“HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththee—” George prayed in a rapid gabble. The prayer he chose took him by surprise. He’d turned Catholic because Connie made it plain she wasn’t about to marry him if he didn’t. He hadn’t thought he took it seriously, not till now. Somebody’d said there were no atheists in foxholes. The deck of a ship under torpedo attack evidently counted.
The Townsend was a greyhound of the sea, capable of well over thirty knots. Why, then, did she feel as if she were nailed in place? The heeling, surging turn she made might have been filmed in slow motion. It might have been, but it wasn’t. It took her out of harm’s way, for the torpedo raced past her stern.
“Thank you, Jesus.” Fritz Gustafson used words as if he had to pay for them. He packed a lot of meaning into those three.
Meatballs on its wings and fuselage, a Jap fighter shot up the destroyer. Bullets clanged and snarled and whined in wild ricochets. Wounded men screeched. Every antiaircraft gun on the ship tried to knock the pilot into the Pacific. He darted away just above the wavetops, untouched or at least still flying.
Fremont Dalby gave credit where it was due: “He’s a motherfucking son of a bitch, but he’s a motherfucking son of a bitch with balls. I hope he gets home.”
“I don’t.” George was not inclined to be chivalrous.
Then, suddenly, the sky was full of airplanes—airplanes blazoned with the American eagle and swords. They threw themselves at the Japs. The Army was on the ball after all. Ignoring the enemy fighters where they could, the fighters bored in on the torpedo-carriers and dive bombers—those were the ones that could sink ships. The Americans outnumbered the Japanese aircraft. Before long, the Japanese decided they’d had enough and flew off in the direction from which they’d come.
No dive bombers had attacked the Townsend. George was pretty sure of it. Even near misses kicked up great columns of water and threw splinters of bomb casing every which way. He couldn’t have ignored anything like that in his singleminded ammunition-passing . . . could he?
One of the other destroyers hadn’t been so lucky. Black, greasy smoke poured from her. A bomb had burst near her bow. She wasn’t dead in the water, but she couldn’t do much more than crawl. Even as he watched, her starboard list got worse.
Sailors bobbed in the water not far from her. The bomb blast had blown them off her deck. Some—corpses—floated face down. Others struggled to stay above the surface. Still others, in life jackets, didn’t have that worry.
As the Townsend swung toward her stricken comrade, the exec’s voice blared from the intercom: “All hands! Lower lines and nets and life rings for rescue!”
Sailors rushed to obey. The other destroyer slumped lower in the water. They weren’t going to be able to save her. Men started coming up on her deck from below. Some of them helped wounded buddies. They were going to abandon ship.
“That could be us,” George said.
He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud till Dalby nodded. “That damn near was us last year,” the gun chief said. “We pick up these sorry bastards and then figure out what to do next.”
Pausing to take on survivors carried risks of its own. If a Japanese submersible prowled these waters, the Townsend would be a sitting duck for it. George thought of his father. But the senior George Enos thought the war was over when his destroyer went down. George, Jr., knew better. Again, he kept an eye peeled for periscopes. This time, no one reproved him. He was a long way from the only sailor doing the same thing.
“Pull hard, you lazy fuckers! Put your backs into it! Haul that line!” a petty officer screamed. By his orders, he might have been serving aboard a nineteenth-century ship of the line. But the destroyer’s men weren’t swinging from one tack to the other; they were bringing a sailor up on deck.
He clung to the rope for dear life. His feet thudded against the side of the ship. “God bless you!” he gasped when he came aboard. He got down on hands and knees and puked his guts out. Nobody could possibly have blamed him for that; he was covered from head to foot in heavy fuel oil, so that he looked as if he’d just escaped from a minstrel show. But if you swallowed much of that stuff, it would kill you as surely as a bullet would. Heaving up your guts was one of the best things you could do.
“Ain’t this a fuckup?” one of the rescued men said as he stood there dripping. “Ain’t this just a grand fuckup? We wanted to see if there was Japs there. We found out, all right. Didn’t we just?”
