“Freedom!” the marchers roared again. Had they turned on the Negroes in line outside the city hall, the handful of policemen could not have hoped to stop them. But they just kept marching and shouting their one-word slogan. That showed discipline, too, and frightened Scipio almost as much as an attack would have done.
He looked from the marchers back to the police. Not only were the policemen outnumbered, they also seemed cowed by the Freedom Party’s show of force. It was almost as if the marchers represented the Confederate government and the police were civilian spectators.
“Them bastards is bad trouble,” Aurelius said, speaking in a low voice to make sure he gave the white men no excuse to do anything but march.
“Every time the Freedom Party do somethin’, mo’ poor buckra join they than the time befo’,” Scipio said. “That go on, they gwine end up runnin’ this here country one fine day. What they do then?”
“Whatever they please,” Bathsheba said. “They do whatever they please.”
“Ain’t nothin’we can do about it, anyways,” Aurelius said.
Scipio suddenly felt the weight of the passbook in his pocket. It might have been the weight of a ball and chain. For the very first time, he truly sympathized with the Red uprising in which he’d played an unwilling part. This march was what Cassius and Cherry and the other Reds had feared the most.
But their uprising had helped spawn the Freedom Party—Scipio understood the dialectic and how it worked, even if he didn’t think of it as revealed truth. And the black uprising had failed, as any black uprising was bound to do: too few blacks, too few weapons. What did that leave for Negroes in the CSA? Nothing he could see.
“We’s trapped,” he said, hoping Bathsheba or Aurelius would argue with him. Neither of them did, which worried him more than anything.
Sam Carsten slammed a shell into the breech of the five-inch gun he served aboard the USS
Remembrance
. “Fire!” Willie Moore shouted. Carsten jerked the lanyard. The cannon roared. The shell casing fell to the deck with a clang of brass on steel. One of the shell-jerkers behind Sam handed him a fresh round. Coughing a little from the cordite fumes, he reloaded the gun.
Moore peered out through the sponson’s vision slit. “I think we’ve got to bring it down a couple hundred yards to drop it just where we want it,” he said, and fiddled with the elevation screw to achieve the result he wanted. When he was satisfied, he nodded to Sam. “Give ’em another one.”
“Right, Chief.” Sam yanked the lanyard again. The gun bellowed. Carsten said, “Christ, by the time we’re through with Belfast, there won’t be anything left of it.”
“Damn stubborn crazy micks,” Moore said. “The ones who want to stay part of England, I mean, not the ones who aim to put all of Ireland into one country. They’re damn stubborn crazy micks, too, but they’re on our side.”
Overhead, two aeroplanes roared off the deck of the
Remembrance
, one on the other’s heels. “They’ll give the Belfasters something to think about,” Sam said.
“That they will,” the commander of the gun crew agreed. “No doubt about it.” He peered through the slit again. “Sons of bitches!” he burst out. “The bastards are shooting back. One just splashed into the water a few hundred yards short of us.”
One of the shell-jerkers, Joe Gilbert—like most in his slot, a big, muscular fellow—said, “Goddamn limeys must have smuggled in some more guns.”
“Yeah,” Carsten said. “And if we call ’em on it, they’ll say they never did any such thing—their pet micks must’ve come up with the guns and the shells under a flat rock somewhere, or else made ’em themselves.”
Officially, Britain recognized Ireland’s independence. She’d had to; the United States and the German Empire had forced the concession from her. The Royal Navy never ventured into the Irish Sea to challenge the
Remembrance
or any other U.S., German, or Irish warship.
But hordes of small freighters and fishing boats smuggled arms and ammunition and sometimes fighting men into the loyalist northeastern part of Ireland. The British Foreign Office blandly denied knowing anything about that. However many ships stood between Ireland on the one hand and England and Scotland on the other, the gun runners always found gaps through which they could slip.
Willie Moore said, “The damn micks—
our
damn micks, I mean—had better start doing a better job of patrolling, that’s all I’ve got to tell you. It’s their goddamn country. If they can’t hang on to it all by their lonesome, I can tell you we ain’t gonna hang around forever to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.” He adjusted the elevation screw again. “Let ’em have the next one now.”
“Aye aye.” Sam fired the five-inch gun again. He had to step smartly to keep the casing from landing on his toes.
