The Grapple (44 page)

“He got us, too,” Cooley said—the cruiser was listing badly.

“Do they want us to take men off, or does their skipper think she’ll stay afloat?” Sam asked. Rage filled him, rage at himself. Destroyers and destroyer escorts sailed with the fleet to keep submarines away. He hadn’t done his job. Any enemy country would gladly trade a sub for a cruiser.

“For now, they think she’ll stay up,” Cooley answered. More flashing Morse came from the cruiser. “We get an ‘attaboy’ for sinking that submersible. They heard it cave in over there, too.”

“Hot damn,” Sam said bitterly. He spoke to the hydrophone operator: “Keep your ears open, Bevacqua.”

“Will do, sir,” the petty officer replied. “I feel like hell on account of that fucker suckered me. He must’ve snuck in under a warm layer or something. Even so—”

“Yeah. Even so,” Sam said. “Well, do your damnedest.” He didn’t look forward to the after-action report. He had to hope he lived to write one.

More airplanes came off the carriers’ flight decks, and more, and still more. They formed up into attacking squadrons above the U.S. fleet, then zoomed off to the east. “I think we’ve found the enemy fleet,” Cooley said.

“That’s what we came for.” Sam paused. “Of course, they came to find us. If they don’t already know where we’re at, seeing where our airplanes are coming from will kind of give them a hint.”

“I know the limeys have Y-ranging. From what I’ve heard, theirs may even be better than ours,” Cooley said. “I’m not so sure about the French.”

“Well, once they see the limeys launching airplanes, they won’t do a whole lot of waiting around after that,” Carsten said, and the exec nodded. Sailors wrestled more depth charges up on deck to replace the ones the
Josephus Daniels
used to sink the enemy submersible.

Half an hour went by. Then Thad Walters said, “We’ve got aircraft coming in from the east, sir. They’re not likely to be friendlies.”

“How far out are they?” Sam asked.

“Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“All right. Thanks.” It wasn’t, and Sam had no reason to be grateful, but he said the polite words anyway. Then he got on the PA system: “We’re going to have company in a little while. Chances are they’ll go after the airplane carriers and battleships ahead of us, but you never can tell. Any which way, our job is to get as many rounds in the air as we can. Some of them will do some good, I promise. We’ve put a lot of work in on our gunnery. This is where it pays off.”

“We’re a lot better than we were when you took over this ship, sir,” Cooley said.

“Thanks, Pat.” This time, Sam did mean it. But he went on, “
Better
doesn’t count. Are we
good enough
? Well, we’ll find out pretty damn quick.”

Some of the ships farther east, at the very forefront of the U.S. fleet, started firing. Black puffs of smoke fouled the blue sky. Peering between the puffs with a pair of field glasses, Sam spotted wings and fuselages glinting in the sun. His belly tightened. His balls wanted to crawl up from his scrotum. He’d been on a ship attacked from the air as early as 1917. He’d been on the
Remembrance
when the Japanese sank her. Good men were going to die here in the middle of the Atlantic. So would good ships. With luck, more of them would die a couple of hundred miles to the east, out over the curve of the world. Neither side’s ships would see the other’s today.

With a thunderous roar, the
Josephus Daniels’
guns cut loose: .50-caliber machine guns, twin 40mm antiaircraft guns, and the 4.5-inch popguns that were her main armament. Those could reach higher and farther than the lighter weapons, but couldn’t fire nearly so fast. “Evasive action, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. “All ahead flank speed!”

“Aye aye, sir!” The exec relayed the command to the engine room. He started zigzagging as the ship’s speed built up. It wouldn’t build up enough. Sam wished for the extra six or seven knots a real destroyer could give him. But then, how much difference would they make against an airplane?

A burning fighter slammed into the Atlantic before Sam could see which side it belonged to. A great black cloud of smoke rose from a stricken ship. He swore. He’d known it would happen, but that didn’t make it any easier to take.

