The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  Jefferson Pinkard heard the distant boom of artillery off to the northwest. He’d heard it before, but only as a rumble on the edge of audibility. Now it was louder and more distinct than he’d ever known it. That meant only one thing: the damnyankees were closer to Camp Determination than they’d ever got before.

  When Pinkard called the local commander to complain, Brigadier General Whitlow Ling said, “If you want to put your guards under my command and send ’em off to the front here, I’ll listen to you. Otherwise, butt out of my business.”

  “I can’t do that,” Jeff said.

  “Then butt out of my business,” the Army man said firmly.

  “But Camp Determination is important to the whole country,” Jeff said.

  “And I’m doing every damn thing I know how to do to keep the U.S. Eleventh Army away from it,” Ling said. “If you think you’re helping when you joggle my elbow, you’d better think twice, ’cause it ain’t so.”

  “We set up this camp way the hell out here so the Yankees couldn’t get at it,” Pinkard said. “We’ve got important business to take care of here.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Ling said. “All I know is, General Dowling has more men than I do. He has a better logistics train than I do. He has a fuck of a lot more airplanes than I do. You want miracles, go talk to Moses.”

  “So don’t fight him straight up,” Jeff said. “Go around him.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that, when Richmond won’t give me the barrels I need?” Brigadier General Ling seemed sure the camp commandant wouldn’t have an answer for him.

  But, thanks to the newspapers and magazine, Jeff did. “Load machine guns and cannons onto a bunch of trucks and go raiding,” he said. “The Canucks are doing it to the USA. Hell, the damn niggers in Georgia and Mississippi are doing it to us. Can we fight as smart as a bunch of coons? Hope to God we can.”

  Had he laid that on too thick? Would Ling hang up on him instead of listening? If Ling thought he could get away with that, he had another think coming, because Jeff would get on the horn to Ferdinand Koenig. If the Attorney General couldn’t make a mere soldier say uncle, Jeff was backing the wrong horse.

  Ling didn’t hang up. He said, “You want us to turn guerrilla, then?”

  “I don’t care what you call it, General,” Pinkard answered. “I want you to make the damnyankees stop. I want you to make ’em go backwards. I don’t give a rat’s ass how you do it. Here’s something you haven’t tried, that’s all. It’s worked good some other places. What have you got to lose?”

  He waited. “It wouldn’t be that expensive,” Ling said in musing tones. “Wouldn’t cost that many men, wouldn’t cost that much matériel. Might be worth a shot.”

  “Anything’s worth a shot right now, wouldn’t you say?” Jeff answered.

  Ling only grunted. That was probably as it should be. A soldier wouldn’t admit his side was in trouble, even if it was—maybe especially if it was. If he hurt the troops’ morale, what would that do? Cause his side more trouble still. “We’ll see what happens,” Ling said at last, and he did hang up.

  “Hooked him, by God,” Jeff said happily as he set down his own telephone. “I do believe I hooked him.” He hadn’t been sure he could.

  He looked out through his window at the men’s half of Camp Determination. A long queue of Negroes waited to go into the bathhouse and delousing station. They would go in, all right, but they wouldn’t come out again—not breathing, anyhow. Guards with submachine guns flanked them to either side, to make sure nobody did anything stupid or desperate. Right this minute, everything seemed calm.

  The camp was busier than it had been for a while, too. U.S. bombers had eased up on the railroad line leading into Camp Determination. They still hit it every so often, but repairs stayed ahead of damage now. And they’d eased up on Snyder, too. Pinkard thanked God for that. He had his family to worry about, and it mattered more to him than anything else in the world.

  As much as he hated to do it, he’d just about decided to send Edith and her boys back to Louisiana. Maybe he would have looked at things differently if she weren’t expecting. But Alexandria was safe in a way Snyder wasn’t. Even though it also had a camp nearby, the United States were in no position to bomb it. If they brought bombers south, they wouldn’t bother with a half-assed target like Alexandria. They’d go and unload on New Orleans, which really mattered.

