Walk in Hell (62 page)

In a thoughtful tone of voice, Conkling went on, “Of course, this here is a
little
shark. That’s why we need to be able to run so damn fast: to get away from the big sharks on the other side.”

“Yeah,” Enos said again. He looked out across the endless sweep of the Atlantic once more. That was no idle sightseeing—far from it. Spotting smoke on the horizon—or, worse, a periscope perilously close—might mean the difference between finishing the cruise and sliding under the waves as smoking refuse. “The limeys are out there looking for us, too.”

“You bet your ass they are, chum,” Conkling said. “They don’t want us running guns to the micks. They don’t want it in a really big way. If they can, they’re gonna keep us from doing it.”

“I know about micks,” Enos said. “Coming out of Boston, I’d damn well better know about micks. If the ones on our side of the ocean can’t stand England, what about all the poor bastards over there, living right next to it? No wonder they rose up.”

“No wonder at all, at all,” Conkling said, winking to make the brogue he’d put on seem funnier. He set a finger by the side of his nose. “And no wonder the good old Kaiser and us, we all got to give ’em as big a hand as we can.”

“Hell of a mess over there, if half what you read in the papers is true,” George said, though that was by no means guaranteed. “Shooting and sniping and bombs on the bridges and the Ulstermen massacring all the Catholics they can catch and the Catholics giving it right back to ’em and more limeys tied down there every day, sounds like.”

“England’s got to do it.” Now Andy Conkling made himself sound serious, as if he were a Navy Department bigwig back in Philadelphia. “They let the Irish go and we or the Germans put men in there, that’s curtains for the King, and they know it damn well.”

“
I
don’t know it,” Enos said. “The Kaiser can’t supply soldiers in Ireland. When the Germans send guns to the Irishmen, they have to do it by submarine. And look at us, sneaking in like we’re going to bed with somebody else’s wife. Don’t suppose we can go at it any other way, not in England’s back yard.”

“Say you’re right,” Conkling replied. “I don’t think so, but say you are. How come England’s making such a big to-do over something that can’t happen?”

“A lot of times people make a big to-do over things that didn’t happen.” For about the hundredth time, George wished he hadn’t had to tell Sylvia where he’d been going when the
Punishment
was wrecked.
I was drunk when I went and I was drunk when I told her,
he thought.
That tells me I shouldn’t get drunk
. She still blamed him for what he hadn’t done. She probably wouldn’t have been much angrier if he had gone and done it, which made part of him wish he had. Only part, though: Mehitabel, looked back on in memory rather than at with desire, wasn’t much.

Smoke poured from the
Ericsson
’s four stacks. George thought the design was ugly and clumsy, but nobody cared what a sailor thought. The destroyer picked up speed, fairly leaping over the ocean. “Getting close to wherever we’re going,” Conkling remarked.

“Yeah,” George answered. Nobody bothered telling sailors much of anything, either. Ireland the crew knew, but only a handful knew where they’d stand off the coast of the Emerald Isle.

Officers and petty officers went up and down the deck. “Be alert,” one of them said. “We need every pair of eyes we’ve got,” another added. A third, a grizzled CPO, growled, “If we hit a mine on account of one of you didn’t spot it, I’ll throw the son of a bitch in the brig.”

That drew a laugh from Conkling, and, a moment later, after he’d worked it through, one from Enos as well. He said, “If they’ve laid mines, how the devil
can
we spot ’em, going as fast as we are? The monitor I was on just crawled along the Mississippi, and we had a sweeper go in front of us when we thought the Rebs had mined the river.”

“Turtles,” Conkling said again. That didn’t answer George’s question. After a few seconds, he realized the question wasn’t going to get answered. That probably meant you couldn’t spot mines very well when you were going full speed ahead, an imperfectly reassuring idea.

“Land ho!” somebody shouted. George stared eastward. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes he saw a smudge on the horizon too big for a smoke plume and too steady to be a cloud. After a moment, he realized that, if he could see land, people on land could also see the
Ericsson
. Someone might be tapping on a wireless key or cranking a telephone even as he stood on the deck, in which case the boat would have visitors soon.

