Walk in Hell

especially not if you were in his power.

Will Cooper came back with Captain Stuart a few minutes later. The captain bore a strong resemblance to his famous father and even more famous grandfather, except that, instead of their full beards, he wore a mustache and a little tuft of hair under his lower lip, giving him the look of a seventeenth-century French soldier of fortune.

“Captain,” Major Potter said, as he had to Jake Featherston, “is this nigger here your man Pompey?”

“Yes, he’s my servant,” Stuart replied after a moment; he’d needed a second look to be certain, too. “What is the meaning of-?”

“Shut up, Captain Stuart,” Potter interrupted, as harshly as he had when Pompey spoke without his leave. Jake’s eyes widened. Nobody had ever addressed Jeb Stuart III that way in his presence. Jeb Stuart, Jr., wore wreathed stars on his collar tabs and was a mighty power in the War Department down in Richmond. But Potter sounded utterly sure of himself: “I’ll ask the questions around here.”

“Now see here, Major,” Stuart said. “I don’t care for your tone.”

“I don’t give a damn, Stuart,” Clarence Potter returned. “I was trying to sniff out Red subversion among the niggers attached to this army last year-last year, Stuart. And I got information that your nigger Pompey wasn’t to be trusted, and I wanted to interrogate him properly. Do you remember that?”

“I did nothing wrong,” Stuart said stiffly. But he looked like a man who had just taken a painful wound and was trying to see if he could still stand up.

“No, eh?” The major from Intelligence knocked him down with contemptuous ease. “You didn’t talk to your daddy the general? You didn’t have me overruled and the investigation quashed? You know better than that, I know better than that-and the War Department knows better than that, too.”

Till now, Jake had never seen Captain Stuart at a loss. Whatever else you said about him, he fought his guns as aggressively as any man would like, and showed a contempt for the dangers of the battlefield any hero of the War of Secession would have envied. But he’d never been threatened with loss of status and influence, only death or mutilation. Those latter two might have been easier to face.

“Major, I think you misunderstood-” he began.

“I misunderstood nothing, Captain,” Potter said coldly. “I was trying to do my duty, and you prevented that. If you’d been right, you’d have gotten away with it. But this nigger was taken in arms with a band of Red rebels, and every sign is that he wasn’t just a fighter. He was a leader in this conspiracy, and had been for a long time. If I’d questioned him last year-but no, you wouldn’t let that happen.” Potter’s headshake was a masterpiece of mockery.

“Pompey?” Stuart shook his head, too, but in amazement. “I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.”

“Frankly, Captain, I don’t give a damn,” Potter said. “If I had my way, I’d bust you down to private, give you a rifle, and let you die gloriously charging a Yankee machine gun. Can’t have everything, I suppose, no matter how much damage your damn-fool know-it-all attitude cost your country. But your free ride to the top is gone, Stuart, and that’s a fact. If you drop dead at ninety-nine and stay in the Army all that time, you’ll be buried a captain.”

Silence stretched. Into it, Pompey said, “Marse Jeb, I-”

“Shut up,” Potter told him. “Get moving.” He shoved the Negro on his way. Jeb Stuart III stared after them. Jake Featherston studied his battery commander. He didn’t quite know what he thought. With Stuart under a cloud, life was liable to get harder for everybody: the captain’s name had been one to conjure with when it came to keeping shells in supply and such. On the other hand, as an overseer’s son Jake wasn’t sorry to watch an aristocrat taken down a peg. More chances for me, he thought, and vowed to make the most of them.

The USS Dakota steamed over the beautiful deep-blue waters of the Pacific, somewhere south and west of the Sandwich Islands. Sam Carsten was delighted to have the battleship back in fighting trim once more; she had been laid up in a Honolulu dry-dock for months, taking repairs after an unfortunate encounter with a Japanese torpedo.

Carsten admired the deep blue sea. He admired the even bluer sky. He heartily approved of the tropic breezes that kept it from seeming as hot as it really was. The sun that shone brightly down from that blue, blue sky…

Try as he would, he couldn’t make himself admire the sun. He was very, very fair, with golden hair, blue eyes, and a pink skin that turned red in any weather and would not turn tan for love nor money. When he was serving in San Francisco, he’d thought himself one step this side of heaven, heaven being defined as Seattle. Honolulu, however pretty it was, made a closer approximation to hell. He’d smeared every sort of lotion known to pharmacist’s mate and Chinese apothecary on his hide. None had done the least bit of good.

