Return Engagement (4 page)

Of course, this Negro was hungry to the point where his ribs would do duty for a xylophone. If his number came up in a population reduction, hunger would be the least and last of his worries, too. He’d probably say and do anything to keep breathing and to put real rations in his belly. He was at least as likely to desert the first chance he saw, or to start aiming his rifle at Confederates again.

Any which way, that wasn’t Jeff’s call. He said, “You’re eating at the table you set when you did whatever the hell you did to land yourself in here. You don’t like it now, you shouldn’t’ve done whatever the hell it was.”

He waited to see if the colored man had some kind of smartmouth comeback ready. Some of these bastards never learned. But this fellow just poured down the soup and spooned up his grits and kept his mouth shut otherwise. That was smart. Of course, if he were really smart, he wouldn’t have been here.

Some of the Negroes in here insisted they were guilty of nothing but being black. They could insist as much as they wanted. It wasn’t going to change a goddamn thing. And if Jake Featherston wanted to run every Negro man, woman, and child through Camp Dependable . . . Pinkard laughed. If he wanted to do that, he’d have to build himself a hell of a lot bigger camp.

Jeff didn’t see that happening. If anything, the start of the war would probably starve Dependable and the other camps in the CSA of guards and resources. Fighting the USA was a hell of a big job. Everything else, he figured, would have to wait on a siding while that train rolled by.

Which also meant he didn’t have to flabble like a turtle jumping off a rock to figure out better ways to deal with population reductions. No matter what Mercer Scott thought, they wouldn’t be too urgent. If some of the guards couldn’t stand the strain, he’d get others. There’d be wounded veterans not fit for tougher duty who could take care of this just fine.

There’s a relief,
Pinkard thought. All the same, finding other ways to go about it kept gnawing at him, like the very beginnings of a toothache.

T
he wind came out of the west, off the Carolina coast. That made Lieutenant, j.g., Sam Carsten happy. It meant the USS
Remembrance
could steam toward the coast when she launched her bombers and torpedo aircraft at Charleston harbor. Had the wind blown in the other direction, she would have had to head straight away from land to send her aircraft towards it.

Not that Sam expected to watch much of the fight either way. His battle station was down in the bowels of the carrier. He was assistant damage-control officer, under Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger. He would rather have had more to do with aviation, but the Navy wanted what it wanted, not what he wanted.

And, in late June off the Carolina coast, being where he was had its advantages. With fair, fair skin, pale blond hair, and blue eyes, he was
this
far from being an albino. Even the mild sun of northern latitudes was a torment to him. Down in Confederate waters, the sun came closer to torture than torment. He painted himself in zinc-oxide ointment till he was blotchy as a leper, and burned anyhow.

One more airplane roared off the deck. Silence came down. “Now we wait,” Pottinger said. He was twenty years younger than Sam, but he’d graduated from Annapolis and was on his way through a normal officer’s career. Carsten had started as an ordinary seaman. He was a mustang, up through the hawse hole. He’d spent a long time as an ensign, and even longer as a j.g. If he ever made lieutenant, he’d be proud. If he made lieutenant commander, he’d be ecstatic.

Of course, there was a war on. All the naval yards on both coasts would start cranking out ships as fast as they could. They’d need bodies to put into them. And some ships would go to the bottom, too, or suffer battle damage and casualties. They’d need replacements. Sam wasn’t thrilled at the idea of getting a promotion on account of something like that, but he knew those things happened. He’d seen it in the last war.

An hour and a half later, the intercom buzzed and squawked. Sam’s head swung towards it. One of the sailors in the damage-control party said, “Oh, God, what the hell’s gone wrong now?” Carsten had the same thought. The intercom seldom brought good news.

“Men, this is the captain speaking,” came from the squawkbox. Whatever the news was, then, it wasn’t small. Captain Stein didn’t waste his time on small stuff. He left that to Commodore Cressy, the exec. After a tiny pause, the skipper went on, “The government of Great Britain has announced that a state of war exists between their country and the United States.”

