Breakthroughs (60 page)

He saw none. There were none to see. He shouted to his gun, to his battery: “It’s up to us. If we don’t stop them fuckers, nobody does.”

They did what they could do. Three or four barrels went up in flames, sending pillars of black smoke high into the sky to mark their funeral pyres. But the rest kept coming, through the woods, through the fields, straight at him—and straight through what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia’s line.

And the line gave way. He’d seen that up at Round Hill: a sea of panic-stricken men in butternut streaming back toward him. He’d hoped he’d never see anything like it again. But here it was. These soldiers—some white, more colored—had had all the fighting they could stand. The only thing left in their minds was escaping the oncoming foe.

They might have had a better chance if they’d stayed and tried to hold back the U.S. soldiers. Infantrymen in green-gray and barrel crews were not the least bit shy about shooting fleeing Confederates in the back.

Featherston would cheerfully have shot them in the back, too. He didn’t have that choice, since they were coming his way. “Fight!” he shouted to the infantrymen. “Turn around and fight, God damn you!” They didn’t. They wouldn’t. As he had at Round Hill, as he had when the soldier cursed him the day before, he shouted, “Canister! If I can’t do it any other way, I’ll send ’em back on account of they’re more afraid of me than they ever dreamt of being afraid of the damnyankees.”

Michael Scott objected again: “Sarge, God only knows how come we didn’t get crucified the last time we did that. If we do it again—”

Featherston did not intend to let his loader balk him, not now. He drew his pistol. “I’ll load and fire it myself if I have to,” he snarled. Then, over open sights, he aimed the gun at the Confederate soldiers heading his way. Scott could have drawn his own weapon. Instead, white-faced, he loaded the round Jake had demanded. Jake pulled the lanyard himself. He shrieked out a Rebel yell when the worthless, cowardly scum in butternut vanished from before the gun as if swept aside by a broom. He might have hit some of the Yankees close on their heels, too.

But the canister rounds—he fired several—did not, could not, stem the rout, any more than they had at Round Hill. The infantry
would
run, and he could not stop them. Save for the ones he killed and maimed, the men in butternut fled past him. Black soldiers and white cried out in amazement that he did not flee, too.

“Cowards!” he shouted at them in turn. “Filthy, stinking, rotten cowards! Stand and fight, damn you all. You’re stabbing your country in the back.”

And then the Yankees were well within canister range. He gave them several rounds, too, to make them go to ground. That bought him time to limber up his guns and abandon his own position. He could not hold if everything around him fell. All four guns got out.

“Backstabbers,” he muttered as he trudged south past Independent Hill. “Nothing but filthy backstabbers. I’ll pay them all back one day, every goddamn one of them, so help me Jesus I will.”

Sam Carsten shoveled in beans and smoked sausage and sauerkraut alongside dozens of other men in the galley. The USS
Dakota
rolled as he ate, but the tables were mounted on gimbals. The rolling wasn’t nearly enough to make his food end up in his lap.

Across the table from him, Vic Crosetti grinned and poured down coffee. “Well, you were right, you lucky son of a bitch—we’re still down here and it’s turning into winter. You don’t toast for a while longer yet.”

“Oh, come on,” Sam said mildly. “Yeah, it’s winter, but it’s not
winter
, if you know what I mean. Just kind of gray and gloomy, that’s all. It’s like San Francisco winter, kind of. That’s not so bad.”

“Yeah, that’s not so bad,” Crosetti said, with the air of a man granting a great and undeserved favor, “but it ain’t so goddamn good, neither. If we was back in the Sandwich Islands now, I’d be laying under a palm tree with one of those what-do-you-call-’em flowers in my hair—”

“Hibiscus?” Carsten said.

“Yeah, one of them,” Crosetti agreed. “With a hibiscus flower in my hair and with my arm around a broad. I’d be suckin’ up a cold drink, or maybe she’d be suckin’ up somethin’ else. But no, it’s winter out in the goddamn South Atlantic, and you, you son of a bitch, you’re
happy
about it.”

“You bet I am,” Carsten said. “For one thing, back at Pearl Harbor we might get leave once in a while, yeah, but they’d work our tails off the rest of the time, harder’n they’re working us now when we aren’t fighting. That’s one thing, mind you. You know damn well what the other one is.”

“Sure as hell do.” Crosetti cackled like a hen just delivered of an egg. “Layin’ under a palm tree wouldn’t do you one single, stinking, solitary bit of good. Everybody’d reckon you were the roast pig they was supposed to eat for supper, ’cept maybe you wouldn’t have an apple in your mouth. God help you if you did, though.”

