American Front (23 page)

It was as good an answer as any, and better than most. Anybody in his right mind would have thought batteries on the mainland were plenty to keep Pearl Harbor safe. The Royal Navy had to have been hearing voices when it built an artificial island to go with those mainland forts. But, since the mainland forts had fallen to the Marines and the Concrete Battleship was still very much a going concern, maybe the English hadn’t been so stupid after all.

The twelve-inch guns in the fort’s two turrets had sunk a cruiser and a couple of destroyers, and damaged two battleships to boot. Until it was reduced, the Pacific Fleet couldn’t use Pearl Harbor for an anchorage. If the British sortied from Singapore, either alone or with the Japs from Manila, there was liable to be hell to pay.

But how were you supposed to take a fort you couldn’t wreck? Pounding by naval guns had chipped and pitted the steel-reinforced concrete that made up so much of the superstructure, but no shells had been lucky enough to land right on top of a turret. Admiral Dewey had offered the fort’s garrison full military honors if they surrendered; scuttlebutt was, he’d even offered them safe passage to anywhere they wanted to go in British or Confederate territory. Whatever he’d offered, they’d said no.

And so, brute force and sweet reason having failed, the Navy was trying something new: sneakiness. Carsten didn’t know which bright boy in glasses had come up with this scheme. What he did know was that, if it went wrong, nobody would ever find enough pieces of him to bury.

The freighter rounded the headland and sped toward the stern of the Concrete Battleship. The only gun it had ever had that could be brought to bear in that direction was a three-inch antiaircraft cannon, which wasn’t turret mounted. The limeys weren’t going to use that one now; the bombardment had long since wrecked it.

It was the only one in the plans, anyhow; what was hidden away in the depths of the fort was anybody’s guess, and one that made Carsten want to run to the head. But to keep the garrison too busy even to worry about what was sneaking up on them, the Navy was plastering the place again. Shells burst on it, sending up smoke with a core of fire, and all around it, sending up great columns of water. Watching all that made Carsten want to pucker, too. If one of those shells was badly aimed—

Most of the Navy ships were at extreme long range, for good and cogent reasons. The Concrete Battleship could still return fire—and did, with a salvo from one of its big-gun turrets. The noise of those two twelve-inchers going off was like the end of the world.

Closer and closer the freighter came. Carsten moved up to the bow, with the rest of the Navy files and Marines carrying rifles. At the bow was a boarding tower that looked like something out of Sir Walter Scott or other tales of medieval adventure. But, considering that the roof of Fort William Rufus was forty feet above the waterline, the boarding party was going to need help getting up there.

All at once, the Navy guns fell silent. Carsten approved of that; a couple of shells had come closer to the freighter than to the Concrete Battleship. The ship slid up to the stern or rear or whatever you wanted to call it of the fort, making contact with a decided thump.

“Well, if those bastards didn’t know we were here, they do now,” somebody close to Carsten said. That was undoubtedly true, and did nothing to make him feel better about the world.

A couple of Marines at the top of the boarding tower secured it to the broken concrete atop the fort. They waved. Sailors and Marines swarmed up the ladder, fast as they could. Sam was somewhere near the middle of the rush. His feet seemed to touch only every third rung. Then he was up on top himself, running through rubble to make sure no limeys came out of their starboard sally port to interfere with what the Americans were doing.

He got down behind a broken chunk of concrete and pointed his Springfield in the direction from which the British would come if they were trying something. He hoped to Jesus they wouldn’t—after all, what harm could a few American sailors with rifles do on top of a fortress that had defied every big gun the U.S. Navy owned?

“Here come the guys with the hoses!” a Marine corporal yelled.

And, sure enough, here they came, up over the boarding tower with hoses just like the ones the
Vulcan
had used to fuel the
Dakota
. The Concrete Battleship had no fueling ports, of course. But it did have air vents, and the combat engineers knew where they were. They weren’t badly covered with broken concrete, either; the Englishmen would have made sure of that.

