Walk in Hell

XII

Jonathan Moss peered down at the battlefield in dismay. The advance through Ontario toward Toronto had been slow and brutally expensive, but it had been a continuous advance. One enemy defensive line after another had been stormed and overwhelmed. Now, for the first time, American troops were in headlong, desperate retreat. From the air, they looked like ants fleeing a small boy’s shoe.

That was, in effect, what they were. A handful of bigger shapes moved on the ground, grinding through American barbed wire and into the U.S. trenches. “Son of a bitch,” Moss said, and the wind blew his words away. “The limeys and Canucks have barrels of their own.”

They looked different from American barrels, of which he’d seen one or two. He flew lower for a better look, figuring that the more he could put in his report, the better it would be. That battalions of American infantrymen were getting much more intimately acquainted with the barrels advancing on them than he could in an aeroplane never once crossed his mind.

The lower he flew, the stranger the enemy barrels looked. They were forward-leaning rhomboids, with tracks going all the way around the outside of their hulls. He wondered why the Canucks-or was it the limeys? — had settled on such a stupid design till he saw a barrel climb almost vertically out of a trench into which it had fallen. However odd the setup seemed, it had its merits.

Instead of mounting a cannon in the nose like U.S. barrels, the ones currently pushing back the American infantry carried two, one on each side, mounted in sponsons whose design-if not the actual pieces of forged iron themselves-had been taken from the secondary armament of warships. Some of the barrels mounted machine guns in one or both sponsons instead of cannon.

“I wonder whose are better, theirs or ours,” Moss said. He had no way to tell at the moment. American barrels still being thin on the ground, and used mostly to spearhead long-planned attacks, none was anywhere nearby to challenge the machines the enemy was hurling at the poor bastards down in the trenches.

Moss dove on the barrels, machine gun blazing. He walked his tracers across one, another, a third. As far as he could tell, they did the massive machines no harm. He cursed himself for a fool. American barrels were armored to hold out enemy machine-gun fire. Whatever you could say about the Canadians and the British, they weren’t stupid. They’d do unto the USA as they’d been done by themselves.

He cursed his stupidity for another reason as well. The advancing foe loosed a storm of lead at his Martin one-decker. Ground fire had shot him down once already. Now again he heard the thrumming pop of bullets tearing through canvas.

Clang! That bullet hadn’t torn through canvas-it had hit something metal. His eyes flicked over the instrument panel. Everything looked all right. If he was lucky, the bullet had ricocheted off the side of the engine block without breaking anything. If he wasn’t lucky, he’d find out soon enough-most likely at the moment he could least afford to.

That clang, though, was an urgent reminder that he couldn’t afford to linger indefinitely down here. He pulled back on the stick. The nose of his fighting scout rose.

As Moss gained altitude, Tom Innis made his own firing run on the advancing enemy. Perhaps profiting from his flightmate’s experience, he didn’t try to shoot up the barrels. Men were always more vulnerable. Banking toward the American lines-or what had been the American lines before the attack-Moss watched men in khaki dive for cover. He whooped with glee and shook his fist in the slipstream.

But not all the British and Canadians tried to shelter themselves from Innis’ gun. They shot back at him as ferociously as they had at Moss. And a streak of smoke began streaming back from Tom’s engine cowling.

“Get out of there!” Moss shouted-uselessly, of course. “Get out of there while you can!” He looked around for Dud Dudley and Phil Eaker-they’d have to shepherd Innis back toward the aerodrome. He’d be a sitting bird if the Canadians or British pounced on his crippled bus.

He swung the one-decker back toward the west. The smoke wasn’t getting better. It was getting worse. “Climb, damn you!” Moss yelled to him, as if he could hear. The more altitude he gained, the farther he’d be able to glide when his engine quit. Moss knew all about that, the hard way.

Innis had to know it, too. But the Martin didn’t get any higher off the deck. The only reason for that, Moss figured, was that it couldn’t get any higher off the deck. And that meant his flightmate was in trouble.

Moss bared his teeth in an anguished grimace-it wasn’t just smoke streaming back from the engine now, it was flame, too. The slipstream blowing in Moss’ face made it hard for him to close his mouth again. The slipstream also blew the flames back toward Tom Innis.

He beat at them with his fist and arm. They spread faster than he could knock them down. “Land it!” Moss screamed. “Land it, God damn you!” He wasn’t cursing his friend. He was cursing fate, without a doubt the most dreadful fate any airman could face. Better to yank out your pistol and put one through your head than go down in a burning crate, as far as he was concerned.

That was especially true if you were going down in a burning crate from, say, fifteen thousand feet. If you were only a couple of hundred feet off the ground when your aeroplane caught fire, you had a chance to put it down and get the hell out before you roasted, too.

You had a chance…. The trouble was, every yard of territory here abouts was as cratered as the surface of the moon: the USA had had to blast the Canucks off the land before advancing through it, and then, even after having had it taken from them, the Canadians and the limeys had shelled it to a faretheewell to make sure the Americans didn’t enjoy owning it.

With a healthy aeroplane, Tom Innis would have had more choices. Of course, with a healthy aeroplane, he wouldn’t have needed to land in the first place. He did the best he could, steering for a meadow that still had some green grass mingled with the brown of earth thrown up from shell blasts.

“Come on. Come on,” Moss whispered, his hand trying to move on the joystick as if he were landing his own aeroplane. Despite smoke and flames and what had to be mortal fear, Innis got the Martin down. You didn’t need much in the way of ground to kill all the speed and hop out. “Come on,” Moss said again as he buzzed overhead. “Taxi, taxi…”

The Martin nosed down into a shell hole and flipped over. It kept right on burning. Nobody came out of it. Nobody was going to come out. Moss knew that. If the fire hadn’t killed Tom, getting the engine and machine gun slammed back into his chest would have done the job.

Infantrymen in green-gray ran toward the crash. Moss and his flightmates kept circling above it. Some of the infantrymen, their faces small pale ovals, looked up at them and shook their heads. No luck. It was over.

Moss felt empty inside as he flew back toward the aerodrome. It could have been me echoed in his mind again and again. It nearly had been him, not so long before. What was the difference between the way he’d put his damaged aeroplane down and how Tom Innis had done it? Luck, nothing more. You didn’t like to think you were alive for no better reason than dumb luck. Was he an ace by dumb luck, too?

When only three returned where four had set out, the mechanics on the ground didn’t need a handbook to figure out what had happened. “What went wrong?” one of them asked quietly. Dud Dudley was the flight leader. That meant he had the delightful job of telling them.

The surviving fliers went into Shelby Pruitt’s tent. The squadron commander looked up from his paperwork. His mouth twisted. “Dammit,” he said, and then, mastering himself, “All right, give me the details.”

Dudley did that, too. When he was through, Moss spoke of the enemy barrels spreading havoc through the U.S. lines. That had seemed the most important news in the world when he’d spotted them. Now he had to flog his memory to come up with details.

Hardshell Pruitt took notes. He had to be a professional about the business of slaughter, too. He asked his questions, both about Innis’ demise and about the barrels. Then he said, “All right, boys. I don’t expect the three of you will be doing any flying tomorrow. Don’t worry about morning roll call, either, come to that. You’ll be recorded as present. Dismissed.”

