The Grapple (66 page)

Moss let out a mournful sigh. If things had worked out the way he wanted, he would be back on the U.S. side of the line now. He might be flying a fighter again. How much had they improved while he sat on the shelf here? He didn’t—couldn’t—know. But he was still fighting the enemy, which he hadn’t been while stuck in Andersonville. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.

“W
ay to go, Pat!” Sam Carsten held out his hand. “I knew you’d do it. Now get out there and give ’em hell.”

“Thank you, sir.” The exec shook the proffered hand.

“You don’t call me
sir
any more. I call you
sir
now…sir,” Sam said. Cooley was getting his own ship, and getting promoted away from the
Josephus Daniels.
He hadn’t yet put on his oak leaves or sewn the thin gold stripe that transformed him from lieutenant to lieutenant commander onto each sleeve, but he had the rank even without its trappings.

Rank or no rank, he shook his head. “Doesn’t seem right. It
isn’t
right, dammit. You’ve taught me so much….”

“My ass,” Carsten said like the old CPO he was. “You knew more than I did when I got here. Now you know a lot more than I do, and the Navy Department’s finally figured it out. We both knew this day was coming. You’re headed for the top, and I’m doing the best job I know how, and that’s the way it ought to be.”

“You ought to have a carrier, not a destroyer escort,” Cooley blurted.

“What the hell would I do with a carrier? Run it on the rocks, that’s what.” Sam had to belittle that; he didn’t want to—he didn’t dare—admit how much he wanted it. He thought he knew what to do. He’d spent enough time aboard the
Remembrance,
first as a rating and then as an officer. But even the baby flattops they were cranking out now had three-stripers in command, and he knew he’d be lucky if he ever made two and a half. He was damn lucky to have made a lieutenant’s two.

“You could swing it,” Pat Cooley said. “You can handle men. You know guns. You know damage control. For everything else”—he winked—“you could lean on your exec till you got the hang of it.”

Sam laughed. “You remember to lean on yours,” he said. “You’re the Old Man now. You’re the good guy, the mild guy. Let him be the professional son of a bitch. That’s his job. It’s not yours any more.”

“I won’t forget.” Cooley slung his duffel over his shoulder.

As he walked off the deck and onto the gangplank that led to the Boston Navy Yard, the crew called out good luck and good wishes to him. Cooley waved and grinned. He hadn’t been an out-and-out Tartar, the way a lot of execs were. The sailors might not love him, but they did respect him.

“Wonder who we’ll get now,” one grizzled petty officer said to another.

“Some hotshot who shaves once a week,” the other CPO predicted. “Well, we’ll break him in, by God.”

“Yeah, we’ll—” The first chief noticed Sam listening and shut up with a snap.

“I know what you guys will do,” Sam said, holding in a smile. “Remember, I’ve done it myself. If you don’t ride the guy
too
hard, everything’ll be jake.”

“Sometimes we forget you’re a mustang, sir,” the first chief said sheepishly. “You just act like an officer, you know?”

Was that a compliment or an insult? Sam didn’t try to parse it. With a snort, he said, “Yeah, like the oldest goddamn lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. If I’m not a mustang, I’m a screwup. Better for the ship if I came up the hawser.”

Those were the magic words. If something was good for the ship, nobody would say a word about it. The two chiefs didn’t hang around, though. They went off someplace where they could slander the outgoing and incoming execs—and probably the skipper, too—without getting overheard.

As for Sam, he walked back to his cramped cabin and wrestled with the ship’s accounts. After a spell in combat, you could always write some things off as lost in action, which simplified your life. He thought about keeping accounts for an airplane carrier. That almost made him decide not to touch the job with an eleven-foot bohunk, which was what you used when a ten-foot Pole wouldn’t reach. But if he ever got the chance, he knew he would leap at it.

He laughed, but he was angry, too. Pat Cooley had given him a new itch, even if it was one he didn’t think he’d ever be able to scratch.

