Drive to the East sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “Fair enough.” Sam nodded. “All ahead full, then. Course 270.”

  “All ahead full. Course 270,” Cooley echoed. “Aye aye, sir.” He called the order for full power down to the engine room. The ship picked up speed till she was going flat out. Sam wished for the extra ten knots she could have put on if she were a real destroyer. Of course, they never would have dropped a mustang on his first command into a real destroyer. He knew damn well he was lucky to get anything fancier than a garbage scow.

  Lieutenant Walters seemed to have got rid of what ailed him. The Y-range operator was still a little pale, but kept close watch on his set. If the ship could spot an enemy airplane before the enemy spotted her, she would have a better chance of getting away. The darker it got, the happier Sam grew. He didn’t think the Confederates had aircraft with Y-ranging gear. He sure hoped they didn’t.

  “Keep an eye peeled for any sign of torpedo boats, too,” he warned. “A fish we’re not expecting will screw us as bad as a bomb.”

  “Yes, sir,” Walters said, and then, “Aye aye, sir.” We’re doing everything we know how to do, Sam thought. Now-is it enough?

  The Josephus Daniels ran on through the night. Listening to her engines pound, Sam felt she was yelling, Here I am! to the world. If she was, the world stayed deaf and blind. Every so often, Lieutenant Walters looked over at him and shrugged or gave a thumbs-up. CPO Bevacqua on the hydrophone kept hearing nothing, too.

  Shortly before 2300, the commander of the Marine detachment came onto the bridge. “About an hour away, eh, Captain?” he said.

  “That’s right, Major,” Sam answered. Mike Murphy outranked him-except that nobody on a ship outranked her skipper. Murphy understood that, fortunately. He was a black Irishman with eyes as blue as a Siamese cat’s-bluer than Sam’s, which took doing. Carsten went on, “Your men are ready?”

  “Ready as they’ll ever be.” Murphy pointed into the darkness. “They’re by the boats, and they’ll be in ’em in nothing flat.” He snapped his fingers.

  “Good enough,” Sam said, and hoped it would be.

  Not quite an hour later, the shape of the western horizon changed. It had been as smooth and flat there as in any other direction. No more. That deeper blackness was land: the coast of the Confederate States of America. “Here we are, sir,” Pat Cooley said. “If that’s not Ocracoke Island dead ahead, my career just hit a mine and sank.”

  So did mine, Sam thought. The Navy Department might blame an exec who’d been conning a ship for botched navigation. The Navy Department would without the tiniest fragment of doubt blame that ship’s skipper. And so it should. The destroyer escort was his ship. This was his responsibility. Nothing on God’s green earth this side of death or disabling injury could take it off his shoulders.

  “Send a petty officer forward with a lead and a sounding line,” Sam said, an order more often heard in the riverboat Navy than on the Atlantic. But he didn’t want the Josephus Daniels running aground, and she drew a lot more water than any river monitor. She needed some water under her keel. Cooley nodded and obeyed.

  Feet thudded on the deck. “Sir, we’ve spotted a light about half a mile south of here!” a sailor exclaimed. “Looks like it’s what we want!”

  It wouldn’t be the Ocracoke lighthouse at the southwestern tip of the island; that had gone dark at the beginning of the war. If you didn’t already know where you were in these waters, the Confederates didn’t want you here. Major Murphy quivered like a hunting hound. “I’d best join my men, I think,” he said, and left the bridge.

  “Very pretty navigation, Pat,” Sam said. “Bring us in a little closer and we’ll lower the boats and turn the Marines loose.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Cooley said, and then, to the engine room, “All ahead one third.” The Josephus Daniels crept southwest.

  After a breathless little while, Sam said, “All stop.” The executive officer relayed the order. The ship bobbed in the water. Sam sent a sailor to Major Murphy to let him know everything was ready. Murphy had no doubt figured that out for himself, but the forms needed to be observed.

  Lines creaking in the davits, the boats went down to the ocean. For this raid, they’d been fitted with motors. One by one, they chugged toward the shore that was only a low, darker line in the night. North Carolina barrier islands were nothing but glorified sandbanks. Every time a hurricane tore through, it rearranged the landscape pretty drastically. Sometimes, after a hurricane tore through, not much landscape-or land-was left in its path.

