Scipio nodded. That described his former boss very well. He was about to say so when a shout from farther up Greene Street made him whip his head around. The shout was one he'd heard before: 'Freedom!' It seemed to come from a great many throats.
All up and down the queue, Negroes looked at one another and up the street in alarm. No one with a dark skin thought of the Freedom Party with anything but dread. 'Freedom!' That great shout was closer now. Scipio glanced at the policemen who'd been keeping the line orderly. He'd always seen the white police as a tool for keeping Negroes in their place. Now he hoped they could protect him and his people.
Past the line of Negroes came the Freedom Party marchers. Scipio stared at them in dismay: hundreds of men tramped along in disciplined ranks. They all wore white shirts and butternut pants. Many of them had steel helmets on their heads. The men in the first rank carried the Stars and Bars and Confederate battle flags. The men in the second rank bore white banners with FREEDOM printed on them in angry red letters, and others that might have been Confederate battle flags save that they featured a red St. Andrew's cross on blue, not blue on red.
'Freedom!' the marchers roared again. Had they turned on the Negroes in line outside the city hall, the handful of policemen could not have hoped to stop them. But they just kept marching and shouting their one-word slogan. That showed discipline, too, and frightened Scipio almost as much as an attack would have done.
He looked from the marchers back to the police. Not only were the policemen outnumbered, they also seemed cowed by the Freedom Party's show of force. It was almost as if the marchers represented the Confederate government and the police were civilian spectators.
'Them bastards is bad trouble,' Aurelius said, speaking in a low voice to make sure he gave the white men no excuse to do anything but march.
'Every time the Freedom Party do something mo' poor buckra join they than the time befo',' Scipio said. 'That go on, they gwine end up runnin' this here country one fine day. What they do then?'
'Whatever they please,' Bathsheba said. 'They do whatever they please.'
'Ain't nothin' we can do about it, anyways,' Aurelius said.
Scipio suddenly felt the weight of the passbook in his pocket. It might have been the weight of a ball and chain. For the very first time, he truly sympathized with the Red uprising in which he'd played an unwilling part. This march was what Cassius and Cherry and the other Reds had feared the most.
But their uprising had helped spawn the Freedom Party- Scipio understood the dialectic and how it worked, even if he didn't think of it as revealed truth. And the black uprising had failed, as any black uprising was bound to do: too few blacks, too few weapons. What did that leave for Negroes in the CSA? Nothing he could see.
'We's trapped,' he said, hoping Bathsheba or Aurelius would argue with him. Neither of them did, which worried him more than anything.
Sam Carsten slammed a shell into the breech of the five-inch gun he served aboard the USS Remembrance. 'Fire!' Willie Moore shouted. Carsten jerked the lanyard. The cannon roared. The shell casing fell to the deck with a clang of brass on steel. One of the shell-jerkers behind Sam handed him a fresh round. Coughing a little from the cordite fumes, he reloaded the gun.
Moore peered out through the sponson's vision slit. 'I think we've got to bring it down a couple hundred yards to drop it just where we want it,' he said, and fiddled with the elevation screw to achieve the result he wanted. When he was satisfied, he nodded to Sam. 'Give 'em another one.'
'Right, Chief.' Sam yanked the lanyard again. The gun bellowed. Carsten said, 'Christ, by the time we're through with Belfast, there won't be anything left of it.'
'Damn stubborn crazy micks,' Moore said. 'The ones who want to stay part of England, I mean, not the ones who aim to put all of Ireland into one country. They're damn stubborn crazy micks, too, but they're on our side.'
Overhead, two aeroplanes roared off the deck of the Remembrance^ one on the other's heels. 'They'll give the Belfasters something to think about,' Sam said.
'That they will,' the commander of the gun crew agreed. 'No doubt about it.' He peered through the slit again. 'Sons of bitches!' he burst out. 'The bastards are shooting back. One just splashed into the water a few hundred yards short of us.'
