The Grapple (11 page)

“I’m going outside for a smoke before they bring in the next poor miserable so-and-so,” he said. “Come with me?”

“You bet,” McDougald said. “Grab all the chances to loaf you can—they may not come your way again.”

With ether and alcohol and other inflammables inside the aid station, lighting up in there was severely discouraged—with a blunt instrument, if necessary. Once O’Doull had stepped away from the green-gray tent, he took out a pack of Niagara Falls.

“Oh, come on, Doc.” McDougald pulled a horrible face. “Haven’t you got anything better than those barge scrapings?”

“’Fraid not,” O’Doull admitted. “Smoked my last Confederate cigarette a couple of hours ago. U.S. tobacco won’t kill me, and it’s like coffee—bad is better than none at all.”

“Like booze, too,” the medic said, and the doctor didn’t deny it. McDougald reached into his pocket and extracted a pack of Dukes. “Here. Bad is better than none, but good is better than bad.”

“Thanks, Granny. I owe you,” O’Doull said. The noncom was a better scrounger than he was. Some headline that made. O’Doull took a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. McDougald gave him a light. He inhaled, then smiled. “My hat’s off to the Dukes.”

“I ought to make you put up your dukes for one that bad.” Granville McDougald paused. “Except mine was even worse, wasn’t it?”

“Sure wasn’t any better,” O’Doull allowed. “But this tobacco is, and I thank you for it.”

“Any time,” McDougald said. “Not like I haven’t mooched butts from you a time or three.”

The roar of artillery from behind them drowned his last couple of words. The fire from the big and medium guns went on and on and on. Some of the shells flying west gurgled as they spun through the air. Leonard O’Doull winced at that sound: gas rounds. He tried to look on the bright side of things: “Sounds like we’re finally going over the river.”

“And through the woods, yeah, but where’s Grandmother’s house?” McDougald said. While O’Doull was still digesting that, the medic went on, “About time we got across the damn Scioto, don’t you think? Hanging on to Chillicothe like they have, the Confederates must have pulled God only knows how many men and how much matériel out of northern Ohio.”

“You sure you don’t belong back at corps HQ or something?” O’Doull said. McDougald laughed at him.

They had time to finish their cigarettes, and that was about it. Then the familiar and hated shout of, “Doc! Hey, Doc!” rang out again.

“I’m here!” O’Doull yelled. More quietly, he added, “Well, let’s see what we’ve got this time.”

They had a corporal with a bullet through his calf. He was cussing a blue streak. “Hey, keep your shirt on, pal,” Granville McDougald said. “If that’s not a hometowner, there’s no such animal.”

“Fuck hometowners,” the corporal snarled. “And fuck you, too, Jack. For one thing, it hurts like shit. And besides, I don’t want any goddamn hometowners. I want to blow the balls off some more of Featherston’s fuckers.”

A man of strong opinions,
O’Doull thought. His voice dry, he said, “It’s not usually smart to swear at the guy who’s going to help fix you up. You might find out it hurts even more than you expected. And before you tell me where to head in, you need to know I’m a major.” Cussing out an officer was a good way for an enlisted man to run into more trouble than he ever wanted to find.

The noncom opened his mouth to draw in a breath. About then, though, the novocaine O’Doull injected by the wound took effect. What came out was, “
Oh,
yeah. That’s not so fucking bad now. You can go ahead and sew me up.” He caught himself. “You can go ahead and sew me up,
sir.
”

O’Doull decided he’d been given the glove. By Granny McDougald’s barely smothered snort, he thought the same thing. But the corporal scrupulously stayed within regulations. O’Doull cleaned out the wound and sewed it up. “Like it or not, pal, you’ve got a hometowner,” he said. “I know you’d be happier if you didn’t get shot, but you could have stopped it with your face or your chest, too.”

“Oh, yeah. I know. I’ve seen—” He broke off, then shook his head. “I started to say, I’ve seen as much of that shit as you have, but I probably haven’t.”

“Depends,” O’Doull answered. “We see plenty of nasty wounds, but the poor guys who get killed on the spot don’t make it back to us. Maybe it evens out.”

“Hot damn,” the corporal said. “Tell you one thing, though—it’s a bunch of fucked-up shit any which way.”

“Buddy, you are preaching to the choir,” Granville McDougald said solemnly. O’Doull decided he couldn’t have put it better himself.

