The Grapple (67 page)

George looked east. Nothing but ocean ahead there. Nothing but ocean all around, ocean and the rest of the ships in the flotilla. None of those ships was a carrier. They didn’t have even a baby flattop along. The cruisers carried scout aircraft, but how much good would those do when enemy bombers appeared overhead?
Not enough
was the answer that occurred to George.

“Yeah, well, maybe we’re better off without an escort carrier,” Thurman said when he grumbled about it. “Eighteen knots? Hell, they can’t get out of their own way—and if we get jumped, thirty airplanes probably won’t be enough to stop the limeys, especially since most of ’em won’t be fighters.”

“No wonder the skipper has us at gunnery practice all the time,” George said.

“No wonder at all,” the gun chief agreed. “’Course, the other thing is, he served a gun himself when he was a rating. He knows what’s going on.”

“He seems like a pretty good guy,” George said.

“Bet your ass,” Thurman said. “He’s on our side—and I’m not just saying that on account of the new exec is a dipshit. Carsten knows what makes sailors tick. He works us pretty hard, but that’s his job. I was in this ship when he took over, and the difference is night and day.”

George had been part of a good gun team on the
Townsend.
This one could beat it. They went through more live ammo than the
Townsend
’s skipper would have wanted to use. Sam Carsten’s attitude seemed to be that everything was fine as long as they had enough to fight with when action came.

They went on watch-and-watch a little more than halfway across the Atlantic: at the point where, if they were unlucky enough, a British patrol aircraft flying out of Limerick or Cork might spot them. The Irish rebels were supposed to be trying to sabotage those patrol flights, but who could guess how much luck they’d have?

“Now hear this.” Lieutenant Zwilling’s cold, unpleasant voice came on the PA system. “We have a wireless report that one of our submersibles just torpedoed a British destroyer about 300 miles east of here. No reports of other British warships afloat in that area. That is all.”

“Sounds good to me,” Petty Officer Thurman said. “The gatekeeper’s gone. We hope like hell he is, anyway.”

They made the closest approach at night. At midnight, they lowered a speedboat into the ocean. It replaced two lifeboats; its skeleton crew consisted of men either from Ireland or of Irish blood. They were making a one-way trip to the Emerald Isle. George passed crates of weapons and ammunition to the crane handlers, who lowered them into the speedboat. Each ship in the flotilla was doing the same thing. The irregulars battling the British occupation of their homeland would get a lift…if the munitions and men arrived.

Big, powerful gasoline engines rumbling and growling, the speedboats roared off to the east. The
Josephus Daniels
turned around and hightailed it back toward the USA. The black gang pulled every rev they could out of her engines. They wanted to get as far away from the Irish coast as they could by the time the sun came up.

She
was
slower than the
Townsend.
Thurman had mocked an escort carrier’s eighteen knots. George wasn’t happy with the destroyer escort’s twenty-four or twenty-five. The
Townsend
broke thirty easy as you please. The flotilla stuck together to help with antiaircraft protection. With really fast ships, it could have got thirty or forty miles closer to home by dawn.

And if it had, maybe the British flying boat wouldn’t have spotted it. The cruisers’ scout airplanes went after the big, ungainly machine. They even shot it down, but the damage was done. George was sure of that. Somewhere in the direction of the rising sun, armorers were loading explosives onto bombers. Maybe fighters would come along as escorts, if they could fly so far. George shuddered, remembering the carrier-launched fighter that shot up his fishing boat.

Waiting was hard, hard. Time stretched like taffy. Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe…

“This is the captain.” Sam Carsten sounded much more sure of himself on the PA than Zwilling did. “The Y-ranging officer says we’ll have visitors in a bit. Give them the kind of friendly American welcome they expect. Do your damnedest, boys. If we ride out this wave, chances are we get past the range where their low-level bombers can hit us. They may send high-altitude heavies after us, but those babies have to be lucky to hit a moving target from three miles up. That’s all.”

