George had no idea whether they hit anything. He didn’t have time to look up. He was too busy doing his job, trying to pass as much ammunition as two men would. The loader didn’t complain, and neither did Fremont Dalby. He couldn’t have done too badly, then.
Only when the gun fell silent did he pause, blinking in surprise. “No more targets,” Dalby announced. “They’ve flown the coop.”
When George glanced at his wristwatch, he blinked in amazement. He also took a good, long look to make sure the second hand was going around. “We’ve only been here fifteen minutes?” he said.
“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Dalby said. “I think maybe we ran ’em off. Other question is, what did they do to us?”
Whenever George moved, his shoes left bloody footprints. He didn’t want to look at what was left of the gun’s original crew. But, in a fight like this, men were small change. How many airplanes had the Japs lost? Would they lose any carriers? Measure that against the damage they’d done and you’d get some idea of who’d come out on top. Maybe.
“You men!” That was an unmistakable officer’s bark. Along with his shipmates, George turned, came to attention, and saluted. The unmistakable officer-a lieutenant commander, no less-kept on barking: “I haven’t seen you before, and I know damn well this isn’t your proper station. Explain yourselves.”
“Sir, we’re from the Townsend,” Dalby answered. “We were looking for a way to hit back at the enemy. You can see for yourself what happened to the men who were posted here. We fought this gun as well as we could, sir.” He spoke calmly, quietly, respectfully. Only his eyes asked, What were you doing while all this crap was going on?
The lieutenant commander had some mileage on him. By the fruit salad on his chest, he’d started out during the Great War. He knew what the petty officer wasn’t saying. Knowing, he turned red-not so red as George’s footprints, but red enough. “Carry on,” he said in a choked voice, and got out of there in a hurry.
“You showed him,” George said.
“Yeah.” Fremont Dalby didn’t sound happy. “You shouldn’t have to show officers, though, especially not the ones who’ve been around the block. But some of ’em just have to make like they’re God.”
When stretcher bearers came by, the men from the Townsend waved to them. They hurried over, but they didn’t stay. “We’re supposed to be looking for wounded,” one of them said. “Those birds ain’t goin’ anywhere if we leave ’em where they’re at. Sooner or later, the meat wagon will deal with ’em.”
“Not right,” George said. “These guys were doing everything they could till their number came up. Shouldn’t just leave ’em like garbage.” Actually, they reminded him of what was all over the decks of the Sweet Sue after the men on the fishing boat had been gutting big cod.
But Dalby cut the stretcher bearers more slack than he’d given the officer. “Wounded count for more,” he allowed. “You can still save them.”
“Thanks, Chief,” said the man who’d spoken before. The bearers hurried away.
Dalby looked at his shipmates. “Either one of you notice if we had bombers taking off?”
“Not me,” George said at once. “I was too busy trying not to let the Japs blow me to kingdom come, and then trying to shoot ’em down.”
“We did,” Fritz Gustafson said. “They were already airborne when I hit the trench.” Two consecutive sentences from him were a telephone book, an unabridged dictionary, from a noisier man.
Fremont Dalby nodded. “That’s pretty good. We ought to be hitting back pretty damn quick, then. Those bastards need to pay.”
“Bombers should have taken off the minute we picked up the Japs’ airplanes on the Y-range set,” George said.
“Yeah,” Dalby said thoughtfully, and then, in deeper, gruffer, angrier tones, “Yeah!” He kicked at the sidewalk. “Yeah, goddammit. Somebody was asleep at the switch again. That would have been the best way to do it, sure as hell. Christ, there are times when I really do think we want to lose this fuckin’ war.”
“Hey, Dalby, you still in one piece?” The shout came from the direction in which the gunners had come. Only another CPO would have used the gun chief’s naked surname with such relish.
“Yeah, we’re here, Burnett.” Dalby gave back what he’d got. “Leastways we didn’t stay in the trench sucking our thumbs and hanging on to our Theodore bears.”