More shells and small-arms ammunition came aboard. So did all kinds of galley supplies. The ship got refueled, too, and he had to sign off on everything. One of these days, if the
Josephus Daniels
didn’t get sunk under him, he’d have to turn her over to somebody else, and he wanted the books to balance, or at least get within shouting distance of balancing, when he did.

The new exec came aboard the next day. Lieutenant Myron Zwilling couldn’t have been more different from Pat Cooley had he tried for a week. He was short and squat and dark. He was also fussily precise; if he had a sense of humor, he kept it so well hidden, even he didn’t know where it was. He stared at Sam’s right hand.

A glance at Zwilling’s hand told the skipper what he was looking for: an Annapolis ring. Zwilling’s was lovingly displayed, and couldn’t have been polished any brighter. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, trying to hold in his disappointment at not finding Sam a Naval Academy graduate. When he saluted, the ring flashed in the sun.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Zwilling,” Sam said, reflecting that the new exec was either an optimist or a jerk, one. How could a two-striper in his mid-fifties possibly be anything but a mustang? “We’ll give ’em hell, won’t we?”

“I hope to aid in making this ship an efficient fighting unit, sir,” Zwilling said, and Sam’s heart sank. He had nothing against efficiency. But he didn’t want to sing hymns to it, and Zwilling plainly did.

“Have you ever served on a D.E. before?” Sam asked.

“No, sir,” Zwilling replied. “My last tour of duty was aboard a fleet oiler, and before that I was a junior officer on the
Idaho.
I have my personnel records with me for your review.”

Of course you do,
Sam thought. That wasn’t fair, but he couldn’t help it. Trying not to show what he was feeling, he said, “Well, let’s give you the quick tour, then. There’ll be places where you want to watch your head—not a lot of room in one of these babies.”

“I’ll be careful, sir,” Zwilling said, and Sam believed him. He was unimpressed with the pair of 4.5-inch guns that made up the
Josephus Daniels’
main armarment. “The secondary weapons on a battleship are bigger than these,” he sniffed.

“Tell me about it. I fought a five-incher on the
Dakota,
” Carsten said.

“As battery chief?” Zwilling asked with his first show of interest in his new skipper as a human being.

“Nope.” Sam shook his head. “I was a loader when the Great War started, and ended up running a gun.”

“A loader. I see.” Zwilling looked as uncomfortable as if Sam had admitted to eating with his fingers when he was a kid. There wouldn’t be any talk about professors or courses, not on this ship there wouldn’t.

Sam took him through the destroyer escort: galley, bunkrooms, engines, and all. Finally, he said, “What do you think?”

“Everything seems orderly enough,” the new exec allowed. “Still, I’m sure there’s room for improvement.”

“There always is,” Sam said, not liking the way the commonplace sounded in Zwilling’s mouth. “Do you think you can find your way back to your cabin from here?”

“I do.” Zwilling didn’t lack for confidence, anyhow.

“Well, ask a sailor if you get lost.” Sam inserted the needle with a smile. “I’ll let you get settled, and we’ll talk some more in the wardroom tonight.”

“Yes, sir.” Zwilling saluted again and strode off.

After Sam went up on deck, he watched a sailor standing on the pier kissing a redheaded woman good-bye. A couple of sniffling little boys in dungarees stood by her, so she was probably the sailor’s wife. After a last embrace, he slung his duffel bag and asked the officer of the deck for permission to come aboard.

“Welcome to the
Josephus Daniels,
” Sam said. “Who are you, and what do you do?”

“I’m George Enos, Junior, sir,” the sailor answered. “I jerked shells on a 40mm on the
Townsend.
Goddamn Confederate Asskicker sank her in the Gulf of California.”

“Well, we can use you.” Carsten paused. Enos? The name rang a bell. He snapped his fingers. “Wasn’t your mother the one who…?”

“She sure was,” Enos said proudly. “My father was a fisherman before he went into the Navy, and so was I.”

