“Nah.” With a slow smile, Theo squeezed out the one word.
Honolulu again. Pete McGill hadn’t wanted to see it. He’d hoped to see Manila once more instead. No such luck, though. The U.S. Navy would have had to win the big Pacific slugfest to make that happen. Far from winning, the great fleet the USA sent west from Hawaii had barely got to play. The planes that rose in swarms from Japanese-held islands and from Japanese carriers didn’t give the American ships the chance to close with the Imperial Navy’s battlewagons.
Wildcats buzzed above Pearl Harbor now. Like the Jap-occupied islands farther west, Hawaii made an enormous, unsinkable aircraft carrier. If anything was going to hold the Japanese Navy away from Pearl, it would be air power.
Meanwhile, Pete and the other Marines aboard the Boise joined her sailors in repairing battle damage and getting her ready to go out again and do… well, something, anyhow. The damage wasn’t anything big-metal dented and torn by near misses from Japanese bombs. The light cruiser hadn’t been a major enemy target. No light cruiser would storm into Tokyo Bay or anything like that. Sensibly, the Japs had gone after the American ships that could do them the most harm.
More planes-fighters, bombers, reconnaissance-came into Hawaii almost every day by ship. So did more tanks, more soldiers, and more everything else. If the United States had to fight Japan starting from San Diego and San Francisco and Seattle, the war would be far longer and harder-if it could be won at all.
But no new Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came. Word got back that planes from Japanese carriers were helping to bombard Singapore. Besieged and isolated, the British bastion at the southern tip of Malaya seemed likely to fall. Everything else from Guam to the border between Burma and India already had.
“I bet the Aussies are sweating bullets,” Joe Orsatti remarked as he and Pete lugged five-inch ammo aboard the Boise. The light cruiser had replenished at sea from the Lassen — ammunition ships, fittingly enough, were named for volcanoes-but she’d shot off almost all of what she’d taken aboard then. Her main armament, by contrast, hadn’t fired a shot.
“I bet you’re right. I sure would be, anyway,” Pete said. His leg and his shoulder still pained him when he worked hard. He wondered if they always would. Every time something in either place twinged, he thought of Vera. If the aches lasted the rest of his life, so would his memories of their time together in Shanghai.
“Gettin’ more stuff through to them, it’s like running the gantlet,” Orsatti said. He set a wooden case that held two shells down on the deck.
With a grunt of relief, Pete laid his burden down, too. Something in his back clicked when he straightened. That had nothing to do with his injuries, or he didn’t think it did. It simply came from hard work.
As other leathernecks knocked the casings apart and stowed the shells, he said, “You’re right twice running. You ought to quit while you’re ahead.”
“Funny. Funny like a dose of the clap,” Orsatti said.
“I ain’t seen your mother lately,” Pete retorted. Orsatti flipped him the bird while they walked down the gangplank to pick up more shells. Neither man hurried. The job would get done, but it didn’t have to get done right away. The Boise wasn’t heading into action again any time soon. Pete went on, “We’ve got to try it, though. They’re screwed if we don’t.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Orsatti picked up another two-shell case: a hundred pounds of brass and explosives, plus the weight of the wood. He lugged it back toward the cruiser.
Pete did the same. His shoulder and his leg really complained. He didn’t listen to them. He could do the work. He’d proved that aboard the Boise. If he hurt, he hurt, that was all. He had a bottle of aspirins he’d bummed off a pharmacist’s mate in sick bay. When he got especially sore, he took a couple. Sometimes he thought they helped. Sometimes they didn’t seem to do anything.
After he set down his next crate, he said, “We could use some liberty, you know?”
“What? You’d rather drink and fuck than haul shit around like a draft horse? What kind of Marine are you, anyhow?” Orsatti demanded in mock anger.
“One with my head on straight, that’s what,” Pete answered. “They don’t pay you to drink and fuck,” the other sergeant pointed out.