Joe Gilbert passed him another shell. He was bending to load it into the breech when a shell from the shore slammed into the sponson. That he was bending saved his life. Most of the shell’s force was spent in penetrating the armor that protected the sponson, but a fragment gutted Willie Moore as if he were a muskie pulled from a Minnesota lake. Another one hissed over Sam’s head and into Gilbert’s neck. The shell-jerker fell without a sound, his head almost severed from his body. Moore screamed and screamed and screamed.
Sam could look out through the hole the shell had torn and see the ocean and, beyond it, burning Belfast. He wasted only a tiny fraction of a second on that. What to do when the sponson got hit had been drilled into him during more than ten years in the Navy. No fire—he checked that first. Inside the sponson, it was just bare metal, with no paint to burn. That didn’t always help, but it had this time. The ammunition wouldn’t go up.
Next, check the gun crew. Joe Gilbert was beyond help. Blood dripped from Sam’s shoes when he picked up his feet. Calvin Wesley, the other shell-hauler, hadn’t been scratched. He gaped at Gilbert’s twitching corpse as if he’d never seen one before. He was a veteran—everybody aboard the
Remembrance
was a veteran—so that was hard to imagine, but maybe it was so.
Willie Moore kept shrieking. One glance at what the shell had done told Sam all he needed to know. He opened the aid kit on the wall of the sponson; a shell fragment had scarred the thick metal right beside it. From the kit, he drew two syringes of morphine. One might have been enough, but he wanted to make sure.
He stooped beside Moore. “Here, Chief, I’ll take care of you.” He gave the gunner’s mate all the morphine in both syringes. After a very little while, Moore fell silent.
“That’s too much,” Wesley said. “It’ll kill him.”
“That’s the idea,” Sam said. He watched Moore’s chest. It stopped moving. Like a man waking up from a bad dream, Carsten shook himself. “Come on, God damn it. We’ve got this gun to fight. You know how to load, right?”
“I better,” Wesley answered. “I seen you guys do it often enough.”
“All right, then. You load and fire, and I’ll aim the damn gun.” Sam had seen that done often enough, too, and practiced it himself when he got the chance during drills. The hit had torn the left side of the sponson too badly for the gun to track all the way in that direction. Otherwise, though, he was still in business. “Fire!”
Calvin Wesley sent on its way the shell Sam had been loading when they were struck. He was setting the next round into the breech when someone out in the passage pounded on the dogged hatch. A shout came through the thick steel: “Anybody alive in there?”
“Fire!” Sam said, and the gun roared. That should have answered the question, but the pounding went on. He nodded to Wesley. “Undog it.”
“Aye aye.” The shell-jerker obeyed.
Half a dozen men spilled into the sponson, Commander Grady among them. “Two dead, sir,” Carsten said crisply, “but we can still use the gun.”
“So I gather.” Grady looked at the bodies. His rabbity features stayed expressionless; he’d seen his share of bodies before. After a moment’s thought, he nodded briskly. “All right, Carsten, this is your gun for the time being. I’ll get you shell-heavers. We’ll clean up this mess and get on with the job.”
Another shell from the shore splashed into the Irish Sea, close enough to the
Remembrance
to send some water through the hole the hit had made in the sponson’s armor. Sam said, “Sir, if we can use a couple of aeroplanes to shoot up that gun and its crew, our life will get easier.”
Even as he spoke, one of the Wright fighting scouts buzzed off the deck of the aeroplane carrier, followed a moment later by another and then another. Commander Grady said, “You aren’t the only one with that idea, you see.”
“Never figured I would be,” Sam answered, not altogether truthfully. All his time in the Navy had taught him that officers often had trouble seeing things that should have been obvious.
Grady pointed to two of the ratings with him. “Drinkwater, you and Jorgenson stay here and jerk shells. Carsten, can Wesley cut the mustard as a loader?”
“Sir, if we fired with a two-man crew, we’ll sure as hell do a lot better with four,” Sam answered. Calvin Wesley shot him a grateful glance. Loader would be a step up for Wesley, as crew chief was a step up for Sam. Sam wished he hadn’t earned it like this, but, as was the Navy way, nobody paid any attention to what he wished.
