mean.”
“Boy, you talk even more New York than I do,” Pete said, again more admiringly than not. “I didn’t figure anybody could.”
“Comes of bein’ a dago,” Orsatti said with pride of his own. If the wrong guy had tried to slap that label on him, he would have decked the bastard, but he could stick it on himself. He pointed at McGill. “Now you, you’re just a regular paddy. If you came from Minnesota, you’d sound like a fuckin’ squarehead. But a guinea like me, don’t matter where he’s from. He still sounds like Hell’s Kitchen-or Jersey at the most.” Inevitably, that came out Joisey.
“Talking about Jersey”-Pete pronounced it much the same way-“who’s that kid who’s been singing with Goodman and now with Dorsey?”
“Sinatra.” Orsatti spoke with assurance. “Yeah, he’s from Hoboken. My folks know his folks some kinda way. I think one of my cousins went out with a gal who’s kin to him-like second cousin or something-but it didn’t stick.”
“Too bad for your cousin,” Pete said. “The way the dames scream for that guy, he’s gonna end up with more money than Henry fuckin’ Ford. Probably enough so some even sticks to a second cousin.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” Orsatti agreed. “But it’s water under the bridge now. And Vito’s in the Army, poor sap, so he’s got more to worry about than trying to make it with Sinatra’s cousin.”
“My ass, he does. The Army’s safe as houses.” Like any halfway decent Marine, McGill looked down his nose at the larger service. He had his reasons, too: “What’s he gonna do besides train and look cute? Army can’t fight the Japs, not till it gets delivered, and that won’t happen any time soon. If we were fighting the Germans, too, he might have to work for a living. Way things are, though? Forget about it.”
“It’s coming. You gotta think so, anyway,” Orsatti said. “Now that France and England are over their fling with the Nazis, we’re shipping ’em stuff again. That’ll piss Hitler off-hell, it’d piss me off. So he’ll start torpedoing freighters, and we’ll jump in, same as we did against the Kaiser.”
“Could be,” Pete allowed. “He’s turned his subs loose again over in the Atlantic.”
Idly, he wondered what it would be like to be a kid from Hoboken with girls screaming for you wherever you went. There sure had to be worse ways to make a living. Back when he had Vera, he wouldn’t have cared if all the other girls in the world were screaming for him. (And if that didn’t prove he’d been head over heels, what would have?) Since he couldn’t have the one he’d wanted most, being able to pick and choose from all the rest didn’t seem half bad.
The Ranger and her shepherds steamed south and west. Nobody’d said where they were going: not to the likes of Pete McGill, anyhow. He didn’t care. As long as it was toward the enemy, that suited him fine.
Wildcats from the carrier flew a combat air patrol over the task force. Floatplanes from the heavy cruiser buzzed ahead of the American ships to make sure they weren’t running into trouble facefirst. Little by little, the USA was learning to fight a mid-twentieth-century war. No matter what kind of super-Jutland the admirals had imagined, it probably wasn’t going to happen. Admirals’ imaginations hadn’t encompassed airplanes and submarines. Battleships turned out to be dinosaurs: huge and ferocious and armored, with mouths full of big, sharp teeth, but doomed to extinction all the same.
Klaxons hooted almost every day. Swabbies and leathernecks dashed to battle stations. It always turned out to be a drill. Men swore when the all-clear sounded. But they didn’t swear too loud or too hard. Most of them had been aboard the Boise when the big American fleet tried to run the Japanese gantlet. Only now was Pete coming to realize how dumb the admirals had really been.
Joe Orsatti laughed at him when he said so. “I bet you still believe in the tooth fairy and the fuckin’ Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, too,” Orsatti said. “But don’t sweat it. Sure, our big guys are dumb. But you bet your ass the Japs are, too.”
Pete was betting his ass. Everybody in this flotilla was. If he’d had any doubts, they were erased when one alert was followed by an iron-throated shout of “This is no drill!” from the intercom speakers. The officer at the mike went on, “Japanese planes incoming from bearing 240. I say again, this is no drill!”
