Lieutenant-Colonel Lempriere laughed again. "You know any soldier in the field longer'n a week who hasn't got his pecker up?"
That brought them around to women. Tom had figured they'd get there sooner or later. He asked about the local officers' brothels, and whether the girls really did steer clear of cures for the clap. Lempriere denied it. He turned out to be a mine of information. As Tom had, he'd been in the last war. Ted Griffith was too young. He listened to the two lieutenant-colonels swap stories of sporting houses gone by. After a while, he said, "Sounds like bullshit to me, gentlemen."
"Likely some of it is," Tom said. "But it's fun bullshit, you know?" They all laughed some more. They ended up yarning and drinking deep into the night.
When the USS Remembrance sortied from Honolulu, Sam Carsten had no trouble holding in his enthusiasm. The airplane carrier wasn't going any place where the weather suited him: up to Alaska, say. She could have been. The Tsars still owned Alaska, and Russia and the United States were formally at war. But they hadn't done much in the way of fighting, and weren't likely to. The long border between the U.S.-occupied Yukon and northern British Columbia on the one hand and Alaska on the other was anything but the ideal place to wage war.
The western end of the chain of Sandwich Islands, now…
Midway, a thousand miles north and west of Honolulu, had a U.S. base on it. The low-lying island wasn't anything much. Aside from great swarms of goony birds, it boasted nothing even remotely interesting. But it was where it was. Japan had seized Guam along with the Philippines in the Hispano-Japanese War right after the turn of the century, and turned the island into her easternmost base. If she took Midway from the USA, that could let her walk down the little islands in the chain toward the ones that really mattered.
Japan didn't have anyone to fight but the USA. The United States, by contrast, had a major land war against the Confederate States on their hands. They were trying to hold down a restive Canada. And the British, French, and Confederates made the Atlantic an unpleasant place-to say nothing of the Confederate submersibles that sneaked out of Guaymas to prowl the West Coast.
Sam wished he hadn't thought about all that. It made him realize how alone out here in the Pacific the Remembrance was. If something went wrong, the USA would have to send a carrier around the Horn-which wouldn't be so easy now that the British and Confederates had retaken Bermuda and the Bahamas. The only other thing the United States could do was start building carriers in Seattle or San Francisco or San Pedro or San Diego. That wouldn't be easy or quick, either, not with the country cut in two.
Most of the crew enjoyed the weather. It was mild and balmy. The sun shone out of a blue sky down on an even bluer sea. Carsten could have done without the sunshine, but he had special problems. Zinc oxide helped cut the burn a little. Unfortunately, a little was exactly how much the ointment helped.
He glanced up to the carrier's island every so often. The antenna on the Y-range gear spun round and round, searching for Japanese airplanes. Midway also had a Y-range station. Between the two of them, they should have made a surprise attack impossible. But Captain Stein was a suspenders-and-belt man. He kept a combat air patrol overhead all through the day, too. Sam approved. You didn't want to get caught with your pants down, not here.
Fighters weren't the only things flying above the Remembrance and the cruisers and destroyers that accompanied her. As she got farther out into the chain of Sandwich Islands, albatrosses and their smaller seagoing cousins grew more and more common. Watching them always fascinated Sam. They soared along with effortless ease, hardly ever flapping. The smaller birds sometimes dove into the ocean after fish. Not the albatrosses. They swooped low to snatch their suppers from the surface of the sea, then climbed up into the sky again.
They were as graceful in the air as they were ungainly on the ground. Considering that every landing was a crash and every takeoff a desperate sprint into the wind, that said a great deal.
The other impressive thing about them was their wingspan, which seemed not that much smaller than an airplane's. Sam had grown up watching hawks and turkey buzzards soar over the upper Midwest. He was used to big birds on the wing. The goony birds dwarfed anything he'd seen then, though.
"I hear the deck officer waved one of them off the other day," he said in the officers' wardroom. "Fool bird wasn't coming in straight enough to suit him."
"He didn't want it to catch fire when it smashed into the deck," Hiram Pottinger said. "You know goonies can't land clean."
"Well, sure," Sam said. "But it shit on his hat when it swung around for another pass."
He got his laugh. Commander Cressy said, "Plenty of our flyboys have wanted to do the same thing, I'll bet. If that albatross ever comes back, they'll pin a medal on it."
Sam got up and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. He was junior officer there, so he held up the pot, silently asking the other men if they wanted any. Pottinger pointed to his cup. Sam filled it up. The head of damage control added cream and sugar. Before long, the cream would go bad and it would be condensed milk out of a can instead. Everybody enjoyed the real stuff as long as it stayed fresh.
Pottinger asked Commander Cressy, "You think the Japs are out there, sir?"
"Oh, I know they're out there. We all know that," the exec answered. "Whether they're within operational range of Midway-and of us-well, that's what we're here to find out. I'm as sure that they want to boot us off the Sandwich Islands as I am of my own name."
"Makes sense," Sam said. "If they kick us back to the West Coast, they don't need to worry about us again for a long time."
Dan Cressy nodded. "That's about right. They'd have themselves a perfect Pacific empire-the Philippines and what were the Dutch East Indies for resources, and the Sandwich Islands for a forward base. Nobody could bother them after that."
"The British-" Lieutenant Commander Pottinger began.
Sam shook his head at the same time as Commander Cressy did. Cressy noticed; Sam wondered if the exec would make him do the explaining. To his relief, Cressy didn't. Telling a superior why he was wrong was always awkward. Cressy outranked Pottinger, so he could do it without hemming and hawing. And he did: "If the British give Japan a hard time, they'll get bounced out of Malaya before you can say Jack Robinson. They're too busy closer to home to defend it properly. The Japs might take away Hong Kong or invade Australia, too. I don't think they want to do that. We're still on their plate, and they've got designs on China. But they could switch gears. Anybody with a General Staff worth its uniforms has more strategic plans than he knows what to do with. All he has to do is grab one and dust it off."
Pottinger was Navy to his toes. He took the correction without blinking. "I wonder how the limeys like playing second fiddle out in the Far East," he remarked.
"It's Churchill's worry, not mine," Cressy said. "But they're being good little allies to the Japs out here. They don't want to give Japan any excuses to start nibbling on their colonies. They make a mint from Hong Kong, and it wouldn't last twenty minutes if Japan decided she didn't want them running it any more."
"Makes sense," Hiram Pottinger said. "I hadn't thought it through."
"Only one thing." Sam spoke hesitantly. Commander Cressy waved for him to go on. If the exec hadn't, he wouldn't have. As it was, he said, "The Japs may not need any excuse if they decide they want Hong Kong or Malaya. They're liable just to reach out and grab with both hands."
He waited to see if he'd made Cressy angry. Before the exec could say anything, general quarters sounded. Cressy jumped to his feet. "We'll have to finish hashing this out another time, gentlemen," he said.