The Grapple (24 page)

He waited. If Nathan Bedford Forrest III did any more bitching, the C.S. General Staff would have a new chief in nothing flat. Forrest must have sensed as much, too, for he said, “All right, Mr. President. They’ll get here as fast as they can.”

“Faster than that,” Featherston said, but it was only reflex complaint; Forrest had satisfied him. He slammed down the telephone, quickly dressed, and did something he didn’t do every day: he went up above ground.

Shockoe Hill gave him a good vantage point. When he looked southeast, he swore at the black smoke rising over the colored part of Richmond. He heard the rattle of small-arms fire and the occasional explosion, too. “Christ!” he said. The police and stalwarts and Party Guards always came loaded for bear, just in case. Well, they found a bear and then some this time.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III proved good as his word. About half an hour later, the first Mule dive bombers screamed down out of the sky above the colored quarter. Whatever the blacks had in the way of small arms, they didn’t have any antiaircraft guns. The flat, harsh
crump!
of bursting bombs echoed across Richmond.

But the Confederate Asskickers weren’t the only airplanes in the sky. U.S. fighters, flying at not much above rooftop level, darted over southeastern Richmond to strafe the people cleaning out the Negroes. Then they zoomed away to the north again.

Jake Featherston did some more swearing at that, swearing sulfurous enough to make his guards and the crews of the antiaircraft guns on the cratered Gray House grounds stare at him in startled admiration. He didn’t know whether the damnyankees had urged Richmond’s Negroes to rise. He didn’t know, and he hardly cared. He did know they had good spies inside the city, to hear about it and take advantage of it so fast.

He called for his driver and pointed toward the trouble. “Take me down there, quick as you can.”

“Uh, yes, Mr. President.” The driver saluted. But then he went on, “Sir, what good will you be able to do there? You don’t want to give the coons a shot at you.”

“Don’t tell me what I want to do,” Jake snapped. “Just get moving, goddammit.”

The driver did. People were in the habit of doing what Jake Featherston said.
A good thing, too,
he thought.
A damn good thing.
Twenty minutes later, he was at what was for all practical purposes the fighting front. He found Ferd Koenig looking ridiculous with a helmet on his jowly head. A moment later, when a bullet cracked past, Featherston wished for a helmet of his own—not that any helmet ever made would stop a direct hit.

“It’s a war, Mr. President,” Koenig said unhappily.

“I see that.” Featherston wasn’t unhappy. He was furious. If the Negroes thought they could get away with this, they needed to think again. “Send in everybody we’ve got,” he told Koenig. “This has to be stamped out right now.”

“Shouldn’t we wait till the soldiers get here?” the Attorney General asked, licking his lips. “Been kind of hot for the manpower we have.”

“Send them in,” Featherston repeated. “When we have the soldiers later, we’ll use ’em. But if we can end it in a hurry, we’ll do that. We’ve already got the Asskickers in action. What more do you want, egg in your beer?”

So the attack went in. And the Negro fighters, waiting in prepared positions, shredded it. Wounded whites staggered back out of the fighting. So did overage cops who looked as if they were on the point of having heart attacks. They killed some Negroes and brought out some others, but they didn’t break the line. Jake Featherston swore yet again. Now he’d have to do it the hard way.

F
rom the bridge, Sam Carsten looked at the
Josephus Daniels
with a kind of fond dismay. They’d done strange things to his ship. Her paint was the wrong shade of gray. Sheet metal changed the outline of the bridge and the gun turrets. Her sailors wore whites of the wrong cut. His own uniform was dark gray, not blue, and so were the rest of the officers’.

By the name painted on both sides of her bow, the
Josephus Daniels
was the CSS
Hot Springs,
a Confederate destroyer escort operating in the North Atlantic. The main danger coming south from Boston was that she would run into a U.S. patrol aircraft or submersible and get sunk by her own side. The Confederate naval ensign, a square version of the C.S. battle flag, completed the disguise.

“If they capture us, they’ll shoot us for spies.” Lieutenant Pat Cooley didn’t sound worried. He was almost childishly excited at playing dress-up. The possibility of getting shot hardly seemed real to him.