Somebody fired up through one of the vents. An engineer howled and reeled backwards, clutching his shoulder. Carsten, seeing that plenty of people were covering the sally port, ran over to the vent and shot down into it a couple of times. He didn’t know how much good he did; he heard the bullets ricocheting off the metal of the air ducts.

“Hell with that, sailor,” an uninjured combat engineer barked at him. “Take Clem’s place on the hose and hang on tight.”

“All right,” Sam said agreeably.

At the rear edge of the Concrete Battleship, somebody yelled “Let ’er rip!” down to the freighter. The hose jerked in Carsten’s arms like a live thing. He did have to hang on tight, to keep it from getting away. A stream of thick, black liquid gushed from the nozzle and poured down the vent. Twenty feet away, another hose crew sent more of the stuff into the opening to a second ventilator shaft. Petroleum odors filled the air.

“What the hell is this stuff?” Carsten asked, doing his best to breathe through his mouth.

“Two parts heavy diesel oil, one part gasoline,” the combat engineer answered. He let out a wry chuckle. “You don’t want to go lookin’ for a match for a cigar right about now, do you, buddy?”

“Now that you mention it, no,” Sam said.

The engineer laughed again. “Good thinking. Real good thinking. We got ten thousand gallons of this stinking shit on that freighter. Take us maybe ten minutes to pour it all down on the limeys’ heads.”

“Good pumps,” Sam observed. “
Damn
good pumps.”

“It’s not like we’ve got time to waste up here,” the combat engineer said. He and Carsten held onto the hose till it suddenly went limp. Then he took a surprisingly small square box out of his pack and set it by the vent. In spite of his warning to Sam, he did light a match and touch it to the fuse. He looked up and grinned. “Now we get the hell out of here, is what we do.”

“Yes,
sir
!” Carsten grabbed his rifle and ran for the boarding tower. Most of the boarding party was already off the Concrete Battleship. A couple of engineers were still busy lighting more demolition charges here and there on the roof.

Sam went down the boarding tower even faster than he’d gone up it. He wanted to get away from Fort William Rufus, far away, as fast as he could. “Everybody off?” somebody yelled. When no one denied it, that same voice shouted, “All astern full!” The freighter backed away from the Concrete Battleship.

“How long a delay did you put on those fuses?” Carsten asked the combat engineer, who’d come down right behind him.

“Ten minutes,” the fellow answered cheerfully.

“Jesus!” Carsten said, and wished the freighter would go faster.

When they’d backed a few hundred yards, shore batteries opened up on the Concrete Battleship to discourage the Englishmen from heading up onto the roof. “If one of their shells fouls up our charges, I’ll kill those sons of bitches with my own hands,” the engineer promised.

Sam wasn’t worrying about that. He was still hoping the freighter could make something better than its current slow progress away from the Concrete Battleship. How long had he taken to run across the battered but unpierced concrete roof? How long had he needed to get down the boarding tower? How much time had gone by since then? And what would happen when—?

That last thought had just gone through his mind when it happened. Fort William Rufus went up in a titanic blast of fire and smoke that obscured the whole artificial island. The shock wave from the explosion slapped the freighter like a barmaid’s hand across your face when you got fresh and she didn’t like it. Heat hit Sam as if he’d stuck his head in front of an oven.

He hardly noticed. He was watching an enormous slab of reinforced concrete fly high, high, high into the air—hundreds of feet up there, flung like the lid of a pot by a playful kid. But this lid weighed tons uncounted.

Beside him, the combat engineer clapped his hands with glee. “We did know where the main powder magazine was,” he said happily.

“I guess you did,” Carsten agreed. The ruined roof fell into the Pacific with a splash bigger than a hundred twelve-inch shells all hitting the same place at the same time. “I guess you did,” Sam repeated. Fresh explosions tore at the Concrete Battleship. “We aren’t going to have any trouble getting in and out of Pearl Harbor, not any more we’re not.”

