In At the Death sa-4

by Harry Turtledove

  "We sure hope so," Roosevelt answered. "Nothing is ever as sure as we wish it would be, but we hope so."

  "Do you know where he is? The wire didn't say."

  "I don't know, but I'm sure I can find out for you. Are you in your office?"

  "No, I'm at a telephone outside the committee meeting room. But I can get there in five minutes."

  "All right. Let me see what I can find out, and I'll call you back." The Assistant Secretary of War hung up.

  Flora ducked back into the meeting room to explain what had happened. The Senators and Representatives made sympathetic noises; a lot of them had fought in the last war, and several had sons at the front this time around. Captain Rickover gave her his best wishes from the witness stand.

  The telephone was ringing when she hurried into her office. Bertha stared in surprise. "Hello, Congresswoman! How funny you should walk in. Mr. Roosevelt is on the line for you."

  "I'll take it right here," Flora said, and grabbed the handset away from her secretary. "Hello, Franklin! Here I am."

  "Hello, Flora. Joshua is in the military hospital in Thayer, Missouri, which is right on the border with Arkansas."

  "Thayer, Missouri," Flora repeated. "Thank you." She hung up, then turned to Bertha. "Get me to Thayer, Missouri, as fast as humanly possible."

  That turned out to be a flight to St. Louis and a railroad journey down from the big city. Bertha squawked till she found out why Flora needed to make the trip. Then she shut up and arranged the tickets with her usual competence.

  Landing in St. Louis, Flora saw to her surprise that it had been hit almost as hard as Philadelphia. The war in the West never got the press things farther east did. But Confederate bombers still came up to strike St. Louis, and long-range C.S. rockets fired from Arkansas had hit the town hard.

  The train ride southwest from St. Louis to Thayer was…a train ride. Every few miles, a machine-gun nest-sometimes sandbagged, more often a concrete blockhouse-guarded the track. Here west of the Mississippi, spaces were wide and soldiers thin on the ground. Confederate raiders slipped north every now and again. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would have had something sharp to say about that…if it hadn't had so many other bigger things closer to home to worry about.

  Thayer had gone up as a railroad town. It had flourished, in a modest way, as a cross-border trading center-and then suffered when the war strangled the trade that kept it going. The military hospital on the edge of town put a little life back into the economy-but at what a cost!

  Joshua wasn't in his bed when Flora got there to see him. She feared something had gone wrong and he was back in the doctors' clutches, but the wounded man in the bed next to his said, "He's playing cards in the common room down at the end of the corridor, ma'am."

  "Oh," Flora said. "Thank you."

  When Flora walked in, Joshua held five cards in his right hand. Bandages swathed the left. He put down the cards to toss money into the pot. "See your five and raise you another five." Then he looked up from the poker game. "Oh, hi, Mom," he said, as if they were bumping into each other back home. "Be with you in a minute. I have to finish cleaning Spamhead's clock."

  "In your dreams, kid. I'll raise you five more." Another greenback fluttered down in the center of the table. The sergeant called Spamhead did have a square, very pink face. He seemed to take the nickname for granted. Flora wouldn't have wanted to be called anything like that.

  He won the pot, too-his straight beat Joshua's three tens. Joshua said, "Oh, darn!" All the other poker players laughed at him. What would he have said if his mother weren't there to hear it? Something spicier, no doubt. He stood up from the table and walked over to Flora. "I didn't think you'd get here so fast."

  "How are you?" Flora asked.

  Joshua raised his wounded hand. "It hurts," he said, as he might have said, It's sunny outside. "But not too bad. Plenty of guys here are worse off. Poor Spamhead lost a foot-he stepped on a mine. He's lucky it wasn't one of those bouncing ones-it would've blown his balls off… Sorry."

  "It's all right," Flora told him. "How else can you say that?" Spamhead got mutilated, and Joshua think's he's lucky. I can see why, but… "What does your doctor say?"

  "That it was a clean wound. That it's nothing much to flabble about. That-"

  "Easy for him to say," Flora broke in indignantly. "He didn't get hurt."

  "Yeah, I know. I thought of that, too," Joshua said. "But he's seen plenty worse, so it's not like he's wrong, either. I'll heal from this, and I'll heal pretty fast. The only thing I won't be able to do that I could before is give somebody the finger with my left hand."

