Drive to the East (2 page)

Three other destroyer escorts and a light cruiser made up the flotilla that would pay a call on Baja California. Sam could have wished they had some air support. Hell, he did wish it. He’d heard that a swarm of light carriers—converted from merchantman hulls—were abuilding. He hoped like anything that was true. True or not, though, the light carriers weren’t in action yet.

He smeared zinc-oxide ointment on his nose, his cheeks, and the backs of his hands. Freckled Pat Cooley didn’t laugh at all. Sam was very blond and very fair. Even this early impression of San Diego spring was plenty to make him burn. He offered Cooley the tinfoil tube.

“No, thank you, sir,” the exec said. “I’ve got my own.” He’d start to bake just about as fast as Carsten did.

The long swells of the Pacific, swells all the way down from the Gulf of Alaska, raised the destroyer escort and then lowered her. She rolled a few degrees in the process. Here and there, a sailor ran for the rail and gave back his breakfast. Sam smiled at that. His hide was weak, but he had a strong stomach.

He took the wheel when they were out on the open sea. Feeling the whole ship not just through the soles of his feet but also through his hands was quite something. He frowned in concentration, the tip of his tongue peeping out, as he kept station, zigzagging with his companions.

“You’re doing fine, sir,” Cooley said encouragingly. “Ask you something?”

“Go ahead.” Sam watched the compass as he changed course.

“Ease it back just a little—you don’t want to overcorrect,” Cooley said, and then, “How bad are things over in the Sandwich Islands?”

“Well, they sure as hell aren’t good.” Sam did ease it back. “With no carriers over there right now, we’re in a bad way.” He remembered swimming from the mortally damaged
Remembrance
to the destroyer that plucked him from the warm Pacific, remembered watching the airplane carrier on which he’d served so long slide beneath the waves, and remembered the tears streaming down his face when she did.

Cooley frowned. “We’ve got plenty of our own airplanes on the main islands. We should be able to make the Japs sorry if they come poking their noses down there, right?”

“As long as we can keep ’em in fuel and such, sure,” Carsten answered. “But the islands—Oahu, mostly—just sit there, and the Japs’ carriers can go wherever they want. There’s a gap about halfway between here and the islands that we can’t cover very well from the mainland or from Honolulu. If the Japs start smashing up our supply convoys, we’ve got big trouble, because the Sandwich Islands get damn near everything from the West Coast.”

“We ought to have airplanes with longer range,” the exec said.

“Yeah.” Sam couldn’t say the same thing hadn’t occurred to him. It had probably occurred to every Navy man who’d ever thought about the question. “Only trouble is, that’s the
one
place where we need ’em. The Confederate States are right next door, so the designers concentrated on guns and bomb load instead. Before the war, I don’t think anybody figured we’d lose Midway and give the Japs a base that far east.”

Cooley’s laugh was anything but amused. “Surprise!” He cocked his head to one side and studied Sam. “You think about this stuff, don’t you?”

Commander Cressy had said almost the same thing in almost the same bemused tone of voice. Like Cressy—who was now a captain—Cooley came out of the Naval Academy. Finding a mustang with a working brain seemed to have perplexed both of them. Cooley had to be more careful about how he showed it: Sam outranked him.

Shrugging, Sam said, “If you guess along, you’re less likely to get caught with your skivvies down. Oh, you will some of the time—it comes with the territory—but you’re less likely to. The more you know, the better off you are.”

“Uh-
huh,
” Cooley said. It wasn’t disagreement. It was more on the order of,
Well,
you’re
not what I thought you were going to be.

The first Mexican town below the border had a name that translated as Aunt Jane. In peacetime, it was a popular liberty port. The handful of Mexican police didn’t give a damn what American sailors did—this side of arson or gunplay, anyhow. If you couldn’t come back to your ship with a hangover and a dose of the clap, you weren’t half trying.

But it wasn’t peacetime now. The Mexicans hadn’t built a proper coast-defense battery to try to protect poor old Aunt Jane’s honor. What point, when overwhelming U.S. firepower from across the border could smash up almost any prepared position? The greasers
had
brought in a few three-inch pieces to tell the U.S. Navy to keep its distance. Some of them opened up on the flotilla.

