added hastily-you couldn't sound complacent about VD. The idea of lying down with a colored woman didn't drive him wild. But if you were a horny kid and there were no white gals for three islands around, you'd take whatever you could get. He remembered some of his own visits to brothels full of Chinese girls in Honolulu during the last war.

  A yeoman came up onto the bridge. "Carriers report airplanes heading our way from Cuba, sir."

  "Thanks, van Duyk," Sam said. Carriers had stronger Y-ranging sets than his ship did.

  The men already stood at battle stations. Sam passed the word that the enemy was on the way. After he stepped back from the PA microphone, Lon Menefee said, "Well, we're not first on their list, anyhow."

  He was bound to be right about that. The Confederates would want to hit airplane carriers and battlewagons and, he supposed, landing craft before they bothered with a lowly destroyer escort. All the same, Sam said, "If we end up on their plate, they won't send us back to the kitchen. And we don't want to get loose and sloppy, either."

  "You've got that straight, sir," Menefee said at once.

  "That's what she said," Sam answered, and the exec snorted. Overhead, some of the fighters from the CAP streaked off toward the west. Was that a good idea? If more enemy aircraft came at the fleet from another direction, from the Bahamas or from Haiti itself, they might catch the ships with their pants down.

  These days, battles mostly happened out of sight of one side's fleet or the other's. This one might start out of sight of both. And that record would be hard to top, unless one of these days you got a fight something like the Battle of the Three Navies back in Great War days.

  "I have bandits on the screen, sir," Lieutenant Walters reported. "Bearing 250, approaching…well, pretty fast. Looks like they're about ten minutes out. Our boys are on 'em."

  "Thanks, Thad," Sam said, and passed the word to the crew. Then he asked, "Any sign of bandits from some different direction?"

  Walters checked his screens before answering, "No, sir."

  Sam grunted. That sounded more like what he'd hoped than what he'd expected. Echoing his thoughts, Lon Menefee said, "The Confederates really must be at the end of their tether."

  "Well, maybe they are. Who woulda thunk it?" Sam called down a speaking tube to the hydrophone station in the bowels of the ship: "Hear anything, Bevacqua?"

  "Not a thing, sir," the CPO replied. "Nothin' but our screw and the ones from the rest of the fleet. Jack diddly from the pings when I send 'em out."

  "All right. Thanks. Sing out if you do, remember."

  "Better believe it, sir," Bevacqua said. "It's my ass, too, you know."

  Hearing that float out of the speaking tube, Menefee raised an eyebrow. It didn't faze Sam a bit. "Is he wrong?" he asked. The exec shook his head.

  Another destroyer escort off to the west started firing. A moment later, so did the Josephus Daniels. "They're going after the carriers," Sam said, watching the Confederate airplanes.

  "Wouldn't you?" Menefee asked.

  "Maybe. But if I could tear up the landing craft, I might want to do that first. This is about Haiti, after all," Sam said. If it was about the island any more. For all he knew, it might have been about hurting the United States as much as the Confederacy could, and nothing more than that. On such a scale, carriers were likely to count more than landing boats.

  But not many C.S. airplanes came overhead. Sam didn't know how many had set out from Cuba, but he would have bet a lot of them never made it this far. The CAP was doing its job.

  The yeoman hurried back up to the bridge. "Our men are ashore, sir," he said. Sam sent the news out over the loudspeakers. The crew cheered and whooped. Van Duyk didn't go away. "There's more news, sir," he added in quieter tones.

  "What's up?" Apprehension gusted along Sam's spine.

  "Hamburg's g
one, sir," van Duyk answered. "One of those bombs."

  "Jesus!" Sam said. Churchill hadn't been kidding, then. England had caught up with the Germans, or at least come close enough to wreck a city. "What does the Kaiser say?"

  "Nothing yet, sir," van Duyk said. "But I sure wouldn't want to be living in London right now."

  "Me, neither," Sam agreed. "Or anywhere else a German bomber could get to." Or a British bomber…Did the limeys have aircraft that could lug what had to be a heavy bomb across the Atlantic to New York City? Did they have bombers that could fly across the Atlantic almost empty and pick up their superbombs in the CSA? That would be easier-if the Confederates had any new superbombs to pick up. All kinds of unpleasant possibilities…

  And he couldn't do a goddamn thing about any of them. All he could do was clap his hands when the forward four-inch gun turned a C.S. bomber into a smear of smoke and flame in the sky.

