“All ahead full, course 010.” Cooley rang the engine room. The Josephus Daniels put on as many revolutions and as much speed as she had. Sam was used to ships with a lot more dash. He felt nailed to the surface of the bay despite the phosphorescent wake streaming from the bow. Destroyer escorts were cheap and easy and fast to build. Considering their liabilities, they needed to be.
On the shore, the Confederates were waking up. First one field gun and then a whole battery started firing at where the Josephus Daniels had been. Those were 105s-guns of about the same caliber as the destroyer escort carried.
The bridge telephone rang. When Sam picked it up, one of the turret chiefs said, “Sir, permission to return enemy fire?”
“Permission denied,” Sam answered, in lieu of screaming, Are you out of your frigging mind? He went on, “We’ve done what we came to do here. Now our job is to get out in one piece so we can come back and do it again one day before long. Shooting back makes us much too visible, and they have more guns than we do. We just scoot. Got that?”
“Yes, sir,” the turret chief said sullenly. Carsten found it hard to fault a man who wanted to raise hell with the enemy, but you needed a sense of proportion. No, I need a sense of proportion. That’s why I’m the Old Man. There were times when he felt like a very old man indeed.
Pat Cooley eyed him from the wheel. Cooley was ten times the ship handler he would ever be. Sam hadn’t taken the wheel of any ship till he became the skipper here. “Your thoughts, Mr. Cooley?” Sam asked.
“Sir, I’d like to shoot back at those bastards,” the exec answered. Sam stiffened. But after a moment Cooley went on, “You’re right, though. Probably a good idea that we don’t. They’re missing us pretty bad-if I were in charge of that battery, I’d be reaming ’em out right now.”
But the man in charge of that C.S. battery-a sergeant or lieutenant tumbled from his blanket when the Josephus Daniels opened up-had a better idea. Two of his guns fired star shells that lit up the bay-and the destroyer escort-with a cold, clear, terrible light.
Men at the antiaircraft guns started shooting at the star shells. If they could wreck the parachutes that supported them in the air, the blazing shells would fall into the sea and sizzle out. The bow turret no longer bore on the Confederate battery. The stern turret opened up without orders. Sam only nodded to himself. With the Josephus Daniels out there in plain sight, a muzzle flash or three didn’t make a rat’s ass’ worth of difference.
And she was out there in plain sight. The Confederate guns on the coast wasted no time correcting their aim. Shells began bursting around and on the destroyer escort. Most of the ships on which Sam had served would have laughed at 105mm shells. But the Josephus Daniels, like any destroyer, was thin-skinned. She had no armor to protect her. Screams made Sam grind his teeth. Men serving the antiaircraft guns topside were vulnerable aboard any ship that floated. He knew that. Knowing it left it no easier to take.
“Smoke, Mr. Cooley,” he said. “We’ll see how much good it does.”
“Smoke. Aye aye, sir.”
More star shells lit up the night. Smoke blossomed around the Josephus Daniels. It helped less than it might have under other circumstances. Sam had feared as much. She was the only thing afloat in this part of Chesapeake Bay. If the smoke screen moved, she had to be at the front end of it. Knowing that, the Confederate gunners didn’t lose a whole lot of accuracy from not being able to see their target anymore.
Nothing to do but take the pounding and try to get away. Sam had heard Great War stories about how raiders caught between their trench line and the enemy’s hated star shells with a purple passion. Now he understood exactly how they felt. There you were, all lit up, naked as a bug on a plate.
A big boom and a flash of light from the shore said the Daniels’ gun had hit something worthwhile-probably the ammunition store for one of the guns shooting at the ship. Before Sam could let out a whoop, a Confederate shell burst just forward of the bridge. He watched a machine-gun crew blown to cat’s meat. Fragments whistled and screeched past him. After pausing to make sure he was still in one piece, he asked, “You all right, Mr. Cooley?”