Grunting, Pete grabbed a shell and handed it to the loader, who slammed it into the five-inch gun’s breech. Joe Orsatti trained the gun to bear on the enemy planes’ expected track toward the Ranger. Pete stood ready to pass as many fifty-pound shells as might be needed. His shoulder complained every time he did it, but he’d long since quit listening.
Overhead, the Wildcats tangled with a swarm of Japanese Zeroes. Wildcats had a chance against Zeroes, but not usually a great chance. One of the American planes splashed into the ocean as Pete watched. “Shit!” he said.
And the Zeroes kept the Wildcats too busy to do what they should have been doing: going after the dive- bombers that followed the fighters in. Japanese naval dive bombers-Vals was the U.S. code name for them-were ugly and old-fashioned. Like German Stukas, they had fixed landing gear. Also like Stukas, they could put a bomb down on a silver dollar if you gave them the chance.
Four of them pulled away from the main bunch and buzzed toward the Boise. A Wildcat that broke off from the big melee shot one of them down. A moment later, a Zero shot down the Wildcat. The rest of the Vals droned on.
All the light cruiser’s antiaircraft guns, large and small, started going off at once. Pete jerked shells like a man possessed. Bursts blackened the air all around the enemy planes. One took a direct hit and turned into a fireball. The other two dove.
Joe Orsatti frantically swiveled the five-inch gun. “Aw, fuck!” he said, again and again. “Aw, fuck!”
Bombs fell free. One of them hit fifty feet to starboard of the Boise. The other caught the cruiser just abaft the bridge.
Pete flew through the air with the greatest of ease. Next thing he knew, he was in the blood-warm Pacific. He was amazed how far from the ship he’d been thrown. A good thing, too, because the Boise was already starting to settle in the water. Pete looked around for a life ring. He could dog-paddle for a while, but… Off to his left, a dark gray dorsal fin sliced the sea. It was the oldest shipwreck cliche in the world-except when it happened to you. And it was happening to Pete.
Theo Hossbach huddled with the rest of the panzer crew around a little fire in a peasant’s hut in a tiny village whose name, if it had a name, was written in an alphabet he couldn’t read. He wished for hot coffee thick with sweet cream. Yes, he was from Breslau, but Viennese-style would have suited him fine.
They’d found some tea in the hut. Water was boiling in a dented pot over the fire. No sugar. No milk. An Englishman probably would have killed himself before he drank such Scheisse. Theo looked forward to getting outside of anything warm. He would have drunk plain old hot water just then, and been glad to have it.
Hermann Witt took the pot and filled everybody’s tin cup. The loose tea in the bottom of Theo’s cup smelled great when the water hit it. He had to make himself wait before he drank so it would brew some in there.
“The Tommies would laugh at us.” Not for the first time, Adi Stoss’ way of thinking paralleled his.
Everybody swore at the Tommies-everybody except Theo, who as usual kept his ideas to himself. “Lousy bastards ran out on us, same as the French fuckers,” Lothar Eckhardt growled. The gunner scratched without seeming to notice he was doing it. Odds were he was lousy himself. Theo was pretty sure he was, too. You came into one of these places, you’d pick up company whether you liked it or not.
“Next time we see Englishmen, it’ll be through our sights,” Kurt Poske agreed.
Adi said, “Well, the good news there would be, we’d be seeing Tommies instead of Ivans. That’d mean we’d got out of Russia in one piece.”
Theo sipped his tea. By now, it was plenty strong. The caffeine made his heart beat faster. It sure held more than the ersatz coffee that came with German rations. He wondered if that crap had any at all. You could get benzedrine tablets. He’d used them once in a while-who didn’t, when you needed to keep going? — but he didn’t like them. They were too much like squashing a cockroach by dropping a building on it. Caffeine, now, caffeine was just right.
“Two-front war,” Witt said, and not another word. With just Theo and Adi there, he probably would have talked some more. Neither Kurt nor Lothar had ever given the slightest hint they would bring anything to the National Socialist Loyalty Officer, but the panzer commander didn’t take needless chances in combat with the enemy or with his own side.
