“You will agree the cost of failure is high,” Abell said.
“You make sure I fail if you don’t support me,” Morrell said. “Is that what you’ve got in mind?”
“No. Of course not. If we didn’t want you here, we would have put someone else in this place,” Abell said. “We had someone else in this place before you recovered from your wound, if you’ll remember.”
“Oh, yes. You sure did.” Morrell rolled his eyes. “And my illustrious predecessor scattered barrels all over the landscape, too. He aimed to support the infantry with them. Perfect War Department tactics from 1916.”
John Abell turned red. In the last war, the War Department had thought of barrels as nothing more than infantry-support weapons. George Custer and Morrell had had to go behind Philadelphia’s back to mass them. The War Department would have stripped Custer of his barrels if it found out what he was up to-till he proved his way worked much better than its.
“That’s not fair,” Abell said once his blush subsided. “We did put you here to set things right, and you can’t say we didn’t.”
“All right. Fine.” Morrell took a deep breath. “If that’s what you want, I’ll try to give it to you. Let me have the tools I need to do my job. Stand back and get out of my way and let me do it, too.”
“And if you don’t?” Now Abell’s voice was silky with menace.
Morrell laughed at him. “That’s obvious, isn’t it? If I make a hash of it, you’ve got a scapegoat. ‘Things went wrong because General Morrell fucked up, that no-good, bungling son of a bitch.’ Tell every paper in the country it’s my fault. I won’t say boo. If I have what I need here and I can’t do what needs doing, I deserve it.”
“You’ll get what’s coming to you,” the General Staff officer said. “And if you don’t deliver once you get it, you’ll really get what’s coming to you. I’m glad you think it seems fair, because it will happen whether you think so or not.”
“Deal.” Morrell stuck out his hand. John Abell looked surprised, but he shook it.
The other sailor tossed five bucks into the pot. “Call,” he said.
“Ten-high straight.” George Enos, Jr., laid down his cards.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” The other sailor couldn’t have sounded more disgusted if he tried for a week. George understood when he threw down his own hand: he held an eight-high straight.
“Got him by a cunt hair, George,” Fremont Dalby said as George scooped up the cash. It was a nice chunk of change; they’d gone back and forth several times before the call. Losing would have hurt. It wouldn’t have left George broke or anything-he had better sense than to gamble that hard-but it would have hurt. Dalby scooped up the cards and started to shuffle. “My deal, I think.”
“Yeah.” George wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. The compartment where they played was hot and airless. A bare bulb in an iron cage overhead gave the only light. The door said STORES on the outside, but the chamber was empty. The sailors sat on the gray-painted deck and redistributed the wealth.
Fremont Dalby passed George the cards. “Here. Cut.” George took some cards from the middle of the deck and stuck them on the bottom. Dalby laughed. “Whorehouse cut, eh? All right, you bastard. I had my royal flush all stacked and ready to deal, and now you went and fucked me. Some pal you are.”
“Sorry,” George said in tones suggesting he was anything but. As the CPO dealt, George asked, “Ever see a real royal flush in an honest game?”
“Nope, and I’ve been playing poker for a hell of a long time,” Dalby answered. “I saw a jack-high straight flush once. That was a humdinger of a hand, too, on account of it beat four queens. But I knew the people, and they weren’t dealing off the bottom of the deck or anything.”
Nobody else in the game admitted to seeing a royal flush, either. George looked at his cards. None of them appeared to have been introduced to any of the others. This wasn’t a jack-high straight flush; it was jack-high garbage. He almost threw it away, but he’d won the last hand, so he stayed in and asked for four cards.
That left him with a pair of jacks. When Dalby called for jacks or better to open, he put in a dollar. The hand got raised twice before it came back to him. He tossed it in with no regret except for the vanished dollar. Fremont Dalby ended up taking it with three kings.
George had just started to shuffle when the klaxons called men to battle stations. Everyone paused just long enough to scoop up the money in front of him. “To be continued,” somebody said as the poker game broke up. And so, no doubt, it would be; it seemed as unending as any movie serial.
