Drive to the East (67 page)

“No, thank you, sir. I never got the habit. I ran track at West Point, and they’re bad for your wind.”

“Ah. I was a football man myself—a tackle,” Dowling said. “Even back in those days, I was built more like a brick than a greyhound.” He lit up. He wasn’t running anywhere.

Not quite half an hour later, the telephone on his desk rang. He picked it up. “Dowling here.”

“Hello, sir. This is John Abell. Do you recognize my voice?”

Even across two-thirds of the country and an indifferent connection, Dowling did. “Yes, indeed, General,” he said.

“Good. That makes things easier,” the General Staff officer said. “I can confirm those orders for you. We did send Major Levitt west with them. Please follow them precisely.”

“I’ll do it,” Dowling promised. “Anything else?”

“No, sir. That covers it,” Abell answered. The line went dead.

Dowling nodded to Levitt. “All right, Major. You are what you say you are, and these”—he tapped the orders again—“are what they say they are. I’ll carry them out.”

“Thank you, sir.” Levitt grinned. “Would you be kind enough to let your adjutant know I don’t have horns and fangs and a spiked tail?”

Dowling smiled, too. “If he frisked you, he should already know that.” But he did get up and let Major Toricelli know the courier was neither a devil nor, worse, a Confederate.

“I didn’t
think
he was, sir, but you never can tell,” his adjutant said. “I wondered if he was a Mormon in disguise, too, to tell you the truth.”

“Gark,” said Dowling, who hadn’t thought of that. “No wonder you checked to see if he was loaded with explosives.”

“It’s a rum old world, sir,” Toricelli said.

“Ain’t it the truth?” Dowling agreed. “And we’re going to be the busiest people in it the next few days. The Eleventh Army is strung out from the border with Chihuahua to the border with Sequoyah. I want to concentrate here, but I want to leave enough of a screen behind so the Confederates don’t notice we’re concentrating till we go over the border.”

“That would be easier if we had more men,” Major Toricelli said.

“Of course it would. And if pigs had wings we’d all carry umbrellas,” Dowling said, which made his adjutant send him a quizzical look. He ignored it and went on, “Let’s go to the map room and see what we can work out.”

The more he studied the situation, the less happy he got. Major Toricelli had it right: if he left enough men behind to fool the foe, he wouldn’t be able to mount the kind of attack the War Department had in mind. He grumbled and fumed, thinking about bricks without straw. His adjutant seemed sunk as deep in gloom—till Toricelli suddenly started to laugh.

Now Dowling had the quizzical stare. “What’s so funny, Major? Nice to think something is.”

“Sir, I don’t think we need the screening force,” Toricelli said. “If the Confederates see what we’re doing and attack us somewhere else along the line—well, so what? Aren’t they doing exactly what we want them to do?”

Dowling eyed the map a little while longer. Then he laughed, too. “Damned if they aren’t, Major,” he said. “Damned if they aren’t, by God. All right. We’ll keep it just secret enough so Featherston’s fuckers think we’re trying to but we aren’t very good at it. We can’t be too open, or they’ll start wondering what’s up.”

Toricelli nodded. “Got you, sir. I like that.”

“So do I,” Dowling said. “Let’s start drafting orders, then.”

The orders went out. The U.S. Eleventh Army started concentrating on Clovis. U.S. air strength in New Mexico started concentrating on Clovis, too. The fighters would help keep the Confederates from breaking up the concentration with bombers when they noticed it. They didn’t take long. Urgent signals started heading east from the C.S. Army of West Texas. Dowling’s cryptographers couldn’t make sense of all of them, but what they could read suggested the enemy was alarmed.

“If I were in West Texas, I’d be alarmed, too,” Dowling told Angelo Toricelli. “I’d think the U.S. general on the other side of the border had gone clear around the bend. Why stir things up here?”

“Because the USA can fart and chew gum at the same time?” his adjutant suggested.

“That’s what we’re doing, all right.” Dowling had to stop, because he was laughing too hard to go on. “If we had a real army here . . .” He shrugged. “But we don’t, so we do the best we can with what we’ve got.”

He was ready on the appointed day. He was less than an hour away from issuing the order to start the opening barrage when he got another phone call from John Abell. “Please hold up for three days, sir,” Abell said.
Please
made the order more polite, but no less an order.

“All right, General. I can still do that—just barely,” Dowling said, and shouted for Major Toricelli to put the brakes on things. Toricelli swore, then started making calls of his own. Dowling asked Abell, “Can you tell me why?”