“Everything’s copacetic here, Skipper,” Cooley said, and then, “Well, almost everything.” He displayed his left sleeve, which had a brand-new gash in it. An inch farther in and he would have gone down to the sick bay with a wounded arm. Six inches farther in and they would have had to carry him to sick bay with a belly wound. Even with all the fancy drugs they had these days, belly wounds were very bad news.
“Good for you, Pat.” That sliced sleeve made Sam less formal than usual. “You don’t really want a Purple Heart, no matter how pretty the ribbon would look on your uniform.”
“Yes, sir,” Cooley said. Another shell screamed in. He and Sam both ducked automatically, not that ducking was likely to do a hell of a lot of good. The shell was a clean miss, bursting a good hundred yards to starboard. A little hesitantly, the exec asked, “Are we going to get out of this, sir?”
Sam thought of talking about the Battle of the Three Navies, when the British and the Japanese hit the Dakota with everything but their purse. He thought about the Remembrance’s last fight, when Japanese air power finally sank the tough old carrier. In the end, though, he just stuck to business: “Unless we take one in the engine room that leaves us dead in the water, we will. Otherwise, those 105s may hurt us, but they won’t be able to kill us before we get out of range.”
Cooley considered that, then nodded. He looked at his wristwatch. “At flank speed, we’ve got to stand the gaff for-what? About another fifteen minutes?”
Carsten checked his watch, too. He laughed ruefully. “Yeah, that’s about right. I didn’t think it would be so long. Aren’t we lucky?”
“Lucky. Right.” Cooley managed an answering grin, but one of a distinctly sepulchral sort. A Confederate shell burst just behind the stern. Those near misses were dangerous, because fragments still flew. Screams from that direction said some of these had struck home.
“Can you give us any more down there?” Sam yelled to the engine room through a speaking tube.
“Sir, she’s flat out,” the chief engineer said. “Shit, we’ve got the valves tied down the way they did on the old paddle-wheel riverboats.”
“All right-thanks.” Sam sighed. He shouldn’t have expected anything different. He hadn’t really, but he’d hoped for something like, Oh, yes, sir, we’ll dreelspayl the paragore and get you two more knots easy as you please. Two more knots? He snorted. He wanted ten more. Well, sonny boy, you ain’t gonna get ’em. He turned back to the exec. “Do you think we ought to throw some zigzags into the course?”
“Straight gets us out of range faster,” Cooley said doubtfully.
“Yeah, but it lets them lead us, too,” Sam answered. “Ever hunt ducks?”
“Once or twice, but I didn’t like it. It’s not all it’s quacked up to be.”
“Ouch. Don’t do that again. I think I’d rather-” Sam broke off. However bad Cooley’s occasional puns were, he didn’t prefer being under Confederate gunfire to listening to them.
The exec did start zigzagging at random. That would have been better with another ten knots, too, but you did what you could with what you had. Sam thought it helped. They took another hit and a couple of more near misses, but nothing that slowed them down. And, even though those were some of the longest fifteen minutes of Sam’s life, they finally ended.
By then, all the shells were coming in astern of the Josephus Daniels. When the Confederates realized as much, they ceased fire.
“Now we’re home free, if one of their airplanes doesn’t find us,” Sam said.
“You’re full of cheerful thoughts, aren’t you, sir?” Cooley said.
“Like a sardine can is full of sardines, son,” Sam answered. “Straighten out and head for home. I’m gong to assess the damage. Keep straight unless we’re attacked. If they jump us before I’m back to the bridge-” He broke off again. “Belay t
hat. I’ll take the conn. You go assess the damage and report back.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Cooley didn’t question him. The Josephus Daniels was his, Sam Carsten’s, no one else’s. Responsibility for her was his, too. He couldn’t stand the idea of anything happening if he wasn’t there when it did. Cooley said, “I’ll hustle, sir.”
Sam stared at the Y-range screens as the ship sped up toward Maryland. No aircraft heading his way, nothing on the water. He didn’t think the Confederates had anything bigger than a torpedo boat operating in the bay, but a torpedo boat could ruin you if you didn’t spot it till too late.