Moved by that same thought, Andy Conkling murmured, “The limeys on shore’ll take us for one of their own. Always have before.” Whether that was expectation or mere pious hope, George didn’t know. He did know it was his hope, pious or not.

“Landing parties to the boats,” a petty officer shouted. Enos hurried to the davits. He had more practice in small boats than most of the men aboard the
Ericsson
, and less experience on the destroyer herself. That made him a logical man for the landing party.

Each boat had a small gasoline engine in the stern, and each was packed with crates that bore no markings whatsoever. Enos scrambled up into a boat. “Steer between Loop Point and Kerry Head,” the petty officer told him and his five comrades. “Ballybunion’s where you’re going, on the south side of Shannon-mouth past the lighthouse. You’ll know the place by the old castle—a big, square, gray, ugly thing, I’m told, not hardly what you think of when
castle
goes through your head. Your chums’ll be waiting for you a little west of the castle. Good luck.”

Hoists lowered Enos’ boat and two more into the sea. They rode low in the water. Those crates weren’t stuffed with feathers. George got the motor going and steered for the distant land. “Jesus,” said one of the sailors in the boat with him, a big square-head named Bjornsen, “I feel naked in something this small.”

“Italians go fishing out of T Wharf back home every day in boats smaller than this,” George said.

“Crazy damn dagos,” Bjornsen muttered, and fell silent.

“Should have taken along a line and some hooks,” Enos said. “Might have brought back something the cooks could have fried for our supper.” He peered down into the green-gray sea. “Wonder what they have in the way of fish over here.”

That sparked another couple of sentences from Bjornsen: “Fish is one thing. I just hope they haven’t got any cooked goose.”

Loop Point boasted a lighthouse. Enos hoped nobody was staring down from it with a pair of field glasses. If somebody was staring down from it with a pair of field glasses, he hoped his boat and the two chugging along behind it looked enough like little local fishing boats to draw no notice.

The land was low and muddy and not particularly green, in spite of Ireland’s fabled reputation. Here and there, George spotted stone houses with turf roofs. They looked little and cramped and uncomfortable, a small step up from a sodbuster shack out on the prairie. He wouldn’t have wanted to live in any of them.

A petty officer named Carl Sturtevant had a map. “There’s the Cashen River inlet,” he said, pointing to a stream that, as far as George was concerned, wasn’t big enough to deserve to be a river. “A couple-three miles to Ballybunion.”

Ballybunion Castle had, at some time in the distant past, had part of one wall blown out of it, making it worthless as a fortification. Enos saw it only in the distance. Closer, some men were waving cloth caps to signal to the boats. “There they are,” he said happily.

“Yeah, those should be our boys,” Sturtevant agreed. “If those ain’t our boys, we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“Shit, if the limeys were wise to us, they wouldn’t waste time with no ambush,” said Bjornsen, a born optimist. “They’d haul a field piece out behind a haystack, wait till we got close, and blow us so high we’d never come down.” He glanced at those anonymous crates. “One hit would do the job up brown, I calculate.”

The men in baggy tweeds came trotting toward the boats. Out from behind a haystack came not a British field gun but several carts. “We’ve got more toys here than they can haul away in those,” George said as his boat beached.

“That’s their worry,” Sturtevant said. He and the other sailors, Enos among them, started unloading the crates.

“God bless you,” one of the Irishmen said. His comrades were lugging the Americans’ presents to the carts. He had a present himself: a jar with a cork in it. “Have a nip o’ this, lads.”

Quickly, the jar went from sailor to sailor. The whiskey tasted different from what George was used to drinking, but it was pretty good. He took a long pull. When he swallowed, he felt as if he’d poured lava down his gullet. The Irishmen didn’t water it to make it stretch further, as bartenders were in the habit of doing.

Wise in the ways of the sea, the Irishmen helped the sailors shove the boats back into the water, some calling thanks in brogues so thick, Enos could barely make them out. Free of the crates, the boats bobbed like corks. He headed out to sea once more, out toward the
Ericsson
.

“How about that?” Sturtevant said. “We just bit the King of England right in the ass.”

“Now all we have to do is see whether we got away with it,” George said. He wished the boat would go faster.

“Will you
look
at that crazy son of a bitch!” Vic Crosetti burst out.