If that wasn’t an order to head for the officers’ club and get smashed, it might as well have been. Moss would have headed there anyway. Dudley and Eaker matched him stride for stride.

News traveled fast through the aerodrome. When the Negro behind the bar saw them come in, he set a bottle of whiskey, a corkscrew, and three tumblers on the bar, nodded, and said not a word. It was almost as if he stood at the bedside of a patient whose chances weren’t good.

As suited his station as flight leader, Dud Dudley carried the bottle. Moss picked up the glasses. That left the corkscrew for Eaker, who brought it over to the table as if glad to have something to do.

Dudley used the corkscrew, tilted the bottle, and poured all the glasses full. “Well, here’s to Tom,” he said, and drained his without taking it from his lips. When it was empty, he let out a long sigh. “I always thought the ornery son of a bitch would be doing this for me, not the other way round.”

“Yeah.” The whiskey burned in Moss’ throat, and in his stomach. He could feel it climbing to his head. “He went out the way you’d figure, if he was ever going to go. He wanted to hit the Canucks and limeys one more lick.”

“That’s a fact.” Dudley filled the tumblers again. “He was a wolf when he drove a bus, nothing else but. Never saw a man who just aimed himself at the enemy and fired himself off like that.”

“Best straight-out aggressive pilot I ever saw,” Moss agreed. “And Luther was the best technical flier I ever saw. And they’re both dead and we’re alive, and what the hell does that say about the way the world works?”

“It’s a damn shame,” Eaker said. The whiskey was already slurring his speech, but he attacked the second glass as single-mindedly as Tom had ever shot up a target. “Not fair. Not fair.”

He’d joined the flight as Luther Carlsen’s replacement. Now another set of personal goods would have to be cleared from the tent. Somebody else new would be sleeping on Innis’cot. They’d have to point Tom out in the pictures on the wall and explain what kind of a man he’d been. It wouldn’t be easy, any of it.

“God damn the Canucks, anyhow,” Moss said. “If they’d just rolled over when the war started, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”

“That’s right,” Eaker said. “Then we could have thrown everything we’ve got at the goddamn Rebs, and that would be the war over and done with, right there.”

“Yeah, and if the Russians hadn’t invaded Germany when things got started, France would have gone down the drain and Kaiser Bill would have won his war, too,” Moss said. “But instead, we’ve got-this.”

He waved a hand to encompass this. It was the hand holding the glass of whiskey. Fortunately, he’d already drunk most of it. A little spilled on the table and on his trouser leg, but not much. He started to pick up the bottle to fill the tumbler once more. “It’s empty,” Dud Dudley said.

“You’re right. It is.” Moss stared at it. “How did it get empty so fast?” Before he could get up and do anything about that, the bartender brought over a fresh bottle. Moss nodded. His neck felt loose. “That’s better.”

“How did it get empty so fast?” Eaker echoed. He sounded even more surprised than Moss had, as if there weren’t the slightest connection between his stumbling speech and that poor dead bottle.

“It got empty the same way we did,” Moss said. “It got empty the same way the whole stupid world did.” Rapidly getting drunk as he was, he couldn’t tell whether that was foolish maundering or profound philosophy. The next day, hung over and wishing he was dead, he couldn’t tell, either, and the day after that, climbing into his one-decker for another flight above the trenches, he still didn’t know.

Night lay like a cloak over the Bonefish. “Ahead one quarter,” Roger Kimball called from his perch atop the conning tower.

“Ahead one quarter-aye aye, sir,” answered Ben Coulter, the helmsman, his voice floating up the hatchway to the skipper.

“If we bring this off, sir-” Tom Brearley breathed.

Kimball made a sharp chopping motion with his right hand, cutting off his exec. “We are going to bring this off,” he said. “No ifs, ands, or buts. I don’t care how many mines the damnyankees have laid in Chesapeake Bay, I don’t care how many shore guns they’ve got watching from Maryland. We are going to pay them a visit. If they aren’t glad to see us, too damn bad.”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley said, the only thing he could say under the circumstances. After a few seconds, he went on, “It’s a shame the USA pushed down so far toward Hampton Roads.”

“You’re right about that,” Kimball said. “If we were holding onto both sides of the mouth of the Bay as tight as we ought to…Things’d look a lot better if that was so, I tell you.”

There were, at the moment, any number of ways in which the war could have looked better from the Confederate point of view. Kimball wasted little time worrying about them. They’d given him the job of penetrating as far up the Chesapeake Bay as he could and doing as much damage as he could once he got there, and he aimed to follow his orders to the letter.

Softly, under his breath, he let out a snort. “As if they’d hand this assignment to Ralph Briggs.”

“Sir?” his executive officer said.

“Never mind, Tom,” Kimball answered. “Woolgathering, that’s all. And maybe there’s more to old Ralph than I give him credit for, anyway.”

He’d never expected to see Briggs back in the CSA till the war ended, not when he’d had his submersible torpedoed out from under him and been fished out of the drink by the damnyankees who did him in. But Briggs had managed to break out of the prisoner-of-war camp where they’d stowed him and to make it through enemy lines (or rather, to make it through some country so broken, it had no real front line) and back into Confederate territory. If he could run a submarine as well as he’d run his own escape, he might yet make a captain to be reckoned with.

Tom Brearley coughed, calling Kimball’s attention back to the here-and-now. “Sir, we’re passing between Smith Island and Crisfield.”

“Thank you, Tom,” Kimball said. “I guess we’ll have to start paying attention, then, won’t we?” Even in the midnight darkness, his grin and Brearley’s answering one were broad and white.

The USA had run steel-mesh nets from Point Lookout on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay over to Smith Island, and then again from the island to Crisfield on the Bay’s eastern shore, precisely to keep Confederate raiders like the Bonefish from coming up and making nuisances of themselves in the Bay’s upper reaches. They backed up the nets with minefields and patrol boats.

From everything the Confederacy had been able to learn, though, the damnyankees had concentrated their efforts on the wider stretch of water west of Smith Island. Their ruling assumption seemed to have been that nobody was crazy enough to try to run a boat through Tangier Sound. Up at the northern end of the sound, only a mile or two of water separated the mainland from Bloodsworth Island. The nets would tangle a submersible that dove, and the guns would put paid to one that didn’t.

Kimball whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Do I look like a crazy man to you, Tom?” he asked.

“No more so than usual-sir,” Brearley answered, which made Kimball laugh out loud.

“Best way to run through the nets,” he said, “is to take ’em on the surface and slide through halfway between two buoys.” He peered through his clandestinely imported German binoculars, trying to spot the buoys to which the nets were attached, and laughed again. “This is a trick we’ve learned from the Huns, mind: it’s how they slip through the English obstacles in the Channel.”

Brearley didn’t have binoculars, but he did have sharp eyes. “There, sir!” He pointed ahead and to starboard. Sure enough, a buoy bobbed there in the light chop.

Kimball swept the binoculars to port till he found the next buoy supporting the net. He grunted in satisfaction. “Won’t even have to change course,” he said, and then called down the hatch: “All ahead full!”

