American Front (10 page)

“Oh. I see what you mean.” Maybe Hoyland even did. He pointed to the map again. “How will we exploit these Cocospera mines?”

“Probably with the niggers the Rebels brought in to work them,” Morrell answered, shrugging. “That’s not our worry. Our worry is to take them.”

“Yes, sir.” Now Hoyland wiped his face with his sleeve, leaving a smear of dust on his cheek. “Even hotter here than it was up in the USA, you ask me.”

“We’ve only come twenty miles, for God’s sake,” Morrell said in some exasperation. “We’ve got a long haul before we get to Guaymas.”

He looked back over his shoulder. Dust clogged the horizon to the north, hiding the men and horses and cannon and horse-drawn wagons and motor trucks that had stirred it up. He knew they were there, though, intent on sealing the western part of the Confederacy from the rest of the country: not only was Guaymas a railhead, it was the only real Pacific port the Rebels had. Shut it down and this part of the South withered on the vine.

The Rebels knew as much, too. Their frontier force had been smashed in the opening U.S. attack, but they were still doing what they could to resist. Off to the northeast of Imuris, the desert rose up into low, rolling hills. They’d mounted some three-inch field guns up on the high ground, and were banging away at the advancing U.S. column.

More dust rising from the U.S. left showed cavalry—or, more likely, mounted infantry—peeling off to deal with the Confederates. Those nuisance field guns had accomplished their objective: to distract some of the American force from its primary mission.

Morrell refused to be distracted. He scrambled between strands of barbed wire that marked the outer bounds of some ranch’s property. He could see the ranch house and its outbuildings a couple of miles ahead, shimmering in the heat haze. As on the U.S. side of the border, ranches were big here; because water was scarce and precious and the ground scrubby as a result, you needed a lot of acreage for your stock.

He didn’t see any of that stock. The owner, whoever he was (
an old-time Mexican or a Southern Johnny-come-lately?
Morrell wondered), had run it off to keep the U.S. forces from getting their hands on it. They’d probably run off themselves, too—with luck, so fast they hadn’t had a chance to take everything out of the ranch house. Whatever they hadn’t taken, the U.S. Army would.

A rifle barked, up ahead. A bullet kicked up dirt, maybe fifty yards from Morrell’s feet. As if that first one had been a test, a fusillade of rifle shots rang out. Morrell threw himself flat on his belly. Somewhere behind him, a wounded man let out a breathless, angry curse.

From the volume of fire, the Confederates were there in about platoon strength. Morrell didn’t hear the deadly chatter of a machine gun, for which he thanked God. Even after the bombardment of New Montgomery, machine guns in the ruins had chewed holes in the U.S. forces.

“We’ll flank ’em out!” he shouted. “Hoyland, your platoon to the left; Koenig, yours to the right. Foulkes, I’ll stay with your boys here in the center. We’ll advance by squads. Let’s go.”

The Confederates had had time to dig themselves holes, and their dun-colored uniforms weren’t easy to spot against the gray-brown dirt: here, at least, they matched the terrain better than the U.S. troops did. They could not let themselves be taken from the sides, though, and began falling back toward the ranch house and other buildings as their foes moved forward. Here and there, a brave man or two would stay in a hole and die in place, buying his comrades time to retreat.

One of those diehards popped up not ten feet from Morrell. The U.S. captain shot first. With a cry of pain, the Confederate fell back. He wasn’t through, though; he tried to bring his rifle to bear once more. Morrell sprang down into the hole and finished him with the bayonet.

He got out and resumed the advance. “We can’t let ’em get set,” he said. “Press ’em hard, every one of you.”

A U.S. soldier was already sprawled behind a woodpile near the house, firing at the Rebels inside. A body sprawled out through a window and poured blood down onto the flowers below.

With better cover, though, the Confederates were taking a heavy toll on the U.S. troopers. Firing came not only from the ranch house but also from the barn, the chicken coop, and what looked like a little separate smithy. Then three of Morrell’s men rushed into the smithy. After a sharp, short volley, it became a U.S. strongpoint rather than a Confederate one.

But heavy firing still came from both the ranch house and the barn. Several men in butternut burst out of the barn and ran toward the house, which was closer to the advancing U.S. soldiers.

“Come on!” Morrell shouted to his own men. He burst from the cover of a scraggly bush and sprinted toward the Confederates, firing as he ran. They fired, too; a couple of bullets cracked past him.

He didn’t have time to be afraid. He fired again, saw one man fall, worked the bolt on his Springfield, and pulled the trigger. His only reward was a dry click; he’d just spent the last round in the magazine. No chance to fumble for a fresh one. The Rebels couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty feet away. He’d always been pretty good with the bayonet. If he stuck one Confederate, maybe the rest would run. Shouting once more for his men to follow him, he rushed at the enemy.