“We’ve got to keep
some
carriers,” Sam said, more to himself than to anyone else. “Otherwise, we won’t be able to land our airplanes when they come home.”

A fighter with a blue-white-red British roundel dove on the destroyer escort, guns blazing. Bullets whined through the air and clanged off metal. Here and there, men sprawled in spreading pools of blood. Sailors got the wounded down to the sick bay. The ship had no doctor, only a couple of pharmacist’s mates. They would have to do what they could. When things calmed down, they could transfer the men hurt worst to a bigger ship with a real surgeon or even to a hospital ship.

Uncounted tracers pursued the enemy airplane, but it got away. Exultant shouts rang out a few minutes later, when a torpedo airplane splashed into the sea. Sailors at the forward 40mm guns jumped and swaggered and pounded their hairy chests like so many gorillas.

Too much was going on too fast in too many places for Sam to have more than a vague idea of how this end of the fight was going—and he had no way to know what was happening off to the east. If everything here and there went perfectly, the battleships could storm off and pound the enemy ships to pieces…but he didn’t think things were going perfectly. Now several greasy black smoke plumes rose into the clean, salt-scented air.

“I hope we’re hurting them worse than they’re hurting us,” Pat Cooley said, exactly echoing his own thought.

After most of an hour, no more enemy aircraft remained overhead. They’d either gone down or flown off toward the east. They might clash with returning U.S. airplanes coming west. As Sam steered the
Josephus Daniels
toward a listing escort carrier, he realized he might have fought in two great naval battles now where nobody had the faintest idea who’d won.

“A
great naval victory in the Atlantic!” blared the wireless set behind the bar in the sleazy seaside San Diego saloon. “British and French claims of triumph are the spasmodic bleating of frightened sheep!”

“Baaa!” George Enos said, looking up from his beer. “What do you think, Chief?”

“Just have to wait and see,” Fremont Dalby answered. “What happens next will tell the story. They said we were licking the Confederates in Ohio, too, when the bastards were really kicking our ass. Or does it look different to you?”

“Nah, that sounds about right,” George said.

“If we go on and blast the crap out of the convoys coming up from South America, then we honest to God did whip the limeys,” Dalby continued, for all the world as if he had an admiral’s broad gold stripe on each sleeve. “If they go on and link up with the Confederates and give us a hard time in our own waters, they walloped us instead.”

“I got you,” George said. “And if neither one happens—”

“It’s a push,” Fritz Gustafson put in.

“There you go.” Dalby nodded emphatically. The empty glass in front of him, and the ones that had preceded it, no doubt had something to do with that emphasis. He put money on the bar, and the man in a boiled shirt and bow tie behind it gave him a full glass and took away the empty one. After a sip, the gun chief went on, “I mean, I think we really are no shit smacking the Confederates around, ’cause we wouldn’t be down in fucking Tennessee if we weren’t. Past that, though…Well, who knows how much to believe?”

“Who cares?” As usual, Gustafson got a lot of mileage out of a few words.

“That’s it.” George drained his beer and nodded to the bartender. The man worked the tap but didn’t hand over the beer till he got paid. George sipped, then sucked foam off his upper lip. “We’ve got to keep doing our job no matter what the big picture looks like. We’ll figure out what it all means later on.”

Down at the far end of the bar, two Marines started slugging at each other. Sometimes, as George knew too well, a brawl like that made the whole joint explode. This time, other young men in forest-green uniforms grabbed the brawlers and sat on them. “Lots of leathernecks in town lately,” Dalby remarked.

“They train here,” George said.

Dalby shook his head. “I mean even besides that,” he said. “Something’s up, I bet.”

“Could be,” George said. “Maybe they’re going to go down and take Baja California away from the Mexicans.”

“Possible,” Dalby said thoughtfully. “We tried that in the last war, and it didn’t work. Maybe we’d have more luck this time around.”

“We could blockade the Confederates at Guaymas.” George warmed to the idea—it was his, after all. “If we did, they couldn’t even get their subs out. That would make it like they didn’t have any ports on the Pacific.”