  Jeff watched the queue snake forward. Everything went smoothly. He’d set it up so everything would, but seeing that it did still made him feel good. It wasn’t a guarantee these days. A year ago, all the Negroes who went through the camp believed the guards when they said the bathhouses and the trucks were just procedures to be put up with as they got transferred somewhere else. Not now. The blacks brought out of colored districts and the captured Red guerrillas had a pretty good idea of what went on here. Jeff blamed damnyankees propaganda for that. It made Camp Determination harder to run, because the inmates understood they had nothing to lose.

  He breathed a silent sigh of relief when the last Negro moved through the barbed-wire gate and into the bathhouse. That meant he could go back to his paperwork with a clear conscience. It never went away, and it was the part of the job he hated most. He hadn’t signed up to be a bureaucrat. He’d signed up to do things, by God. But you couldn’t just do things, not in the CSA you couldn’t. You had to keep records to show you’d done them, too.

  And you had to keep records about things that went wrong. He’d just sent away two more guards from the women’s side for having lesbian affairs with the prisoners, and one male guard who’d got caught cornholing colored boys. Those involuntary separations required a mountain of forms. You couldn’t just fire somebody for something like that. You almost had to catch people in the act, because those accusations could ruin somebody’s life.

  One of the women was raising a stink. She denied everything on a stack of Bibles. Jeff didn’t care. He had witnesses to prove she’d been carpet-munching. That was dirty enough when a man did it to a woman (though Pinkard sure didn’t complain when Edith went down on him—oh, no!). When another woman did it, it was about as disgusting as cornholing. This gal had to go, and she would.

  She’ll probably end up a girls’ gym teacher, someplace where word of this hasn’t spread, Jeff thought. Under the Freedom Party, records were a lot more thorough and complete than they had been back in the old days, but they weren’t perfect, not by a long shot.

  He’d just signed the last of the papers that would get rid of the dyke when air-raid sirens started wailing and airplane engines droned overhead. A minute or so later, the antiaircraft guns around Camp Determination thundered into action. In the camp compound, he watched guards hastily don helmets. Falling shrapnel could cave in a man’s skull.

  The colored prisoners, of course, had no helmets. Jeff only shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. If one of the smokes got clobbered, well, so what? It only meant he was buying his plot a little sooner than he would have otherwise.

  A thunderous explosion rattled the window in his office. It was safety glass reinforced with chicken wire, but it almost blew out anyhow. That wasn’t a bomb going off. That was a bomber crashing, and its whole load blowing up at once. The gunners didn’t nail very many, but every once in a while they came through.

  Prisoners in the yard were pointing up in the sky at the bomber stream. They were cheering and dancing and urging the damnyankees on. Rage ripped through Pinkard. How dared they root for the other side? They deserved everything they were catching, all right. Whether they would have cheered for the United States if they weren’t catching hell from the Confederate States never once crossed his mind.

  Not surprising, not when he had other, more important, things to worry about. The bombers started unloading on Snyder again. More antiaircraft guns protected the towns, but flak alone couldn’t keep bombers away. If the Confederacy had some fighters of its own in the air…

  But the Confederac
y damn well didn’t. Basically, Snyder had to sit there and take it. I will get Edith and the boys back to Alexandria, so help me God I will, Jeff thought. If the damnyankees were going to bomb innocent civilians…Again, he didn’t dwell on what the Confederates had done to innocent civilians on the other side of the border, let alone on what the men he commanded were doing to civilians right here in this camp.

  He hated those strings of boom! boom! boom!, one right after another. Sure, Edith and Willie and Frank would be down in the storm cellar. Sure, it would take a direct hit to harm them. The odds against that were long. But it could happen, as he knew too well. And he couldn’t do one damn thing about it. He hated that even more.

  Here inside Camp Determination, he was safe as houses. The Yankees had never bombed the camp. They cared more about the worthless niggers inside it than they cared about the honest white people they were trying to murder.

  Another bomber exploded. This one sounded as if it blew up in midair. The United States were paying for things today, anyhow. Sometimes the bombers got off scot-free. That was just plain embarrassing. At least the gunners weren’t standing around with their thumbs up their asses.