“Good to have you aboard,” Sam said. “Good to meet you, too, by God.”

“Thank you, sir.” The sailor cocked his head to one side. “Have we ever met before? You look kind of familiar.”

With his very blond hair and pink skin, Sam sometimes got mistaken for other fair men. He shook his head. “Not that I know of, anyway. You live around here?” After Enos nodded, Sam went on, “I’ve been through more times than I can count, so you may have seen me somewhere, but I’ve got to tell you I don’t remember.”

“Maybe it’ll come to me.” Enos grinned like a kid. “Or maybe I’m talking through my hat. Who knows? Will I go on a 40mm here, sir?”

“Have to see how everything shakes down, but I’d say your chances are pretty darn good,” Sam answered. “Go below for now and sling your duffel somewhere. The chiefs will take charge of you.”

“Aye aye, sir.” With a crisp salute, George Enos headed for a hatch.

He could have been a kid when we bumped into each other,
Sam realized.
But if he was, why would he remember me?
He shrugged. He had no way of knowing. Maybe it would come back to Enos. And maybe it wouldn’t. The world wouldn’t end either way.

Orders came the next day: join up with a task force heading east across the Atlantic to raid Ireland.
This is where I came in,
Carsten thought. He’d run guns to the micks during the Great War, and shelled—and been shelled by—British positions in Ireland afterwards. The difference this time around was an abundance of British land-based air. He wondered how much the Navy Department brass down in Philly had thought about that.

When he showed Myron Zwilling the orders, the new exec just nodded and said, “That’s what we’ll do, then.”

“Well, yeah,” Sam said. “I’d like to have some kind of hope of coming back afterwards, though.”

“If they need to expend us, sir—” Zwilling began.

“Hold your horses.” Sam held up a hand. “If they need to expend us on something important, then sure. We needed to take Bermuda back if we could—I guess we did, anyhow. I’ve pulled some raids on the Confederates that I think really hurt those bastards. But this? This looks chickenshit to me.”

“You don’t know the big picture, sir,” Zwilling said.

He was right. Sam didn’t. “What I do know, I don’t like.”

“You can’t refuse the mission,” the exec said.

He was right again. That would mean a court-martial, probably, or else just an ignominious retirement. “I’m not refusing it,” Carsten said hastily. “I’m worrying about it. That’s a different kettle of fish.”

“Yes, sir.” The way Zwilling said it, it meant,
No, sir.

You’re not helping,
Sam thought. An exec was supposed to be a sounding board, someone with whom he could speak his mind. He wasn’t going to get that from Myron Zwilling. He didn’t need to be an Annapolis grad to see as much.

“We’ll give it our best shot, that’s all.” Sam thought about George Enos, Jr. “And we’ll make damn sure all the antiaircraft guns and ashcan launchers are fully manned.”

“Of course, sir,” Myron Zwilling said.

XVII

G
eorgia. Chester Martin looked south and east. He was really and truly in Georgia, if only in the northwesternmost corner of the state. When he looked across it, though, he knew what he saw on the other side.

The end of the war.

Damned if I don’t,
he thought. If the U.S. Army could grind across Georgia, it would cut the Confederate States in half. It would take Atlanta, or else make the city worthless to the CSA. How could the enemy go on fighting after that? Oh, both halves of a worm wiggled for a while if you sliced it in two…but not for long.

And the Confederates had to know that as well as he did. Their artillery stayed busy all the time. They staged night raids with everything from big bombers down to little puddle-jumping biplanes that flew along at treetop height and peeked right into your foxhole.

No matter what they did at night, the USA ruled the daytime skies. Two-engine and four-engine bombers pounded Confederate positions. So did U.S. fighter-bombers. After they dropped their bombs, they climbed to go after the outnumbered C.S. Hound Dogs that still rose to challenge the U.S. air armada. And fewer Hound Dogs rose each week than had the week before. Little by little, the Confederate States were getting ground down.

