Walk in Hell (16 page)

“Yeah, well, it’d be a lot worse if they were toting guns,” Kim-ball insisted. The executive officer’s response hadn’t been what he’d expected or what he’d wanted. “Hell, one of the reasons we fought the War of Secession—not the only one, but one—was so we could do what we wanted with our niggers, not what anybody else wanted us to do.”

“Yes, sir, that’s true,” Brearley said. “When we decided to manumit them twenty years later, after the Second Mexican War, we did it on our own. And if we wanted to reward them for fighting for us, would it be so bad, sir?”

Kimball stared down at the innocent-looking youngster perched on the steel ladder a few rungs below him. It was as if he’d never seen Brearley before—and, in some important ways, maybe he hadn’t. “You’d let ’em all be citizens, wouldn’t you, Mr. Brearley? You’d let niggers be citizens of the CSA.”

He might have accused Brearley of eating with his fingers, or perhaps of practicing more exotic, less speakable perversions. The executive officer bit his lip, but answered, “Sir, if they fought for us, how could we keep from making them into citizens? And if it’s a choice between having them fight for us or against us, which would you sooner see?”

That wasn’t the way the argument was supposed to go. “They’re niggers,” Kimball said flatly. “They can’t fight whites, not really.”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley said, and said no more. He needed to say no more. If Negroes couldn’t fight, why was the
Bonefish
coming up the Pee Dee for a second run against them? Even more to the point, why hadn’t the Congaree Socialist Republic and the other Red rebel outfits the blacks had set up collapsed weeks before?

Would all this have been prevented had the Confederacy let blacks join the Army and, strange as the notion felt, let them vote? Kimball shook his head. “The Army laborers are Reds, too. And if the black bastards voted, they’d have elected that damn lunatic Arango last year.”

This time, Brearley didn’t say anything at all. When your commanding officer had expressed his opinion and you didn’t agree with it, nothing was the best thing you could say.

Clang!
A bullet hit the outside of the conning tower. The deck machine guns opened up, blasting away at where they thought the fire had come from. And then, defiantly, a machine gun—maybe the same machine gun that had shot at the
Bonefish
before—began hosing the submersible down again.

Boom! Boom! Boom!
The deck gun roared out its reply. Kim-ball looked down at Brearley again. The exec still didn’t say anything. But a silent reproach was no less a reproach because it was silent.

A portly colonel sporting the little medal that said he’d fought in the Second Mexican War looked down his nose at Irving Morrell. “Not as smart as we thought we were, eh, Major?” he said. Instead of a Kaiser Bill mustache, he sported white wraparound whiskers that, with his bald head, gave him a striking resemblance to Franz Joseph, the elderly Austro-Hungarian Emperor.

“No, Colonel Gilbert,” Morrell answered tonelessly. Longtime General Staff officers had been saying things like that to him ever since the Mormons exploded their mines south of Ogden. The only safe response he had was agreeing with them, and also the only truthful one. The Mormons had done a hell of a lot of damage with those mines, and he hadn’t anticipated them.

He looked glumly at the situation map for Utah. The drive toward Ogden, the last major rebel stronghold, no longer proceeded nearly north, with east and west ends of the line parallel to each other. The eastern end of the line was still about where it had been, anchored against the Wasatch Mountains, but now the line ran back on a ragged slant, the western end touching the Great Salt Lake a good ten miles farther south than it had been. Only frantic reinforcement had kept the disaster from being even worse than it was.

Colonel Gilbert studied the map, too. “If we hadn’t had to pull those troops out of Sequoyah and Kentucky, Major, our progress against the Confederates would have been a good deal greater than it is.”

“Yes, sir,” Morrell said. The USA should have been taking advantage of the uprising within the enemy’s territory, not quelling an uprising of its own. He knew that as well as the white-whiskered colonel. Knowing it and being able to do anything about it, unfortunately, were two different things.

