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XVII

Robert Quinn looked up from the papers on his desk when Hipolito Rodriguez walked into Freedom Party headquarters in Baroyeca. "Hola, Senor Rodriguez," Quinn said. "I don't often see you except on meeting nights."

"Usually, I am working on the farm during the day," Rodriguez said. "But I've been thinking about what you said about the Confederate Veterans' Brigades."

"Ah. Have you?" Quinn smiled broadly. "I'm glad to hear it, senor. And what have you decided about them?"

"I would like to join," Rodriguez said simply.

"?Bueno!" Quinn jumped up from his chair and stuck out his hand. He pumped Rodriguez's. "Congratulations! I think you are doing the right thing for yourself and the right thing for your country."

"For myself, I'm sure I am," Rodriguez replied. "I've studied what the law gives, and it's generous. It gives more than I could make if I stayed on my farm." He knew why that was so, too, though he didn't mention it. The law that set up the Veterans' Brigades was bound to be geared to the richer Confederate northeast. What would have been barely enough to get by on there seemed like a lot more in Sonora and Chihuahua. He went on, "Do you have the papers I will need to sign?"

Quinn shook his head. "No. They are not here. You will find them at the alcalde's office. This is a government matter, not a Freedom Party matter."

"What is the difference?" Rodriguez asked, honestly confused.

"Many times, it is not so much," Quinn admitted. "But military affairs-except for the Freedom Party guards-belong to the government, and even the guards end up getting their gear through the Attorney General's office. So yes, you do this there."

"Then I will. Muchas gracias, senor. Freedom!"

Back before the Freedom Party rose to power, the alcalde's office had been a sleepy place. It had been a center of power, yes, but a small one. The dons, the big landowners, were the ones who'd given the orders. But the Party had broken them; Rodriguez had been in a couple of the gunfights that turned the trick. These days, the alcalde and the guardia civil took orders from Hermosillo and from Richmond, which meant from the Party. If those orders sometimes came through Robert Quinn, they did so unofficially.

All the same, the clerk to whom Hipolito Rodriguez spoke seemed unsurprised to see him. The man had the paperwork ready for him to fill out. He even had a voucher for a railroad ticket, though not the exact date. A telephone call to the train station took care of that. "You leave for Texas day after tomorrow. The train goes out at twenty past ten in the morning. You must be here by then."

"I will." Rodriguez knew the train often ran late. But it didn't always, and he didn't think he could get away with taking a chance here. In the last war, the Army had been very unhappy with people who ran late.

"One other thing," the clerk said. "How is your English? You will have to use it when you go to the northeast."

They'd both been speaking the English-laced Spanish that remained the dominant language in Sonora and Chihuahua. Rodriguez shrugged and switched to what he had of real English: "I do all right. Learn some when I fight before, learn some from ninos, learn some from wireless. No is muy good, but is all right."

"Bueno," the clerk said, and then, "That is good." His English was smoother than Rodriguez's-almost as good as, say, Robert Quinn's Spanish. He went on in the CSA's leading language: "Be on the train, then, the day after tomorrow."

Rodriguez was. His whole family-except for Pedro, who was in Ohio-came with him to the station to say good-bye. He kissed everybody. The train pulled in two minutes early. He'd hoped for more time, but what you hoped for and what you got too often had little to do with each other. He climbed on board, showed the conductor the voucher, and took a seat by the window. He waved to his wife and children till the train chugged off and left them behind.

He hadn't gone this way since he headed off for basic training more than half a lifetime before. He'd been jammed into the middle of a crowded car then, and hadn't had much chance to look out. Now he watched in fascination as the train climbed up through the Sierra Madre Occidental and then down into the flatter country in Chihuahua.

Some Chihuahuans got on the train as it stopped at this town or that one. They and the Sonorans jeered at one another in the same mixture of Spanish and English. To English-speaking Confederates, Sonorans and Chihuahuans alike were just a bunch of damn Mexicans. They knew how they differed, though. Rodriguez made as if he were playing an accordion. Norteno music, with its thumping, German-based rhythms and wailing accordions, was much more popular in Chihuahua than in Sonora, though some musicians from the northern part of his state played it, too.

More things than the music changed when the train got into northern Chihuahua. Rodriguez started seeing bomb damage. Once, the train sat on a siding for most of a day. Nobody gave any explanations. The men going into the Veterans' Brigades hadn't expected any-they'd been in the service before, after all. Rodriguez's guess was that the damnyankees had managed to land a bomb, or maybe more than one, on the tracks.

Eventually, the train did start rolling again. When it went over a bridge spanning the Rio Grande between El Paso del Norte and El Paso, it crossed from Chihuahua into Texas. Rodriguez braced himself. So did a lot of the other middle-aged men in the car with him. They weren't entering a different country, but they were coming into a different world.