U.S. artillery on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge sent volleys as far into Confederate territory as they would reach, announcing that the high ground had a new owner. Some of the guns up there had belonged to the Confederacy. Unlike small arms, their artillery shared several calibers with its U.S. equivalents. They must have thought they would capture U.S. guns, not the reverse. But those streams of paratroopers floating down from the sky caught them by surprise.

Captain Rhodes came forward and cautiously looked at the fields and pine woods ahead. He didn’t use field glasses—they were a dead giveaway that an officer was up there snooping, and an invitation to a sniper to draw a bead on him. He looked from one end of a trench, walked fifty feet with his head down, then popped up for another peek.

Some of the fields out there were minefields. The Confederates had marked some of them with signs that said
MINES
!
or warned people away with skulls and crossbones. Some of the signs were genuine. Others, by what Chester had seen before, were bluffs. And real minefields sometimes went unmarked, too. Advancing U.S. soldiers and barrels would find them the hard way—and probably come under machine-gun fire once slowed down in them.

“We can take those bastards,” Rhodes said.

Chester Martin nodded. “Yes, sir. I think we can, too. Won’t be too easy, won’t be too cheap, but we can do it.”

The company commander turned and looked west. “We ought to be cleaning out the rest of Tennessee, too, so we don’t have such a narrow front here. We can sure as hell do that. Even now, the Confederates have a devil of a time getting men and matériel from east to west.”

“Yes, sir,” Chester said again. “That’s how Nashville fell—almost an afterthought, you might say.”

“Sure.” Rhodes grinned. “Goddamn big afterthought, wasn’t it? But you’re right, Sergeant. Once we pushed past to the east, once we got over the Cumberland, Nashville stopped mattering so much. The Confederates had bigger worries closer to home. So they pulled out and let us march in, and they tried to hold Chattanooga instead.”

Chester looked back over his shoulder toward the city Captain Rhodes had named. “And they couldn’t do that, either,” he said happily.

“Nope.” Rhodes sounded pretty happy, too. “They’re like a crab—they’ve got claws that pinch, and a hard shell to go with it. But once you crack ’em, there’s nothing but meat inside.”

“Sounds good to me—except the meat in our rations is better than the horrible tinned beef they use,” Martin said. “Even they call it Dead Donkey. But their smokes are still good.” He took a pack of Dukes out of his pocket and offered it to Rhodes. “Want some?”

“Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.” The company CO took one, lit it, and started to hand the pack back.

“Keep it,” Chester said. “I’ve got plenty. Lots of dead Confederates these days, and lots of POWs who don’t need cigarettes any more.”

“Thanks,” Rhodes repeated, and stuck the pack in his shirt pocket. He took a drag, blew it out, and then shook his head. “Hate to pay you back for your kindness this way, Chester, but I don’t know what I can do about it.”

“What’s going on?” Chester grew alert. It wasn’t the same sort of alertness he used around the enemy, but your own side could screw you, too.

“Well, I hear repple-depple’s coughed up a shiny new second looey for us, so I’m afraid you’re going to lose your platoon,” Rhodes said.

“Oh.” Martin weighed that. It stung, but not too much. “I’ll live. When they made me a first sergeant after I reupped, I figured they’d have me breaking in shavetails. I’ve had some practice by now. I think I’m halfway decent at it.”

“Fine.” Rhodes set a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got a good attitude. I’m glad you’re not getting pissy about it.”

“Life is too short.” On the battlefield, Chester had seen how literally true that was.

Second Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin turned out not to be what he expected. Oh, he was young. The only second lieutenants who weren’t young were men up from the ranks, and they didn’t need a graying first sergeant to ramrod them. Lavochkin was squat and fair and tough-looking, with the meanest, palest eyes Chester Martin had ever seen.

“You’re going to show me the ropes, are you?” the youngster asked.

“That’s the idea, sir.” Martin sounded more cautious than he’d thought he would.

