Drive to the East (32 page)

She was taking a drag, and choked on it. She went alarmingly red. Dowling had to pound her on the back. When she could talk again, she wheezed, “God damn you, General—you caught me by surprise.”

“Sorry, Miss Clemens.” Dowling more or less meant it.

“A likely story,” she said, sounding more like her herself. “You’re just trying to get rid of me so you don’t have to answer questions about how things got screwed up this time.”

“I thought you already had all the answers,” he teased.

She shook her head. “Not yet. But I aim to get ’em.” With determined stride, she advanced on Daniel MacArthur.

T
he
Townsend
slid over the improbably blue waters of the tropical Pacific as smoothly as if Japanese airplanes had never bombed her. As George Enos, Jr., swabbed her deck, he looked over the side every now and again to see if he could spot the feathery wake of a periscope.

When he did it once too often to suit a petty officer, that worthy barked, “Enos, you’re goldbricking. You think your eyeballs are gonna spot something our hydrophones miss?”

“Probably not.” George knew better than to make a challenge too blatant. “But you never can tell, can you?”

“I can tell when you’re goofing off,” the petty officer said. After the one growl, though, he went off to harass somebody else. George’s answer held enough truth to let him wiggle off the hook.

He swabbed conscientiously for a while, in case the petty officer came sneaking back and caught him doing too close to nothing. He wasn’t terrified of the man, the way some ordinary seamen were. For one thing, he was in his thirties himself; the other man didn’t put him in mind of an angry father. For another, he’d been yelled at by experts on the
Sweet Sue.
What was one more fellow with a big voice? Getting along was easier, but one more bawling-out wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Fighters buzzed overhead. These days, American ships didn’t sail out of range of land-based aircraft from the Sandwich Islands. Somebody in Honolulu, or perhaps somebody back in Philadelphia, had finally had a rush of brains to the head. George wished that would have happened sooner. The
Townsend
would have been better off for it.

Or maybe it wasn’t such a rush of brains. About fifteen minutes later, the destroyer’s klaxons hooted for general quarters. George threw the mop into the bucket and ran for his antiaircraft gun. He didn’t know whether the skipper had spotted an enemy submarine or aircraft or just had a case of the galloping jimjams. That wasn’t his worry. Being ready to do his little bit to keep the ship safe was.

He got to the twin-40mm mount just ahead of Fremont Dalby. If you were ahead of your gun chief, you were doing all right. “You know what’s going on?” Dalby panted.

“Nope. All I know is, I run like hell when I hear the siren,” George answered.

Dalby chuckled. “Long as you do know that, what you don’t know doesn’t matter anywhere near as much.”

The rest of the sailors who served the gun took their places within another minute or so. The
Townsend
’s intercom crackled to life: “Now hear this. We have detected aircraft approaching from the northwest. Y-ranging gear says we have about fifteen minutes. Assistance from more land-based airplanes is promised. That is all.” A pause. “Do your duty and all will be well.”

George laughed a sour laugh. “ ‘All will be well.’ Yeah—unless we get blown to kingdom come, anyway.”

“I’d like to see those Army assholes get more fighters out here in fifteen minutes, too,” Dalby added. “Matter of fact, I
would
like to see it, but I’m not gonna bet the damn farm.”

Two other destroyers cruised with the
Townsend,
a reconnaissance in force north of Kauai. The American powers that be wanted to tell the Japs the Sandwich Islands weren’t going to be their ham and cheese on rye. That was what the American authorities wanted to say, yeah, but they were liable to be offering the patrol up as an hors d’oeuvre.

Fritz Gustafson kept things short and to the point: “Give me lots of ammo. Can’t do much without it.” There was a loader’s notion of practicality.

As usual, the time between the call to general quarters and the appearance of enemy fighters seemed an eternity and an eyeblink at the same time. One of the 40mm mounts on another destroyer opened up. Tracers tiger-striped the sky. Shells burst here, there, everywhere. The only trouble was, George couldn’t spot any airplanes but the U.S. fighters.

“Spring fever,” Dalby said scornfully.

“Better too soon than too late,” Gustafson said. That was thoroughly practical, too.