The bullet caught him in the right thigh. The rifle flew out of his hands and crashed to the ground. So did he. Looking down at himself, he saw in mild surprise that a chunk of meat about the size of a clenched fist was missing from the side of his leg. Blood spilled out onto the hot, dry, thirsty ground.

He didn’t hurt—and then he did. His groans were lost in the racket of gunfire. Nobody could come to retrieve him, not when he lay right between the two battling forces. Nobody fired at him to finish him off, either. He was not altogether sure that was a mercy. The fierce sun beat down on him.

Next thing he remembered, the sun was in a different part of the sky. Somebody was rolling him over onto his back. Did they think him dead? The very idea made him indignant. But no—Private Altrock was wrapping something around his leg.

“Get that belt good and tight,” Lieutenant Hoyland said. “He’s already lost a hell of a lot of blood.”

“Yes, sir,” Altrock said, and grunted as he pulled the makeshift tourniquet tighter.

“Did we—take the position?” Morrell asked, each word a separate effort.

“Yes, sir,” Hoyland told him. “You take it easy now. We’ll get you out of here.” Off to one side, a couple of men were improvising a stretcher from two poles and a shelter half. When they were done, Altrock and Hoyland got Morrell onto it, lifting him like a sack of grain. He remembered the stretcher coming off the ground, but blacked out again after that.

He woke up out of the direct sun, looking up at green-gray cloth.
A hospital tent
, he thought dimly. A man in a gauze mask bent over him with an ether-soaked rag. “Wait,” Morrell croaked. “If you go into close combat, make sure you’ve got the last bullet.” The rag came down, and with it blackness.

III

The
Dakota
slowed to a crawl to let the fuel ship
Vulcan
come alongside. Sailors cursed and grunted as they wrestled with the hose from the
Vulcan
and started pumping heavy fuel oil into the battleship.

Seaman First Class Sam Carsten looked on the refueling process with something less than approval: he was swabbing the deck nearby, and saw more work piling up for him every moment. “Can’t you lugs be careful?” he demanded. “Bunch of filthy slobs, is what you are.”

“Sorry, mother dearest,” one of the men on the refueling party said in a high, scratchy falsetto. His comrades laughed. So did Carsten, who leaned on his mop to watch the work go on. He laughed easily, even at himself. He was a big, slow-moving blue-eyed blond, his skin ever more sunburned these days.

“Wish we were back in San Francisco,” he said wistfully. “It was right nice there—good weather for a paleface like me. Another couple days of this and you can spread me with butter and marmalade, because I’ll be a piece of toast.”

“It’s hot, sure as hell,” the other sailor agreed. Black oil stains spotted his dungarees. “It ain’t near as hot as we’re gonna make it for the goddamn limeys, though.”

“That’s right,” another hose-handler agreed. He eyed Carsten. “You’re gonna be toast, are you? Maybe we’ll use you for the Sandwich Islands, then.” He snickered at his own wit.

“Pretty funny,” Carsten said amiably. He swabbed a few strokes to satisfy any watching petty officer, then took it easy again. He’d been in the Navy five years, and was used to its rhythms and routines. Things had sped up on account of the war, sure, but not that much: on a ship you had to do things by the numbers even in peacetime, which wasn’t so true in the Army. He paused to roll himself a cigarette, lighted it with a match he scraped to life on the sole of his shoe, and sucked in a breath of smoke before going on, “Any luck at all, we’ll cornhole the limeys but good.”

“Cornhole ’em, hey?” one of the hose jockeys said. “I like that, damned if I don’t. We’re sure comin’ up at ’em the wrong way.”

“Yeah.” Carsten plied the mop again. If you looked busy, people would figure you were. If you didn’t, they’d find something for you to do, probably something you’d like less than what you were doing now.

As he worked, he thought again about cornholing the Royal Navy. The more he thought about it, the better he liked it. The U.S. Pacific Fleet had put to sea days before war was declared, sailing out of San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles and San Diego. The Seattle squadron was still up there, to face the British and Canadian ships based in Vancouver and Victoria. But the main fleet had swung west and south in a long loop around the western end of the Sandwich Island chain, and now—

“Wish we’d have beaten the British to annexing those damned islands,” said the sailor with the oil-spotted dungarees. “Then we could have sailed from there ’stead of the West Coast, and we’d be steaming for Singapore.”

“Or maybe for the Philippines,” Carsten said. “The Japs, they’re England’s good pals. One of these days, we kick them in the slats, too.”

He tried to think like Admiral Dewey. If they could boot the British out of the Sandwich Islands, they booted them all the way across the Pacific, to Singapore and Australia. They’d have only the one chance, though; if things went wrong here, British battleships would be steaming up and down the west coast of the United States for the rest of the war, and there’d be damn all anybody would be able to do about it.

