Return Engagement (70 page)

That made Sam blink even as he knocked back his shot and waved for another reload. “Me?” His voice squeaked in surprise. He wondered when he’d last squeaked like that. Probably not since he’d joined the Navy, which was a hell of a long time ago now. “Nothing special about me, sir. Just a mustang who’s long in the tooth.”

With whiskey-fueled precision, Cressy started ticking off points on his fingers. “Item: there aren’t that many mustangs to begin with. Coming up through the hawse hole’s never been easy. Item: most of the mustangs I’ve known don’t make very good officers. That doesn’t mean they’re not good men. They are, just about every one of them. And they have fine records as ratings, or they wouldn’t have made officer’s grade in the first place. But most of ’em don’t have the imagination, the, the
breadth,
to make good officers. You’re different.”

“Thank you kindly. I don’t know that it’s true, but thank you. I try to do the best work I can, that’s all.”

The vehemence with which Captain Cressy shook his head spoke of how much he’d put away. “No. Any mustang, near enough, will do his particular job pretty well. Most of them won’t care about anything outside their assignment, though. You aren’t like that. How many times did you get chased out of the wireless shack?”

“Oh, maybe a few, sir,” Sam allowed. “I like to know what’s going on.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Cressy told him. “And you would always come up with something interesting in the officers’ wardroom—always. You don’t just want to know what’s going on. You think about it, too, and you think straight.”

Sam only shrugged. Praise made him uncomfortable. “Sir, you know ten times as much as I do.”

“More, yes, but not ten times. How much schooling did you have before you enlisted?”

“Eighth grade, sir. About what you’d expect.”

“Yes, about what I’d expect. On the other hand, I’ve got one of these.” Cressy tapped his Annapolis class ring with the forefinger of his other hand. “If you had one of these, you’d hold flag rank now. You’ve . . . picked up your learning other ways, and that’s a slower, harder business. I was talking about breadth a little while ago. You can make officer’s rank with an eighth-grade education, but if you haven’t got something more than that on the ball you won’t go anywhere even if you do. That’s what sets you apart from most mustangs. You’ve got that extra something.”

“Fat lot of good it did me,” Sam said bitterly. “I could know everything there was to know and I wouldn’t’ve been able to douse that fire aft on the
Remembrance.
”

“Some things are bigger than you are, that’s all,” Cressy said. “You weren’t the only one trying, you know.”

“But I was in charge, dammit,” Carsten said. “Well, Lieutenant Commander Pottinger was, God rest his soul, but I was the fellow with a hose in my hand.”

“Some things are bigger than you are,” Cressy repeated. “That fire was bigger than a man with a hose.”

Sam wanted to argue with him. However much he wanted to, he knew he couldn’t. The
Remembrance
had taken too many hits for any damage control to help. He changed the subject: “You’ll have your own command now, sir. A cruiser at least—maybe a battleship.”

“Not the way I wanted to get it,” Cressy said once more. “And if I do go into business for myself, I’d sooner do it in another flattop. Trouble is, we haven’t got any that are short a skipper, and we won’t till they launch the ones that are building. And the carriers have the same trouble everything else has—getting stuff and people from A to B when A is west of Ohio and B is east or the other way round.”

“What the hell can we do about that, sir?” Sam asked.

“Fight. Keep fighting. Not give up no matter what,” Cressy answered. “The Japs can’t hope to lick us. Oh, if we screw up bad enough, they may drive us out of the Sandwich Islands”—he grimaced at the thought—“but even if they do, they won’t land three divisions south of Los Angeles. Britain and France can’t lick us—same argument on the East Coast. And I don’t see how the Confederates can lick us, either. They can hurt us. But I think we’re too big and too strong for them to knock us flat and hold us down. We’re the only people who can lick us. If we give up, if we lay down, we’re in trouble. As long as we don’t, we’ll stay on our feet longer than anybody who’s in there slugging with us.”

Sam waved to the barkeep for another shot. Noticing Cressy’s glass was also empty, he pointed to it and held up two fingers. The bartender nodded. As the man poured the drinks, Sam said, “I hope you’re right, sir.”