“They don’t pay me enough to do this shit all the goddamn time when I’m in Pearl,” McGill said. “When I’m on board ship, okay, fine. I’m stuck there. I ain’t stuck here-except I need a pass.”
“People in hell need mint juleps to drink,” Orsatti told him. “You had all that soft China duty, where you could eat like a pig and screw like a lord. You aren’t in a good place to piss and moan, you know?”
Pete shut up. China duty was soft, especially to somebody who’d spent most of his time in the Corps on one ship or another. Servants, good food all the time, cheap whorehouses-what more could a Marine want? But when it went bad, it went as bad as it could. He wondered how many of the leathernecks he’d served with in Peking and Shanghai were still alive. He hoped they’d made the Japs pay a high price for bagging them.
A few days later, he did snag a pass into Honolulu. He got drunk, he went to Hotel Street, and he got laid. Then he drank some more and got laid again. In the course of drinking more still, he knocked an Army sergeant cold with a left to the belly and a right to the jaw. He walked out of that joint before the Shore Patrol showed up, leaving the Army three-striper on the floor. The jerk would be sadder when he woke up, but probably no wiser.
He made it back to the Boise on time. Next morning, it was black coffee and some of those aspirins. He hardly remembered coldcocking the Army guy. Nor was he the only man just back from liberty who seemed a little the worse for wear.
For his sins, the Boise steamed out into the Pacific later that day for live-fire exercises with towed targets. Aspirins or no aspirins, when the guns started going off he thought his head would explode with them. Before long, he hoped it would.
The other guys at the gun razzed him every time he flinched. Since he flinched a lot, he got several weeks’ worth of razzing all in the space of a few hours. “Hangovers and big booms don’t mix,” Joe Orsatti observed.
“Thank you, Albert Einstein,” Pete replied. After a moment, he added, “Fuck you, Albert Einstein.”
His jimjams didn’t keep him from passing shells to the loader when planes brought targets overhead. If slow-moving strips of orange cloth had dive-bombed the Boise, the Marines at her secondary armament would have blown them out of the sky.
A Navy lieutenant warned, “Keep an eyeball peeled for submarines. We aren’t within safe waters.”
He outranked the leathernecks-a two-striper was the equivalent of a Marine Corps captain. So they couldn’t say much while he was in earshot. Once he’d gone… That was a different story.
“What? He thinks we’re too dumb to look if he don’t tell us to?” Orsatti groused.
“He must figure we’re like ordinary swabbies,” Pete put in. That got some laughs. Marines were convinced sailors were idiots in training to be morons. Of course, it worked both ways, which was one of the reasons sailors and Marines from the same ship sometimes brawled when they got liberty at the same time.
One of the other guys in the gun crew just said, “Whistleass pecker-head.” That summed things up as well as any other two words Pete could have thought of.
No one saw a periscope, or even imagined he saw a periscope. The hydrophones didn’t report any contacts. There was talk that the Boise would get a fancy new version as part of her refit. Sonar was the name Pete had heard. He didn’t know much about it, but he was in favor of anything that would help keep them from stopping a torpedo.
They made it back to Pearl undamaged. That young lieutenant seemed convinced they got back for no other reason than his own enormous heroism. The leathernecks laughed behind their hands. Otherwise, they kept their opinions to themselves.
Ivan Kuchkov hated squelching through the mud. He hadn’t had to do that when he was in the Red Air Force, or not nearly so much of it, anyhow. But his only other choices were falling behind and letting the Nazis capture him (a bad bet) or getting wounded or killed (a worse one). So squelch he did.
Ukrainian mud seemed particularly oozy and bottomless, too. Everybody said Ukrainian soil-the famous black earth-was fertile beyond compare. He supposed that was so: this country was all kolkhozes. But, when the rasputitsa came, the black earth also turned goopy beyond compare.
“Avram!” Ivan called. Then he raised his voice to yell “Avram!” again, louder this time. The point man was well out ahead of the section, the way he was supposed to be.
