He laughed once more. Now he sat behind sheet metal and bulletproof glass in an armored seat. He could fly more than twice as high as that pusher could have gone. But he still flew, or flew again, with aggressively unreliable engines. Maybe he could bail out now if they went south on him. On the other hand, maybe he couldn’t.
Finding the airstrip from which he’d taken off was another adventure. Just any old field wouldn’t do. The turbo had a high takeoff and landing speed. It needed a lot of runway. One that was fine for prop jobs likely wouldn’t let him land.
Instead of the base, he spotted another airplane: a Confederate Grasshopper buzzing along over U.S. territory to see what it could see. Grasshoppers were marvelous little machines. They could hover in a strong headwind and land or take off in next to nothing. For artillery spotting or taking out casualties or sneaking in spies or saboteurs, they couldn’t be beat. Moss knew that several captured specimens were wearing the U.S. eagle over crossed swords instead of the Confederate battle flag.
The guy in this one saw him coming before he got close enough to fire. It scooted out of the way with a turn no honest fighter could match. Try to shoot down a Grasshopper whose pilot knew you were there and you’d end up talking to yourself. It was like trying to kill a butterfly with an axe.
More for the hell of it than any other reason, Moss made another pass. With effortless ease, the Grasshopper evaded him again. He didn’t even bother opening fire. And the observer in the back of the light airplane’s cockpit squeezed off a burst at him with his pintle-mounted machine gun. None of the tracers came close, but the defiant nose-thumbing—it couldn’t be anything else—tickled Moss’ funny bone. He would have had a better chance against the Grasshopper in his 1914 Curtiss pusher than he did in a Screaming Eagle.
He made it back to the airfield and eased the turbo down to the ground. You had to land gently. The nosewheel was less sturdy than it should have been; sometimes it would break off if you came down on it too hard. The first couple of pilots who’d discovered that would never learn anything else now.
“How’d it go?” a groundcrew man asked as Moss climbed down from the cockpit.
“Nailed a Hound Dog,” he answered. The groundcrew techs cheered. Somebody pounded him on the back. He went on, “His buddy dove for the deck and got away—bastard was good. And I made a couple of runs at a Grasshopper, but ffft!” He squeezed his thumb and forefinger together, miming a watermelon seed squirting out between them.
“Take an even strain, Colonel,” a groundcrew man said. “Those suckers’ll drive you bugshit.” The others also made sympathetic noises.
“How’d she perform?” another tech asked.
“Everything went fine this time around.” Moss banged a fist off the side of his head in lieu of knocking wood. “Engines sounded good, gauges looked good all the way through, guns behaved themselves, nosewheel wasn’t naughty.” He turned to eye it. There it was, all right, looking as innocent as if its kind never, ever misbehaved. No matter how innocent it looked, he knew better.
Leaving the Screaming Eagle to the men who fed and watered it, he walked over to the headquarters tent to report more formally. His flight suit kept him warm up over thirty thousand feet. Here in the muggy warmth of Georgia spring, he felt as if it were steaming him.
Colonel Roy Wyden ran the turbo squadron. He was a boy wonder, just past thirty, with the ribbons for a Distinguished Service Cross and a Bronze Star among the fruit salad on his chest. When Moss told him he’d knocked down a C.S. fighter, Wyden reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle and two glasses. He poured a couple of knocks of good Tennessee sipping whiskey—spoil of war—and said, “Way to go.”
“Thank you, sir.” Moss tasted the drink and added, “Thank you, sir.” Wyden grinned at him—and seemed even younger. Moss went on, “I went after a Grasshopper, too, but he got away a lot easier than the Hound Dog’s buddy.”
“Those goddamn things. There ought to be a bounty on ’em,” Wyden said. “A Screaming Eagle isn’t exactly the weapon of choice against them, either.”
“Tell me about it!” Moss exclaimed. “He fired at me. I never laid a glove on him. He’s back there somewhere laughing his ass off.”
“They’ll drive you to drink, all right.” As if to prove it, Wyden sipped from his own whiskey. He glanced over to Moss. “Does that Hound Dog make you an ace in both wars?”