Cressy gave him a sad, sweet smile he never would have shown sober. “Hell, Carsten, so do I.” He waited till the bartender brought the fresh drinks, then lifted his glass in salute. “And here’s to you. Since they fished you out of the Pacific, where do you want to go from here?”

“I haven’t really worried about it all that much, sir,” Sam answered. “I’ll go wherever they send me. If they want to leave me in damage control, well, I’ll do that. I don’t like it a whole lot, but I’m good at it by now. If they put me back in gunnery, that’d be better. Or if they finally give me something to do with airplanes, I’d like that the most. It’s why I transferred over to the
Remembrance
in the first place, back when I was still a petty officer.”

“If I were running the Bureau of Personnel, that’s not what I’d do with you,” Captain Cressy said.

“Sir?” A polite question was always safe.

“If it were up to me, I’d give you a ship,” Cressy said, which made Sam want to jam a finger in his ear to make sure he’d heard right. The other officer went on, “I would. I’d give you a destroyer or a minelayer or a minesweeper. You could handle it, and I think you’d do a first-rate job.”

“Th-Thank you, sir,” Sam stammered. “I’m gladder than hell you think so.” He wasn’t nearly so sure he thought so himself, or that he wanted so much responsibility. But if he didn’t, why had he tried to become an officer in the first place?

This time, Captain Cressy’s smile was knowing. “Don’t pop a gasket worrying about it, because the odds are long. BuPers doesn’t know you the way I do. But they may stick you in a destroyer as exec under a two-and-a-half striper. Or they may give you something little—a sub chaser, say—and let you show what you can do with that.”

“Well,” Sam said wonderingly, and then again: “Well.” Command hadn’t occurred to him. Neither had serving as exec. He raised his glass in a salute of his own. “If they do give me the number-two slot somewhere, sir, the man I’ll try to imitate is you.”

“That’s a real compliment,” Cressy said. “I know who my models are. I suppose a few people in the Navy have picked up a pointer or two from me.” He was sandbagging, and doubtless knew it. He pointed at Sam. “You’ll have to do it your own way in the end, though, because you’re you, not me. You’ve got years on me, and you’ve got all that experience as a rating. Use it. It’ll do you good.”

“Me? Command?” Sam didn’t squeak this time, but he still did sound wondering, even to himself. He wondered if he could swing it. He’d understudied poor dead Pottinger in the damage-control party for years. The men had obeyed him about as well as they had the lieutenant commander. He’d always figured he could run the party if something ever happened to Pottinger. Now something damn well had, but it had happened to the
Remembrance,
too.

“You can do the job, Carsten. You can get the men to do what they’re supposed to do, too,” Cressy said. “You think I would say that if I didn’t mean it?” He eyed Sam with owlish, booze-fueled intensity.

“Command,” Sam said once more. He was feeling the whiskey, too. “Well, it’s up to BuPers, not me.” But now he couldn’t help wondering what sort of orders the clerks back in Philadelphia would cut for him.

S
ometimes January south of the Potomac was almost as bad as January up in Ontario. Sometimes, though, January here could feel like April up there. A high up close to fifty? A low above freezing? That hardly seemed like winter at all to Jonathan Moss.

He remembered flying in the Canadian winter during the Great War. More to the point, he remembered
not
flying most of the time. Bad weather—either snow or just low clouds—had kept fighters on the ground more often than not. Things weren’t so bad here.

And the U.S. soldiers on the ground needed all the help they could get. They were trying to gain footholds on the south bank of the Rapidan, and not having a whole lot of luck. The only place where they’d gained any lodgement at all was in some truly miserable second-growth country that was marked on the map as the Wilderness. Having flown over it, Jonathan could see how it had got the name. The only reason the Confederates hadn’t thrown the Army back into the river there was that they had as much trouble bringing men up to defend as the U.S. forces did in expanding their little bridgehead.

Moss’ squadron listened in a tent as he briefed them. He whacked a large-scale map with a wooden pointer. “This is a ground-attack mission, gentlemen,” he said. “We’re going to shoot up the Confederates. Then we’ll come home, gas up, get reloaded, and go back and do it again. We’ll keep on doing it till they break. Have you got that? Any questions?”

