“You can still get word through.” That was a statement, not a question. Cincinnatus refused to believe anything different.
“What if I kin?” Lucullus didn’t deny it. He just spread his hands, pale palms up. “Ain’t gonna do me a hell of a lot of good. Who’s gonna pay any mind to a nigger all shut up like he was in jail? They gonna haul us off to them camps nobody never comes out of.”
That had a chilling feel of probability to Cincinnatus. Even so, he gave Lucullus the best answer he could: “What about Luther Bliss?” He hated the man, hated and feared him, but Bliss’ remained a name to conjure with. He hoped hearing it would at least snap Lucullus out of his funk and make him start thinking straight again.
And it worked. Lucullus very visibly gathered himself. “Mebbe,” he said. “But only mebbe, dammit. Freedom Party fellas is hunting Bliss right now like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Hell I wouldn’t,” Cincinnatus said. “If they know he’s around, they’ll want him dead. He’s too dangerous for them to leave him breathin’. Ain’t that all the more reason for you to git back in touch with him?”
“Mebbe,” Lucullus said again. “What kin he do, though? They gots police an’ them damn stalwarts all around. Anytime they wants to come in an’ start gettin’ rid of us…”
“We got guns. You got guns. You ain’t gonna tell me you ain’t got guns, ’cause I know you lie if you do,” Cincinnatus said. “They come in like that, they be sorry.”
“Oh, yeah.” Lucullus’ jowls wobbled as he nodded. “They be sorry. But we be sorrier. Any kind o’ fight like that, we loses. Guns we got is enough to make them fuckers think twice. Ain’t enough to stop ’em. Cain’t be, and you got to know that, too. They uses barrels, we ain’t got nothin’ ’cept Featherston Fizzes against ’em. They sends in Asskickers to bomb us flat, we ain’t even got that. We kin hurt ’em. They kin fuckin’ kill us, an’ I reckon they is lookin’ fo’ the excuse to do it.”
Cincinnatus grunted. Lucullus had to be right. Against the massed power of the CSA, the local Negroes would lose. And the Confederate authorities might well be looking for an excuse to move in and wipe them out. Which meant… “You got to git hold o’ Bliss,” Cincinnatus said again.
“What good it do me?” Lucullus asked sourly. “I done told you-”
“Yeah, you told me. But so what?” Cincinnatus said, and Lucullus stared at him. The barbecue cook usually dominated between them. Not now. Cincinnatus went on, “We’re all shut up in here. Bad things start happenin’ out past the wire, how could we have much to do with ’em? But you kin get hold of Luther Bliss, and that son of a bitch got other ofays who’ll do what he tell ’em to.”
Lucullus kept right on staring, but now in a new way. “Mebbe,” he said once more. This time, he didn’t seem to mean, You’re crazy. Even so, he warned, “Luther Bliss don’t care nothin’ about niggers just ’cause they’s niggers.”
“Shit, I know that. Luther Bliss hates everybody under the sun,” Cincinnatus said, startling a laugh out of Lucullus. “But the people Luther Bliss hates most are Freedom Party men and the Confederates who run things. We hate them people, too, so we’s handy for him.”
“Well, yeah, but the people he hates next most is Reds,” Lucullus said. “You got to remember, that don’t help me none.”
“You got any better ideas?” Cincinnatus demanded, and then, “You got any ideas at all?”
Lucullus glared at him. If anything, that relieved Cincinnatus, who didn’t like seeing the younger man paralyzed. Cincinnatus would have done almost anything to get Lucullus’ wits working again; enraging him seemed a small price to pay. Lucullus said, “I kin git hold o’ him. He kin do dat shit, no doubt about it. But how much good it gonna do us?”
“What do you mean?” Cincinnatus asked.
“They got the wire around us. We is in here. Whatever they wants to do with us-whatever they wants to do to us-they got us where they wants us. How we get out? How we get away?”
Cincinnatus laughed at him. “They gonna let us out. They gonna let a lot of us out, anyways.” Lucullus’ jaw dropped. Cincinnatus drove the point home: “Who’s gonna do their nigger work for ’em if they don’t? Long as they need that, we ain’t cooped up in here all the time.”
“You hope we ain’t,” Lucullus said, but a little spirit came back into his voice.