“And you’ve done what to earn the right?” Lieutenant Lavochkin seemed serious.

“I lived through the Great War. I ran a company for a while. I’ve seen a good bit of action this time around, too…sir.”

Those icy eyes measured Chester like calipers. “Maybe.” Lavochkin took off his helmet to scratch his head. When he did, he showed Chester a long, straight scar above his left ear.

“You got hit, sir?” Chester said. That had to be why Lavochkin was coming out of the replacement depot.

He shrugged broad shoulders. “Only a crease. You’ve been wounded, too?”

“Once in the arm, once in the leg. You were lucky, getting away with that one.”

“If I was lucky, the shithead would have missed me.” Lavochkin peered south. “Give me the situation in front of us. I want to lead a raid, let the men see I’ll go where they go. They need to know I’m in charge now.”

A lot of shavetails wouldn’t have been, even with the rank to give orders. Lavochkin…Lavochkin was a leader, a fighter, a dangerous man. He’d go places—unless he stopped a bullet. But they all took that chance.

“Sir, maybe you’d better check with Captain Rhodes before we go raiding,” Chester said.

Lavochkin scowled. That made him look like an even rougher customer than he had before. In the end, though, he nodded. “I’ll do that,” he said.

Rhodes came up to Chester a couple of hours later, a small, bemused smile on his face. He glanced around to make sure the new lieutenant wasn’t anywhere close by before remarking, “Looks like we’ve got a tiger by the tail.”

“Yes, sir. I thought so, too,” Martin said. “You going to turn him loose?”

“I sure am,” the company commander answered. “He needs to find out what he can do, and so do we. And if things go wrong, well, you’ve got your platoon again, that’s all.”

“If I come back,” Chester said. “I’m not gonna let him take my guys out by himself. I’m going, too.”

Lieutenant Lavochkin didn’t like that. “I don’t need you to hold my hand, Sergeant.”

“I’m not doing it to hold your hand, sir,” Chester said evenly. “I’m doing it for my men.”

“In case I don’t cut it?”

“Yes, sir.” Martin didn’t beat around the bush.

Lavochkin gave him one of those singularly malignant stares. Chester just looked back. The young officer tossed his head. “Well, come on, then. We’ll see who learns something.”

The raid went in a little before midnight. Lavochkin knew enough to smear mud on his face to darken it. He carried a captured Confederate submachine gun along with the usual officer’s .45. He also had a Great War trench knife on his belt. Was he showing off, or had he been in some really nasty places before he got hurt?
We’ll find out,
Chester thought.

Lavochkin moved quietly. The Confederate machine-gun nest ahead sat on a small rise, but brush screened one approach most of the way up. Chester would have gone at it from that direction, too. Lavochkin slid forward as if he could see in the dark.

Suddenly, he stopped moving. “They’ve got wire, the bastards,” he said. He didn’t ask for a wire-cutter—he had one. A couple of soft twangs followed. “This way—stay low.” Chester flattened out like a toad under the wheels of a deuce-and-a-half. He got through.

Before long, he could hear the Confederates at the machine gun talking. He could smell their tobacco smoke, and see the glow of a cigarette coal. They had no idea U.S. soldiers were in the neighborhood.

“Everybody ready?” Lavochkin whispered. No one denied it. Chester was close enough to the lieutenant to see him nod. “All right, then,” he said. “At my signal, we take ’em. Remember, we want prisoners, but shoot first if you’re in trouble. Runnels, scoot over to the left like we planned.”

“Yes, sir,” the soldier said softly. He was little and skinny; Lavochkin had picked the right guy for quiet scooting.
He’s a prick, but I think he knows what he’s doing,
Chester thought.

Lavochkin’s signal was nothing if not dramatic. He pulled the pin from a grenade and tossed it about halfway between Runnels and the Confederate position. As soon as it burst, Runnels, who carried a captured automatic rifle, fired several quick rounds.