“No, sir. I made it the first time, but I’ve only got three this round,” Moss said. “I spent too damn long on the shelf in Andersonville and then running around with the black guerrillas.”
“You ought to get some credit for that. It’s not like you didn’t hurt the Confederates while you were doing it.”
“The war on the ground’s an ugly business.” Some of the memories that surfaced in Moss’ mind made him finish his drink in a hurry. “Our war with the CSA is ugly. The one the Negroes are fighting…No quarter on either side there. And what Featherston’s fuckers would have done to me for fighting on the Negroes’ side—”
“Better not to think about that,” Wyden broke in.
“Yeah. I know. Just staying alive took luck. If the Confederates hadn’t had all of their regulars fighting the USA, they would’ve hunted us down pretty damn quick. Jake should’ve started in on his blacks sooner, or else left them alone till after the war. Trying to get rid of them at the same time as he was fighting us only screwed him up.”
“He figured he’d whip us quick and then take care of the smokes.” Wyden got outside the last of his drink. “Tough shit, Eliot.”
For some reason, Moss thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He started giggling. Nobody in the guerrilla band, not even Nick Cantarella, would have made that kind of joke. Moss hadn’t known how much he missed it till he heard it again.
When George Enos saw land off the Oregon’s port bow, he realized how much the war had changed. That was the coast of North Carolina out there. Even six months earlier, coming so close would have been asking to get blown to pieces. Now some of the big wheels back in Philadelphia thought the Navy could get away with it.
George hoped like hell they were right.
Two battleships, two heavy cruisers, two escort carriers to give them air cover, the usual destroyers and supply ships that accompanied a flotilla: now they were paying a call on the Confederate States. The gamble was that the Confederates couldn’t pay a return call on them.
“Listen up, guys,” said Wally Fodor, the chief in charge of George’s antiaircraft guns. “We can put a hell of a lot of shells in the air. No goddamn Asskicker’s gonna make a monkey out of us, right?”
“Right!” the gun crew shouted. George didn’t know about the other guys, but he was as pumped up as he would have been if he were playing in a big football game. That was for glory and for cash, though. He was playing for his neck here.
Dive bombers roared off the baby flattops’ decks. They would send a message to a state that had mostly been shielded from the war ever since it started. U.S. fighters circled overhead. Any Confederate airplanes that tried to visit the flotilla would get a warm reception.
Smoothly, almost silently, the Oregon’s forward pair of triple turrets swung so the big guns bore to port. The barrels elevated a few degrees. “Brace yourselves!” Fodor yelled. He covered his ears with his hands and opened his mouth wide to help equalize the pressure inside his head.
In the nick of time, George did the same. The guns thundered, right over his head. He staggered—he couldn’t help it. He felt as if somebody’d dropped a boulder on his noggin. In spite of his precautions, his ears wanted to move to a far country where things like this didn’t happen. “Wow!” he said.
Shore had to be twenty miles away, maybe more. Some little while went by before the distant roar of bursting fourteen-inch shells came back to George’s abused ears. He was amazed he heard them—or anything else.
“Good morning, Morehead City!” Wally Fodor whooped.
George imagin
ed people going about their business, probably not even suspecting anything was wrong, when all of a sudden—wham! Fourteen hundred pounds of steel and high explosive coming down on your head could ruin your whole day.
The guns bellowed again. When George reached for his ears this time, it was to see if they were bleeding. They didn’t seem to be. He couldn’t imagine why not. The other battleship—she was the Maine—was firing, too. Those detonations were just loud. Or maybe his ears were so stunned that nothing this side of cataclysmic really registered.
“Well, if they didn’t know we were in the neighborhood before, they damn well do now,” Tom Thomas said. People mostly called the shell-jerker Ditto; George wondered what the devil his parents were thinking of.
More booms said the latest shells were striking home—or maybe those were bombs from the carriers’ airplanes. Smoke began to rise from the shore. The cruisers from the flotilla had to get closer to land than the battlewagons before opening up. Their eight-inch main armament didn’t have the range of the bigger ships’ heavier guns. Before long, they started firing, too.
“This is so neat!” Ditto said. “Ever think we could get away with shore bombardment?”