  “Confederates at that station are going to think a hurricane hit ’em,” Sam murmured.

  He didn’t know he’d spoken aloud till Pat Cooley nodded and said, “Hell, yes-uh, sir.”

  Grinning, Sam set a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Pat. We’re on the same page.”

  Gunfire crackled across the water. Sam tensed. If something had gone wrong, if the bastards in butternut somehow knew the Marines were coming… In that case, the destroyer escort’s guns would have to do some talking of their own. The wireless operator looked up. “Sir, Major Murphy says everything’s under control.”

  Sure enough, the gunfire died away. Sam had nothing to do but wait. He drummed his fingers on the metalwork in front of him. Waiting was always a big part of military life. Right this minute, it was also a hard part.

  “There we go!” Pat Cooley pointed. Fire rose from the station.

  “Yeah, there we go, all right,” Sam agreed. “Other question is, did the Confederates get off an alarm call before we finished overrunning the place?” He shrugged. “Well, we’ll find out.”

  Not very much later, sailors peering over the starboard rail called, “Boats coming back!” Sam almost said something like, Stand by to repel boarders! He wondered when the skipper of a ship this size last issued an order like that. But these boarders were on his side-or they’d damned well better be.

  Raising boats was harder than lowering them. He had nets out against the sides of the ship for the Marines and their prisoners-he hoped they’d have prisoners-to climb if the crew couldn’t do it. But they managed. He went down to the deck and met Major Murphy there. “Everything go well?” he asked.

  “Well enough, Captain,” the Marine officer answered. “We lost one man dead, and we have several wounded we brought back.” The groans on deck would have told Sam that if Murphy hadn’t. The Marine went on, “But we destroyed that station, and we’ve brought back prisoners to question and samples of Confederate Y-ranging gear for the fellows with thick glasses and slide rules to look at. What they do with the stuff is up to them, but we got it. We did our job.”

  “Sounds good,” Sam said. “Now my job is to make sure we deliver the goods. Is everybody back aboard ship?”

  “I think so,” Major Murphy said.

  An indignant Confederate came up to them. “Are you the captain of this vessel?” he demanded of Sam. “I must protest this-this act of piracy!” He sounded like an angry rabbit.

  “Go ahead and protest all you please, pal,” Sam said genially. “And you can call me Long John Silver, too.” Major Murphy and several nearby Marines spluttered. Sam went to the rail to make sure no boats or Marines were unaccounted for. Satisfied, he hurried back up to the bridge.

  “Are we ready to leave town, sir?” Pat Cooley asked.

  “And then some,” Sam said. “Make our course 135. All ahead full.”

  “All ahead full,” Cooley echoed, and passed the order to the engine room. “Course is… 135.” He sounded slightly questioning, to let Sam change his mind without losing face if he wanted to.

  But Sam didn’t want to. “Yes, 135, Pat,” he said. “I really do want to head southeast, because that’s the last direction the Confederates will look for us. Once we get away, we can swing wide and come back. But I figure most of the search’ll be to the north, and I want to get away from land-based air the best way I know how. So-135.”

  Cooley nodded. “Aye aye, sir-135 it is.” The Josephus Daniels st
eamed away from the North Carolina coast at her sedate top speed.

  Brigadier General Irving Morrell did not like getting pushed around by the Confederates. They’d done it in Ohio, and now they were doing it in Pennsylvania. They had the machines they needed to go forward. He didn’t have as many machines as he needed to stop them. It was as simple as that.

  Men… Well, how much did men count in this new mechanized age? The United States had more of them than the Confederate States did. The question was, so what?

  A nervous-looking POW stood in front of Morrell. In the other man’s beat-up boots, Morrell would have been nervous, too. He said, “Name, rank, and pay number.”

  An interpreter turned the question into Spanish. A torrent of that language came back. The interpreter said, “His name is Jose Maria Castillo. He is a senior private-we would say a PFC. His pay number is 6492711.”

