further gone than I thought.'
'Sure hope so,' Menefee said. 'Tell you one thing: when the Marines and the Army guys go ashore, their venereal rate's gonna climb like one of those fighters. Lots of infected people in Haiti, and the gals there'll be mighty glad to see 'em.'
'Well, with the spiffy new pills and shots we've got, it's not as bad as it used to be. Still not good,' Sam added hastily-you couldn't sound complacent about VD. The idea of lying down with a colored woman didn't drive him wild. But if you were a horny kid and there were no white gals for three islands around, you'd take whatever you could get. He remembered some of his own visits to brothels full of Chinese girls in Honolulu during the last war.
A yeoman came up onto the bridge. 'Carriers report airplanes heading our way from Cuba, sir.'
'Thanks, van Duyk,' Sam said. Carriers had stronger Y-ranging sets than his ship did.
The men already stood at battle stations. Sam passed the word that the enemy was on the way. After he stepped back from the PA microphone, Lon Menefee said, 'Well, we're not first on their list, anyhow.'
He was bound to be right about that. The Confederates would want to hit airplane carriers and battlewagons and, he supposed, landing craft before they bothered with a lowly destroyer escort. All the same, Sam said, 'If we end up on their plate, they won't send us back to the kitchen. And we don't want to get loose and sloppy, either.'
'You've got that straight, sir,' Menefee said at once.
'That's what she said,' Sam answered, and the exec snorted. Overhead, some of the fighters from the CAP streaked off toward the west. Was that a good idea? If more enemy aircraft came at the fleet from another direction, from the Bahamas or from Haiti itself, they might catch the ships with their pants down.
These days, battles mostly happened out of sight of one side's fleet or the other's. This one might start out of sight of both. And that record would be hard to top, unless one of these days you got a fight something like the Battle of the Three Navies back in Great War days.
'I have bandits on the screen, sir,' Lieutenant Walters reported. 'Bearing 250, approaching…well, pretty fast. Looks like they're about ten minutes out. Our boys are on 'em.'
'Thanks, Thad,' Sam said, and passed the word to the crew. Then he asked, 'Any sign of bandits from some different direction?'
Walters checked his screens before answering, 'No, sir.'
Sam grunted. That sounded more like what he'd hoped than what he'd expected. Echoing his thoughts, Lon Menefee said, 'The Confederates really must be at the end of their tether.'
'Well, maybe they are. Who woulda thunk it?' Sam called down a speaking tube to the hydrophone station in the bowels of the ship: 'Hear anything, Bevacqua?'
'Not a thing, sir,' the CPO replied. 'Nothin' but our screw and the ones from the rest of the fleet. Jack diddly from the pings when I send 'em out.'
'All right. Thanks. Sing out if you do, remember.'
'Better believe it, sir,' Bevacqua said. 'It's my ass, too, you know.'
Hearing that float out of the speaking tube, Menefee raised an eyebrow. It didn't faze Sam a bit. 'Is he wrong?' he asked. The exec shook his head.
Another destroyer escort off to the west started firing. A moment later, so did the Josephus Daniels. 'They're going after the carriers,' Sam said, watching the Confederate airplanes.
'Wouldn't you?' Menefee asked.
'Maybe. But if I could tear up the landing craft, I might want to do that first. This is about Haiti, after all,' Sam said. If it was about the island any more. For all he knew, it might have been about hurting the United States as much as the Confederacy could, and nothing more than that. On such a scale, carriers were likely to count more than landing boats.
But not many C.S. airplanes came overhead. Sam didn't know how many had set out from Cuba, but he would have bet a lot of them never made it this far. The CAP was doing its job.
The yeoman hurried back up to the bridge. 'Our men are ashore, sir,' he said. Sam sent the news out over the loudspeakers. The crew cheered and whooped. Van Duyk didn't go away. 'There's more news, sir,' he added in quieter tones.
'What's up?' Apprehension gusted along Sam's spine.
