Carsten would have bet any money you cared to name that the gunner's mate would have beaten him there, no matter where he was on the ship when the call for battle stations rang out. He sometimes thought Kidde could just wish himself to the sponson from anywhere on board.
'Aye aye, 'Cap'n,' ' Carsten answered, with a salute more extravagant than he would have given Dewey. 'Cap'n' Kidde chuckled; he'd had the inevitable nickname for as long as he'd been in the Navy.
The sponson was tiny and cramped, with plenty of sharp metal corners to gouge your legs or your arms if you weren't careful. Bare electric bulbs in wire cages on the ceiling shed a harsh, yellow light. The place stank of paint and brass and nitrocellulose and old sweat, odors no amount of swabbing could ever wash away.
Kidde patted the breech of the gun- affectionately, as if it were a trollop's backside in some Barbary Coast dive in San Francisco. 'Wish we had some high-explosive shells for this baby along with armor piercing. She'd make a hell of an antiaircraft gun, wouldn't she?'
'Damned if she wouldn't,' Carsten said. 'Have to fuse 'em just right, to burst around the aeroplane, but damned if she wouldn't. You ought to talk to somebody about that one, Mate, you really should.'
'Ahh, it's just stack gas,' Kidde said with a shrug. By then, the other loader and the gun layer were in their places. Luke Hoskins, the number-two shell jerker, was slower than he should have been. Kidde reamed him up one side and down the other with a tongue sharp enough to chip paint.
'Have a heart, 'Cap'n' Kidde,' Hoskins said. 'First decent shit I've had in three days, and the goddamn battle stations sounds when I got my pants around my ankles in the aft head.'
'Tough,' Kidde said flatly. 'Next time, don't waste time wipin' your ass. It won't matter what you smell like- we get into a real scrap and we'll all be shittin' ourselves any which way.'
Carsten laughed till he incautiously jerked around and barked his shin on the edge of an ammunition rack. He swore, but kept on laughing. Part of that was good nature, part of it nerves. He didn't try to figure out which part was which.
A runner came by with word that the aeroplane spotted had been one of the ones they'd launched. 'He's floatin' on the water now an' the New York, it's fishin' him out of the drink with a crane,' he reported. 'Old Man says to stay at battle stations, though.' He hurried away.
The gun crew looked at one another. If they were staying at battle stations, that meant they'd be heading toward Pearl Harbor for the attack. And, sure enough, the rumble of the big steam engines got louder as they picked up steam. The Vulcan and the rest of the support ships would be dropping behind now-this was a job for the warships and the transports that carried a regiment of Marines and a whole division of Army men toward Oahu.
Another man stuck his head inside the blazing-hot metal box where Carsten and his comrades waited for orders. Voice cracking with excitement, the sailor said, 'Word is, the limeys ain't done much with their fleet, an' a lot of it's still in the harbor. We caught 'em with their pants down.'
'You think it's really true?' Hoskins breathed.
'Why not?' Sam Carsten said. ' Battle stations got you that way, didn't it?' The other seaman glared at him, but he wasn't easy to get angry at.
'If it's so,' Kidde said, 'you can serve those Englishmen up with tea and crumpets, because they're dinner. They hit us a low blow back in granddad's day, comin' in on the side of the Rebels. Now we give it back. Sweet suffering Jesus, do we ever! All those ships sittin' inside Pearl Harbor, waiting for us to smash 'em…' His smile was beatific.
Carsten peered through one of the narrow vision slits the sponson afforded. Torpedo-boat destroyers sprinted ahead of the battleships, their creamy wakes vivid against the deep blue of the tropical Pacific. The Dakota and her fellow capital ships were still picking up speed, too; the steel deck hummed and shuddered against his feet as the engines reached full power. They had to be making better than twenty knots. At that rate, it wouldn't be long until 'There it is!' he exclaimed excitedly. 'Land on the horizon! We'll give 'em what-for any minute now. Well- Holy Jesus!'
'What?' The rest of the gun crew, the ones who weren't looking out themselves, all shouted the question together.
'Harbor defense guns just opened up on us. They may not have known we were here, but they sure as hell do now.'
He didn't see the shell splash into the sea. Almost a minute later, though, the sound of the great cannon reached him: a thunder that cut through not only the roar of the Dakota's engines but also the hardened steel armor of the sponson.
And then, bare seconds after that, the battleship's main armament cut loose, the two fourteen-inch guns in the forward superfiring turret and then the three from the A turret just below and ahead of it. He'd heard the noise from the distant British cannon; the roar of the guns from his own ship enveloped him, so that he felt it with his whole body more than with his ears. When the guns went off, the Dakota seemed to buck for a moment before resuming its advance.
Sailors crowded up to see what they could see. The shore and the harbor wouldn't be in range of their secondary armament for some time to come. It was like having a moving picture unreel right before your eyes, Carsten thought, except this had sound-all the sound in the world, not some piano-pounding accompanist-and bright colors.
More thunderclaps came from the guns of the other battleships in the fleet. The shore defenses sent up answering gouts of smoke and flame. This time, Carsten spied the splashes from a couple of shells. If you took a Ford, loaded it with explosives, and dropped it into the sea from a great height, you'd get a plume of water like that. Some of the splashes were close enough to the destroyers for the upthrown seawater to drench the men aboard.
'Christ!' Altogether involuntarily, Carsten turned away from his viewing slit. One shell from the salvo hadn't landed by a destroyer, but on it. The ship might suddenly have rammed headlong into a brick wall. In an instant, it went from a yappy little terrier leading the fleet into action to a pile of floating-or rather, rapidly sinking- wreckage.
'A lot of good men there,' Hiram Kidde said, as if carving an epitaph on a headstone. So, in a way, he was.
The Dakota began to zigzag violently at what seemed like random intervals. Armored against such shells, it could take far more punishment than a thin-skinned destroyer. That didn't mean you wanted to be punished- anything but. 'Cap'n' Kidde summed that up in one short phrase: 'Hate to be zigging when we should have zagged.'
'Wish you hadn't said that,' Hoskins told him. The grin the gunner's mate gave him in return looked like a death's head.
Sam Carsten made himself look some more. A few men in life jackets bobbed in the water near the stricken destroyer. He hoped they'd get picked up before the sharks found them.
He raised his gaze to Oahu ahead. Shells slammed down around the forts holding the coast-defense guns. Smoke and dust rose in great clouds. But the guns kept pounding back in answer. And more smoke rose from within the sheltered waters of Pearl Harbor, smoke that did not spring from shells. Carsten said, 'I think they're gonna come out and fight.'
'They're in a bad way,' Kidde said, relishing the prospect. 'They can't just sit there and take it, but if they come out, we're going to cross the T on 'em.'
Sure enough, one of the Dakota's zigs to port became a full turn, so that she presented her whole ten-gun broadside to the emerging British warships, which could reply only with their forward-facing cannon.
'Hit!' everybody screamed at once as gouts of smoke spurted from a stricken British vessel, and then again, a moment later, 'Hit!'
The ships of the Royal Navy were firing back; across blue water, orange flame and black smoke belched from the muzzles of their guns. And their gunnery was good. With a noise like a freight train roaring past when you were standing much too close to the tracks, a salvo of three shells smashed into the ocean a couple of hundred yards short of the Dakota. The battleship heeled to port as the captain took evasive action.
'Wish I could see what was happening on the port beam,' Carsten said. 'Have they bracketed us?'
'Sam, is that somethin' you really want to know?' Kidde asked him. After a moment, Carsten shook his head. If they put one salvo in front of you and one behind, the next one came down right on top of you.