Captain John Abell came into the room, too. Seeing Morrell and Colonel Gilbert examining the Utah situation, he came over and looked at the map himself. He put his hands behind his back and interlaced his fingers; his face assumed an expression of thoughtful seriousness. What he looked like, Morrell thought, was a doctor hovering over the bed of a patient who had taken a turn for the worse. Morrell had seen plenty of doctors with that expression, when it had looked as if he would lose his leg.

“Unfortunate,” Abell murmured. He couldn’t very well say anything more; Morrell outranked him. But what he was thinking was plain enough.

And there was nothing Morrell could do about it. He’d gained the credit for his notion of hitting the Mormons from several directions at once to weaken their resistance to the main line of effort. Because the notion had worked, he’d come to be thought of as the expert on Utah. And when something happened there that he hadn’t allowed for, he found blame accruing to him as readily as credit had before.

No, more readily than credit, for credit had come grudgingly even after his success was obvious. No one blamed him only grudgingly. Here he was, an outsider, a newcomer, who’d dared to presume himself more astute, more clever, than General Staff veterans. When he turned out not to have thought of everything, it was as if he hadn’t thought of anything.

The door to the map room opened. The newcomer was a lieutenant so junior, he hardly seemed to have started shaving. He too made a beeline for the map of Utah. That didn’t surprise Morrell, not any more; misery loved company.

But the lieutenant wasn’t interested, or wasn’t chiefly interested, in the strategic situation there. He was interested in Irving Morrell. Saluting, he said, “General Wood’s compliments, sir, and he would like to see you at your earliest convenience.”

“I’m coming,” Morrell said; when the chief of the General Staff wanted you at your earliest convenience, he wanted you right now. The lieutenant nodded; he might have been even greener than his uniform, but he understood that bit of military formality.

Behind Morrell, Colonel Gilbert spoke to Captain Abell: “Maybe the general is trying to figure out how we can get blown up on the Ontario front, too.” Maybe he hadn’t intended Morrell to hear that. Maybe. But when Abell snickered, Morrell knew he was supposed to have heard that. The young captain was too smooth to offer insult by accident.

Escape, then, became something of a relief. The lieutenant led him through the maze of General Staff headquarters without offering a word of conversation, and responded only in monosyllables when Morrell spoke. That made Morrell fear he did not stand in General Wood’s good graces.

He clicked his tongue between his teeth. He thought he should still have had credit in his account with the head of the General Staff. Utah wasn’t the only matter concerning which he’d come to Wood’s notice. Along with a doctor back in Tucson, New Mexico, he’d suggested the steel helmets that by now had been issued to just about every U.S. front-line soldier. That should have counted for something against the troubles in Utah.

Wood’s adjutant sat at a desk in an outer office, pounding away at a typewriter hard and fast enough to make the rattle of the keys sound almost like machine-gun fire. Idly, Morrell wondered if the adjutant had ever heard real machine-gun fire. They led sheltered lives here.

“Major Morrell,” the adjutant said, rising politely enough. “I’ll tell the general you’re here.” He went into Wood’s private office. When he returned a moment later, he nodded. “Go on, sir. He’s expecting you.” The staccato typing resumed as Morrell walked past him.

Morrell came to stiff attention before General Leonard Wood. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, saluting.

“At ease, Major,” Wood answered easily. “Smoke if you care to. It’s not the firing squad for you, or the guillotine, either.” One of his hands went to the back of his neck. “That’s what a Frenchman comes up with when he thinks about efficiency. Let it be a lesson to you.”

“Yes, sir.” Morrell wouldn’t have minded a cigar, but didn’t light up in spite of Wood’s invitation.

The general sighed and studied Morrell with that same sickroom expression he’d come to loathe. From the chief of the General Staff, the look came naturally: he’d earned an M.D. before joining the military. He sighed again. “It didn’t quite work out, did it, Major?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” Morrell replied, though he’d long since reached the same conclusion.