His feet clanged on the deck as he ran for the nearest stairway. Dalby was older and rounder, but stayed with him all the way. They got to their antiaircraft gun at the same time. Along with the Townsend, three other destroyers surrounded the Trenton. The escort carrier’s fighters buzzed high overhead. Kauai lay somewhere to the southeast. They were out tweaking the Japs again, much as Francis Drake had singed the beard of the King of Spain. Like King Philip, the Japs were liable to singe back.
“Is this real or a drill, Enos?” Dalby said. “I got five bucks says it’s a drill.”
The odds favored him. They had many more drills than real alerts. Still, in these waters… “You’re on,” George said. They shook to seal the bet.
“Now hear this! Now hear this!” the intercom blared. “Aircraft from the Trenton are attacking a Japanese carrier. The Japs are sure to try to return the favor if they can. Be ready. It is expected that the Trenton will be their main target, but we want to remind them that we love them, too.”
“There’s a fin you owe me,” George said happily. “That’ll buy one of the boys some shoes.”
“My ass,” Fremont Dalby said, his voice sour. “It’ll buy you a couple of shots and a blowjob from a Chinese whore on Hotel Street when we get back to Pearl.”
Since he was probably right, George didn’t argue with him. He just said, “Well, that’s a damn sight better than nothing, too.” The gun crew laughed. Even the CPO’s lips twitched.
They waited. Before too long, the executive officer said, “Y-ranging gear reports inbound aircraft. They aren’t ours. We’re going to have company in about fifteen minutes. Roll out the welcome mat for our guests, boys.” Five minutes later, he came back on the loudspeakers: “Trenton’s aircraft report that that Jap carrier is on fire and dead in the water. Score one for the good guys.”
Cheers rang out up and down the Townsend’s main deck, and probably everywhere else on the ship, too. The crew had faced savage air attacks more than once. Getting their own back felt wonderful.
“Those Jap pilots are liable to know they can’t go home again,” Dalby warned. “That means they’ll give it everything they’ve got when they hit us. Knock ’em down as quick as you can so they don’t crash into the ship or something.”
Knocking down airplanes was hard enough without any extra pressure to do it fast. George just shrugged. Unless somebody got hurt, all he had to do was make sure the gun had enough ammo to keep shooting. What happened after that was Dalby’s responsibility, not his.
The Y-range antenna swung round and round. George and everybody else up on deck peered northwest, the direction from which trouble had so often come before. The Townsend picked up speed. She would want to do as much dodging as she could. George glanced over toward the Trenton. The carrier couldn’t pick up a lot of speed. Her engines wouldn’t let her.
“There they are!” somebody yelled.
George swore softly. Those were Jap airplanes, all right. Their silhouettes might have been more familiar to him than those of U.S. aircraft. The half dozen fighters in combat air patrol over the little U.S. fleet streaked toward the enemy. Japanese escort fighters were bound to outnumber them. Their pilots would want to take out as many enemy strike aircraft as they could before the enemy shot them down. A pilot’s life wasn’t always glamorous. George wouldn’t have traded places with anybody up there.
An a
irplane tumbled out of the sky, leaving a comet’s trail of fire and smoke all the way down to the Pacific. “That’s a Jap!” someone shouted. George hoped he knew what he was talking about.
This wasn’t like the last few times the Townsend had ventured out in the direction of Midway. The main attack wasn’t aimed at the destroyer. The Japs wanted the Trenton. A carrier was really dangerous to them, as aircraft from the converted freighter had just proved. Destroyers? Destroyers were nuisances, annoyances, worth noticing now only because they tried to keep enemy aircraft away from the Trenton.
That made the 40mm crews’ jobs easier. They were less rattled, less hurried, than they had been when enemy dive bombers singled the Townsend out for attention. George fed his gun shells. Fritz Gustafson loaded them into the breeches. At Fremont Dalby’s command, two other sailors shifted the antiaircraft gun in altitude and azimuth. Empty shell casings clattered down onto the deck by the gun crews’ feet. Every so often, George or Gustafson would kick them out of the way so nobody tripped over them.