“Not on a line that isn’t secure,” the General Staff officer replied. Dowling found himself nodding. The Confederates had a couple of thousand miles of wire on which to be listening in. And, after a little thought, he had a pretty fair notion of the answer anyway.

N
ovember in the North Atlantic wasn’t so bad as, say, January in the North Atlantic. Nobody would ever have mistaken it for July off the Sandwich Islands, though. The
Josephus Daniels
climbed over swells, slid into troughs, bounced all the time, and generally behaved like a toy boat in a bathtub with a rambunctious four-year-old.

Sam Carsten took it all in stride. He’d rounded the Horn more than once, facing seas that made the North Atlantic at its worst seem tame by comparison. But he wasn’t surprised when the destroyer escort’s passageways began to stink of vomit. A lot of men were seasick. He ordered cleaning parties increased. Smelling the result of other men’s nausea helped make sailors sick. The reek diminished, but didn’t go away. He hadn’t expected anything different.

“You’re a good sailor, sir,” Pat Cooley said, watching Sam tear into a roast beef sandwich on the bridge. The exec hadn’t been sick, not so far as Sam knew, but he did look a little green.

“Not too bad,” Sam allowed, and took another bite. “I’ve had plenty of practice, that’s for damn sure.” He looked up at the cloud-filled sky. “Weather’s right for people like us, anyhow.”

The fair, auburn-haired exec eyed the even fairer blond skipper. “Well, that’s true,” Cooley said. “But everything comes with a price, doesn’t it?” Yes, he
was
green.

“It does.” Sam finished the sandwich and wiped crumbs off his hands. “When we’re up and down so much, and when all this damn spray’s in the air, the Y-ranging set doesn’t give us as much as it would in softer weather.”

Cooley gulped. “I wasn’t thinking of the Y-ranging set, sir.” Sam thought he would have to leave the bridge in a hurry, but he fought down what might have been about to come up. Sam admired that. Carrying on in spite of what bothered you was a lot tougher than not being bothered, which he himself wasn’t.

“I know, Pat,” he said now, more gently than he was in the habit of speaking. “But it also means we have to patrol the hard way, and it means we can’t see as far. I hope it doesn’t mean something slips past us.”

Along with several other destroyer escorts and destroyers, the
Josephus Daniels
sailed east of Newfoundland. Their goal was simple: to stop the British from sneaking men and arms into Canada to keep the rebellion there sizzling. As with most goals, setting it was easier than meeting it.

The U.S. Navy had bigger fish to fry, or it would have committed more ships to the job. Fortunately, the Royal Navy did, too. If it didn’t keep the USA away from the convoys from South America and South Africa that fed the United Kingdom, Britain would start to starve. Losing that fight had made the U.K. throw in the sponge in the Great War. Under Churchill and Mosley, the limeys were doing their best to make sure it didn’t happen again. They didn’t treat supporting the Canuck rebels as job number one.

But the British had one big advantage: the North Atlantic was vast, and the ships in it relatively tiny. A lot of what they sent got through. And as for what didn’t—well, if it didn’t, what did they lose? A rusty freighter, some munitions, and a few sailors captured or killed. Cheap enough, for a country fighting a war.

Meanwhile, the United States had to pull ships away from attacking Britain’s supply convoys for this thankless job. Carsten didn’t love convoy-hunting; he’d done too much of it the last time around. But it seemed like a trip to Coney Island next to this.

Up to the crest of a wave. As the
Josephus Daniels
started to slide down into the trough, the Y-range operator stirred in his seat. “Something?” Sam asked.

“I’m—not sure, sir,” the young officer answered. “I thought so for a second, but then we lost the target.”

“What bearing?” Sam tried not to sound excited. He
wanted
to go after something.

“About 315, sir,” said Lieutenant, J.G., Thad Walters.

“Mr. Cooley.” Now Sam’s voice was sharp and crisp. “Change course to 315. All ahead full. And sound general quarters, if you please.”

“Changing course to 3-1-5: aye aye, sir,” Cooley said. He called, “All ahead full,” down to the engine room. His finger stabbed a button near the wheel. Klaxons hooted. Sailors dashed to their battle stations.

Sam stared northwest.
You bastard—you almost snuck past us,
he thought. He knew he might be thinking unkind thoughts at a figment of the electronics’ imagination. That was a chance he took. He spoke to the wireless operator on the bridge: “Signal the other ships in the patrol that we are changing course to pursue a possible enemy ship.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The rating at the Morse key reached for the book to find the proper code groups.

