Walk in Hell

puffball. He reached out with his own foot and kicked the fragment of humanity against the traverse wall so no one would stumble over it.

“Poor bastard,” Paul Andersen said from behind him. “Wonder who he was.”

“Don’t know,” Martin answered. “Whoever he was, he never knew what hit him. Hell of a lot of worse ways to go than that, and Jesus, ain’t we seen most of ’em?” About then, by the noise, a couple of other men came on the wounded soldier for whom they’d been heading. He’d found one of those worse ways.

Andersen sighed. “Yeah,” he said, and stood against the wall, a few feet away from the severed foot, to relieve himself. “Sorry,” he muttered as he buttoned his fly. “Didn’t feel like holding it till I got to the latrine. Damn shelling probably blew shit all over the place, anyway.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Chester Martin told him. “You got any makings, Paul? I’m plumb out.”

“Yeah, I got some.” The corporal passed him his tobacco pouch.

He rolled a cigarette in a scrap of newspaper, pulled out a brass lighter, flicked the wheel, and got the smoke going. “Ahh, thanks,” he said after a long drag. “Hits the spot.” He looked around. “Sort of feels the way it does after a big rainstorm, you know what I mean? Peaceful-like.”

“Yeah,” Andersen said again, quite unself-consciously. A couple of rifle shots rang out, but they were three, four hundred yards away: nothing to worry about. “Might as well finish taking stock of what they did to us this time.”

All things considered, the company had got off lucky. Only a couple of men had died, and most of the wounds were home-towners, not the sort where the fellow who’d taken them begged you to shoot him and put him out of his anguish, and where, if you did, nobody ever said a word about it to you afterwards. Martin had seen his share of wounds like that; talking with the other soldiers in his squad, he said, “You see one like that, it’s your share for a lifetime and then some.”

“Yeah.” Specs Peterson laughed. “You want to hear something stupid, Sarge? Back before the war started, I was thinkin’ about lettin’ my beard grow out, on account of I couldn’t stand the sight of blood when I nicked myself with a razor.”

“That’s pretty stupid, all right,” Martin agreed, which made Specs glare at him in what might have been mock anger and might have been real. He went on, “You too cheap to pay a barber to do it for you? Those boys, they make damn sure they don’t cut you.”

“Too cheap, hell,” Peterson came back. “Where you from, Sarge?”

“Toledo,” Martin answered. “You know that.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I forgot,” Peterson said. “All right, Toledo, that’s the big city. Me, I’m off a farm in the western part of Nebraska. The barber in the little country town, he was so drunk all the time, it’s a wonder he never cut anybody’s throat. And I was ten miles outside of town, and we ain’t never gonna have the money for a flivver. So how the hell am I supposed to get a barber to shave me?”

“Damned if I know,” Martin answered. “So blood doesn’t bother you any more, that right?”

Specs Peterson snorted. “What do you think?”

Martin inspected him. He was even filthier than he had been before the dive into the shelter, and had unkempt stubble sprouting on cheeks and chin. Frowning sadly, Martin said, “So why the hell haven’t you shaved any time lately?”

“I was going to this morning, Sarge, honest, but the Rebs started shelling us.” Behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, Peterson raised an eyebrow. “You may have noticed.”

“Oh, yeah.” Martin snapped his fingers. “You know, I knew something was goin’ on then, but I couldn’t quite remember what.” Paul Andersen threw a clod of dirt at him. In the trenches, though, it passed for wit.

The Dakota steamed out of Pearl Harbor. Standing on deck, Sam Carsten said, “You know somethin’, Vic? This ship puts me in mind of the old joke about the three-legged dog. The wonder is, she goes at all.”

“Yeah, well, I ain’t gonna argue with you, you know what I’m saying?” Vic Crosetti answered, scratching his hairy arm. “I’ll tell you something else, too. She’s as ugly as a three-legged dog right now.”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed, mournful for a couple of reasons. For one thing, if he’d scratched himself half as hard as Crosetti was doing, he’d have drawn blood from his poor, sunburned hide. For another, the Dakota really was ugly these days. “What she’s really like is a guy who took one in the trenches and he ends up with a steel plate in his head.”

“Got enough steel plates to eat a whole steel dinner off of,” Crosetti said, whereupon Carsten made as if to pick him up and fling him over the rail.

Bad pun aside, though, the description was accurate enough. Not all the damage the Dakota had taken in the Battle of the Three Navies was repaired; parties were still patching, strengthening, refurbishing. Some of the damage wouldn’t be fixed, probably, till the war was over. But the battleship could make twenty knots and fight, and the Japanese and the British hadn’t disappeared off the face of the earth. Ugly or not, jury-rigged or not, she was going back out on patrol.

“I just hope the steering holds us,” Carsten said.

Vic Crosseti’s bushy eyebrows went up and down. “Why the hell do you want that? Didn’t you think it was fun, charging the whole damn British fleet all by ourselves? Nobody else had the balls to try anything like that. The other guys, they stayed in line like good little boys and girls. You want to stand out from the crowd, is what you want to do.”

“When they shoot you if you stand out, it’s not as bully as it would be otherwise,” Carsten said. Crosetti laughed. Then he got busy in a hurry, swiping a rag against the nearest stretch of painted metal. Sam imitated him without conscious thought. If somebody near you started working for no obvious reason, he’d spotted an officer you hadn’t.

Commander Grady-the fat stripe where a thin one had been before got sewn onto his cuff after the Battle of the Three Navies-said, “Never mind the playacting, Carsten.” He sounded amused; as sailors knew the nasty ways in which officers’ minds worked, so officers had some clues about how sailors operated. Grady went on, “You come with me. I’ve got some real work for you.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Sam answered. As he followed the commander of the starboard secondary armament, he knew without turning his head when Vic Crosetti would put down the rag and light himself a smoke. He also knew the little dago would be grinning like a monkey, because Sam had had to go do something real while he got to stand around a little longer.

Grady said, “We’re trying to get the number-four sponson into good enough shape so we can fire the gun if we have to.”

“Yes, sir,” Carsten said doubtfully. The number-four sponson had taken a hit from somebody’s secondary armament, whether British or Japanese nobody knew-nobody had been taking notes, and the shell hadn’t left a carte de visite: except for smashing the sponson to hell and gone, that is. Nobody had come out of there alive. Thinking about it gave Sam the horrors. It could have been the number-one sponson, easy as not.

“I think they can do it,” Grady said. “In fact, they damn near have done it. But the gun mount still isn’t quite right, and there’s not a lot of room in there, what with all the other repairs they’ve had to make. I want somebody familiar with a sponson as it’s supposed to be to pitch in with some good advice for them.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said again. “Uh, sir, so you know, ‘Cap’n’ Kidde has forgotten more about sponsons than I’ll ever know.”

“He’s still helping with the rebuilding of the number-two on the port side. That got it worse than this one. He suggested you for the duty.”

“All right, sir,” Carsten answered. He didn’t know whether Kidde was mad at him and wanted to keep him hopping or whether the gunner’s mate was putting him in a spot where he could shine for the higher-ups. A little of both, maybe: that was “Cap’n” Kidde’s way. If he did this right, he’d look good where looking good could really help him. If he fouled up, he’d pay for it.

He ducked through the hatchway. Commander Grady didn’t follow; he had other fish to fry. Even the bulkhead around the hatchway showed the damage the sponson had taken. It was a mass of patches and welds, none of them smoothed down or painted over. There might be time for that later. There hadn’t been time for it yet.

Inside, the sponson was even more crowded than it had been when the gun crew filled it during the Battle of