The Townsend’s five-inch guns blasted away at the Japs. Their shells could reach a lot farther and packed much more punch, but they couldn’t fire nearly so fast. Their roar, on top of the thunder from all the smaller weapons, hammered the ears. George wondered whether he’d be able to hear at all by the time the war ended.
And the big guns’ blast shook and jarred loose damn near everything on the deck. The last time they’d cut loose, a sailor George knew ended up spitting a filling out into the palm of his hand. He’d been lucky, too, even if he didn’t think so when the pharmacist’s mate played dentist on him. Stray too close to a five-incher’s muzzle when it went off and blast could kill, even if it didn’t leave a mark on your body. George didn’t aspire to be a corpse, unmarked or otherwise.
“Hit!” The whole gun crew shouted at the same time when a Japanese dive bomber they’d been shooting at suddenly wavered in the air and started trailing smoke. “We got the son of a bitch!” George added exultantly.
That pilot must have known he had nowhere to go. With his own carrier in flames, he wouldn’t have had anywhere to go even if his engine were running perfectly. Taking a hit must have rubbed his nose in it. He dove for the Trenton. Instead of releasing his bomb and trying to pull up, he seemed intent on using his airplane as an extra weapon.
A hail of antiaircraft fire from the escort carrier said its gunners realized the same thing. They scored more hits on the dive bomber, but didn’t deflect it from its course. The ship swung to starboard-slowly, so slowly. A carrier built from the keel up as a warship would have had a much better chance of getting away.
But that turn, small as it was, saved the Trenton. Maybe the enemy pilot was dead in the cockpit, or maybe the heavy fire severed the cables to his rudder and ailerons so he couldn’t swerve no matter how much he wanted to. He splashed into the Pacific a hundred yards to port of the carrier. His bomb went off then, sending up a great plume of white water. A near miss like that would damage the Trenton with fragments, and might make her leak from sprung seams. But it wouldn’t turn her into a torch and send her to the bottom.
“Fucker had balls,” Fritz Gustafson said with grudging respect. As grudgingly, George nodded. Trying to get in a last lick at your foe when you knew you were a goner took nerve.
Not so many Japanese airplanes were left in the sky now. U.S. fighters and ferocious AA had knocked down a lot of them. Then George watched something that chilled him to the bone. A Jap fighter pilot heeled his undamaged airplane into a dive and swooped on the Trenton like a hunting falcon. He didn’t try to save himself-all he wanted to do was damage that carrier the only way he had left. That he would die if he succeeded couldn’t have mattered to him. He wasn’t going home anyway.
The Trenton shot him down. His fighter broke up and fell in flaming pieces into the sea. But he’d given the other Japs an idea-or maybe he’d told them over the wireless what he aimed to do. One after another, they all dove on the American ships below them. Dead men themselves, they didn’t want to die alone.
George’s gun put as many rounds as it could into a fighter. The Japanese didn’t make their aircraft as sturdy as Americans did-not that a U.S. fighter would have survived a pasting like that. But the Jap wasn’t trying to survive, only to take Americans with him. He didn’t quite make it. His burning airplane crashed into the ocean off the Townsend’s starboard bow.
One fighter did crash on the Trenton’s flight deck-and then skidded off into the sea, trailing flames. It scraped eight or ten sailors off the ship with it. Fires lingered on the flight deck after the Jap was gone. Damage-control parties beat them down with high-pressure seawater. By the time the escort carrier’s strike aircraft got back, she was ready to land them. “By God, we did it,” George said. In the waters off the Sandwich Islands, Americans hadn’t said anything like that for a while, but they’d earned the right today. George said it again, with feeling.
XV
Brigadier General Abner Dowling’s guards now enforced a wider perimeter around the house he was using than they had before. He wondered if they joked that he had a wide perimeter, too. He wouldn’t have been surprised. The perimeter around the place, though, was no laughing matter. It came by direct order from the War Department.
