Walk in Hell

part, though: Mehitabel, looked back on in memory rather than at with desire, wasn’t much.

Smoke poured from the Ericsson’s four stacks. George thought the design was ugly and clumsy, but nobody cared what a sailor thought. The destroyer picked up speed, fairly leaping over the ocean. “Getting close to wherever we’re going,” Conkling remarked.

“Yeah,” George answered. Nobody bothered telling sailors much of anything, either. Ireland the crew knew, but only a handful knew where they’d stand off the coast of the Emerald Isle.

Officers and petty officers went up and down the deck. “Be alert,” one of them said. “We need every pair of eyes we’ve got,” another added. A third, a grizzled CPO, growled, “If we hit a mine on account of one of you didn’t spot it, I’ll throw the son of a bitch in the brig.”

That drew a laugh from Conkling, and, a moment later, after he’d worked it through, one from Enos as well. He said, “If they’ve laid mines, how the devil can we spot ’em, going as fast as we are? The monitor I was on just crawled along the Mississippi, and we had a sweeper go in front of us when we thought the Rebs had mined the river.”

“Turtles,” Conkling said again. That didn’t answer George’s question. After a few seconds, he realized the question wasn’t going to get answered. That probably meant you couldn’t spot mines very well when you were going full speed ahead, an imperfectly reassuring idea.

“Land ho!” somebody shouted. George stared eastward. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes he saw a smudge on the horizon too big for a smoke plume and too steady to be a cloud. After a moment, he realized that, if he could see land, people on land could also see the Ericsson. Someone might be tapping on a wireless key or cranking a telephone even as he stood on the deck, in which case the boat would have visitors soon.

Moved by that same thought, Andy Conkling murmured, “The limeys on shore’ll take us for one of their own. Always have before.” Whether that was expectation or mere pious hope, George didn’t know. He did know it was his hope, pious or not.

“Landing parties to the boats,” a petty officer shouted. Enos hurried to the davits. He had more practice in small boats than most of the men aboard the Ericsson, and less experience on the destroyer herself. That made him a logical man for the landing party.

Each boat had a small gasoline engine in the stern, and each was packed with crates that bore no markings whatsoever. Enos scrambled up into a boat. “Steer between Loop Point and Kerry Head,” the petty officer told him and his five comrades. “Ballybunion’s where you’re going, on the south side of Shannon-mouth past the lighthouse. You’ll know the place by the old castle-a big, square, gray, ugly thing, I’m told, not hardly what you think of when castle goes through your head. Your chums’ll be waiting for you a little west of the castle. Good luck.”

Hoists lowered Enos’ boat and two more into the sea. They rode low in the water. Those crates weren’t stuffed with feathers. George got the motor going and steered for the distant land. “Jesus,” said one of the sailors in the boat with him, a big square-head named Bjornsen, “I feel naked in something this small.”

“Italians go fishing out of T Wharf back home every day in boats smaller than this,” George said.

“Crazy damn dagos,” Bjornsen muttered, and fell silent.

“Should have taken along a line and some hooks,” Enos said. “Might have brought back something the cooks could have fried for our supper.” He peered down into the green-gray sea. “Wonder what they have in the way of fish over here.”

That sparked another couple of sentences from Bjornsen: “Fish is one thing. I just hope they haven’t got any cooked goose.”

Loop Point boasted a lighthouse. Enos hoped nobody was staring down from it with a pair of field glasses. If somebody was staring down from it with a pair of field glasses, he hoped his boat and the two chugging along behind it looked enough like little local fishing boats to draw no notice.

The land was low and muddy and not particularly green, in spite of Ireland’s fabled reputation. Here and there, George spotted stone houses with turf roofs. They looked little and cramped and uncomfortable, a small step up from a sodbuster shack out on the prairie. He wouldn’t have wanted to live in any of them.

A petty officer named Carl Sturtevant had a map. “There’s the Cashen River inlet,” he said, pointing to a stream that, as far as George was concerned, wasn’t big enough to deserve to be a river. “A couple-three miles to Ballybunion.”

Ballybunion Castle had, at some time in the distant past, had part of one wall blown out of it, making it worthless as a fortification. Enos saw it only in the distance. Closer, some men were waving cloth caps to signal to the boats. “There they are,” he said happily.

“Yeah, those should be our boys,” Sturtevant agreed. “If those ain’t our boys, we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“Shit, if the limeys were wise to us, they wouldn’t waste time with no ambush,” said Bjornsen, a born optimist. “They’d haul a field piece out behind a haystack, wait till we got close, and blow us so high we’d never come down.” He glanced at those anonymous crates. “One hit would do the job up brown, I calculate.”

The men in baggy tweeds came trotting toward the boats. Out from behind a haystack came not a British field gun but several carts. “We’ve got more toys here than they can haul away in those,” George said as his boat beached.

“That’s their worry,” Sturtevant said. He and the other sailors, Enos among them, started unloading the crates.

“God bless you,” one of the Irishmen said. His comrades were lugging the Americans’ presents to the carts. He had a present himself: a jar with a cork in it. “Have a nip o’ this, lads.”

Quickly, the jar went from sailor to sailor. The whiskey tasted different from what George was used to drinking, but it was pretty good. He took a long pull. When he swallowed, he felt as if he’d poured lava down his gullet. The Irishmen didn’t water it to make it stretch further, as bartenders were in the habit of doing.

Wise in the ways of the sea, the Irishmen helped the sailors shove the boats back into the water, some calling thanks in brogues so thick, Enos could barely make them out. Free of the crates, the boats bobbed like corks. He headed out to sea once more, out toward the Ericsson.

“How about that?” Sturtevant said. “We just bit the King of England right in the ass.”

“Now all we have to do is see whether we got away with it,” George said. He wished the boat would go faster.

“Will you look at that crazy son of a bitch!” Vic Crosetti burst out.

Sam Carsten looked. The Sandwich Islander in question was indeed crazy, as far as he could tell. The fellow was skimming over the waves toward shore standing upright on a plank maybe nine or ten feet long and a foot and a half or two feet wide.

“Why the devil doesn’t he fall off and break his fool neck?” Sam said. “You wouldn’t even think a monkey could do that, let alone a man.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Crosetti said. “But I ain’t gonna let him hear me call him a monkey. He’d break me in half.” That was undoubtedly true. The surf-rider, who came up onto the beach with the plank on his head, was a couple of inches above six feet and muscled like a young god, which was all the more evident because he wore only a dripping cotton loincloth dyed in bright colors.

“Hey, pal,” Carsten said, and tossed him a dime. “That’s a hell of a ride you had there.” Crosetti coughed up a dime, too.

“Thank you both very much, gentlemen,” the fellow said. Like a fair number of his people, he talked like an educated Englishman, which made it hard to treat him like a nigger. His skin was only a couple of shades darker than Crosetti’s, anyhow.

“Where did you learn to do that, anyway?” Sam asked. The moment the words were out of his mouth, he realized he’d been stupid. Too late to do anything about it then, of course. That was the way the world worked.

The native laughed at him. It wasn’t a snotty laugh, it was a friendly laugh: maybe because the surf-rider was a friendly guy, maybe because he knew better than to get himself in trouble squabbling with the U.S. Navy. Both, Sam judged. The fellow said, “Having grown up here in Honolulu with the sea as my neighbor, so to speak, it was a sport I acquired as a boy. I confess I can see how surprising it might appear to those born in other climes.”