Drive to the East (55 page)

If he wasn’t the first one out of a foxhole when the shelling eased, he couldn’t have been later than the third. “Fuck,” he said softly. You forgot what artillery could do to a man till you saw it with your own eyes. One of his guards lay there, gutted and beheaded—except the reality, which included smell, was a hundred times worse and only a tenth as neat as the words suggested.

Another bodyguard lay hunched over on his side, clutching his ankle with both hands. He had no foot; he was doing his best to keep from bleeding to death. Jake bent beside him. “Hang on, Beau,” he said, far more gently than he usually spoke. “I’ll make you a tourniquet.” His boots—the same sort he’d worn in the field in the last war—had strong rawhide laces. He pulled one out, fast as he could. “Easy there. I got to move your hands so I can tie this son of a bitch.”

“Thank you, sir.” Beau sounded preternaturally calm. Some wounded men didn’t really feel it for a little while. He seemed to be one of the lucky ones, though he hissed when the President of the CSA tightened the tourniquet around his ragged stump. Jake used a stick to twist it so the stream of blood slowed to the tiniest trickle. He’d tended to battlefield wounds before; his hands still remembered how, as long as he didn’t think about it too much.

“Morphine!” he yelled. “Somebody give this poor bastard a shot! And where the hell are the medics?”

The men with Red Cross smocks were already there, taking charge of other injured guards. One of them knelt by Beau. The medic injected the bodyguard, then blinked to find himself face to face with Jake Featherston. “You did good, uh, sir,” he said. “He ought to make it if everything heals up all right.”

“Hear that, Beau?” Jake said. “He says you’re gonna be fine.” The medic hadn’t quite said that, but Jake didn’t care. He wanted to make the bodyguard as happy as he could.

“Fine,” Beau said vaguely. Maybe that was shock, or maybe it was the morphine hitting him. The medics got him onto a stretcher and carried him away. Jake wondered what kind of job he could do that didn’t require moving around. The President shrugged. Beau would be a while getting better, if he did.

The head of the bodyguard contingent came up with fire in his eye. He’d got his trousers muddy; Jake judged that accounted for at least part of his bad temper. When the man spoke, he did his best to stay restrained: “Sir, can we please move to a safer location? You see what almost happened to you here.”

Jake shook his head. “Not to me, by God. I know what to do when shells start coming down. I’m sorry as hell some of your men didn’t.”

“And if a shell had landed in your hole, Mr. President?” the bodyguard asked.

“It didn’t, dammit,” Jake said. The guard chief just looked at him. Jake swore under his breath. The man was right, and he knew it. Admitting somebody else was right and he himself wrong was the hardest thing in the world for him. He didn’t do it now, not in so many words. He just scowled at the bodyguard. “I reckon I’ve seen what I came to see.”

“Thank you, sir.” The man saluted. He called to the other guards who hadn’t been hurt: “We can get him away now!”

They all showed as much relief as a drummer who finds out his latest lady friend isn’t in a family way after all. And they hustled Jake back from the gun pit with Olympic speed. He thought it was funny. The guards thought it was anything but. One of them scolded him: “Sir, did you
want
to get yourself killed?”

If he’d asked whether Jake wanted to get the guards killed, the President would have gone up in smoke. But that wasn’t what he’d wanted to know, and so Jake Featherston only sighed. “No. I wanted to watch the damnyankees catch it.”

“Well, you’ve done that, and now you’ve seen we can catch it, too,” the bodyguard said. “Will you kindly leave well enough alone?”

“Sure,” Featherston said, and all the bodyguards brightened. Then he added, “Till the next time it needs doing.” Their shoulders slumped.

“We really shouldn’t be anywhere close to the line,” the guards’ leader said. “Damnyankee airplanes are liable to drop bombs on our heads. Even less we can do about that than we can about artillery, dammit.”

Jake laughed raucously. “Jesus H. Christ, don’t the damnyankees come over Richmond about every other night and drop everything but the fucking kitchen sink on our heads? Bastards’d drop that, too, if they reckoned it’d blow up.”

Some of the bodyguards smiled. Their chief remained severe. “Sir, you’ve got a proper shelter there, not a, a—hole in the ground.” He slapped at the knees of his trousers. Not much mud came away. He fumed. He didn’t like to get dirty.