Cooley came back. “Sir, looks like four to six dead, a couple of dozen wounded. We’ve got one wrecked 40mm mount-that’s the worst of the damage. The rest is mostly metalwork. All things considered, we got away cheap.”
“Thank you, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. We got away cheap. The dead and the maimed would not agree with the exec. Sam found that he was inclined to. War measured what you dished out against what you took. By that grim arithmetic, the Josephus Daniels had got away cheap.
Hyrum Rush had gone back to Utah and been passed through the lines into Mormon-held territory under flag of truce. As far as Flora Blackford was concerned, even that was better than he deserved. His parting words before getting on the train that would take him west were, “You people will see what this costs you.” If he hadn’t been under safe-conduct, that would have been plenty to make Flora lock him up and throw away the key.
“The nerve of the man!” she spluttered when his warning-his threat? — got back to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. “We should never have talked with him in the first place!”
“There I agree with you completely,” Robert Taft said. “You will have more luck persuading the administration than I’m likely to, though.”
Taft was a famously acerbic man, and also one given to understatement. He remained the leading hard-line Democrat in the Senate. Flora worried about agreeing with him. He no doubt also worried about agreeing with her.
“I’ve never said Socialists can’t make mistakes,” Flora answered. “I have said they aren’t the only ones who can make mistakes. Some people don’t recognize the difference.”
He gave her a tight smile-the only kind his face had room for. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” he said, and she found herself smiling back.
They had plenty to do, questioning officers and men about the bloody fiasco at Fredericksburg. About the most anybody-including Daniel MacArthur-would say to defend it was, It seemed like a good idea at the time. Trying to pin down why it had seemed a good idea was like trying to scoop up water with a sieve. The committee remained very busy and accomplished very little.
Like anyone else these days, Hyrum Rush had to go up through Canada to travel from east to west. Flora kept track of his progress through Franklin Roosevelt. “I hope you’re making him cool his heels up there,” she told the Assistant Secretary of War.
“We thought about it, Congresswoman,” he said. “We thought about it long and hard-believe you me we did. Finally, though, we decided that showing him how bad our bottleneck up there really is would only encourage him. And so we hustled him through instead.”
Flora thought about that. Reluctantly, she nodded. “You’re inconveniencing him most by inconveniencing him least,” she said.
Even over the telephone, his laugh made her want to laugh along with him. “That’s just what we’re doing, Flora,” he said between chortles. “The only thing is, I didn’t know it was what we were doing till you told me just now. I’m going to steal your line every chance I get, and most of the time I’m not going to give you any credit.”
“Who in politics ever does give anybody else any credit?” Flora said, which only set him laughing again.
She stopped worrying about Hyrum Rush once she heard he’d got back to what his people called Deseret. Sooner or later, the U.S. Army would grind it out of existence-for good this time, she hoped. Utah and the Mormons had been a running sore on the body politic for much too long.
The biggest question facing the Joint Committee was whether it would have the nerve to tell the War Department to put somebody besides Daniel MacArthur in charge in Virginia. Flora was convinced the man didn’t deserve his command. But she also saw he had an aura of invulnerability about him-not because of his battlefield talents but because of his personality.
George Custer had had an aura like that during the Great War. Even Teddy Roosevelt had moved carefully around him. Of course, Custer and Roosevelt-the other Roosevelt-had been rivals for years, ever since the Second Mexican War. But no one in the present administration had anything close to TR’s own strength of character. That being so, any decisive steps without prodding from the Joint Committee struck even Flora, a good Socialist, as unlikely.
She was saying so, pointedly enough to dismay Chairman Norris, when an explosion made the building shake. Plaster pattered down from the ceiling. Somebody said, “That was a close one.”
Somebody else said, “Damn Confederates haven’t sent any day bombers for a while-begging your pardon, Congresswoman.”
“Oh, I damn them, too,” Flora said. “You don’t need to doubt that for even a minute, believe me.” She looked down at her notes. “May I continue, Mr. Chairman?”
“You have the floor, Congresswoman.” Senator Norris looked as if he wished she didn’t.