It didn’t seem real to Sam, either, but for a different reason. “Not a whole lot of POWs off Navy ships,” he said. “If something goes wrong, they’ll just damn well sink us.” That wasn’t romantic. It had no cloak-and-dagger flavor to it. He didn’t care. It was real.

By now, barring bad luck, they were too far south for U.S. airplanes to harry them. Subs were always a risk, but Sam didn’t know what to do about it except monitor the hydrophones as closely as he could. The crew was doing that.

He had the best set of C.S. Navy recognition signals his U.S. Navy superiors could give him. He also had an ace in the hole, a deserter from the CSA named Antonio Jones. Normally, Sam would have been leery about a Confederate traitor. Anybody like that was too likely to be playing a double game. But he—and, again, his superiors—had a good reason for thinking Jones reliable.

The man was black as the ace of spades.

He came from Cuba, the only state in the CSA where Negroes had surnames. He pronounced his “Hone-ace”: he spoke English with an accent half Confederate drawl, half syrupy Cubano Spanish. He hated the homeland he’d left behind, and he burned to go back there. And so here he was, with a disguised destroyer escort for transport…among other things.

“Not the first time I’ve been in the gun-running business,” Carsten remarked.

“No?” the exec said, as he was supposed to.

“Nope. I took rifles into Ireland in the last go-round, just to help keep England busy,” Sam said. “The Irish paid us off in whiskey. Don’t expect that’ll happen in Cuba.”

“No, suh,” Antonio Jones said. He wore a mess steward’s uniform. High cheekbones and a strong nose argued for a little Indian blood in him. “But maybe you get some rum.”

“Oh,
I
won’t,” Sam said. “That’ll be for the fellows who do the real work. Long as they don’t get drunk and disorderly, I’ll look the other way.”

Pat Cooley raised an eyebrow, but lowered it again in a hurry. A lot of skippers would do the same thing, not just a man who was a mustang. The exec contented himself with saying, “Let’s hope they have the chance to drink it.”

“Not all these little tricks are easy,” Sam said. “We just have to do what we can and hope for the best, same as always.”

They were off the coast of South Carolina when a seaplane of unfamiliar design buzzed out to look them over. The mock Confederate sailors ran to their guns. With luck, that wouldn’t alarm the fliers in the seaplane, which also sported the Confederate battle flag on wings, fuselage, and tail.

After a couple of passes, the seaplane waggled its wings at the pseudo-
Hot Springs
and flew away. “Let’s just hope it didn’t fly low enough to read our name,” Pat Cooley said.

“I don’t
think
it did.” Sam hoped he wasn’t whistling in the dark. The people the seaplane wirelessed probably wouldn’t be surprised to find a C.S. destroyer escort in these waters. They probably
would
be surprised to find the
Hot Springs
around here. They also probably wouldn’t be very happy. The
Josephus Daniels
wasn’t fast enough to run away from everything they’d throw at her. She wasn’t armed well enough to fight it off, either. All she could do was go down swinging.

“Y’all are
bueno
?” Antonio Jones asked.

“Well, I’ll tell you—if we’re not, we’ll know pretty damn quick.” Sam went from the bridge to the wireless shack. “Any Confederate traffic for us or about us?” he asked the men with earphones.

“Nothing for us, sir,” one of the yeomen answered. “If there’s anything about us, it’s not in clear.”

“If it’s in code, chances are we’re shafted,” Sam said. “All right—thanks.” He returned to his station, at least somewhat reassured.

Another seaplane examined them when they neared the southern tip of Florida. They must have passed that inspection, too. If they hadn’t, cruisers and land-based dive bombers would have called on them. As far as Sam knew—as far as anybody in the U.S. Navy knew—the Confederates had no airplane carriers. It made sense that they wouldn’t; they didn’t need that kind of navy. Land-based air and coast-defense ships could keep the United States from mounting major operations against them, and submarines let them strike at the USA from far away.

“You know what our best chance is?” Sam said as the
Josephus Daniels
neared the northeastern coast of Cuba.

“Sure,” his exec answered. “Our best chance is that the Confederates won’t figure we’re crazy enough to try anything like this in the first place.”

“Just what I was thinking—maybe we ought to get married,” Sam said.

“Sorry, sir. No offense, but you’re not my type,” Cooley answered. They both laughed.