Sam Carsten looked. The Sandwich Islander in question was indeed crazy, as far as he could tell. The fellow was skimming over the waves toward shore standing upright on a plank maybe nine or ten feet long and a foot and a half or two feet wide.

“Why the devil doesn’t he fall off and break his fool neck?” Sam said. “You wouldn’t even think a monkey could do that, let alone a man.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Crosetti said. “But I ain’t gonna let him hear me call him a monkey. He’d break me in half.” That was undoubtedly true. The surf-rider, who came up onto the beach with the plank on his head, was a couple of inches above six feet and muscled like a young god, which was all the more evident because he wore only a dripping cotton loincloth dyed in bright colors.

“Hey, pal,” Carsten said, and tossed him a dime. “That’s a hell of a ride you had there.” Crosetti coughed up a dime, too.

“Thank you both very much, gentlemen,” the fellow said. Like a fair number of his people, he talked like an educated Englishman, which made it hard to treat him like a nigger. His skin was only a couple of shades darker than Crosetti’s, anyhow.

“Where did you learn to do that, anyway?” Sam asked. The moment the words were out of his mouth, he realized he’d been stupid. Too late to do anything about it then, of course. That was the way the world worked.

The native laughed at him. It wasn’t a snotty laugh, it was a friendly laugh: maybe because the surf-rider was a friendly guy, maybe because he knew better than to get himself in trouble squabbling with the U.S. Navy. Both, Sam judged. The fellow said, “Having grown up here in Honolulu with the sea as my neighbor, so to speak, it was a sport I acquired as a boy. I confess I can see how surprising it might appear to those born in other climes.”

“Other climes, yeah,” Carsten said, while Vic Crosetti did his best, which wasn’t any too good, to keep from snickering. As always, every inch of Sam’s flesh the sun touched was cooked red and juicy.

“How come you talk so damn fancy?” Crosetti asked.

“This is how English was taught to me,” the Sandwich Islander said with another shrug. “Since you Americans came here, I have learned the language may be spoken with a number of different accents.”

“Haven’t heard anybody here who’s got quite as much mush in his mouth as you do,” Crosetti said. Was he looking for a fight in spite of denying it before? He hadn’t had that much to drink yet; he and Sam had only just come on leave from the
Dakota
.

The surf-rider sighed. “You must understand, gentlemen, that under the previous administration my father was assistant minister for sugar production, thus enabling me to acquire rather better schooling than most of my contemporaries.”

Sam needed a moment to realize that
under the previous administration
meant
when the British ran the show
. He needed another moment to realize something else. “Your father was assistant what-do-you-call-it, and you took our dimes? Christ on His cross, I bet you can buy and sell both of us and hardly even notice you’ve done it.”

“It may be so, but, for one thing, we Hawaiians—we prefer that to Sandwich Islanders, if it matters to you—have discovered expediency to be the wiser course in dealing with the occupying authorities. Had I refused your money, you might have thought I was insulting you, with results unpleasant for me.” The fellow’s smile revealed large, gleaming white teeth. “And besides, you both chose to reward me for my skill out of what I know to be your small pay. Especially in wartime, acts of kindness and generosity should not be discouraged, lest they disappear altogether off the face of the earth.”

“Whew!” Carsten couldn’t remember the last time anybody had done that much explaining. “You ought to be a chaplain, uh—”

“John Liholiho, at your service.” The surf-rider’s bow could have been executed no more smartly had he been wearing top hat, cutaway, and patent-leather shoes rather than gaudy loincloth and bare feet. “And with whom have I had the pleasure of conversing?”

Carsten and Crosetti gave their names. Crosetti plucked at Sam’s sleeve, whispering, “Listen, do you want to spend the time chewing the fat with this big galoot, or do you want to get drunk and get laid?”

“We got a forty-eight, Vic—don’t have to be back on board ship till day after tomorrow,” Sam answered, also in a low voice. “God knows it’s easy to find a saloon and a piece of ass in this town, but when are you going to run across another real live aristocrat?”

“Ahh, you want to be a schoolteacher when you grow up,” Crosetti snarled in deeply unhappy tones. But he didn’t leave. He hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his tropical white bell-bottoms and waited to see whether Sam could make standing on the beach banging his gums with a native more interesting than a drunken debauch.