Some of the men who got on near the Rio Grande were short and dark and swarthy like most of them, and spoke the same English-flavored Spanish. But some-and more and more as the train rolled north and east-were big, fair, light-eyed English-speakers. They eyed the men already aboard with no great liking. They thought of Rodriguez and his kind as greasers and dagos-not quite niggers, but not white men, either. Rodriguez remembered his soldier days, and threatening to kill a white man who'd called him names once too often. He wondered if he'd have to do it again.

Then one of the Texans peered through bifocals at one of the men who'd got on the train in Chihuahua. "Luis, you stinking son of a bitch, is that you?"

The other fellow-Luis-stared back. "Jimmy? Si, pendejo, is me." He got up. The two men embraced and showered each other with more affectionate curses in English and Spanish.

"This little bastard drug me back to our lines after I got hit on a trench raid over in Virginia-drug me on his back, y'all hear?" Jimmy said. "I coulda bled to death or been a prisoner for a coupla years, but he done drug me instead. Doc patched me up, an' I was back in the line in three weeks."

"Then he save me," Luis said in English no better than Rodriguez's. "He-?como se dice?-he kick grenade away before it go off."

"Hell, I was savin' my own ass along with yours," Jimmy said. "It wasn't nothin' special."

After that, none of the other white men in the car acted rude toward the brown men they rode with. Rodriguez didn't know what they were thinking. He doubted that had changed much. But so what? A man's thoughts were his own business. What he did, he did in public.

When the train stopped in Fort Worth, the conductor shouted, "All out for guard training here!"

Rodriguez had to push past his seatmate on the aisle. "Excuse, please. Is me." He grabbed his denim duffel bag from the rack above the seats, slung it over his shoulder, and went up the aisle to the door. A good many others, some brown like him, others ordinary Texans, got out, too.

Stretching his legs on the platform felt good. A man in a uniform of military cut but made from gray rather than butternut spoke in a loud voice: "I am Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton. I have the honor and privilege to be a Freedom Party guard. Freedom!" The last word was a fierce roar.

"Freedom!" Rodriguez and his comrades echoed.

Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton sneered at all of them impartially, caring no more for white than for brown. "y'all have a lot to learn, and you won't learn some of it till you get to a real camp," he said. "Come on, now, let's get you off to where you're supposed to be at, get your paperwork all done, and then we'll see what the hell we got in you. Follow me." He did a smart about-face and marched off the platform.

"Ain't it nice they're so glad to see us?" Jimmy didn't bother to keep his voice down. Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton's back got even stiffer than it was already; Rodriguez hadn't thought it could. The Freedom Party guard didn't stop or turn around, though.

Buses waited outside the station. The recruits for the Veterans' Brigades filled two of them. Rodriguez got into the second one. The cloud of black, stinking smoke that belched from the tailpipe of the first almost asphyxiated him. If the Confederate States weren't using it for poison gas, they should have been. His own bus coughed out the same sort of fumes, but he didn't have to breathe those. Gears grinding, the bus groaned into motion.

Decatur, Texas, was about forty miles northwest of Fort Worth. Getting there took an hour and a half-not bad, not as far as Rodriguez was concerned. The town was bigger than Baroyeca, but not very big. It stood on what the locals called a hill. To Rodriguez, who knew what mountains were supposed to be, it seemed like nothing more than a swell of ground, but he saw no point in arguing.

On the flat land below Decatur stood a compound surrounded by barbed wire. There was a ramshackle barracks hall inside; a guard tower with a machine gun stood at each corner. The guard towers were manned. Negroes wandered inside the barbed-wire perimeter. Outside the compound were neat rows of butternut tents.

Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton said, "This here is Training Camp Number Three. y'all are gonna learn to take care of nigger prisoners by taking care of the stinkin' sons of bitches. Ain't no better way to learn than by doin' what you got to do. Am I right or am I wrong?" When the men didn't answer fast enough to suit him, he donned an ugly scowl. "I said, Am I right or am I wrong?"

He may have a funny rank because he is a Party guard and not a soldier, but he is nothing but a top sergeant, thought Rodriguez, who remembered the breed well. "You are right, Assault Troop Leader!" he shouted along with the rest of the veterans. By the way some of them smiled, they were remembering their younger days, too.

The paperwork was about what Rodriguez expected: fitting pegs into slots. He had to ask for help two or three times; he spoke more English than he read. He didn't feel bad or embarrassed about it. Others from Sonora and Chihuahua were doing the same thing, some more often than he.