Grady pointed to the dead meat that had been Willie Moore and Joe Gilbert. “Get these bodies out of here,” he ordered the men he hadn’t appointed to the gun crew. “We’ve already spent too much time here.”
As the sailors dragged the corpses out of the sponson, Sam took what had been Willie Moore’s spot. The chief of a gun crew had an advantage denied the rest of the men—he could see out whenever he chose: through the vision slit, through the rangefinder, and now through the hole that would, when time allowed, no doubt have a steel plate welded over it.
Sam peered southwest, toward the shore half a dozen miles away. The fighting scouts the
Remembrance
had launched were buzzing around something. A flash told Carsten it was the gun that had fired on his ship. The shell fell astern of the aeroplane carrier.
He twisted the calibration screw on the rangefinder and read out the exact distance to the target: 10,350 yards. Willie Moore had known without having to think how far to elevate the gun for a hit at that distance. Sam didn’t. He glanced at a yellowing sheet of paper above the vision slit: a range table. Checking the elevation, he saw the gun was a little low, and adjusted it. Then he traversed it ever so slightly to the left.
“Fire!” he shouted. He’d given the order before, with only Calvin Wesley in the sponson with him, but it seemed more official now. If he fought the gun well, it might be his to keep.
Wesley let out a yelp as the shell casing just missed mashing his instep. But when one of the new shell-heavers handed him the next round, he slammed it home in good style.
“You want to mind your feet,” Sam said, traversing the gun a little farther on its track. “You can spend some time on crutches if you don’t.” He turned the screw another quarter of a revolution. “Fire!”
He spied another flash in the same instant as his own gun spoke. The shell the pro-British rebels launched was a near miss. At the range at which he was fighting, he could not tell whether he’d hit or missed. But the gun on the shore did not fire again. Either his shell had silenced it, one from a different five-incher had done the trick, or the aeroplanes from the
Remembrance
had exterminated the crew.
He didn’t waste time worrying over which was so. As long as the Irish rebels couldn’t hurt the
Remembrance
any more, he was free to go back to what his gun had been doing before the ship came under fire: pounding Belfast to bits. Sooner or later, the rebels would figure out they couldn’t win the war against their more numerous opponents—and against the might of Germany and the United States. If they needed help figuring that out, he would gladly lend a hand.
The shell-heavers were just hired muscle, big men with strong backs. Calvin Wesley did his new job well enough, though Sam knew he’d done it better himself. He shrugged. Willie Moore would have handled the gun better than he was doing it. Experience counted.
“Only one way to get it,” he muttered, and set about the business of acquiring as much as he could.
Roger Kimball’s heart thumped with anticipation as he knocked on the hotel-room door. He’d met Anne Colleton this way whenever she’d let him. Once, she’d opened the door and greeted him naked as the day she was born. Her imagination knew no bounds. Neither did his own appetites.
With a slight squeak, the door opened. The figure in the doorway was not naked. It was not Anne Colleton, either. Kimball’s heart kept pounding just the same. Vengeance was an appetite, too, as Anne would have agreed in a flash. “Welcome to Charleston, Mr. Featherston,” Kimball said.
“Thank you kindly, Commander Kimball,” Jake Featherston answered. The words were polite enough, but he didn’t sound kindly, not even a little bit. And he bore down on Kimball’s title in a way that was anything but admiring. But, after he stood aside to let Kimball come in, his tone warmed a little: “I hear tell I’ve got you to thank for whispering my name into Miss Colleton’s ear. It’s done the Party good, and I won’t say anything different.”
That was probably why he’d agreed to see Kimball. Did he recall the dismissive telegram he’d sent down to Charleston? He must have; he had the look of a man who remembered everything. Kimball didn’t intend to bring it up if Featherston didn’t. As for whispering Featherston’s name into Anne Colleton’s ear…well, mentioning it on the telephone was one thing, but when Anne let him get close enough to whisper in her ear, he had other things to say.
“Want a drink?” Featherston asked. When Kimball nodded, the leader of the Freedom Party pulled a bottle out of a cabinet and poured two medium-sized belts. After handing Kimball one glass, he raised the other high. “To revenge!”
“To revenge!” Kimball echoed. That was a toast to which he’d always drink. He took a long pull at the whiskey. Warmth spread from his middle. “Ahh! Thanks. That’s fine stuff.”