And then everybody spotted the Japs. The American fighters zoomed toward them. All three destroyers put up a curtain of anti-aircraft fire. Japanese fighters rushed ahead to hold the enemy away from the torpedo-carriers and dive bombers they shepherded. Almost at the same time, two fighters plunged into the Pacific. One carried the Rising Sun, the other the eagle in front of crossed swords.

George pointed. “Torpedo bomber, coming at us!”

He didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so ugly in all his life. In fact, the airplane carrying the torpedo under its belly—offset slightly to the left—was smoothly streamlined. The torpedo itself was a straight tube with a bluntly curved nose and with fins at the stern: a splendid piece of industrial design. But it was designed to sink his ship and to kill him. If that didn’t make it ugly in his sight, nothing could.

Streams of tracers converged on the Japanese aircraft. George wasn’t the only one who’d spotted it. The pilot had to fly straight and low to launch his fish. That left him a perfect, and perfectly vulnerable, target while he did it. He was a brave man; he did what he’d been trained to do. His airplane exploded into fire. But the torpedo was in the water by then.

“HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththee—” George prayed in a rapid gabble. The prayer he chose took him by surprise. He’d turned Catholic because Connie made it plain she wasn’t about to marry him if he didn’t. He hadn’t thought he took it seriously, not till now. Somebody’d said there were no atheists in foxholes. The deck of a ship under torpedo attack evidently counted.

The
Townsend
was a greyhound of the sea, capable of well over thirty knots. Why, then, did she feel as if she were nailed in place? The heeling, surging turn she made might have been filmed in slow motion. It might have been, but it wasn’t. It took her out of harm’s way, for the torpedo raced past her stern.

“Thank you, Jesus.” Fritz Gustafson used words as if he had to pay for them. He packed a lot of meaning into those three.

Meatballs on its wings and fuselage, a Jap fighter shot up the destroyer. Bullets clanged and snarled and whined in wild ricochets. Wounded men screeched. Every antiaircraft gun on the ship tried to knock the pilot into the Pacific. He darted away just above the wavetops, untouched or at least still flying.

Fremont Dalby gave credit where it was due: “He’s a motherfucking son of a bitch, but he’s a motherfucking son of a bitch with balls. I hope he gets home.”

“I don’t.” George was not inclined to be chivalrous.

Then, suddenly, the sky was full of airplanes—airplanes blazoned with the American eagle and swords. They threw themselves at the Japs. The Army was on the ball after all. Ignoring the enemy fighters where they could, the fighters bored in on the torpedo-carriers and dive bombers—those were the ones that could sink ships. The Americans outnumbered the Japanese aircraft. Before long, the Japanese decided they’d had enough and flew off in the direction from which they’d come.

No dive bombers had attacked the
Townsend.
George was pretty sure of it. Even near misses kicked up great columns of water and threw splinters of bomb casing every which way. He couldn’t have ignored anything like that in his singleminded ammunition-passing . . . could he?

One of the other destroyers hadn’t been so lucky. Black, greasy smoke poured from her. A bomb had burst near her bow. She wasn’t dead in the water, but she couldn’t do much more than crawl. Even as he watched, her starboard list got worse.

Sailors bobbed in the water not far from her. The bomb blast had blown them off her deck. Some—corpses—floated face down. Others struggled to stay above the surface. Still others, in life jackets, didn’t have that worry.

As the
Townsend
swung toward her stricken comrade, the exec’s voice blared from the intercom: “All hands! Lower lines and nets and life rings for rescue!”

Sailors rushed to obey. The other destroyer slumped lower in the water. They weren’t going to be able to save her. Men started coming up on her deck from below. Some of them helped wounded buddies. They were going to abandon ship.

“That could be us,” George said.

He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud till Dalby nodded. “That damn near was us last year,” the gun chief said. “We pick up these sorry bastards and then figure out what to do next.”

Pausing to take on survivors carried risks of its own. If a Japanese submersible prowled these waters, the
Townsend
would be a sitting duck for it. George thought of his father. But the senior George Enos thought the war was over when his destroyer went down. George, Jr., knew better. Again, he kept an eye peeled for periscopes. This time, no one reproved him. He was a long way from the only sailor doing the same thing.

“Pull hard, you lazy fuckers! Put your backs into it! Haul that line!” a petty officer screamed. By his orders, he might have been serving aboard a nineteenth-century ship of the line. But the destroyer’s men weren’t swinging from one tack to the other; they were bringing a sailor up on deck.

