American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (86 page)

  He’d led the sailors in the damage-control parties when things looked black. That had earned him respect he could have got no other way. It had also earned him thin new gold stripes on his cuffs; he’d been promoted to lieutenant, junior grade, for what he’d done. Glad as he was of the promotion, he could have done without some of the respect. He feared he would end up trapped in an assignment he’d never wanted.

  Martin van der Waal had always insisted it was an important assignment. Even had Sam been inclined to argue, the experience of getting torpedoed would have changed his mind. But he agreed with his injured superior. Important, antitorpedo work definitely was. That still didn’t mean he cared to make a career of it.

  He spent as much time as he could on deck. That meant more tinfoil tubes of zinc-oxide ointment, but he did it anyhow. Watching aeroplanes take off and land never failed to fascinate him. He got plenty of chances to watch, for the
Remembrance
flew a continuous air patrol. The Japanese Navy had ships out here, too, and who found whom first would have a lot to do with how any fight turned out. The way the arrester hook caught the cables stretched across the deck and brought a landing aeroplane to an abrupt halt still fascinated him.

  One perfect morning, he was taking the air on the flight deck after breakfast when alarms began to sound. Klaxons hooting in his ears, he ran for his battle station, wishing it weren’t deep in the bowels of the aeroplane carrier. He wanted to be able to see what was going on. As usual, the Navy cared not at all for what he wanted.

  “What’s the word, sir?” he panted as he came up to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger.

  “Nothing good,” his superior answered. “One of our machines spotted a whole flight of aeroplanes with meatballs on their wings heading this way.”

  “There’s no Jap base within a couple of thousand miles of where we’re at,” Sam said. The light went on in his head before Pottinger needed to enlighten him: “We’ve found a Japanese aeroplane carrier or two.” The other damage-control officer shook his head. “Not quite. Their aeroplanes have found us, but we haven’t found them yet.”

  “Heading back along their bearing would be a pretty good bet,” Carsten said.

  Lieutenant Commander Pottinger nodded. He was a tall, lean man with a weathered face, hollow cheeks, a long, narrow jaw, and a pointed nose. He looked like a New Englander, but had a Midwestern accent. “I expect you’re right,” he said. “This is liable to be a damn funny kind of naval battle, you know?

  We’re not even in sight of the enemy’s fleet, but our aeroplanes are going to slug it out with his.” As if to underline his words, one machine after another roared into the sky, the noise of the straining engines loud even several decks below the one from which the aeroplanes were taking off. “Long-range artillery, that’s what they’ve turned into,” Sam said. “They can hit when our battleships can’t.” Pottinger nodded again. “That’s right. Battleships are probably obsolete, though plenty of men will try and run you out of the Navy if you say so out loud.” He made a disdainful noise. “Plenty of men likely tried to run people out of the Navy if they spoke up for steam engines and ironclads, too.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Sam had known more than a few officers who never stopped pining for the good old days.

  Something burst in the water not far from the
Remembrance
. He felt the carrier heel into the sharpest turn she could make, and then, a moment later, into another one in the opposite direction. More bombs burst around her.

  Hiram Pottinger might have been talking things over back on shore, for all the excitement he showed.

  “Zigzags,” he said approvingly. “That’s what you do against submersibles, and that’s what you do against aeroplanes, too.”

  “Well, yes, sir,” Carsten said. “That’s what you do, and then you hope like hell it works. You get hit by a bomb, that could put a little crimp in your morning.” He did his best to imitate his superior’s nonchalance.

  One-pounders and other antiaircraft guns on the deck started banging away at the attacking aeroplanes.

  So did the five-inch guns in the sponsons under the flight deck. The noise was terrific. They could reach a lot farther than the smaller weapons, but couldn’t fire nearly so fast.

  “I wonder what’s going on up there,” Sam said. “I wonder how nasty it is.”

  “It’s no walk in the park,” Pottinger said.

  “I didn’t figure it was, sir,” Sam said, a little reproachfully. He’d seen plenty of nasty action—it didn’t come much nastier than what he’d been through in the Battle of the Three Navies. A moment later, he realized Pottinger, if he’d ever been in a battle before, had probably gone through it down here.

