moaned and then, mercifully, passed out. As they hauled the petty officer towards a passageway, another Japanese fighter strafed the Remembrance. Bullets cracked past Sam and clattered off the flight deck. He breathed a sigh of relief when he had steel between him and the deadly chaos overhead.
As soon as he saw a sailor, though, he said, 'Here, take over for me. Get this man below. I've got duty topside.' He hurried back up to put his life on the line again, though he did his best not to think of it like that.
Off to starboard, one of the American destroyers was on fire from bow to stern and sinking fast. Boats and men in life jackets bobbed around her. Even as Sam watched, the destroyer rolled over and went to the bottom. In these waters, the bottom was a long, long way down. Sam shivered at how far down it was.
A bomb burst in the sea not far from the Remembrance, drenching Carsten and most of the others on deck. Even so, a sailor with wigwag signals guided an aeroplane to a landing. Maintenance men fueled it. Its prop started spinning again. Down the flight deck it rolled, bumping over the hasty repairs, and up into the air again.
'Didn't think we could do that,' Sam said to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger.
'He must have been flying on fumes, or he never would have tried coming in,' Pottinger agreed. 'Lucky the Japs have let up a little.'
'I wonder what we're doing to them,' Sam said. 'Worse than this, I hope. We'd better be, by God.'
'Yes, we'd better be. But how can we know?' Pottinger said. 'They're over the horizon. The only ones who have any real idea how the fight's going are our pilots.'
'No, sir-not even them,' Sam said. His superior raised an eyebrow. He explained: 'They don't know what the Jap pilots are doing to us, just like the Japs can't be sure what we're doing to them. Maybe the fellows in the wireless shacks-ours and theirs-have the big picture. Maybe nobody does. Wouldn't that be a hell of a thing?'
Lieutenant Commander Pottinger laughed. 'We won't know who won till day after tomorrow, when we read it in the newspapers.'
'Yeah.' It wasn't exactly funny, but Carsten laughed, too. 'As long as we live through it, we've come out all right.' A Japanese aeroplane and an American machine both splashed into the Pacific within a quarter of a mile of the Remembrance. Sam hoped somebody would live through the fight.
T he Kansas City Star was the daily published closest to Leavenworth that was actually worth reading. Irving Morrell had discovered that during his last stay in Kansas. Now, of course, the wireless supplemented the paper. Back then, wireless had only started passing from Morse code to voice. Even now, the newspaper gave him a far more detailed picture than the quick reports on the wireless could.
'I don't think anybody knows who won this stupid battle, Agnes,' he said two days after reports about the sea fight north of the Sandwich Islands started coming in. 'I really don't. If you look at our claims, we sank the whole Jap fleet and didn't take a scratch. If you look at theirs, they did it to us.'
His wife shrugged and poured him another cup of coffee. 'My bet is, both sides are lying as hard as they can.'
'My bet is, you're right,' Morrell answered. 'I suppose we'll sort it out in time for Mildred's children to study about it in school.'
Hearing her name made his daughter look up from her scrambled eggs. 'Study what in school?' she asked.
'A big naval battle in the Pacific,' her father said.
She rolled her eyes. 'For heaven's sake, who cares?'
Agnes laughed. 'If everybody felt that way, we wouldn't have to fight any more wars. That wouldn't be so bad, would it?'
'That would be wonderful,' Morrell said with the deep conviction of a man who'd seen-who'd taken part in-the worst man could do to his fellow man. He gulped the scalding coffee. 'That would be wonderful, but it's not going to happen any time soon, no matter how much I wish it would. Speaking of which, I'm off to the Barrel Works.'
'All right, dear.' Agnes got up, too, and came over to give him a kiss. 'I'll see you when you get back. Some more things should be out of boxes by then.'
'Good.' Morrell was convinced he could no more escape from boxes than a bug could get out of a spiderweb. He wondered how many times he'd moved in the course of his military career. He didn't try to count them all up. That way lay madness.