“All ahead full-aye aye, sir!” The diesels that powered the Bonefish roared as the submarine sped up. Kimball hoped they didn’t roar so loud as to draw the attention of guns and searchlights on the shore or on Smith Island. His lips pulled back from his teeth. Maybe the Yanks weren’t so far wrong when they figured only a crazy man would try Tangier Sound.

“Through!” Brearley said, his voice rising in triumph. Kim-ball felt triumphant himself, with one set of buoys behind him.

At his order, the diesels throttled back. Now that he was in the Sound, the trick, he figured, was to act as if he owned the place. “All right, we’ve got the minefield coming up next,” he said. “We have to steer along the chain of islands here, right close to shore. We’ll be in good shape then.”

If the damnyankees hadn’t done any minelaying since the CSA got their latest reports, and if no mines had come loose and drifted into her path, the Bonefish would be in good shape. Kim-ball had to take the channel slowly, though, to give himself the chance to stop and withdraw if he or a sailor at the bow spotted a spiked sphere bobbing in the sea. That meant the submersible hadn’t passed the Bloodsworth Island gap by dawn.

“Shall we dive, sir, and spend the day on the bottom?” Brearley asked. “That won’t be much fun, but-”

“We’ll do nothing of the sort,” Kimball declared. “I want you to take down the naval ensign, Mr. Brearley, and go to the flag locker for-”

“A U.S. flag, sir?” the exec said in some alarm. “Going under false colors is-”

“Technically legal, if we run up the true ones before we start to fight,” Kimball said. “But that’s not what I want, Mr. Brearley. I want you to replace the naval ensign with the national flag. And then I intend to go through the channel as if I had every right to do so. I’ll bet you a Stonewall the damnyankees see what they expect to see, not one thing more.”

He wasn’t betting a five-dollar Confederate goldpiece. He was betting his life and the lives of the boat’s complement. But Tom Brearley, once he got the idea, didn’t argue any more. Down came the naval ensign, which, like the Confederate battle flag on land, displayed St. Andrew’s cross in blue on red. Both looked as they did for the same reason: the CSA’s Stars and Bars too closely resembled the USA’s Stars and Stripes for them to be readily distinguished at any distance. Normally, that confusion was dangerous. Every once in a while, it could be exploited.

Flying the Stars and Bars, the Bonefish made for the narrow passage between Bloodsworth Island and Maryland’s eastern mainland. Kimball made no effort to avoid being seen. On the contrary. He sailed along as if he had every right in the world to be where he was. Field glasses were surely trained on him from the land. Guns could have been, at a moment’s notice.

No one fired. He crossed the net as he had the one before, but with even greater panache. “This is astonishing, sir,” Tom Brearley breathed.

Kimball shrugged. “They see a submersible out in the open. They look at the flag. They see red, white, and blue. Nobody’d be stupid enough to do what we’re doing. And so-”

He looked north, toward the mainland. He saw a few gun positions, close by the shore, and there were surely others he didn’t see farther inland, ones mounting bigger guns. The horizon dipped and swooped as he swung the field glasses around to examine Bloodsworth Island. The day was rapidly lightening. He could see men in white U.S. uniforms close by the edge of the sea. He waved in their direction. One of them was peering at him with field glasses, too. The fellow waved back.

“You know what it’s like?” Kimball said, chuckling. “It’s like seducing a woman.” He thought of Anne Colleton; for a moment, warmth tingled through his loins. Then he returned to the subject at hand: “You let her see that there’s any doubt in your mind about what you’re going to do, all that happens is, you get your face slapped for your trouble. But if she’s sure you’re sure, hell, her corset’s off and her legs are open before she worries about whether it’s right or wrong or purple.”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley said, nothing but reverence in his voice. They were past the nets now. The sun came up, red as fire in the east. All the guns that could have turned them to crumpled, smoking metal lay silent, silent.

“Go below, Tom,” Kimball said, following his exec down into the Bonefish a moment later. He dogged the hatch after him. “Take us down to periscope depth,” he ordered Ben Coulter, his voice relaxed and easy. To the rest of the crew, he went on, “We’ll go down nice and slow. No rush about submerging now. It’s going to be like we’re putting on our show for the damnyankees out there-this is how a submersible dives, boys.”

“Of course I’ll always love you, darling,” Tom Brearley said, sounding very much like a successful seducer sliding out the door.

Kimball laughed out loud and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re learning, Tom. You’re learning.” The sailors didn’t quite know what their officers were talking about, but it sounded dirty. That was plenty to get them laughing, too.

The Bonefish slid away from the dangerous narrow waters of Tangier Sound, out into Chesapeake Bay. Here behind the nets and the minefields, everything was clear. Kimball saw plenty of fishing boats through the periscope, but didn’t waste fish on them or rise to sink them with gunfire. He wanted bigger prey-he hadn’t taken these risks for fishermen.

And he got his reward. Steaming along came an ocean monitor, a bigger version of the river craft the USA and CSA both used: basically, one battleship turret mounted on a raft. It couldn’t get out of its own way, but in these confined waters was deadly dangerous to anything those big guns could reach. Sneaking up on it was hardly tougher than beating a two-year-old at football.

The first torpedo, perfectly placed just aft of amidships, would have been plenty to sink the monitor. The second, a couple of hundred feet farther up toward the bow, made matters quick and certain. “Too easy, sir,” Brearley said as the long steel tube echoed with cheers.

“You gonna make us throw her back, then?” Kimball demanded.

“No, sir,” the exec answered. “Hell no, sir.” He didn’t ask how Kimball planned to extricate the Bonefish from Chesapeake Bay now that, belatedly, the Yankees knew she was there. He might have done that before, but not now. He figured Kimball would find a way.

I figure I will, too, Kimball thought. Getting it in is the tough part. Once you manage that, pulling out afterwards is easy.

Major Irving Morrell wondered why he in particular had been saddled with two officers from America’s allies. Maybe someone on the General Staff back in Philadelphia remembered his service there and reckoned he could show visiting firemen how the war was fought on this side of the Atlantic. And maybe, too, someone on the General Staff-Captain Abell came to mind, among other candidates-remembered his work there and hoped he would wreck his career once and for all by botching this assignment.

If Abell or someone like him had had that in mind, Morrell thought he would be disappointed. Though the German officer belonged to the Imperial General Staff, both he and his Austrian counterpart gave every sign of being good combat soldiers. They seemed very much at home squatting by a campfire, sketching lines in the dirt with a stick to improvise a map.

“I’m glad both of you understand my German,” Morrell said in that language. “We all study it at West Point, of course, but I’ve used it more for reading than speaking since.”

“It is not so bad, not so bad at all,” said Major Eduard Dietl, the Austrian of the duo: a dark man, thin to scrawniness, with an impressive beak of a nose. “Your teacher was a Bavarian, I would say.”

“Yes, that’s so,” Morrell agreed. “Captain Steinhart was born in Munich.”

