The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  “Sure.” Rhodes grinned. “Goddamn big afterthought, wasn’t it? But you’re right, Sergeant. Once we pushed past to the east, once we got over the Cumberland, Nashville stopped mattering so much. The Confederates had bigger worries closer to home. So they pulled out and let us march in, and they tried to hold Chattanooga instead.”

  Chester looked back over his shoulder toward the city Captain Rhodes had named. “And they couldn’t do that, either,” he said happily.

  “Nope.” Rhodes sounded pretty happy, too. “They’re like a crab—they’ve got claws that pinch, and a hard shell to go with it. But once you crack ’em, there’s nothing but meat inside.”

  “Sounds good to me—except the meat in our rations is better than the horrible tinned beef they use,” Martin said. “Even they call it Dead Donkey. But their smokes are still good.” He took a pack of Dukes out of his pocket and offered it to Rhodes. “Want some?”

  “Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.” The company CO took one, lit it, and started to hand the pack back.

  “Keep it,” Chester said. “I’ve got plenty. Lots of dead Confederates these days, and lots of POWs who don’t need cigarettes any more.”

  “Thanks,” Rhodes repeated, and stuck the pack in his shirt pocket. He took a drag, blew it out, and then shook his head. “Hate to pay you back for your kindness this way, Chester, but I don’t know what I can do about it.”

  “What’s going on?” Chester grew alert. It wasn’t the same sort of alertness he used around the enemy, but your own side could screw you, too.

  “Well, I hear repple-depple’s coughed up a shiny new second looey for us, so I’m afraid you’re going to lose your platoon,” Rhodes said.

  “Oh.” Martin weighed that. It stung, but not too much. “I’ll live. When they made me a first sergeant after I reupped, I figured they’d have me breaking in shavetails. I’ve had some practice by now. I think I’m halfway decent at it.”

  “Fine.” Rhodes set a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got a good attitude. I’m glad you’re not getting pissy about it.”

  “Life is too short.” On the battlefield, Chester had seen how literally true that was.

  Second Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin turned out not to be what he expected. Oh, he was young. The only second lieutenants who weren’t young were men up from the ranks, and they didn’t need a graying first sergeant to ramrod them. Lavochkin was squat and fair and tough-looking, with the meanest, palest eyes Chester Martin had ever seen.

  “You’re going to show me the ropes, are you?” the youngster asked.

  “That’s the idea, sir.” Martin sounded more cautious than he’d thought he would.

  “And you’ve done what to earn the right?” Lieutenant Lavochkin seemed serious.

  “I lived through the Great War. I ran a company for a while. I’ve seen a good bit of action this time around, too…sir.”

  Those icy eyes measured Chester like calipers. “Maybe.” Lavochkin took off his helmet to scratch his head. When he did, he showed Chester a long, straight scar above his left ear.

  “You got hit, sir?” Chester said. That had to be why Lavochkin was coming out of the replacement depot.

  He shrugged broad shoulders. “Only a crease. You’ve been wounded, too?”

  “Once in the arm, once in the leg. You were lucky, getting away with that one.”

  “If I was lucky, the shithead would have missed me.” Lavochkin peered south. “Give me the situation in front of us. I want to lead a raid, let the men see I’ll go where they go. They need to know I’m in charge now.”

  A lot of shavetails wouldn’t have been, even with the rank to give orders. Lavochkin…Lavochkin was a leader, a fighter, a dangerous man. He’d go places—unless he stopped a bullet. But they all took that chance.

  “Sir, maybe you’d better check with Captain Rhodes before we go raiding,” Chester said.

  Lavochkin scowled. That made him look like an even rougher customer than he had before. In the end, though, he nodded. “I’ll do that,” he said.

  Rhodes came up to Chester a couple of hours later, a small, bemused smile on his face. He glanced around to make sure the new lieutenant wasn’t anywhere close by before remarking, “Looks like we’ve got a tiger by the tail.”

  “Yes, sir. I thought so, too,” Martin said. “You going to turn him loose?”

  “I sure am,” the company commander answered. “He needs to find out what he can do, and so do we. And if things go wrong, well, you’ve got your platoon again, that’s all.”