“We ain’t got away with it yet,” Fodor answered. George Enos was thinking the same thing. But he was the new kid on the block, so he kept his mouth shut. The gun chief went on, “When we steam out of aircraft range, then I’ll be happy. And even after that there’s fuckin’ subs.”
The main armament fired again. Fired was the word, too. The gouts of flame that shot from the muzzles were almost as long as the gun barrels. If God needed to light a cigar, this was where He’d do it.
Up above the bridge, the Y-ranging antenna spun round and round, round and round. It would spot enemy airplanes on the way in, anyway. How much good that would do…Well, knowing the bastards were coming was better than not knowing they were.
Inshore from the Oregon, not far from the cruisers, a tall column of water suddenly sprang into being. A moment later, another one appeared, even closer to the U.S. warships.
“What the hell?” somebody said. “Those aren’t bombs—we woulda got the word the bombers were loose.”
“They must have shore guns,” Wally Fodor said. “Soon as we spot the flashes, they’re history. And they’ll have a bitch of a time hitting us. We can move, but they’re stuck where they’re at.”
A few more rounds fell near the cruisers. Then, as abruptly as they’d begun, they stopped. Either the Confederates had given up or U.S. gunfire put their cannon out of action. George neither knew nor cared what the right answer was. As long as those guns kept quiet, that suited him fine.
Then the PA system came to life with a crackle of static: “Now hear this! Now hear this! Enemy aircraft approaching from the north! Expect company in five or ten minutes!”
George’s stomach knotted. Here we go again, he thought. He’d had a ship sunk under him; he knew disasters could happen. He didn’t want to remember that, but he didn’t see how he could help it, either.
“Just like a drill,” Chief Fodor said. “They haven’t got us yet, and we aren’t about to let ’em start. Right?”
“Right!” the gun crew shouted again. George was as loud as anybody. How loud he yelled made no difference in the bigger scheme of things, but it wasn’t bad if it helped him feel a little better.
Some of the fighters that had been circling over the ships zipped away to see if they could meet up with the intruders before the C.S. airplanes got the chance to intrude. Others held their stations. If the enemy bombers got past the first wave of fighters, they still wouldn’t have a free run at the flotilla.
“You’ve been through this before, right?” Fodor asked George. “I mean for real, not just for practice.”
“Sure, Chief,” George answered. “I’ve got it from the Japs and Featherston’s fuckers and the limeys. I don’t like it, but I can do it.”
“That’s all you need,” the gun chief said. “I thought I remembered you lost your cherry, but I wanted to make sure.”
Airplane engines scribed contrails across the sky. Their wakes, George thought. But the comparison with ships misled. It wasn’t just that airplanes were so much faster. They also moved in three dimensions, not just two like surface ships.
A destroyer’s antiaircraft guns started going off. So did the heavy cruisers’. Then George saw a couple of gull-winged ships that looked only too horribly familiar. “Asskickers!” he yelled, and his wasn’t the only cry that rose.
One of the slow, ungainly Confederate dive bombers went down trailing smoke a moment after he shouted. It splashed into the Atlantic a mile or so from the Oregon, and kicked up more water than the shells the coastal guns had fired.
The other C.S. Mule bored in on the battleship. The Oregon heeled in as tight a turn as she could make, but she was large and cumbersome and much less nimble than, say, the Josephus Daniels would have been. That made her action less evasive than George wished it were.
He didn’t have much time to worry about it. “Commence firing!” Wally Fodor shouted. The shell-jerkers started passing George ammo. He fed the twin 40mms’ breeches like a man possessed. Casings leaped from the guns and clattered on the deck. Bursts—puffs of black smoke—appeared all around the attacking airplane.
But it kept coming. The bomb under its belly dropped. The Asskicker zoomed past, hardly higher than the tops of the battleship’s masts. The bomb burst on the ocean, less than fifty yards from the Oregon.
Water hit George like a fist in the face. Next thing he knew, he was flat on his back, partly on the deck, partly on Ditto Thomas, who’d stood right behind him. “Get—glub!—offa me, goddammit!” Thomas spluttered, spitting out what looked like about half of the ocean.
