American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (71 page)

  Sam Carsten scratched his nose. His fingertip came away white with zinc-oxide ointment. Even here, off the west coast of Canada, he needed shielding from the summer sun. But, though he might burn in these waters, he wouldn’t scorch.

  He turned to George Moerlein. Back when they were both petty officers, they’d bunked together. But Moerlein was even newer on the
Remembrance
than he was now, having rejoined her crew during a fueling stop in Seattle. Carsten said, “Feels good to see us in business again.”

  “Yeah—uh, yes, sir,” Moerlein said. “Sorry, sir.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sam answered. His old bunkmate had forgotten for a moment he was an officer these days. He went on, “I’m just glad this ship isn’t tied up at the Boston Navy Yard any more.”

  “Me, too, sir.” Moerlein got it right this time. “That was what finally made me put in for a transfer—I wondered if she’d ever go to sea again. For a hell of a long time, sure didn’t look like it.” He pulled out a cigar, then sheepishly put it back in his pocket. The smoking lamp was out on the flight deck during takeoffs and landings, for excellent good reasons. The petty officer shook his head. “I’ve been away too damn long. I shouldn’t even have started to do that.”

  “Well, you saved me the trouble of barking at you,” Sam answered.

  Moerlein gave him a wry grin, then said, “What the hell do we do if we catch the Japs with their finger in the cookie jar? They’re in international waters, same as we are. What
can
we do?”

  “Damned if I know,” Carsten said. “But if they’re sending people into Canada to try to get the Canucks to rise up against us, we can’t let ’em get away with that, can we?”

  “Beats me,” Moerlein told him. “But if we do find ’em and we do clobber ’em, don’t you figure it’s about even money we’re doing it on account of President Blackford needs votes and wants to look tough?”

  Sam scowled. “I’d hate to think that.” He drummed his fingers on his trouser leg. “Of course, just because I’d hate to think it doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

  An hour later, another flight of aeroplanes took off from the
Remembrance
, while a flight that had gone out before landed on the deck. The carrier kept aeroplanes in the sky all the time. If the Japs really were trying to sneak something past her, they wouldn’t have an easy time of it.

  As far as Sam could prove, the
Remembrance
was just going through the motions. Her air patrols had spotted nothing out of the ordinary: fishing boats and merchantmen, none of them flying the Rising Sun.

  Whether they stumbled upon any actual Jap warships or not, though, the training the whole crew—and especially the pilots—got was priceless, as far as he was concerned. George Moerlein had it dead right: anything was better than sitting in the Navy Yard.

  When klaxons started howling a couple of days later, Sam sprinted to his battle station figuring it was just another drill. He certainly hoped so; going to the bowels of the ship on antitorpedo duty wasn’t, never had been, and never would be his favorite choice. By now, though, he’d spent more than twenty years in the Navy. He knew how things worked. The Navy did what it wanted, not what he wanted.

  Commander van der Waal was down there ahead of him, at the head of a damage-control party. The other officer’s face was thoroughly grim. “What’s up, sir?” Sam panted. “They tell you anything?”

  “Yes,” van der Waal said. “Our aeroplanes spotted a high-powered motorboat pulling away from what looked like an ordinary freighter. Ordinary freighters don’t carry speedboats, though.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Sam said softly, and then, louder, “They sure don’t. What flag is the freighter flying?”

  “Argentine,” van der Waal answered. “But the aeroplane buzzed her at smokestack height, and the sailors don’t look like they’re from Argentina. She doesn’t respond to wireless signals, either.” The throb of the
Remembrance
’s engine grew louder and deeper as the great ship picked up speed. “
Son
of a bitch,” Sam said again. “What are we going to do about it?”

  “Freighter’s only about sixty miles north of us,” van der Waal said. “Seems like we’re going up for a look-see of our own.”

  “What about that speedboat?” Carsten asked.

  “It won’t outrun an aeroplane—probably a swarm of aeroplanes by now,” Commander van der Waal said. “But if we find that freighter’s full of Japs sailing under cover of a false flag . . . Well, I don’t know what we’ll do then.”