  “If I come back,” Chester said. “I’m not gonna let him take my guys out by himself. I’m going, too.”

  Lieutenant Lavochkin didn’t like that. “I don’t need you to hold my hand, Sergeant.”

  “I’m not doing it to hold your hand, sir,” Chester said evenly. “I’m doing it for my men.”

  “In case I don’t cut it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Martin didn’t beat around the bush.

  Lavochkin gave him one of those singularly malignant stares. Chester just looked back. The young officer tossed his head. “Well, come on, then. We’ll see who learns something.”

  The raid went in a little before midnight. Lavochkin knew enough to smear mud on his face to darken it. He carried a captured Confederate submachine gun along with the usual officer’s .45. He also had a Great War trench knife on his belt. Was he showing off, or had he been in some really nasty places before he got hurt? We’ll find out, Chester thought.

  Lavochkin moved quietly. The Confederate machine-gun nest ahead sat on a small rise, but brush screened one approach most of the way up. Chester would have gone at it from that direction, too. Lavochkin slid forward as if he could see in the dark.

  Suddenly, he stopped moving. “They’ve got wire, the bastards,” he said. He didn’t ask for a wire-cutter—he had one. A couple of soft twangs followed. “This way—stay low.” Chester flattened out like a toad under the wheels of a deuce-and-a-half. He got through.

  Before long, he could hear the Confederates at the machine gun talking. He could smell their tobacco smoke, and see the glow of a cigarette coal. They had no idea U.S. soldiers were in the neighborhood.

  “Everybody ready?” Lavochkin whispered. No one denied it. Chester was close enough to the lieutenant to see him nod. “All right, then,” he said. “At my signal, we take ’em. Remember, we want prisoners, but shoot first if you’re in trouble. Runnels, scoot over to the left like we planned.”

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier said softly. He was little and skinny; Lavochkin had picked the right guy for quiet scooting. He’s a prick, but I think he knows what he’s doing, Chester thought.

  Lavochkin’s signal was nothing if not dramatic. He pulled the pin from a grenade and tossed it about halfway between Runnels and the Confederate position. As soon as it burst, Runnels, who carried a captured automatic rifle, fired several quick rounds.

  Naturally, the Confederates in the machine-gun nest started shooting at the noise and muzzle flashes. Chester saw the flame spurting from their weapons. He hoped Runnels was all right. He hoped he would be all right himself, too, because he was up and running for the enemy entrenchment as fast as he could go.

  Runnels squeezed off another burst to keep Featherston’s men thinking about him and nobody else. He yelled like a wild man, too. The deception worked just the way Lieutenant Lavochkin hoped it would. The Confederates didn’t notice the footfalls of the onrushing U.S. soldiers till the men in green-gray were right on top of them. Martin heard a startled, “What the fuck?” as one of the machine gunners tried to swing his piece around.

  Too late. Lavochkin cut him down with three accurate rounds from his submachine gun. Then he leaped down into the entrenchment. The rest of the U.S. soldiers followed. Chester hadn’t used a bayonet for anything but opening cans and holding a candle since trench raids a generation earlier. He discovered he still knew how. He stuck a machine gunner who was grabbing for a submachine gun of his own. The sharpened steel
grated on a rib, then went deep. The Confederate let out a gurgling shriek as he crumpled.

  Seeing one of their buddies spitted like a pig made the rest of the Confederates quit trying to fight and surrender. “Let’s get ’em out of here,” Lavochkin said. “Get the guns off the tripods and take them, too.”

  “Let’s get us out of here,” Chester said. “We woke up the rest of the butternut bustards.”

  Sure as hell, shouts and running feet said the Confederates were rallying. Runnels alertly fired at them. That made them hit the dirt. They didn’t know if he was there by himself or had buddies close by. The raiders scrambled out of the nest with captives and booty and hurried back toward the U.S. line. A few wild shots sped them on their way, but they made it with nothing worse than a sprained ankle and a fat lip from one of the Confederates before three men jumped on him.

  Intelligence officers took the prisoners away for grilling. In the trench from which they’d started out, Lavochkin eyed Chester Martin. “Well, Sergeant?” he said. “Do I pass?”