He got a gray uniform like Hamilton's but plainer. He got a pair of shiny black marching boots. He got a submachine gun, but no ammunition for it yet. And he got assigned to a cot in one of those tents. His tentmate turned out to be a Texan named Ollie Parker. "You ain't no nigger-lover, are you?" Parker demanded. Rodriguez shook his head. Parker, who'd looked worried, relaxed. "In that case, I reckon we'll get on just fine."

Rain poured from the night sky. Scipio put on his galoshes and his raincoat and took his umbrella out of a wastebasket at the Huntsman's Lodge. He'd get wet walking home anyway. He knew that ahead of time, and knew how inconvenient it was. He also knew he couldn't do anything more than he'd already done.

"See you tomorrow, Xerxes," Jerry Dover said.

"Reckon so," Scipio answered, although, since it was half past one, his boss would really see him again later today.

He slid out the door and started for the Terry. The thick, black clouds overhead only made it darker than it would have been otherwise-which is to say, very dark indeed. He tried to stride carefully, feeling with each foot as well as stepping. He didn't want to walk off the curb and fall in the gutter or land in a pothole and sprain his ankle.

He'd got almost to the Terry when a flashlight beam stabbed into his face from up ahead. He gasped in surprise and fear. With the raindrops drumming down on his umbrella, he hadn't heard anyone up there. And, coming out of the gloom, the beam felt bright as a welder's torch.

"What the hell you doin' out after curfew, nigger?" The voice that snapped the question belonged to a white man.

Scipio realized the raincoat hid the tuxedo that told without words what he did. "Suh, I waits table up at de Huntsman's Lodge," he answered. "I jus' git off work a few minutes gone by."

By now, just about every cop in Augusta had stopped him at one time or another. From behind the flashlight, this one said, "Show me you got on your fancy duds under that there raincoat."

"Yes, suh. I do dat." Scipio shifted the umbrella from his right hand to his left and used his right to undo the top couple of buttons on the coat and tug it wide so the policeman could see the wing collar and bow tie beneath it.

"It's him, all right," another policeman said. "I almost blew the bastard's head off a few weeks ago." Scipio still couldn't see anything but the dazzling beam of light and the raindrops falling through it. He heard more cops muttering agreement. How many were out there? He got the idea there were quite a few.

"Whereabouts exactly you live, uncle?" asked the policeman behind the flashlight.

After giving his address, Scipio buttoned the raincoat to keep out the November chill. "How come you wants to know dat, suh?" he asked. "I ain't done nothin' wrong."

"You're out after curfew. We wanted to jug you, we sure as hell could," the cop said, and the cold of a winter from much farther north took root in Scipio's vitals. But the white man went on, "You just get your sorry black ass home, then. This here ain't got nothin' to do with you."

"This here what?" Scipio inquired.

"Cleaning out transients and terrorists." Abruptly, the flashlight beam winked out. Green and purple afterimages danced in front of Scipio's eyes. Aside from them, he couldn't see a thing. He'd hardly been able to before, but this was even worse. "Come on through," the policeman told him. "Come on. You'll be fine."

Had he ever heard a white man say something like that before? Maybe, but not for a long time. Since the Freedom Party took over? He wouldn't have been surprised if he hadn't.

And the cop didn't lie. Nothing happened to him when he went by however many white men stood out there in the rain. No colored night runners tried to redistribute the wealth, either. The Negroes had enough sense to stay in where it was dry. Scipio had already unlocked the front door to his apartment building before he started wondering why the police didn't. He shrugged. They'd let him alone. If they got rid of some of the predators who preyed more on their own kind than on whites, he wouldn't shed many tears.

He slipped into bed without waking Bathsheba. He was awakened an hour or so later himself, though, by harsh barks that effortlessly pierced the patter of the rain on the windows. Bathsheba woke, too. "Do Jesus!" she said. "What's that?"

"Guns," Scipio answered, and told her of the policemen in the Terry. He finished, "Reckon some o' dem terrorists an' transients don't fancy gettin' cleaned out."

"How fussy the police gonna be, figurin' out who is one o' them bad folks and who ain't?" his wife asked.

Scipio hadn't thought about that. How often were cops fussy when they dealt with blacks? Not very. But he said, "Dey didn't run me in."

Bathsheba laughed. "Oh, you is real dangerous, you is."

That infuriated Scipio. He brought up the educated white man's voice he hardly ever used: "Once upon a time, more than a few people believed I was."

"Oh." Bathsheba laughed again, this time nervously. "I done forgot about that."

He returned to the dialect of the Congaree to say, "Somewhere in South Carolina is folks who don't never forget." Anne Colleton hadn't forgotten. She might have kept after him if the Yankees' bombers hadn't put an end to her career. She couldn't be the only one in that part of the state who refused to give up the hunt, either.