“Talk to Luther Bliss,” Cincinnatus repeated. “Hell, they let me out for anything, I’ll talk to him.”
“Like he listen to you,” Lucullus said scornfully. “You ain’t got no guns. You ain’t got no people who kin do stuff. I tells you somethin’-you git outa the barbed wire, you try an’ get your black ass back to the USA. Ain’t far-jus’ over de river.”
“Might as well be over the moon right now,” Cincinnatus said with a bitter laugh. “Confederate soldiers holdin’ that part of Ohio. By what I hear, they’re worse on colored folks than the Freedom Party boys are here. They reckon they’re United States colored folks, an’ so they got to be the enemy.” Cincinnatus thought that was a pretty good bet, too. He added, “ ’Sides, I ain’t leavin’ without my pa.”
“You is the stubbornest nigger ever hatched,” Lucullus said. “Onliest thing that hard head good for nowadays is gittin’ you killed.” He made shooing motions with his hands. “Go on. Git. I don’t want you ’round no mo’.”
Cincinnatus didn’t want to be in the barbecue place anymore. He didn’t want to be in Covington anymore. He didn’t want to be in Kentucky at all anymore. The trouble was, nobody else gave a damn what he wanted or didn’t want.
Cane tapping the ground ahead of him, he walked out for a better look at what the whites in Covington had done. He’d seen more formidable assemblages of barbed wire when he was driving trucks in the last war, but those had been made to hold out soldiers, not to hold in civilians. For that, what the cops and the stalwarts had run up would do fine.
Normally, making a fence out of barbed wire would have been nigger work. Whites had done it here, though. That worried Cincinnatus. If whites decided they could do nigger work, what reason would they have to keep any Negroes around in the CSA?
A swagbellied cop with a submachine gun strolled along outside the fence. He spat a brown stream of tobacco juice onto the sidewalk. The sun sparkled from the enameled Freedom Party pin on his lapel. Hadn’t Jake Featherston climbed to power by going on and on about how whites were better than blacks? How could they be better than blacks if they got rid of all the blacks? Then they would have to work things out among themselves. Race wouldn’t trump class anymore, the way it always had in the Confederacy.
That fat policeman spat again. His jaw worked as he shifted the chaw from one cheek to the other. Did he care about such details? Did the countless others like him care? Cincinnatus couldn’t make himself believe it. They’d get rid of Negroes first and worry about what happened after that later on.
Cincinnatus suddenly felt as trapped as Lucullus did. Up till now, the rumors about what the Confederates were doing to Negroes farther south in the CSA, things he’d heard at Lucullus’s place and the Brass Monkey and in other saloons, had seemed too strange, too ridiculous, to worry him. Now he looked out at the rest of Covington through barbed wire. It wasn’t even rusty yet; sunshine sparkled off the sharp points of the teeth. He couldn’t get out past it, not unless that cop and his pals let him. And they could reach into the colored district whenever they pleased.
He didn’t like the combination, not even a little bit. Except for trying to escape with his father as soon as he got even a halfway decent chance, though, he didn’t know what he could do about it.
I need a rifle, he thought. Reckon I can get one from Lucullus. They come after me, they gonna pay for everything they get.
Dead night again, and the Josephus Daniels creeping along through the darkness. Sam Carsten peered out at the black water ahead as if he could see the mines floating in it. He couldn’t, and he knew as much. He had to hope the destroyer escort had a goo
d chart of these waters, and that she could dodge the mines. If she couldn’t… Some of them were packed with enough TNT to blow a ship high enough out of the water to show her keel to anybody who happened to be watching. Out on the open sea, he didn’t worry much about mines. Here in the narrow waters of Chesapeake Bay, he couldn’t help it.
At the wheel, Pat Cooley seemed the picture of calm. “We’re just about through the worst of it, sir,” he said.
“Glad to hear it,” Sam said. “If we go sky-high in the next couple of minutes, I’m going to remind you you said that.”
The exec chuckled. “Oh, I expect I’ll remember it myself.”
Sam set a hand on his shoulder. The kid was all right-not a nerve in his body, or none that showed. And he was a married man, too, which made it harder for him. “Family all right?” Carsten asked.