  “So far, so good, sir,” Chester answered. “The other half of the test is, not doing that kind of shit real often. You know what I mean?” Lavochkin scowled at him, but slowly nodded.

  George Enos thought the Josephus Daniels was a step down from the Townsend as a ship. She was smaller and older and slower and more crowded. But she seemed a tight ship, and a happy one, too. From what he’d seen and heard, those two went together almost as often as the cliché claimed.

  He’d slept in a hammock on the Townsend. Having to sling one on the Josephus Daniels was no surprise, and no great disappointment. He started to make himself at home, learning, for instance, that her sailors hardly ever called her by her last name alone. He also found out that Josephus Daniels had been Secretary of the Navy during the Great War. After all the time he’d spent on the Townsend, he still didn’t know who Townsend was. With the ship at the bottom of the Gulf of California, he wasn’t likely to find out now.

  Everyone liked the skipper. Sam Carsten’s craggy face and pale, pale hair kept trying to ring a bell in George’s mind. He’d seen Carsten somewhere before, and not in the Navy. He kept picturing an oak tree….

  Nobody had a good word to say about the exec. That was also normal to the point of boredom. But people did speak well of the just-departed Pat Cooley. “This Zwilling item ain’t fit to carry Cooley’s jock,” said Petty Officer Second Class Clem Thurman, who was in charge of the 40mm gun near the bow whose crew George joined.

  “No?” George said. Somebody was plainly meant to.

  “Fuck, no.” Thurman spat a stream of tobacco juice into the Atlantic. “Cooley was the kind of guy who’d find out what you needed and pull strings to get it for you. This new one, he looks in the book for reasons to tell you no.” He spat again.

  “That’s no good,” George said.

  “Tell me about it,” Thurman said. “You ask me, this mission we’re on is no damn good, either. Ireland? I got nothin’ against micks—don’t get me wrong. We give them guns so they can yank on Churchill’s nuts, that’s great. We get our ass shot off tryin’ to give ’em guns—that’s a whole different story, Charlie.”

  George looked east. Nothing but ocean ahead there. Nothing but ocean all around, ocean and the rest of the ships in the flotilla. None of those ships was a carrier. They didn’t have even a baby flattop along. The cruisers carried scout aircraft, but how much good would those do when enemy bombers appeared overhead? Not enough was the answer that occurred to George.

  “Yeah, well, maybe we’re better off without an escort carrier,” Thurman said when he grumbled about it. “Eighteen knots? Hell, they can’t get out of their own way—and if we get jumped, thirty airplanes probably won’t be enough to stop the limeys, especially since most of ’em won’t be fighters.”

  “No wonder the skipper has us at gunnery practice all the time,” George said.

  “No wonder at all,” the gun chief agreed. “’Course, the other thing is, he served a gun himself when he was a rating. He knows what’s going on.”

  “He seems like a pretty good guy,” George said.

  “Bet your ass,” Thurman said. “He’s on our side—and I’m not just saying that on account of the new exec is a dipshit. Carsten knows what makes sailors tick. He works us pretty hard, but that’s his job. I was in this ship when he took over, and the difference is night and day.”

  George had been part of a good gun team on the Townsend. This one could beat it. They went through more live ammo than the Townsend’s skipper would have wanted to use. Sam Carsten’s attitude seemed to be that everything was fine as long as they had enough to fight with when action came.

  They went on watch-and-watch a little more than halfway across the Atlantic: at the point where, if they were unlucky enough, a British patrol aircraft flying out of Limerick or Cork might spot them. The Irish rebels were supposed to be trying to sabotage those patrol flights, but who could guess how much luck they’d have?

  “Now hear this.” Lieutenant Zwilling’s cold, unpleasant voice came on the PA system. “We have a wireless report that one of our submersibles just torpedoed a British destroyer about 300 miles east of here. No reports of other British warships afloat in that area. That is all.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Petty Officer Thurman said. “The gatekeeper’s gone. We hope like hell he is, anyway.”