Barbed wire enclosed a field in which sat the experimental barrel he'd been working with ten years earlier. The machine hadn't been in the field all those years; it would have been a rusted, useless hulk if it had. Even though the Socialists had stopped work on new barrels for so long, the Army had carefully greased this one and stored it in a garage, in case it was ever wanted again. Morrell gave the General Staff-not his favorite outfit- reluctant credit for that. He didn't know what he would have done if he'd had to start altogether from scratch.
Sentries at the gate saluted. 'Good morning, Colonel,' they chorused.
'Morning, boys.' Morrell pointed into the field. 'Who's working on the barrel?'
'Sergeant Pound, sir,' one of the sentries answered.
'I might have known.' Morrell opened the gate and went inside. One of the sentries closed it after him. As he hurried toward the barrel, he called, 'You're up early today, Sergeant.'
'Oh, hello, sir.' Sergeant Michael Pound was a broad-shouldered, muscular man with close-cropped brown hair and a neat mustache showing the first silver threads. 'The carburetor still isn't what it ought to be, you know.'
'I'm not surprised, seeing how long the whole vehicle's been sitting there doing nothing,' Morrell answered. 'How are you going to get it clean?'
Sergeant Pound held up a coffee can. 'There's this new solvent called carbon tetrachloride. It gets grease off of anything,' he said enthusiastically. He was wild for any new invention; that was what had drawn him into barrels in the first place. 'It's wonderful stuff-nonflammable, a really excellent cleaner. Only one drawback.' He plopped the carburetor into the can.
'What's that?' Morrell asked, as he was surely supposed to.
'If you use it indoors, it's liable to asphyxiate you,' Pound replied. 'Some people are fools, of course. Congressmen get excited about that sort of thing. They want to ban the stuff. If you ask me, anyone who's dumb enough not to read the label deserves whatever happens to him.' He had no patience with incompetent people, no doubt because he was so all-around competent himself.
Morrell slapped him on the back. 'It's damn good to see you again, Sergeant, to hell with me if it's not.'
'Thank you very much, sir,' Michael Pound replied. 'I felt I was wasting my time these past few years in the artillery. Of course, the Army would have thrown me out on my ear if I'd tried to stay in barrels, but the men in charge of things aren't exactly the smartest ones we've got, are they?'
'I believe I'll plead the Fifth on that one,' Morrell said, laughing. 'Do you think you could do a better job of it?'
'Sir, I'm sure I could.' Pound wasn't joking. Because he did so many things well, he thought he could do anything. Sometimes he turned out to be right. Sometimes he was disastrously wrong. Occasional disasters did nothing to damage his self-confidence.
'How did you put up with going back to the artillery after the Barrel Works closed down?' Morrell asked.
'Well, for one thing, sir, like I said, if I hadn't they would have found something else even worse for me to do-or they would have thrown me out altogether, and that wouldn't have been good, not when the collapse came,' Pound said. 'And besides, I always thought the politicians would eventually come to their senses. I just never imagined they'd take so long.'
'Who did?' Morrell said. He'd asked for Sergeant Pound by name when he came back to Leavenworth. The man was worth his weight in gold-which, considering his massive frame, was no mean statement. If he occasionally suffered delusions of omnipotence… well, nobody was perfect.
'Knaves. Fools and knaves,' he said now: one of his favorite phrases.
'You'd better be careful,' Morrell warned him. 'You're starting to sound like you belong in the Freedom Party.'
'Oh, no, sir. I didn't say they were a pack of traitors who need to be lined up against a wall and shot.' Pound had no trouble imitating the Freedom Party's impassioned rhetoric. He added, 'Besides, that Featherston is a dangerous lunatic. If he gets elected this fall, he's liable to show just how dangerous he is.'
'I wish I could tell you you were wrong,' Morrell said.
'He's liable to prove as troublesome to us as those Action Francaise people are to the Kaiser,' Pound said.