Naturally, the Confederates in the machine-gun nest started shooting at the noise and muzzle flashes. Chester saw the flame spurting from their weapons. He hoped Runnels was all right. He hoped he would be all right himself, too, because he was up and running for the enemy entrenchment as fast as he could go.

Runnels squeezed off another burst to keep Featherston’s men thinking about him and nobody else. He yelled like a wild man, too. The deception worked just the way Lieutenant Lavochkin hoped it would. The Confederates didn’t notice the footfalls of the onrushing U.S. soldiers till the men in green-gray were right on top of them. Martin heard a startled, “What the fuck?” as one of the machine gunners tried to swing his piece around.

Too late. Lavochkin cut him down with three accurate rounds from his submachine gun. Then he leaped down into the entrenchment. The rest of the U.S. soldiers followed. Chester hadn’t used a bayonet for anything but opening cans and holding a candle since trench raids a generation earlier. He discovered he still knew how. He stuck a machine gunner who was grabbing for a submachine gun of his own. The sharpened steel grated on a rib, then went deep. The Confederate let out a gurgling shriek as he crumpled.

Seeing one of their buddies spitted like a pig made the rest of the Confederates quit trying to fight and surrender. “Let’s get ’em out of here,” Lavochkin said. “Get the guns off the tripods and take them, too.”

“Let’s get
us
out of here,” Chester said. “We woke up the rest of the butternut bustards.”

Sure as hell, shouts and running feet said the Confederates were rallying. Runnels alertly fired at them. That made them hit the dirt. They didn’t know if he was there by himself or had buddies close by. The raiders scrambled out of the nest with captives and booty and hurried back toward the U.S. line. A few wild shots sped them on their way, but they made it with nothing worse than a sprained ankle and a fat lip from one of the Confederates before three men jumped on him.

Intelligence officers took the prisoners away for grilling. In the trench from which they’d started out, Lavochkin eyed Chester Martin. “Well, Sergeant?” he said. “Do I pass?”

“So far, so good, sir,” Chester answered. “The other half of the test is, not doing that kind of shit real often. You know what I mean?” Lavochkin scowled at him, but slowly nodded.

G
eorge Enos thought the
Josephus Daniels
was a step down from the
Townsend
as a ship. She was smaller and older and slower and more crowded. But she seemed a tight ship, and a happy one, too. From what he’d seen and heard, those two went together almost as often as the cliché claimed.

He’d slept in a hammock on the
Townsend.
Having to sling one on the
Josephus Daniels
was no surprise, and no great disappointment. He started to make himself at home, learning, for instance, that her sailors hardly ever called her by her last name alone. He also found out that Josephus Daniels had been Secretary of the Navy during the Great War. After all the time he’d spent on the
Townsend,
he still didn’t know who Townsend was. With the ship at the bottom of the Gulf of California, he wasn’t likely to find out now.

Everyone liked the skipper. Sam Carsten’s craggy face and pale, pale hair kept trying to ring a bell in George’s mind. He’d seen Carsten somewhere before, and not in the Navy. He kept picturing an oak tree….

Nobody had a good word to say about the exec. That was also normal to the point of boredom. But people did speak well of the just-departed Pat Cooley. “This Zwilling item ain’t fit to carry Cooley’s jock,” said Petty Officer Second Class Clem Thurman, who was in charge of the 40mm gun near the bow whose crew George joined.

“No?” George said. Somebody was plainly meant to.

“Fuck, no.” Thurman spat a stream of tobacco juice into the Atlantic. “Cooley was the kind of guy who’d find out what you needed and pull strings to get it for you. This new one, he looks in the book for reasons to tell you no.” He spat again.

“That’s no good,” George said.

“Tell me about it,” Thurman said. “You ask me, this mission we’re on is no damn good, either. Ireland? I got nothin’ against micks—don’t get me wrong. We give them guns so they can yank on Churchill’s nuts, that’s great. We get our ass shot off tryin’ to give ’em guns—that’s a whole different story, Charlie.”