Chief Burnett’s reply offered an improbable and uncomfortable destination for both thumbs and Theodore bears. Dalby suggested that Burnett’s mother already resided there. Burnett gave forth with an opinion on certain habits of Dalby’s mother about which he was unlikely to have personal knowledge. Then, in the same unruffled tone of voice, he asked, “You cocksuckers hit anything?”
“Damfino,” Dalby answered, also without much heat. “We gave it our best shot, that’s all.” He slapped Gustafson and George on the back, staggering them both-and George was not a small man, and Fritz Gustafson was a big one. “You already knew the squarehead’s solid. And this guy here ain’t half bad.”
George shuffled his feet on the blood-splashed sidewalk. “Thanks, Chief,” he mumbled. A Naval Cross from the hands of an admiral wouldn’t have meant nearly so much as that laconic praise from a man who mattered to him.
“Well, well,” Tom Colleton said. “What have we here?”
What they had there was a company of Confederate barrels: big, snorting machines painted in butternut with swirls and splotches of dark green and dark brown to make them harder to spot and harder to hit. But they were barrels the likes of which hadn’t been seen up in Ohio before.
Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton strolled over for a closer look at the new monsters. They were plainly related to the beasts that had spearheaded the Confederate thrust to Lake Erie the summer before. They were just as plainly bigger and meaner-Tyrannosaurus rex next to the earlier Allosaurus. They seemed more squat, lower to the ground. As Tom Colleton got up to them, he realized they weren’t, but the impression remained. Instead of going straight up and down, most of their armor was cleverly sloped to help deflect shells. And their turret guns were bigger and longer than those of the earlier models.
One of the barrel drivers was head and shoulders out of his machine: no point in buttoning up when the damnyankees weren’t close. “That’s a two-and-a-half-inch cannon you’ve got there?” Colleton asked.
“Three inches, sir,” the man answered, proud as if he’d said eight inches of himself. “Some of those Yankees’ll never know what hit ’em. Seventeen-pound shell.”
“Sweet Jesus!” Tom exclaimed. “Yeah, that’ll make you sit up and take notice, all right. How many of these bastards have we got?”
“Many as we need, I reckon,” the driver said.
“Oh, yeah? I’ll believe that when I see it,” Tom Colleton said. In his experience, nobody ever had as many barrels as he needed. The enemy wrecked a few, some more broke down-and then, just when they would have come in handy to take out some well-sited, well-protected machine-gun nests, there wouldn’t be any for miles around.
But the driver nodded. Why not? He could duck down inside all that lovely armor plating. He didn’t have to look longingly at it from the outside. He didn’t have to worry about machine guns, either, no matter how well protected they were. He said, “Sir, don’t you fret. This time, by God, we’re going to get the job done.”
“Here’s hoping,” Tom said. The driver-a cocky kid-just grinned at him. He found himself grinning back. It wasn’t as if barrel crewmen didn’t have worries of their own. When they were in the field, they were cannon magnets. All the enemy’s heavy weapons bore on them. The armor that kept out small-arms fire could turn into a roasting pan to cook soldiers if something did get through.
“You’ll see.” Yeah, the kid was cocky.
He also sounded like somebody who knew more than he was letting on. “What is the job we’re going to get done?” Tom asked. He commanded a regiment; nobody’d bothered to tell him anythi
ng. He should have been miffed that a noncom from another unit knew more about what was going on than he did. He should have been, but he wasn’t, or not very. He’d seen enough in both the Great War and this one to know that kind of crap happened all the time.
Before the barrel driver could answer, somebody inside the machine said something to him through the intercom. Tom heard the squawk in the kid’s earphones, but he couldn’t make out any words. The driver said, “Sorry, sir-gotta go. Orders are to push up a little closer to the front.”
“Be careful,” Tom warned. “The damnyankees have started sneaking in more and more infiltrators. They like to plant mines, and their snipers try and blow the heads off drivers and commanders who don’t stay buttoned up.”
“Sir, we’ve got us this big ol’ cannon and two machine guns. I reckon we can make any old infiltrators knuckle under,” the driver answered. He ducked down into the barrel, but didn’t close the hatch. The engine’s note deepened as the machine rattled forward with its companions.