Sam called the
Josephus Daniels
to general quarters. He laughed to himself as the klaxons hooted. This was the first time he hadn’t had to run like hell to take his battle station. Here he was on the bridge, right where he belonged.

The Mexicans’ fire fell at least half a mile short. Columns of water leaped into the air as shells splashed into the Pacific. Sailors seeing their first action exclaimed at how big those columns were. That made Sam want to laugh again. He’d seen the great gouts of water near misses from fourteen-inch shells kicked up. Next to those, these might have been mice pissing beside elephants.

“Let’s return fire, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said.

“Aye aye, sir.” The exec relayed the order to the gun turrets. Both four-inchers—nothing even slightly fancy themselves: not even secondary armament on a capital ship—swung toward the shore. They fired almost together. At the recoil, the
Josephus Daniels
heeled slightly to starboard. She recovered almost at once. The guns roared again and again.

Shells began bursting around the places where muzzle flashes revealed the Mexican guns. The other members of the flotilla were firing, too. The bigger cannons on the ships could reach the shore, even if the guns on shore couldn’t touch the ships. Through binoculars, Sam could easily tell the difference between bursts from the four-inch guns on the destroyer escorts and the light cruiser’s six-inchers.

Plucky if outranged, the Mexicans defiantly shot back. “I wouldn’t do that,” Cooley said. “It just tells us we haven’t knocked ’em out. Now more’ll come down on their heads.”

“They’re making a point, I suppose.” Sam peered through the binoculars again. “Our gunnery needs work. I’d say that’s true for every ship here. I can’t do anything about the others, but by God I can fix things on this one.”

“Uh, yes, sir.” Cooley looked at him, plainly wondering whether he knew any more about that than he did about conning a ship.

Sam grinned back. “Son, I was handling a five-inch gun on the
Dakota
about the time you were a gleam in your old man’s eye.”

“Oh.” The exec blushed between his freckles. “All right, sir.” He grinned, too. “Teach me to keep my mouth shut—and I hardly even opened it.”

One of the bursts on shore was conspicuously bigger than the others had been. “There we go!” Sam said. “Some of their ammo just went up. I don’t know whether they’ve got real dumps there or we hit a limber, but we nailed ’em pretty good either way.”

“Blew some gunners to hell and gone either way, too,” Cooley said.

“That’s the point of it,” Carsten agreed. “They won’t care if we rearrange the landscape. After they bury José and Pedro—if they can find enough of ’em left
to
bury—they’ll get the idea that we can hurt them worse than they can hurt us. It’s about people, Pat. It’s always about people.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Pat Cooley said again. This time, it wasn’t doubt in his eyes as he looked Sam over: it was bemusement again. Sam laughed inside himself.
No, the mustang isn’t quite what you figured on, eh, kid?

The light cruiser’s skipper didn’t choose to linger to continue the one-sided gun duel. The flotilla steamed south. Sam hoped the Mexicans didn’t have anything more up their sleeves than what they’d already shown.

F
or you, the war is over.
The Confederate officer who took Major Jonathan Moss prisoner after his fighter got shot down over Virginia had sounded like an actor mouthing a screenwriter’s lines in a bad film about the Great War. The only thing that had kept Moss from telling him so was that the son of a bitch was likely right.

Moss strolled near the barbed-wire perimeter of a prisoner-of-war camp outside the little town of Andersonville, Georgia. He didn’t get
too
close to the barbed wire. Inside it was a second perimeter, marked only by two-foot-high stakes with long, flimsy bands supported on top of them. The red dirt between the inner and outer perimeters was always rolled smooth so it would show footprints. The goons in the guard towers outside the barbed wire would open up with machine guns without warning if anybody presumed to set foot on that dead ground without permission.

Other officers—fliers and ground pounders both—also walked along the perimeter or through the camp. The only other thing to do was stay in the barracks, an even more depressing alternative. The Confederates had built them as cheaply and flimsily as the Geneva Convention allowed. No doubt U.S. accommodations for C.S. prisoners were every bit as shabby. Moss didn’t care about that; he wasn’t in a U.S. camp. What he did care about was that, when it rained here—which it did all too often—it rained almost as hard inside the barracks as it did outside.