“Jesus!” Sam had been swigging coffee himself. He had everything he could do to keep it from coming out his nose. “Don’t make me laugh like that again. Especially don’t make me laugh like that and want to deck you at the same time.” He put down the coffee mug and made a fist—a pale, pale fist.

Vic Crosetti grinned again, no doubt ready with another snappy comeback.
Damn smartmouth wop,
Carsten thought with wry affection, bracing himself to laugh and get furious at the same time again. But instead of sticking the needle in him one more time, Crosetti jumped from his seat and sprang to attention. So did Sam, wondering why the devil Commander Grady was coming into the galley.

“As you were, men,” the commander of the starboard secondary armament said. “This isn’t a snap inspection.”

“Then what the hell is it?” Crosetti mumbled as he sat down again. Carsten would have said the same thing if his bunkmate hadn’t beaten him to it. Several sailors let out quiet—but not quite quiet enough—sighs of relief.

“I have an announcement to make,” Grady said, “an announcement that will affect the
Dakota
and our mission. We have just received word by wireless telegraph that the Empire of Brazil has declared war on the United Kingdom, the Republic of France, the Confederate States of America, and the Republic of Argentina.” He grinned now, an expression of pure exultation. “How about that, boys?”

For a few seconds, the big compartment was absolutely still. Then it erupted in bedlam. At any other time, a passing officer would have angrily broken up the disturbance and assigned punishment to every man jack in there. Now Commander Grady, showing his teeth like a chimpanzee in the zoo, pounded on the bulkhead and whooped louder than anybody else.

“Dom Pedro knows whose ship is sinking, and it isn’t ours!” Carsten shouted.

“Good-bye, England!” Crosetti yelled, and waved at Sam as if he were King George. “So long, pal! Be seein’ you—be seein’ you starve.”

“Hell of a lot longer run from Buenos Aires to west Africa than it is from Pernambuco,” Sam said through the din, as if he were seeing things from Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske’s cabin. “And with Brazil in the war on our side, we’ll be able to use their ports, and they’ll have some ships of their own they’ll throw into the pot.” As he weighted the sudden, enormous change, his smile got wider and wider. “Near as I can see, the limeys are a lobster in the pot, and the water’s starting to boil.”

“Near as I can see, you’re right.” Vic Crosetti nodded emphatically. Then he leered at Carsten. “And you know what else?”

“No, what?” Sam asked.

“Near as I can see, you’re a lobster in the pot, and the water’s starting to boil, too,” Crosetti answered. “If we go up into Brazilian waters, buddy, that might as well be Pearl Harbor.” He pantomimed putting on a bib. “Waiter! Some drawn butter, and make it snappy.”

“You go to hell,” Carsten said, but he was laughing, too.

“Maybe I will,” the swarthy Italian sailor answered, “but if we head to Brazil, you’ll burn ahead of me, and that’s a promise.”

He was right. Sam knew only too well how right he was. All at once, the big, fair sailor dug into the unappetizing dinner before him. “I better eat quick,” he said with his mouth full, “so I can get to the pharmacist’s mate before I have to go back on duty.”

“First sensible thing I’ve heard you say in a long time,” Crosetti told him. With Commander Grady still there celebrating along with the sailors, Sam couldn’t even think about punching his bunkmate in the nose…very much.

The pharmacist’s mate behind the dispensary window was a wizened, cadaverous-looking fellow named Morton P. Lewis. On a day like today, even his face wore as much of a smile as it had room for. “Ah, Carsten,” he said, nodding rather stiffly at Sam. “Haven’t seen you for a while, but I can’t say I’m surprised to see you now.” His Vermont accent swallowed the
r
in Sam’s last name and turned
can’t
into something that might have come from an Englishman’s mouth.

“Heading up toward sunny weather,” Carsten said resignedly. “You want to give me a couple of gallons of that zinc-oxide goop?”

“It’s dispensed in two-ounce tubes, as you know perfectly well.” Lewis’ voice was prim, proper, precise.

“Oh, don’t I just,” Sam said. “Don’t I just.” He sighed. “Damned if I know why I bother with the stuff. I burn almost as bad with it as without it.”

“Your answer, I would say, boils down to the word
almost
,” the pharmacist’s mate replied.

“Yeah.” Carsten sighed again. “Well, let me have a tube now, would you? Sooner I start using it—” He broke off and stared at Morton P. Lewis. “
Boils down to
is right. You do that on purpose, Mort?”