Didn’t we just? The mournful words echoed inside George’s head. He turned to Fremont Dalby and said, “I wonder if we’ll be able to hang on to the Sandwich Islands.”
“We wouldn’t have any trouble if the Japs were the only thing on our plate,” Dalby said. “We could lick ’em easy enough. But this is the ass end of the goddamn war. Whatever they can spare from fighting the CSA and the big mess in the Atlantic and holding Canada down—whatever they can spare, we get that.”
“It’s not enough,” George said.
Dalby shrugged. “They haven’t thrown us out yet. They’re not fighting anybody else, either. But the Sandwich Islands are even harder for them to get at than they are for us.”
“I guess so.” George knew he sounded dubious. He felt dubious. He’d seen too much to feel any other way. And if he hadn’t, one look at the draggled survivors from the other destroyer would have been plenty to show him.
****
Hipolito Rodriguez packed his worldly goods into a duffel bag. He didn’t know how many times he’d done that when he was in the Army during the last war—enough so that he hadn’t lost the knack, anyhow. Shouldering the duffel wasn’t as easy as it had been then, though. A lot more years had landed on him since, and almost getting electrocuted hadn’t helped.
All the same, he managed. Some of the other guards from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades were in no better shape than he was. They managed, too. If you couldn’t manage, you shouldn’t have been here at all.
“Well done, men,” said Tom Porter, the troop leader—essentially, the top sergeant. “God knows we do need to fumigate these barracks—we’ve got more bugs in ’em than you can shake a stick at. I’m not telling you one goddamn thing you don’t already know.”
“Got that right,” a guard drawled. He mimed scratching—or maybe he wasn’t miming. Rodriguez had found out about delousing stations during the Great War, too. They’d changed a little since then—a little, but not nearly enough.
“It’s all them niggers’ fault,” another guard said. “They’s filthy, and we git their vermin.”
He was bound to be right about that. The rank smell of Camp Determination was always in a guard’s nostrils. Put lots of unwashed men and women together with Texas heat and humidity and it was no wonder you raised a bumper crop of every kind of pest under the sun.
The exterminators were a cheerful crew who’d come west from Abilene. BUGGONE! their trucks said. On the side of each was painted a man walking up to an overgrown cockroach. He had a mallet behind his back; the roach wore an apprehensive expression.
“Y’all got dogs or cats or canaries or snakes or goldfish or whatever the hell still in the building?” one of the men asked, fumbling in the breast pocket of his coveralls for a cheap cigar. “Better get ’em out if you do, on account of this stuff’ll kill ’em deader’n shit.”
A couple of the guards did have pets, but they’d taken them out. When the exterminator lit that cheroot, one of Rodriguez’s comrades asked him, “You gonna kill the bugs with the smoke from that goddamn thing?”
Laughing, the fellow answered, “How’d you guess? Now our secret’s out.”
He and his crew covered the barracks with an enormous tent of rubberized cloth. They could make it as big as they wanted; squares of the stuff zipped together. Rodriguez admired that—it struck him as good design.
One of the squares had a round hole in it that accepted the tube from the machine that pumped the poison into the tent: again, good design. The exterminators didn’t leave anyt
hing to chance, any more than the people who’d designed Camp Determination had done. A small gasoline engine powered the machine, which was hooked up to a gas cylinder with a large skull and crossbones painted on it.
Rodriguez had seen poison-gas cylinders during the last war. He asked the fellow with the nasty cigar, “You use chlorine or phosgene? I remember how chlorine kill all the rats in the trenches. More come later, though.” The trenches had been heaven on earth for rats and mice.
“Nah, this here is a different mix,” the exterminator told him. “It’s stronger than any of the stuff they used back then.”
“Bueno,” Rodriguez said. “This means, maybe, the bugs don’t come back for a while once you kill them?”
“Maybe,” the man answered. By the way he hesitated before he said it, Rodriguez decided he meant no. Sure enough, he continued, “We get paid to kill all the little bastards that’re in there now. What happens after that . . . If you leave out ant syrup and spray Flit around and keep the place clean so you don’t draw roaches, you’ll do pretty good. And you can always call us out again.”
