“Somebody was asleep at the switch, not giving them the right kind of uniforms,” George said. “The Confederates are starting to wear camouflage, for Christ’s sake. Least we could do is have our guys not look like Christmas trees in the desert.”
“Probably figured we were only fighting Mexicans, so what difference did it make?” Dalby said. “That’s how they think back in Philadelphia. But anybody with a rock in front of him and a gun in his hands is trouble. What are we doing making things easier for him?”
“Acting dumb,” Fritz Gustafson said, which was all too likely to be true.
They had the time to gab, because the Townsend didn’t come close enough to shore for them to open up with their 40mm guns. That would have let the Mexicans shoot back. No enemy airplanes appeared overhead. If they had, the fighters from the escort carriers would have dealt with them before the antiaircraft guns could-George hoped so, anyhow.
He watched the Marines hack out a toehold on the barren Mexican coast. “Boy, if the Confederates weren’t over on the far side of the Gulf of California, I’d say the Mexicans were fucking welcome to this Baja place,” he remarked.
“You notice the Confederate States didn’t buy it when they picked up Sonora and Chihuahua,” Fremont Dalby said. “You notice we didn’t take it away after we won the Great War. Goddamn Mexicans are welcome to it.”
George looked at his wristwatch. “Other crew’s coming on pretty soon. They’re welcome to it, too. I want some shuteye.” He yawned to show how much he wanted it. “This watch-and-watch crap is for the birds.”
“What? You don’t like four hours on, four hours off around the clock?” Dalby said in mock surprise. “You want more than a couple-three hours of sleep at a time? Shit, Enos, what kind of American are you?”
“A tired one,” George answered. “A hungry one, too. If I eat, I don’t get enough sleep. If I don’t eat, I still don’t get enough sleep, but I come closer, and I get hungry like a son of a bitch. I can’t win.”
Dalby scraped his index finger over his thumbnail. “There’s the world’s smallest goddamn violin playing sad songs for you. That shows how sorry I am. You’re not talking about anything I’m not doing.”
“I know, Chief,” George said quickly. One advantage of Gustafson’s usual silence was that he couldn’t get in trouble by opening his big mouth too wide and falling in.
When the other crew took over at the twin 40mm, George raced down to the galley and snagged a ham sandwich and a mug of coffee. He inhaled them, then climbed into his hammock. It was hot and stuffy belowdecks, but he didn’t care. The destroyer’s five-inch guns roared every so often, but he didn’t care about that, either. He thought he could have slept on top of one of them.
He was punchy and groggy when he got shaken awake, and needed a minute or two to remember where he was, and why, and what he was supposed to be doing. “Oh, God,” he groaned, “is it that time already?”
“Bet your ass, Charlie,” his tormentor said cheerfully, and went on to rout other victims from sleep.
The sun had set. On the shore, tracers zipped back and forth. The U.S. Marines used yellow or red tracer rounds. Maybe the Mexicans had been buying theirs from the Empire of Japan, because they were ice blue. It made for a bright and cheerful scene-or a scene that would have been bright and cheerful if George hadn’t known that those tracers, along with all the ordinary bullets he couldn’t see, were fired with intent to kill.
“Looks like we’re holding more ground than we were when I sacked out,” he said.
“Yeah, I think so,” Fremont Dalby agreed. “Now that we’re holding it, though, what are we going to do with it?”
“Beats me,” George said. “But I’ll tell you one thing-I’d sooner be fighting Francisco Jose’s boys than Hirohito’s any old day.”
“Well, if you think I’ll argue with that, you’re crazier than one man’s got any business being,” the gun chief replied. “The Japs are tough, and their gear is as good as ours. These guys…They’re using stuff left over from the last war, and you have to figure most of ’em don’t want to be here.”
“Would you?” George said. “It’s got to be hell on earth. Hot sun. Rocks. Rattlesnakes-gotta think so, anyway. Most of those guys probably just want to go back to their farms and make like none of this ever happened.”
“Sounds good to me,” Dalby said. “If we go home and the Confederates go home, who’s left to fight? See? Piece of cake. They’ll be calling with the Nobel Peace Prize any goddamn day now. Want to split it?”
“Sure? Why not?” George said. On the barren, desolate coast of Baja California, something blew up with a rending crash. “Hope that was on the Mexican side of the line,” George said. Fremont Dalby nodded.
Aprivate came up to Chester Martin with a half-grim, half-sick expression on his face. Seeing that, Martin knew what he was going to say before he said it. But say it he did: “Sarge, they found Don. Bushwhackers caught him. It ain’t pretty.”
“Shit,” Chester said. “This is worse than Kentucky, all right.” Kentucky had gone back and forth between the CSA and the USA. Most people there hated Yankees, but a fair-sized minority didn’t. Even some of the ones who hated Yankees understood they didn’t come equipped with horns and tails.
Here in central Tennessee, none of the locals seemed to have got the news. They reacted to soldiers in green-gray as if to demons from hell. Some of them ran, while the rest tried to fight back. Civilians weren’t supposed to fight back. If anybody’d told that to the Confederates, it didn’t sink in.
“What are we going to do, Sarge?” the private asked.
“I know what I want to do,” Chester answered. “I want to take hostages. And if the bastard who did that to Don doesn’t turn himself in, I want to shoot the son of a bitch.”
“Yeah!” the private said savagely.
“I can’t do it on my own,” Chester said. “My ass’d be in a sling if I tried it. But I bet Captain Rhodes can.”
Hubert Rhodes was newly in command of the company, which had had two COs wounded on back-to-back days before he arrived. Unless he was unlucky, Martin didn’t think he’d be easy to kill. He was tough and skinny, with a thin, dark mustache and gray eyes that seemed to see everywhere at once. He didn’t mind having a noncom head up a platoon, which gave him another good mark in Chester’s book.
When Chester found him, he was field-stripping and cleaning a captured Confederate automatic rifle. He carried it himself, in lieu of the usual officer’s.45. He put himself where the enemy could shoot at him, and he wanted to be able to answer with as much firepower as he could.
He looked up before Chester got very close. You couldn’t get close to him without his knowing it. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?” he asked. By the way he talked, he came from somewhere in the Midwest.
“Damn Confederate bushwhackers just murdered one of my men, sir,” Martin replied. “Murdered him and did nasty things to the body after he was dead. I hope after, anyway.”
Rhodes’ mouth was never wide and giving. It tightened more than usual now. “What do you want to do about it?” he asked. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“Take hostages, sir,” Chester said. “We may not make ’em stop this shit, but we can make it expensive for ’em.”
Without looking at the weapon he was working on, Rhodes reassembled it. His hands didn’t need his eyes’ help to know what they were doing. He got up and lit a cigarette: also Confederate plunder. “Sounds good. Let’s do it,” he said. “You think ten’s enough, or do you want twenty?”