F
rom the deck of the USS
Townsend,
George Enos watched two new escort carriers come into Pearl Harbor. Like the pair that had previously sailed from the West Coast down to the Sandwich Islands, the
Tripoli
and the
Yorktown
were as ugly as a mud fence. They were built on freighter hulls, with a flight deck and a little island slapped on topside. They had a freighter’s machinery, too, and couldn’t make better than eighteen knots unless they fell off a cliff.

But each one of them had thirty airplanes: fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo-carriers. They weren’t fleet carriers; since the loss of the
Remembrance
more than a year earlier, the USA had no fleet carriers operating in the Pacific. Still, they were ever so much better than no carriers at all, which was what the United States had had in these waters for most of the time since the
Remembrance
went to the bottom.

“Well, doesn’t look like the Japs are going to drive us back to San Francisco after all,” George remarked. He spoke with the flat vowels and swallowed r’s of the Boston fisherman he was before he joined the Navy to make sure the Army didn’t conscript him.

“Damn well better not,” said Fremont Blaine Dalby, the CPO who commanded the twin 40mm antiaircraft gun for which George jerked shells.

“Didn’t look so good when they were bringing their carriers down from Midway and knocking the snot out of us here,” George said.

“They had their chance. Now it’s our turn.” Chief Dalby was a man who knew what he knew. Even his name showed that: it showed he came from a rock-ribbed Republican family in a country where the Republicans, caught between the Socialists and the Democrats, hadn’t amounted to a hill of beans since the 1880s.

“About time, too.” Fritz Gustafson, the gun crew’s loader, talked as if the government charged him for every word he said.

“If we can get Midway back…” George said.

“That’d be pretty good,” Dalby agreed.
He
wasn’t shy about talking—not even a little bit. “Run the Japs out there, run ’em off Wake, too, so they don’t come back to Midway, and then we can stop worrying about the real Sandwich Islands, the ones down here, for a while.”

“Gotta hang on to Hotel Street,” Gustafson said. George and Fremont Dalby both snorted. Hotel Street not only had more saloons and cathouses per square inch than any other street in Honolulu, it probably had more than any other street in the world. Sailors and soldiers and Marines might not give a damn about the Sandwich Islands as a whole, but they’d be bound to fight like men possessed to keep Hotel Street in American hands.

“Think four of these baby flattops are enough to take Midway?” George asked.

“Dunno. I ain’t no admiral,” Dalby said. As a CPO, he had a much smaller sphere of authority than a man with a broad gold stripe on his sleeve. But within that sphere, his authority was hardly less absolute. “Tell you what, though—I hope like hell there’s a couple more of those babies somewhere halfway between here and the coast.”

“Yeah.” George nodded. There was a gap in the middle of the eastern Pacific that neither aircraft from Oahu nor those from the West Coast could cover very well. Japan had done her best to get astride the supply line between the mainland and the Sandwich Islands and starve the islands into submission. It didn’t quite work, but it came too close for comfort, both metaphorically and literally.

Thinking of U.S. warplanes looking for enemy aircraft and ships made George notice the combat air patrol above Pearl Harbor. Fighters always buzzed overhead these days. Y-ranging gear should be able to give U.S. forces enough warning to scramble airplanes, but nobody seemed inclined to take chances.

“Wonder how come Jap engines sound screechier than ours,” George said. Japanese carrier-based fighters had strafed the
Townsend
more than once. He knew the sound of those engines better than he wanted to.

“They take ’em out of the washing machines they used to buy from us,” Dalby suggested. George laughed. Any joke a CPO made was funny because a CPO made it.

The
Townsend
sailed a couple of days later, escorting the
Tripoli
and the
Yorktown
north and west toward Midway. They wouldn’t get there in a hurry, not at the escort carriers’ lackadaisical cruising speed. George wasn’t enthusiastic about getting there at all. He’d gone north and west from Oahu too many times, and sailed into danger each and every one of them.

You always ran to your battle station like a madman when general quarters sounded. When you didn’t know if it was a drill or the real McCoy, you ran even harder.

Run as he would, George couldn’t get to the twin 40mm mount ahead of Fremont Dalby. The gun chief seemed drawn there by magnetism instead of his legs, which were shorter than George’s.