“Aw, shit,” somebody said, softly and almost reverently. Again, Sam was inclined to agree. The Royal Navy could play football on anybody’s gridiron. It had written the book from which other navies around the world cribbed—and it had been building hard these past few years.

“Prime Minister Churchill said,, ‘We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, because we are made of sugar candy. We know the United States are strong. But the destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valor our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted, we must be inflexible. Victory at all costs.” “ Captain Stein paused again, then continued, “Well, he gives a nice speech, doesn’t he? But we’ll whip him and the limeys anyhow.”

“Yeah,” several sailors said together. The skipper had gauged their feelings well. No matter how good a speech Churchill gave, Sam wondered how smart he was. He could have stayed out of the American war and concentrated on helping France and Russia whip Germany and her European allies. He might have had a pretty good chance of bringing that off, too, and the USA would never have declared war on him.

But Churchill was rolling the dice. He’d always been a man for whom Britain without her empire was like eggs without ham. Beating Germany alone wouldn’t get back what she’d lost at the end of the Great War. Beating Germany and the United States might.

“Where we are now, we don’t have to worry about the Royal Navy right away,” Lieutenant Commander Pottinger said. “We have plenty of other things to worry about instead.”

The sailors laughed. Sam did, too, not that it was all that funny. Land-based bombers had damaged his battleship off the South American coast during the last war. The state of the art had improved a lot since then. By attacking Charleston harbor, the
Remembrance
was sticking her head in the lion’s mouth.

To keep from thinking about that, he thought about something else: “If the one that started in 1914 was the Great War, what are we going to call this one? The Greater War?” He got a laugh. He almost always could. He had a knack for that, whenever he felt like using it.

Hiram Pottinger said, “Let’s hope we call it the, ‘This Was Easy and We All Went Home in a Hurry War.” “ He got a bigger laugh. Sam joined it and softly clapped his hands. He liked that kind of name just fine.

A few minutes afterwards, the intercom came to life again. “This is Commander Cressy.” As usual, the executive officer sounded cool, calm, and collected. “Our wireless ranging gear shows aircraft not our own approaching the ship from the west. It is a wee bit unlikely that those aircraft will be friendly. I know you’ll give them the warm reception they deserve.”

“Happy days,” Sam said. The lion was trying to bite.

“Better this news than a surprise,” Pottinger said, and Sam could only nod. The wireless ranging gear had gone into the
Remembrance
just the year before. She’d made a special trip to the Boston Navy Yard for the installation. Without it, she would have been blind to the approaching menace, maybe till too late.

Sam wondered whether the Confederates also had wireless ranging gear—Y-range, people were calling it. They’d figured out where the
Remembrance
was pretty damn quick. Nobody’d said anything about their having it. But then, how much of war was finding out the hard way what the other fellow had that you didn’t know about ahead of time? Put that way, it sounded quietly philosophical. Put another way, it meant Sam was likely to get killed because some dimbulb in Philadelphia was asleep at the switch.

“They’re going to throw up a lot of antiaircraft all around us,” said one of the sailors in the damage-control party. Maybe he’d had the same nasty thought Sam had, and was trying to reassure himself.

And maybe whoever’d given the order for this raid hadn’t stopped to figure out the likely consequences of sending an airplane carrier within range of land-based aircraft. Hardly anybody had had to worry about land-based attacks on ships during the Great War. Sam was a rare exception. If an admiral hadn’t had a new thought since 1917, he’d figure everything would go fine. And maybe he’d turn out to be right, and maybe he wouldn’t. And the
Remembrance
was going to find out which.

If the Confederates happened to have a submarine in the neighborhood, too . . . Well, that was another reason destroyers and cruisers ringed the carrier. They were supposed to carry better antisubmersible gear than they’d had in the Great War, better even than they’d had in the Pacific War against Japan.

Would you be able to hear the ships around the
Remembrance
shooting at Confederate airplanes if you were way the hell down here? Carsten cocked his head to one side, listening intently. All he could make out were the carrier’s usual mechanical noises.

