anyhow.
George didn't know whether to believe the stories. He did know he'd been away from Connie long enough to hope to find out if they were true. He could hope it would be his last fling before he went back to his wife for good. That would help him feel not so bad about doing what he wanted to do anyway.
But Wally Fodor repeated, 'Don't hold your breath. Besides, do you really want to get knocked over the head if you go ashore? They don't love us down here. Chances are they're never going to, either.'
'Hey, I don't care about love,' the shell-jerker said. 'Long as I can get it in, that's good enough.' Laughter said it was good enough for most of the gun crew.
They didn't get liberty. They did get fresh produce. Boats came alongside to sell the battleship fruit and meat and fish. Fresh orange juice and lemonade appeared in the galley. So did fresh peas and green beans, and salads with tender lettuce and buttery avocados and tomatoes and celery. The sailors ate fried shrimp and fried fish and spare ribs and fried chicken.
George had to let his belt out a notch. The chow beat the hell out of any Navy rations he'd had before. Bumboats brought out fresh water, too, enough so the crew didn't have to use seawater and saltwater soap when they showered. If that wasn't a luxury, he'd never known one. Peace had its advantages, all right.
He'd just stripped off his uniform to get clean when an enormous explosion knocked him ass over teakettle. 'The fuck?' he said, which was one of the more coherent comments from the naked sailors.
Klaxons hooted. He ran for his battle station without thinking about his clothes. Bodies lay on the deck. He'd worry about them later. Right now, he had a job to do, and he could do it with pants or without. He wasn't the only naked man heading for duty-not even close.
Petty Officer Fodor had a cut on his face and another one on his arm. He didn't seem to notice either one. 'They blew up a goddamn bumboat,' he said. 'Right alongside us, they blew up a goddamn bumboat.'
'They're idiots if they did,' George said. The Oregon, like any modern battleship, had sixteen-inch armor belts on either side to protect against gunfire and torpedoes. They weren't perfect, as the melancholy roll of torpedoed battlewagons attested. But they were a hell of a lot better than nothing. A blast that might have torn a destroyer in two dented the Oregon and killed and hurt people exposed to it without coming close to sinking her.
'This is the captain speaking!' the PA blared. 'Odd-numbered gun stations, aid in casualty collection and damage assessment. Even numbers, hold your posts.'
As the skipper repeated the order, George and the other men from his twin-40mm mount dashed off to do what they could for the sailors who hadn't been so lucky. There were a lot of them: anybody who'd been on deck when the bumboat exploded was down and moaning or down and thrashing or down and not moving at all, which was worst.
Some of the paint was burning. Men already had hoses playing on the fires. The stink made George's asshole pucker. When your ship got hit, that odor was one of the things you smelled. And he almost fell on his face skidding through a puddle of seawater from the fire-fighters.
He knelt by a burned man who was clutching his left shoulder. 'C'mon, buddy-I'll give you a hand,' he said.
'Thanks.' The wounded sailor groped for him. 'Sorry. I can't see a goddamn thing.'
'Don't worry about it. The docs'll fix you up.' George had no idea whether they could or not. The other man's face didn't look good, which was putting it mildly. 'Your legs all right? I'm gonna get you on your feet if I can.'
'Give it a try,' the injured man said, which might have meant anything. He groaned and swayed when George hauled him upright, but he didn't keel over again. George got the fellow's good arm around his own shoulder. He also got blood on his own bare hide, but that was something to flabble about later.
Helping the other sailor down three flights of steep, narrow steel stairs when the poor guy couldn't see where to put his feet was an adventure all by itself. George managed. Other sailors and groups were carrying injured men and trying to get them down in stretchers without spilling them out.
In the sick bay and in the corridors outside it, the battleship's doctors and pharmacist's mates were working like foul-mouthed machines. One of the mates took a quick look at the sailor George had brought down. 'Put him there with them,' he said, pointing to a group of other men who were hurt but not in imminent danger of dying. 'We'll get to him as soon as we have a chance to.'