“Here in the United States, I feel surrounded by Bavarians,” said the German officer, Captain Heinz Guderian. He was shorter and squatter than Dietl, with a round, clever face. He went on, “The U.S. uniform is almost the exact color of those the Bavarians wear.” His own tunic and trousers were standard German Imperial Army field-gray, a close match for Dietl’s pike-gray Austrian uniform. Neither differed much in cut from that which Morrell wore; the German uniform had served as the model for those of the other two leading Alliance powers.

Dietl sipped coffee from a tin cup. “This is such a-spacious land,” he said, waving his hand. “Oh, I know I think any land spacious after Heinz and I crossed the Atlantic by submersible, but the train ride across the USA and up into Canada to reach the front here…amazing.”

“He is right,” Guderian agreed. “West of Russia, Europe has no such vast, uncrowded sweeps of territory.”

“And these mountains.” Dietl waved again, now at the Canadian Rockies. “The Carpathians are as nothing beside them.” He spoke with the air of a man accustomed to comparing peaks one to another: unsurprising, since he wore the Edelweiss badge of a mountain soldier himself. Sighing, he went on, “Almost I wish the Italians had thrown away their neutrality. They’ve always wanted to; everyone knows it. But they never have dared. No nerve, damn them. Fighting in the Alps would be like this, I think.”

“Fighting is not a sport. Fighting is for a purpose,” Guderian said seriously. “The idea would be to break out of the mountains and into Venetia and Lombardy below-if there were a war, of course.”

Morrell thought that would be more than Austria-Hungary could manage, still fighting the Russians and the Serbs as she was. But he held his peace. Dietl struck him as a man like himself, happiest in the field. Maybe Guderian had worn red stripes on his trousers a little too long.

And then the German officer said, “Besides, you can’t conduct a proper pursuit in the mountains. Get around the enemy and smash him up-that’s what the whole business is about.” Morrell revised his earlier assessment.

Dietl said, “The problem of pursuit is the basic problem of this entire war. The foe retreats through territory not yet devastated, and toward his own railheads, while you advance over country that has been fought in, and away from your own sources of supply. No wonder we measure most advances in meters, not kilometers.”

“Barrels help this problem by making breakthroughs possible once more,” Guderian said.

“Barrels help, but they’re not enough, not by themselves,” Morrell said. “They’re too slow-how can you have a breakthrough at a slow walk? How can you outrun the retreating enemy when you’re not running? Once the barrels force a hole in the enemy’s defenses, we need something faster to go through the hole and create the confusion that really kills.”

Guderian smiled. “Some people would say cavalry is the answer.”

“Some people will say the earth is flat, too,” Morrell said. He made a quick sketch of a sailing ship falling off the edge. The German and Austrian observers laughed. He went on, “With machine guns and rifles, cavalry’s no answer at all. We need better machines, faster machines.”

“I can see why they called you to Philadelphia, Major,” Guderian said. “You have the mind of a General Staff officer. You impose yourself on the conditions around you; you do not let them impose themselves on you.”

“Is that what I do?” Morrell said, faintly bemused. He was a man without strong philosophical bent; his chief concern was to hit the enemy as hard as he could and as often as he could, until he didn’t need to hit him any more.

Someone on the Canuck side of the line had the same idea. Canadian artillery, which had been quiet for the previous several days, suddenly sprang to life. Morrell threw himself flat on the ground. So did Dietl. So did Guderian; he might have spent most of his time in amongst the maps, but he knew how to handle himself in the open air, too.

Along with the bombardment came a great crackle of rifle fire off to Morrell’s right. Trained on the British model, the Canucks made formidable riflemen. They were quick and accurate, and every shot of theirs counted. And, by the sound of what was going on over there, they had found the weak spot in Morrell’s line. He’d posted one company rather thinly over a long stretch of woods he’d reckoned almost impassable. The Canadians seemed intent on showing why almost was a word that didn’t belong in war-planners’ dictionaries.

Guderian and Dietl were both looking at him. All right, we have come into the field to observe the American Army and to observe this man: he could all but hear what they were thinking. He now finds himself in difficulty. How does he respond?

“Runners!” Morrell shouted, and the men came over to him: some running, some crawling along the ground, for shells were still dropping thick and fast. An American machine gun started banging away, there on the right, and he let out the briefest sigh of relief. That was where he’d posted Sergeant Finkel’s squad, and the Canadians would have a devil of a time shifting him if he didn’t feel like being shifted. And sure enough, shouts of dismay said the Canuck advance had suddenly run into a roadblock.

Morrell snapped orders: “Half of Captain Spadinger’s company to pull out of line and contain the damage. The same for the machine-gun company from Captain Hall’s company. The rest of the units not under immediate assault will counterattack, aiming to pinch off the neck of the Canadian advance. I will lead this counterattack personally.” The runners hurried away. Morrell smiled gaily at the observers. “Will you join me, gentlemen?”

Neither of them hesitated. Running doubled-over, ignoring his bad leg, Morrell got to Hall’s company bare moments after the runner he’d sent. The machine-gun men were already on their way off to the east, to shoot up any Canadians who burst out of those not quite impassable woods. Dietl and Guderian, both breathing hard, flopped into foxholes.

Captain Hall said, “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble holding them, sir. They can’t come too far.”

“Ich will nicht nur zu-” Morrell snarled in exasperation and switched from German to English: “I don’t want to hold them. I want to drive them back, to hurt them.” He pointed northeast.

“If their artillery is alert, they’ll slaughter us, sir,” Hall said.

“I don’t think they will be,” Morrell answered. They’d better not be. “They’ve got this bombardment laid on to cover an attack. Who’d be cuckoo enough to move forward when they’re putting pressure on us?” He didn’t give the company commander any chance to argue. He also didn’t give himself any chance to think twice. “Let’s go!” He scrambled to his feet and ran for the Canadian lines, Springfield in his hands.

His men followed, whooping like Red Indians. He’d gained them a couple of major advances toward Banff by all-out audacity; they were willing to believe he could buy them one more. For close to thirty seconds, the Canucks left behind in their trenches were too intent on their comrades’ push to pay much attention to what the Americans were doing off to the west. That was about fifteen seconds too long. Before a machine gun started mowing down the oncoming men in green-gray, they were within grenade range of its position. It fell silent. More grenades flew into the Canadian trenches. The Americans followed.

As Morrell leaped over the parapet, a Canadian aimed at him from point-blank range. He braced himself for another wound. Christ, not that leg again, he thought. I don’t want to be on crutches or in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. Blow my brains out and get it over with.

The Canuck fired. The bullet went wild, for the fellow in khaki had taken a wound of his own in the instant that he pulled the trigger. Morrell finished him with the bayonet, then looked over his shoulder to find Major Dietl there with a pistol in his hand. “Danke schon,” he said.

“Bitte,” the Austrian answered, with such Hapsburg formality that Morrell expected him to click his heels. He didn’t. He leaped down into the trench instead. Cleaning it of Canadians was the ugly business it always seemed to be. Dietl held his own. At one point, though, he observed, “These foes of yours are in greater earnest than the Russians and have discipline of a sort the Serbs have never imagined.”

“The Canadians are good soldiers,” Morrell agreed. “The Confederates, too, come to that.”