  “Thanks.” Morrell studied Senior Private Castillo. The prisoner from the Empire of Mexico was medium-sized, skinny, swarthy, with mournful black eyes and a big, bushy mustache like the ones a lot of Confederate soldiers had worn during the Great War. His mustard-yellow uniform would have given good camouflage in the deserts on Mexico’s northern border. Here in western Pennsylvania, it stood out much more. Morrell said, “Ask him what unit he’s in and what their orders were.”

  More Spanish. The POW didn’t have to answer that. Did he know he didn’t have to? Morrell wasn’t about to tell him. And he answered willingly enough. “He says he’s with the Veracruz Division, sir,” the interpreter reported. “He says that’s the best one Mexico has. Their orders are to take places the Confederates haven’t been able to capture.”

  “Are they?” Morrell carefully didn’t smile at that. He suspected any number of Confederate officers would have had apoplexy if they heard the Mexican prisoner. If the Veracruz Division was the best one Francisco Jose had, the Emperor of Mexico would have been well advised not to take on anything tougher than a belligerent chipmunk. The men all had rifles, but they were woefully short on machine guns, artillery, barrels, and motorized transport. The soldiers seemed brave enough, but sending them up against a modern army wouldn’t have been far from murder-if that modern army hadn’t been so busy in so many other places.

  The prisoner spoke without being asked anything. He sounded anxious. He sounded, frankly, scared out of his wits. Morrell had a hard time blaming him. Surrender was a chancy enough business even when two sides used the same language, as U.S. and C.S. soldiers did. Would-be POWs sometimes turned into casualties when their captors either wanted revenge for something that had happened to them or just lacked the time to deal with prisoners. If a captive knew no English… He likely thinks we’ll eat him for supper, Morrell thought, not without sympathy.

  Sure enough, the interpreter said, “He wants to know what we’re going to do with him, sir.”

  “Tell him nobody’s going to hurt him,” Morrell said. The interpreter did. Jose Castillo crossed himself and gabbled out what had to be thanks. Every once in a while, war made Morrell remember what a filthy business it was. That a man should be grateful for not getting killed out of hand… Roughly, Morrell went on, “Tell him he’ll be taken away from the fighting. Tell him he’ll be fed. If he needs a doctor, he’ll get one. Tell him we follow Geneva Convention rules, if that means anything to him.”

  The prisoner seized his hand and kissed it. That horrified him. Getting captured had, in essence, turned a man into a dog. He gestured. The interpreter led Jose Castillo away. Morrell wiped his hand on his trouser leg.

  “Don’t blame you, sir,” one of his guards said. “God only knows what kind of germs that damn spic’s got.”

  Germs were the last thing on Morrell’s mind. He just wanted to wipe away the touch of the desperate man’s lips. If he couldn’t feel them anymore, maybe he could forget them. He needed to forget them if he was going to do his job. “He’s out of the fighting now,” he said. “He’s luckier than a lot of people I can think of.”

  “Well, yeah, sir, since you put it that way,” the guard said. “He’s luckier’n me, for instance.” He grinned to show Morrell not to take him too seriously, but Morrell knew he was kidding on the square. Only a few hard cases really liked war; most men endured it and tried to come through in one piece.

  From everything Morrell had heard, Jake Featherston was part of the small minority who’d enjoyed himself in the field. Morrell couldn’t have sworn that was so, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. Who but a man who enjoyed war would have loosed another one on a country-two countries-that didn’t?

  That guard shifted his feet, trying to draw Morrell’s attention. Morrell nodded to him. The soldier asked, “Sir, is it true that the Confederates are inside Pittsburgh?”

  “I think so, Wally,” Morrell answered. “That’s what it sounds like from the situation reports I’ve been getting, anyhow.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Wally said.

  “It isn’t what we had in mind when this whole mess started,” Morrell allowed. What the USA had had in mind was a victory parade through the ruined streets of Richmond, preferably with Jake Featherston’s head on a platter carried along at the front. Richmond was close to the border, which didn’t mean the United States had got there. They hadn’t in the War of Secession or the Great War, either.

  “So what are we gonna do?” Wally asked-a thoroughly reasonable question. “How come we don’t just pitch into ’em?”