  Jeff knew losing a few bombers wouldn’t keep the USA from coming back. He also knew how helpless he was to do anything about it. What choice did he have but wait here till the raid ended and then go back to Snyder and see if he still had any family left?

  None. None at all.

  Bombers stayed above Snyder for most of an hour. As soon as the bombs stopped falling, Jeff jumped into the Birmingham that was his to use. He didn’t wait for a driver, but gunned the engine to life and roared off to find out if his family was all right.

  He had to go off the road and onto the shoulder a couple of times to avoid craters. He was glad it hadn’t rained any time lately, or his auto might have bogged down. But the fires rising from Snyder made him mutter and curse and pray, all in a confused jumble. He knew what he meant, but he doubted anybody else, even God, would have.

  Once he got into Snyder, he had to make more detours, both because of holes in the streets and because of burning buildings. The bombs hadn’t smashed the town’s one fire engine. Its bell clanged like the shrieks of a lost soul as it raced from one disaster to the next. How much good could it do at each stop? Some, maybe.

  Jeff’s heart was in his throat when he turned onto his street. A house half a block in front of his had taken a direct hit. Part of a body lay on the front lawn. Pinkard gulped and looked away.

  But there were Edith and Frank and Willie. His wife was bandaging a neighbor lady who looked to have been cut by flying glass. His stepsons watched with more interest than horror. They’d seen things like this before. Kids got used to war and other disasters faster than grownups did. For them, it soon became routine.

  For Jeff…“Thank God you’re all right!” he called as he sprang from the motorcar and ran over to Edith.

  “This was a bad one, but we made it into the cellar quick as we could. The windows are already cardboard and plywood, so we didn’t lose any glass. I don’t smell gas. The power’s out, but it’ll come back.” As Edith talked, she went on bandaging the neighbor lady’s head. “There you go, Vera. It’s not too deep, and I don’t think the scar will be bad.”

  “Thank you, Edith.” With middle-class politeness, Vera nodded to Jeff. “Hello, Mr. Pinkard. Sorry we have to run into each other like this. It’s a miserable war, isn’t it?”

  “It sure is, ma’am.” Jeff coughed on the smoke in the air. He shook his fist toward the west. “It’s a miserable war, but by God we’ll win it.”

  Cabo San Lucas wasn’t quite the ass end of nowhere, but you could see it from there. George Enos knew damn well he wasn’t any place he wanted to be. As usual, nobody in the Navy bothered asking his opinion. The Marines had taken the place away from the Empire of Mexico. U.S. Army troops were pushing down from San Diego to occupy the rest of Baja California. The godawful terrain and the heat and the lack of water were giving them more trouble than Francisco José’s soldiers were.

  Also annoying, or worse than annoying, to the men in green-gray and forest green were air raids across the Gulf of California from Confederate Sonora. C.S. bombers struck by night, when they were harder for U.S. fighters to find and shoot down. The Confederacy didn’t keep a lot of airplanes in Sonora, but the ones they had did what any small force was supposed to do: they made the other side hate their guts.

  And they were the reason the Townsend lingered by Cabo San Lucas. More and more escort carriers came down the coast of Baja California. Sooner or later, they’d try to force their way into the Gulf of California and put C.S. air power in Sonora out of business. When they did, they would need escorts to deal with Confederate and Mexican surface raiders and submersibles. That was what destroyers were for.

  “This would go quicker if we got a couple of fleet carriers instead of all these chickenshit little baby flattops,” George grumbled. “An escort carrier isn’t big enough to hold many airplanes, and the damn things can’t make twenty knots if you throw ’em off a cliff.”

  Fremont Dalby gave him the horselaugh. “Now tell me another one,” he said. “Like they’re gonna waste fleet carriers down here. Fast as we build more of ’em, they go into the Atlantic. It’s just like last time: we cut off England’s lifeline to Argentina and Brazil, we screw her to the wall.”

  “Yeah,” George said. That was what the father he barely remembered was doing in 1917, and how the senior George Enos died after the CSA threw in the sponge.