  Maybe this was harder. Carsten wouldn’t have believed it beforehand, but it might have been true.

  When he was fighting a gun, he had some idea, even if only a small one, of what was going on. Here . . .

  Here it might have been happening in a distant room. The only difference was, what happened in that distant room might kill him.

  Later, he wished he hadn’t had that thought at that moment. The
Remembrance
shuddered when a bomb burst on her flight deck. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger said, “Oh, shit,” which summed up Sam’s feelings perfectly. Then Pottinger added, “Well, time for us to go to work.”

  “Yes, sir,” Carsten agreed.

  That was how he got up to the flight deck in the midst of combat. He wanted to be there, but not under those circumstances. The flight crew were already doing what they had to do: manhandling steel plates across the hole the bomb had torn in the deck and doing everything they could to flatten out the torn lips of steel.

  “Well done,” Pottinger shouted. “We have to be able to land aeroplanes and get them in the air again.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sam said again. His boss might be new to carrier duty, but he’d just proved he understood the essence of it. Sam went on, “They could have done a lot worse if they’d fused the bomb differently.”

  “What do you mean?” Lieutenant Commander Pottinger asked.

  “If they’d given it an armor-piercing tip and a delayed fuse, it would have gone through before it blew up,” Sam answered. “Then we’d really be in the soup.”

  “Urk,” Pottinger said, which again matched Sam’s thought.

  Sam said, “They’re like us: they’re still learning what all they can do with aeroplanes and carriers, too.” An aeroplane with the red Rising Sun of Japan painted on wings and fuselage roared overhead, machine guns in the wings blazing. The engine was even louder than the guns; the fighter couldn’t have been more than fifty feet above the deck. Bullets struck sparks from the new steel plates. Others smacked flesh with wet thuds. Men shrieked or crumpled silently. Streams of tracers from the
Remembrance
’s antiaircraft guns converged on the Japanese machine. For a dreadful moment, Sam thought it would get away in spite of all the gunfire. But then flames and smoke licked back from the engine cowling toward the cockpit. The fighter slammed into the sea.

  “Scratch one fucker!” Sam shouted exultantly.

  A sailor next to him was down and groaning, clutching his leg. Red spread over his trousers. “It hurts!” he groaned. “It hurts bad!”

  “George!” Sam’s exultation turned to dismay in the space of a heartbeat. He’d known George Moerlein ever since first coming aboard the
Remembrance
. Seeing him down with a nasty wound made Sam’s stomach turn over. By the way the petty officer was bleeding, he needed help right away. Sam tore off his belt and wrapped it around Moerlein’s thigh above the bullet wound, tight as he could. “Give me a hand over here!” he yelled.

  “Let’s get him down to sick bay, sir,” a sailor said. He helped Carsten haul George Moerlein up.

  Moerlein moaned and then, mercifully, passed out. As they hauled the petty officer towards a passageway, another Japanese fighter strafed the
Remembrance
. Bullets cracked past Sam and clattered off the flight deck. He breathed a sigh of relief when he had steel between him and the deadly chaos overhead.

  As soon as he saw a sailor, though, he said, “Here, take over for me. Get this man below. I’ve got duty topside.” He hurried back up to put his life on the line again, though he did his best not to think of it like that.

  Off to starboard, one of the American destroyers was on fire from bow to stern and sinking fast. Boats and men in life jackets bobbed around her. Even as Sam watched, the destroyer rolled over and went to the bottom. In these waters, the bottom was a long, long way down. Sam shivered at how far down it was.

  A bomb burst in the sea not far from the
Remembrance
, drenching Carsten and most of the others on deck. Even so, a sailor with wigwag signals guided an aeroplane to a landing. Maintenance men fueled it.

  Its prop started spinning again. Down the flight deck it rolled, bumping over the hasty repairs, and up into the air again.

  “Didn’t think we could do that,” Sam said to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger.

  “He must have been flying on fumes, or he never would have tried coming in,” Pottinger agreed. “Lucky the Japs have let up a little.”

  “I wonder what we’re doing to them,” Sam said. “Worse than this, I hope. We’d better be, by God.”

