together. Ramsay waited for the U.S. troopers to move their own Maxim gun away from wherever they'd had it before and try to neutralize the Confederate weapon, but they didn't. Instead, here and there among the oaks, white flags started going up.
'Ease off, you Rebs!' somebody yelled. 'You got us.'
Firing slowly died away. 'All right, Yanks, come out,' Captain Lincoln called. The U.S. troopers obeyed, hands high over their heads. Nobody shot them down. This wasn't like the skirmish up in Kansas, the one by the railroad track. This one had been fair all the way-no armored automobiles to mess up the odds.
There were, all told, maybe twenty-five U.S. soldiers. Their leader, a fellow with a Kaiser Bill mustache that had lost a good deal of its waxed perfection, wore the single silver bars of a first lieutenant. 'We have some wounded back there,' he said, pointing in the direction from which he'd come.
'We'll take care of them,' Captain Lincoln promised, and told off a detachment to lead the Yankee prisoners back toward the road.
'A good haul,' Stephen Ramsay said, standing up and emerging from cover. 'We'll pick up that machine gun and as much ammunition as they have left for it, and then somebody'll shoot it back at 'em till all the cartridges are gone.'
Captain Lincoln gathered him up by eye. 'Come on, Corporal,' he said. 'Let's go see who we rescued there.'
Ramsay followed him through what had been the U.S. position. He was curious about that himself; he hadn't known any other Confederate cavalry was operating in this neck of the woods. He didn't know everything there was to know, though; he would have been the first-well, maybe the second-to admit as much.
From out of some woods that looked impenetrable, a voice called a sharp warning: 'Don't come no further! We got you covered six different ways.'
Captain Lincoln stopped. So did Ramsay, right behind him. 'Who are you?' Lincoln asked; it hadn't sounded like a Yankee holdout.
A hoarse laugh answered him. 'Ain't none of your damn business who we are and who we ain't,' the unseen man said. 'You jus' go on home, Captain; we ain't got a quarrel with you now, even if mebbe we used to.'
'What's that supposed to mean?' Ramsay muttered.
He hadn't meant anyone, even Lincoln, to hear him, but his ears were ringing from the fire fight, and he spoke louder than he'd intended. 'Means we wouldn't've mixed it up with them damnyankees if we hadn't thought they was you.'
'Outlaws!' Captain Lincoln exclaimed.
'Yeah, and now we got a nice new Maxim gun to play with, too, you want to come in after us. You want to fight the USA, fine. Leave us the hell alone.'
'What do we do, sir?' Ramsay asked.
'I think we leave them the hell alone, Corporal,' Lincoln said loudly. 'We're not the police and we're not the sheriffs. We owe these people one, too. They let us know where the Yankees were, and a machine gun's too heavy to lug around to robberies.' He turned his back and started away. Nobody shot at him, or at Ramsay.
'Hell of a thing,' Ramsay said when they were back among their comrades, and then, 'We could take 'em.'
'Oh, no doubt,' Lincoln agreed. 'But that's not our mission. We're having enough trouble with what is.' Ramsay thought that over and decided the captain was right.
Sam Carsten wished he were someplace else. He'd had that feeling before, but never so bad. If he got noticed 'This is what I get for volunteering,' he muttered under his breath as the ugly freighter pulled away from Kapalama Basin, around Sand Island, and west over Keehi Lagoon toward the entrance to Pearl Harbor. 'Cap'n' Kidde could have told him as much. Hell, Kidde had told him as much-after it was too late for him to do anything about it. But the gunner's mate hadn't been standing next to him when the captain of the Dakota asked for volunteers for a dangerous mission, and so his hand had shot up along with everybody else's. He hadn't particularly expected to be picked, but here he was.
Off to the west, the sound of big and medium-sized guns never let up. All of Oahu belonged to the United States Navy and Marines-all of it except one lump of rock and cement that made the U.S. hold on everything else a hell of a lot less secure than it should have been.
Smoke wreathed Fort William Rufus, the fort everybody, limey and Yank alike, called the Concrete Battleship. 'Why the devil did the damned English have to go and build a fort right there?' Carsten said.
'Drive us crazy?' somebody next to him suggested.
It was as good an answer as any, and better than most. Anybody in his right mind would have thought batteries on the mainland were plenty to keep Pearl Harbor safe. The Royal Navy had to have been hearing voices when it built an artificial island to go with those mainland forts. But, since the mainland forts had fallen to the Marines and the Concrete Battleship was still very much a going concern, maybe the English hadn't been so stupid after all.
The twelve-inch guns in the fort's two turrets had sunk a cruiser and a couple of destroyers, and damaged two battleships to boot. Until it was reduced, the Pacific Fleet couldn't use Pearl Harbor for an anchorage. If the British sortied from Singapore, either alone or with the Japs from Manila, there was liable to be hell to pay.
But how were you supposed to take a fort you couldn't wreck? Pounding by naval guns had chipped and pitted the steel-reinforced concrete that made up so much of the superstructure, but no shells had been lucky enough to land right on top of a turret. Admiral Dewey had offered the fort's garrison full military honors if they surrendered; scuttlebutt was, he'd even offered them safe passage to anywhere they wanted to go in British or Confederate territory. Whatever he'd offered, they'd said no.
And so, brute force and sweet reason having failed, the Navy was trying something new: sneakiness. Carsten didn't know which bright boy in glasses had come up with this scheme. What he did know was that, if it went wrong, nobody would ever find enough pieces of him to bury.
The freighter rounded the headland and sped toward the stern of the Concrete Battleship. The only gun it had ever had that could be brought to bear in that direction was a three-inch antiaircraft cannon, which wasn't turret mounted. The limeys weren't going to use that one now; the bombardment had long since wrecked it.
It was the only one in the plans, anyhow; what was hidden away in the depths of the fort was anybody's guess, and one that made Carsten want to run to the head. But to keep the garrison too busy even to worry about what was sneaking up on them, the Navy was plastering the place again. Shells burst on it, sending up smoke with a core of fire, and all around it, sending up great columns of water. Watching all that made Carsten want to pucker, too. If one of those shells was badly aimed Most of the Navy ships were at extreme long range, for good and cogent reasons. The Concrete Battleship could still return fire-and did, with a salvo from one of its big-gun turrets. The noise of those two twelve-inchers going off was like the end of the world.
Closer and closer the freighter came. Carsten moved up to the bow, with the rest of the Navy files and Marines carrying rifles. At the bow was a boarding tower that looked like something out of Sir Walter Scott or other tales of medieval adventure. But, considering that the roof of Fort William Rufus was forty feet above the waterline, the boarding party was going to need help getting up there.
All at once, the Navy guns fell silent. Carsten approved of that; a couple of shells had come closer to the freighter than to the Concrete Battleship. The ship slid up to the stern or rear or whatever you wanted to call it of the fort, making contact with a decided thump.
'Well, if those bastards didn't know we were here, they do now,' somebody close to Carsten said. That was undoubtedly true, and did nothing to make him feel better about the world.
A couple of Marines at the top of the boarding tower secured it to the broken concrete atop the fort. They waved. Sailors and Marines swarmed up the ladder, fast as they could. Sam was somewhere near the middle of the rush. His feet seemed to touch only every third rung. Then he was up on top himself, running through rubble to make sure no limeys came out of their starboard sally port to interfere with what the Americans were doing.
He got down behind a broken chunk of concrete and pointed his Springfield in the direction from which the British would come if they were trying something. He hoped to Jesus they wouldn't-after all, what harm could a few American sailors with rifles do on top of a fortress that had defied every big gun the U.S. Navy owned?