Tom stared after them, coughing a little from the noxious exhaust fumes. He would have bet everything he owned that the kid had never seen combat. Nobody who had was that casual about snipers. If the other guy shot first, how big your gun was or how many rounds per minute you could put out didn’t matter.
“Luck,” Tom muttered. If that smiling puppy lived through his first couple of brushes with U.S. soldiers, he had a good chance of living quite a while longer. You got experience in a hurry-or, if you didn’t, they buried you somewhere up here with a helmet stuck on a stick or on a rifle to mark where you lay.
That fancy barrel the kid was driving couldn’t help but improve his odds. If we’d had these when the war started… Tom shook his head. The CSA hadn’t had them, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. The damnyankees hadn’t had them, either. How long would they need to come up with barrels that matched these? How long before both sides sported land dreadnoughts, behemoths that laughed at danger and squashed antlike mortal men under their tracks without even knowing they were there?
Tom shook his head again. Nothing he could do about it except try to make sure he wasn’t one of the poor sorry bastards who got squashed. He had no guarantees of that, either, and he knew it.
The barrels had rolled east out of Sandusky, not west. That said something, anyhow. He’d expected them to go in that direction, but nothing was carved in stone. It did look as if the CSA would have to hit the USA another lick to make the bigger country fall over. Cutting the United States in half hadn’t quite done the job.
Why hadn’t Al Smith thrown in the sponge, dammit? Everybody could have gone home. Tom would rather have been in St. Matthews than in Sandusky. He didn’t know anybody who wanted to be here. But needing to be here was a different story.
Not all the reinforcements that came in were armored units. The infantrymen Tom saw made him raise an eyebrow. They weren’t raw troops in fresh uniforms. They wore butternut frayed at the cuffs and the elbows and knees, faded by the sun, and deprived of all possibility of holding a crease by hard use. Their weapons were well tended, but a long way from factory-new. They were, in other words, just as much veterans as the men he commanded.
Where had they come from? Virginia seemed the only likely answer. Outside of Ohio, it was the only place that could have produced men like this. Fighting went on here and there in the West, but neither side put full force into that effort. The CSA and the USA both seemed sure the decision would come where they were strongest, not at the periphery. As far as Tom could see, the big brains on both sides were likely right.
But the damnyankees were still pounding away in Virginia. Could the Confederate States pull men out of there and go on holding them off? Tom had to hope so.
A day or two later, he realized that wasn’t necessarily the right question. An even more pressing one was, couldn’t the Confederate States do anything in Ohio without bleeding Virginia of men? The answer to that one looked to be no, and it wasn’t the answer Tom wanted to find. Robbing Peter to pay Paul wasn’t a good way to fight a war.
But what choice did the CSA have? None Tom could see. This was the downside of getting into a fight with a country that had a lot more manpower than you did. He called down more curses on Al Smith’s head. The whole idea of storming up through Ohio, of cutting the United States in half, had been to knock the USA out of the fight before numbers really mattered. The Confederates had tried it. They’d succeeded as well as they’d hoped to. Everything had been perfect.
Except the United States hadn’t quit.
Now the Confederate States faced the same sort of grinding struggle as they’d seen in the Great War. What should have been a one-punch KO was a no-holds-barred wrestling match now.
Airplanes droned by overhead. Tom Colleton cast a wary eye up to the heavens. He knew where he’d jump if they turned out to be U.S. airplanes. He looked for shelter as automatically as he breathed. That he looked for shelter so automatically helped keep him breathing.
But they were C.S. machines. Even when the silhouettes were tiny, he recognized them. He wondered what he’d do when his side-or the damnyankees-brought out new models. He had a pretty good notion, too: the first few times, he’d dive for cover whether he needed to or not. After that, he’d be able to tell friend from foe again.
The day was coming. It was probably coming soon. The Confederate States had new, improved barrels. Before long, they were bound to have new, improved airplanes, too. So were the United States.
