The rest of the men in the barracks laughed. “He got you, Jonah,” somebody said. “He got you good.”
By the dull flush rising on Gurney’s blunt features, he already knew that. He liked ragging on other people. Oh, sure-he liked that fine. It wasn’t so much fun when somebody turned the tables on him. If Rodriguez had had a dime for everybody like that he’d met, he would have been one of the richest men in Sonora, certainly too rich to be a camp guard.
Scowling, Gurney said, “You’re asshole buddies with the big cheese in the camp, ain’t you?”
“We were in the war together,” Rodriguez answered with a shrug. Because he’d practiced stripping and assembling the submachine gun so much, he could let his hands do it while he kept an eye on the other guard. “I dunno about asshole buddies. I don’t think I like the sound of that too much.” He did like the sound with which a full magazine went into place: a satisfying click.
Jonah Gurney didn’t seem to notice. “No?” he said. “What you aim to do about it, greaser?”
One step up from niggers-that was how Sonorans and Chihuahuans seemed to a lot of whites in the CSA. Another, smaller, click from Rodriguez’s gun: the safety coming off. Casually, calmly, Rodriguez said, “What do I aim to do? I aim to blow your fucking head off, pendejo.” All at once, the barrel of the gun pointed straight at Gurney’s nose. Rodriguez’s finger twitched on the trigger.
That wasn’t what shook the Alabaman. The smile on his face was. Gurney’s own face went pale as a plate of grits. He tried a smile of his own. The only word that suited it was ghastly. “Hey,” he said with lips and tongue that suddenly seemed numb, “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it, honest to God I didn’t.”
“Kiss my ass,” Rodriguez said succinctly.
“Put down the piece, Rodriguez.” That was Troop Leader Porter, the noncom in charge of Rodriguez’s squad. “There ain’t gonna be any killing here today.”
“Thank you, Troop Leader,” Jonah Gurney gabbled. “You see what that crazy Mexican fucker was gonna do to me? Ought to take him out and-”
“Shut up.” Porter’s voice was flat and hard. “Pack up your shit and get the hell out of here. You’re reassigned, as of now. Maybe some other camp’ll take you. I don’t know. I don’t care. But you’re not gonna stay at Camp Determination another minute, and you can take that to the bank. You’re a troublemaking son of a bitch, and we’ve got no need for people like you. Get out. Fuck off.”
Gurney stared at him as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “You’re gonna back a goddamn dago against a white man?”
“I’m going to back a guard who pulls his weight against a slacker who does as little as he can to get by,” Porter said. “I wouldn’t have been real sorry to see you dead, Gurney, if it wasn’t for the paperwork I’d have to fill out to make sure Rodriguez didn’t end up in hot water over your worthless carcass.”
Gurney plainly thought himself as much abandoned and thrown over the side for no good reason as the original Jonah. He gestured toward the rest of the guards in the barracks, a wave full of angry disbelief. “Come on, y’all!” he cried. “You gonna let him get away with that? You gonna let him screw over a white man for the sake of a goddamn Mexican?” Disbelief stretched his voice high and shrill.
For close to a minute, nobody said anything. Nobody seemed to want to look at Gurney, or at Rodriguez, or at Troop Leader Porter. For that matter, nobody seemed to want to look at anybody else. Finally, somebody behind Gurney said, “He’s got the stripes, Jonah. Reckon that gives him the right.”
“Like hell it does!” Jonah Gurney shouted furiously. “We’re white men! That gives us the right. That’s what this here country’s all about, ain’t it? That’s what the Freedom Party’s all about, ain’t it?”
Again, silence stretched. This time, Porter broke it. “Go on, Jonah,” he said, his voice surprisingly gentle. “Go on now, and don’t get yourself any deeper in Dutch. I’m gonna make like I didn’t hear any of what you said just now. A man’s gotta blow off steam. I know that. But you don’t want me to have to tell the commandant you were trying to make a mutiny, now do you?”
When Rodriguez was in the Army, they’d read out the Articles of War every so often. Making a mutiny was one of the things they could shoot you or hang you for. Even mentioning it put a chill in the hot, muggy air. Rodriguez didn’t know if camp guards came under the same military law as soldiers, but he would have bet they did.