Lieutenant Walters watched his set like a cat keeping an eye on a mousehole. He didn’t say anything the first time the
Josephus Daniels
climbed to the top of a crest. The next time, though, he jerked as if he’d stuck his finger in a light socket. “It’s there, sir!” he exclaimed. “Bearing 310, speed . . . eleven knots.”

“Change course to 310, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said, and then, to the Y-range operator, “Mr. Walters, give me a range as soon as you can.” Eleven knots. That sure sounded like a lumbering British freighter. He couldn’t think of any other kind of ship likely to be in these waters right now.

After a couple of more climbs to the crest, Walters said, “Sir, range is about six miles.”

“Thank you,” Sam answered. In good weather, the target would have been easily visible. Of course, for the limeys to bet that the weather off Newfoundland in November would be lousy gave odds a hell of a lot better than putting chips down on double-zero at the roulette table.

Before too long, the freighter did come into sight: a big, lumbering tub not much different from what Sam had expected. At his order, the wireless operator sent more code groups.

“Come up alongside, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. “I think we’ll need to put a prize crew aboard.”

The
Josephus Daniels
was a tub herself, but she seemed all sharklike grace alongside the freighter. Sam handled the blinker himself, signaling,
WHAT SHIP ARE YOU? HEAVE TO FOR BOARDING AND INSPECTION
.

WE ARE THE
KARLSKRONA
. WE ARE SWEDISH. WE ARE NEUTRAL
, came the reply.

“Fat chance,” Sam said. He signaled,
HEAVE TO FOR BOARDING AND CONTRABAND INSPECTION
. He called to the forward gun turret: “Put one across her bow if she doesn’t stop.”

She didn’t. The shot rang out.
LAST WARNING
, Sam signaled. Sailors ran across the
Karlskrona
’s deck. For a couple of seconds, Sam thought it was panic. Then, suddenly, he didn’t: it was too well organized, too well drilled.

“Sink that ship!” he shouted at the same time as Pat Cooley yelled, “She’s got guns!”

Ever since taking over the
Josephus Daniels,
Sam had concentrated on gunnery. His men hadn’t been the best then. They were now. He would have matched them against the gunners from any other destroyer escort in the Navy.

And they needed to be. He and Pat Cooley both exclaimed in horror when the armed freighter opened fire. The size of the spout that miss kicked up . . . “She’s got six-inchers!” Cooley yelped.

“Uh-huh,” Sam said grimly. The enemy outgunned his ship, and they weren’t far from point-blank range. A couple of hits could sink the
Josephus Daniels.
“Flank speed and zigzag, Mr. Cooley. Let’s not make it easy for them.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Cooley swung the wheel hard to port, then just as hard to starboard. Another great gout of water rose, this one closer to the destroyer escort. The limeys were getting the range.

But the
Josephus Daniels
’ gunners already had it. Both turrets were firing, and the ship’s violent maneuvers fazed them not a bit. “Hit!” Sam yelled, and then, “Hit!” again. He whooped after the second one—it was near the bow, where the freighter carried one of her guns. The destroyer escort’s twin 40mms opened up, too—they were close enough for them to reach the foe. He felt as if he’d fallen back in time to the War of 1812, when ships went toe to toe at short range and slugged away at each other till one surrendered or sank.

One of those big shells—the damn freighter had a light cruiser’s firepower—burst much too close to the
Josephus Daniels
’ stern. Shrapnel howled through the air. That one would cause casualties even if it was a miss. If the burst was close enough, it might spring hull plates, too, and make the destroyer escort’s seams leak. But it wouldn’t hurt her badly.

And she was chewing up the freighter. Her four-inch guns threw shells that weighed only a third as much as the enemy’s, but she fired much faster and she fired much straighter. “She’s on fire!” Pat Cooley yelled, and then, half a minute later, “She’s struck her colors!”

Sure enough, the freighter’s ensign came down, and a white flag of surrender went up to replace it. “Cease fire!” Sam ordered. The turrets stopped at once; the men at the antiaircraft guns needed a few seconds to get the word—or maybe they just didn’t want to hear it. That went against the rules, but not against human nature. “Approach to pick up survivors, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. He told the men at the gun turrets what the destroyer escort was doing, and added, “If you see anybody going near her guns, open up again.”