  “Argentine flag’s handy for them—Argentina doesn’t love us, either,” Sam said. During the Great War, Argentina had fought Chile and Paraguay, both of them U.S. allies, because she’d been making money hand over fist sending grain and meat to Britain and France. Sam’s old ship had been part of the American-Chilean fleet that sailed round the Horn to try to cut off that trade: not altogether successfully, not till the Empire of Brazil finally entered the war on the side of the USA and Germany, forcing Argentine and British ships out of her territorial waters.

  “We may be only a couple of hours from war, Ensign,” van der Waal said.

  “Yes, sir,” Sam answered. “Well, if we are, I hope we kick the Japs around the block, but good.” In fact, he wondered how much damage the USA and Japan could do to each other. An awful lot of ocean separated the two countries. The United States—the American Empire, counting Canada—had more resources. Could they bring them all to bear, though, with a long frontier facing a Confederacy that hated them and might be tempted to throw in with the Japs? Of course, the Japanese had to worry about the Russians sitting over their holdings in Manchuria.

  After a while, a sailor brought word from the wireless room: “We’ve ordered them to stop for inspection, and they say they don’t have to, not in international waters. They sure as hell don’t talk like Argentines.”

  Technically, whoever was aboard that freighter was right. Technically, a man who stepped out into the street with a traffic light was also right. If a truck ran the light and killed him, he ended up just as dead as if he’d been wrong. Another half an hour passed. Then one of the five-inch guns Sam knew so well bellowed.

  “Shot across her bow,” van der Waal said. Carsten nodded.

  And then, quite suddenly, the
Remembrance
’s engines roared with emergency power. The great ship turned hard to port. Van der Waal and Carsten stared at each other. Sam said, “They must’ve—” He got no further than that, because a torpedo slammed into the aeroplane carrier and knocked him off his feet. The lights flickered, but stayed on. “Starboard hit, felt like back toward the stern,” van der Waal said. He was on his wallet. When he tried to get to his feet, he fell back with a groan and a curse. “I think the burst broke my ankle. I can’t move on it. Are you sound, Carsten?”

  Sam was already upright again. “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re in charge of damage control, then,” the other officer said, biting his lip against the pain. “I know it’s not the job you wanted, but you’ve got to do it. We’re taking on water, sure as hell.”

  “Yes, sir, I can feel it,” Carsten agreed. Astonishing how small a list his sense of balance could detect.

  But this wasn’t a time to marvel about such things, not if he wanted to have the chance to marvel later.

  He nodded to van der Waal. “I’ll take care of it, sir, you bet. Come on, boys—let’s get moving.” Even as he led the men of the damage-control party back toward the wound in the ship, he wondered if the next torpedo would slam into her amidships and flood the engine room. If she lost power, the lights and the pumps would fail, and then the
Remembrance
might well go down.

 
  That damn Jap ship must’ve had a submersible tagging along, in case we found her,
 he thought unhappily.
And we’re out here all by our lonesome, without any destroyers along. The Navy
Department didn’t really believe we’d come up with anything, so they decided to do this on the
cheap. Now it’s liable to kill us all.

  One of the sailors said, “Fuel storage for the aeroplanes is back here. We’re lucky the gasoline didn’t blow up and send us right to the moon.”

  “Gurk,” Sam said. He hadn’t thought of that.

  All the watertight doors were closed. That was something. But how many doors, how many watertight compartments, had the blast shattered? That was what they had to find out. Whether the
Remembrance
lived or died would turn on the answer.

  Water in the corridor told them they were nearing the hit. “Do we open that door, sir?” a sailor asked, pointing to the twisted portal, no longer tight, under which the seawater was leaking.

  “You bet we do,” Sam answered. “Likely men still alive on the other side. Now we fan out, too, cover as much ground as we can, start sealing off what we have to and getting out sailors. Let’s go. This is what we’ve trained for, and it’s what we’ve got to do.”
I sound just like Commander van der Waal,
 he thought.
Damned if he
wasn’t right all along, even if I didn’t feel like admitting it.

  They found sailors closer to the damage who were already doing what they could to stem the tide of water pouring into the
Remembrance
: stuffing mattresses and whatever else they could find into sprung seams between doors and hatchways and such. Carsten took charge of them, too. He kicked aside a floating severed hand that still trailed blood.

