Return Engagement (13 page)

Some of the cruisers also sported revolving Y-range antennas. They used them not only to spot incoming enemy aircraft but also to improve their gunnery. Y-ranging gave results more precise than the stereoscopic and parallax visual rangefinders gunners had used in the Great War.

A signalman at the stern wigwagged a fighter onto the deck. Smoke stinking of burnt rubber spurted from the tires. The hook the airplane carried in place of a tailwheel snagged an arrester wire. The pilot jumped out. The flight crew cleared the machine from the deck. Another one roared aloft to take its place.

“You’re in unfamiliar territory, Carsten,” said someone behind Sam.

He turned and found himself face to face with Commander Dan Cressy. “Uh, yes, sir,” he answered, saluting the executive officer. “I’m like the groundhog—every once in a while, they let me poke my nose up above ground and see if I spot my own shadow.”

The exec grinned. “I like that.”

Sam suspected Cressy would have a ship of his own before long. He was young, brave, and smarter than smart; he’d make flag rank if he lived.
Unlike me,
Carsten thought without rancor. As a middle-aged mustang, he had much slimmer prospects of promotion. He’d dwelt on them before. He didn’t feel like doing it now, especially since all of them but getting the
junior grade
removed from his lieutenant’s rank would take an uncommon run of casualties among officers senior to him.

“Glad you do, sir,” Sam said now. He sure as hell didn’t want the exec to catch him brooding.

“Damage-control parties have done good work for us,” Cressy said. “The skipper is pleased with Lieutenant Commander Pottinger—and with you. You showed nerve, fighting that five-inch gun when the Confederates hit us off Charleston.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” Sam said, and meant it. The exec usually did Captain Stein’s dirty work for him. The skipper got the credit, the exec got the blame: an ancient Navy rule. Winning praise from Cressy—even praise he was relaying from someone else—didn’t happen every day.

“You were on this ship when you were a rating, weren’t you?” Cressy asked.

“Yes, sir, I sure was, just after she was built,” Sam said. “I had to leave her when I made ensign. There wasn’t any slot for me here. When I came back, they put me in damage control. If I’d had my druthers, I’d have stayed in gunnery, or better yet up here with the airplanes.” He knew he was sticking his neck out. Grumbling about an assignment he’d had for years was liable to land him in dutch.

Commander Cressy eyed him for a moment. “When you’re so good at what you do, how much do you suppose your druthers really matter?”

“Sir, I’ve been in the Navy more than thirty years. I know damn well they don’t matter at all,” Sam answered. “But that doesn’t mean I haven’t got ’em.”

That got another grin from Cressy. Sam had a way of saying things that might have been annoying from somebody else seem a joke, or at least nothing to get upset about. The exec said, “Well, fair enough. If we ever get the chance to give them to you . . . we’ll see what we can do, that’s all.”

“Thank you very much, sir!” Sam exclaimed. It wasn’t a promise, but it came closer than anything he’d ever heard up till now.

“Nothing to thank me for,” Cressy said, emphasizing that it was no promise. “There may not be anything to do, either. You have that straight?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I sure do,” Sam said. “I can handle the job I’ve got just fine. It isn’t the one I would have picked for myself, that’s all.”

Klaxons began to hoot. “Now we both get to do the jobs we’ve got,” Commander Cressy said, and went off toward the
Remembrance
’s island at a dead run. Carsten was running, too, for the closest hatchway that would take him down to his battle station in the carrier’s bowels.

Closing watertight doors slowed him, but he got where he was going in good time. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger came down at almost exactly the same moment. “No, I don’t know what’s going on,” Pottinger said when Sam asked him. “I bet I can guess, though.”

“Me, too,” Sam said. “We must’ve spotted that British carrier.”

“I can’t think of anything else,” Pottinger said. “Their pilot was probably stupid, shooting up that fishing boat.”

“One of ours would’ve done the same thing to their boat off the coast of England,” Sam said. “Flyboys are like that.”

In the light of the bare bulb in its wire cage overhead, Pottinger’s grin was haggard. “I didn’t say you were wrong. I just said the limey was stupid. There’s a difference.”