“What can I tell you?” he said when George asked him about it. “I know I’ve got to be here, so I damn well am.” In a way, that didn’t make any sense at all. In another way, it did.

Up above the bridge, the Y-ranging antenna spun round and round, round and round. It would pick up incoming Japanese aircraft long before the naked eye could. How much good picking them up ahead of time would do was an open question. They weren’t any easier for guns on the destroyer to shoot down. With luck, though, fighters from the carriers could drive them off before they got within gunnery range.

Few of the islands north and west of Kauai were inhabited; if not for its position, Midway wouldn’t have been, either. Albatrosses and other sea birds nested on the rocks and reefs rising above the Pacific. Some of the enormous birds glided past the
Townsend
and the other ships in the flotilla.

Pointing to a long-winged albatross, George said, “I’m surprised Y-ranging doesn’t pick up those things. They’re damn near as big as a fighter.” He exaggerated, but not too much.

“I hear from the guys on the hydrophones that they’ve got to be careful, or else they really can mistake a whale for a sub—and the other way round,” Fremont Dalby said.

“That wouldn’t be good,” George said.

“No shit!” No, Fritz Gustafson didn’t talk a lot, but he got plenty of mileage out of what he did say.

As they got closer to Midway, tension built. George didn’t want to do anything but stick close to his gun. The
Townsend
had come through a couple of ferocious attacks. Blazing away with everything you had gave you a chance to come through, but the pilots in the enemy airplanes were the guys in the driver’s seat these days.

Dive bombers and escorting fighters roared off the escort carriers and flew up toward Midway. “Still not obvious the Japs have Y-ranging,” Dalby said. “If they don’t, we can plaster their aircraft on Midway before they even know we’re on the way.”

“Wouldn’t break my heart,” George said. “Bastards tried to do it to us at Pearl Harbor. Not like we don’t owe ’em.”

“If they’d done it, I bet they would have followed up with a landing,” the gun chief said. “Maybe we’ll be able to do the same up here before long.”

“That wouldn’t break my heart, either,” George said.

The more time went by without a warning over the PA that the Y-ranging gear was picking up enemy airplanes, the happier he got. Maybe the American bombers really were knocking the daylights out of whatever the Japs still had on Midway.

Then the speakers crackled to life. George groaned, and he wasn’t the only one. “May I have your attention?” the exec said, as if he didn’t know he would. “Our aircraft report the Japanese appear to have abandoned Midway…. May I have your attention? Our aircraft report the Japanese appear to have abandoned Midway.”

“Fuck me,” Fremont Dalby said reverently.

“Wow,” George agreed.

“Little yellow bastards know how to cut their losses,” Dalby said. “If they can’t take the Sandwich Islands, what’s Midway worth to ’em? It’s out at the ass end of nowhere, and it’s got to be even more expensive for the Japs to supply than it is for us.”

“What do you want to bet they’ve bailed out of Wake, too?” George said.

“I wouldn’t mind,” the gun chief told him.

“Beats working,” Fritz Gustafson said.

“Oh, hell, yes,” Dalby said. “If they’re gone from Midway and Wake, what are we gonna do? Go after ’em? Charge through all their little islands and head for the Philippines? We need the Philippines like we need a hole in the head.”

“Amen,” George said. “If they want to call this mess a draw, I don’t mind. I don’t mind a bit.” The rest of the gun crew nodded. They’d all developed a thoroughgoing respect for Japanese skill and courage. The Japs had already come too close to killing them more than once. George knew he wouldn’t be sorry never to see any more maneuverable fighters with meatballs on their wings.

But that raised another question. George asked it: “If the Japs are pulling back here, where are they going to use their ships and airplanes?” He assumed Japan would use them somewhere. In a war, that was what you did.

Fremont Dalby suddenly started to laugh. “Malaya. Singapore. What do you want to bet? Malaya’s got tin and rubber, and Singapore’s the best goddamn harbor in that whole part of the world.”

“But they belong to England,” George objected. “England and Japan are on the same side.”

“Were,” Fritz Gustafson said.

Dalby nodded. “I think you nailed that one, Fritz. England’s busy in Europe. England’s busy in the Atlantic against us. What can the fuckin’ limeys do if Japan decides to go in there? Jack shit, far as I can see. When Churchill hears about this, I bet he craps his pants.”