“Bueno,” Rodriguez repeated, more sourly this time. Like undertakers, exterminators weren’t likely to go out of business anytime soon.
The engine came to noisy life. Whatever was in the gas cylinder started going into the tented barracks hall. Rodriguez got a tiny whiff of something that smelled sort of like mothballs but a hell of a lot stronger. That whiff was plenty to convince him he didn’t want to breathe any more of it. He moved away from the barracks in a hurry, and noticed the exterminators had already put some distance between themselves and their machinery.
“How soon can we go back in after y’all leave?” a guard asked one of the Buggone people.
“You folks did leave the windows and doors open so the place can air out?” the exterminator asked in return. The guard nodded. The exterminator said, “Well, in that case you oughta be safe goin’ in there tonight—say, after ten.”
Several guards swore. Rodriguez gave a mental shrug. Some things you just couldn’t help. What was the point of getting all excited about those?
“Wish we could fumigate the damn niggers like they was bugs,” a guard said.
Unfortunately for him, he said it where Tom Porter could hear him. The underofficer reamed him out for it: “Goddammit, Newcomb, watch your fool mouth. This here is a transit camp. It ain’t nothin’ else but a transit camp. You let the idea get out that it is somethin’ else and you turn the devil loose. Do you want that? Do you? Answer me when I talk to you, goddammit!”
“No, Troop Leader,” Newcomb said hastily.
“Then shut up, you hear me? Just shut up,” Porter said, and put his hands on his hips like an angry parent scolding a five-year-old. “You’ve all heard this shit before. To hell with me if I know what’s so hard about keeping your damnfool mouths shut, but y’all leak like a pail with a hole in it. We got to keep the niggers in camp tame, or we buy ourselves all kinds of shit. They go wild on us, we got to watch our backs every second like they did in the camps in Mississippi and Louisiana. Y’all want that? Do y’all?” Now he was yelling at every guard in earshot.
“No, Troop Leader,” they chorused, Rodriguez loud among them.
“All right, then,” the troop leader said, at least partly mollified. “Try and remember. You’re makin’ your own lives easier if you do.”
When Rodriguez patrolled the camp—either the men’s or the women’s half—he tried to watch his back every minute anyway. He didn’t know anybody who came from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade who didn’t. Anybody who’d lived through the last war had seen for himself that not having eyes in the back of your head was a good way to end up dead in a hurry. Some of the younger fellows, the men who’d been Party stalwarts or guards but hadn’t actually known combat, were the ones who strolled through the compounds without a visible care in the world. Sooner or later, one of them would get knocked over the head. That might teach the others some sense. Rodriguez hoped it would, anyhow.
His shift was on the women’s side today. He would have gone up with the window shade if he’d accepted all the favors offered him. The women figured their lives could be easier if they had a guard on their side, and they knew what they had to give to get one. If he wanted favors like that, he could have them. When they got thrown in his face half a dozen times a day, he mostly didn’t want them.
“These nigger bitches is all whores,” opined his partner, an Alabaman named Alvin Sprinks.
“It could be,” Rodriguez said. He didn’t think it was, at least under most circumstances, but he didn’t feel like arguing. Life was too short.
A couple of guards with submachine guns at his back, Jefferson Pinkard prowled through the women’s camp. Rodriguez had seen how his wartime buddy made his own rounds in Camp Determination, going where he wanted to go when he wanted to go there. That was just an extension of the rule of watching your back all the time. To a man of Pinkard’s rank, the whole camp was his back.
“You think we get a lot of pussy thrown at us? Man, what about him?” Sprinks sounded jealous. Rodriguez only shrugged. If they tried to give you more than you wanted or could use, who cared how much more than that they tried to give you?
Pinkard spotted him, waved, and made a sudden left turn to head his way. The guards tramped along behind him like a couple of well-trained hounds. “How you doin’, Hip?” the camp commandant called.