“People bombs,” Dowling said as he showed his adjutant the order. “Not just auto bombs anymore, but people bombs, too. What on God’s green earth are we coming to? That’s all I want to know.”
Captain Angelo Toricelli studied the order. “The Mormons have done this in the USA,” he said. “Negroes have done it in the CSA. It doesn’t say white Confederates have started doing it anywhere.”
“If they haven’t, it’s only a matter of time till they do,” Dowling said gloomily. “If you think the Freedom Party doesn’t have people who’d martyr themselves for St. Featherston, you’re out of your tree. Plenty of fanatics who’d thank him for the chance to blow up a damnyankee or three. Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.”
“I wish I could, sir.” Toricelli sounded mournful, too. He went on, “I don’t think the world is ever going to be the same. From now on, if you’re in a big city or if you’re in politics or the military, you won’t be able to go down to the corner diner for a cup of coffee or a ham on rye without wondering whether the quiet fellow in the next booth is going to blow himself to hell and gone-and you along with him.”
“You’re in a cheerful mood today, aren’t you?” But Dowling feared the younger officer was right-dead right. “One thing consoles me, anyhow.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Bound to be more people who want to blow up Jake Featherston than ones who want to see me dead bad enough to kill themselves to get me.”
“Sir, I believe they call that a dubious distinction.”
“And I believe you’re right.” Dowling laughed, but on a note not far from despair. “What is the world coming to, Captain? Just before the war started, I listened to a fellow named Litvinoff going on and on about nerve agents-he wouldn’t call them gases. He was happy as a clam in chowder, you know what I mean?”
“Oh, yes, sir.” Toricelli nodded. “I’ve met people like that. It’s their toy, and they don’t care what it does, as long as it does what it’s supposed to.”
“That’s right. That’s exactly right.” Dowling nodded, too. “And now this. Is there anything we won’t do to each other?”
Toricelli considered that. “I don’t know, sir. I’m not sure I’m the right person to ask,” he said. “Don’t you think you ought to talk to one of the Negroes in a Freedom Party camp instead? But ask fast, while there are still some left.”
“Ouch!” Abner Dowling winced. “Well, you got me there. Maybe I ought to put it a different way: aren’t there some things we shouldn’t do to each other?”
“We’ve got the Geneva Convention,” Toricelli said.
“It doesn’t talk about people bombs,” Dowling said. “It doesn’t talk about those camps, either.
It doesn’t talk about gas, come to that. Nobody wanted to talk about gas when they were hammering it out, because everybody figured he might need it again one of these days.”
Now Toricelli eyed Dowling with a certain bemusement. “You’re just about as cheerful as I am, aren’t you, sir?”
“I’m as cheerful as I ought to be,” Dowling answered. He looked out the window. An auto painted U.S. green-gray was coming up to his headquarters. The guards stopped it before it got too close. Anybody could paint a motorcar. Who was inside mattered far more than what color it was.
But the driver seemed to satisfy the guards. He got out of the Chevrolet and hurried toward the building. “I’ll see what he wants, sir,” Captain Toricelli said.
“Thanks,” Dowling told him.
His adjutant returned a few minutes later with the man from the auto-a sergeant. “He’s from the War Department, sir,” Toricelli said. “Says he’s got orders for you from Philadelphia.”
“Well, then, he’d better give them to me, eh?” Dowling did his best not to show worry. Orders from Philadelphia could blow up in his face almost as nastily as a people bomb. He could be cashiered. He could be summoned before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War again-and wasn’t even once cruel and unusual punishment? He could be ordered back to the War Department to do something useless again. The possibilities were endless. The good possibilities seemed much more sharply limited.
“Here you are, sir,” the sergeant said.
Dowling opened the orders and put on his reading glasses. If this noncom had orders to report on how he took bad news, he was damned if he’d give the man any satisfaction. Wounded soldiers bit back screams for the same reason.
He skimmed through the orders, blinked, and read them again more slowly. “Well, well,” he said when he’d finished.
“May I ask, sir?” Captain Toricelli was sensitive to everything that might go wrong. What hurt Dowling’s career could hurt his, too.
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