Having driven the Canucks back, his men turned their fire on the Canadian detachment that had gone ahead. Caught between two forces, some of the Canadians went down, some threw down their rifles and threw up their hands in surrender, and some, the hard cases, dug in among the pines and firs and spruces to make the Americans pay a high price for them.

Morrell paid the price, having made the cold-blooded judgment that he could afford it. When the fighting had died away to occasional rifle shots, the Americans were still holding the trenches from which the Canadian attacking party had jumped off. “Very nicely done,” Captain Guderian said. “You used the enemy’s aggressiveness against him most astutely.”

“Coming from an officer of the Imperial General Staff, that’s quite a compliment,” Morrell said.

“You have earned it, Major. It will be reflected in my report.”

“And mine,” Dietl agreed. Morrell grinned, more pleased with the day’s work itself than with the praise it had garnered, but not despising that, either. I wonder if favorable action reports from German and Austro-Hungarian observers cancel out the Utah fiasco, he thought, and looked forward to finding out.

Reggie Bartlett examined the trench line just outside of Duncan, Sequoyah, with something less than awe and enthusiasm. “Lord,” he said feelingly, “don’t they teach people around here anything about digging in?”

“You listen good, Bartlett,” said Sergeant Pete Hairston, his new squad leader. “Just on account of they gave you a pretty stripe on your sleeve for bustin’out o’the damnyankees’prisoner camp, that don’t mean you know everything there is to know. Where were you fighting before the Yankees nabbed you?”

“I was on the Roanoke front,” Bartlett answered.

Hairston’s lantern-jawed face, the face of a man who’d acquired three stripes on his own sleeve more by dint of toughness than any other military virtue, changed expression. More cautiously, he asked, “How long you put in there?”

“From a few weeks after the war started till the Yanks got me last fall,” Bartlett said with no small pride. Anybody who’d spent almost a year and a half fighting between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Alleghenies could hold his head high among soldiers the world over.

Hairston knew that, too. “Shitfire,” he muttered, “all the fighting in Sequoyah’s nothin’ but a football game in the park, you put it next to the clangin’ and bangin’ back there.” He hadn’t bothered asking about Reggie’s previous experience till now. After a moment’s thought, he went on, “But I reckon that’s why this here ain’t like you expected it would be. We ain’t got the niggers to dig all the fancy trenches like I hear tell they got back there, and even if we did, we ain’t got the soldiers to put in ’em.”

“I see that,” Bartlett said. “I surely do.”

It horrified him, too, though he saw no point in coming out and saying so. The sergeant was right-there weren’t enough trenches, not by his standards. A lot of what they called trenches here were only waist-deep, too, so you might not get shot while you crawled from one foxhole to another. Then again, of course, you might. There wasn’t that much barbed wire out in front of the lines to keep the U.S. troops away, either. And, as Hairston had said, there weren’t that many Confederate soldiers holding the position, such as it was.

The sergeant might have picked that thought out of Reggie’s mind. “Ain’t that many damnyankees up here, neither,” he said. “They put four or five divisions into a big push, reckon they’d be in Dallas week after next.” He laughed to show that was a joke, or at least part of a joke. “’Course, they ain’t got four or five spare divisions layin’ around with dust on ’em, any more’n we do. An’if they did, they’d use ’em in Kentucky or Virginia or Maryland, just like we would. This here’s the ass end o’ nowhere for them, same as it is for us.”

“Not quite the ass end of nowhere,” Reggie said, liking the sound of the phrase. “I saw those oil wells when I came up through Duncan.”

“Yeah, they count for somethin’, or the brass reckons they do, anyways,” Hairston admitted. “You ask me, though, you could touch a match to this whole goddamn state of Sequoyah, blow it higher’n hell, an’ I wouldn’t miss it one goddamn bit.”

On brief acquaintance with Sequoyah, Bartlett was inclined to agree with the profane sergeant. To a Virginian, these endless hot burning plains were a pretty fair approximation of hell, or at least of a greased griddle just before the flapjack batter came down. Somewhere high up in the sky, an aeroplane buzzed. Reggie’s head whipped round in alarm. For the briefest moment, half of him believed he wouldn’t see any man-made contraption, but the hand of God holding a pitcher of batter the size of Richmond.

Hairston said, “We’ll take you out on patrol tonight, start gettin’ you used to the way things are around here. It ain’t like Virginia, I’ll tell you that. Ain’t nothin’ like Georgia, neither.”

His voice softened. Reggie hadn’t been sure it could. He asked, “That where you’re from?”

“Yeah, I’m off a little farm outside of Albany. Hell.” The sergeant’s face clouded over. “Probably nothin’ left of that no more anyways. By what I hear tell, them niggers tore that part o’ the state all to hell and gone when they rose up. Bastards. You think about things, it ain’t so bad, not havin’ that many of ’em around.”

“Maybe not.” Reggie had been in the Yankee camp all through the Red Negro uprising. The U.S. officers had played it up, and the new-caught men had gone on and on about it, but it didn’t feel real to him. It was, he supposed, like the difference between reading about being in love and being in love yourself.

Hairston stuck his head out of the foxhole and looked around in a way that gave Bartlett the cold shivers. Do that on the Roanoke front and some damnyankee sniper would clean your ear out for you with a Springfield round. But nothing happened here. The sergeant finished checking the terrain, then squatted back down again. “Yanks are takin’it easy, same as us.”

“All right, Sarge.” Reggie shook his head. “I am going to have to get used to doing things different out here.” He didn’t think he’d ever get used to exposing any part of his precious body where a Yankee could see it when he wasn’t actually attacking.

As promised, Hairston took him out into no-man’s-land after the sun went down. No-man’s-land hereabouts was better than half a mile wide; he’d counted on a couple of hundred yards of it back in Virginia, but seldom more than that.

Going on patrol did have some familiar elements to it; he and his companions crawled instead of walking, and nobody had a cigar or a pipe in his mouth. But it was also vastly different from what it had been back in the Roanoke valley. For one thing, some of the prairie and farmland north of Duncan hadn’t been cratered to a faretheewell.

For another…“Doesn’t stink so bad,” Bartlett said in some surprise. “You haven’t got fourteen dead bodies on every foot of ground. Back in Virginia, seemed like you couldn’t set your hand down without sticking it into a piece of somebody and bringing it back all covered with maggots.”

“I’ve done that,” said Napoleon Dibble, one of the privates in the squad. “Puked my guts out, too, I tell you.”

“I puked my guts out, too, the first time,” Bartlett agreed. But it wasn’t quite agreement, not down deep. By the way Nap Dibble talked, he’d done it once. Reggie had lost track of how many times he’d known that oozy, yielding sensation and the sudden, stinking rush of corruption that went with it. By the time the damnyankees captured him, having it happen again hadn’t been worth anything more than a mild oath.

Something swooped out of the black sky and came down with a thump and a scrabble only a few yards away. Hissing an alarm, Reggie swung his rifle that way. To his amazement, Sergeant Hairston laughed at him. “Ain’t nothin’ but an owl droppin’ on a mouse, Bartlett. Don’t they got no owls up on the Roanoke front?”

