The Grapple (72 page)

“I’d like to choose horse turds at five paces to show you what a fool you are,” Potter said.

“Do not make a mockery of this, General. I will not abide it,” Patton warned. “I have challenged; you have accepted. The weapons must be lethal.”

“I just said I’d like to. I didn’t say I would,” Potter answered. “Lethal, is it? All right, sir. I’ll give you lethal weapons, and see how you like it.” By the carnivorous smile on Patton’s face, he expected to like it very much. Then Potter said, “I choose flamethrowers at ten paces.”

General Patton’s jaw dropped. Some of the high color left his face. “You are joking,” he got out with some effort.

“Not me,” Potter said. “Isn’t that lethal enough to suit you? We’ll both be burnt meat in nothing flat. Well, sir? You wanted a duel. I goddamn well gave you one. Do you still want it?”

For a horrible moment, he thought Patton would say yes. His superior might be furious enough to immolate himself if he could take the man he hated with him. But Patton, though his lips drew back from his teeth in a furious grimace, shook his head. Nobody who’d ever seen what a flamethrower could do wanted one to do it to him. Back in gaslight days, a moth would sometimes fly into the flame of a lamp. That was about what jellied gasoline did to a man.

Then, to Potter’s amazement, George Patton started to laugh. “By God, General, you have more spunk than I gave you credit for!”

He
admires
me,
Potter thought, more bemused yet.
I made myself into a bigger jackass than he did, and he
admires
me for it.
Some of the Austro-Hungarian alienists who were probing the shape of man’s psyche would probably have had some interesting things to say about that. Wearily, Potter said, “The United States are the enemy, sir. You’re not, and I’m not, either. They’re the ones we’ve got to lick—and the ones we’ve got to keep from licking us.”

“Well said! Very well said!” In a final surreal touch, Patton bowed again. “Please accept my apologies for the slap and the insult. While I was provoked, I see now that I was hasty.”

“I’ll let it go.” But Potter had enough of the old code in him—and enough pride—to go on resenting what Patton had done. Aiming a flamethrower at him would have been a treat. It would, unfortunately, have been a last treat.

Patton, perhaps still unnerved, made what was for him an astonishing choice: he condescended to ask, “Since you seem unhappy with my plans for engaging the Yankees, General, what would you do instead?”

“Fight for time,” Potter answered at once, thinking again of Professor FitzBelmont and U-235. How far were he and his crew from building a bomb that could give the CSA a fighting chance again? And how far were their U.S. counterparts from building a bomb that would end all the Confederacy’s chances?

“You will perhaps understand a campaign needs more detailed goals and objectives than that.” Patton could have sounded snotty. In fact, he did; that was part of his nature. But he didn’t sound anywhere near as snotty as he might have, and Potter gave him reluctant credit for it.

“Yes, sir,” Potter said. “If you ask me, our goal is to keep the Yankees out of Atlanta. We can’t afford to lose it, partly because of all the factories and partly because it’s such an important rail junction. Transit between the East Coast and everything from Alabama on west goes to hell if Atlanta falls, and that goes a long way toward losing the war for us. Objectives would have to do with containing the U.S. advance as close to the Georgia-Tennessee border as we can.”

“And driving it back,” Patton said.

Potter shrugged. “If we can, at this stage of things. But mostly I want to make the U.S. forces come at us. I want to use the defender’s advantage for everything it’s worth. I want the United States to have casualty lists three, four, five times as long as ours. They’re bigger than we are, but they can’t afford that kind of thing forever. If they bleed enough, maybe they’ll get sick of banging their heads against a brick wall and give us a peace we can live with.”

And if we drop uranium bombs on them a year after that, it’d damn well serve them right,
he thought.
Would they hit us first? I don’t know. I didn’t used to think so. Now, though, we may have given them too many reasons not to let us have another chance.

“In your opinion, then, we cannot hope to win the war on the ground.” Patton spoke like a judge passing sentence.

Potter didn’t care. “Sir, they’re in Georgia. Doesn’t that speak for itself? They’re cleaning up the pockets of resistance west of their thrust through Kentucky and Tennessee, too, and we haven’t been able to keep them from doing that. Between Richmond and Philadelphia, we’ve stayed even with them in the air. Everywhere else? Here, for instance? You know the answer as well as I do. We haven’t matched their latest barrel yet, either.”