The ominous words seemed to get home to Gurney, too. “This ain’t right, dammit,” he muttered. “My Congressman’s gonna hear about it, so help me God he is.” But he might have shrunk, standing there in plain sight. He filled his gray canvas duffel bag, slung it over his shoulder, and trudged out of the barracks.
Rodriguez nodded to Porter. “Thank you,” he said softly.
“I didn’t do it for you,” the noncom answered.
“Thank you anyway,” Rodriguez said.
His gratitude only embarrassed the troop leader. “I didn’t do it for you, dammit,” he repeated. “I did it for all of us. When we’re in there with the coons, we’ve got to know we can trust each other to guard our backs. Anybody who doesn’t care to help another man who wears the same uniform no matter what, I don’t want that son of a bitch here. I can’t trust him. Nobody can trust him.” He looked around the barracks. “We got anybody else who feels the way Gurney did? Anybody who does, clean out your footlocker and head out the door. I won’t put a bad word on your fitness report-swear to Jesus I won’t-but I want you doin’ somethin’ else. Anybody?”
No one moved. No one spoke.
“All right, then,” Porter said. “Rodriguez isn’t the only man from Sonora and Chihuahua we’ve got at this camp-not even close. Has anybody seen any sign that those people are falling down on the job? Anything at all?” Again, no one said a word. The noncom nodded. “I haven’t, either. The government and the Party-and the Party, mind you-thought they could do it, or they wouldn’t have recruited them in the first place, right? Y’all gonna tell Jake Featherston he doesn’t know what he’s doin’? You let me know where you want your body sent first.”
That pretty much took care of that. White men were careful around Rodriguez from then on out. He wasn’t sure whether they were afraid to say anything bad to him even if he had it coming or they were afraid he’d shoot them if they did say anything. Either way felt awkward. He wished they would just treat him the way they treated one another. Too much to hope for, he feared.
He wasn’t a Mexican, a greaser, to the Negroes in the camp. Maybe that was because they knew most Sonorans and Chihuahuans had no more use for them than most whites did. More likely, he judged, it was because to them, in his gray uniform, he was a guard. The uniform took precedence over the face.
When he went over to the women’s side of the camp, the prisoners always tried to soften him up. If he’d do something for them, they made it plain, they would do something for him. And some of them left nothing to the imagination. Taking up all the offers and come-ons and out-and-out propositions would have drained a man half his age dry in nothing flat.
Some of the guards took up as many as they could. In a way, Rodriguez understood that. They had to think, Why not? Sooner or later, whether she knew it or not, a woman was going out in a truck. Why not enjoy her while she was here? If she was enjoyable, why not fix it so she went out later, not sooner? In the end, what difference did it make?
Rodriguez took up an offer himself every now and then, but only every now and then. Most of the time, he remembered he was a married man. When three guards in quick succession got the clap, that made him more cautious than ever. Magdalena wouldn’t thank him for bringing home a drippy faucet.
Troop Leader Porter was loudly disgusted when that happened. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he exclaimed. “And fucking’s about right, ain’t it? We gonna have to set up a shortarm station around here? I knew we had some dumb pricks on this duty, but y’all have gone over the line. Next man who comes down v
enereal, he’s gonna get a dishonorable discharge to go with his dishonorable discharge, you hear me?”
“Yes, Troop Leader!” the guards chorused. Sooner or later, somebody would. If it was later, the noncom might have forgotten about his threat. If it was sooner… Rodriguez resisted temptation till he got shifted to the men’s side.
That was a different business. Walking through the men’s side, inspecting barracks to make sure the prisoners weren’t working on tunnels or any other nefarious schemes, was like walking through a cage full of wolves and cougars. Nothing was likely to happen to you if you were careful and if you stayed with your buddies. If you went off by yourself…
One guard got his head smashed in. His weapon disappeared. Everybody turned the men’s half of the camp upside down and inside out. Rodriguez thought that submachine gun was gone for good, or till a mallate emptied the clip into more guards. But, by what had to be not far from a miracle, it got fished out of a latrine trench. It was wrapped in greasy rags and slathered with lard-not as good as Cosmoline, but enough to keep it in working order. No one ever found out who did in the guard. All the prisoners had their rations cut in punishment, but nobody squealed.