“I don’t hardly remember seeing any,” Reggie answered. “They’ve got buzzards, and they’ve got crows, and they’ve got rats. Don’t hardly remember seeing mice-rats ran ’em out, I guess. Hated those bastards. They’d sit up on their haunches and look at you with those beady little black eyes, and you’d know what they’d been eating, and you’d know they were figuring they’d eat you next.” Napoleon Dibble made a disgusted noise. Ignoring him, Bartlett finished, “The one good thing about when the Yankees would throw gas at us was that it’d shift the rats-for a little while.”

“Gas,” Hairston said thoughtfully. “Haven’t seen that more than a time or two out here. Haven’t missed it any, neither, and that’s a fact. You run up against any of those what-do-you-call-’ems-barrels?”

“No, I’ve just heard about those, and seen ’em on a train after I got out of the Yankee camp,” Bartlett answered. “They hadn’t started using them by the time I got captured. They have ’em out here?”

“Ain’t seen any yet,” the sergeant said. “Like I told you, this is the ass end of the war. Those armored cars, now, I’ve seen some of those, but a trench’ll make an armored car say uncle.”

“Don’t like ’em anyways,” Nap Dibble said, to which the other members of the squad added emphatic if low-voiced agreement.

Not too far away-farther than the owl that had frightened Reggie, but not all that much-something started screaming. He froze. Was it a wounded man? A crazy man? A woman having a baby right out in the middle of no-man’s-land? “Coyote,” Sergeant Hairston explained laconically. “Scares you out of a year’s growth the first time you hear one, don’t it?”

“Lord, yes.” Reggie knew his voice was shaky. His heart pounded too fast for him to feel more than mildly embarrassed. Crazy coyotes were something he hadn’t had to worry about back on the Roanoke front.

And then, from up ahead, he heard a noise he did recognize: the metallic click of a bayonet against a rock. He stiffened and stared around for the nearest shell hole into which to dive. The other members of the patrol looked around, too, but not with the tight-lipped intensity they would have shown back in Virginia. Softly, Pete Hairston called, “That you, Toohey?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Who the hell else is it gonna be?” A Yankee voice came floating out of the night. The accent was different from the one Ralph Briggs had tried to get Reggie to learn, but it wasn’t like anything that had ever been heard in the CSA. Toohey went on, “Your damn artillery don’t ease up, you’re gonna run into a patrol where the sergeant don’t feel like doin’ any business ’cept shootin’ you Rebs.”

“Chance we take in this here line o’ work,” Hairston answered. “You got what you said you was gonna have?”

“Sure as hell do.” Something in a jug sloshed suggestively. Toohey went on, “What about youse guys?”

Several of the men in Hairston’s squad passed the sergeant their tobacco pouches. He went forward by himself and exchanged a few low-voiced words with the U.S. soldiers. When he came back, he didn’t have the tobacco any more, but he was carrying the jug.

The Yanks withdrew. They were pretty quiet, but not quiet enough to have kept star shells from going up on the Roanoke front and machine guns and mortars from chasing them back to their lines. Things were different out here. “Is that what I think it is, there in the jug?” Bartlett asked, pointing.

“Sure as hell is,” Hairston answered. “Hard to get popskull around these parts. All sorts of Indians here in Sequoyah, and they all got chiefs that hate the stuff. So what we do is, we swap smokes for it with the damnyankees: tobacco they got is so bad, it’s a cryin’ shame.”

Napoleon Dibble added, “We got to fight the sons of bitches, sure, but that don’t mean we can’t do a swap every now and then when we ain’t fightin’. Won’t change how the war turns out, one way or t’other.” He laughed a loud, senseless laugh; Reggie didn’t think he was very bright.

“I suppose you’re right,” Reggie said slowly. “But what does Lieutenant Nicoll-is that his name? — think about it?”

Hairston stared at him. The whites of the sergeant’s eyes glittered in the starlight. “You out of your mind, Bartlett? Who the devil you think set this deal up in the first place?”

Reggie didn’t say anything. He couldn’t think of anything to say. All he could do was try to figure out exactly what they thought the war was all about out here in the west.

“Here they come!” Chester Martin threw himself into a shelter dug into the forward wall of the trench a split second before the Confederate shells started landing. The earth shook. Fragments hissed through the air. He sniffed anxiously, wondering whether the Rebs were throwing gas and he needed to pull his mask on over his head. He didn’t think so.

He wasn’t the only one in the shelter. He was lying on top of Specs Peterson in a position that would have been a hell of a lot more enjoyable had Specs been a perfumed whore instead of a bad-tempered private who hadn’t been anywhere near soap and water any time lately.

“They’ve been shellin’us like bastards the past couple weeks,” Peterson bawled in his ear-not much, as sweet nothings went.

“Yeah, they-oof!” Martin’s rejoinder was rudely abridged when somebody dove in on top of him, making him the squashed meat in a three-man sandwich. Peterson, in the role of the lower piece of bread, didn’t much care for it, either. Everybody thrashed around till nobody was kneeing anybody too badly, at which point two more soldiers came scrambling into the hole in the ground. It couldn’t hold five men, but it did.

“Amazing how you can pack these shelters when it’s a choice between packing ’em and getting blown to cat’s meat out there,” said Corporal Paul Andersen, one of the latest arrivals.

“Yeah,” Martin said again. “Now what we got to do is, we got to synchronize our breathing. You know how the officers are always synchronizing their watches when we go over the top. If we all breathe in and out at the same time, maybe we all really can squeeze in here.”

“Hell, maybe the Rebs’ll drop a big one right on top of us,” Specs Peterson said. “Then we won’t have to worry about breathing at all no more.” Martin and Andersen stuck elbows in him, which had the twin virtues of giving them more room and making him shut up.

Martin took advantage of the extra room to draw a deep breath. “Like I was saying before half the division jumped on me, I figure the reason the Rebs are shelling us so hard is on account of they ain’t got no barrels. They’ve moved a hell of a lot of artillery forward to shoot at the ones we got when they come up-and to make life miserable for us poor bastards in between times.”

“Makes sense, Sarge,” Andersen said. “Wish it didn’t, but it does.” A big shell, a six-incher or maybe even an eight-, did land almost on top of the shelter then. Dirt rained down between the boards holding up the roof; some of the boards themselves cracked, with noises like rifle shots. That sent more dirt spilling down on the soldiers.

Can I claw my way out if I get buried? Martin wondered. Even inside the shelter, shielded from the worst of the blast, he felt his lungs trying to crawl out through his nose. Get too close to a big one and the blast would kill you without leaving a mark on your body.

With commendable aplomb, Andersen picked up where he’d left off: “We came up with the barrels, I thought that first morning we were going to win the war then and there. But even if the Rebs don’t have any, they’ve sure as hell figured out how to fight ’em. Same with gas earlier.”

“You notice, though,” Peterson said, “the Rebs ain’t makin’ many attacks these days, not like they were doin’ before we made it over to this side o’ the Roanoke. Costs us more when we got to go to them instead of the other way round.”

“We got what we came for,” Martin said. “We got the iron mines. ’Course, we can’t use ’em much, because their long-range guns still reach most of ’em. And we got the railroad, too. ’Course, they’ve already built new track further east and slid around the part of the valley we took away from ’em.”