“We’re ahead of them in rockets,” Patton said.

“Yes, sir,” Potter said. “Those will hurt them. Those
have
hurt them. They’ll make us lose slower. Do you really think they can make us win?”
Maybe if we put a U-235 bomb in the nose of one. But how much does one of those damn things weigh? When will we have a rocket that can get it off the ground? In time for this war?
You’d have to be a wild-eyed optimist to believe anything like that.

“Yours is a counsel of despair,” Patton said.

“I don’t want to throw my brigade away charging their guns,” Potter said. “I want to make them throw their brigades away charging my guns. I don’t think that’s despair. Where we are now, I think it’s common sense.”

“When I give you orders, I expect you to obey them.”

“When I get orders, I expect them to be ones I’m better off obeying.”

They glared at each other. Neither had convinced the other—Potter knew that. Swearing under his breath, Patton stormed out of Potter’s tent. Potter wondered what he would do if Patton commanded him to go over the river line and attack the enemy.
I’ll refuse,
he decided.
Let him do what he wants after that. It’ll keep the brigade in being a while longer, anyhow.

The orders arrived two hours later. Potter’s men were to hold in place. Patton laid on a counterattack farther west. Potter sighed. Patton had grasped the letter, not the spirit. He didn’t know what he could do about that. Well, actually, he did know: he couldn’t do a damn thing.

Guns blazing, the counterattack went in. It drove U.S. forces back a couple of miles, then ran out of steam. Potter wished he’d expected anything different.

T
he
Josephus Daniels
rode the waves in the North Atlantic—rode them like a roller-coaster car going up and down ever taller, ever steeper bumps. George Enos took the motion in stride: literally, as he had no trouble making his way around the destroyer escort despite the roughening seas. Though not a big warship, the
Josephus Daniels
made a platform ever so much more stable than the fishing boats that bobbed on the ocean like little corks in a bathtub…and sometimes sank as if going down the drain.

He wasn’t worried the
Josephus Daniels
would sink—not on her own, anyhow. She might have help from British, French, or Confederate submersibles, though.

At least she was out of range of British land-based airplanes. George had gone through too many attacks from the air, both here and in the tropical Pacific, ever to want to help try to fight off another one.

“We’re still floating,” the sailors boasted. Most of them were kids. They’d helped rescue men whose ships had gone to the bottom, but they’d never been sunk themselves. They were cocky because of it. It hadn’t happened to them, so they were sure it couldn’t.

With the
Townsend
at the bottom of the Gulf of California, George knew better. The water there was shallow. Maybe one day somebody would salvage her for scrap metal. Unless someone did, she’d never see the surface again. Neither would the men who’d died aboard her or who hadn’t been able to get off before she went down.

Sam Carsten knew better, too. The captain sometimes talked about how he’d been on the
Remembrance
when the Japanese sank her. That made George wonder if he’d seen the skipper in the Sandwich Islands.

It seemed logical, but he didn’t think so. The memory, if it was a memory, felt older than his stint there. When he thought of the skipper, he thought of Boston, and not of Boston the way it was now, either: not the Boston he’d occasionally come back to since joining the Navy. When he thought of Sam Carsten, he thought of his home town a long time ago, back in the days when he was a kid.

Sunshine flashing off the gilded dome of the State House, seen from across Boston Common…

When that came back to him, his mouth fell open in amazement. He felt like a man who’d just scratched an itch he’d thought he would never be able to reach. “Son of a bitch!” he said softly. “
Son
of a bitch!”

Then he wanted to tell the skipper about it. That would have been next to impossible on a battlewagon or an airplane carrier. For an able seaman to get an audience with the captain of a ship like that was like getting an audience with God. It shouldn’t have been that hard on the
Josephus Daniels.
Sam Carsten was only a two-striper, and a mustang to boot. He should have had—he probably did have—a soft spot for the men from whose ranks he’d risen.

He wasn’t the problem. His exec was. Lieutenant Myron Zwilling seemed convinced God Himself needed to stand in line to see the skipper. As for a mere rating…Well, in Zwilling’s mind the question hardly arose.