  "Joshua!" Flora wasn't exactly shocked, but she was surprised.

  Her son grinned sheepishly, but not sheepishly enough-he'd done that on purpose. "I didn't even think of it," he said. "The medic who took me back to the aid station was the one who said it first."

  "Terrific. Now I know who to blame." Flora sounded as if she were about to haul that medic up before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. She was tempted to do it, too. She recognized abuse of power when she saw it, which didn't mean it failed to tempt her.

  Maybe Joshua saw the temptation gleaming in her eyes, for he said, "Somebody else would've come up with it if he hadn't. I would have myself, I bet-it's the way soldiers think."

  "Terrific. I don't want you thinking like that," Flora said. Joshua didn't answer. He just looked at her-looked down at her, to remind her he was taller, to remind her he was grown if not grown up, to remind her that he didn't care how she wanted him to think. He would think the way he chose, not the way she did. She squeezed him, careful of the gauze-shrouded hand. "I'm glad you're going to be all right. I'm gladder than I know how to tell you."

  "Sure, Mom." Joshua took it for granted. Flora didn't, couldn't, and knew she never would. She started to cry. "I'm fine, Mom," Joshua said, not understanding at all. He probably was. Flora knew too well that she wasn't.

  E ver feel like a piece on a chessboard, sir?" Lon Menefee asked.

  Sam Carsten nodded. "Now that you mention it, yes." The comparison wasn't one he would have made himself. Poker, pinochle, and checkers were more his speed. He knew how the different chessmen moved, but that was about it.

  But the Josephus Daniels sure was making a long diagonal glide across the board of the Atlantic right now. Something big was in the wind. The Navy Department had found a more urgent assignment for her than protecting the carriers that protected the battlewagons that bombarded the coast of Haiti while Marines and soldiers went ashore.

  "I'm sure not sorry to get out of range of land-based air," he said. "Even with our own flyboys overhead, I don't like that for hell."

  "Worked out all right," Menefee said.

  Sam had to nod. "Well, yeah. When the butternut bastards on the island saw they wouldn't be able to hold us, they couldn't give up fast enough."

  The exec laughed. "D'you blame 'em?"

  "Christ, no!" Sam said. "If they didn't surrender to us, the Haitians would've got 'em. They weren't up for that." Haiti had won its freedom from France in a bloody slave revolt that shocked the South a century and a half before. What the Negroes there now would have done to the Confederate soldiers they caught…Carsten's mouth tightened. "The blacks probably wouldn't have treated Featherston's fuckers any worse than they got treated themselves."

  "Yes, sir," Menefee said, "but that covers one hell of a lot of ground."

  "Mm." Sam let it go at that. Again, the exec wasn't wrong. The Confederates had set up one of their murder factories outside of Port-au-Prince. At first, they'd just killed Haitian soldiers and government officials. Then they'd started in on the educated people in the towns: folks who might give them trouble one of these days. Before long, all you needed was a black skin-and how many Haitians didn't have one of those?

  "They'll pay," Menefee predicted. "If we can arrest the guys who ran that camp in Texas, we can do the same with the sons of bitches in the Caribbean." />
  "I expect you're right," Sam said. A wave rolling down from the north slapped the Josephus Daniels' port side and made the destroyer escort roll a little. She was heading east across the ocean as fast as she could go, east and north. Musingly, Sam went on, "I wonder how long we'll stay out of range of land-based air."

  "You think U.S. troops will land on Ireland the way we did on Haiti, sir?" Menefee asked. "That'd be a rougher job. Logistics are worse, and the limeys aren't knocked flat the way the Confederates were."

  "It's one of the things I'm wondering about," Sam answered. "The other one is, what's the Kaiser going to do now? Yeah, England dropped a superbomb on Hamburg, but how many more does Churchill have? You don't want to piss the Germans off, because whatever you go and do to them, they'll do to you doubled and redoubled." He wasn't a great bridge player, either, but he could talk the lingo.

  "Beats me," Menefee said. "I expect we'll find out before too long."

  The Josephus Daniels remained part of the flotilla that had landed troops on Haiti. Sam felt a certain amount of satisfaction because the destroyer escort wasn't the slowest ship in it-the baby flattops were. He wouldn't have done without them for the world; if he really was sailing against the British Isles, he wanted all the air cover he could get. In fact, he wanted even more air cover than that.

  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.

  T his 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?"