The Grapple (51 page)

He hoped they would do the heavy lifting against Bermuda. If they plastered the runways on the island so the British fighters and bombers couldn’t take off…If they did that, his own life expectancy would go up. He’d been lucky in war so far. He’d had a battleship hit and a carrier sunk under him, but he’d barely got scratched. He hoped that would go on—he liked his carcass the way it was.

Most of the time, Navy men were lucky compared to their Army counterparts. They slept in bunks, or at least in hammocks, not wrapped in a blanket in the mud. They ate pretty good chow, not the canned rations soldiers had to put up with. Most of the time, they were in transit from here to there; except for lurking submersibles, nothing put them in danger minute by minute for days or weeks at a stretch.

But…There was always a but. When things went wrong for sailors, they went wrong in a big way. If a ship went down to the bottom, she could take hundreds of men—even a couple of thousand on a carrier—down with her.

He wished he hadn’t had that thought. He reached out and rapped his knuckles on the wheel. Pat Cooley sent him a quizzical look. “What’s up, sir?”

“Nothing, not really. Just snapping my fingers to keep the elephants away.”

The exec looked around. “Nothing but the Atlantic for miles and miles,” he said. “I didn’t know the enemy was issuing heavy-duty water wings.”

“Gotta watch out for those water elephants,” Sam said gravely. “Next time you see something sticking out of the Atlantic, it won’t be a periscope—it’ll be one of their trunks instead.”

“No doubt, sir,” Cooley answered. “And the trunk’ll probably be packed, too—with explosives or with bushwah, depending.”

“Bushwah—no doubt about it,” Sam said, his face still straight. “An essential wartime ingredient.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” the exec said.

Carsten studied the charts of the waters around Bermuda. The one thing he was sure of was that he didn’t want to get too close without a pilot aboard who knew them like the back of his hand. There were too many reefs marked, too many names like Cow Ground Flat and Brackish Pond Flats. There were also too many wrecks charted, some from the eighteenth century, some of blockade runners during the War of Secession, and ungodly numbers from the days of the Great War. He wondered how many wrecks
weren’t
marked. He didn’t want to add the
Josephus Daniels
to that number.

“Sir, we’ve got airplanes outbound from Bermuda,” the Y-ranging officer said. “They don’t intend to sit there and take it.”

“And we’re still a hundred miles offshore,” Carsten said. “Well, we already knew the limeys have their own Y-ranging gear.”

“Sure looks that way, sir,” Lieutenant Walters said. “Seems like they’re trying to keep us from doing too much to the island.”

“Can they?” Sam and his executive officer asked the same thing at the same time.

“No way to tell yet,” Walters answered. He watched the screens for another couple of minutes, then grunted. “That’s funny.”

“What’s up?” Sam asked.

“I’m picking up incoming aircraft with a bearing of about 250—a little south of west.” The Y-ranging officer laughed. “Gadget must have the hiccups. It does that once in a while.”

Sam didn’t think it was funny, not one little bit. He looked at Pat Cooley. The exec was looking back at him, similar consternation in his eyes. “How far is it from Cape Hatteras to Bermuda, Pat?” Sam asked.

“About six hundred miles, sir,” Cooley answered.

“That’s what I thought,” Sam said. “If the Confederates wanted to try bombing us, they could, in other words.” He didn’t wait for a reply this time. He just snapped out an order: “Bring the ship to general quarters. Signal the rest of the fleet what we’ve spotted and what we think it means.” Other Y-ranging sets would pick up those airplanes, too, but would the men eyeing the screens know what they were seeing?

Klaxons hooted. Sailors dashed to their battle stations as if someone had tied torches to their tails. “If the limeys can put up airplanes at the same time as the Confederates, things are liable to get interesting,” Lieutenant Cooley remarked, sounding calmer than he had any business being.

“Interesting. Yeah,” Sam said tightly. “And I hear that the ocean is wet, and Jake Featherston doesn’t always tell the truth, and you’re liable to get hurt if a .50-caliber slug hits you.”

Cooley gave an uncertain chuckle, plainly having trouble making up his mind whether the skipper was being sardonic or had just flipped his lid. The blinker on the closest cruiser started sending Morse. Cooley and Carsten both turned field glasses toward the signal.
CONFIRM C.S. AIRCRAFT
, it said, one letter at a time.
PREPARE TO DEFEND. AIR COVER LIMITED
.