“Far as I’m concerned, the damn limeys were welcome to keep the Sandwich Islands,” he muttered under his breath as he swabbed a stretch of the Dakota’s deck. He chuckled wryly. “Somehow, though, folks who outrank me don’t give a damn that I sunburn if you look at me cross-eyed. Wonder why that is?”

“Wonder why what is?” asked Vic Crosetti, who was sanitizing the deck not far away and who slept in the bunk above Carsten’s. “Wonder why people who outrank a Seaman First don’t give a damn about him, or wonder why you look like a piece of meat the galley didn’t get done enough?”

“Ahh, shut up, you damn lucky dago,” Sam said, more jealousy than rancor in his voice. Crosetti had been born swarthy. All the sun did to him was turn him a color just this side of Negro brown.

“Hey, bein’ dark oughta do me some good,” Crosetti said. No matter what color he was, nobody would ever mistake him for a Negro, not with his nose and thick beard and arms thatched with enough black hair to make him look like a monkey.

Sam dipped his mop in the galvanized bucket and got another stretch of deck clean. He’d been a sailor for six years now, and had mastered the skill of staying busy enough to satisfy officers and even more demanding chief petty officers without really doing anything too closely resembling work. Crosetti wasn’t going at it any harder than he was; if the skinny little Italian hadn’t been born knowing how to shirk, he’d sure picked up the fundamentals in a hurry after he joined the Navy.

Carsten stared off to port. The destroyer Jarvis was frisking through the light chop maybe half a mile away, quick and graceful as a dolphin. Its wake trailed creamy behind it. The Jarvis could steam rings around the big, stolid Dakota. That was the idea: the destroyer could keep torpedo boats and submersibles away from the battlewagon. That the idea still had some holes in it was attested by the repairs just completed on the Dakota.

Crosetti looked out over the water, too. “Might as well relax,” he said to Carsten. “Nobody in the Navy’s seen hide nor hair of the Japs or the limeys since we got bushwhacked the last time. Stands to reason they’re mounting patrols to make sure we ain’t goin’ near the Philippines or Singapore, same as we’re doing here.”

“Stood to reason last time, too,” Sam answered. “Only thing is, the Japs weren’t being reasonable.”

Crosetti cocked his head to one side. “Yeah, that’s so,” he said. “You got a cockeyed way of looking at things that makes a lot of sense sometimes, you know what I’m saying?”

“Maybe,” Carsten said. “I’ve had one or two guys tell me that before, anyway. Now if there was some gal who’d tell me something like that, I’d have something. But hell, gals here, they ain’t gonna look past the raw meat.” He ran a sunburned hand down an equally sunburned arm.

“If that’s the way you think, that’s what’ll happen to you, yeah,” Crosetti said. “It’s all in the way you go after ’em, you know what I’m saying? I mean, look at me. I ain’t pretty, I ain’t rich, but I ain’t lonesome, neither, not when I’m on shore. You gotta show ’em they’re what you’re after, and you gotta make ’em think you’re what they’re after, too. All how you go about it, and that’s a fact.”

“Maybe,” Sam said again. “But the ones you really want to hook onto, they’re the ones who won’t bite for a line like that, too.”

“Who says?” Crosetti demanded indignantly. Then he paused. “Wait a minute. You’re talkin’ about gettin’ married, for God’s sake. What’s the point to even worrying about that? You’re in the Navy, Sam. No matter what kind of broad you marry, you ain’t gonna be home often enough to enjoy it.”

Carsten would have argued that, the only difficulty being that he couldn’t. So he and Crosetti talked about women for a while instead, no subject being better calculated to help pass time of a morning. Sam didn’t really know how much his bunkmate was making up and how much he’d really done, but he’d been blessed with either a hell of a good time or a hell of an imagination.

An aeroplane buzzed by. Sam looked at it anxiously: following a Japanese aeroplane had got the