The throb of the
Remembrance
’s engines deepened as the great ship picked up speed. One after another, airplanes roared off her flight deck. Some of those would be torpedo carriers and dive bombers to go after the British ship, others fighters to protect them and to fight off whatever the limeys threw at the
Remembrance
and the
Sandwich Islands
.

As usual once an action started, the damage-control party had nothing to do but stand around and wait and hope its talents weren’t needed. Some of the sailors told dirty jokes. A petty officer methodically cracked his knuckles. He didn’t seem to know he was doing it, though each pop sounded loud as a gunshot in that cramped, echoing space.

Time crawled by. Sam had learned not to look at his watch down here. He would always feel an hour had gone by, when in fact it was ten minutes. Better not to know than to be continually disappointed.

When the
Remembrance
suddenly heeled hard to port, everybody in the damage-control party—maybe everybody on the whole ship—said, “Uh-oh!” at the same time. If the antiaircraft guns had started banging away right then, Sam would have known some of the British carrier’s bombers had got through. Since they didn’t . . .

“Submersible!” he said.

Lieutenant Commander Pottinger nodded. “I’d say the son of a bitch missed us—with his first spread of fish, anyhow.” He added the last phrase to make sure nobody could accuse him of optimism.

Not much later, explosions in the deep jarred the
Remembrance
. “They’re throwing ashcans at the bastard,” one of the sailors said.

“Hope they nail his hide to the wall, too,” another one said. Nobody quarreled with that, least of all Sam. He’d seen more battle damage than anybody else down there. If he never saw any more, he wouldn’t have been the least bit disappointed.

Another depth charge burst, this one so close to the surface that it rattled everybody’s teeth. “Jesus H. Christ!” Pottinger said. “What the hell are they trying to do, blow our stern off?”

Nobody laughed. Such disasters had befallen at least one destroyer. Sam didn’t think anybody’d ever screwed up so spectacularly aboard a carrier, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

Then the intercom crackled to life. “Scratch one sub!” Commander Cressy said exultantly.

Cheers filled the corridor. Carsten shouted as loud as anybody. A boat with somewhere around sixty British or Confederate or French sailors had just gone to the bottom.
Better them than me,
he thought, and let out another whoop. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger stuck out his hand. Grinning, Sam squeezed it.

Thuds on the deck above told of airplanes landing. One of the sailors said, “I wonder what the hell’s going on up there.” Sam wondered the same thing. Everybody down here did, no doubt. Until the intercom told them, they wouldn’t know.

An hour later, the all-clear sounded—still with no news doled out past the sinking of the one submarine. Sam would have made a beeline for the deck anyway, just to escape the cramped, stuffy, paint- and oil-smelling corridor in which he’d been cooped up so long. The added attraction of news only made him move faster.

He found disgusted fliers. “The limeys hightailed it out of town,” one of them said. “We went to where they were supposed to be at—as best we could guess and as best we could navigate—and they weren’t anywhere around there. We pushed out all the way to our maximum range and even a little farther, and we still didn’t spot the bastards. They’re long gone.”

“Good riddance,” Sam offered.

“Well, yeah,” the pilot said, shedding his goggles and sticking a cigar in his mouth (he wasn’t fool enough to light it, but gnawed at the end). “But that’s a hell of a long way to come to shoot up a goddamn fishing boat and then go home.”

“I think they were trying to lure us out to where the submarine could put a torpedo in our brisket,” Sam said. “The Japs did that to the
Dakota
in the Sandwich Islands, and she spent a lot of time in dry dock after that.”

“Maybe,” the pilot said. “Makes more sense than anything I thought of.”

“It didn’t work, though,” Sam said. “We traded one of our fishing boats for their sub—and I hear they didn’t even sink the fishing boat. I’ll make that deal any day.”

IV

C
larence Potter’s promotion to brigadier general meant inheriting his luckless predecessor’s office. Not being buried under the War Department had a couple of advantages. Now he could look out a window. There wasn’t much point to one when all it would show was dirt. And now a wireless set brought in a signal, not just static.