'Good luck, pal,' George said as he eased the wounded sailor down. It was painfully inadequate, but it was all he could offer.
'Thanks. Go help somebody else,' the other man said. Somebody-maybe a pharmacist's mate, maybe a rating one of the doctors had dragooned-stuck a needle into him. Morphine sure wouldn't hurt.
George was helping to get another injured man down to first aid when someone said, 'I wonder what we'll do to Miami for this.'
'Blow the fucking place off the fucking map,' the wounded sailor said. That sounded good to George. He'd heard of people bombs and auto bombs, but a boat bomb? The son of a bitch who thought of that one had more imagination than he knew what to do with. George hoped he'd been on the boat and pressed the button that blew it up. If he had, maybe the scheme would die with him.
Or was that too much to hope for?
'Hell of a note if we've got to inspect every boat that brings us supplies,' a CPO said. 'Sure looks like we will, though.'
When George got down to sick bay this time, he noticed a group of badly hurt men nobody was helping. They had to be the ones the doctors thought wouldn't get better no matter what. No time to waste effort on them, then. That was cruel logic, but it made sense.
The Oregon, he learned later, lost 31 dead and more than 150 wounded. In response, the U.S. Army seized 1,500 Miamians. Some of the attempted seizures turned into gun battles, too. The locals knew what the soldiers were coming for, and weren't inclined to give themselves up without a fight. Because of the casualties the Army took rounding up the hostages, it rounded up more hostages still.
Guns aimed toward the city, the Oregon sailed close inshore. The sharp, dry crack!s of rifle volleys came across the water, one after another after another. They got the message across: if you messed with the USA, you paid. And paid. And paid.
Some of the sailors weren't satisfied even so. 'We ought to blast the shit out of that place,' Wally Fodor said. 'Those assholes fucked with us, not with the Army. We ought to give them a fourteen-inch lesson.'
'Sure works for me,' George said. All right, so battleships were shore-bombardment vessels these days. There was a shore that needed bombarding, and it was lying there naked and undefended in front of them.
But the order didn't come. The men pissed and moaned. That was all they could do. They couldn't open up on Miami without orders. Oh, maybe they could-the men on the smaller guns, anyhow-but they were looking at courts-martial and long terms if they did. Nobody had the gall to try it.
Discipline tightened up amazingly. They'd taken it easy after the Confederate surrender. They didn't any more. You never could tell what might happen now. George would have bet skippers and execs all around the fleet were preaching sermons about the battleship. That was just what he wanted, all right: to serve aboard the USS Object Lesson.
'Isn't it great?' he said to Fodor. 'All those guys are going, 'See? You better not be a bunch of jerkoffs like the clowns on the Oregon. Otherwise, the Confederates'll blow your nuts off, too.''
'Yeah, that's about the size of it, all right,' the gun chief agreed. 'They can fix up the scar on the side of the ship and slap fresh paint all over the place, but the scar on our reputation ain't gonna go away so fast. Goddamn Confederate cockknockers took care of that in spades.'
'Fuck it,' George said. 'I just want to get back to Boston in one piece. Goddamn war was supposed to be over months ago.'
'You think we were down here for no reason?' Fodor patted the gun mount. 'I wish they would've lined up the hostages right there on the beach. Then we coulda opened up on 'em with the 40mms. Boy, we would've gone through 'em in a hurry.'
'Yeah.' George hadn't thought of the antiaircraft guns as weapons that could substitute for a firing squad. But Wally Fodor wasn't wrong. 'You turn these babies on people, you know what you've got? You've got Grim Reapers, that's what.'
'I like it,' Fodor said, and damned if he didn't show up the next day with a can of white paint and some stencils. GRIM REAPER 1 went on the right-hand gun barrel, GRIM REAPER 2 on the gun on the left. 'Way to go,
