Walk in Hell

the Three Navies. A bunch of men in dungarees turned their heads to stare at Sam. One of them said, “You must be the guy Commander Grady was talking about.”

“Yeah, I’m Sam Carsten, loader on the number-one gun, this side.” Carsten pointed toward the bow.

“Good.” The fellow in dungarees nodded. “Then you know how one of these damn things goes when it’s working right.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Pleased to meetcha, Sam, by the way. I’m Lou Stein. These here lugs are Dave and Mordecai and Bismarck and Steve and Cal and Frank and Herman.”

Sam spent the next couple of minutes shaking hands and wondering how the hell he was going to keep the repair crew straight in his head. The only one he knew he wouldn’t forget was Mordecai, who’d lost a couple of fingers in some kind of accident and whose handshake was strange because of it. He couldn’t have had any trouble with tools, though, or they wouldn’t have let him do his job.

At the same time as Sam was sizing up the repair crew, he was also sizing up the sponson. It was even more cramped than it would have been otherwise, because they’d welded steel plates inside the inner curve to cover up the damage the entering shell had done. They hadn’t covered quite all of it. Above the new steel, a dark, reddish brown stain still marked the inside of the armor plate. Carsten tried not to look at it. It might easily have come from a loader.

He shook himself. Got to get down to business, he thought. “Commander Grady said you were having some kind of trouble in here-I mean, besides all this stuff.” He waved at the roughly welded steel slabs. He wouldn’t have wanted to serve this gun-might as well put toilet paper between him and enemy gunfire as that thin metal. But then again, the armor plate over it didn’t look to have done the best job of protecting the sailors in here, either.

Mordecai said, “Damn gun won’t traverse the way it’s supposed to. It gets all herky-jerky about a third of the way through the arc. Here, I’ll show you.”

He demonstrated. Sure as hell, there was one point at which the five-inch gun would not hold a target steadily. “That’s pretty peculiar, all right,” Carsten agreed. “Acts like there’s a kink in the hydraulic line some kind of way, don’t it?”

“That’s what we figured, too,” Lou Stein said. “But if there is, we sure as hell ain’t been able to find it. Those things are armored, after all; they shouldn’t kink.”

“If I hadn’t done all the things I shouldn’t do, my mama would be a happier lady today,” Sam answered, which made the repair crew laugh. He went on, “Besides, in this mess, how the devil can you tell which way is up, anyhow?” He waved his hand. The plate on the inner curve of the armor wasn’t the only new, raw repair, not by a long shot it wasn’t. Other rectangular plates of metal covered damage to the roof and to the deck.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wondered if this crew had done all that quick, rough work. If they had, he’d just stuck his foot in his face. But Mordecai said, “Tell me about it, why don’t you?”

“Let me go under there and take a look,” Carsten said. “Got a flashlight I can borrow?”

Stein wore one on his belt. Hiram Kidde would have wanted one like it; it had the size and heft to make a hell of a billy club. The door that let Sam down below into the mechanism that moved the gun worked stiffly; the metal in which it was set had been bent and imperfectly straightened.

With the door open so he could call to the repair crew above, he said, “Run it through there, would you?” They did. He shined the flashlight on as much of the hydraulic line as he could see. “Damn. Doesn’t look like anything wrong here.”

“That’s what we thought,” Mordecai answered. “You’re doing everything exactly the way we did it.”

“Am I? All right.” Stubbornly, Carsten traced the hydraulic line from the gun back to where it ran behind the steel door through which he’d come. Behind the door…He whistled tunelessly between his teeth. Wondering if Lou or Bismarck or any of them had done it before him, he shut the door.

He whistled again, louder. A peeled-back strip of steel from the shell hit had been pushed between two links of the flexible armor the hydraulic line wore. You couldn’t see that from above, because the hasty repairs to the deck hid it. And you might not be able to see it when you came down here, either, because you literally shut the door on it. But when the gun moved to that particular position, the line moved and the steel pinched off the flow of hydraulic fluid.

“Lucky it never pierced the hose in the armor,” Sam muttered. He opened the door again. “Lou, you want to come down here and take a look at this?”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Lou Stein said when Carsten showed him what he’d found. “Jeez, I wish it had pierced the line. Then we would have found out what the hell was wrong. Well, we can fix it, anyhow.”

A cutting torch made short work of the offending metal. Mordecai used it with as much assurance as if he’d had ten fingers, not eight. He said, “Sam, we get back to Pearl, everybody on this-here repair crew will buy you a beer. This one’s been makin’ us crazy for a while, let me tell you. Look behind the goddamn door. What do they call it? Hiding in plain sight?”

“Yeah.” Sam chuckled. “Hell, any sailor who doesn’t want to work knows how to do that.” He and Mordecai grinned at each other.

XIII

“What’s the matter, Ma?” Edna Semphroch asked. “Lord, you ought to be dancing out in the street at how bully things are, but you’ve done nothing but mope the past month.” She dried a last cup and set it in the cupboard. “We’ve got more money than I ever thought I’d see in all my born days, and we haven’t seen hide nor hair of that awful Bill Reach since the Rebs hauled him off. I don’t miss him, neither. He gave me the horrors.” She shuddered.

“I don’t miss him, either,” Nellie Semphroch answered. She was drying silverware, and threw a fork into the drawer with unnecessary violence. “I wish to God I’d never set eyes on him.”

She waited for Edna to start prying again about who Reach was, who he had been, and what he’d meant to her. She’d fended off those questions for months now. What Edna would learn if she got the true answer would not only make her wilder, it would also probably make her despise Nellie.

But, for once, Edna took a different tack tonight. She said, “Is Mr. Jacobs across the street all right? You ain’t been over there for a while now, and you were going every few days for a long time.”

If Edna had noticed that, had some alert Confederate intelligence officer noticed it, too? Nellie grimaced; she wondered if she even cared. She dried a teaspoon. “As far as I know, he’s fine,” she answered, doing her best to sound unconcerned, indifferent.

Edna looked at her out of the corner of her eye. “Were you sweet on him, Ma?” she asked in a tone that invited woman-to-woman confidences. “Is that what it is? Were you sweet on him and you had a quarrel?”

“We’ve never had a quarrel,” Nellie snapped, all pretense of indifference vanishing before she could try to keep it. The irony was that she had discovered she was sweet on Hal Jacobs-and he on her-bare moments before she discovered he was working for Bill Reach, whom she still loathed with the deep and abiding loathing that clung to every part of her life before she’d met Edna’s father.

Too clever for her own good, Edna noticed the hot denial at once, both for what it said and for what it didn’t. “It’s all right, Ma, it really is,” she said tolerantly. “You know I wouldn’t mind if you found somebody. Pa’s been dead so long, I don’t hardly remember him anyways. And Mr. Jacobs seems nice enough, even if-” She stopped. “He seems nice enough.”

Even if he’s old and not very handsome. Nellie could read between the lines, too. She sighed. Edna wanted license for herself, and was consistent enough, maybe even generous enough, to grant the same license to everyone else, even to her mother. That Nellie might not want it never occurred to her. But then, she didn’t know Nellie had had far too much license far too young. Nellie hoped she would never find out.

“You really ought to make up with him, Ma,” Edna said. “I mean-” She stopped again. This time, she didn’t amend anything. She didn’t need to amend anything. Nellie could figure out what she meant. You’re not getting any younger. You’re not going to catch anything better.

“Maybe I will,” Nellie said with another sigh. She hadn’t brought Hal Jacobs any information gleaned at the coffeehouse since she found out to whom he’d been giving it. One reason-one big reason-the place flourished as it