He knew, of course, that Confederate wireless stations said only what the government—that is, the Freedom Party—wanted people to hear. Broadcasters could not tell too many lies, though. If they did, U.S. stations would make them sorry. Unjammed, U.S. broadcasts could reach far into the CSA, just as C.S. programs could be heard well north of the border.

And so, when a Confederate newsman gleefully reported that the Confederate Navy and the Royal Navy had combined to take Bermuda away from the United States, he believed the man. “In a daring piece of deception, HMS
Ark Royal
lured two U.S. carriers away from the island, making the joint task force’s job much easier,” the newscaster said.

Slowly, Potter nodded to himself. That must have been a nervy piece of work. The Royal Navy must have believed that Bermuda was worth a carrier. It hadn’t had to pay the price, but it might have.

Eyeing a map, the Intelligence officer decided the British were dead right. The game had been worth the candle. With Bermuda lost, U.S. ships would have to run the gauntlet down the Confederate coast to resupply the Bahamas. He didn’t think the United States could or would do it. Taking them away from the USA would probably fall to the Confederacy rather than Britain, but it would eliminate a threat to the state of Cuba and make it much harder for U.S. ships to move south and threaten the supply line between Argentina and the United Kingdom. Cutting that supply line was what had finally made Britain throw in the sponge in the Great War.

And if we take the Bahamas, what will we do with all the Negroes there?
he wondered. That was an interesting question, but not one he intended to ask Jake Featherston. If he was lucky, Featherston would tell him it was none of his goddamn business. If he was unlucky, something worse than that would happen.

He didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about it. As Confederates went, he was fairly liberal. But Confederates—white Confederates—did not go far in that direction. What happened to Negroes—in the Confederate States or out of them—wasn’t high on his list of worries. Blacks inside the CSA deserved whatever happened to them, as far as he was concerned.

There, Anne Colleton would have completely agreed with him. He shook his head. He made a fist. Instead of slamming it down on the desk, he let it fall gently. He still couldn’t believe she was dead. She’d been one of those fiercely vital people you thought of as going on forever. But life didn’t work like that, and war had an obscene power all its own. What it wanted, it took, and an individual’s vitality mattered not at all to it.

His fist fell again, harder this time. He was damned if he knew whether to call what he and Anne had had between them love. There probably wasn’t a better name for it, even if the two of them had disagreed so strongly about so many things that they’d broken up for years, and neither one of them ever really thought about settling down with the other. Anne had never been the sort to settle down with a man.

“And neither have I, with a woman,” Potter said softly. He tried to imagine himself married to Anne Colleton. Even if what they’d known had been love, the picture refused to form. Domestic bliss hadn’t been in the cards for either one of them.

Potter laughed at himself. Even if he’d had a wife who specialized in domestic bliss—assuming such a paragon could exist in the real world—he wouldn’t have had time to enjoy it. When he wasn’t here at his desk, he was unconscious on a cot not far away. The coffee he poured down till his stomach sizzled made sure he was unconscious as little as possible.

He lit a cigarette. Tobacco didn’t help keep him awake. It did, or could every now and then, help him focus his thoughts. Since the war started, getting instructions to the spies the CSA had in the USA and getting reports back from them had grown a lot harder than it was during peacetime.

Where was that roster? He pawed through papers till he found it. One of the Confederates who spoke with a good U.S. accent worked at a Columbus wireless station. Potter scribbled a note:
“Satchmo’s Blues” at 1630 on the afternoon of the 11th, station CSNT.

The note would go to Saul Goldman. Goldman would make sure the right song went out at the right time from the Nashville wireless station. The Confederate in Columbus listened to CSNT every afternoon at half past four. If he heard “Satchmo’s Blues,” he made his coded report when he went on the air in the wee small hours. Someone on the Confederate side of the line would hear and decipher it. Potter didn’t know all the details, any more than Goldman knew exactly who would be listening for that tune. Someone was listening. Someone would hear. That was all that mattered.

