Sam said, "Of course it'll be unofficial when they look over what the Confederates are up to in south Florida and Cuba." He winked. "Of course it will."
Commander van der Waal chuckled. "Yeah, and rain makes applesauce."
But two could play at that game. Before long, a biplane came down from Florida and began flying lazy circles above the Remembrance. Not caring for the company, the aeroplane carrier's commander ordered a couple of fighting scouts aloft to look over the newcomer and, if need be, to warn him off. Sam happened to be going by the wireless shack when one of the U.S. pilots said, "The Confederate says he's just a civilian. His machine's got Confederate Citrus Company painted on the side. He's out for a stroll, you might say."
What the officer inside the wireless center said meant, Yeah, and rain makes applesauce, but was a good deal more pungently phrased. The officer went on, "Tell the son of a bitch he can goddamn well go strolling somewhere else, or maybe he'll go swimming instead."
"Yes, sir," the pilot answered. Carsten lingered in the corridor to hear what happened next. After half a minute or so, the pilot came back on the air: "Sir, he says if we want an international incident from shooting down an unarmed civilian pilot in international waters, we can have one."
The officer in the wireless center expended more bad language. At last, he said, "I'd better talk to the old man about that one." He might have wanted to order the Confederate aeroplane knocked out of the sky, but he didn't have the nerve to do it without approval from on high. Carsten wouldn't have, either.
Maybe the skipper of the Remembrance used some blue language of his own. Whether he did or not, that CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY aeroplane flew above the carrier for the next hour and a half. Nobody fired a shot at it. The pilot finally ran low on fuel or got bored or found some other reason to fly back off toward the north.
In the officers' galley at supper that evening, Sam said, "I bet they're developing that bastard's photographs right now."
"Probably," a lieutenant, junior grade, agreed. "Fat lot of good they can do with 'em, though. Maybe they've built a few submersibles without our noticing, and maybe than can keep 'em hidden from us, too-"
"Especially since the Socialists aren't spending the money on inspections that the Democrats did," a lieutenant commander put in.
"Yes, sir," the j.g. said. "But there's no way in hell they could build themselves an aeroplane carrier on the sly. That's too big a secret to keep. Besides, they haven't got the aeroplanes to put aboard it."
"We hope they don't," Sam said. "For all we know, they're all labeled Confederate Citrus Company right now."
That produced a few laughs and a few curses. The lieutenant commander said, "That machine had no guns. The pilots checked, first thing."
"Yes, sir," Sam said. "But how long would they need to convert the type to something they could use in combat?"
Nobody had anything resembling an answer for him. The lieutenant commander said, "That's something we ought to find out about. Maybe more of these fruit-company bastards will come look us over before too long. If they do, we'll look them over, too." He sighed. "I don't know how much good that will do us, not the way things are in Philadelphia these days, but we do have to make the effort."
By the next morning, though, they'd left the Straits and even Cuba behind. No more aeroplanes came out from the CSA to inspect them. Carsten was sure that didn't mean nobody was keeping an eye on them. Lots of little fishing boats, some Confederate, others Mexican, bobbed in the Gulf of Mexico. How many of them had wireless sets? How many of those sets were sending reports to, say, the Confederate Naval Academy at Mobile, or to New Orleans? He didn't know, but he had his suspicions.
He also had suspicions of another sort. Whenever he came up onto the flight deck, he kept staring out into the blue, blue waters of the Gulf. "What are you doing?" Commander van der Waal asked. "Looking for periscopes?"
"Yes, sir," Sam answered, altogether seriously.
Van der Waal stared. "Do you really think the Confederates would try to sink us?"
"No, sir," Sam said. "I think they'd have to be crazy to try that. But if they've got any submersibles, what better way to train their crews than by stalking a real, live aeroplane carrier?"
His superior pondered that, then nodded. "Good point, Carsten. Let's see what we can do about it. Maybe we ought to get some training in, too."
Before long, the Remembrance shut down her engines and drifted to a stop. Sam knew what that meant: she was giving her hydrophone operators the best chance she could to pick up the sounds of submarines moving on their electric engines somewhere under the sea.
What will we do if we hear one? Carsten wondered. The carrier couldn't start lobbing depth charges into the Gulf of Mexico. That would be an act of war, no less than if one of the hypothetical subs launched a torpedo at her. We could report it to Philadelphia. How much good would that do? Sam didn't know. But the Confederate States couldn't claim they had no submersibles if the Remembrance found one.
Or could they? Maybe they'd claim the boat belonged to the Empire of Mexico. Sam doubted the Mexicans could build such boats on their own, or man them if they did, but how could you know for sure? You couldn't. Subs under the sea were hard to find and even harder to identify; they didn't come with license plates, the way motorcars did.
Nobody ever officially said whether the hydrophone operators found anything. Sam did get a letter of commendation in his service jacket for "enhancing the Remembrance 's readiness against surprise attack." He drew his own conclusions from that. He also kept his mouth shut about them. Sometimes advertising you'd done something smart was a good idea. Sometimes it was anything but.
When they neared the Central American coast, a tiny gunboat flying the blue-and-white Costa Rican flag came out of Puerto Limon to greet the Remembrance. An officer at the bow hailed her through a megaphone. He looked just the way Sam had thought a Costa Rican would look, and spoke English with a Spanish accent. The gunboat, which might have been a toy alongside the aeroplane carrier, got out of the way in a hurry so the elephantine ship could advance.
Puerto Limon itself turned out to be very different from what Carsten had expected. He'd come to ports in Latin America before. He'd figured the people here would be like the officer: swarthy, most of them of mixed white and Indian blood, and Spanish-speaking. Instead, most of them turned out to be Negroes, and they used more English than Spanish. In their mouths, the language had a lilt that put him in mind of what he'd heard in the Bahamas.
A long line of black men carrying huge bunches of bananas came up the pier next to the one where the Remembrance tied up. They vanished into the hold of a freighter flying the Confederate flag, then emerged to go back down the pier lugging crates: whatever that freighter had been carrying here to exchange for the golden fruit (actually, the bananas going aboard were green; Sam supposed they would ripen on the way up to the CSA).
White sailors aboard the freighter stared over at the aeroplane carrier. To Commander van der Waal, Carsten remarked, "I wonder how many of those bastards were in the C.S. Navy during the war."
"More than a few, or I miss my guess," the other officer answered. "We've just given them some free intelligence." He shrugged. "That's the way it goes, sometimes."
The Costa Rican officer from the gunboat came aboard a few minutes later. His white uniform was more festooned with gold braid than that of the Remembrance 's skipper, but he introduced himself as Lieutenant Commander Garcia. That tickled Sam's funny bone. "I wonder what an admiral in the Costa Rican Navy looks like," he remarked.
"You probably can't see the cloth on his uniform at all, on account of the gold and the medals and such." Commander van der Waal's snicker had a nasty edge to it. "My little girl back in Providence likes to play dress-up the same way. Of course, she's got an excuse-she's only eight years old."