'Hamburg's gone, sir,' van Duyk answered. 'One of those bombs.'
'Jesus!' Sam said. Churchill hadn't been kidding, then. England had caught up with the Germans, or at least come close enough to wreck a city. 'What does the Kaiser say?'
'Nothing yet, sir,' van Duyk said. 'But I sure wouldn't want to be living in London right now.'
'Me, neither,' Sam agreed. 'Or anywhere else a German bomber could get to.' Or a British bomber…Did the limeys have aircraft that could lug what had to be a heavy bomb across the Atlantic to New York City? Did they have bombers that could fly across the Atlantic almost empty and pick up their superbombs in the CSA? That would be easier-if the Confederates had any new superbombs to pick up. All kinds of unpleasant possibilities…
And he couldn't do a goddamn thing about any of them. All he could do was clap his hands when the forward four-inch gun turned a C.S. bomber into a smear of smoke and flame in the sky.
Abruptly, it was over, at least around the Josephus Daniels. He couldn't spot any more Confederate airplanes above the ship. The gunners went on shooting awhile longer. They didn't believe in taking chances.
'Boy,' Lon Menefee said. 'I hope the guys going ashore have as easy a time as we did.'
'Yeah, me, too,' Sam said. 'You would've thought the Confederates could throw more at us.'
'A year ago, they could have,' the exec said. 'Two years ago, they were throwing the goddamn kitchen sink.'
Carsten nodded. For the first year of the war, things had looked mighty black. Pittsburgh said the CSA wouldn't be able to conquer the USA. Till then, even that was up in the air. If the Confederates had taken it and gone on toward Philadelphia-But they hadn't. They couldn't. And afterwards it became clear they'd thrown too much into that attack, and didn't have enough left to defend with.
That was afterwards, though. At the time, no one had any idea whether they would fall short. What looked inevitable after the fact often seemed anything but while shells were flying and people were dying. By how much did the Confederates fall short in Pittsburgh? Sam didn't know, and he wasn't sure anyone else did. All the same, he would have bet the answer was on the order of only a little bit.
Lon Menefee's thoughts ran in a different direction: 'Wonder how many smokes our guys'll find alive on Haiti.'
'Hadn't worried about that.' Sam bared his teeth in what was anything but a smile. 'They would've had guns- they were a country before the butternut bastards jumped on 'em. I hope they gave Featherston's fuckers a good big dose of trouble.' No, he didn't particularly love Negroes, but he didn't want to see them dead, either-especially if they were making the Confederates sweat.
C assius hadn't thought patrolling Madison, Georgia, and keeping white folks in line could get dull, but it did. Anything you did over and over got dull. Well, he didn't suppose screwing would, but he hadn't done enough of that to count as 'over and over.' A few hasty grapples with women who'd been part of Gracchus' band at one time or another were the sum of his experience.
He knew just enough to know he wanted to know more.
And he knew enough to be worried about whether he'd ever get the chance for it. One muggy evening at supper, he asked Gracchus, 'Where we gonna find us some nice gals to marry?'
The guerrilla chief looked down at his mess kit, as if hoping one would turn up there. But he had the same roasted pork ribs and sweet potatoes and green beans as Cassius-only those, and nothing more. 'Beats me. Beats the shit outa me,' he said heavily. 'Most of the niggers left alive down here is the ones in the bands. Ain't a hell of a lot of gals who wanted to pick up a Tredegar.'
'Don't I know it! Sometimes I gets so horny, can't hardly stand it,' Cassius said. 'Plenty of white women left with no husbands on account of the war…'
'Good fuckin' luck! Good fuckin' luck!' Gracchus said. 'Yeah, plenty o' white widows. An' you know what else? They's sorry their husbands is dead. An' they's even sorrier we ain't.'
Cassius wished he thought the older man were wrong. Unfortunately, he didn't. A shortage of black women and a shortage of white men should have had an obvious solution. Before the war, during the war, saying that where any white could hear him would have got him a one-way ticket to the graveyard. Would things be any