“Thank you, sir.” The florid politeness that had once seemed so unnatural to her was now second nature. “As I was saying-”
But before she could say it, a man in a guard’s uniform stuck his head into the meeting room. “We’re evacuating the building. That was an auto bomb near the front entrance. We don’t know if they’ve got any more close by.” He grimaced. “We don’t even know who they are, dammit.” He didn’t apologize for swearing in front of Flora.
They. The enemy within never went away. Who was it this time? Confederate saboteurs? Mormons living up to Hyrum Rush’s promise? Rebellious Canadians? British agents? Any combination of those groups working together? Flora didn’t know. Somebody was going to have to find out, though.
“Please come with me,” the guard said.
“Before we do, let’s see your identification,” Robert Taft snapped. Flora reluctantly allowed that that made good sense. If the man in the uniform was part of the plot… People were going to start looking under beds before they went to sleep if this went on.
The guard showed Senator Taft his identity card without a word of protest. Satisfied, Flora nodded. Flora wondered what Taft would have done if the man had gone for his pistol instead. Probably thrown himself at it-he had the courage of his convictions, as well as plenty of courage of the ordinary sort.
Following the guard, the members of the Joint Committee hurried out of the massive building Congress used in Philadelphia-wags called it the box the Capitol came in. They emerged on the side opposite the one where the auto bomb had gone off. Along with several others, Flora started around the building so she could see the damage for herself. “That isn’t safe!” the guard exclaimed.
“And how do you know standing here is?” she answered. “Any one of these motorcars may be full of TNT and ready to blow up.” The guard looked very unhappy, which didn’t mean she was wrong.
“You told him,” Taft said approvingly.
“So I did,” she said, and hurried on. A makeshift police and fire line stopped her and the others before they got very close to the site of the explosion. Even what they could see from there was bad enough. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay everywhere. The front of the hall had taken heavy damage. It all seemed worse than the aftermath of an air raid, perhaps because the auto’s chassis turned into more, and more lethal, shrapnel than a bomb casing did. One of Flora’s colleagues was noisily sick on his shoes.
“Someone will pay for this.” Robert Taft sounded grim.
No sooner had he spoken than half the facade of the Congressional hall crashed down to th
e cratered street. A great gray-brown cloud of dust rose. Soldiers and policemen rushed into it to rescue whoever lay buried under the rubble. Flora covered her face with her hands.
A reporter chose that moment to rush up to her and ask, “Congresswoman, what do you think of this explosion?”
“I hope not too many people got hurt. I hope the ones who did will recover.” Flora realized the man had a job to do, but she didn’t feel like answering foolish questions right now.
That didn’t stop the reporter from asking them. With an air of breathless anticipation, he said, “Who do you think is to blame for this atrocity?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure there will be an investigation,” Flora said.
“But if you had to guess, who would be responsible?” he persisted.
“If I had to guess right now, I would be irresponsible,” Flora told him.
The answer should have made him take a hint and go away. No such luck. He was not one of those reporters who recognized anything as subtle as a hint. And that turned out to be just as well, for his next question told Flora something she didn’t know: “What do you think of the explosions in Washington and New York and Boston and Pittsburgh and Chicago and-other places, too?”
“What explosions?” Flora and Robert Taft spoke together, in identical sharp tones.
“Whole bunch of auto bombs.” The reporter seemed as willing to give information as to try to pry it out of other people. “The Capitol and Wall Street and the State House in Boston and I don’t know what all else. Lots of damage, lots of people dead. All about the same time as this one. News was coming over the wire and by wireless when I got the call to get my, uh, fanny over here.”
“Jesus Christ!” Taft burst out. Flora didn’t echo him, but her thoughts amounted to something similar. He went on, “This has the smell of a conspiracy.” Flora wouldn’t have argued with that, either.
The reported scribbled in his spiral-bound notebook. “Smell of a conspiracy,” he repeated, and dipped his head. “Thank you, Senator-that’s a good line.” He hurried off.
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