“Ain’t it great when we’re winnin’ the damn war?” Andersen said.

That drew a profane chorus from the men stuffed into the shelter with him. A few minutes later, the Confederate barrage abruptly stopped. It didn’t do anything to ease Chester Martin’s mind. Sometimes the Rebs would really stop. Sometimes they’d stop long enough for people to come out of their shelters and then start up again to catch them in the open. And sometimes, no matter what Specs Peterson said, they’d send raiders over the top, hoping the U.S. soldiers would stay huddled in the bomb-proofs. What to do? For this shelter, it was his call. He was the sergeant here.

“Out!” he shouted. “They start shelling again, we jump back in.”

People spilled out. By the way things worked, Martin was the next to last one to make it out into the trench. Every muscle in his body twanged with tension. If the Rebs were going to open up again, it would be right about…now. When the moment passed without fresh incoming shells, he breathed a little easier.

Back behind the U.S. lines, artillery came to life, answering the Confederate barrage. “Let the big guns shoot at the big guns,” Paul Andersen said. “Long as they leave me alone, I don’t care, and that’s the God’s truth.”

“Amen.” Chester looked around the trenches and sighed. “Got us some spadework to do, looks like to me.” High explosive and steel and brass had had their way with the landscape, blowing big holes in the trenches, knocking down stretches of parapet and parados, and incidentally knocking a couple of vital machine-gun positions topsy-turvy.

Here and there, up and down the line, wounded men were shouting-some wounded men were screaming-for stretcher-bearers. Heading toward one of those shouting men, Martin rounded the corner of a firebay, stepped into a traverse, and was confronted by a man’s leg, or that portion of it from about the middle of the shin downward, still standing erect, foot in shoe, the rest of the man nowhere to be seen. A little blood-only a little-ran down from the wound to streak the puttee.

He’d seen too much, these past nearly two years. Put a man in a place where he grew acquainted with horror every day, and it ceases to be horrible for him. It becomes part of the landscape, as unremarkable as a dandelion puffball. He reached out with his own foot and kicked the fragment of humanity against the traverse wall so no one would stumble over it.

“Poor bastard,” Paul Andersen said from behind him. “Wonder who he was.”

“Don’t know,” Martin answered. “Whoever he was, he never knew what hit him. Hell of a lot of worse ways to go than that, and Jesus, ain’t we seen most of ’em?” About then, by the noise, a couple of other men came on the wounded soldier for whom they’d been heading. He’d found one of those worse ways.

Andersen sighed. “Yeah,” he said, and stood against the wall, a few feet away from the severed foot, to relieve himself. “Sorry,” he muttered as he buttoned his fly. “Didn’t feel like holding it till I got to the latrine. Damn shelling probably blew shit all over the place, anyway.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Chester Martin told him. “You got any makings, Paul? I’m plumb out.”

“Yeah, I got some.” The corporal passed him his tobacco pouch.

He rolled a cigarette in a scrap of newspaper, pulled out a brass lighter, flicked the wheel, and got the smoke going. “Ahh, thanks,” he said after a long drag. “Hits the spot.” He looked around. “Sort of feels the way it does after a big rainstorm, you know what I mean? Peaceful-like.”

“Yeah,” Andersen said again, quite unself-consciously. A couple of rifle shots rang out, but they were three, four hundred yards away: nothing to worry about. “Might as well finish taking stock of what they did to us this time.”

All things considered, the company had got off lucky. Only a couple of men had died, and most of the wounds were home-towners, not the sort where the fellow who’d taken them begged you to shoot him and put him out of his anguish, and where, if you did, nobody ever said a word about it to you afterwards. Martin had seen his share of wounds like that; talking with the other soldiers in his squad, he said, “You see one like that, it’s your share for a lifetime and then some.”

“Yeah.” Specs Peterson laughed. “You want to hear something stupid, Sarge? Back before the war started, I was thinkin’ about lettin’ my beard grow out, on account of I couldn’t stand the sight of blood when I nicked myself with a razor.”

“That’s pretty stupid, all right,” Martin agreed, which made Specs glare at him in what might have been mock anger and might have been real. He went on, “You too cheap to pay a barber to do it for you? Those boys, they make damn sure they don’t cut you.”

“Too cheap, hell,” Peterson came back. “Where you from, Sarge?”

“Toledo,” Martin answered. “You know that.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I forgot,” Peterson said. “All right, Toledo, that’s the big city. Me, I’m off a farm in the western part of Nebraska. The barber in the little country town, he was so drunk all the time, it’s a wonder he never cut anybody’s throat. And I was ten miles outside of town, and we ain’t never gonna have the money for a flivver. So how the hell am I supposed to get a barber to shave me?”

“Damned if I know,” Martin answered. “So blood doesn’t bother you any more, that right?”

Specs Peterson snorted. “What do you think?”

Martin inspected him. He was even filthier than he had been before the dive into the shelter, and had unkempt stubble sprouting on cheeks and chin. Frowning sadly, Martin said, “So why the hell haven’t you shaved any time lately?”

“I was going to this morning, Sarge, honest, but the Rebs started shelling us.” Behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, Peterson raised an eyebrow. “You may have noticed.”

“Oh, yeah.” Martin snapped his fingers. “You know, I knew something was goin’ on then, but I couldn’t quite remember what.” Paul Andersen threw a clod of dirt at him. In the trenches, though, it passed for wit.

The Dakota steamed out of Pearl Harbor. Standing on deck, Sam Carsten said, “You know somethin’, Vic? This ship puts me in mind of the old joke about the three-legged dog. The wonder is, she goes at all.”

“Yeah, well, I ain’t gonna argue with you, you know what I’m saying?” Vic Crosetti answered, scratching his hairy arm. “I’ll tell you something else, too. She’s as ugly as a three-legged dog right now.”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed, mournful for a couple of reasons. For one thing, if he’d scratched himself half as hard as Crosetti was doing, he’d have drawn blood from his poor, sunburned hide. For another, the Dakota really was ugly these days. “What she’s really like is a guy who took one in the trenches and he ends up with a steel plate in his head.”

“Got enough steel plates to eat a whole steel dinner off of,” Crosetti said, whereupon Carsten made as if to pick him up and fling him over the rail.

Bad pun aside, though, the description was accurate enough. Not all the damage the Dakota had taken in the Battle of the Three Navies was repaired; parties were still patching, strengthening, refurbishing. Some of the damage wouldn’t be fixed, probably, till the war was over. But the battleship could make twenty knots and fight, and the Japanese and the British hadn’t disappeared off the face of the earth. Ugly or not, jury-rigged or not, she was going back out on patrol.

“I just hope the steering holds us,” Carsten said.

Vic Crosseti’s bushy eyebrows went up and down. “Why the hell do you want that? Didn’t you think it was fun, charging the whole damn British fleet all by ourselves? Nobody else had the balls to try anything like that. The other guys, they stayed in line like good little boys and girls. You want to stand out from the crowd, is what you want to do.”