“Hell of a lot of good a proper shelter did Al Smith,” Jake said. That made all the guards unhappy again. They didn’t like remembering all the things that could go wrong. Jake didn’t like remembering those things, either, but he would do it if he could score points off men who liked it even less.

The guard chief changed the subject, at least a little: “Sir, couldn’t you just stay somewhere safe and follow the war with reports and things?”

“No way in hell,” Jake replied at once. “No place’d stay safe for long. Soon as the Yankees found out where I was at, they’d send bombers after me. I don’t care if I went to Habana—they’d still send ’em. But that’s beside the point. Point is, you can’t trust reports all the goddamn time. Sometimes you’ve got to, yeah. You can’t keep up with everything by your lonesome. But if you don’t get your ass out there and see for yourself every so often, people’ll start lying to you. You won’t know any better, either, ’cause you haven’t been out to look. And then you’re screwed. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” the bodyguard said mournfully. He knew what that meant. It meant he and his men would have to keep worrying, because Jake would go on sticking his nose where the damnyankees could shoot it off.

Airplanes droned by overhead. Jake looked for the closest hole in the ground. So did most of the guards. They weren’t combat troops, no, but a trip to the field taught lessons in a hurry. The airplanes flew from west to east. They had familiar silhouettes. Jake relaxed—they were on his side.

None of the bodyguards relaxed. They weren’t supposed to, not while they were on duty. Their leader said, “Mr. President, can we please take you someplace where you’re not in quite so
much
danger?”

“Gonna fly me to the Empire of Brazil?” Jake quipped. A few guards gave him another round of dutiful smiles. Most stayed somber. He supposed that was just as well. Like sheep dogs, they had to be serious about protecting him. Trouble was, he made a piss-poor sheep.

S
ometimes Sam Carsten thought the Navy didn’t know what to do with the
Josephus Daniels.
Other times he was sure of it. After the destroyer escort had threaded its way out through the minefields in Delaware Bay once more, he turned to Pete Cooley and said, “I swear to God they’re trying to sink us. I really do.”

“I think we’ll be all right, sir,” the exec said. “We will as long as Confederate airplanes don’t spot us, anyhow.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “As long as.” His ship was ordered to strike at the CSA. U.S. flying boats and other aircraft constantly patrolled the United States’ coastal waters. If there was intelligence to say the Confederates didn’t do the same thing, he hadn’t seen it.

“Mission seems simple enough,” Cooley said. “We start heading in as soon as night falls, land the raiders, pick ’em up, and get the hell out of there.” He sounded elaborately unconcerned.

Sam snorted. “One of these days, Pat, somebody needs to explain the difference between ‘simple’ and ‘easy’ to you.”

“I know the difference,” Cooley said with a grin. “An easy girl puts out right away. A simple girl’s just dumb, so you’ve got to snow her before she puts out.”

“All right, dammit.” In spite of himself, Sam laughed. The exec
wouldn’t
take things seriously. Maybe that was as well, too. “Just so we don’t get spotted. And our navigation better be spot-on, too.”

“I’ll get us there, sir,” Cooley promised.

As with shiphandling, Sam was learning to use sextant and chronometer to know where the ship was and where it was going. He thought it was the hardest thing he’d ever tried to pick up. The Navy had tables that made it a lot easier than it was in the days of iron men and wooden ships, but
easier
and
easy
didn’t mean the same thing, either. Sorrowfully, Sam said, “This is the first time in a million years I wish I’d paid more attention in school.”

“You’re doing real well, sir, for a—” Two words too late, Pat Cooley broke off. He tried again: “You’re doing real well.”

For a mustang.
He hadn’t quite swallowed enough of that. Or maybe it had been
for a dumb mustang.
Taking sun-sights and then trying to convert them to positions sure as hell made Sam feel like a dumb mustang. He painfully remembered the time when he’d screwed up his longitude six ways from Sunday and put the
Josephus Daniels
halfway between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The only thing the exec said then was, “Well, the infantry could use the fire support.” Sam thought that showed commendable restraint.

For now, he swung the destroyer escort well out into the North Atlantic before steaming south. He figured that was his best chance to get where he was going undetected. He didn’t know that it was a good chance, but
good
and
best
also weren’t always synonyms. The ocean wasn’t nearly so rough as it would be when winter clapped down, but it wasn’t smooth, either. Sailors and Marine raiders spent a lot of time at the rail.