Sooner or later, some bright young damnyankee would be listening, too, and would put two and two together and come up with four. At that point, the Confederate in Columbus would start suffering from a sharply lower life expectancy, even if he didn’t know it yet.

Or maybe, if the men from the USA were sneaky enough, they wouldn’t shoot the Confederate spy. Maybe they would turn him instead, and make him send their false information into the CSA instead of the truth.

How would the people who listened and deciphered know the agent had been turned? How would they keep the Confederates from acting on damnyankee lies? Mirrors reflecting into other mirrors reflecting into other mirrors yet . . . Intelligence was that kind of game, a chess match with both players moving at the same time and both of them blindfolded more often than not.

Somewhere not far from Columbus, some other Confederate spy would be waiting for a different signal. He would have a different way to respond. If what he said didn’t match what the fellow at the wireless station reported, a red flag would—with luck—go up.

Potter snorted. Without luck, nobody would notice the discrepancy till too late. In that case, some Confederate soldiers would catch hell. It wasn’t as if soldiers didn’t catch hell all the time.

Air-raid sirens began to warble. That was what the instruction posters said, anyhow.
When the siren begins to warble, that is your signal to take cover.
It didn’t sound like a warble to Potter. It sounded like the noise a mechanical dog would make if a giant stepped on its tail. howlhowlhowlhowlhowlhowl endlessly, maddeningly repeated . . .

The damnyankees had nerve, coming over Richmond in broad daylight—either nerve or several screws loose. Potter locked up his important papers in a desk drawer, then headed for the stairway to the shelters in the War Department subbasement—not far from where he’d formerly worked, in fact. He’d just reached the stairwell when the antiaircraft guns started banging away. “I hope we shoot down all of those bastards,” a young lieutenant said.

“That would be nice,” Potter agreed. “Don’t hold your breath till it happens, though.” The lieutenant gave him an odd look. It was one he’d seen a great many times before. “Don’t worry, sonny,” he said. “I’m as Confederate as you are, no matter what I sound like.”

“All right, sir,” the lieutenant said. “I don’t reckon they’d make you a general if you weren’t.” His voice was polite. His face declared he didn’t altogether believe what he was saying. Potter had seen that before, too.

Bombs were already screaming down when Potter got into the shelter. It was hot and crowded and not very comfortable. The ground shook when bombs started bursting. The lights overhead flickered. The shelter would be a hell of a lot less pleasant if they went out. Crammed into the sweaty dark with Lord only knew how many other people . . . He shuddered.

More bombs rained down. A woman—a secretary? a cleaning lady?—screamed. Everybody in the shelter seemed to take a deep breath at the same time, almost enough to suck all the air out of the room. One scream had probably come close to touching off a swarm of others.

Crump!
The lights flickered again. This time, they did go out, for about five seconds—long enough for that woman, or maybe a different one, to let out another scream. A couple of men made noises well on the way toward being screams, too. Then the lights came on again. Several people laughed. The mirth had the high, shrill sound of hysteria.

Behind Potter, somebody started saying, “Jesus loves me. Jesus loves me. Jesus loves me,” again and again, as relentless as the air-raid siren. Potter almost shouted at him to make him shut up—almost but not quite. Telling the man that maybe Jesus loved him but no one else did might make the Intelligence officer feel better, but would only wound the poor fellow who was trying to stay brave.

The next explosions were farther away than the blast that had briefly knocked out the lights. Potter let out a sigh of relief. It wasn’t the only one.

“How long have we been down here?” a man asked.

Potter looked at his watch. “Twenty-one—no, twenty-two—minutes now.”

Several people loudly called him a liar. “It’s got to be hours,” a man said.

“Feels like years,” someone else added. Potter couldn’t very well quarrel with that, because it felt like years to him, too. But it hadn’t been, and he was too habitually precise to mix up feelings and facts.

After what seemed like an eternity but was in truth another fifty-one minutes, the all-clear sounded. “Now,” somebody said brightly, “let’s see if anything’s left upstairs.”

