The five-incher bellowed again. Pete heard it as if from very far away. If he had any ears at all left by the time this got done, he’d count his blessings. A shell casing clanged on the deck. Somebody kicked it out of the way to keep from tripping over it. It didn’t roll far. Too much other brass had already been kicked. Pete grabbed the next round and passed it to the loader. Into the breech it went. The gun lowered a little to bear on the dive-bomber. Blam! The cycle began anew.
The Jap plane didn’t give a damn about the Boise. It was swooping down on a heavy cruiser. Shells burst all around it, black smoke puffs soiling the clean, moist Pacific air. The pilot ignored everything but his target. He released the bomb and zoomed away bare yards above the ocean. A shell clipped his wing then. His plane broke up as it went into the drink. Fire floating on the sea was the only grave marker he’d ever get.
Too late came the hit. The bomb burst right alongside the American ship. It wasn’t a killing blow. But blast and fragments would do their worst, and their worst was no damn good. The Boise had taken blows like that, and suffered from them yet.
“One fucker won’t be back!” Joe Orsatti shouted. Everybody at the five-inch mount yelled as loud as he could. It was the only way the Marines had a prayer of making themselves heard. Even as things were, Pete might not have understood if he hadn’t read the gun chief’s lips.
“How many more have they got?” he yelled back. Orsatti didn’t answer. By the nature of things, he couldn’t know. Neither could Pete. But that was the question.
All the guys with the fat gold stripes on their sleeves who’d made up the American attack plan seemed to have missed something: the Japs had turned their mid-Pacific islands into unsinkable aircraft carriers. They had sinkable carriers, too; the Americans had sunk one. But no American carriers remained afloat, and the U.S. fleet had yet to see any Japanese naval craft at gun range. (No, that wasn’t quite true. One Jap sub incautiously surfaced near a battleship whose big guns happened to be trained its way. A few seconds later, nothing was left of that sub but paper clips.)
No twilight-of-the-gods super-Jutland here, no matter what the planners-and Pete McGill-had figured this fight would look like. No Joe Louis-Max Schmeling. Instead, the Japs were making like some superfast lightweight. Hank Armstrong on benzedrine, maybe. They jabbed and jabbed and jabbed, and when you tried to hit back they weren’t there. And they wore you down, one punch at a time.
Pete had guessed the big free-for-all would happen somewhere near the Philippines. And it might have, if the U.S. fleet had been able to get that far. But even Guam still lay far to the west. And reaching Guam would be no cure-all; the Stars and Stripes didn’t fly there any more. How many Japanese planes would come up from all their islands and attack the remains of the American force? How long before they’d be more than all the antiaircraft guns aboard the surviving ships could hope to knock down? If the admirals went on being stubborn, that day might come soon.
If it did, Pete probably wouldn’t even get a brief patch of fire on the Pacific to mark where he’d gone down. An oil slick would be about it.
He didn’t want to die. Not yet. He didn’t have nearly enough revenge for Vera. Four red rings circled his five- inch gun’s barrel, each one signifying a plane Orsatti was sure they’d killed. The rings, and the rest of the paint on the barrel, were blistered and scorched from the heat of all the shells that had gone through. It took a hell of a lot of firing to knock a plane out of the sky: way more than anybody’d figured before the war got rolling.
The Boise ’s engines picked up. Pete felt the new vibration through the soles of his shoes. The light cruiser swung into a long turn, carving a white wake into blue water. When the turn ended, she was heading east.
“Now hear this!” blared from the loudspeakers. “At the orders of the fleet’s commanding officer, we are withdrawing toward Hawaii. I say again-at the orders of the CO, the fleet is withdrawing from these waters.”
So it wasn’t just the Boise. It was everybody. Everybody who was left, anyway. Pete wasn’t even sure of the current CO’s name; Admiral Kimmel went down with the Arizona when she sank, probably figuring that was easier than having to explain failure back home.
Well, if the new guy was throwing up his hands and hightailing it back toward Pearl, his name was also likely to be mud whoever the hell he was. The Secretary of the Navy and the President would blame him for not blowing the Japs out of the water. After all, if another admiral fell on-or was pushed onto-his sword, less blame would stick to his superiors.
