In at the Death (42 page)

More booms said the latest shells were striking home—or maybe those were bombs from the carriers’ airplanes. Smoke began to rise from the shore. The cruisers from the flotilla had to get closer to land than the battlewagons before opening up. Their eight-inch main armament didn’t have the range of the bigger ships’ heavier guns. Before long, they started firing, too.

“This is so neat!” Ditto said. “Ever think we could get away with shore bombardment?”

“We ain’t got away with it yet,” Fodor answered. George Enos was thinking the same thing. But he was the new kid on the block, so he kept his mouth shut. The gun chief went on, “When we steam out of aircraft range, then I’ll be happy. And even after that there’s fuckin’ subs.”

The main armament fired again.
Fired
was the word, too. The gouts of flame that shot from the muzzles were almost as long as the gun barrels. If God needed to light a cigar, this was where He’d do it.

Up above the bridge, the Y-ranging antenna spun round and round, round and round. It would spot enemy airplanes on the way in, anyway. How much good that would do…Well, knowing the bastards were coming was better than not knowing they were.

Inshore from the
Oregon
, not far from the cruisers, a tall column of water suddenly sprang into being. A moment later, another one appeared, even closer to the U.S. warships.

“What the hell?” somebody said. “Those aren’t bombs—we woulda got the word the bombers were loose.”

“They must have shore guns,” Wally Fodor said. “Soon as we spot the flashes, they’re history. And they’ll have a bitch of a time hitting us. We can move, but they’re stuck where they’re at.”

A few more rounds fell near the cruisers. Then, as abruptly as they’d begun, they stopped. Either the Confederates had given up or U.S. gunfire put their cannon out of action. George neither knew nor cared what the right answer was. As long as those guns kept quiet, that suited him fine.

Then the PA system came to life with a crackle of static: “Now hear this! Now hear this! Enemy aircraft approaching from the north! Expect company in five or ten minutes!”

George’s stomach knotted.
Here we go again
, he thought. He’d had a ship sunk under him; he knew disasters could happen. He didn’t want to remember that, but he didn’t see how he could help it, either.

“Just like a drill,” Chief Fodor said. “They haven’t got us yet, and we aren’t about to let ’em start. Right?”

“Right!” the gun crew shouted again. George was as loud as anybody. How loud he yelled made no difference in the bigger scheme of things, but it wasn’t bad if it helped him feel a little better.

Some of the fighters that had been circling over the ships zipped away to see if they could meet up with the intruders before the C.S. airplanes got the chance to intrude. Others held their stations. If the enemy bombers got past the first wave of fighters, they still wouldn’t have a free run at the flotilla.

“You’ve been through this before, right?” Fodor asked George. “I mean for real, not just for practice.”

“Sure, Chief,” George answered. “I’ve got it from the Japs and Featherston’s fuckers and the limeys. I don’t like it, but I can do it.”

“That’s all you need,” the gun chief said. “I thought I remembered you lost your cherry, but I wanted to make sure.”

Airplane engines scribed contrails across the sky.
Their wakes
, George thought. But the comparison with ships misled. It wasn’t just that airplanes were so much faster. They also moved in three dimensions, not just two like surface ships.

A destroyer’s antiaircraft guns started going off. So did the heavy cruisers’. Then George saw a couple of gull-winged ships that looked only too horribly familiar. “Asskickers!” he yelled, and his wasn’t the only cry that rose.

One of the slow, ungainly Confederate dive bombers went down trailing smoke a moment after he shouted. It splashed into the Atlantic a mile or so from the
Oregon
, and kicked up more water than the shells the coastal guns had fired.

The other C.S. Mule bored in on the battleship. The
Oregon
heeled in as tight a turn as she could make, but she was large and cumbersome and much less nimble than, say, the
Josephus Daniels
would have been. That made her action less evasive than George wished it were.

