Kelly came up behind him and watched in approval so silent that George jumped when he turned around and discovered him there. “You take care of the equipment,” the Navy man said, as if surprised to discover that trait in someone so recently a civilian.
“Sir, I put in a lot of years on a fishing trawler,” George answered. “We didn’t spend so much time polishing things as we do here, but everything had to work.” The Atlantic, he thought, was much less forgiving of mistakes than the Mississippi. It would, quite impersonally, kill you if you gave it even a quarter of a chance.
On the other hand, the Rebels would kill you most personally if they got their chance, or even a piece of their chance. He supposed that pretty much balanced things out. Kelly might have been thinking along those lines, too, for he said, “We have to be ready every second.”
“Yes, sir,” Enos agreed.
Kelly sighed. “I do wish we were something more than fire support for the Army. Out on the ocean, by all I hear, ships do what they need to do, not what some fool in green-gray thinks they need to do.”
As far as George was concerned, a dark blue uniform could also cover up a fool. He carefully did not mention that to Kelly, who was liable to think Enos had him in mind with the comment. What he did say was, “Crazy kind of war we’re fighting here.”
“Sailor, if you think I’m going to argue with you, you’re the one who’s crazy,” Kelly told him. “Snapping-turtle Navy is a strange sort of place.”
Enos would have said more, but klaxons started shouting. He would have run to his battle station, but he was already there. What he did do was run a belt into his machine gun, then look around to see what he was supposed to use for a target. He didn’t spot anything.
Word was not long in coming. Fingers began pointing south. Squinting, Enos spotted a tiny smudge of smoke on the horizon. It was what the smoke from the Punishment’s stacks might have looked like, if seen from a distance of several miles. Which meant-
“Well, well,” Lieutenant Kelly said, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. “You don’t see ship-to-ship actions very often in river warfare. Aren’t you glad we’ve found an exception for you, Enos?”
“Sir, I’ll fight,” George said. “You know I’ll fight. Expecting me to be glad about it is probably asking too much.” He’d had revenge enough by now for what the Rebs had done to him while he was a fisherman. He wouldn’t have minded spending the rest of the war somewhere far away from the roar of guns and close to Sylvia, George, Jr., and Mary Jane. He wondered if his little girl remembered him. Then he wondered if Sylvia remembered him-he hadn’t had a letter for a while.
Kelly said, “The next interesting question is whether we saw the Rebs before they saw us.” Interesting was such a nice, bland word to apply to a question that was liable to determine whether the Punishment remained a river monitor or turned into a flaming hulk in the next few minutes.
With a small noise, half whir, half grind, the turret of the Punishment began to revolve. The big guns elevated a few degrees. Before they could fire, though, a couple of great columns of water fountained up from the Mississippi, several hundred yards ahead of the monitor. Secondary splashes rose from shell fragments hitting the water.
“Well, well,” Kelly said again, as calmly as if the toast were too dark to suit him. “That answers that, doesn’t it?”
It did, and, as far as George was concerned, it was the wrong answer. He felt singularly useless. Whatever happened in the duel between the Punishment and the Confederate monitor, it wasn’t going to happen at ranges where a machine gun would do any good. That meant he had to remain a spectator at what might be his own destruction. He’d had to do that before, aboard the submersible-hunting trawler Spray. He didn’t think he’d get used to it if he had to do it a hundred times.
The Punishment’s guns bellowed. The deck quivered under Enos’ feet. He hoped the fellow at the rangefinder knew his business. No way to be certain, not with land and the twists of the river hiding the enemy from sight. Only smoke by which to gauge positions-it was a particularly deadly version of blindman’s buff.
Smoke spurted from the Punishment’s stacks. Now the monitor had to move quickly, either that or present a sitting target to its Confederate counterpart. Moving, though, was as likely to mean heading into the path of enemy fire as away from it. George wondered how Commander Heinrich, the skipper of the Punishment, chose which way to go. However he did it, he earned his money.
More shells from the Confederate gunboat splashed into the Mississippi. These were closer, so that some of the water they kicked up came raining down onto the deck of the Punishment. Enos wished he had his slicker from the Ripple.
Lieutenant Kelly, though, was grinning. “They haven’t straddled us,” he said. “Their next salvo will be long, and the one after that, if we’re lucky, longer yet. That gives us more time to find them and hit them.” He spoke as if that were all in a day’s work-and so, in fact, it was. George still hadn’t got used to the notion that, wearing this uniform, his day’s work involved killing people.
Boom! Boom! The guns in the Punishment’s turret replied to the Confederate fire. George hadn’t watched to see whether their muzzles had moved up or down or whether they thought they had the range. How, firing with only smoke to go by, would they know if they’d made a hit? By seeing more smoke, he supposed, or by having the enemy gunboat quit shooting at them.
It hadn’t quit shooting at the moment, worse luck. As Kelly had predicted, the next two shells were long. Enos waited anxiously for the salvo after that. How clever was the Rebel captain?
George had heard the Confederate shells roaring overhead before they splashed into the Mississippi. When the roar came again, he cringed at his machine gun: the shells screaming down sounded as if they were going to land on top of his head. “Brace yourselves, boys,” Lieutenant Kelly shouted through the screech of their descent. “They’re-”
One of them hit just to port of the Punishment, the other, half a second later, to starboard. The monitor staggered under Enos’ feet, as if it had fallen into a hole. But there were no holes in the Mississippi-or rather, there hadn’t been. That stagger was part of what knocked George off his feet. The rest was blast, which flung him against the side of the turret.
A fragment from the shell clanged off the turret about the same time as he hit it. A fresh, bright scar appeared on the metal, less than six inches above his head. He sucked in a breath, wondering if he’d feel the stab of a broken rib or two. To his relief, he didn’t.
Dazedly, he sat up and looked around. Lieutenant Michael Kelly hadn’t been so lucky as he was. There Kelly sprawled, cut almost in half by a piece of flying steel. To his horror, he saw the lieutenant’s eyes still had awareness in them. Kelly’s mouth moved, but only blood came from it. Then, mercifully, he slumped down dead.
And then, quite as if nothing had happened, the Punishment’s guns bellowed out a reply to the Confederate salvo. The crew might have been damaged, but the warship lived on. It would keep doing its job, too. George had an uneasy vision of a stream of men entering its hatches like beeves being driven into a slaughterhouse, the cannon firing, and out the far hatches coming, not steaks and ground meat, but coffins. But that would not matter to the ship. There would always be more men to feed into it, as there were always more men to feed into the trenches.
Across the water came a deep, low rumble, like thunder far away. For a moment, Enos thought it was the sound of the Confederate gunboat firing. But he hadn’t heard it when the other vessel’s previous salvos reached for the Punishment. The distant plume of smoke suddenly swelled enormously at the base.