  Abruptly, it was over, at least around the Josephus Daniels. He couldn't spot any more Confederate airplanes above the ship. The gunners went on shooting awhile longer. They didn't believe in taking chances.

  "Boy," Lon Menefee said. "I hope the guys going ashore have as easy a time as we did."

  "Yeah, me, too," Sam said. "You would've thought the Confederates could throw more at us."

  "A year ago, they could have," the exec said. "Two years ago, they were throwing the goddamn kitchen sink."

  Carsten nodded. For the first year of the war, things had looked mighty black. Pittsburgh said the CSA wouldn't be able to conquer the USA. Till then, even that was up in the air. If the Confederates had taken it and gone on toward Philadelphia-But they hadn't. They couldn't. And afterwards it became clear they'd thrown too much into that attack, and didn't have enough left to defend with.

  That was afterwards, though. At the time, no one had any idea whether they would fall short. What looked inevitable after the fact often seemed anything but while shells were flying and people were dying. By how much did the Confederates fall short in Pittsburgh? Sam didn't know, and he wasn't sure anyone else did. All the same, he would have bet the answer was on the order of only a little bit.

  Lon Menefee's thoughts ran in a different direction: "Wonder how many smokes our guys'll find alive on Haiti."

  "Hadn't worried about that." Sam bared his teeth in what was anything but a smile. "They would've had guns-they were a country before the butternut bastards jumped on 'em. I hope they gave Featherston's fuckers a good big dose of trouble." No, he didn't particularly love Negroes, but he didn't want to see them dead, either-especially if they were making the Confederates sweat.

  C assius hadn't thought patrolling Madison, Georgia, and keeping white folks in line could get dull, but it did. Anything you did over and over got dull. Well, he didn't suppose screwing would, but he hadn't done enough of that to count as "over and over." A few hasty grapples with women who'd been part of Gracchus' band at one time or another were the sum of his experience.

  He knew just enough to know he wanted to know more.

  And he knew enough to be worried about whether he'd ever get the chance for it. One muggy evening at supper, he asked Gracchus, "Where we gonna find us some nice gals to marry?"

  The guerrilla chief looked down at his mess kit, as if hoping one would turn up there. But he had the same roasted pork ribs and sweet potatoes and green beans as Cassius-only those, and nothing more. "Beats me. Beats the shit outa me," he said heavily. "Most of the niggers left alive down here is the ones in the bands. Ain't a hell of a lot of gals who wanted to pick up a Tredegar."

  "Don't I know it! Sometimes I gets so horny, can't hardly stand it," Cassius said. "Plenty of white women left with no husbands on account of the war…"

  "Good fuckin' luck! Good fuckin' luck!" Gracchus said. "Yeah, plenty o' white widows. An' you know what else? They's sorry their husbands is dead. An' they's even sorrier we ain't."

  Cassius wished he thought the older man were wrong. Unfortunately, he didn't. A shortage of black women and a shortage of white men should have had an obvious solution. Before the war, during the war, saying that where any white could hear him would have got him a one-way ticket to the graveyard. Would things be any different once the CSA finally threw in the sponge? Fat chance, he thought.

  "Be a few gals don't care what color man they got, long as they got one," Gracchus predicted. "A few-the ones who git horny the same way a guy does. But even supposin' you find one, where you gonna set up housekeepin' wid her? Any place you try, how long 'fore the neighbors burn your house down, likely with the both of you in it?"

  "The Yankees-" Cassius began.

  Gracchus shook his head. "Yankees can't be everywhere. 'Sides, most of 'em don't want us messin' wid no white women, neither. They kin use us, yeah. But they ain't gonna stick their necks out fo' us when they don't got to, and you kin bet your ass on dat. Hell, you mess wid a white woman, you is bettin' your sorry ass on dat."

  "Shit," Cassius said, again not because he thought Gracchus was wrong but because he didn't. "Maybe we go up to the USA, then. Got to be some colored gals there who'd give us the time o' day."

  "Might not be too bad, if the Yankees let us," Gracchus allowed. "But we ain't U.S. citizens any more'n we's Confederate citizens. We don't belong nowhere. You don't believe me, go ask a white man."