He didn’t have much time to worry about it. “Commence firing!” Wally Fodor shouted. The shell-jerkers started passing George ammo. He fed the twin 40mms’ breeches like a man possessed. Casings leaped from the guns and clattered on the deck. Bursts—puffs of black smoke—appeared all around the attacking airplane.

But it kept coming. The bomb under its belly dropped. The Asskicker zoomed past, hardly higher than the tops of the battleship’s masts. The bomb burst on the ocean, less than fifty yards from the
Oregon
.

Water hit George like a fist in the face. Next thing he knew, he was flat on his back, partly on the deck, partly on Ditto Thomas, who’d stood right behind him. “Get—
glub!
—offa me, goddammit!” Thomas spluttered, spitting out what looked like about half of the ocean.

“Yeah.” George scrambled to his feet and gave Ditto a hand to haul him up, too. Ditto rubbed at his eyes. George’s also stung from seawater. The other men from the gun crew were picking themselves up. Wally Fodor had a cut on his ear that bloodied the shoulder of his tunic. Could you get a Purple Heart for something like that? George wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, and he didn’t think Wally would, either.

At that, the number three mount got off lucky. Guys were down at the next 40mm mount, too, only they weren’t getting up again. A fragment of bomb casing had taken off one sailor’s head like a guillotine blade. Another man was gutted as neatly as a fat cod on a fishing trawler. But cod didn’t scream and try to put themselves back together. And you couldn’t gaff a sailor and put him on ice in the hold, though it might have been a mercy.

Stretcher-bearers carried him below. The
Oregon
boasted not one but two real doctors, not just a pharmacist’s mate like the
Josephus Daniels
. Could they do anything for a guy with his insides torn out? Doctors were getting smarter all the time, and the fancy new drugs meant fever didn’t always kill you. Even so…

George didn’t get the chance to brood about it. “Come on!” Fodor yelled. Did the CPO even know he was wounded? “Back to the gun! We may get another shot at the sonsabitches!”

Suddenly, though, the sky seemed bare of Confederate aircraft. One limped off toward the north, toward land, trailing smoke as it went. The rest—weren’t there any more. A rubber raft bobbed on the surface of the Atlantic: somebody’d got out of one of them, anyhow.

The
Oregon
’s main armament boomed out another thunderous broadside. Half a minute later, the
Maine
also sent a dozen enormous shells landward. The air attack had made them miss a beat, but no more.

“Jesus!” George said, his ears ringing. “Is that the best those sorry suckers can do?”

“Sure looks like it.” Chief Fodor sounded surprised, too. He noticed the blood on his shoulder, and did a professional-quality double take. “What the fuck happened here?”

“Maybe a splinter nicked you, or maybe you got hurt when the water knocked you down,” George answered.

“I be damned,” Fodor said. “I always heard about guys getting hurt without even knowing it, but I figured it was bullshit. Then it goes and happens to me. I be damned.”

A U.S. destroyer steamed toward the downed Confederate flier. Somebody on the destroyer’s deck threw the man a line. He didn’t climb it. After a minute or so, a sailor went down into the raft with him and rigged a sling. The men on deck hauled the Confederate up—he must have been wounded. He was probably lucky not to be strawberry jam. Then they lowered the line to their buddy. Up he swarmed, agile as a monkey.

The big guns on both battlewagons bellowed again. If that was all the Confederates could do to stop them…If that was all, the Confederacy really was coming apart at the seams.

P
aperwork. Jefferson Pinkard hated paperwork. He’d never got used to it. He didn’t like being a paper-shuffler and a pen-pusher. He could manage it, but he didn’t like it. Working in a steel mill for all those years left him with the driving urge to go out there and
do
things, dammit.

To soothe himself, he kept the wireless going. If he listened with half an ear to one of the Houston stations playing music, he didn’t have to pay so much attention to all the nitpicking detail Richmond wanted from him. Muttering, he shook his head. No, not Richmond. Richmond was gone, lost, captured. Jake Featherston and what was left of the Confederate government were somewhere down in North Carolina now, still screaming defiance at the damnyankees and at the world.