George looked back toward Ireland again. He felt silly as soon as he did. Of course the Y-ranging set reached farther than the Mark One eyeball. It wouldn’t be worth much if it didn’t. But those airplanes with the blue-white-red roundels were on the way.

“At least I can shoot back now,” George muttered.

“What’s that, Enos?” Petty Officer Thurman asked.

“When I was a fisherman, a limey fighter shot up my boat. I was lucky—everything missed me. But the son of a bitch killed a couple of my buddies.” George set a hand on the 40mm’s breech. “This time, by God, I’ve got a gun, too.”

Thurman nodded. “There you go. Pay those fuckers back.”

“Hope so,” George said. “Don’t much like the idea of air attack again, though, not when my last ship got bombed out from under me.” The Gulf of California had been warm and calm. The North Atlantic in the latitudes of Ireland was rarely calm and never warm. If the
Josephus Daniels
went down, how long could he stay afloat? Long enough to get picked up? He had to hope so.

“We’ll get ’em.” Thurman sounded confident. Like a captain, a gun chief was supposed to. Underlings could flabble. The guys in charge stayed above all that.

The
Josephus Daniels
built up speed. As far as George could judge, pretty soon she was going flat out. Even so, the cruisers in the flotilla could have walked away from her and the other destroyer escorts. They could have, but they didn’t. George was glad to see them stick around. They put a lot of shells in the air—and, he told himself in what was half cold-blooded pragmatism and half shameful hope, they made bigger targets than destroyer escorts did.

“Bandits within ten miles,” Lieutenant Zwilling said over the PA system. “Bearing 090. Won’t be long now.”

Everybody stared back the way they’d come. George pointed and yelled, “There!” as soon as anybody else. And if he could see the enemy airplanes, they could see his ship, too.

One of them flew in low and slow, straight for the
Josephus Daniels.
“Fuck me if that ain’t a torpedo bomber!” Thurman yelled. He swung the twin 40mm mount around to bear on it. “We’ve got to blast the bastard!”

“Fuck me if it’s not a two-decker!” George exclaimed as he passed shells and the gun began to roar. “Which war are we in, anyway?” Next to Japanese airplanes, it seemed downright primitive.

Tracers shot red, fiery streaks toward the biplane. “It’s what they call a Swordfish,” Thurman said. “Looks like a goddamn stringbag, don’t it? But it can do for us if we don’t knock it down first.”

They did. The Swordfish’s right wing tilted down and touched a wavetop. Then the airplane cartwheeled and broke up. It never got the chance to launch the torpedo.

“One down!” Thurman shouted exultantly. He couldn’t be sure his gun had nailed the British torpedo bomber. Several others were also shooting at it. Another Swordfish, this one trailing smoke, went into the Atlantic. But white wakes in the water said some of the slow, ugly two-deckers managed to launch their torpedoes.

The
Josephus Daniels
zigzagged as hard as she could. George automatically adjusted as the ship heeled first one way, then the other. He kept passing shells. The gun never ran dry. After this, if there was an after this, he would really be part of its crew—this was baptism by total immersion.

British fighters buzzed overhead like wasps. Every so often, they would swoop down and sting, machine guns blazing on their wings. George had never got a good look at the one that shot up the
Sweet Sue.
Now he did. The fighters seemed much more up-to-date than the torpedo bombers. He wished they didn’t.

One of them raked the
Josephus Daniels
from end to end, bullets clanging and whining as they ricocheted off steel and striking home with soft wet thwacks when they met flesh. Wounded men’s shrieks rang through the gunfire.

Petty Officer Thurman caught two bullets in the chest. Looking absurdly surprised, he flailed his arms a couple of times to try to keep his balance. Then, crumpling, he tumbled off the gun mount and splashed into the sea. Only a puddle of blood said he’d ever stood there.

“Jesus!” George said.

One of the aimers, a guy named Jorgenson, stepped up to take over the twin 40mm. The loader took his place. And George stepped into the loader’s slot. Jorgenson screamed at a sailor running by to jerk shells. The man started to squawk, but then settled down and started doing it.