And then, without warning, all hell broke loose. The
Remembrance
’s dual-purpose five-inch guns and all her smaller quick-firing antiaircraft weapons let go at once. Sam could sure as hell hear that. The engines started working harder. The ship heeled to the left, then to the right. Captain Stein was handling her as if she were a destroyer, dodging and twisting on the open sea like a halfback faking his way past lumbering defensive linemen.

Trouble was, airplanes didn’t lumber. By comparison, the
Remembrance
was the one that was slow.

A bomb burst in the water close by the ship. That felt almost like being inside a bell when it was rung. Two more went off in quick succession, a little farther away. Fragments would cause casualties up on deck. The blasts might spring seams, too. Nobody was screaming for damage control, though, so maybe not.

Then, up near the starboard bow, a bomb burst on the
Remembrance.

The ship staggered, as if she’d taken one right on the chin—and she had. Lights flickered, but they stayed on. The reassuring deep throb of the engines went on. So did the antiaircraft fire. Not a mortal wound, then—not right away, anyhow. But it could be.

“Carsten, take a party and deal with that!” Pottinger rapped out.

“Aye aye, sir!” Sam turned to the sailors. “Come on, boys. We’ve got work to do. Sections one and two, with me.”

The ship was buttoned up tight. They had to open and close a slew of watertight doors to get where they were going. Carsten wished there were something to be done about that. It slowed aid. But it also helped keep the ship afloat, which counted for more.

He’d been out on deck under air attack during the Pacific War. It was just as much fun as he remembered. A Confederate airplane went into the sea almost without a splash. Another flew by nearly low enough to land, spraying machine-gun bullets down the flight deck. Men dove for cover, not that there was much. Screams rose when bullets struck home.

Sam sprinted up the deck toward the bomb hit. He skidded to a stop at the smoking edge of the damage. The explosion had torn off a corner of the flight deck, exposing one of the five-inch gun positions just below. The gun seemed intact. Red smears and spatters said the gunners were anything but. Sam turned to a petty officer—one of the flight-deck crew—beside him. “Can you still take off and land with the deck like this?”

“Hell, yes, sir,” the man answered. “No problem. It was a glancing hit—should have been a miss, I think, but we zigged instead o’ zagging.” He didn’t seem very worried.

“All right.” Carsten gave orders to most of the men he commanded to help set things right. Then he said, “Doheny, Eisenberg, Bengough—follow me. We can still fight that gun, God damn it.” He hadn’t been in charge of a five-inch for years, but he knew how.

He scrambled down through the wreckage to the gun. He cut his hands a couple of times, but he wouldn’t notice till later. A fighter from the carrier’s combat air patrol, flame licking back from the engine cowling toward the eagle with crossed swords on the tail, cartwheeled into the Atlantic. Another Confederate airplane shot up the
Remembrance.

“Doheny, jerk shells. Bengough, you load and shoot. Eisenberg, handle azimuth! Can you do that?” Sam waited for a nod, then grabbed the elevation screw. “Come on, you bastards! Like the skipper said, we’ve got company!”

At his orders, the gun started banging away. Black puffs of smoke dotted the sky. A Confederate airplane, hit square in the fuselage, broke in two. Both burning chunks went into the drink. The pilot never had a chance to hit the silk. Carsten and his makeshift crew cheered like maniacs. Even as he yelled, though, he was looking for a new target. How many waves of attackers would the Confederates send at the
Remembrance
? And how long till her own bombers and torpedo airplanes came home and she could get the hell out of range? It already seemed like forever.

A
nne Colleton looked across the warm blue water of Charleston harbor toward Fort Sumter. A plaque said General Beauregard had stood right here when the Confederacy opened fire on the island fortress the United States and that damned fool Abraham Lincoln refused to surrender.
FIRST SHOTS IN THE BATTLE FOR OUR FREEDOM FROM YANKEE OPPRESSION
, the plaque declared.

That little island remained fortified to this day. Big coast-defense guns could reach far out to sea. But they couldn’t reach far enough to smash all the threats the United States might throw at Charleston. Antiaircraft guns bristled on the island and around the harbor. If the damnyankees flew airplanes off the deck of a ship at the ships and the shore installations here, they would catch as much hell as the gunners could give them.