Not surprising, not when he had other, more important, things to worry about. The bombers started unloading on Snyder again. More antiaircraft guns protected the towns, but flak alone couldn’t keep bombers away. If the Confederacy had some fighters of its own in the air…
But the Confederacy damn well didn’t. Basically, Snyder had to sit there and take it. I will get Edith and the boys back to Alexandria, so help me God I will, Jeff thought. If the damnyankees were going to bomb innocent civilians…Again, he didn’t dwell on what the Confederates had done to innocent civilians on the other side of the border, let alone on what the men he commanded were doing to civilians right here in this camp.
He hated those strings of boom! boom! boom!, one right after another. Sure, Edith and Willie and Frank would be down in the storm cellar. Sure, it would take a direct hit to harm them. The odds against that were long. But it could happen, as he knew too well. And he couldn’t do one damn thing about it. He hated that even more.
Here inside Camp Determination, he was safe as houses. The Yankees had never bombed the camp. They cared more about the worthless niggers inside it than they cared about the honest white people they were trying to murder.
Another bomber exploded. This one sounded as if it blew up in midair. The United States were paying for things today, anyhow. Sometimes the bombers got off scot-free. That was just plain embarrassing. At least the gunners weren’t standing around with their thumbs up their asses.
Jeff knew losing a few bombers wouldn’t keep the USA from coming back. He also knew how helpless he was to do anything about it. What choice did he have but wait here till the raid ended and then go back to Snyder and see if he still had any family left?
None. None at all.
Bombers stayed above Snyder for most of an hour. As soon as the bombs stopped falling, Jeff jumped into the Birmingham that was his to use. He didn’t wait for a driver, but gunned the engine to life and roared off to find out if his family was all right.
He had to go off the road and onto the shoulder a couple of times to avoid craters. He was glad it hadn’t rained any time lately, or his auto might have bogged down. But the fires rising from Snyder made him mutter and curse and pray, all in a confused jumble. He knew what he meant, but he doubted anybody else, even God, would have.
Once he got into Snyder, he had to make more detours, both because of holes in the streets and because of burning buildings. The bombs hadn’t smashed the town’s one fire engine. Its bell clanged like the shrieks of a lost soul as it raced from one disaster to the next. How much good could it do at each stop? Some, maybe.
Jeff’s heart was in his throat when he turned onto his street. A house half a block in front of his had taken a direct hit. Part of a body lay on the front lawn. Pinkard gulped and looked away.
But there were Edith and Frank and Willie. His wife was bandaging a neighbor lady who looked to have been cut by flying glass. His stepsons watched with more interest than horror. They’d seen things like this before. Kids got used to war and other disasters faster than grownups did. For them, it soon became routine.
For Jeff…“Thank God you’re all right!” he called as he sprang from the motorcar and ran over to Edith.
“This was a bad one, but we made it into the cellar quick as we could. The windows are already cardboard and plywood, so we didn’t lose any glass. I don’t smell gas. The power’s out, but it’ll come back.” As Edith talked, she went on bandaging the neighbor lady’s head. “There you go, Vera. It’s not too deep, and I don’t think the scar will be bad.”
“Thank you, Edith.” With middle-class politeness, Vera nodded to Jeff. “Hello, Mr. Pinkard. Sorry we have to run into each other like this. It’s a miserable war, isn’t it?”
“It sure is, ma’am.” Jeff coughed on the smoke in the air. He shook his fist toward the west. “It’s a miserable war, but by God we’ll win it.”
Cabo San Lucas wasn’t quite the ass end of nowhere, but you could see it from there. George Enos knew damn well he wasn’t any place he wanted to be. As usual, nobody in the Navy bothered asking his opinion. The Marines had taken the place away from the Empire of Mexico. U.S. Army troops were pushing down from San Diego to occupy the rest of Baja California. The godawful terrain and the heat and the lack of water were giving them more trouble than Francisco Jose’s soldiers were.
Also annoying, or worse than annoying, to the men in green-gray and forest green were air raids across the Gulf of California from Confederate Sonora. C.S. bombers struck by night, when they were harder for U.S. fighters to find and shoot down. The Confederacy didn’t keep a lot of airplanes in Sonora, but the ones they had did what any small force was supposed to do: they made the other side hate their guts.
And they were the reason the Townsend lingered by Cabo San Lucas. More and more escort carriers came down the coast of Baja California. Sooner or later, they’d try to force their way into the Gulf of California and put C.S. air power in Sonora out of business. When they did, they would need escorts to deal with Confederate and Mexican surface raiders and submersibles. That was what destroyers were for.
“This would go quicker if we got a couple of fleet carriers instead of all these chickenshit little baby flattops,” George grumbled. “An escort carrier isn’t big enough to hold many airplanes, and the damn things can’t make twenty knots if you throw ’em off a cliff.”
Fremont Dalby gave him the horselaugh. “Now tell me another one,” he said. “Like they’re gonna waste fleet carriers down here. Fast as we build more of ’em, they go into the Atlantic. It’s just like last time: we cut off England’s lifeline to Argentina and Brazil, we screw her to the wall.”
“Yeah,” George said. That was what the father he barely remembered was doing in 1917, and how the senior George Enos died after the CSA threw in the sponge.
Dalby didn’t notice George was feeling subdued. “Maybe-maybe-the Sandwich Islands get one,” he said. “Depends on how serious we are about going after the Japs.”
“Makes sense, I guess,” George said. “If it’s up to me, though, we wait till we’re done with the really important stuff, and then we kick their scrawny yellow asses.”
“That’s how I’d do it, too,” Dalby agreed. “’Course, that doesn’t mean it’s how the admirals will want to handle it. Expecting the brass to do shit that makes sense is like expecting a broad to understand if you screw around on her. You can expect it, yeah, but that don’t mean it’s gonna happen. Like for instance, you know what I heard?”
“I’m all ears,” George said.
“You’d look even funnier than you do now if you were, and that’s saying something,” Dalby told him, altogether without malice. George flipped the gun chief the bird. Since Dalby was ribbing him personally, he could get away with that. Had the conversation had anything to do with duty or the ship, he would have had to take whatever abuse the older man dished out. Dalby went on, “Anyway, scuttlebutt is they’re keeping a flotilla bigger’n this one off the northwest coast, near where the Columbia lets out into the Pacific. Carriers, escorts, subs, the whole nine yards.”
“That’s pretty crazy,” George said. “Why would they put so many ships up where they don’t do any good?”
Fremont Dalby shrugged and lit a cigarette. He held out the pack to George, who took one, too. After a couple of puffs, Dalby said, “It’s almost like they’re guarding that whole stretch of coast, like there’s something up there they don’t want the Japs to hit no matter what.”
“What could there be?” George asked. “They think the Japs’ll bomb the salmon-canning plants, or what?”