  They made the closest approach at night. At midnight, they lowered a speedboat into the ocean. It replaced two lifeboats; its skeleton crew consisted of men either from Ireland or of Irish blood. They were making a one-way trip to the Emerald Isle. George passed crates of weapons and ammunition to the crane handlers, who lowered them into the speedboat. Each ship in the flotilla was doing the same thing. The irregulars battling the British occupation of their homeland would get a lift…if the munitions and men arrived.

  Big, powerful gasoline engines rumbling and growling, the speedboats roared off to the east. The Josephus Daniels turned around and hightailed it back toward the USA. The black gang pulled every rev they could out of her engines. They wanted to get as far away from the Irish coast as they could by the time the sun came up.

  She was slower than the Townsend. Thurman had mocked an escort carrier’s eighteen knots. George wasn’t happy with the destroyer escort’s twenty-four or twenty-five. The Townsend broke thirty easy as you please. The flotilla stuck together to help with antiaircraft protection. With really fast ships, it could have got thirty or forty miles closer to home by dawn.

  And if it had, maybe the British flying boat wouldn’t have spotted it. The cruisers’ scout airplanes went after the big, ungainly machine. They even shot it down, but the damage was done. George was sure of that. Somewhere in the direction of the rising sun, armorers were loading explosives onto bombers. Maybe fighters would come along as escorts, if they could fly so far. George shuddered, remembering the carrier-launched fighter that shot up his fishing boat.

  Waiting was hard, hard. Time stretched like taffy. Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe…

  “This is the captain.” Sam Carsten sounded much more sure of himself on the PA than Zwilling did. “The Y-ranging officer says we’ll have visitors in a bit. Give them the kind of friendly American welcome they expect. Do your damnedest, boys. If we ride out this wave, chances are we get past the range where their low-level bombers can hit us. They may send high-altitude heavies after us, but those babies have to be lucky to hit a moving target from three miles up. That’s all.”

  George looked back toward Ireland again. He felt silly as soon as he did. Of course the Y-ranging set reached farther than the Mark One eyeball. It wouldn’t be worth much if it didn’t. But those airplanes with the blue-white-red roundels were on the way.

  “At least I can shoot back now,” George muttered.

  “What’s that, Enos?” Petty Officer Thurman asked.

  “When I was a fisherman, a limey fighter shot up my boat. I was lucky—everything missed me. But the son o
f a bitch killed a couple of my buddies.” George set a hand on the 40mm’s breech. “This time, by God, I’ve got a gun, too.”

  Thurman nodded. “There you go. Pay those fuckers back.”

  “Hope so,” George said. “Don’t much like the idea of air attack again, though, not when my last ship got bombed out from under me.” The Gulf of California had been warm and calm. The North Atlantic in the latitudes of Ireland was rarely calm and never warm. If the Josephus Daniels went down, how long could he stay afloat? Long enough to get picked up? He had to hope so.

  “We’ll get ’em.” Thurman sounded confident. Like a captain, a gun chief was supposed to. Underlings could flabble. The guys in charge stayed above all that.

  The Josephus Daniels built up speed. As far as George could judge, pretty soon she was going flat out. Even so, the cruisers in the flotilla could have walked away from her and the other destroyer escorts. They could have, but they didn’t. George was glad to see them stick around. They put a lot of shells in the air—and, he told himself in what was half cold-blooded pragmatism and half shameful hope, they made bigger targets than destroyer escorts did.

  “Bandits within ten miles,” Lieutenant Zwilling said over the PA system. “Bearing 090. Won’t be long now.”

  Everybody stared back the way they’d come. George pointed and yelled, “There!” as soon as anybody else. And if he could see the enemy airplanes, they could see his ship, too.

  One of them flew in low and slow, straight for the Josephus Daniels. “Fuck me if that ain’t a torpedo bomber!” Thurman yelled. He swung the twin 40mm mount around to bear on it. “We’ve got to blast the bastard!”

  “Fuck me if it’s not a two-decker!” George exclaimed as he passed shells and the gun began to roar. “Which war are we in, anyway?” Next to Japanese airplanes, it seemed downright primitive.

  Tracers shot red, fiery streaks toward the biplane. “It’s what they call a Swordfish,” Thurman said. “Looks like a goddamn stringbag, don’t it? But it can do for us if we don’t knock it down first.”