She couldn’t even say she understood, for Brigid’s sister would not believe her. Then she found a new worry, different but in its own way no less urgent: while Brigid Coneval mourned, who would take care of the children when she had to go to work?
TheGreatWar: Breakthroughs
Sam Carsten swabbed the deck of the USS Dakota with a safety line tied round his waist. The battleship pitched like a toy boat in a rambunctious boy’s bathtub, chewing its way over and through waves that put to shame any others he’d ever known.
He shouted to his bunkmate, Vic Crosetti, who plied a mop not far away: “Everything they say about Cape Horn is true!”
“Yeah,” Crosetti shouted back, through the howl of the wind. “Only trouble is, they don’t say near enough, the tight-mouthed sons of bitches.”
There was nothing tight-mouthed about him. He was a voluble Italian, little and swarthy and hairy and ugly as a monkey. Carsten, by contrast, was tall and muscular, with pink skin and hair so blond, it was almost white.
Crosetti leered at him. “You sunburned yet, Sam?”
“Fuck you,” Carsten said amiably. He’d burned in San Francisco. Christ, he’d burned in Seattle. Duty in the Sandwich Islands and the tropical Pacific had been a hell of burning and peeling and zinc oxide and half a dozen other ointments that didn’t do any good, either. “I finally find weather that suits me, and what do I get? A scrawny dago giving me a hard time.”
Had some men called him a scrawny dago, Crosetti would have answered with a kick in the teeth or a knife in the ribs. When Sam did, he grinned. Carsten had a way of being able to talk without ticking people off. He even had trouble starting brawls in waterfront saloons.
Another enormous swell sweeping along from west to east lifted the Dakota to its crest. For a moment, Sam could see a hell of a long way. He spotted another battleship from the U.S. force that had set out from Pearl Harbor for Valparaiso, Chile, the autumn before-except autumn meant nothing in the Sandwich Islands and was spring down in Chile. Farther off, he made out a U.S. armored cruiser and a couple of the destroyers that guarded the big battlewagons from harm.
He also spied a Chilean armored cruiser. But for the different flag and different paint job-the Chileans preferred a sky blue to the U.S. gray-it looked the same as its American counterpart. It should have; it had come out of the Boston Navy Yard.
Pointing to it, Carsten said, “We sold the Chileans their toys, and England sold the Argentines theirs. Now we get to find out who’s a better toymaker.”
“Hell with all of ’em,” Crosetti said. “If Argentina was on our side, Chile’d be in bed with the limeys. But Argentina’s keeping England fed, so Chile ends up playin’ on our team. Big deal, you ask me.”
“Hey, listen, if Argentina was on our side, we’d be sailing east to west, straight into all these damn waves and this stinking wind instead of riding with ’em. How’d you like that?”
“No thanks,” Crosetti said at once.
Carsten got a faraway look in his eyes. “How’d you like to try sailing east to west through here in a ship without an engine-I mean really sailing through here?” he said. Crosetti crossed himself. Sam laughed. “Yeah, that’s how I feel about it, too.”
“They were tough bastards in the old days,” Vic Crosetti said. “Stupid bastards, too, to want to come down to such a god-forsaken corner of the world.”
Before Carsten could answer that, klaxons started hooting, a noise hideous enough to cut through the raging wind. Everyone on deck undid his safety line and ran for his battle station. Sam had no idea whether it was a drill or whether some destroyer up ahead had spotted British or Argentine or maybe even French ships. He knew he had to treat the noise as if shells would start dropping around-or on-the Dakota at any moment.
The battleship sank into the trough between waves, plunging her bow steeply downward. Sam’s foot skidded on seawater. He flailed his arms wildly, and somehow managed to keep from falling on his face. Then his shoes rang on metal rungs as he went below.
His battle station was loader on the forwardmost starboard five-inch gun. He flung himself into the cramped sponson and waited to see what would happen next.
There ahead of him-he would have been astonished were it otherwise-was the commander of that five-inch gun, a chief petty officer and gunner’s mate named Hiram Kidde and more often than not called “Cap’n.” He’d ditched his habitual cigar somewhere on the way to the sponson. He couldn’t have been too far from it; he wasn’t breathing hard, and he was a roly-poly fellow who’d been in the Navy for years before Sam got his first pair of long pants.
“Is this practice, or for real?” Sam asked.
“Damned if I know,” Kidde answered. “Think they tell me anything?”
In scrambled the rest of the crew: gun layers and shell jerkers. They were all at their stations when Commander Grady, who was in charge of the starboard secondary armament, stuck his head into the sponson. Grady nodded approval; he was a pretty decent sort. “Well done, men,” he said.
Hiram Kidde asked the same question Carsten had: “What’s the dope, sir? Is this just another drill, or have we got trouble up ahead?”
“We’ve got trouble up ahead sure as the sun comes up tomorrow,” Grady answered. “Sooner or later, if they don’t stop us, we are going to be in position to disrupt shipments of wheat and beef from Argentina to England. If we can do that, the limeys starve, so they’ll move heaven and earth to keep us away.”
“I understand that, sir,” Kidde answered patiently. “What I meant was, have we got trouble up ahead right now?” Grady would know. Whether he would tell was liable to be a different question.
He started to answer, but then somebody in the corridor spoke to him. “What?” he said, sounding surprised. He hurried off.
“Damn,” said Luke Hoskins, one of the shell haulers. He was the right man for his job, being both taller and thicker through the shoulders than Carsten, who wasn’t small himself. Nobody the size of, say, Vic Crosetti could have handled five-inch, sixty-pound shells as if he were about to load them into his shotgun. Also, shell-jerker wasn’t the sort of job that called for much in the way of brains.
“I think it’s-” Kidde began, just as the klaxons signaled the all-clear.
“You were going to say you thought it was the real thing, weren’t you?” Carsten said as they started filing out of the cramped sponson.
He expected Kidde to deny everything, but the gunner’s mate nodded. “Hell yes, I did. We should have done this months ago, instead of wasting time in Valparaiso and Concepcion like we did. Shit, we were ready, but the Chilean Navy ain’t what you’d call a fireball.”
“How do you say tomorrow in Spanish?” Carsten said. “ Manana, that’s it. I wonder how many times we heard manana up there.”
“Too damn many, however many it was,” Kidde said positively. “Wasted time, wasted time.” He shook his head, a slow, mournful gesture. “Seas wouldn’t have been near so heavy if we’d got moving in the middle of summer hereabouts instead of waiting till we were heading down toward fall. I still don’t trust our steering, either. Wish I did, but I don’t.”
Carsten’s laugh was a noise he made to hold fear at bay. “What’s the matter, ‘Cap’n’? You don’t want to do a circle toward the limeys and Argentines, the way we did toward the limeys and Japs in the Battle of the Three Navies?”
Kidde swore loudly and sulfurously for a couple of minutes before calming down enough to say, “We were lucky once, which is how come we ain’t on the bottom of the Pacific. You can’t count on being lucky once. You sure as hell can’t count on being lucky twice.”