“When they shoot you if you stand out, it’s not as bully as it would be otherwise,” Carsten said. Crosetti laughed. Then he got busy in a hurry, swiping a rag against the nearest stretch of painted metal. Sam imitated him without conscious thought. If somebody near you started working for no obvious reason, he’d spotted an officer you hadn’t.

Commander Grady-the fat stripe where a thin one had been before got sewn onto his cuff after the Battle of the Three Navies-said, “Never mind the playacting, Carsten.” He sounded amused; as sailors knew the nasty ways in which officers’ minds worked, so officers had some clues about how sailors operated. Grady went on, “You come with me. I’ve got some real work for you.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Sam answered. As he followed the commander of the starboard secondary armament, he knew without turning his head when Vic Crosetti would put down the rag and light himself a smoke. He also knew the little dago would be grinning like a monkey, because Sam had had to go do something real while he got to stand around a little longer.

Grady said, “We’re trying to get the number-four sponson into good enough shape so we can fire the gun if we have to.”

“Yes, sir,” Carsten said doubtfully. The number-four sponson had taken a hit from somebody’s secondary armament, whether British or Japanese nobody knew-nobody had been taking notes, and the shell hadn’t left a carte de visite: except for smashing the sponson to hell and gone, that is. Nobody had come out of there alive. Thinking about it gave Sam the horrors. It could have been the number-one sponson, easy as not.

“I think they can do it,” Grady said. “In fact, they damn near have done it. But the gun mount still isn’t quite right, and there’s not a lot of room in there, what with all the other repairs they’ve had to make. I want somebody familiar with a sponson as it’s supposed to be to pitch in with some good advice for them.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said again. “Uh, sir, so you know, ‘Cap’n’ Kidde has forgotten more about sponsons than I’ll ever know.”

“He’s still helping with the rebuilding of the number-two on the port side. That got it worse than this one. He suggested you for the duty.”

“All right, sir,” Carsten answered. He didn’t know whether Kidde was mad at him and wanted to keep him hopping or whether the gunner’s mate was putting him in a spot where he could shine for the higher-ups. A little of both, maybe: that was “Cap’n” Kidde’s way. If he did this right, he’d look good where looking good could really help him. If he fouled up, he’d pay for it.

He ducked through the hatchway. Commander Grady didn’t follow; he had other fish to fry. Even the bulkhead around the hatchway showed the damage the sponson had taken. It was a mass of patches and welds, none of them smoothed down or painted over. There might be time for that later. There hadn’t been time for it yet.

Inside, the sponson was even more crowded than it had been when the gun crew filled it during the Battle of the Three Navies. A bunch of men in dungarees turned their heads to stare at Sam. One of them said, “You must be the guy Commander Grady was talking about.”

“Yeah, I’m Sam Carsten, loader on the number-one gun, this side.” Carsten pointed toward the bow.

“Good.” The fellow in dungarees nodded. “Then you know how one of these damn things goes when it’s working right.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Pleased to meetcha, Sam, by the way. I’m Lou Stein. These here lugs are Dave and Mordecai and Bismarck and Steve and Cal and Frank and Herman.”

Sam spent the next couple of minutes shaking hands and wondering how the hell he was going to keep the repair crew straight in his head. The only one he knew he wouldn’t forget was Mordecai, who’d lost a couple of fingers in some kind of accident and whose handshake was strange because of it. He couldn’t have had any trouble with tools, though, or they wouldn’t have let him do his job.

At the same time as Sam was sizing up the repair crew, he was also sizing up the sponson. It was even more cramped than it would have been otherwise, because they’d welded steel plates inside the inner curve to cover up the damage the entering shell had done. They hadn’t covered quite all of it. Above the new steel, a dark, reddish brown stain still marked the inside of the armor plate. Carsten tried not to look at it. It might easily have come from a loader.

He shook himself. Got to get down to business, he thought. “Commander Grady said you were having some kind of trouble in here-I mean, besides all this stuff.” He waved at the roughly welded steel slabs. He wouldn’t have wanted to serve this gun-might as well put toilet paper between him and enemy gunfire as that thin metal. But then again, the armor plate over it didn’t look to have done the best job of protecting the sailors in here, either.

Mordecai said, “Damn gun won’t traverse the way it’s supposed to. It gets all herky-jerky about a third of the way through the arc. Here, I’ll show you.”

He demonstrated. Sure as hell, there was one point at which the five-inch gun would not hold a target steadily. “That’s pretty peculiar, all right,” Carsten agreed. “Acts like there’s a kink in the hydraulic line some kind of way, don’t it?”

“That’s what we figured, too,” Lou Stein said. “But if there is, we sure as hell ain’t been able to find it. Those things are armored, after all; they shouldn’t kink.”

“If I hadn’t done all the things I shouldn’t do, my mama would be a happier lady today,” Sam answered, which made the repair crew laugh. He went on, “Besides, in this mess, how the devil can you tell which way is up, anyhow?” He waved his hand. The plate on the inner curve of the armor wasn’t the only new, raw repair, not by a long shot it wasn’t. Other rectangular plates of metal covered damage to the roof and to the deck.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wondered if this crew had done all that quick, rough work. If they had, he’d just stuck his foot in his face. But Mordecai said, “Tell me about it, why don’t you?”

“Let me go under there and take a look,” Carsten said. “Got a flashlight I can borrow?”

Stein wore one on his belt. Hiram Kidde would have wanted one like it; it had the size and heft to make a hell of a billy club. The door that let Sam down below into the mechanism that moved the gun worked stiffly; the metal in which it was set had been bent and imperfectly straightened.

With the door open so he could call to the repair crew above, he said, “Run it through there, would you?” They did. He shined the flashlight on as much of the hydraulic line as he could see. “Damn. Doesn’t look like anything wrong here.”

“That’s what we thought,” Mordecai answered. “You’re doing everything exactly the way we did it.”

“Am I? All right.” Stubbornly, Carsten traced the hydraulic line from the gun back to where it ran behind the steel door through which he’d come. Behind the door…He whistled tunelessly between his teeth. Wondering if Lou or Bismarck or any of them had done it before him, he shut the door.

He whistled again, louder. A peeled-back strip of steel from the shell hit had been pushed between two links of the flexible armor the hydraulic line wore. You couldn’t see that from above, because the hasty repairs to the deck hid it. And you might not be able to see it when you came down here, either, because you literally shut the door on it. But when the gun moved to that particular position, the line moved and the steel pinched off the flow of hydraulic fluid.

“Lucky it never pierced the hose in the armor,” Sam muttered. He opened the door again. “Lou, you want to come down here and take a look at this?”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Lou Stein said when Carsten showed him what he’d found. “Jeez, I wish it had pierced the line. Then we would have found out what the hell was wrong. Well, we can fix it, anyhow.”

A cutting torch made short work of the offending metal. Mordecai used it with as much assurance as if he’d had ten fingers, not eight. He said, “Sam, we get back to Pearl, everybody on this-here repair crew will buy you a beer. This one’s been makin’ us crazy for a while, let me tell you. Look behind the goddamn door. What do they call it? Hiding in plain sight?”

“Yeah.” Sam chuckled. “Hell, any sailor who doesn’t want to work knows how to do that.” He and Mordecai grinned at each other.