“No, sir,” Zwilling replied. “My last tour of duty was aboard a fleet oiler, and before that I was a junior officer on the Idaho. I have my personnel records with me for your review.”
Of course you do, Sam thought. That wasn’t fair, but he couldn’t help it. Trying not to show what he was feeling, he said, “Well, let’s give you the quick tour, then. There’ll be places where you want to watch your head-not a lot of room in one of these babies.”
“I’ll be careful, sir,” Zwilling said, and Sam believed him. He was unimpressed with the pair of 4.5-inch guns that made up the Josephus Daniels’ main armarment. “The secondary weapons on a battleship are bigger than these,” he sniffed.
“Tell me about it. I fought a five-incher on the Dakota,” Carsten said.
“As battery chief?” Zwilling asked with his first show of interest in his new skipper as a human being.
“Nope.” Sam shook his head. “I was a loader when the Great War started, and ended up running a gun.”
“A loader. I see.” Zwilling looked as uncomfortable as if Sam had admitted to eating with his fingers when he was a kid. There wouldn’t be any talk about professors or courses, not on this ship there wouldn’t.
Sam took him through the destroyer escort: galley, bunkrooms, engines, and all. Finally, he said, “What do you think?”
“Everything seems orderly enough,” the new exec allowed. “Still, I’m sure there’s room for improvement.”
“There always is,” Sam said, not liking the way the commonplace sounded in Zwilling’s mouth. “Do you think you can find your way back to your cabin from here?”
“I do.” Zwilling didn’t lack for confidence, anyhow.
“Well, ask a sailor if you get lost.” Sam inserted the needle with a smile. “I’ll let you get settled, and we’ll talk some more in the wardroom tonight.”
“Yes, sir.” Zwilling saluted again and strode off.
After Sam went up on deck, he watched a sailor standing on the pier kissing a redheaded woman good-bye. A couple of sniffling little boys in dungarees stood by her, so she was probably the sailor’s wife. After a last embrace, he slung his duffel bag and asked the officer of the deck for permission to come aboard.
“Welcome to the Josephus Daniels,” Sam said. “Who are you, and what do you do?”
“I’m George Enos, Junior, sir,” the sailor answered. “I jerked shells on a 40mm on the Townsend. Goddamn Confederate Asskicker sank her in the Gulf of California.”
“Well, we can use you.” Carsten paused. Enos? The name rang a bell. He snapped his fingers. “Wasn’t your mother the one who…?”
“She sure was,” Enos said proudly. “My father was a fisherman before he went into the Navy, and so was I.”
“Good to have you aboard,” Sam said. “Good to meet you, too, by God.”
“Thank you, sir.” The sailor cocked his head to one side. “Have we ever met before? You look kind of familiar.”
With his very blond hair and pink skin, Sam sometimes got mistaken for other fair men. He shook his head. “Not that I know of, anyway. You live around here?” After Enos nodded, Sam went on, “I’ve been through more times than I can count, so you may have seen me somewhere, but I’ve got to tell you I don’t remember.”
“Maybe it’ll come to me.” Enos grinned like a kid. “Or maybe I’m talking through my hat. Who knows? Will I go on a 40mm here, sir?”
“Have to see how everything shakes down, but I’d say your chances are pretty darn good,” Sam answered. “Go below for now and sling your duffel somewhere. The chiefs will take charge of you.”
“Aye aye, sir.” With a crisp salute, George Enos headed for a hatch.
He could have been a kid when we bumped into each other, Sam realized. But if he was, why would he remember me? He shrugged. He had no way of knowing. Maybe it would come back to Enos. And maybe it wouldn’t. The world wouldn’t end either way.
Orders came the next day: join up with a task force heading east across the Atlantic to raid Ireland. This is where I came in, Carsten thought. He’d run guns to the micks during the Great War, and shelled-and been shelled by-British positions in Ireland afterwards. The difference this time around was an abundance of British land-based air. He wondered how much the Navy Department brass down in Philly had thought about that.
When he showed Myron Zwilling the orders, the new exec just nodded and said, “That’s what we’ll do, then.”
“Well, yeah,” Sam said. “I’d like to have some kind of hope of coming back afterwards, though.”
“If they need to expend us, sir-” Zwilling began.
“Hold your horses.” Sam held up a hand. “If they need to expend us on something important, then sure. We needed to take Bermuda back if we could-I guess we did, anyhow. I’ve pulled some raids on the Confederates that I think really hurt those bastards. But this? This looks chickenshit to me.”
“You don’t know the big picture, sir,” Zwilling said.
He was right. Sam didn’t. “What I do know, I don’t like.”
“You can’t refuse the mission,” the exec said.
He was right again. That would mean a court-martial, probably, or else just an ignominious retirement. “I’m not refusing it,” Carsten said hastily. “I’m worrying about it. That’s a different kettle of fish.”
“Yes, sir.” The way Zwilling said it, it meant, No, sir.
You’re not helping, Sam thought. An exec was supposed to be a sounding board, someone with whom he could speak his mind. He wasn’t going to get that from Myron Zwilling. He didn’t need to be an Annapolis grad to see as much.
“We’ll give it our best shot, that’s all.” Sam thought about George Enos, Jr. “And we’ll make damn sure all the antiaircraft guns and ashcan launchers are fully manned.”
“Of course, sir,” Myron Zwilling said.
XVII
Georgia. Chester Martin looked south and east. He was really and truly in Georgia, if only in the northwesternmost corner of the state. When he looked across it, though, he knew what he saw on the other side.
The end of the war.
Damned if I don’t, he thought. If the U.S. Army could grind across Georgia, it would cut the Confederate States in half. It would take Atlanta, or else make the city worthless to the CSA. How could the enemy go on fighting after that? Oh, both halves of a worm wiggled for a while if you sliced it in two…but not for long.
And the Confederates had to know that as well as he did. Their artillery stayed busy all the time. They staged night raids with everything from big bombers down to little puddle-jumping biplanes that flew along at treetop height and peeked right into your foxhole.
No matter what they did at night, the USA ruled the daytime skies. Two-engine and four-engine bombers pounded Confederate positions. So did U.S. fighter-bombers. After they dropped their bombs, they climbed to go after the outnumbered C.S. Hound Dogs that still rose to challenge the U.S. air armada. And fewer Hound Dogs rose each week than had the week before. Little by little, the Confederate States were getting ground down.
U.S. artillery on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge sent volleys as far into Confederate territory as they would reach, announcing that the high ground had a new owner. Some of the guns up there had belonged to the Confederacy. Unlike small arms, their artillery shared several calibers with its U.S. equivalents. They must have thought they would capture U.S. guns, not the reverse. But those streams of paratroopers floating down from the sky caught them by surprise.
Captain Rhodes came forward and cautiously looked at the fields and pine woods ahead. He didn’t use field glasses-they were a dead giveaway that an officer was up there snooping, and an invitation to a sniper to draw a bead on him. He looked from one end of a trench, walked fifty feet with his head down, then popped up for another peek.
Some of the fields out there were minefields. The Confederates had marked some of them with signs that said MINES! or warned people away with skulls and crossbones. Some of the signs were genuine. Others, by what Chester had seen before, were bluffs. And real minefields sometimes went unmarked, too. Advancing U.S. soldiers and barrels would find them the hard way-and probably come under machine-gun fire once slowed down in them.