Sam might not have been much of a navigator. He might not have been the shiphandler he wished he were. He might—he would—burn if the sun looked at him sideways. But by God he had a sailor’s stomach. Some of the youngsters in the officers’ mess and some of the Marine officers who dined with them looked distinctly green. Sam tore into the roast beef with fine appetite.

“Be thankful the chow’s as good as it is,” he said. “When we’re on a long patrol or going around the Horn, it’s all canned stuff and beans after a while.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Lieutenant Thad Walters said. The Y-range operator bolted from the mess with a hand clapped over his mouth. Carsten hoped the J.G. got to a head before he wasted the cooks’ best efforts.

Lieutenant Cooley brought the
Josephus Daniels
about 125 miles off the North Carolina coast just as the sun was sinking in flames in the direction of the Confederacy. “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be, sir,” the exec said.

“Fair enough.” Sam nodded. “All ahead full, then. Course 270.”

“All ahead full. Course 270,” Cooley echoed. “Aye aye, sir.” He called the order for full power down to the engine room. The ship picked up speed till she was going flat out. Sam wished for the extra ten knots she could have put on if she were a real destroyer. Of course, they never would have dropped a mustang on his first command into a real destroyer. He knew damn well he was lucky to get anything fancier than a garbage scow.

Lieutenant Walters seemed to have got rid of what ailed him. The Y-range operator was still a little pale, but kept close watch on his set. If the ship could spot an enemy airplane before the enemy spotted her, she would have a better chance of getting away. The darker it got, the happier Sam grew. He didn’t think the Confederates had aircraft with Y-ranging gear. He sure hoped they didn’t.

“Keep an eye peeled for any sign of torpedo boats, too,” he warned. “A fish we’re not expecting will screw us as bad as a bomb.”

“Yes, sir,” Walters said, and then, “Aye aye, sir.”
We’re doing everything we know how to do,
Sam thought.
Now—is it enough?

The
Josephus Daniels
ran on through the night. Listening to her engines pound, Sam felt she was yelling,
Here I am!
to the world. If she was, the world stayed deaf and blind. Every so often, Lieutenant Walters looked over at him and shrugged or gave a thumbs-up. CPO Bevacqua on the hydrophone kept hearing nothing, too.

Shortly before 2300, the commander of the Marine detachment came onto the bridge. “About an hour away, eh, Captain?” he said.

“That’s right, Major,” Sam answered. Mike Murphy outranked him—except that nobody on a ship outranked her skipper. Murphy understood that, fortunately. He was a black Irishman with eyes as blue as a Siamese cat’s—bluer than Sam’s, which took doing. Carsten went on, “Your men are ready?”

“Ready as they’ll ever be.” Murphy pointed into the darkness. “They’re by the boats, and they’ll be in ’em in nothing flat.” He snapped his fingers.

“Good enough,” Sam said, and hoped it would be.

Not quite an hour later, the shape of the western horizon changed. It had been as smooth and flat there as in any other direction. No more. That deeper blackness was land: the coast of the Confederate States of America. “Here we are, sir,” Pat Cooley said. “If that’s not Ocracoke Island dead ahead, my career just hit a mine and sank.”

So did mine,
Sam thought. The Navy Department might blame an exec who’d been conning a ship for botched navigation. The Navy Department would without the tiniest fragment of doubt blame that ship’s skipper. And so it should. The destroyer escort was
his
ship. This was
his
responsibility. Nothing on God’s green earth this side of death or disabling injury could take it off his shoulders.

“Send a petty officer forward with a lead and a sounding line,” Sam said, an order more often heard in the riverboat Navy than on the Atlantic. But he didn’t want the
Josephus Daniels
running aground, and she drew a lot more water than any river monitor. She needed some water under her keel. Cooley nodded and obeyed.

Feet thudded on the deck. “Sir, we’ve spotted a light about half a mile south of here!” a sailor exclaimed. “Looks like it’s what we want!”

It wouldn’t be the Ocracoke lighthouse at the southwestern tip of the island; that had gone dark at the beginning of the war. If you didn’t already know where you were in these waters, the Confederates didn’t want you here. Major Murphy quivered like a hunting hound. “I’d best join my men, I think,” he said, and left the bridge.