Where would it end? Probably with both sides flying to the moon, with guns that could strike from five hundred miles away, and with bombs that could blow up whole counties if not whole states. Tom laughed at himself, but then he wondered why. Back in 1917, he couldn’t have imagined the weapons the CSA and the USA were using now. What would the state of the art be in 1967, or in 1992?
He shivered, standing there under the warm spring sunshine. Things were much deadlier now than they had been a generation earlier. If that went on for another twenty-five years, wouldn’t wars end almost before they started? And if not, why not?
“Sir?”
Tom started. He wondered how long the sergeant standing beside him had been trying to get his attention. By the exaggerated patience on the man’s face, he’d done everything but wave wigwag flags. “What is it, Meyers?” Tom asked. “I’m here-I really am.”
“That’s good, sir,” Sergeant Meyers said. “I was going to ask you if you knew when the balloon was going up. Not officially, you understand, but if you knew. It’d help the men get ready.”
“I wish to God I did, Sergeant, but whatever we’re doing, nobody has bothered to tell me about it yet. You can take that for whatever you think it’s worth.” Tom’s laugh was half rueful, half furious. “One of the drivers for those new barrels had a pretty good notion, or reckoned he did. He had to pull out before he could tell me what it was. Damned impressive barrel, though.”
“Oh, yes, sir!” Meyers was not a man given to wild enthusiasms; few sergeants were. That sort of man was much more likely to be a private or a lieutenant. But the sergeant waxed enthusiastic now. “We have enough of those critters, we’ll make the damnyankees say uncle for sure.”
“I hope you’re right, Sergeant.” Tom meant it. After what the C.S. Army had been through the year before, though, and after what it had accomplished, he took nothing for granted. That any one weapon, no matter how wonderful, could knock the USA out of the war struck him as unlikely.
He kept his mouth shut. If Sergeant Meyers thought the Yankees would fall over dead as soon as the Confederates kicked them back one more hill, fine. That made him a more cheerful soldier, a better soldier, at least until the damnyankees did get pushed back past that last hill, if they ever did. If they got pushed back and didn’t fall over dead… Well, in that case Meyers and the other men like him would have some rethinking to do. He might not be such a terrific soldier for a while after that.
Wherever we’re going, we’re going ea
st, Tom thought. Right into the heart of Yankeeland. We’d better make ’em say uncle, by God.
“Steady as she goes, Mr. Cooley,” Sam Carsten told his executive officer.
“Steady as she goes-aye aye, sir,” Pat Cooley replied, his freckled face intent on keeping the Josephus Daniels as steady as she could possibly go. The destroyer escort crept through the hot, muggy night towards a shoreline that was…
Carsten didn’t like to think about how very ready to receive them that Virginia shoreline probably was. Keeping anything secret in these crowded waters required a miracle beyond the power of any Navy Department functionary to provide. Sam wasn’t altogether certain the Holy Ghost could have given him one as big as he needed. Sneaking into Chesapeake Bay without getting either mined or torpedoed hadn’t been the smallest of miracles all by itself.
He spoke into the telephone that connected the bridge with the gun turrets: “Everything ready there? You have your targets?”
“Yes, sir!” the gun chiefs answered together.
“All right, then.” Sam smiled there in the darkness. Even as a rating, he’d been in charge of bigger pieces than these four-inch popguns. “At my order, and give it everything you’ve got… Fire!”
Twin tongues of flame belched from the turrets, lighting up the night for a heartbeat with a hellish orange glow. Recoil made the ship shudder. Those tongues thrust out again, and then again and again, as each gun crew did its best to prove it was faster than the other. First the bow turret took the lead, then the stern. All told, judging a winner was next to impossible.
Splashes of fire inland told of shell hits. Sam knew where the target was, but not what it was. That evidently wasn’t necessary for the mission. He kept an eye on the luminous hands of his watch. When exactly five minutes had gone by, he said, “Cease firing,” into the telephone. An aching silence fell. He turned to the exec. “Mr. Cooley, I do believe we may have worn out our welcome. Get us out of here. All ahead full, course 010.”
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