“Do what?” said Lewis, a man whose sense of humor, if he’d ever had one, must have been amputated at an early age. His blank look convinced Carsten he hadn’t done it on purpose. But, even if humorless, the pharmacist’s mate wasn’t stupid. “Oh. I see what you’re asking about. Heh, heh.”

“Listen, can I have the stuff, for God’s sake?” Sam asked.

“You don’t require a doctor’s prescription for zinc-oxide ointment,” Lewis said, which Carsten already knew from years at sea. “You don’t require authorization from a superior officer, either.” Carsten knew that, too. The pharmacist’s mate finally came to the point: “You do require the completion of the required paperwork.” He didn’t notice he’d used the same word twice in one sentence, and Sam didn’t point it out to him.

He did say, “Mort, if we get men wounded during an action, I hope you don’t make them fill out all their forms before you give ’em what they need.”

“Oh, no,” Lewis said seriously. “Unnecessary delay in emergency situations is forbidden by regulation.” He went back in among his medicaments before Carsten could find an answer for that.

When he returned, he was carrying a tinfoil tube and a sheaf of papers. In ordinary situations, delay seemed to be encouraged, not forbidden. Sam checked boxes and signed on lines. What it all boiled down to was that he wouldn’t use the zinc oxide for anything illegal or immoral. Since the stuff was too thick and resistant to be any fun if he wanted to jack off with it, he couldn’t imagine anything illegal or immoral he
could
use it for.

Wading through the paperwork meant he had to hustle to make it up on deck without getting chewed out. That was the way life in the Navy worked: you hurried so you could take it easy a few minutes later. It had never made a whole lot of sense to him, but nobody’d asked his opinion. He wasn’t holding his breath waiting for anyone to ask, either.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Hiram Kidde came by, puffing on a fat cigar. He asked Sam’s opinion: “How about Dom Pedro, eh?” But he didn’t wait for an answer, giving his own instead: “Took the wall-eyed little son of a bitch long enough.”

“Yeah,” Carsten said; he agreed with that opinion. “But he’s gone and done it. He sees the writing on the wall.”

“He’d better,” the chief gunner’s mate said. “Train was almost out of the station before he decided to jump on board.” He sneered, an expression that could turn a junior lieutenant’s bones to water. “Doesn’t cost him anything, either—just his name on four pieces of paper. Not like Brazil’s gonna do any fighting.”

“Maybe a little against Argentina,” Sam said. “But yeah, not much. Jesus, though, closing that coast to England and opening it up to us…doesn’t cost Dom Pedro much, like you say, but it does us a hell of a lot of good.”

“Uh-huh.” Kidde gave him almost the same leer Vic Crosetti had. “Does us a hell of a lot of good, but you’re going to be fried crisp when we head up that way.”

Wearily, Sam reached into his pocket and displayed the tube of zinc-oxide ointment. Hiram Kidde laughed so hard, he had to take the cigar out of his mouth. When he started to flick the long, gray ash onto the deck, Carsten said, “Whoever swabs that up ought to swab your shoes, too.”

Kidde looked down at his feet. He could have seen himself in the perfectly polished oxfords. Three steps put him by the rail. The ash went into the Atlantic. “There. You happy now?” he asked.

“Sure,” Sam answered. “Why not? Way I see things, world’s looking pretty decent these days. Yeah, I’m going to burn for a while, but the
Dakota
’s home port is San Francisco. War ever ends, I figure we’ll go back there for a spell.”

“You burn in Frisco, too,” Kidde pointed out, “and that ain’t easy.”

“I know, but I don’t burn so bad there,” Sam said. “I’ll tell you one more thing, too: Brazil jumping into the war may make me burn, but it makes the limeys sweat. You come right down to it, that’s a pretty fair bargain.”

“Well,
mon vieux,
how is it with you?” Lucien Galtier asked his horse as they made their way up toward Rivière-du-Loup. A U.S. Ford didn’t bother to honk for them to pull over, but zoomed around the wagon and shot up toward town at what had to be close to thirty miles an hour. “I wonder why he is in such a hurry,” Galtier mused. “I wonder why anyone would be in such a hurry.”

The horse did not answer, save for a slight snort that was likelier to be a response to the stink of the motorcar’s exhaust than to Galtier’s words. But the Ford kicked up hardly any dust from the fine paved road. The Americans had extended it for their own purposes, not for his, but he was taking advantage of it. Jedediah Quigley had told him he would. Jedediah Quigley had told him quite a few things. A good many more than he’d expected had turned out to be true.