“So—we roll the dice,” he muttered. If the Pacific Fleet took the Sandwich Islands away from England, the USA would have an easier time resupplying them than the British did now. They’d run around the chain so the limeys wouldn’t spot them on the way in, and now they were picking up fuel for the last run on Pearl Harbor. One good surprise and the islands would be theirs.

One good surprise—Alarms began to ring. “Battle stations! Battle stations!” came the cry. “Aeroplane spotted. Not known whether hostile.”

The fleet had launched a pair of aeroplanes a couple of hours before, to scout out what lay ahead. But were these American aeroplanes returning, or British machines doing some scouting of their own? If they were British, the fleet had to knock them out of the sky before they could report back to the Royal Navy and to the land-based guns defending Pearl Harbor.

Carsten’s battle station was at the starboard bow, loading five-inch shells into one of the guns of the
Dakota
’s secondary armament. He threw his cigarette over the side as he ran to the sponson. Bringing it in would have been his own funeral, except that the gunner’s mate, a bruiser named Hiram Kidde, would have taken care of that for him.

Behind him, the hose went back aboard the
Vulcan
, as if an elephant had owned a retractable trunk. They had enough fuel on board for the attack, and they could worry about everything else later.

“You ready, Sam?” Kidde asked.

Carsten would have bet any money you cared to name that the gunner’s mate would have beaten him there, no matter where he was on the ship when the call for battle stations rang out. He sometimes thought Kidde could just wish himself to the sponson from anywhere on board.

“Aye aye, ‘Cap’n,’” Carsten answered, with a salute more extravagant than he would have given Dewey. “Cap’n” Kidde chuckled; he’d had the inevitable nickname for as long as he’d been in the Navy.

The sponson was tiny and cramped, with plenty of sharp metal corners to gouge your legs or your arms if you weren’t careful. Bare electric bulbs in wire cages on the ceiling shed a harsh, yellow light. The place stank of paint and brass and nitrocellulose and old sweat, odors no amount of swabbing could ever wash away.

Kidde patted the breech of the gun—affectionately, as if it were a trollop’s backside in some Barbary Coast dive in San Francisco. “Wish we had some high-explosive shells for this baby along with armor piercing. She’d make a hell of an antiaircraft gun, wouldn’t she?”

“Damned if she wouldn’t,” Carsten said. “Have to fuse ’em just right, to burst around the aeroplane, but damned if she wouldn’t. You ought to talk to somebody about that one, Mate, you really should.”

“Ahh, it’s just stack gas,” Kidde said with a shrug. By then, the other loader and the gun layer were in their places. Luke Hoskins, the number-two shell jerker, was slower than he should have been. Kidde reamed him up one side and down the other with a tongue sharp enough to chip paint.

“Have a heart, ‘Cap’n’ Kidde,” Hoskins said. “First decent shit I’ve had in three days, and the goddamn battle stations sounds when I got my pants around my ankles in the aft head.”

“Tough,” Kidde said flatly. “Next time, don’t waste time wipin’ your ass. It won’t matter what you smell like—we get into a real scrap and we’ll all be shittin’ ourselves any which way.”

Carsten laughed till he incautiously jerked around and barked his shin on the edge of an ammunition rack. He swore, but kept on laughing. Part of that was good nature, part of it nerves. He didn’t try to figure out which part was which.

A runner came by with word that the aeroplane spotted had been one of the ones they’d launched. “He’s floatin’ on the water now an’ the
New York
, it’s fishin’ him out of the drink with a crane,” he reported. “Old Man says to stay at battle stations, though.” He hurried away.

The gun crew looked at one another. If they were staying at battle stations, that meant they’d be heading toward Pearl Harbor for the attack. And, sure enough, the rumble of the big steam engines got louder as they picked up steam. The
Vulcan
and the rest of the support ships would be dropping behind now—this was a job for the warships and the transports that carried a regiment of Marines and a whole division of Army men toward Oahu.

Another man stuck his head inside the blazing-hot metal box where Carsten and his comrades waited for orders. Voice cracking with excitement, the sailor said, “Word is, the limeys ain’t done much with their fleet, an’ a lot of it’s still in the harbor. We caught ’em with their pants down.”

“You think it’s really true?” Hoskins breathed.

“Why not?” Sam Carsten said. “Battle stations got you that way, didn’t it?” The other seaman glared at him, but he wasn’t easy to get angry at.

“If it’s so,” Kidde said, “you can serve those Englishmen up with tea and crumpets, because they’re dinner. They hit us a low blow back in granddad’s day, comin’ in on the side of the Rebels. Now we give it back. Sweet suffering Jesus, do we ever! All those ships sittin’ inside Pearl Harbor, waiting for us to smash ’em…” His smile was beatific.