  Before long, he was sure the hit the aeroplane carrier had taken wouldn’t sink her. Most of her compartments were holding against the flood. Both his sense of balance and a level he had with him insisted that her list had stabilized. Her pumps never faltered. Most important of all, the second torpedo, the one he’d dreaded so much, never came.

  In spare moments, when he wasn’t too busy sloshing through seawater eventually up past his waist, he wondered why the Japanese submersible hadn’t put another fish, or two or three more, into the
Remembrance
. Word eventually trickled down from above. “Sir, we sank the fucker,” a messenger said. “She launched two at us. One missed. The other one nailed us. We had some aeroplanes with bombs underneath ’em in the air by then, to help sink the Jap freighter and the speedboat. One of ’em spotted the submersible as she launched, and he put a bomb right on the bastard’s conning tower. That sub sank, and it ain’t coming up again.”

  “Bully!” Every once in a while, especially when he didn’t think, Sam still used the slang he’d grown up with. The messenger was a fresh-faced kid who’d surely been pissing in his diapers when the Great War started, and looked at him as if at the Pyramids of Egypt or any other antiquity. He didn’t care. If the kid wanted to say
swell
, that was fine. Most of the time, Sam said
swell
himself. But
bully
, even if it did smack of the days before the war, said what he wanted to say, too. The United States had found themselves a new fight. They’d need the
Remembrance
. And Sam, old-fashioned or not, was glad not to be among its first casualties.

 
H
eadlines in the
Rosenfeld Register
shrieked of war: VICIOUS JAP ATTACK ON USS REMEMBRANCE! A subhead said,
Ship badly damaged but stays afloat!
 Another headline warned, BEWARE THE YELLOW PERIL!

  Mary McGregor had never seen a Japanese in her life. Except for pictures in books, she’d never seen a Negro, either. She imagined Japanese almost as yellow as sunflowers, with slit eyes set in their faces at a forty-five-degree angle. It wasn’t a pretty picture. She didn’t care. The Japs were fighting the United States. As far as she was concerned, nothing else mattered. If they were fighting the USA, she was all for them.

  The Yellow Peril story in the
Register
warned anyone who spotted a Jap to report him at once to U.S.

  occupation authorities. She pointed that out to her mother. “Pretty funny, isn’t it?” she said. “Can’t you just see a Jap walking down the main street in Rosenfeld and stopping in at Gibbon’s general store to buy a pickle and some thumbtacks?”

  “That story must be going out all over Canada,” her mother said. “Maybe there are places where you really might run into Japanese people—Vancouver, somewhere like that. I know they’ve got Chinamen in Vancouver. Why not Japs, too?”

  “Maybe,” Mary said. “That would make some sense—as much sense as the Yanks ever make, anyway.

  But why put that kind of notice in the
Register
? It’s just stupid here, really, really stupid.” She held up a hand before her mother could answer. “I know why. Some Yank in a swivel chair probably said, ‘Stick this order in every paper in Canada, from British Columbia to Nova Scotia. And stick it in every paper in Newfoundland, too, while you’re about it.’ Who cares whether it makes sense if you’re sitting in a swivel chair?”

  Maude McGregor smiled. “You’re probably right. The Americans do things like that. They like giving
big
orders, if you know what I mean. It’s part of what makes them the kind of people they are.” Had Mary been a man among men and not a young woman talking with her mother, she would have expressed her detailed opinion about what sort of people Americans were. Her eyes must have sparked in a way that got her opinion across without words, for her mother’s smile got wider. Then Maude McGregor said, “Next time you go to the cinema with Mort Pomeroy, make sure there aren’t any Japs under the front seat in his motorcar.”

  “I’ll do that,” Mary said, laughing.

  Her mother’s smile changed. She said, “Your face just lit up. You think he’s special, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Mary nodded without hesitation. “I’ve never felt like this about a boy before.” She hadn’t had much chance to feel anything special about boys up till now. Most of them stayed away from the McGregor house as if she had a dangerous disease. And, in occupied Canada, what disease could be more dangerous than not only descending from someone who’d fought the Yanks to his last breath but also being proud of it?