“I’ve heard notions I liked less,” Fremont Dalby allowed.

“Me, too,” Gustafson said, which was a solid accolade.

“If they send the Marines south, I bet we go along, too,” George said. “We could do shore bombardment and keep the submersibles away from the landing craft.”

Dalby laughed at him. “You tell ’em, Admiral,” he said, reversing the thought George had had a moment before. But that held more admiration than derision, for he turned to Fritz Gustafson and said, “He’s not as dumb as he looks, is he?”

“Not always, anyhow,” Gustafson said—more praise, of sorts.

The next morning, George hardly remembered his prediction. You could get hung over on beer if you worked at it, and he’d been diligent the day before. Black coffee and aspirins took the edge off his pounding headache, but left his stomach feeling as if shipfitters were using blowtorches in there. His buddies seemed in no better shape. That was some consolation, but only some.

Two days later, the
Townsend
put to sea with several other destroyers, the escort carriers that had raided Baja California before, and a gaggle of slow, ugly landing craft. Surveying them as they waddled along, Fremont Dalby said, “It’s a good thing the Empire of Mexico has a horseshit Navy. A real fleet could sink those sorry wallowers faster than you can say Jack Robinson.”

George would have argued, except he thought Dalby was right. “I’m glad
I’m
not on one of those scows,” he said.

“Amen, Brother Ben!” Dalby exclaimed. “You’d be puking your guts out every inch of the way. I know you’ve got a good stomach—I’ve seen it. But you could put a statue into one of those damn things and it’d barf brass by the time we got down to Cabo San Lucas.”

They didn’t get down to Cabo San Lucas. The Marines went ashore about halfway down the Baja peninsula. That had Dalby and the handful of other old-timers on the destroyer muttering to themselves. The Army had landed in almost the same spot during the Great War, and had had to pull out not much later. George couldn’t see that it mattered one way or the other. Once you got south of Tijuana, Baja California didn’t have enough of anything except rocks and scorpions—but it sure had plenty of those.

The Mexican coastal garrison held its fire till the landing craft got close, then opened up with several batteries of three-inch guns that were a generation out of date on the big battlefields farther east but that still worked just fine.

Keeping quiet let those guns escape the fury of the dive bombers that flew off the escort carriers to soften up the landing zone before the Marines went in. As soon as they started firing, all the real warships with the flotilla blasted away with their main armament from ranges at which the smaller land-based guns couldn’t reply. One by one, the Mexican cannon fell silent. They weren’t playing possum this time, either. George wouldn’t have wanted to be on the receiving end of that shellacking.

But they’d done more damage than anyone on the U.S. side would have expected. A couple of landing craft were on fire, and a couple of more had simply gone down to the shallow bottom of the Pacific. Machine guns greeted the men in those dark green uniforms who splashed ashore.

The dive bombers returned and pounded the machine-gun nests. So did guns from the
Townsend
and her comrades. Fighters strafed the rocks just beyond the beach. Peering shoreward with binoculars, Fremont Dalby said, “We’re whaling the crap out of them. Only bad thing is, you can’t hardly see them at all—their khaki matches the landscape real good. The leatherheads stick out like sore thumbs, poor bastards.”

“Somebody was asleep at the switch, not giving them the right kind of uniforms,” George said. “The Confederates are starting to wear camouflage, for Christ’s sake. Least we could do is have our guys not look like Christmas trees in the desert.”

“Probably figured we were only fighting Mexicans, so what difference did it make?” Dalby said. “That’s how they think back in Philadelphia. But anybody with a rock in front of him and a gun in his hands is trouble. What are we doing making things easier for him?”

“Acting dumb,” Fritz Gustafson said, which was all too likely to be true.

They had the time to gab, because the
Townsend
didn’t come close enough to shore for them to open up with their 40mm guns. That would have let the Mexicans shoot back. No enemy airplanes appeared overhead. If they had, the fighters from the escort carriers would have dealt with them before the antiaircraft guns could—George hoped so, anyhow.