George's stomach knotted. Here we go again, he thought. He'd had a ship sunk under him; he knew disasters could happen. He didn't want to remember that, but he didn't see how he could help it, either.
"Just like a drill," Chief Fodor said. "They haven't got us yet, and we aren't about to let 'em start. Right?"
"Right!" the gun crew shouted again. George was as loud as anybody. How loud he yelled made no difference in the bigger scheme of things, but it wasn't bad if it helped him feel a little better.
Some of the fighters that had been circling over the ships zipped away to see if they could meet up with the intruders before the C.S. airplanes got the chance to intrude. Others held their stations. If the enemy bombers got past the first wave of fighters, they still wouldn't have a free run at the flotilla.
"You've been through this before, right?" Fodor asked George. "I mean for real, not just for practice."
"Sure, Chief," George answered. "I've got it from the Japs and Featherston's fuckers and the limeys. I don't like it, but I can do it."
"That's all you need," the gun chief said. "I thought I remembered you lost your cherry, but I wanted to make sure."
Airplane engines scribed contrails across the sky. Their wakes, George thought. But the comparison with ships misled. It wasn't just that airplanes were so much faster. They also moved in three dimensions, not just two like surface ships.
A destroyer's antiaircraft guns started going off. So did the heavy cruisers'. Then George saw a couple of gull-winged ships that looked only too horribly familiar. "Asskickers!" he yelled, and his wasn't the only cry that rose.
One of the slow, ungainly Confederate dive bombers went down trailing smoke a moment after he shouted. It splashed into the Atlantic a mile or so from the Oregon, and kicked up more water than the shells the coastal guns had fired.
The other C.S. Mule bored in on the battleship. The Oregon heeled in as tight a turn as she could make, but she was large and cumbersome and much less nimble than, say, the Josephus Daniels would have been. That made her action less evasive than George wished it were.
He didn't have much time to worry about it. "Commence firing!" Wally Fodor shouted. The shell-jerkers started passing George ammo. He fed the twin 40mms' breeches like a man possessed. Casings leaped from the guns and clattered on the deck. Bursts-puffs of black smoke-appeared all around the attacking airplane.
But it kept coming. The bomb under its belly dropped. The Asskicker zoomed past, hardly higher than the tops of the battleship's masts. The bomb burst on the ocean, less than fifty yards from the Oregon.
Water hit George like a fist in the face. Next thing he knew, he was flat on his back, partly on the deck, partly on Ditto Thomas, who'd stood right behind him. "Get-glub!-offa me, goddammit!" Thomas spluttered, spitting out what looked like about half of the ocean.
"Yeah." George scrambled to his feet and gave Ditto a hand to haul him up, too. Ditto rubbed at his eyes. George's also stung from seawater. The other men from the gun crew were picking themselves up. Wally Fodor had a cut on his ear that bloodied the shoulder of his tunic. Could you get a Purple Heart for something like that? George wouldn't lose any sleep over it, and he didn't think Wally would, either.
At that, the number three mount got off lucky. Guys were down at the next 40mm mount, too, only they weren't getting up again. A fragment of bomb casing had taken off one sailor's head like a guillotine blade. Another man was gutted as neatly as a fat cod on a fishing trawler. But cod didn't scream and try to put themselves back together. And you couldn't gaff a sailor and put him on ice in the hold, though it might have been a mercy.
Stretcher-bearers carried him below. The Oregon boasted not one but two real doctors, not just a pharmacist's mate like the Josephus Daniels. Could they do anything for a guy with his insides torn out? Doctors were getting smarter all the time, and the fancy new drugs meant fever didn't always kill you. Even so…
George didn't get the chance to brood about it. "Come on!" Fodor yelled. Did the CPO even know he was wounded? "Back to the gun! We may get another shot at the sonsabitches!"
Suddenly, though, the sky seemed bare of Confederate aircraft. One limped off toward the north, toward land, trailing smoke as it went. The rest-weren't there any more. A rubber raft bobbed on the surface of the Atlantic: somebody'd got out of one of them, anyhow.
The Oregon's main armament boomed out another thunderous broadside. Half a minute later, the Maine also sent a dozen enormous shells landward. The air attack had made them miss a beat, but no more.
"Jesus!" George said, his ears ringing. "Is that the best those sorry suckers can do?"
"Sure looks like it." Chief Fodor sounded surprised, too. He noticed the blood on his shoulder, and did a professional-quality double take. "What the fuck happened here?"
"Maybe a splinter nicked you, or maybe you got hurt when the water knocked you down," George answered.
"I be damned," Fodor said. "I always heard about guys getting hurt without even knowing it, but I figured it was bullshit. Then it goes and happens to me. I be damned."
A U.S. destroyer steamed toward the downed Confederate flier. Somebody on the destroyer's deck threw the man a line. He didn't climb it. After a minute or so, a sailor went down into the raft with him and rigged a sling. The men on deck hauled the Confederate up-he must have been wounded. He was probably lucky not to be strawberry jam. Then they lowered the line to their buddy. Up he swarmed, agile as a monkey.
The big guns on both battlewagons bellowed again. If that was all the Confederates could do to stop them…If that was all, the Confederacy really was coming apart at the seams.
P aperwork. Jefferson Pinkard hated paperwork. He'd never got used to it. He didn't like being a paper-shuffler and a pen-pusher. He could manage it, but he didn't like it. Working in a steel mill for all those years left him with the driving urge to go out there and do things, dammit.
To soothe himself, he kept the wireless going. If he listened with half an ear to one of the Houston stations playing music, he didn't have to pay so much attention to all the nitpicking detail Richmond wanted from him. Muttering, he shook his head. No, not Richmond. Richmond was gone, lost, captured. Jake Featherston and what was left of the Confederate government were somewhere down in North Carolina now, still screaming defiance at the damnyankees and at the world.
Camp Humble went right on reducing population. Trains still rolled in from Louisiana and Mississippi and Arkansas and east Texas. Ships brought Negroes from Cuba to the Texas ports. He aimed to go right on doing his job till somebody set over him told him to stop.
Without warning, the song he was listening to broke off. An announcer came on the air: "We interrupt this program for a special proclamation from the Governor of the great state of Texas, the Honorable Wright Patman. Governor Patman!"
"What the-?" Jeff said. Something had hit the fan, that was for damn sure.
"Citizens of Texas!" Governor Patman said. "A hundred years ago, this state was an independent republic, owing allegiance to no nation but itself. We joined first the USA and then the CSA, but we have never forgotten our own proud tradition of…freedom." That was the Party slogan, yeah, but he didn't use it the way a good Party man would.
Jeff muttered, "Uh-oh." No, he didn't like the way Patman used it at all.
Sure as the devil, the Governor of Texas went on, "The Confederate government has brought us nothing but ruin and a losing war. The United States have already stolen part of our territory and revived the so-called state of Houston that blighted the map after the last war. They have killed our soldiers, bombed our cities, and ruined our trade. The Confederate government is powerless to stop them or even slow them down."