  Once more, he made more sense than Cassius wished he did. Every time you tried to get around what Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party had done to Negroes in the Confederate States, you banged your head into a stone wall instead.

  The next morning, a couple of Confederate privates and a corporal came up to Cassius as he was on patrol. None of them was carrying a weapon. When they saw him, they all raised their hands and stood very still. "Don't shoot, pal," the corporal said. "We're just lookin' for somebody to surrender to, that's all. Reckon you're it."

  Had they worn the camouflage of the Freedom Party Guards, Cassius would have been tempted to plug them no matter how they tried to sweet-talk him. Who could guess what guards were doing when they weren't fighting the Yankees? Cassius could, for one. Maybe they were closing Negroes up behind barbed wire. Or maybe they were shoving them into the hell-bound trains from which nobody came back. It wasn't by accident that Freedom Party Guards had a tough time giving themselves up to the U.S. Army's new black auxiliaries.

  But these three were just in ordinary butternut. If they'd gone out of the way to give Negroes a hard time, it didn't show. And the noncom hadn't been dumb enough to call Cassius boy. He gestured with his rifle. "Y'all come with me. POW camp's right outside of town. You don't give nobody trouble, you'll be all right."

  "Had enough trouble," the corporal said, and both privates nodded. The two-striper went on, "Me, I got a Purple Heart and two oak-leaf clusters. One more wound and I'm a goddamn colander. Enough is enough. Damnyankees wouldn't be here in the middle of Georgia if we weren't licked."

  "Damn right." If the Yankees weren't here, Cassius probably wouldn't have been, either. Sooner or later, the militias and the Mexicans would have squashed Gracchus' band. "Get movin'. Keep your hands high, and don't git close enough to make me jumpy, or you be mighty sorry."

  "You got the piece," the corporal said. "You call the shots."

  As they tramped through Madison, the other two soldiers opened up a little. One was from Mississippi, the other from Arkansas. They'd had enough of the war; they were heading home. Cassius thought they were nuts to try to get through two states full of U.S. soldiers, but they weren't the first men to tell him a story like that. As Confederate armies came apart at the seams, as men thought of themselves ahead of their country once more, the whole thrashing corpse of the CSA seemed full of people in uniform on the move. Some were trying to get somewhere, like these. Others were trying to get away either from Confederates who didn't want them deserting or from U.S. soldiers who had reason to want to catch them.

  "Never reckoned we'd get whupped," the corporal said mournfully. "First time I got shot was in Ohio. Sec
ond time was in Pennsylvania. Third time was in Tennessee, just outside of Chattanooga. Things weren't going so good by then."

  "I suppose I can see how you'd say that," Cassius allowed. "But if you was a colored fella here in Georgia, things never went good. Ain't many of us left alive."

  "We were up at the front, fighting the damnyankees. We didn't know nothin' about none o' that," the private from Arkansas said quickly. Too quickly? Cassius wasn't sure. He did know the U.S. guards at the POW camp questioned new prisoners about what they'd done before they got caught. Every so often, they arrested somebody and took him away for more grilling.

  "Nabbed yourself some more of these sorry sacks of shit, did you?" a U.S. sergeant in Madison called to Cassius, and gave him a thumbs-up. Cassius waved back.

  "He's got no cause to call us that," the C.S. corporal said. "I wouldn't call him that if I went and captured him-and I got me a few damnyankees during the war."

  The private from Mississippi nodded. "You didn't cuss us when you caught us," he said to Cassius. "Your mama must've learned you manners."

  "She did." Cassius' eyes suddenly stung. "And then you goddamn ofays went an' shipped her to a camp, an' my pa, an' my sis, too, an' I reckon they's all dead now."

  None of the Confederate soldiers said much after that, which was smart of them. And yet the Mississippian had a point of sorts. Cassius hadn't cursed the Confederates when they gave themselves up to them. Some of that was because swear words weren't enough to let him tell them what he thought of them. But some of it was because Confederate whites and Confederate blacks understood one another in ways U.S. whites never would. They might not like one another-hell, they might and often did hate one another. But they and their ancestors had mostly lived side by side for hundreds of years. Each knew how the other ticked.

  "Score three for the good guys!" a guard outside the POW compound called as Cassius brought the captives up to the entrance.