“Yeah.” George scrambled to his feet and gave Ditto a hand to haul him up, too. Ditto rubbed at his eyes. George’s also stung from seawater. The other men from the gun crew were picking themselves up. Wally Fodor had a cut on his ear that bloodied the shoulder of his tunic. Could you get a Purple Heart for something like that? George wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, and he didn’t think Wally would, either.
At that, the number three mount got off lucky. Guys were down at the next 40mm mount, too, only they weren’t getting up again. A fragment of bomb casing had taken off one sailor’s head like a guillotine blade. Another man was gutted as neatly as a fat cod on a fishing trawler. But cod didn’t scream and try to put themselves back together. And you couldn’t gaff a sailor and put him on ice in the hold, though it might have been a mercy.
Stretcher-bearers carried him below. The Oregon boasted not one but two real doctors, not just a pharmacist’s mate like the Josephus Daniels. Could they do anything for a guy with his insides torn out? Doctors were getting smarter all the time, and the fancy new drugs meant fever didn’t always kill you. Even so…
George didn’t get the chance to brood about it. “Come on!” Fodor yelled. Did the CPO even know he was wounded? “Back to the gun! We may get another shot at the sonsabitches!”
Suddenly, though, the sky seemed bare of Confederate aircraft. One limped off toward the north, toward land, trailing smoke as it went. The rest—weren’t there any more. A rubber raft bobbed on the surface of the Atlantic: somebody’d got out of one of them, anyhow.
The Oregon’s main armament boomed out another thunderous broadside. Half a minute later, the Maine also sent a dozen enormous shells landward. The air attack had made them miss a beat, but no more.
“Jesus!” George said, his ears ringing. “Is that the best those sorry suckers can do?”
“Sure looks like it.” Chief Fodor sounded surprised, too. He noticed the blood on his shoulder, and did a professional-quality double take. “What the fuck happened here?”
“Maybe a splinter nicked you, or maybe you got hurt when the water knocked you down,” George answered.
“I be damned,” Fodor said. “I always heard about guys getting hurt without even knowing it, but I fig
ured it was bullshit. Then it goes and happens to me. I be damned.”
A U.S. destroyer steamed toward the downed Confederate flier. Somebody on the destroyer’s deck threw the man a line. He didn’t climb it. After a minute or so, a sailor went down into the raft with him and rigged a sling. The men on deck hauled the Confederate up—he must have been wounded. He was probably lucky not to be strawberry jam. Then they lowered the line to their buddy. Up he swarmed, agile as a monkey.
The big guns on both battlewagons bellowed again. If that was all the Confederates could do to stop them…If that was all, the Confederacy really was coming apart at the seams.
Paperwork. Jefferson Pinkard hated paperwork. He’d never got used to it. He didn’t like being a paper-shuffler and a pen-pusher. He could manage it, but he didn’t like it. Working in a steel mill for all those years left him with the driving urge to go out there and do things, dammit.
To soothe himself, he kept the wireless going. If he listened with half an ear to one of the Houston stations playing music, he didn’t have to pay so much attention to all the nitpicking detail Richmond wanted from him. Muttering, he shook his head. No, not Richmond. Richmond was gone, lost, captured. Jake Featherston and what was left of the Confederate government were somewhere down in North Carolina now, still screaming defiance at the damnyankees and at the world.
Camp Humble went right on reducing population. Trains still rolled in from Louisiana and Mississippi and Arkansas and east Texas. Ships brought Negroes from Cuba to the Texas ports. He aimed to go right on doing his job till somebody set over him told him to stop.
Without warning, the song he was listening to broke off. An announcer came on the air: “We interrupt this program for a special proclamation from the Governor of the great state of Texas, the Honorable Wright Patman. Governor Patman!”
“What the—?” Jeff said. Something had hit the fan, that was for damn sure.
“Citizens of Texas!” Governor Patman said. “A hundred years ago, this state was an independent republic, owing allegiance to no nation but itself. We joined first the USA and then the CSA, but we have never forgotten our own proud tradition of…freedom.” That was the Party slogan, yeah, but he didn’t use it the way a good Party man would.
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