Antonio Jones looked from one of them to the other. “This ain’t funny,
amigos,
” he said. “What that Featherston bastard is doing to colored people in my
estado,
it’s a shame and a disgrace. We got to go to the mountains and fight back.”

“Sorry, Mr. Jones.” Sam didn’t think he’d ever called a Negro
mister
before, but orders were to treat him like a big shot. “We know your people are in trouble. We’re not laughing about that. But my crew is in trouble, too, and it will be till we get back into U.S. waters.”
And even after that,
he added, but only to himself. “We
can
laugh about that. We’d go nuts if we didn’t, chances are.”

“Ah. Now I understand.” Jones sketched a salute. “All right,
Señor Capitán.
We do this, too, against our worries.”

The sun sank into the sea with tropical abruptness. No long, lazy twilights in these latitudes; darkness came on in a hurry. Pat Cooley had the conn as the
Josephus Daniels
approached the Cuban coast. Sam didn’t want to risk the ship in any way he didn’t have to. What they were doing was already risky enough by the nature of things.

“One patrol boat where it’s not supposed to be could ruin our whole day,” Cooley remarked.

“All the guns are manned, and Y-ranging should let us see him before he sees us,” Sam said. “With luck, we’ll sink him before he gets word off about us.”

Cooley nodded. Sam wondered how much luck they’d already used up when those C.S. seaplanes believed they were what they pretended to be. Did they have enough left? He’d find out before long.

Y-ranging gear also let them spot the Cuban coast. Although it was blacked out, the darkness wasn’t so thorough as it would have been farther north. U.S. bombers weren’t likely to visit here. Eyeing what had to be two fair-sized towns, Sam said, “That’s Guardalavaca to starboard, and that has to be Banes to starboard. We are where we’re supposed to be. Nice navigating, Mr. Cooley.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” the exec said.

Sailors were hauling crates of rifles and submachine guns and machine guns and cartridges up on deck. Soon they’d be lowered into the
Josephus Daniels’
boats and brought ashore…if the destroyer escort got the recognition signal she was supposed to.

That thought had hardly crossed Carsten’s mind before three automobiles on a beach aimed their headlights across the water in the warship’s general direction. Antonio Jones breathed a sigh of relief. Sam breathed another one. Anxiety tempered his—were they sailing into a trap? He had to find out.

“Thank you, sir,” the black Cuban answered. “God willing”—he crossed himself—“the
Partido de Libertad
here will have some new worries.” They went out on deck together. Sailors in ersatz Confederate uniforms swung crate after crate down into the waiting boats. Jones continued, “It is not as much white man against black man here as it is on the mainland of the CSA. There are many of mixed blood on this island, and even some whites help us as much as they can.”

“Good. That’s good, Mr. Jones.” Sam did his best to pronounce it the way the Negro did. He was uneasily aware that his own country wasn’t doing everything it could to help the Negroes in the Confederate States. Well, the United States were doing
something.
The proof of that was right here. Sailors scrambled down nets to board the boats and take the guns and ammo ashore.

Antonio Jones went to the port rail to go down himself. “I hope you stay safe,
Capitán
Carsten,” he said.

“I hope you do, too,” Sam said. “Maybe after the war’s done, we’ll get together and talk about it over a beer.”

“I hope so, yes.” Jones sketched a salute and swung himself over the rail. He descended as nimbly as any sailor. Motors chugging, the boats pulled away from the
Josephus Daniels
and went in toward the beach.

Nothing to do but wait,
Sam thought. He would rather be doing. He’d smuggled arms into Ireland himself. He knew the ploy worked right away. If firing broke out on the beach now…
Well, in that case I’m screwed, too.

The boats came back after what felt like years. His watch insisted it was more like forty-five minutes. Sailors hoisted the boats up one after another. “Smooth as rum, sir,” said one of the men back from the beach. The simile made Sam suspicious, or more than suspicious. Remembering the good Irish whiskey he’d downed in the last war, he said not a word.

“Goddamnedest thing you ever saw, too,” a grizzled CPO added. “They had this kid running things on the beach. If he was a day over sixteen, I’m a nigger. But he knew what was what, Fidel did. He gave orders in that half-Spanish, half-English they talk here, and people jumped like you wouldn’t believe. He was a white kid, too, not a smoke like Mr. Antonio Jones.”