“Oh, yes, sir,” Cooley answered. “Jane’s over the chicken pox, and Sally didn’t catch ’em.” His wife had worried when his daughter came down with the ailment, because she didn’t remember having it as a little girl. If she hadn’t got chicken pox by now, though, she must have had them then, because anybody who could catch them damn well would.
Another twenty minutes crawled by in a day or two. The soft throb of the engines came up through Sam’s shoes. The sound, the feel, were as important as his own pulse. If they stopped, the ship was in mortal peril. As things were… “I think we’re out of it now,” Sam said.
Cooley nodded. “I do believe you’re right-except for the little bastards that came off their chains and started drifting.” He paused. “And unless one side or the other laid some mines nobody knows about that aren’t on our charts.”
“You’re full of cheerful thoughts today, aren’t you?” Sam said. Pat Cooley just grinned. Either or both of those things was perfectly possible, and both men knew it too well. Those weren’t the only nasty possibilities, either, and Sam also knew that only too well. He spoke into a voice tube: “You there, Bevacqua?”
“Not me, Skip,” came the voice from the other end. “I been asleep the last couple weeks.” A snore floated out of the tube.
“Yeah, well, keep your ears open while you’re snoozing. This is good submarine country,” Sam said.
“Will do, Skip,” Vince Bevacqua said. The petty officer was the best hydrophone man the Josephus Daniels carried, which was why he was on duty now. Back during the Great War, hydrophones had been as near worthless as made no difference. The state of the art had come a long way since then. Now hydrophones shot out bursts of sound waves and listened for echoes-it was almost like Y-ranging underwater. It gave ships like this one a real chance when they went after subs.
“Not the best submarine country,” Cooley observed. “Water’s pretty shallow.”
“Well, sure, Pat, but that’s not quite what I meant,” Sam said. “It’s good sub country because we’ve just made it past the minefields. When some people get through something like that, they go, ‘Whew!’ and forget they’re not all the way out of the woods. They get careless, let their guard down. And that’s when the bastards on the other side drop the hammer on them.”
The bridge was dark. Showing a light in crowded, contested waters like these was the fastest way Sam could think of to get the hammer dropped on him. In the gloom, he watched the exec swing toward him, start to say something, and then think twice. After a few seconds, Cooley tried again: “That’s… pretty sensible, sir.”
He sounded amazed, or at least bemused. Carsten chuckled under his breath. “You live and learn,” he told the younger man. “You’ve got an Academy ring. You got your learning all boiled down and served up to you, and that’s great. It gives you a hell of a head start. By the time you get to my age, you’ll be a four-striper, or more likely an admiral. I’ve had to soak all this stuff up the hard way-but I’ve had a lot longer to do it than you have.”
Again, Pat Cooley started to answer. Again, he checked himself so he could pick his words with care. Slowly, he said, “Sir, I don’t think that’s the kind of thing they teach you at Annapolis. I think it’s the kind of thing you do learn with experience-if you ever learn it at all. You’re-not what I expected when they told me I’d serve under a mustang.”
“No, eh?” Instead of chuckling, Sam laughed out loud now. “Sorry to disappoint you. My knuckles don’t drag on the deck-not most of the time, anyway. I don’t dribble tobacco juice down my front, and I don’t spend all my time with CPOs.” A lot of mustangs did hang around with ratings as much as they could: those were still the men they found most like themselves. Sam had been warned against that when he got promoted. He suspected every mustang did. A lot of them, though, didn’t listen to the warning. He had.
“Sir, you’re doing your best to embarrass me,” Cooley said after one more longish pause. “Your best is pretty good, too.” He laughed as Sam had. Unlike Sam, though, he sounded distinctly uneasy when he did it.
A tinny ghost, Vince Bevacqua’s voice floated out of the mouth of the tube: “Skipper, I’ve got a contact. Something’s moving down there-depth about seventy, range half a mile, bearing 085.”
“Seventy,” Sam echoed thoughtfully. That was below periscope depth. If the hydrophone man had spotted a submersible, the boat didn’t know the Josephus Daniels was in the neighborhood-unless it had spotted the destroyer escort and submerged before Bevacqua realized it was there. Sam found that unlikely. He knew how good the petty officer was… even if he didn’t hang around with him. “Change course to 085, Mr. Cooley,” he said, switching to business.