  “Because if we do, we’d probably lose right now,” Morrell said unhappily. “We don’t have enough men or materiel yet. We’re getting there, though.” I hope.

  As a matter of fact, things could have been worse. The Confederates had been planning to surround Pittsburgh instead of swarming into it, but U.S. counterattacks hadn’t let them do that. Now they had to clear the Americans from a big city house by house and factory by factory. That wouldn’t come easy or cheap. Again, Morrell hoped it wouldn’t, anyhow.

  He’d been screaming at every superior in Pennsylvania to let him concentrate before he counterattacked. He’d been screaming at Philadelphia to get him enough barrels so he’d have a legitimate chance of getting somewhere when he finally did. He was sure he’d made himself vastly unpopular. He couldn’t have cared less. What could they do to him? Dismiss him from the Army? If they did, he would thank them, take off the uniform, and go back to Agnes and Mildred outside of Fort Leavenworth. Whatever happened to the country after that… happened. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be his fault.

  Before long, he discovered they could do something worse than dismissing him. They could ignore him. They could, and they did. His requests for more barrels and more artillery fell on deaf ears. Since they wouldn’t dismiss him, he sent a telegram of resignation to the War Department and waited to see what came of that.

  He didn’t want them to accept it. He thought he could hit the Confederates harder than anyone they could put in his slot. But if they thought otherwise, he wasn’t going to beg them to let him stay. Maybe they would give his replacement the tools they were denying him. If someone else got the weapons he wasn’t getting, that made him less indispensable than he thought himself now.

  No answering telegram came back. Instead, less than twenty-four hours later, Colonel John Abell showed up on his doorstep. No, Brigadier General Abell: he had stars on his shoulder straps now. “Congratulations,” Morrell told the General Staff officer, more or less sincerely.

  “Thank you,” Abell answered. “For some reason, I’m considered an expert on the care and feeding of one Irving Morrell. And so-here I am.”

  “Here you are,” Morrell agreed in friendly tones. “Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

  “As a matter of fact, it looks like rain,” Abell said-and it did. He gave Morrell a severe look. It was like being haunted by the ghost of an overstrict schoolteacher. “See here, General-how dare you threaten to resign when the country is in crisis?”

  “After all these years we’ve been banging heads, you s
till don’t know how I work.” Morrell wasn’t friendly anymore. “How can you care for me and feed me if you don’t know where I live or what I eat? I wasn’t threatening anything or anybody. I’ve just had enough of being asked to do the impossible. If you put someone else here, maybe you’ll support him the way you should.”

  “You are the recognized expert on barrel tactics-recognized by the Confederates as well as your own side.” Abell spoke the words as if they tasted bad. To him, they probably did. He said them anyhow. He did have a certain chilly integrity.

  “Confederate recognition I could do without,” Morrell said. As if in sympathy, his shoulder twinged. The enemy wanted him dead-him personally. That was why he tolerated Wally and the other bodyguards he didn’t want. He knew too well the Confederates might try again. Anger rising in his voice, he went on, “And if the War Department thinks I’m so goddamn wonderful and brilliant and all that, why do I have to send a letter of resignation to get it to remember I’m alive?”

  “That is not the case, I assure you,” John Abell said stiffly.

  “Yeah, and then you wake up,” Morrell jeered. “Now tell me another one, one I’ll believe.”

  “We are trying to meet your needs, General.” If Abell was angry, he didn’t show it. He was very good at not showing what he thought. “Please remember, though, this is not the only area where we are having difficulties.”

  “Difficulties, my ass. The Confederates are in Pittsburgh. They’re going to tear hell out of it whether they keep it or not. That’s not a difficulty-that’s a fucking calamity. Tell me I’m wrong. I dare you. I double-dare you.” Morrell felt like an eight-year-old trying to pick a fight.

  “If we destroy the Confederate Army causing the devastation in Pittsburgh, that devastation may become worthwhile,” Abell said.

  Morrell clapped a hand to his forehead. If he was going to be melodramatic, he’d do it in spades. “Christ on His cross, Abell, what do you think I’m trying to do?” he howled. “Why won’t Philadelphia let me?”