“Not bad, sir. Thank you.” Rodriguez was always careful to show respect for his friend’s rank. Nobody’d called him Hip since the Great War ended; it was the sort of nickname only an English-speaker would use. From Pinkard, it didn’t bother him; it reminded him of the days when they’d been miserable side by side.
“Your barracks got fumigated this morning—ain’t that right?” Pinkard asked.
“Yes, Señor Jeff.” In spite of himself, Rodriguez was impressed by Pinkard’s grasp of detail. Nothing went on in Camp Determination that he didn’t know about, often before it happened.
“Bet you’ll be glad to get rid of the bugs,” Jeff said.
“Oh, yes, sir.” Rodriguez nodded. “But it is like anything else, sí?” He had the brains not to talk directly about the way the camp worked, not where mallates could overhear. “One batch goes away, but before long there is another.”
“Yeah, well, then we’ll call out those Buggone folks one more time and do it all over again. We’ll—” Pinkard broke off. He looked around the women’s half of Camp Determination. Then he looked back at Hipolito Rodriguez. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. “Son of a bitch!”
“What is it?” Rodriguez asked.
“Don’t rightly know yet,” Jeff answered. “Might be nothin’. But it might be somethin’ big, too. You never can tell till you go and find out. If it is, I promise you I’ll get you what you deserve for it. Don’t want you to be like Chick Blades, who never did find out what he came up with.”
Rodriguez scratched his head. “What you mean, Señor Jeff?”
“Never mind. Don’t worry about it. It happened a long time ago, back in Louisiana.” Pinkard shook his head, as if at something he didn’t want to remember but couldn’t forget. He gathered himself. “You got to go on with your rounds, and so do I. See you later. Freedom!” Off he went, his guards in his wake.
“What the devil was that all about?” Alvin Sprinks asked.
“I don’t know,” Rodriguez said truthfully. “The commandant, he has an idea, I think.”
“Reckon so.” Despite agreeing, Sprinks sounded doubtful. The next idea he had would be his first. He could read and write—Rodriguez didn’t think there were any guards who couldn’t—but he didn’t like to.
“When we gonna git outa this place?” a gray-haired colored woman asked as the guards started through the camp again.
“Soon, Auntie, soon,” Rodriguez answered. Alvin Sprinks nodded solemnly. Rodriguez thought he would laugh or give the game away in some different fashion, but he didn’t. M
aybe the troop leader had put the fear of God in him, at least for a while. He might not have his own ideas, but he could get them from someone else.
IX
WAITING FOR the balloon to go up was the hardest thing a soldier did. Back in 1914, Tom Colleton had waited eagerly, even gaily, confident the war would be won and the damnyankees smashed before the cotton harvest came in. Everything would be glorious. Three years later, he was one of the lucky ones who came home again, glory quite forgotten.
The new war had smashed the USA, had split the country in two. That he was up here by Sandusky, Ohio, proved as much. Like Jake Featherston, like everyone else in the CSA, he’d assumed that splitting the United States meant winning the war. There was a lesson there, on what assumptions were worth, but he didn’t care to dwell on it.
“This time for sure,” he muttered.
“Sir?” asked an improbably young lieutenant commanding one of the companies in his regiment. He should have had a more experienced officer in that slot, but the replacement depot hadn’t coughed one up. Reinforcements were coming into Ohio, which was good. Even with them, though, not every hole got filled.
Tom wished the damnyankees had the same problem. He envied them their manpower pool. Confederate soldiers mostly had better weapons. He thought, and was far from alone in thinking, Confederate soldiers were better trained. Every one of them was worth more in combat than his U.S. counterpart. But Jesus God, there were a hell of a lot of Yankees!
He needed to answer the youngster. “This time for sure,” he repeated. “When we hit the U.S. forces this time, we’ve got to knock them out of the war. We’ve got to, and we damn well will.”
“Oh, yes, sir!” said the shavetail—Tom thought his name was Jackson. It was a safe bet, anyway; about one in every three Confederate soldiers seemed to be named Jackson. “Of course we will!”
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