Carsten peered through one of the narrow vision slits the sponson afforded. Torpedo-boat destroyers sprinted ahead of the battleships, their creamy wakes vivid against the deep blue of the tropical Pacific. The
Dakota
and her fellow capital ships were still picking up speed, too; the steel deck hummed and shuddered against his feet as the engines reached full power. They had to be making better than twenty knots. At that rate, it wouldn’t be long until—

“There it is!” he exclaimed excitedly. “Land on the horizon! We’ll give ’em what-for any minute now. Well—Holy Jesus!”

“What?” The rest of the gun crew, the ones who weren’t looking out themselves, all shouted the question together.

“Harbor defense guns just opened up on us. They may not have known we were here, but they sure as hell do now.”

He didn’t see the shell splash into the sea. Almost a minute later, though, the sound of the great cannon reached him: a thunder that cut through not only the roar of the
Dakota
’s engines but also the hardened steel armor of the sponson.

And then, bare seconds after that, the battleship’s main armament cut loose, the two fourteen-inch guns in the forward super-firing turret and then the three from the A turret just below and ahead of it. He’d heard the noise from the distant British cannon; the roar of the guns from his own ship enveloped him, so that he felt it with his whole body more than with his ears. When the guns went off, the
Dakota
seemed to buck for a moment before resuming its advance.

Sailors crowded up to see what they could see. The shore and the harbor wouldn’t be in range of their secondary armament for some time to come. It was like having a moving picture unreel right before your eyes, Carsten thought, except this had sound—all the sound in the world, not some piano-pounding accompanist—and bright colors.

More thunderclaps came from the guns of the other battleships in the fleet. The shore defenses sent up answering gouts of smoke and flame. This time, Carsten spied the splashes from a couple of shells. If you took a Ford, loaded it with explosives, and dropped it into the sea from a great height, you’d get a plume of water like that. Some of the splashes were close enough to the destroyers for the upthrown seawater to drench the men aboard.

“Christ!” Altogether involuntarily, Carsten turned away from his viewing slit. One shell from the salvo hadn’t landed by a destroyer, but on it. The ship might suddenly have rammed headlong into a brick wall. In an instant, it went from a yappy little terrier leading the fleet into action to a pile of floating—or rather, rapidly sinking—wreckage.

“A lot of good men there,” Hiram Kidde said, as if carving an epitaph on a headstone. So, in a way, he was.

The
Dakota
began to zigzag violently at what seemed like random intervals. Armored against such shells, it could take far more punishment than a thin-skinned destroyer. That didn’t mean you wanted to be punished—anything but, “Cap’n” Kidde summed that up in one short phrase: “Hate to be zigging when we should have zagged.”

“Wish you hadn’t said that,” Hoskins told him. The grin the gunner’s mate gave him in return looked like a death’s head.

Sam Carsten made himself look some more. A few men in life jackets bobbed in the water near the stricken destroyer. He hoped they’d get picked up before the sharks found them.

He raised his gaze to Oahu ahead. Shells slammed down around the forts holding the coast-defense guns. Smoke and dust rose in great clouds. But the guns kept pounding back in answer. And more smoke rose from within the sheltered waters of Pearl Harbor, smoke that did not spring from shells. Carsten said, “I think they’re gonna come out and fight.”

“They’re in a bad way,” Kidde said, relishing the prospect. “They can’t just sit there and take it, but if they come out, we’re going to cross the T on ’em.”

Sure enough, one of the
Dakota
’s zigs to port became a full turn, so that she presented her whole ten-gun broadside to the emerging British warships, which could reply only with their forward-facing cannon.

“Hit!” everybody screamed at once as gouts of smoke spurted from a stricken British vessel, and then again, a moment later, “Hit!”

The ships of the Royal Navy were firing back; across blue water, orange flame and black smoke belched from the muzzles of their guns. And their gunnery was good. With a noise like a freight train roaring past when you were standing much too close to the tracks, a salvo of three shells smashed into the ocean a couple of hundred yards short of the
Dakota
. The battleship heeled to port as the captain took evasive action.

“Wish I could see what was happening on the port beam,” Carsten said. “Have they bracketed us?”

“Sam, is that somethin’ you really want to know?” Kidde asked him. After a moment, Carsten shook his head. If they put one salvo in front of you and one behind, the next one came down right on top of you.

“We in range for our piece yet, ‘Cap’n’?” Hoskins asked.

“Not quite, but we’re gettin’ there,” the gunner’s mate replied. But then the
Dakota
turned so the gun didn’t bear on the enemy. Carsten pictured the turrets that housed the main armament swinging back into position to carry on the fight. You fought your ship to bring them to bear on the most important targets the enemy had. If a torpedo boat or destroyer made a run at you, the five-inchers like the one Carsten manned were supposed to settle its hash. They were good for giving shore batteries hell, too: batteries that weren’t main harbor defenses, anyhow.