The British fighter got away anyhow.

George had practiced as loader, both here and on the
Townsend.
He knew what to do, and he did it. It kept him too busy to see what was going on, which might have been a blessing in disguise. After a while, Jorgenson said, “Hold up.” George did. That gave him his first chance in several minutes to raise his head.

No more airplanes. He looked around in dull wonder. Where did they go? Back toward Ireland, he supposed. He didn’t think they’d come off a British carrier. A couple of U.S. ships had fires, but they were all still moving. With luck, they’d get out of range before the next limey strike—if there was one—could come this far. With more luck, the speedboats had landed their weapons without getting spotted. To the brass in the Navy Department, that was the only thing that mattered.

I
n a way, getting out of Richmond was a relief for Jake Featherston. He felt stifled in the concrete bunker under the Gray House, and in the Confederate capital as a whole. The damnyankees were clobbering the city with everything they had, and they had more than Jake ever dreamt they would. He’d done his best to flatten Philadelphia, and his best was pretty good, but the United States were doing worse in and to Richmond.

In another way, though, leaving the bunker, leaving the capital, made him sweat bullets. As long as he stayed in the bunker, he was safe. All the reinforced concrete above his head laughed off even direct hits. It had taken several, without any damage to speak of. Once he got down to Georgia, he felt secure enough. But getting there…

The trouble was, you never could tell who was reading your signals, even the ones in the codes your cryptographers swore were unbreakable. Those codes might not be such an ultra enigma to the USA. Maybe traitors had delivered cipher machines to the enemy. Maybe the Yankees were just better codebreakers than anybody in the CSA figured.

And if they were, and if their fighters bounced Jake’s transport airplane or their bombers hit his train…Well, in that case Don Partridge became President, and the Confederate States went straight down the crapper.

But it hadn’t happened, not this time. He was down here talking things over with General Patton. And the Yankees were in Georgia. Not much of Georgia, but they were over the state line. Not Kentucky. Not Virginia. Not Tennessee. Georgia. They’d never got into Georgia in the last war. He hated their being here now.

“You want my head, sir? You can have it. I won’t say boo,” Patton told him, as he had up in Richmond. “I promised I’d hold Chattanooga, and I didn’t do it. It’s my fault, no one else’s. If you need a head to roll, here’s mine.”

Not without a certain reluctance, Featherston shook his own head. “Nah. Who would I get that was better? Besides, could they have run you out unless the paratroopers dropped on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge?”

“No way in hell—uh, Mr. President,” Patton said.

“Well, I didn’t reckon so myself,” Jake said. “All right—they fooled us once, damn them. Can they do it again?”

“Not that way, anyhow,” the general answered.

“I didn’t think so, either,” Jake said.
If they can, we’re in even worse shape than I figured.
“So your job now is to hold ’em where they’re at, not let ’em break loose into Georgia.”

“I understand the need, sir,” Patton said. “I know how important Atlanta’s industry and rail junctions are. I’ll do everything I know how to do with the men I’ve got. I wish I had more.”

“You’ve got everything we can give you. Tell you the truth, you’ve got more than I can afford to give you,” Featherston said. “Manpower…Well, we’re moving more women into factories and onto farms. That frees up some new soldiers, anyhow. And we’ve got some new weapons we’ll be trying out here.”

“New barrels?” Patton asked eagerly. “You have no idea how galling it is to see the Yankees outgunning and outarmoring us. Barrels are supposed to be our strength, not theirs.”

“The new ones are on the drawing boards,” Jake said. “They’ll go into production as soon as we iron out the kinks. It would’ve happened sooner, but U.S. bombers pounded the crap out of the factories in Birmingham, and that set us back.” If the United States weren’t able to base bombers in Kentucky and Tennessee, they would have had a much harder time bombing a town in Alabama. Featherston couldn’t growl too loud about that, not when Patton had offered his head and he’d declined to take it.