That was all, no matter how much Sam waited and longed for more. “Happy day,” he said, and whistled something without much tune. He went to the speaking tube that connected the bridge to the engine room: “Be ready to give me flank speed at my order. We’re facing air attack any minute now.”

“Flank speed at your order. Aye aye, sir.” Nobody down in the black gang sounded ruffled. They never did down there. They did all they could do, and they didn’t worry about anything beyond the noise and heat of their province. Sam envied them their simplicity. It was the one thing he missed from his days as a rating. Now he had to think about the whole ship and the tactical situation at the same time.

“One thing,” Cooley said. “The Confederates probably won’t throw Asskickers at us. They don’t have the range to come out this far and make it back to the mainland. That means medium bombers hitting from high altitude, and they aren’t nearly so accurate.”

“Can Asskickers dive-bomb us and then land on Bermuda?” Sam asked.

His exec looked quite humanly surprised for a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that.” Cooley sounded less self-assured than usual. He checked some reference books, and didn’t look happy when he closed them. “Probably, sir. They may not be able to carry a full bomb load, but I think they can get here.”

“One more piece of good news,” Sam said.

The cruiser that had signaled them opened fire with her five-inch guns. A moment later, the
Josephus Daniels’
pair of four-inchers opened up, too, and then the twin 40mm guns, and then the .50-caliber machine guns. The racket was terrific, astonishing, deafening. Sam knew he didn’t hear as well as he would have liked. Artilleryman’s ear, soldiers called it. This wouldn’t help.

Sure as hell, a gull-winged Confederate Mule stooped on the cruiser. Sam saw the dive bomber release the bomb it carried under its belly a split second before a big shell connected with it. The airplane turned into a fireball. Fragments rained down into the Atlantic. But the bomb caught the cruiser just abaft the bridge. The big ship staggered in the water. A great plume of smoke rose from her.

“Pilot’s a damn fool,” Cooley said. Sam made a questioning noise. The exec explained: “They should be going after the troopships and the carriers. In a fight like this, escorts are chump change.”

He’d just called his own ship chump change, which didn’t necessarily mean he was wrong. Another burning Asskicker plunged into the sea. The combat air patrol over the fleet was doing something, anyhow. And the guys at one of the forward 40mm mounts started whooping and dancing like men going out of their heads. They’d shot down an enemy airplane, or they sure as hell thought they had.

More Asskickers pulled out of their parabolic dives and fought for altitude. They were most vulnerable then, since they weren’t moving very fast as they climbed. Several of them got hacked out of the sky. But other ominous smoke pillars rose from the fleet.

“It’s a big game,” Sam said. “I wish I knew what the score was.”

“If we get troops ashore on Bermuda, we’re winning,” Pat Cooley said. “If we don’t…If we don’t, the Navy Department had a lousy idea.”

No sooner had he said that than another destroyer signaled them—the damaged cruiser was no longer close.
ADVANCE WITH US TO BOMBARD ISLAND
, the other ship’s signal lamp flashed.

“Acknowledge and tell ’em we’re on the way,” Sam said to Cooley.

“Aye aye, sir.”

Bermuda was actually made up of several low-lying islands linked by bridges and causeways. The
Josephus Daniels’
fire went in against the airstrip in the northeast. The gunners worked their pieces with furious haste, knowing that the more damage they did, the less chance British and C.S. airplanes would have of getting off the ground and striking back.

Landing boats waddled forward from troopships that stayed out of the artillery range. Hidden gun emplacements opened up on them. Here and there, a boat was hit and went up in flames or simply sank. But most of the landing craft made it to the beach. U.S. bombers and fighters pounded all the enemy positions they could find. U.S. Army men and Marines swarmed forward. Sam hoped for the best.

T
ill Armstrong Grimes got wounded, he’d never been in upstate New York in his life. But a lot of U.S. military hospitals were in that part of the country, because Confederate bombers had to fly a long way to get there. The one where he was recuperating lay somewhere between Syracuse and Rochester. Since he wasn’t sure which town was which, he would have had trouble nailing it down any better than that.