He clung to the rope for dear life. His feet thudded against the side of the ship. “God bless you!” he gasped when he came aboard. He got down on hands and knees and puked his guts out. Nobody could possibly have blamed him for that; he was covered from head to foot in heavy fuel oil, so that he looked as if he’d just escaped from a minstrel show. But if you swallowed much of that stuff, it would kill you as surely as a bullet would. Heaving up your guts was one of the best things you could do.

“Ain’t this a fuckup?” one of the rescued men said as he stood there dripping. “Ain’t this just a grand fuckup? We wanted to see if there was Japs there. We found out, all right. Didn’t we just?”

Didn’t we just?
The mournful words echoed inside George’s head. He turned to Fremont Dalby and said, “I wonder if we’ll be able to hang on to the Sandwich Islands.”

“We wouldn’t have any trouble if the Japs were the only thing on our plate,” Dalby said. “We could lick ’em easy enough. But this is the ass end of the goddamn war. Whatever they can spare from fighting the CSA and the big mess in the Atlantic and holding Canada down—whatever they can spare, we get that.”

“It’s not enough,” George said.

Dalby shrugged. “They haven’t thrown us out yet. They’re not fighting anybody else, either. But the Sandwich Islands are even harder for them to get at than they are for us.”

“I guess so.” George knew he sounded dubious. He felt dubious. He’d seen too much to feel any other way. And if he hadn’t, one look at the draggled survivors from the other destroyer would have been plenty to show him.

H
ipolito Rodriguez packed his worldly goods into a duffel bag. He didn’t know how many times he’d done that when he was in the Army during the last war—enough so that he hadn’t lost the knack, anyhow. Shouldering the duffel wasn’t as easy as it had been then, though. A lot more years had landed on him since, and almost getting electrocuted hadn’t helped.

All the same, he managed. Some of the other guards from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades were in no better shape than he was. They managed, too. If you couldn’t manage, you shouldn’t have been here at all.

“Well done, men,” said Tom Porter, the troop leader—essentially, the top sergeant. “God knows we do need to fumigate these barracks—we’ve got more bugs in ’em than you can shake a stick at. I’m not telling you one goddamn thing you don’t already know.”

“Got that right,” a guard drawled. He mimed scratching—or maybe he wasn’t miming. Rodriguez had found out about delousing stations during the Great War, too. They’d changed a little since then—a little, but not nearly enough.

“It’s all them niggers’ fault,” another guard said. “They’s filthy, and we git their vermin.”

He was bound to be right about that. The rank smell of Camp Determination was always in a guard’s nostrils. Put lots of unwashed men and women together with Texas heat and humidity and it was no wonder you raised a bumper crop of every kind of pest under the sun.

The exterminators were a cheerful crew who’d come west from Abilene.
BUGGONE!
their trucks said. On the side of each was painted a man walking up to an overgrown cockroach. He had a mallet behind his back; the roach wore an apprehensive expression.

“Y’all got dogs or cats or canaries or snakes or goldfish or whatever the hell still in the building?” one of the men asked, fumbling in the breast pocket of his coveralls for a cheap cigar. “Better get ’em out if you do, on account of this stuff’ll kill ’em deader’n shit.”

A couple of the guards did have pets, but they’d taken them out. When the exterminator lit that cheroot, one of Rodriguez’s comrades asked him, “You gonna kill the bugs with the smoke from that goddamn thing?”

Laughing, the fellow answered, “How’d you guess? Now our secret’s out.”

He and his crew covered the barracks with an enormous tent of rubberized cloth. They could make it as big as they wanted; squares of the stuff zipped together. Rodriguez admired that—it struck him as good design.

One of the squares had a round hole in it that accepted the tube from the machine that pumped the poison into the tent: again, good design. The exterminators didn’t leave anything to chance, any more than the people who’d designed Camp Determination had done. A small gasoline engine powered the machine, which was hooked up to a gas cylinder with a large skull and crossbones painted on it.

Rodriguez had seen poison-gas cylinders during the last war. He asked the fellow with the nasty cigar, “You use chlorine or phosgene? I remember how chlorine kill all the rats in the trenches. More come later, though.” The trenches had been heaven on earth for rats and mice.