  “Yes, we’d better be. But how can we know?” Pottinger said. “They’re over the horizon. The only ones who have any real idea how the fight’s going are our pilots.”

  “No, sir—not even them,” Sam said. His superior raised an eyebrow. He explained: “They don’t know what the Jap pilots are doing to us, just like the Japs can’t be sure what we’re doing to them. Maybe the fellows in the wireless shacks—ours and theirs—have the big picture. Maybe nobody does. Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing?”

  Lieutenant Commander Pottinger laughed. “We won’t know who won till day after tomorrow, when we read it in the newspapers.”

  “Yeah.” It wasn’t exactly funny, but Carsten laughed, too. “As long as we live through it, we’ve come out all right.” A Japanese aeroplane and an American machine both splashed into the Pacific within a quarter of a mile of the
Remembrance
. Sam hoped
somebody
would live through the fight.

 
T
he
Kansas City Star
was the daily published closest to Leavenworth that was actually worth reading.

  Irving Morrell had discovered that during his last stay in Kansas. Now, of course, the wireless supplemented the paper. Back then, wireless had only started passing from Morse code to voice. Even now, the newspaper gave him a far more detailed picture than the quick reports on the wireless could.

  “I don’t think anybody knows who won this stupid battle, Agnes,” he said two days after reports about the sea fight north of the Sandwich Islands started coming in. “I really don’t. If you look at our claims, we sank the whole Jap fleet and didn’t take a scratch. If you look at theirs, they did it to us.” His wife shrugged and poured him another cup of coffee. “My bet is, both sides are lying as hard as they can.”

  “My bet is, you’re right,” Morrell answered. “I suppose we’ll sort it out in time for Mildred’s children to study about it in school.”

  Hearing her name made his daughter look up from her scrambled eggs. “Study what in school?” she asked.

  “A big naval battle in the Pacific,” her father said.

  She rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake, who cares?”

  Agnes laughed. “If everybody felt that way, we wouldn’t have to fight any more wars. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

  “That would be wonderful,” Morrell said with the deep conviction of a man who’d seen—who’d taken part in—the worst man could do to his fellow man. He gulped the scalding coffee. “That would be wonderful, but it’s not going to happen any time soon, no matter how much I wish it would. Speaking of which, I’m off to the Barrel Works.”

  “All right, dear.” Agnes got up, too, and came over to give him a kiss. “I’ll see you when you get back.

  Some more things should be out of boxes by then.”

  “Good.” Morrell was convinced he could no more escape from boxes than a bug could get out of a spiderweb. He wondered how many times he’d moved in the course of his military career. He didn’t try to count them all up. That way lay madness.

  Barbed wire enclosed a field in which sat the experimental barrel he’d been working with ten years earlier. The machine hadn’t been in the field all those years; it would have been a rusted, useless hulk if it had. Even though the Socialists had stopped work on new barrels for so long, the Army had carefully greased this one and stored it in a garage, in case it was ever wanted again. Morrell gave the General Staff—not his favorite outfit—reluctant credit for that. He didn’t know what he would have done if he’d had to start altogether from scratch.

  Sentries at the gate saluted. “Good morning, Colonel,” they chorused.

  “Morning, boys.” Morrell pointed into the field. “Who’s working on the barrel?”

  “Sergeant Pound, sir,” one of the sentries answered.

  “I might have known.” Morrell opened the gate and went inside. One of the sentries closed it after him.

  As he hurried toward the barrel, he called, “You’re up early today, Sergeant.”

  “Oh, hello, sir.” Sergeant Michael Pound was a broad-shouldered, muscular man with close-cropped brown hair and a neat mustache showing the first silver threads. “The carburetor still isn’t what it ought to be, you know.”

  “I’m not surprised, seeing how long the whole vehicle’s been sitting there doing nothing,” Morrell answered. “How are you going to get it clean?”

  Sergeant Pound held up a coffee can. “There’s this new solvent called carbon tetrachloride. It gets grease off of anything,” he said enthusiastically. He was wild for any new invention; that was what had drawn him into barrels in the first place. “It’s wonderful stuff—nonflammable, a really excellent cleaner. Only one drawback.” He plopped the carburetor into the can.