“I am changing course to 085, sir-aye aye,” the exec replied.
Sam tapped a waiting sailor on the shoulder. “Tell the depth-charge crews to be ready at my order.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The sailor dashed away. He didn’t care whether Sam was a mustang. To a kid like him, the Old Man was the Old Man, regardless of anything. And if the Old Man happened to be well on the way toward being an old man-that still didn’t matter much.
“I’ll be damned if he thinks we’re anywhere around, sir,” Bevacqua said, and then, “Whoops-take it back. He’s heard us. He’s picking up speed and heading for the surface.”
“Let’s get him,” Sam said. “Tell me when, and I’ll pass it on to the guys who toss ash cans.”
“Will do, Skipper.” Bevacqua waited maybe fifteen seconds, then said, “Now!”
“Launch depth charges!” Sam shouted through the PA system-no need to keep quiet anymore.
During the Great War, ash cans had rolled off over the stern. The state of the art was better now. Two projectors flung depth charges well ahead of the ship. The charges arced through the air and splashed into the ocean.
“All engines reverse!” Cooley said. Sam nodded. Depth charges bursting in shallow water could blow the bow off the ship that had launched them. Carsten recalled the pathetic signal he’d heard about from a destroyer escort that had had that misfortune befall her: I HAVE BUSTED MYSELF. If it happened to him, he’d be busted, too, probably all the way to seaman second class.
Even though the Josephus Daniels had backed engines, the ash cans did their damnedest to lift her out of the water. Sam felt as if somebody’d whacked him on the soles of his feet with a board. Water rose and then splashed back into the sea. More bursts roiled the Atlantic.
Somebody at the bow whooped: “She’s coming up!”
“Searchlights!” Sam barked, and the night lit up. He knew the chance he was taking. If C.S. planes spotted him before he settled the sub, he was in a world of trouble. Have to settle it quick, then, he thought.
Men spilled out of the damaged submersible’s conning tower and ran for the cannon on the deck. It was only a three-inch gun, but Carsten’s destroyer escort wasn’t exactly a battlewagon. If that gun hit, it could hurt.
“Let ’em have it!” Sam yelled. The forward gun spoke in a voice like an angry god’s. The antiaircraft cannon at the bow started barking, too. They were more than good enough to tear up an unarmored target like a sub. The e
nemy got off one shot, which went wild. Then men on that deck started dropping as if a harvester were rumbling down it.
“White flag!” Three people shouted the same thing at the same time.
“Cease fire!” Sam yelled through the intercom, and then, “If they make a move toward that gun, blow ’em all to hell!” He turned away from the mike and spoke to Cooley: “Approach and take survivors.”
“Aye aye, sir,” the exec said. He had a different worry: “I hope to hell she’s not one of our boats.”
“Gurk!” Sam said. That hadn’t even crossed his mind. It wasn’t impossible in these waters, one more thing he knew too well. They wouldn’t just bust him for that. They’d boot him out of the Navy.
As the Josephus Daniels drew closer, he breathed again. The shape of the conning tower and the lines of the hull were different from those of U.S. boats. And the sailors tumbling into life rafts wore dark gray tunics and trousers. They were Confederates, all right.
A last couple of men popped out of the hatch atop the conning tower. The submersible startled rapidly settling down into the sea. They opened the scuttling cocks, Sam realized. He swore, but halfheartedly. In their place, he would have done the same thing.
“Watching them will be fun,” Cooley said. “We haven’t got a brig. Even if we did, it wouldn’t hold that many.”
“We’ll keep them up on deck, where the machine guns will bear,” Sam answered. “I don’t see how we can make our cruise with them along, though. I’ll wireless for instructions.”
As soon as the prisoners were aboard, he doused the searchlight. The pharmacist’s mate did what he could for the wounded. Sam went down to the deck and called for the enemy skipper. “Here I am, sir,” a glum-sounding man said. “Lieutenant Reed Talcott, at your service. I don’t thank you for wrecking us, but I do for picking us up.” He tipped a greasy cap he’d somehow kept on his head.
“Part of the game, Lieutenant,” Sam said, and gave his own name. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been sunk, too.”
“Not one damn bit,” Talcott said promptly.
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