But there were ways around the executive officer. The skipper was a gunnery fanatic. He lavished most of his attention on the two four-inch guns that gave the
Josephus Daniels
what little long-range bite she had, but he didn’t forget the 40mm mounts, either.

Picking a time when Carsten seemed a bit less rushed than usual, George said, “Ask you something, sir?”

“What’s on your mind, Enos?” The captain of a bigger ship wouldn’t have known all his men by name, but Sam Carsten did.

“You’ve been in Boston a good many times, I expect,” George said.

“That’s a fact—I told you so once. Anybody who’s been in the Navy as long as I have, he says he hasn’t been in Boston a lot, he’s a damn liar,” Carsten replied.

“Yes, sir. Do you remember one time when you were out on the Boston Common and you went under a tree to get out of the sun?” George said. “There was a family having a picnic under there—a woman, and a boy, and a girl. This would have been—oh, some time around the start of the Twenties. I was ten, eleven, maybe twelve. Does that ring any kind of bell, sir?”

Sam Carsten’s face went far away as he thought back. “No,” he said, but then, “Wait a minute. Maybe. Damned if it doesn’t. Somebody said something about the
Ericsson.
” Because of what had happened to the destroyer at the end of the Great War, any Navy man who heard about it was likely to remember.

And, when the skipper remembered that, it brought everything flooding back to George. “I did!” he said. “I told you my father was on her.”

“There was a girl along with you, yeah,” Carsten said slowly. “She was younger than you, I think.”

“My sister Mary Jane,” George said.

Carsten shook his head in slow wonder. “Well, if that doesn’t prove it’s a small world, I’ll be damned if I know what would. I wanted to get under that tree so I wouldn’t burn, and your mother was nice enough to let me share it.”

He was almost as fair as a ghost; George had seen him blotched with zinc-oxide ointment several times, and it wasn’t much paler than his skin. No, he wouldn’t have liked summer sun in Boston, not one bit. And…“My mother
was
a nice person,” George said.

“Nice-looking, too. I remember that,” the skipper said. Would he have tried to pick her up if he’d met her without her children? Had he tried anyhow, in some way that went over the kids’ heads? If so, he’d had no luck. He eyed George. “You say
was
? I’m sorry if she’s not living any more.”

“She’s not.” That brought memories back, too, ones George would sooner have left submerged. “She took up with the writer who did the book about how she went and shot the Confederate submersible skipper. Bastard drank. They would fight and make up, you know? Except the last time, they didn’t. He shot her and then he shot himself.”

“Jesus!” the skipper said. “I’m sorry. That must have been hell.”

“It was…pretty bad, sir,” George said. “If he wanted to blow his own brains out, fine, but why did he have to go and do that to her, too?”

Carsten set a hand on his shoulder. “You look for answers to stuff like that, you go crazy. He did it because he went around the bend. What else can you say? If he didn’t go around the bend, he wouldn’t have done anything like that.”

“I guess so.” That wasn’t much different from the conclusion George had reached himself. It made for cold comfort. No—it made for no comfort at all. What he wanted was revenge, and he couldn’t have it. Ernie robbed him of it when he turned the gun on himself.

“Sure as hell, you were right about one thing—I did look familiar.” Sam Carsten tried to steer him away from his gloom. “I wouldn’t have known you in a million years, but you were just a kid then. Damned if I don’t recall that day on the Common, though. How about that?” He walked down the deck shaking his head.

“So you weren’t just blowing stack gas when you said you ran into the Old Man once upon a time,” Petty Officer Third Class Jorgenson said. He still had charge of the 40mm mount. “How about that?”

“Yeah, how about that?” George agreed. “I thought so, but I couldn’t pin it down till now.”

The crew for the gun spent as much time working together as they could. Because of casualties, just about everyone was in a new slot. Till they figured out how to do what they had little practice doing, they would be less efficient than the other gun crews. That could endanger the ship.

Because the skipper was a fiend for good gunnery, he encouraged them and kept their usual bosses from loading extra duty on them. Carsten wanted them to spend as much time at the gun as they could. They steadily got better. Fremont Dalby would have had some pungent things to say about their performance. Jorgenson
did
have pungent things to say about it. But they improved.