“Well, hell,” Sam said, “when you put it like that, I’m not, either.” He stared over toward the nearest destroyer, as if to make certain nobody on deck was asleep at the switch.
Out swung the crane. It plucked the aeroplane out of the water and hoisted it, pilot and all, onto the deck of the Dakota. As usual, Sam tried to get close enough to the machine to hear what the pilot was telling the officers who crowded round him. As usual, he failed.
Frustrated, he turned away-and almost ran into Vic Crosetti. “Stickin’ your nose in where it don’t belong, ain’t you, Sam?” Crosetti said.
“Yeah, same as you are,” Carsten returned.
Crosetti laughed, altogether unembarrassed. “Hey, everybody can tell I got a big nose, right?” He put a hand on the organ in question, which was indeed of formidable proportions. “You know what they say-big in the nose means big somewhere else, too.”
“In the ears, looking at you,” Sam said.
“You better watch yourself, Carsten,” Crosetti said, clenching a fist in mock anger. “Pretty soon we’re going to sail far enough north for the sun to remember its first name, and then they’ll stick an apple in your mouth, on account of the rest of you’s gonna look like a roast pig that needs a little more time in the oven.”
“I’d laugh like a damn loon if only that was a joke,” Carsten said, warily eyeing the sky. Here below the equator, fall was heading toward winter. He favored winter, and clouds, and storms.
Before long, the Dakota leaned into a long turn that swung her course to the west. The rest of the joint American-Chilean fleet moved with her. Vic Crosetti clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Pilot must have spotted a convoy sneaking along the coast,” he said happily. “I guess we’ll go leave ’em a calling card.”
“I’d say you’re likely right,” Sam agreed. “Using a battleship to sink freighters is like smashing a fly with an anvil, if anybody wants to know what I think, but nobody seems to.”
“I sure as hell don’t,” Crosetti said, grinning as he planted the barb.
When the hooting horns summoned the crew of the Dakota to battle stations, Hiram Kidde was grinning from ear to ear as he greeted the sailors who manned the five-inch gun. “Just like shooting fish in a barrel, boys,” the gunner’s mate said. “Fish in a barrel, sure as hell.”
“Fish in a barrel don’t shoot back,” Carsten said. “Fish in a barrel don’t man torpedo boats.”
“That’s right,” Luke Hoskins agreed. “That’s just right. Sam and I were talking about that topside.”
“It’s a risk,” “Cap’n” Kidde allowed. “But it ain’t a hell of a big risk, I’ll tell you that. I’d sooner take my chances against those damn mosquitoes than against a real live battleship any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.”
Nobody quarreled with that. Carsten stepped away from the breech of the five-inch gun and peered out of the sponson through the vision slit. He needed a moment to realize the horizon wasn’t smooth and unbroken, as it was farther out to sea. It had lumps and bumps on it. “We’re within sight of land,” he said in surprise.
“Won’t be much longer before things start happening, then,” Kidde predicted. “If you can see it from here, they’ve seen it from the observation mast for a while now. I wonder if the skipper aims to get in close enough to use the secondaries to sink the freighters, and save the wear and tear on the big guns.”
“That’d be good,” Sam said. “You get close enough to use the secondaries against a battleship and you’re in more trouble than you really want. We found out everything we wanted to know about that and then some in the Battle of the Three Navies-oh, Lord, didn’t we just?”
Heads bobbed up and down as all the men in the gun crew remembered the Dakota ’s wild and undesired ride toward first the British and then the Japanese fleet. Hoskins said, “What I want to do is, I want to hit a torpedo boat with a five-inch shell. God damn me if there’d be anything left of the bastard but matchsticks and kindling.” The gun crew nodded again. Carsten liked the picture that made in his mind.
As he usually did, Hiram Kidde thought along with the officers in charge of the Dakota. Commander Grady, who was responsible for the starboard secondary armament, stepped into the crowded sponson and said, “Boys, they’re going to give us the fun this time. Pick your target, blow it to hell and gone, and then hit the next one. Every time you send a few thousand tons of meat and wheat to the bottom, you push the limeys that much closer to starving.”
“Yes, sir!” Kidde said. “It’ll be a pleasure, sir.”
“Good.” Grady hurried away to pass the word to the rest of the five-inch gun crews on his side of the battleship.
Kidde peered down into the rangefinder. “Inside nine thousand yards,” he murmured, and worked the elevation screw. To the crew, he added, “Let’s get a shell in the gun.”
Hoskins jerked one out of the magazine and passed it to Sam Carsten, handling the sixty-pound weight as if it were nothing. Sam slammed it into the breech and slid the block closed.
“Fire!” Kidde shouted.
Carsten jerked the lanyard. The gun roared and bucked. Stinking cordite fumes filled the sponson. The other guns of the secondary armament were roaring, too. Sam worked the breech mechanism. The empty brass shell casing clattered down onto the steel deck. Luke Hoskins handed him another shell. He slammed it home.
“That one was long,” Hiram Kidde reported, fiddling with the elevation screw again. When he was satisfied, he let out a grunt and shouted “Fire!” again. He grunted once more when the shell hit. “Short this time. All right-we’ve got the bastard straddled. Give me another one.”
“This one should be right on the money,” Sam said as he fired the cannon.
“Hit!” Kidde screamed. “That was a hit. Bastard’s burning! Pour a couple more into him, Carsten.”
“Right, ‘Cap’n,’ ” Sam said. “Feels good to do the shooting instead of getting shot at.”
When the first target had taken what Kidde reckoned to be fatal damage, he turned the gun toward another hapless freighter. But before he had the gun laid, he grunted yet again, this time in surprise. “Somebody’s shooting back at us,” he said. “I didn’t spot any flash or smoke, but a good-sized shell just splashed down forward of the bow.”
“Railroad gun somewhere inland?” Carsten asked.
“That’d be sneaky, wouldn’t it?” the gunner’s mate answered. “You got a nasty head on your shoulders, you know?” He peered through the vision slit. “Still don’t see anything, though.”
Guns topside started firing: not the titanic main armament, which Sam would have thought the proper response to a big gun mounted on a flatcar, but the one-pounders that had been bolted into place here and there on deck not long before the war began. Luke Hoskins, who had less imagination than any man Carsten knew, was the one who solved the riddle: “That wasn’t a shell, ‘Cap’n’-bet you anything it was a bomb off an aeroplane.”
Everybody in the gun crew stared at him. “Dip me in shit if I don’t think you’re right,” Kidde said. “Jesus! What do we do about that? Only way you knock down an aeroplane is by dumb fucking luck.” He shrugged. “They don’t pay me to worry about it. They pay me to fight this gun, and that’s what I’m going to do.” He finished turning it to its new target. “Fire!”
Sam jerked the lanyard. The gun bellowed. A moment later came the bellow of another explosion, this one on deck. It was a big explosion, a frighteningly big explosion. Bombs didn’t have to survive being shot out of guns the way shells did, Carsten realized. Not needing thick walls, they could carry a hell of a lot of explosive for their size.
Another blast shook the deck under Sam’s feet. He kept on loading and firing to Hiram Kidde’s commands. As Kidde had said, what else could he do? But then the Dakota turned away from the freighters he’d been shelling, away from the Argentine coast, and ran for the open sea. More bombs fell on and around her.