Nobody said anything. Moss had a question of his own:
what happens if we keep hammering and they don’t break?
He’d seen that more times than he could count in the last war. What happened was that a lot of men ended up dead and maimed. But he was the only Great War veteran here. The pilots he led were young and eager. He envied them. He was neither.

Eager or not, he was good at what he did. He wouldn’t have lived through one war and the first six months of another if he hadn’t been. And, eager or not, he was reasonably confident he’d come back to this airstrip once he and his men had worked over the Confederate positions. He’d made a lot of flights. What was one more?

The groundcrew men said his Wright was in fine fettle. He ran down the checklist himself just the same. They weren’t going up there. He damn well was. Everything did seem all right. It almost always did. The day he didn’t double-check, though, was bound to be the day when something went wrong.

Engine roaring, the fighter jounced along the runway and sprang into the air. Moss climbed quickly. He circled above the field, waiting for the men he led to join him. “Ready?” he called on the wireless.

“Ready!” The word dinned in his earphones.

“Then let’s go.” He flew south. A few puffs of smoke from bursting antiaircraft shells sprouted around the squadron. What dinned in Jonathan’s earphones then were curses. He added a few of his own, or more than a few. They were still in U.S.-held territory, which meant their own side was doing its best to shoot them down. That its best wasn’t quite good enough failed to reassure him.

Before long, they left the overenthusiastic gunners behind. From the air, the battlefield looked much more like those from the Great War than the Ohio ones had. Because the front had moved slowly here, things on both sides of it had been pounded and cratered in a way they hadn’t farther west. The bombed-out landscape took Jonathan back half a lifetime across the years.

There was the Rappahannock. Hardly the blink of an eye later, there was the Rapidan, and the U.S. toehold on the far bank. The Wilderness had surely looked like what it was even before war came to it. Bombs and artillery and entrenchments did nothing to improve it.

Moss didn’t want to shoot up his own side, even if his own side hadn’t been shy about shooting at him. Green flares went up from the ground to mark U.S. positions. Anything beyond them was fair game. He swooped low over the battlefield, shooting up trenches and trucks and anything that caught his eye. A column of men in butternut tramping up a road dissolved like maple sugar in water under machine-gun fire.

Whoops of glee filled Moss’ earphones. He let out shouts when he was shooting things up, too. It was fine sport—none finer—if you didn’t think about the havoc you were wreaking on the ground. Watching trucks go up in flames, watching ant-sized men scatter in all directions, was like being inside an adventure film.

This had a drawback adventure films didn’t: people shot back at you here. Confederate antiaircraft gunners and machine gunners and riflemen filled the air with lead. Strafing runs were more dangerous than bomber escort because of all the small-arms fire that couldn’t touch you at altitude. Moss never worried about it very much. It was just something that came with the mission.

He was clawing his way up off the deck to go around for another pass when his engine suddenly quit. Smoke and steam gushed from it. Oil streamed back and smeared his windshield. A chunk of metal from the cowling slammed off the bulletproof glass, too.

“Shit,” he said, and then something stronger. He gave the altimeter a quick glance—two thousand feet. If he didn’t get out now, he never would. He cranked back the canopy, stood up in his seat, and bailed out.

He got away from the stricken fighter without smashing against the tail—always an escaping pilot’s first worry. As soon as he was free, he yanked the ripcord. He didn’t have a lot of time to waste, not down that low. The parachute opened with a loud
whump!
Moss’ vision went red for a few seconds, then slowly cleared.

Another, smaller,
whump!
was a bullet going through the silk canopy above his head. He was a target hanging up here in the sky. If the Confederates on the ground wanted to shoot him, they could. They could shoot him by accident, too. Till he got down, he couldn’t do anything about anything.

A tall column of black, greasy smoke rising from the ground not too far away had to be the Wright’s funeral pyre. He shuddered. If the canopy had jammed, it would have been his funeral pyre, too.

Here came the ground. He steered away from a stand of trees and towards a clearing. Then he wondered if he’d made a mistake, because soldiers in butternut came out of the woods. No help for it now. He bent his knees, bracing for the landing. He twisted an ankle, but that was all.

As he struggled to get out of the parachute harness, the soldiers ran up to him. He looked down the barrels of several automatic rifles and submachine guns. “Surrender!” three men yelled at the same time.