No one moved. No one spoke.
“All right, then,” Porter said. “Rodriguez isn’t the only man from Sonora and Chihuahua we’ve got at this camp-not even close. Has anybody seen any sign that those people are falling down on the job? Anything at all?” Again, no one said a word. The noncom nodded. “I haven’t, either. The government and the Party-and the Party, mind you-thought they could do it, or they wouldn’t have recruited them in the first place, right? Y’all gonna tell Jake Featherston he doesn’t know what he’s doin’? You let me know where you want your body sent first.”
That pretty much took care of that. White men were careful around Rodriguez from then on out. He wasn’t sure whether they were afraid to say anything bad to him even if he had it coming or they were afraid he’d shoot them if they did say anything. Either way felt awkward. He wished they would just treat him the way they treated one another. Too much to hope for, he feared.
He wasn’t a Mexican, a greaser, to the Negroes in the camp. Maybe that was because they knew most Sonorans and Chihuahuans had no more use for them than most whites did. More likely, he judged, it was because to them, in his gray uniform, he was a guard. The uniform took precedence over the face.
When he went over to the women’s side of the camp, the prisoners always tried to soften him up. If he’d do something for them, they made it plain, they would do something for him. And some of them left nothing to the imagination. Taking up all the offers and come-ons and out-and-out propositions would have drained a man half his age dry in nothing flat.
Some of the guards took up as many as they could. In a way, Rodriguez understood that. They had to think, Why not? Sooner or later, whether she knew it or not, a woman was going out in a truck. Why not enjoy her while she was here? If she was enjoyable, why not fix it so she went out later, not sooner? In the end, what difference did it make?
Rodriguez took up an offer himself every now and then, but only every now and then. Most of the time, he remembered he was a married man. When three guards in quick succession got the clap, that made him more cautious than ever. Magdalena wouldn’t thank him for bringing home a drippy faucet.
Troop Leader Porter was loudly disgusted when that happened. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he exclaimed. “And fucking’s about right, ain’t it? We gonna have to set up a shortarm station around here? I knew we had some dumb pricks on this duty, but y’all have gone over the line. Next man who comes down venereal, he’s gonna get a dishonorable discharge to go with his dishonorable discharge, you hear me?”
“Yes, Troop Leader!” the guards chorused. Sooner or later, somebody would. If it was later, the noncom might have forgotten about his threat. If it was sooner… Rodriguez resisted temptation till he got shifted to the men’s side.
That was a different business. Walking through the men’s side, inspecting barracks to make sure the prisoners weren’t working on tunnels or any other nefarious schemes, was like walking through a cage full of wolves and cougars. Nothing was likely to happen to you if you were careful and if you stayed with your buddies. If you went off by yourself…
One guard got his head smashed in. His weapon disappeared. Everybody turned the men’s half of the camp upside down and inside out. Rodriguez thought that submachine gun was gone for good, or till a mallate emptied the clip into more guards. But, by what had to be not far from a miracle, it got fished out of a latrine trench. It was wrapped in greasy rags and slathered with lard-not as good as Cosmoline, but enough to keep it in working order. No one ever found out who did in the guard. All the prisoners had their rations cut in punishment, but nobody squealed.
“Suh, what they buildin’ out past the wire?” a man asked Rodriguez not long after the gun was recovered.
By chance, the black had picked a guard who knew. The answer would get Rodriguez a promotion as soon as the paperwork went through. But he just scowled at the scrawny prisoner and said, “You find out when the time comes.”
“You don’t got to be dat way, suh.” The Negro’s voice was a sheepish whine he’d no doubt used to talk his way out of trouble before. “I didn’t mean no disrespect. I wasn’t rude or crude or mean or nothin’ like that. I just wants to know.”
“You find out when the time comes,” Rodriguez repeated, and glared at the prisoner. The fellow knew when to back off in a hurry. When the time came, when he found out, that wouldn’t help him a bit.
XII
All ahead one-third,” Sam Carsten called down to the engine room from the Josephus Daniels’ bridge.
“All ahead one-third, sir, aye aye.” The answer came back at once. The destroyer escort picked up a little speed.
Sam read the chart by the dim glow of a flashlight with red cellophane taped over the bulb. That didn’t spoil his night vision and wouldn’t be visible from any great distance. Getting out of Philadelphia Harbor and Delaware Bay was going to be even more fun than escaping Chesapeake Bay.
If the clouds overhead broke… If they did, moonlight would pour down on the U.S. warship while she was still sneaking through the minefields that protected the harbor. That, to put it mildly, wouldn’t be good. Confederate subs lurked just outside, hungry for anything they could catch.
“I wish they would have given us a pilot who really knows these minefields,” Pat Cooley said.
“Me, too,” Sam told his exec. “I asked for one at the Navy yard. Hell, I screamed for one. They wouldn’t give him to me. They said we’d have to stop and lower a boat to let him come back, and that that would make the mission even more dangerous. They said they didn’t have enough pilots like that for us to just go on and take him with us.”
“Well, I can sort of see their point,” Cooley said reluctantly. “Sort of.” In the light of that cellophane-covered flashlight, he looked like a pink, angry ghost. “If we were a battleship or a carrier, though, we would have got one.”
“Now that you mention it, yes.” Carsten gave the younger officer a crooked smile. “Didn’t you figure out we were expendable the first time they gave us a shore-bombardment mission?”
“Sorry, sir. I guess I’m just naive,” Cooley answered. “But I’ll tell you something-I’m sure as hell convinced now.”
“That’s, uh, swell.” Sam had almost said it was bully. To someone the executive officer’s age, that would have smacked of the nineteenth century, if not the Middle Ages. Since Sam was only middle-aged himself-and not always reconciled to that-he didn’t want Cooley to think of him as one with Nineveh and Tyre. Then he stopped flabbling about changing tastes in American slang and went back to worrying about getting blown out of the water if he screwed up. “Come left to 150. I say again, come left to 150.”
“Coming left to one-five-oh: aye aye, sir.” Cooley changed course without question or comment. He was still the best shiphandler on the Josephus Daniels. In a nasty spot like this, the best shiphandler belonged at the wheel. He had to make his course corrections on the basis of what Sam told him, and had to hope Sam was telling him the right thing. If that wasn’t enough to give you an ulcer before you hit thirty, Sam didn’t know what would be.
Even if I do everything right, we still may go sky-high, Sam thought unhappily. Not all Confederate submersibles carried torpedoes. Some laid mines. If they’d laid some that U.S. sweepers hadn’t found yet, that could get-interesting. Or a moored mine might have come loose. If it drifted into their path… Sam would have done everything right, and a fat lot of good it would do him.