Clouds were rolling in out of the northwest, which probably meant yet another storm was on the way. Moss looked down at his wrist to see what time it was. Then he muttered to himself. He’d been relieved of wristwatch and wallet shortly after his capture.

All things considered, it could have been worse. The food was lousy—grits and boiled greens and what the guards called fatback, a name that fit only too well—but there was enough of it. Meals were the high points of the day. Considering how dreary they were, that said nothing good about the rest of the time.

A captain came up to Moss. Nick Cantarella looked like what he was: a tough Italian kid out of New York City. “How ya doin’?” he asked.

Moss shrugged. “All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” He wasn’t above stealing a line from one of the more inspired film comics he’d seen.

Chuckling, Cantarella said, “Yeah, this place makes Philly look good, and that’s sayin’ somethin’.” He looked around. The guard in the closest tower was watching the two of them, but he couldn’t hear a quiet conversation. No prisoners were in earshot, either. “It could happen one of these days.”

“Could it?” Moss said eagerly.

“Could, I said.” Cantarella left it at that, and trudged away with his head down and the collar of his leather jacket turned up.

However much Moss wanted to learn more, he kept quiet. Trying to know too much and learn too fast only made people in the Andersonville camp suspicious. Not all the inmates were prisoners: so Moss had been assured, anyhow. The United States and Confederate States were branches off the same trunk. They’d grown apart, but not that far apart. It wasn’t impossible for a clever Confederate to impersonate a U.S. officer. No one here was trusted with anything important—indeed, with anything at all—till someone known to be reliable vouched for him. Till then, he was presumed to be talking to the guards.

That had made it harder for Moss to gain people’s confidence. His squadron was fairly new in Maryland, and not many people fighting in the East knew him. Finally, another pilot shot down over Virginia proved to have flown with him in Ohio and Indiana, and also proved to be known to a couple of pilots already in the Andersonville camp. Once they’d assured their friends that Joe was legit, Joe could do the same for Moss.

So now he knew there were plans to stage an escape from the camp. That was all he knew about them. Details would come sooner or later. He had no idea whether he’d be on the list of prisoners chosen to disappear. He did think the breakout had a chance. Following Geneva Convention rules, the Confederates paid prisoners who were commissioned officers the same salary as they gave to men of equal grade in their own service. Escapees would have money, then. They spoke the local language, even if their accent was odd. If they could get outside the barbed wire, get a little start . . .

For you, the war is over.
Moss could hope not, anyhow. He didn’t know what the hope was worth. In the meantime . . . In the meantime, the rain arrived about half an hour later. It drove Moss back into the barracks. The red dirt outside rapidly turned to a substance resembling nothing so much as tomato soup. Inside, rain dripped between the unpainted pine boards of the roof. Some of the leaks were over bunks. Makeshift cloth awnings channeled away the worst of them.

Moss’ mattress and pillow were cheap cotton sacking stuffed with sawdust and wood shavings. Eight wooden slats across the bed frame supported the bedding. The mattress was every bit as comfortable as Moss had thought it would be when he first set eyes on it. He might have had worse nights sleeping on the slats. Then again, he might not have.

A poker game was going on in one corner of the barracks. A poker game was always going on in one corner of the barracks. The prisoners had little on which to spend the brown banknotes—not bills, not down here—the Confederates gave them. They could buy cigarettes at what passed for the camp canteen. They could pay guards a little extra to bring them something besides grits, greens, and fatback. Past that . . . Past that, they could play poker and redistribute the wealth.

Every once in a while, Moss sat in, but only every once in a while. The gods might have designed poker as a way to separate him from his money. In a poker game, you were either a shark or you were bait. In the courtroom, he’d been a shark. In the air, he’d been a shark—till a Confederate took a bite out of his fighter. At the poker table, he was bait.

Other captured officers came in out of the rain. Some of them sat down on their bunks. Some of them lay down. Two or three went to sleep. Some men seemed to go into hibernation here, sleeping fourteen or sixteen or eighteen hours a day. Geneva Convention rules said officers didn’t have to work. The sleepy ones took not working to an extreme. Moss didn’t know whether to envy them or to give them a good swift kick in the ass to get their motors started.