One of the shell-jerkers, Joe Gilbert-like most in his slot, a big, muscular fellow-said, 'Goddamn limeys must have smuggled in some more guns.'
'Yeah,' Carsten said. 'And if we call 'em on it, they'll say they never did any such thing-their pet micks must've come up with the guns and the shells under a flat rock somewhere, or else made 'em themselves.'
Officially, Britain recognized Ireland's independence. She'd had to; the United States and the German Empire had forced the concession from her. The Royal Navy never ventured into the Irish Sea to challenge the Remembrance or any other U.S., German, or Irish warship.
But hordes of small freighters and fishing boats smuggled arms and ammunition and sometimes fighting men into the loyalist northeastern part of Ireland. The British Foreign Office blandly denied knowing anything about that. However many ships stood between Ireland on the one hand and England and Scotland on the other, the gun runners always found gaps through which they could slip.
Willie Moore said, 'The damn micks-our damn micks, I mean-had better start doing a better job of patrolling, that's all I've got to tell you. It's their goddamn country. If they can't hang on to it all by their lonesome, I can tell you we ain't gonna hang around forever to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.' He adjusted the elevation screw again. 'Let 'em have the next one now.'
'Aye aye.' Sam fired the five-inch gun again. He had to step smartly to keep the casing from landing on his toes.
Joe Gilbert passed him another shell. He was bending to load it into the breech when a shell from the shore slammed into the sponson. That he was bending saved his life. Most of the shell's force was spent in penetrating the armor that protected the sponson, but a fragment gutted Willie Moore as if he were a muskie pulled from a Minnesota lake. Another one hissed over Sam's head and into Gilbert's neck. The shell-jerker fell without a sound, his head almost severed from his body. Moore screamed and screamed and screamed.
Sam could look out through the hole the shell had torn and see the ocean and, beyond it, burning Belfast. He wasted only a tiny fraction of a second on that. What to do when the sponson got hit had been drilled into him during more than ten years in the Navy. No fire-he checked that first. Inside the sponson, it was just bare metal, with no paint to burn. That didn't always help, but it had this time. The ammunition wouldn't go up.
Next, check the gun crew. Joe Gilbert was beyond help. Blood dripped from Sam's shoes when he picked up his feet. Calvin Wesley, the other shell-hauler, hadn't been scratched. He gaped at Gilbert's twitching corpse as if he'd never seen one before. He was a veteran-everybody aboard the Remembrance was a veteran-so that was hard to imagine, but maybe it was so.
Willie Moore kept shrieking. One glance at what the shell had done told Sam all he needed to know. He opened the aid kit on the wall of the sponson; a shell fragment had scarred the thick metal right beside it. From the kit, he drew two syringes of morphine. One might have been enough, but he wanted to make sure.
He stooped beside Moore. 'Here, Chief, I'll take care of you.' He gave the gunner's mate all the morphine in both syringes. After a very little while, Moore fell silent.
'That's too much;' Wesley said. 'It'll kill him.'
'That's the idea,' Sam said. He watched Moore's chest. It stopped moving. Like a man waking up from a bad dream, Cars-ten shook himself. 'Come on, God damn it. We've got this gun to fight. You know how to load, right?'
'I better,' Wesley answered. 'I seen you guys do it often enough.'
'All right, then. You load and fire, and I'll aim the damn gun.' Sam had seen that done often enough, too, and practiced it himself when he got the chance during drills. The hit had torn the left side of the sponson too badly for the gun to track all the way in that direction. Otherwise, though, he was still in business. 'Fire!'
Calvin Wesley sent on its way the shell Sam had been loading when they were struck. He was setting the next round into the breech when someone out in the passage pounded on the dogged hatch. A shout came through the thick steel: 'Anybody alive in there?'
'Fire!' Sam said, and the gun roared. That should have answered the question, but the pounding went on. He nodded to Wesley. 'Undog it.'
'Aye aye.' The shell-jerker obeyed.
Half a dozen men spilled into the sponson, Commander Grady among them. 'Two dead, sir,' Carsten said