Lucien Galtier chased bits of rabbit-and-prune stew around his plate with knife and fork. He ate some potato, too, then reached for a little glass of applejack that sat nearby. “Hard times coming,” he said in a mournful voice.

“It will be all right,” his wife, Marie, said. “Would you like more?” When he nodded, she picked up his plate and handed it to Nicole, their oldest daughter. “Get your father some more stew, please.”

“Yes, Mama, certainly,” Nicole said, rising from the table and heading back into the kitchen. Lucien smiled to watch her go. She reminded him of Marie when they’d been courting: small and dark and brisk and resolutely cheerful. No wonder half the young men in the neighborhood would come around on errands that didn’t really need doing.

But he would not let Nicole distract him from his worries. “Hard times coming,” he said again, and then went on before Marie could answer: “Wives, now, wives, they look at things and they say, ‘It will be all right,’ no matter what it is, no matter how unlikely things are to be right ever again. We face starvation. nothing less—starvation, I tell you.”

“Yes, Lucien, of course,” Marie said, full of calm acceptance, as Nicole brought back his plate, piled high with steaming stew and potatoes. The plums that made the prunes had come from his own little orchard. The potatoes were from his farm, too. So were the rabbits, who had paid the penalty for being uninvited guests. He knew how to make applejack, but old Marcel, two farms away, had a still going and did not charge outrageous prices, so what was the point in cooking up his own? He finished the glass, savoring the warmth it put in his middle.

After he’d methodically plowed through the second helping, he said, with the air of a man granting a great concession, “Of course, here on the farm it could be that times are not so hard as they are in the town. I do not say it is, mind you, but it could be.”

“This I think is so,” Marie replied. “In Rivière-du-Loup, in St.-Antonin, in St.-Modeste, people cannot get along with what they are able to make so easily as can we, who raise our own food and who can even make our own clothes at need.” She glanced from Nicole to her other, younger, daughters, Susanne, Denise, and Jeanne. “In the attic, stored away, are a spinning wheel and the parts for a loom. I have not brought them down and shown you what to do with them because, till now, there has been no need; we have sewn with cloth bought from the store. But my mother taught me, as her mother taught her, and I can teach you if we are able to get no more cloth, as may happen.”

The girls, who ranged in age from Jeanne’s seven to Nicole’s twenty, all clamored for Marie to bring down the old tools and teach them how to make cloth. Marie sent Lucien an amused glance. He returned it, saying, “See how bravely they take on new work. I remember my mother making cloth, too. I do not recall her being so eager to do it, though.” He hid pride in his daughters behind gruffness.

“They want to find out something new, Lucien, or something so old, it seems new to them,” Marie said. “That is not bad. When it is no longer new to them, it will no longer be exciting, either; no doubt you are right about that.”

Lucien looked at his two sons: Charles, sixteen, compact like Marie, and Georges, a couple of years younger but already bigger than his brother. “Some people,” he said pointedly, “have no interest in work even when it is of a new sort.”

That was unfair, and he knew it; both boys worked on the farm like draft horses. Predictably, Charles got angry about it. Most times, Lucien would have been glad to see him turn eighteen, for the sake of the discipline with which he would have returned after two years’ conscription. Most times, yes. With a war on—

Even more predictably, Georges turned it into a joke, asking, “
Eh bien
, Papa—this laziness, do you think we get it from you or from Mama?”

“You get it from the Devil, you little wretch,” Lucien exclaimed, but then he had to cough a couple of times in lieu of laughing out loud. The next thing Georges took seriously—save, perhaps, a leather strap well applied to his backside, but he was getting too big for that—would be the first.

Outside, the dogs began to bark. A moment later came the sound of several men approaching the house, some of them mounted, others afoot. The Galtiers exchanged sudden glances of alarm. So many neighbors would never come together, not unannounced. That meant Americans, and Americans meant trouble.