Had the War Department taken a direct hit, they would have known about it. Even so, the crack spawned plenty of nervous laughter. People began filing out of the shelter. This was only the third or fourth time the USA had bombed Richmond. Everybody felt heroic at enduring the punishment. And someone said, “Philadelphia’s bound to be catching it worse.”

Half a dozen people on the stairs nodded. Potter started to himself. He wondered why. Yes, there was a certain consolation in the idea that the enemy was hurting more than your country. But if he blew you up, or your family, or your home, or even your office, what your side did to him wouldn’t seem to matter so much . . . would it? Vengeance couldn’t make personal anguish go away . . . could it?

That near miss hadn’t blown up Potter’s office. But it had blown the glass out of the windows, except for a few jagged, knife-edged shards. The soles of his shoes crunched on glittered pieces of glass in the carpet. More sparkled on his desk. He couldn’t sit down on his swivel chair without doing a good, thorough job of cleaning it. Otherwise, he’d get his bottom punctured. He shrugged. A miss
was
about as good as a mile. An hour or two of cleanup, maybe not even that, and he’d be back on the job.

L
ieutenant-Colonel Tom Colleton peered north toward Grove City, Ohio. It wasn’t much of a city, despite the name; it couldn’t have held more than fifteen hundred people—two thousand at the outside. What made it important was that it was the last town of any size at all southwest of Columbus. Once the Confederate Army drove the damnyankees out of Grove City, they wouldn’t have any place to make a stand this side of the capital of Ohio.

Trouble was, they knew it. They didn’t want to retreat those last eight miles. If the Confederates got into Grove City, they could bring up artillery here and add to the pounding Columbus and its defenses were taking. U.S. forces were doing their best to make sure that didn’t happen.

Grove City lay in the middle of a fertile farming belt. Now, though, shells and bombs were tearing those fields, not tractors and plows. Barrel tracks carved the most noticeable furrows in the soil. The smell of freshly turned earth was sweet in Colleton’s nostrils; he crouched in a foxhole he’d just dug for himself, though the craters pocking the ground would have served almost as well.

More shells churned up the dirt. The U.S. soldiers had an artillery position just behind Grove City, and they were shooting as hard and as fast as they could. Somewhere not far away, a Confederate soldier started screaming for his mother. His voice was high and shrill. Tom Colleton bit his lip. He’d heard screams like that in the last war as well as this one. They meant a man was badly hurt. Sure enough, these quickly faded.

Tom cursed. He was in his late forties, but his blond, boyish good looks and the smile he usually wore let him lie ten years off his age. Not right now, not after he’d just listened to a soldier from his regiment die.

And when bombs or shells murdered his men, he couldn’t help wondering whether his sister had made those same noises just before she died. If Anne hadn’t been in Charleston the day that goddamn carrier chose to raid the city . . . If she hadn’t, the world would have been a different place. But it was what it was, and that was all it ever could be.

“Wireless!” Tom shouted. “God damn it to hell, where are you?”

“Here, sir.” The soldier with the wireless set crawled across the riven ground toward the regimental commander. The heavy pack on his back made him a human dromedary. “What do you need, sir?”

“Get hold of division headquarters and tell ’em we’d better have something to knock down those Yankee guns,” Colleton answered. “As best I can make out, they’re in map square B-18.”

“B-18. Yes, sir,” the wireless operator repeated. He shouted into the microphone. At last, he nodded to Tom. “They’ve got the message, sir. Permission to get my ass back under cover?”

“You don’t need to ask me that, Duffy,” Tom said. The wireless man crawled away and dove into a shell hole. Soldiers said two shells never came down in the same place. They’d said that in the Great War, too, and often died proving it wasn’t always true.

Within a few minutes, Confederate shells began falling on map square B-18. The bombardment coming down on the Confederate soldiers south of Grove City slowed but didn’t stop. Tom Colleton shouted for Duffy again. The wireless man scrambled out of the shell hole and came over to him, his belly never getting any higher off the ground than a snake’s. Duffy changed frequencies, bawled into the mike once more, and gave Tom a thumbs-up before wriggling back to what he hoped was safety.