“Suh, what they buildin’ out past the wire?” a man asked Rodriguez not long after the gun was recovered.
By chance, the black had picked a guard who knew. The answer would get Rodriguez a promotion as soon as the paperwork went through. But he just scowled at the scrawny prisoner and said, “You find out when the time comes.”
“You don’t got to be dat way, suh.” The Negro’s voice was a sheepish whine he’d no doubt used to talk his way out of trouble before. “I didn’t mean no disrespect. I wasn’t rude or crude or mean or nothin’ like that. I just wants to know.”
“You find out when the time comes,” Rodriguez repeated, and glared at the prisoner. The fellow knew when to back off in a hurry. When the time came, when he found out, that wouldn’t help him a bit.
XII
All ahead one-third,” Sam Carsten called down to the engine room from the Josephus Daniels’ bridge.
“All ahead one-third, sir, aye aye.” The answer came back at once. The destroyer escort picked up a little speed.
Sam read the chart by the dim glow of a flashlight with red cellophane taped over the bulb. That didn’t spoil his night vision and wouldn’t be visible from any great distance. Getting out of Philadelphia Harbor and Delaware Bay was going to be even more fun than escaping Chesapeake Bay.
If the clouds overhead broke… If they did, moonlight would pour down on the U.S. warship while she was still sneaking through the minefields that protected the harbor. That, to put it mildly, wouldn’t be good. Confederate subs lurked just outside, hungry for anything they could catch.
“I wish they would have given us a pilot who really knows these minefields,” Pat Cooley said.
“Me, too,” Sam told his exec. “I asked for one at the Navy yard. Hell, I screamed for one. They wouldn’t give him to me. They said we’d have to stop and lower a boat to let him come back, and that that would make the mission even more dangerous. They said they didn’t have enough pilots like that for us to just go on and take him with us.”
“Well, I can sort of see their point,” Cooley said reluctantly. “Sort of.” In the light of that cellophane-covered flashlight, he looked like a pink, angry ghost. “If we were a battleship or a carrier, though, we would have got one.”
“Now that you mention it, yes.” Carsten gave the younger officer a crooked smile. “Didn’t you figure out we were expendable the first time they gave us a shore-bombardment mission?”
“Sorry, sir. I guess I’m just naive,” Cooley answered. “But I’ll tell you something-I’m sure as hell convinced now.”
“That’s, uh, swell.” Sam had almost said it was bully. To someone the executive officer’s age, that would have smacked of the nineteenth century, if not the Middle Ages. Since Sam was only middle-aged himself-and not always reconciled to that-he didn’t want Cooley to think of him as one with Nineveh and Tyre. Then he stopped flabbling about changing tastes in American slang and went back to worrying about getting blown out of the water if he screwed up. “Come left to 150. I say again, come left to 150.”
“Coming left to one-five-oh: aye aye, sir.” Cooley changed course without question or comment. He was still the best shiphandler on the Josephus Daniels. In a nasty spot like this, the best shiphandler belonged at the wheel. He had to make his course corrections on the basis of what Sam told him, and had to hope Sam was telling him the right thing. If that wasn’t enough to give you an ulcer before you hit thirty, Sam didn’t know what would be.
Even if I do everything right, we still may go sky-high, Sam thought unhappily. Not all Confederate submersibles carried torpedoes. Some laid mines. If they’d laid some that U.S. sweepers hadn’t found yet, that could get-interesting. Or a moored mine might have come loose. If it drifted into their path… Sam would have done everything right, and a fat lot of good it would do him.
He gauged distances and times and speed and ordered other course corrections. Lieutenant Cooley coolly made them. “How am I doing?” the exec asked after a while.
“You’re here to ask the question. You’re standing on a nice, level deck. We’re not burning. We’re not sinking. You’re doing fine. If you hit a mine, I’ll have something to say to you. Till then, don’t worry about it.”
