“But you’re fighting in Texas,” Pinkard pointed out. “Never heard you talk like this here before.”
“Yes, I am fighting in Texas,” Rodriguez agreed sadly. “ Mala suerte -bad luck. You never hear me talk like this?” His smile was oddly sweet. “I am not so drunk before, I think, when we talk of Texas.”
“I don’t give a damn about Texas myself any more,” Pinkard said. “Hell, we’ve lost the damn war. Like you say, the damnyankees are welcome to the place. All I want to do is go back home.”
“You no say, ‘Go back home to my wife,’ like you used to,” Rodriguez said. “You didn’t used to go up with the putas, neither, when they take us out of line.”
“Leave it alone, Hip,” Jeff said. “Leave it the hell alone. Whatever happened back there happened, is all. It ain’t anybody’s business but mine.”
Rodriguez looked at him with large, liquid eyes. He realized he’d never before admitted anything out of the ordinary had happened back in Birmingham. The Sonoran said, “I hope it turns out well for you, whatever it is.”
“I got my doubts, but I hope so, too,” Jeff said, and fell asleep in his chair.
Even out in the middle of the ocean, Sam Carsten kept a weather eye peeled for aeroplanes whenever he came out on the USS Dakota ’s deck. He was still amazed at how much damage a bomb explosion could do; the one from the Argentine-based aeroplane had caused at least as much harm as a hit from a battleship’s secondary armament.
Hastily welded sheets of steel covered the destruction the bomb had wrought; they looked as out of place as bandages covering a wound on a man’s body. Because the patches were neither painted nor smooth, they drew the wrath of petty officers merely by existing. Sam laughed when he had that notion-he was a petty officer himself these days, even if he did still think like an ordinary seaman.
Hiram Kidde came up beside him. Kidde had been one of the exalted for a long time now; Carsten waited for some snide comment about the way the Dakota looked with a steel plate in her head, or at the least a grumble over the repairs’ not having been neater.
He got nothing of the sort. What Kidde said was, “It’s a good thing those limey sons of bitches didn’t have an armor-piercing nose on that bomb, the way we’ve got armor-piercing shells. Otherwise, that one little bastard would’ve done even worse than it did.”
Carsten considered that. After a couple of seconds, he nodded. “You’re likely right, ‘Cap’n,’ ” he said. “This was only a first try, though. I expect they’ll get it right, or we will, or somebody will, pretty damn quick.”
Kidde gave him a look that was anything but warm. “You know what you’re saying, don’t you?” he demanded. “You’re saying we might as well melt the Dakota and all the other battlewagons in the whole damn Navy down for tin cans right now, on account of by the time the next war rolls around, aeroplanes’ll sink ’em before they get within five hundred miles of where they’re going.”
“Am I saying that?” Sam did some more thinking. “Well, maybe I am. But I tell you what-maybe we don’t melt ’em down for cans till after this here war is over, because I don’t figure the aeroplanes’ll sink too many battleships this time out.”
“Real white of you,” the gunner’s mate said. “ Real white. You make me feel like a guy in the buggy-whip business, going broke an inch at a time because people are buying Fords instead of buggies these days.”
“Hell of a big buggy whip we’re sailing on,” Sam observed after letting his eye run along the Dakota from bow to stern.
“Don’t talk stupid,” Hiram Kidde snapped. “You know what I’m talking about. You’re a squarehead, yeah, but you never were a dumb squarehead.”
“Goddamn, ‘Cap’n,’ you say the sweetest things,” Carsten said, and they both laughed. After one more pause for thought, Carsten went on, “Maybe we’ll get some use out of battleships in the next war after all.” He didn’t doubt there would be a next war; there would always be a next war.
Kidde got a cigar going, then held it in his mouth at an angle that made his dubious look even more dubious. “Wait a minute. You’re the same guy who was just saying somebody’d have armor-piercing aeroplane bombs long about day after tomorrow, or next week at the latest. Soon as that happens, the jig is up, right?”
“Maybe,” Sam said. “Maybe not, too. It’s up if the aeroplanes get to drop the bombs on the ships, sure as hell. But if our side has aeroplanes, too, to shoot down the other fellow’s bombing aeroplanes, the battleships can get on with the job they’re supposed to be doing, right?”
Now Kidde stopped and did some thinking. “That sounds good,” he said when he came out of his own study, “but I don’t think it works. You squeeze enough, you might be able to mount two or three aeroplanes on a battleship, maybe one or two on a cruiser. That won’t be enough to hold off all the aeroplanes the other bastards can throw at you from dry land.”
“Mmm,” Carsten said-an unhappy grunt. “Yeah, you’re right. A fleet’d need a whole ship stuffed full of aeroplanes, and there is no such animal.”
“See?” Hiram Kidde said. “You got to keep your head on your shoulders, or else you go flying off every which way.” He walked down toward the stern, puffing contentedly on his cigar.
Carsten stuck his thumbs in his trouser pockets and slowly mooched after the gunner’s mate. His idea had been pretty foolish, when you got down to it. He had a picture of the Navy, whose business was ships, building a ship to take care of aeroplanes. It hung in his mental gallery right alongside the portrait of the first Negro president of the Confederate States.
The Dakota swung through a turn toward the west, toward the Argentine coast. Sam knew what that meant: it meant that, aeroplanes or no aeroplanes, the flotilla was going to bore in and see what they could do to the British convoys scuttling along in or near Argentine territorial waters.
He supposed that made sense. It sure as hell made dollars and cents. This attack had surely cost millions to fit out, and as surely hadn’t worked near enough devastation to be worthwhile. Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske either had wireless orders from Philadelphia to do something worth doing, or else he was going to try to do something big to keep from getting wireless orders from Philadelphia telling him to sail his command back to Valparaiso and forget about marauding in the South Atlantic. Carsten had no way of knowing which of those was true, but he’d been in the Navy long enough to be pretty sure it was one or the other.
Rear Admiral Fiske was also doing everything he could to keep the Dakota and the American and Chilean ships with her from getting a nasty surprise of the sort they’d already had once. Long before klaxons hooted men to their battle stations, he had crews at all the antiaircraft guns on the battleship’s deck.
He also sent not only the Dakota ’s aeroplane but the other two the flotilla boasted off to the west ahead of the ships. They wouldn’t be able to fight off any bombing aeroplanes, but they could at least warn of their presence. Sam wondered how much good that would do. He shrugged. It couldn’t hurt.
The U.S. aeroplanes could and did do one other useful thing: they could spot convoys for the Dakota and her companions to attack. Down in the five-inch gun’s sponson, Sam attributed a sudden shift in course to the north as likely springing from a wireless report. “Hope they haven’t stuck some freighters out there to humbug us into getting too close,” Luke Hoskins said.
“Now there’s a nice, cheery thought,” Carsten said. He turned to Hiram Kidde, who was peering out through the vision slit. “See anything, ‘Cap’n’?”
“Smoke trails,” the chief of the gun crew answered. “Can’t spot the ships that are making ’em, though. Land behind ’em. We-”