Camp Humble went right on reducing population. Trains still rolled in from Louisiana and Mississippi and Arkansas and east Texas. Ships brought Negroes from Cuba to the Texas ports. He aimed to go right on doing his job till somebody set over him told him to stop.

Without warning, the song he was listening to broke off. An announcer came on the air: “We interrupt this program for a special proclamation from the Governor of the great state of Texas, the Honorable Wright Patman. Governor Patman!”

“What the—?” Jeff said. Something had hit the fan, that was for damn sure.

“Citizens of Texas!” Governor Patman said. “A hundred years ago, this state was an independent republic, owing allegiance to no nation but itself. We joined first the USA and then the CSA, but we have never forgotten our own proud tradition of…freedom.” That was the Party slogan, yeah, but he didn’t use it the way a good Party man would.

Jeff muttered, “Uh-oh.” No, he didn’t like the way Patman used it at all.

Sure as the devil, the Governor of Texas went on, “The Confederate government has brought us nothing but ruin and a losing war. The United States have already stolen part of our territory and revived the so-called state of Houston that blighted the map after the last war. They have killed our soldiers, bombed our cities, and ruined our trade. The Confederate government is powerless to stop them or even slow them down.”

“Uh-oh,” Pinkard said, and then, for good measure, “Aw, shit.”

“Since the Confederate government cannot protect us, it is no longer a fit government for the great people of Texas,” Governor Patman said. “Accordingly, by my order, the state of Texas is from this day forward no longer part of the so-called Confederate States of America. I hereby restore the Republic of Texas as a free and independent nation, on an equal footing with the Confederate States, the United States, the Empire of Mexico, and all the other free and independent nations of the world.

“As my first act as provisional President of the Republic of Texas, I have asked the government of the United States for an armistice. They have recognized my administration—”

“Jesus! I fuckin’ bet they have!” Jeff exclaimed. What a mess! And he was, literally, in the middle of it.

“—and agreed to a cease-fire. All Texas soldiers are ordered to no longer obey the so-called Confederate authorities. All other Confederate troops within the borders of the Republic of Texas may hold in place and be disarmed by Texas authorities, or may withdraw to territory still under the rule of the so-called Confederate States. The United States have agreed that the forces of the Republic of Texas are not obliged to hinder this retreat, nor will we—so long as it remains peaceful and orderly. U.S. forces reserve the right to attack retreating C.S. forces, however, and neither will we interfere with them on the ground, in the air, or at sea.

“At this point in time, that is all. As peace returns at last after the madness of the Featherston administration, I call on God Almighty to bless the great Lone Star Republic of Texas. Thank you, and good afternoon.”

“That was Governor—uh, excuse me, President—Wright Patman of the, uh, Republic of Texas.” The wireless announcer sounded as flummoxed as everybody else had to be. He went on, “President Patman has brought peace to Texas, and what could be a more precious gift?”

“He’s bugged out on the war, that’s what he’s done, the goddamn traitor son of a bitch!” Jeff Pinkard shouted, as if Patman and the announcer were there to hear him.

He remembered what Mayor Doggett had told him to do if the damnyankees got close: take his family and get the hell out in a civilian auto and civilian clothes. The advice looked a lot better now than it had then. But Raymond was tiny, and Edith still wasn’t over birthing him, and…

The telephone rang. If that was Edith, and she’d listened to the wireless…“Pinkard here.”

It wasn’t Edith. It was Vern Green, and
he’d
listened to the wireless. “Fuck a duck!” the guard chief cried. “What the hell are we gonna do, sir? Can we get outa here? The damnyankees’ll crucify us if they catch us.”

“They’re still way the hell over on the other side of the state,” Jeff said uneasily.

“All the better reason to get out now, while we still can,” Green said. “That asshole Patman, he’s surrendering to them, near as makes no difference. There’ll be U.S. soldiers all over Texas fast as they can move.”