Cooley chuckled. “You’ve got a good way of looking at things, sir.”
“Do I? I don’t know,” Sam said. “This whole business of being in command is new to me. I’m making it up as I go along-and I probably shouldn’t tell you a word of that. Well, too goddamn bad. It’s not like you and everybody else aboard don’t already know it.”
“Don’t worry about it, sir. Everybody knows you’re the Old Man, and everybody feels good about it,” Cooley said.
“Thanks,” Sam said. On the Josephus Daniels, he was the old man literally as well as figuratively. The destroyer escort had a couple of grizzled chiefs with close to his mileage on them, but only a couple. He was old enough to be father for most of the crew. If anything, that might help his position of command. If somebody looked and sounded like your dad, you were used to taking orders from him. Of course, if you were eighteen you were probably convinced your dad was a jerk, so maybe command authority didn’t follow from age after all.
Like his early small worry, that one got submerged in the intricacy and tension of what he was doing. He stayed at it till the gray light of earliest morning grew brighter than the flashlight’s red beam. Then he stood up very straight and allowed himself to look away from the chart and stretch.
“I think we’re through it, Pat,” he said.
“Good. That’s hard work.” The exec also stretched. “I think we handled it about as well as we could.”
“You did the hard part,” Carsten said. “I just told you where to go.” He grinned. “I’m the only man on this ship who can.”
“You’re the only one who can say it,” Cooley replied. “Everybody else just thinks it.” He turned to the bespectacled, extremely junior J.G. in charge of the Y-range gear. “Isn’t that right, Walters?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” Thad Walters replied, deadpan-which, in a perverse way, proved Cooley’s point.
Sam took another look at the lightening sky. He didn’t like what he saw, not even a little bit. “Any sign of those damn Confederate maritime bombers?” he asked, knowing he sounded anxious. Any skipper without air cover of his own-and even skippers with it-had the right to sound anxious in this day and age.
Walters eyed the screen. So did Sam. He didn’t see anything untoward, but would an expert? War was getting to be a business of gadget against gadget, not man against man. Well, that had been true when battleships ruled the seas, too, but the gadgets were a lot subtler these days.
“Looks all right for now,” the young J.G. said.
“Keep an eye peeled,” Sam to
ld him. He spoke into a voice tube: “Anything on the hydrophone, Bevacqua?”
“No, sir,” the petty officer’s voice came back. “Everything’s quiet.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” Another gadget, Sam thought. They’d had hydrophones during the Great War, too. Back then, though, you’d had to stop to listen. If a sub was in the neighborhood, stopping wasn’t the best thing you could do. In the last war, also, the hydrophone could give you a bearing on where a submersible prowled, but not a range.
The boys with the thick glasses and the slide rules had fancied up the device in the interwar years. These days, hydrophones could filter out a ship’s own engine noise, though they still worked better in silence. They could also say just where in the water an enemy submarine hid. The way Vince Bevacqua explained it, new-model hydrophones used sound waves as Y-ranging gear used wireless waves: they bounced them off a target and picked up the reflections.
Technical details fascinated Sam. He knew he would never be able to repair, let alone improve, a Y-range set or a hydrophone. That didn’t bother him. The better he understood how the gadgets worked, what they could and couldn’t do, the better he’d be able to use them and the more he could count on what they told him.
“Keep listening,” was all he said now.
“Who, me?” Bevacqua answered. Sam laughed. He knew how hard the petty officer concentrated with the earphones on his head.
Pat Cooley waved at the thick clouds overhead. “We’ve got a nice low ceiling this morning,” he remarked. “We probably don’t have to worry about the maritime bombers too much. Only thing that has any real chance of running across us is a flying boat out snooping.”
“Yeah, those bastards fly low all the time,” Sam agreed. “One of these days before too long, they’ll have Y-range gear, too, and then everything’ll be out to lunch. Makes you wonder what the Navy’s coming to, doesn’t it?” He wasn’t worried, not as far as his own career went. A kid like Cooley would see a lot more change, though.
Drive to the East sa-2 Page 40
