He wasn’t quite so far away as Vaclav had thought he might be: no more than 1,500 meters. The Czech aimed with his usual meticulous care. He took a couple of deep breaths. As he let out the second one, he fired.
Muzzle brake or not, padded stock or not, the antitank rifle always tried to break his shoulder. He’d have a fresh purple bruise tonight, to go with the ones that were fading to yellow. But the Nationalist general stopped in the middle of one of his jerky gestures and fell over. As far as Vaclav was concerned, that counted for more than the bruises.
The Fascists started running around like chickens suddenly minus their heads. The guy with the field glasses popped up again. Except for Vaclav’s rule against shooting twice from the same place, he would have nailed him for his presumption. Sitting tight wasn’t easy, but he did it.
His pals back in the Republican trenches were on the ball. They started shooting rifles and machine guns at the Nationalist lines. That made Sanjurjo’s men decide against going out to hunt for him. He appreciated the gesture. Any heirs he might eventually have would, too.
More waiting, then. Once darkness fell, Vaclav crept back to the little stretch of trench the Czechs held. They pounded him on the back and plied him with harsh Spanish brandy and even harsher Spanish cigarettes. “Do you know who you got?” they yelled. “Do you?”
Since Vaclav didn’t, he answered, “Tell me, for Christ’s sake. All I know is, it wasn’t the big cheese.”
“Next best thing, by Jesus,” one of them said. “It was that Franco asshole who’s given us so much grief.”
“Hey! That was worth doing!” Jezek said. Francisco Franco was-no, had been-one of the Nationalists’ better generals. He had balls even if he was a Fascist, and he had a tenacity few on either side showed. What he grabbed, he held on to.
Well, all he’d grab from here on out was a plot of earth two meters long, a meter wide, and two meters deep. In the end, that was all anybody ever grabbed, but when you got it mattered.
The Republicans hadn’t put an enormous price on his head, the way they had with Sanjurjo. All the same, Vaclav bet they’d give him some leave and some cash to have a good time in Madrid for potting Franco. And if you couldn’t have a good time in Madrid, you weren’t half trying.
Battle damage repaired, the Boise steamed out of Pearl Harbor and headed west, looking for trouble. Pete McGill was happy about that. Any chance to give the Japs one in the slats-or, better, one in the nuts-looked good to him.
He wished he were on the six-inch guns instead of the secondary armament. Then he could have fired at enemy ships, not planes. If you sank a destroyer or another light cruiser, you could give yourself credit for hundreds of Japs instead of the lousy one or two you got for hitting a fighter or a bomber. Vera still needed more revenge. No matter how much he tried to take, it could never be enough. That didn’t mean he didn’t want to up his score, though.
Along with the Boise came three destroyers, a heavy cruiser, and the Ranger. All the other ships were along to protect the carrier. The Ranger wasn’t the ideal carrier to go after the Japs. She was just arrived from the Atlantic, and she’d been more a training ship than a combat vessel. But the fleet carriers that had been in the Pacific now lay on the bottom. If the USA was going to hit back at all, it needed to grab whatever it could get its hands on.
“Two years from now, none of this shit’ll matter,” Joe Orsatti said as the gun crew stood by their piece looking out over the wide, empty ocean. “Two years from now, we’ll have so fuckin’ many carriers, they’ll fly out our nose when we sneeze. Tojo’ll see ’em in his bathtub, for Chrissake. Little tiny Wildcats’ll strafe his fuckin’ mustache.”
Everybody laughed. “You’re outa your goddamn tree, you know that?” Pete said, not without admiration.
“Yeah, well, I have fun.” Orsatti looked around some more. “Except when I gotta put up with youse guys, I mean.”
“Boy, you talk even more New York than I do,” Pete said, again more admiringly than not. “I didn’t figure anybody could.”
“Comes of bein’ a dago,” Orsatti said with pride of his own. If the wrong guy had tried to slap that label on him, he would have decked the bastard, but he could stick it on himself. He pointed at McGill. “Now you, you’re just a regular paddy. If you came from Minnesota, you’d sound like a fuckin’ squarehead. But a guinea like me, don’t matter where he’s from. He still sounds like Hell’s Kitchen-or Jersey at the most.” Inevitably, that came out Joisey.
“Talking about Jersey”-Pete pronounced it much the same way-“who’s that kid who’s been singing with Goodman and now with Dorsey?”
“Sinatra.” Orsatti spoke with assurance. “Yeah, he’s from Hoboken. My folks know his folks some kinda way. I think one of my cousins went out with a gal who’s kin to him-like second cousin or something-but it didn’t stick.”
“Too bad for your cousin,” Pete said. “The way the dames scream for that guy, he’s gonna end up with more money than Henry fuckin’ Ford. Probably enough so some even sticks to a second cousin.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” Orsatti agreed. “But it’s water under the bridge now. And Vito’s in the Army, poor sap, so he’s got more to worry about than trying to make it with Sinatra’s cousin.”
“My ass, he does. The Army’s safe as houses.” Like any halfway decent Marine, McGill looked down his nose at the larger service. He had his reasons, too: “What’s he gonna do besides train and look cute? Army can’t fight the Japs, not till it gets delivered, and that won’t happen any time soon. If we were fighting the Germans, too, he might have to work for a living. Way things are, though? Forget about it.”
“It’s coming. You gotta think so, anyway,” Orsatti said. “Now that France and England are over their fling with the Nazis, we’re shipping ’em stuff again. That’ll piss Hitler off-hell, it’d piss me off. So he’ll start torpedoing freighters, and we’ll jump in, same as we did against the Kaiser.”
“Could be,” Pete allowed. “He’s turned his subs loose again over in the Atlantic.”
Idly, he wondered what it would be like to be a kid from Hoboken with girls screaming for you wherever you went. There sure had to be worse ways to make a living. Back when he had Vera, he wouldn’t have cared if all the other girls in the world were screaming for him. (And if that didn’t prove he’d been head over heels, what would have?) Since he couldn’t have the one he’d wanted most, being able to pick and choose from all the rest didn’t seem half bad.
The Ranger and her shepherds steamed south and west. Nobody’d said where they were going: not to the likes of Pete McGill, anyhow. He didn’t care. As long as it was toward the enemy, that suited him fine.
Wildcats from the carrier flew a combat air patrol over the task force. Floatplanes from the heavy cruiser buzzed ahead of the American ships to make sure they weren’t running into trouble facefirst. Little by little, the USA was learning to fight a mid-twentieth-century war. No matter what kind of super-Jutland the admirals had imagined, it probably wasn’t going to happen. Admirals’ imaginations hadn’t encompassed airplanes and submarines. Battleships turned out to be dinosaurs: huge and ferocious and armored, with mouths full of big, sharp teeth, but doomed to extinction all the same.
Klaxons hooted almost every day. Swabbies and leathernecks dashed to battle stations. It always turned out to be a drill. Men swore when the all-clear sounded. But they didn’t swear too loud or too hard. Most of them had been aboard the Boise when the big American fleet tried to run the Japanese gantlet. Only now was Pete coming to realize how dumb the admirals had really been.
Joe Orsatti laughed at him when he said so. “I bet you still believe in the tooth fairy and the fuckin’ Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, too,” Orsatti said. “But don’t sweat it. Sure, our big guys are dumb. But you bet your ass the Japs are, too.”
Pete was betting his ass. Everybody in this flotilla was. If he’d had any doubts, they were erased when one alert was followed by an iron-throated shout of “This is no drill!” from the intercom speakers. The officer at the mike went on, “Japanese planes incoming from bearing 240. I say again, this is no drill!”