“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.
“We can take those bastards,” Rhodes said.
Chester Martin nodded. “Yes, sir. I think we can, too. Won’t be too easy, won’t be too cheap, but we can do it.”
The company commander turned and looked west. “We ought to be cleaning out the rest of Tennessee, too, so we don’t have such a narrow front here. We can sure as hell do that. Even now, the Confederates have a devil of a time getting men and materiel from east to west.”
“Yes, sir,” Chester said again. “That’s how Nashville fell-almost an afterthought, you might say.”
“Sure.” Rhodes grinned. “Goddamn big afterthought, wasn’t it? But you’re right, Sergeant. Once we pushed past to the east, once we got over the Cumberland, Nashville stopped mattering so much. The Confederates had bigger worries closer to home. So they pulled out and let us march in, and they tried to hold Chattanooga instead.”
Chester looked back over his shoulder toward the city Captain Rhodes had named. “And they couldn’t do that, either,” he said happily.
“Nope.” Rhodes sounded pretty happy, too. “They’re like a crab-they’ve got claws that pinch, and a hard shell to go with it. But once you crack ’em, there’s nothing but meat inside.”
“Sounds good to me-except the meat in our rations is better than the horrible tinned beef they use,” Martin said. “Even they call it Dead Donkey. But their smokes are still good.” He took a pack of Dukes out of his pocket and offered it to Rhodes. “Want some?”
“Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.” The company CO took one, lit it, and started to hand the pack back.
“Keep it,” Chester said. “I’ve got plenty. Lots of dead Confederates these days, and lots of POWs who don’t need cigarettes any more.”