“It’s too bad,” Wood said. “I honestly don’t know if this place is good for you, but you’ve certainly been good for it. We get insulated against the soldier in the field and what he needs. You’re a breath of fresh air here.”

“Too fresh, I’d say by what’s happened lately.” Morrell spoke without rancor.

“Major, it’s not your fault we did not anticipate the Mormons’ mining us,” Wood said. “No blame for that will go into your record, I assure you. But Utah had turned into your baby, and when the baby turned out to have warts—”

“More than warts, I’d say, sir,” Morrell answered. “They wrecked most of a division there, and we only had two in the front line.”

“That is very much in people’s minds right now,” Wood agreed. “I think it’s unfortunate, but it’s true. As a result, your usefulness here has been compromised through what is, I repeat, no fault of your own.”

“Sir, if my usefulness here is compromised, could you please return me to the field?” Morrell could hear the eagerness in his own voice. A chance to get out of Philadelphia, to get back to real action—

And General Wood was nodding. “I’m going to do exactly that, Major. As you know, I would have liked you to stay around longer, to learn some more tricks of the trade, so to speak. But situations have a way of changing, like it or not. My eye is still on you, Major. Now, though, I think it best to have it on you at a distance for a while. I assure you once more, no imputation of blame will appear in your personnel file.”

Morrell barely heard that. It mattered little to him. What did matter was that he would be able to fight his way now, out in the open, face to face with the foe. He had learned a few things here, and was eager to try them out along with everything he’d known before he came.

“Where do you plan on sending me, sir?” he asked. “Someplace where things are busy, I hope.”

“You’ve given the Rebels a hard time through the first year of the war,” Wood said, which was true only if you neglected the months during which Morrell had been flat on his back. Being the chief of the General Staff, Wood was allowed to neglect details like that. He said, “You’ve shown a knack for mountain warfare. What would you say if they sent you up to the Canadian Rockies and helped us cut the Pacific Coast off from the rest of the Canucks?”

“What would I say? Sir, I’d say, ‘Yes, sir!’” Morrell knew he was all but quivering as he stood there. The mountains in eastern Kentucky had been little gentle knobby things. The Canadian Rockies were mountains with a capital M, full of ice and snow and jagged rocks. Nobody would figure you could accomplish much on that kind of terrain at this time of year. All the more reason to go out and prove people wrong.

“I’ll make the arrangements, then,” Wood said. “Good luck, Major.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” Morrell said, much more for the promised arrangements than the polite wishes.
The Canadian Rockies
…The prospect sang in him. John Abell would think him a fool. He didn’t care what John Abell thought.

After not too hard a day doing not too much—although anyone who heard him talking about it might conclude he’d been at slave labor since he tumbled out of his bunk—Sam Carsten lined up for evening chow call.

“We been out here a long time, wherever the devil ‘here’ is,” he said. “I want to get back to Honolulu, spend some of the money I’ve earned. I can feel it burnin’ a hole in my pocket while I’m standing here.”

“Yeah, well, if it gets loose, it can come to me,” Vic Crosetti said. “I got one pocket in every set of dungarees lined with asbestos, just for money like that.”

Carsten snorted. So did everybody else who heard Crosetti. The sailor in front of him, a big, rangy fellow named Tilden Winters, said, “Wish my stomach had a pocket like that. The slop they’ve been giving us the past few days, I wouldn’t feed it to a rat crawling up the hawser.”

“You tried feedin’ it to a rat crawling up the hawser, he’d crawl back down—rats aren’t stupid,” Carsten said. That got a laugh, too, but it was kidding on the square. The
Dakota
had indeed been out on patrol a long time, and gone through just about all the fresh food with which she’d left port. Sam went on, “Some of the things the cooks come up with—”

“And some of the things the purchasing officers bought, figuring we’d be stupid enough to eat ’em,” Winters added. “That salt beef yesterday tasted like it had been in the cask since the Second Mexican War, or maybe since the War of Secession.”