Then again, if the Americans kept pushing forward no matter what, it wouldn’t be long before they had nothing left to push with. Going into this war, everybody’d wondered how sea power stacked up against air power. Now that the returns were in, they didn’t look encouraging for the poor bastards in ships. It had been a running fight between airplanes all the way west across the Pacific. Now that the U.S. Navy was out of carriers, the fleet went on taking it on the chin no matter how much antiaircraft fire the ships threw up.
Pete nervously scanned the sky. Just because the fleet was on the lam, that didn’t mean the Japs would leave it alone. Kick ’em while they’re down was good advice in bar brawls and in war. If the other guy didn’t think he’d almost licked you, he wouldn’t jump on you again any time soon. Now the U.S. Navy was trying to get up off the floor and brush away the sawdust and the spilled beer.
Some of the other ships were still firing-maybe at Japanese planes, maybe at nothing. Around the Boise, it was quiet for the moment. Pete suddenly realized how very stiff and sore and weary he was. “Fuck,” he said.
Orsatti must have read his lips, because he didn’t say it very loud. The gun chief nodded. He looked like hell: unshaven, bags under his eyes, his face thin and drawn. Pete probably looked the same way, but he hadn’t seen himself any time lately. He’d been living on coffee and sandwiches and snatching sleep curled up on the deck next to the gun like a dog since… He couldn’t work out since when. It had been a while now. He knew that.
One of the other guys pulled a crumpled pack of Luckies from his dungarees and gave everybody a cigarette. Pete took his gratefully. The nicotine seemed to help a little with the haze of fatigue that dogged him. “Fuck,” he said again. This time, the rest of the crew nodded in mournful agreement.
“Didn’t never figure we’d get licked,” Orsatti said, speaking slowly and loudly. “Not by the Japs.”
Pete could have said I told you so. He’d known the Emperor’s finest were tougher than most Americans wanted to believe. He kept quiet. Sometimes being right cost more than it was worth.
But then he did say “Fuck” one more time. After another drag on the Lucky-some luck! — he amplified it: “What’s gonna happen to the poor sorry assholes stuck on the islands we took away from the slanties?”
“Maybe we’ll make pickup while we go,” Orsatti said. But he didn’t sound as if his heart was in the words. Pete could see why. If the fleet was doing its goddamnedest to get away from the Japs, would it want to stop for anything? That was asking to get worked over again.
But to leave leathernecks behind to try to hold off Hirohito’s bastards with whatever they happened to have… That was the worst kind of losing proposition. Sweet Jesus, was it ever!
Or was it, really? Wasn’t getting killed trying to take them off and then leaving them stuck for the Japs anyway worse still? An admiral was bound to think so. The admiral in charge of the fleet did think so. Pete was a Marine. For two cents’ change, he would have torn the goddamn admiral’s head off and pissed in the hole.
Married. When Sarah Goldman (no, she was Sarah Bruck now; she had to keep reminding herself she was Sarah Bruck) had thought about being married before she actually was, she hadn’t thought much about what came after she went through the ceremony. Oh, she’d thought about some of it, but you couldn’t do that all the time even when you were newlyweds and very young. She hadn’t thought about what her life would be like after the wedding.
She had expected she would eat better, and she did. The Brucks were bakers, after all. Even if they were Jews, even if the Nazis watched them three times as hard as the Aryan bakers in Munster, they found ways of making flour silently vanish from the official allocation. Some they baked into stuff they ate themselves. They traded the rest with other people who dealt in food. Nobody-nobody below the rank of General-major, anyhow-ate well in the Third Reich. But the Brucks did very well for Jews, and better than some Aryans.
Sarah hadn’t expected she would work so much harder. Isidor might have got himself a wife. His mother and father had got themselves a brand-new employee they didn’t have to pay. They made the most of it. She knew next to nothing about baking when she started sharing Isidor’s little room. They set about giving her a crash course.
To be fair, they started her on simple things, as if she were a child. She could tell time, obviously. They could trust her to open the ovens and take out the loaves after half an hour (they could also smear ointment on her hands when she burned herself doing it-it wasn’t as if they’d never got burned).