Lying around doing nothing with nobody to yell at him for it felt strange, almost unnatural. Not worrying about snipers or machine guns felt even stranger. He got plenty of chow—not wonderful chow, but better than the canned stuff he’d been eating most of the time. He got all the cigarettes he wanted, even if they were U.S. barge scrapings instead of Confederate tobacco.

And the nurses were…nurses. Women. Some of them were tough old battleaxes who’d been taking care of people since the Great War. Others, though, were young and cute and friendly. Armstrong hoped some of them would prove more than friendly. Guys who’d been there a while told stories about nurses who helped soldiers recuperate by hopping into bed with them. But soldiers always told stories about women. Armstrong didn’t see anything like that, no matter how much he wished he would.

Even so, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been around women who didn’t want to blow his brains out. It reminded him there was a bigger world out there than the one that involved storming the next apartment building full of Mormons or Canucks.

So did reading newspapers and listening to the wireless. Oh, they were full of things like the reconquest of Bermuda and the U.S. drive aimed at Chattanooga. But that wasn’t all. They didn’t go on about the war twenty-four hours a day. There were stories about crime and scandal and films and a lady in Schenectady who’d had quadruplets.

That one impressed the nurses more than it did Armstrong. “Men!” one of them sniffed when she found out Armstrong didn’t get it. “Can you imagine trying to take care of four little tiny babies all at once? Can you imagine trying to take care of four two-year-olds all at once? My God!” She rolled her eyes.

Armstrong couldn’t imagine anything like that. But, since Susan was young and cute instead of being a battleaxe, he did his best. “Bad?” he asked.

“My God!” she repeated. “My kids are almost two years apart, and they still drive me nuts. But four of them doing the same things, making the same messes, getting into the same trouble all at the same time? I hope she’s got lots of people helping her, that’s all I can tell you.”

She wore a wedding ring. Armstrong hadn’t even noticed before.
Damn,
he thought. “Where’s your husband stationed?” he asked.

“He’s in west Texas right now,” Susan answered. “He’s been lucky so far.” She reached out and knocked on the nightstand by his iron-framed cot. “But when I see what can happen to you guys…” She grimaced.

“I’m getting better,” said Armstrong, not the least self-centered young man around. But then he realized that might need something more with it. He did his best: “Most of us are getting better.”

He won a smile from the nurse. “I know,” she said. “But I still worry. How can I help it?”

“I guess you can’t, but it doesn’t do you any good,” Armstrong said. “It doesn’t do your husband any good, either. What’s his name, anyway?” He didn’t give a rat’s ass what the guy’s name was, but asking might make Susan like him better, and who could say where that would take him?

Her smile got bigger—she did appreciate the question. “He’s Jerry,” she said. “He’s so sweet…” Her face went all mushy. If she’d looked at Armstrong that way, he would have been in business. Since she was thinking about Jerry instead, he just lay there and smiled himself and nodded. He didn’t hope the guy would stop an antibarrel round with his face, but he didn’t exactly love him, either.

He watched Susan’s perky behind as she went to check on the wounded man in the next bed. He wasn’t the only recovering soldier watching her. The guys in this ward were wounded, yeah, but they were a long way from dead.

That afternoon, Susan bustled up to him with a different kind of smile on her face. She was pleased for him. “You’ve got visitors,” she announced, then turned and said, “You can come in now.”

In walked his father and mother. His mother gave him a big hug and a kiss. His father squeezed his hand hard and said, “I’m proud of you, son.”

“What? For getting shot?” Armstrong said. “I’m not proud of that. It was just bad luck.”

“No, not for getting shot.” Merle Grimes’ left hand stayed on the head of his cane. “For being brave enough to fight in the front line, and for doing it well.”

His old man had done his fighting a generation earlier, and he must have forgotten how things worked. You didn’t go to the front line because you were brave. You went there because some slob with stars on his shoulder straps decided your regiment could do a particular job—or maybe because you drew the short straw. And if you didn’t go forward when the other guys did, the Army made sure you caught hell. If you did go forward, you had a chance of coming through, anyway.

“You’re going to be all right,” his mother said. “The nurse told us so.”

“Yeah, Mom,” Armstrong said. “I probably won’t even have a limp.” They were talking about putting him back on duty once he healed up, so he figured the chances he’d be able to walk straight were pretty fair.