  Dalby didn’t notice George was feeling subdued. “Maybe—maybe—the Sandwich Islands get one,” he said. “Depends on how serious we are about going after the Japs.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” George said. “If it’s up to me, though, we wait till we’re done with the really important stuff, and then we kick their scrawny yellow asses.”

  “That’s how I’d do it, too,” Dalby agreed. “’Course, that doesn’t mean it’s how the admirals will want to handle it. Expecting the brass to do shit that makes sense is like expecting a broad to understand if you screw around on her. You can expect it, yeah, but that don’t mean it’s gonna happen. Like for instance, you know what I heard?”

  “I’m all ears,” George said.

  “You’d look even funnier than you do now if you were, and that’s saying something,” Dalby told him, altogether without malice. George flipped the gun chief the bird. Since Dalby was ribbing him personally, he could get away with that. Had the conversation had anything to do with duty or the ship, he would have had to take whatever abuse the older man dished out. Dalby went on, “Anyway, scuttlebutt is they’re keeping a flotilla bigger’n this one off the northwest coast, near where the Columbia lets out into the Pacific. Carriers, escorts, subs, the whole nine yards.”

  “That’s pretty crazy,” George said. “Why would they put so many ships up where they don’t do any good?”

  Fremont Dalby shrugged and lit a cigarette. He held out the pack to George, who took one, too. After a couple of puffs, Dalby said, “It’s almost like they’re guarding that whole stretch of coast, like there’s something up there they don’t want the Japs to hit no matter what.”

  “What could there be?” George asked. “They think the Japs’ll bomb the salmon-canning plants, or what?”

  “Beats me,” Dalby said. “Like I told you, this is all scuttlebutt. Maybe it’s just a cloud of stack gas, but the guys I heard it from say it’s the straight skinny.”

  “Something’s going on that we don’t know about,” George said.

  Dalby gave him exaggerated, silent applause. “No kidding, Sherlock,” he said. George laughed. Maybe it would all make sense after the war was over. Maybe it would never make sense. Some of the dumb stunts the brass pulled were like that, too.

  The Townsend was one of the lead escorts when a flotilla centered on three escort carriers steamed into the Gulf of California. The flotilla had minesweepers along, too, in case the Con
federates and Mexicans had surprises waiting for any newcomers. George would have if he were waiting for trouble from the USA.

  “Tell me about it,” Dalby said when he worried out loud. “Mines are simple, mines are cheap, mines’ll blow your sorry ass sky-high if you hit one. What more could anybody want from the fuckers?”

  They didn’t hit any mines the first day inside the gulf. On the second morning, klaxons hooted the men to general quarters. “Now hear this! Now hear this! Aircraft approaching from the northeast! Aircraft approaching from the northeast!”

  Fighters zoomed off the baby flattops’ decks. From what George had heard, Confederate Asskicker dive bombers were great when they operated unopposed, but they were sitting ducks for fighters. He didn’t know if what he’d heard was the gospel, but had the feeling he’d find out pretty damn quick.

  Confederate fighters escorted the dive bombers. Up till recently, land-based aircraft were always hotter than their carrier counterparts, which needed heavier airframes to stand up to the stresses of catapult-aided takeoffs and landings cut short by tailhooks and arrester wires. But the latest U.S. carrier-based fighters were supposed to be as tough and fast as anything in the air.

  An airplane tumbled down toward the sea. Fremont Dalby had a pair of binoculars. “That’s an Asskicker!” he said. “Got the fixed landing gear and flies with its wings going up on either side like a goddamn turkey buzzard.”

  Another airplane plummeted. “Who’s that?” Fritz Gustafson asked.

  “Dunno,” Dalby answered. “I think it was one of ours, though. They’ve got blunter noses than C.S. Hound Dogs do.”

  Two more machines fell out of the sky, both burning. Keeping track of who was doing what to whom got harder and harder. The rolling, roiling fight drew ever closer to the flotilla.

  “Here we go.” At Fremont Dalby’s orders, the gun layers swung the twin 40mm mount toward the closest Confederate airplane. George Enos passed Fritz Gustafson two shells and got ready to give him more. Dalby put the guns exactly where he wanted them and opened fire.