More gunfire split the night. In spite of it, Scipio yawned. By now, he knew more about gunfire than he'd ever wanted to learn. This wasn't getting any closer. As long as it stayed away, he wouldn't get too excited about it. Gunfire or no gunfire, he fell asleep.

When he woke, watery sunshine was trying to get through the blackout curtains. Bathsheba had gone off to clean white men's houses. Scipio put on dungarees and an undershirt and went out to fix breakfast for himself.

His son was in there washing everyone else's breakfast dishes. Cassius liked that no better than any other thirteen-year-old boy would have, but he did it when his turn came up. He looked back over his shoulder at Scipio. "Noisy in the nighttime," he said.

"Sure enough was," Scipio agreed.

"You know what was goin'on?" By the eager bounce in Cassius' voice, he wished he'd been a part of it, whatever it was. Scipio had named him for the Red rebel who'd led the Congaree Socialist Republic to its brief rise and bloody fall. This Cassius didn't know to whom he owed the name, but he seemed to want to live up to it.

He also seemed surprised when Scipio nodded and said, "Cops goin'after riffraff in de Terry. You don' want to mess wid no police. Buckra gots mo' guns'n we. You always gots to, 'member dat. You ain't right if you is shot." Maybe, just maybe, he could make his son believe it. So many didn't or wouldn't, though, and had to find out for themselves. Whites never tired of teaching the lesson, either.

"What do the ofays call riffraff?" Cassius asked.

"Dunno," Scipio admitted. "Dey reckon I weren't las' night, though. Dey lets me go on pas' 'em to git here. I finds out when I goes to work."

Cassius' expression said being passed like that was cause for shame, not pride. But he didn't push it, which proved he had some sense, anyhow. Then, as if to show he didn't have much, he said, "I could go out now an' take a look."

"You could stay here, too, and you gwine stay here," Scipio said. "Mebbe still trouble out dere. We already gots enough troubles. Don't need to go lookin' for mo'."

"Nothin' happen to me." Cassius was sure as could be.

"I say you stay here. You hear me?" Scipio sounded as firm and fatherly as he could. Cassius was getting to the age where they butted heads. Scipio knew that sort of thing happened. But he didn't want his son disobeying him here. The way things were in the CSA these days, this was a matter of life and death. Scipio hated cliches. He hated them all the more when they were literally true.

Some of his urgency must have got through to his son, for Cassius nodded. "I hear you, Pa."

"Good. Dat's good. You is a good boy." As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Scipio hoped they wouldn't make things worse. They might have with him when he was Cassius' age.

When it was time to head for the Huntsman's Lodge, Scipio put on his boiled shirt and black bow tie, his tuxedo jacket and satin-striped trousers. Not trusting the weather, he carried his raincoat and umbrella. But it was clear and sunny outside. The rain had washed the mugginess out of the air. It was the kind of crisp, cool fall day Augusta didn't get very often. Scipio savored the breeze against his cheek. The only thing he missed was the sharp smell of burning leaves, but after last night's downpour a man would have to drench them in gasoline to get them to burn.

As he usually did, he skirted the bus stop where the auto bombs had gone off. He hadn't gone much farther toward the white part of town when he stopped in astonishment. By the way things looked, the Augusta police hadn't just been after transients and terrorists in their raid the night before. Doors hung open in house after house, tenement after tenement. Not a shop near there was doing business. A stray dog whined and ran up to Scipio, looking for reassurance on the empty, quiet street.

Scipio had none, not for the dog, not for himself. The breeze swung one of those open doors on squeaky hinges. The small, shrill noise made the black man start violently. "Do Jesus!" he said, and wished he had even a fraction of his wife's faith. "The buckra done clean out dis whole part o' de Terry."

He hurried up into white Augusta as if fleeing ghosts. And so he might have been, for there were no living souls to flee in that part of the colored district. No one in the white part of town seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. The newsboys hawking the Augusta Constitutionalist shouted about the fighting in Virginia, not what had happened here. Scipio bought a copy anyhow. The story had to go in the paper somewhere… didn't it?

He found what he was looking for buried near the bottom of page four. It didn't say much: just that the Augusta police had cleaned out some criminals in the Terry. In the course of the investigation, more than a few Negroes were discovered not to possess papers authorizing them to dwell in our fair city, the reporter wrote. They have been removed for resettlement. Some minor resistance was encountered, but soon overcome.

Anyone who'd listened to the gunplay the night before would have known the resistance was more than minor. And anyone who'd walked through that part of the Terry could see the cops had cleared out everybody, not just people without the right stamps in their passbooks. But how many white men were likely to do that? And how many were likely to give a damn if they did?

When Scipio got to the Huntsman's Lodge, he wasn't surprised to find Jerry Dover in a state. "We're missing a waiter, a cook, and a busboy!" Dover exclaimed. "No word, no nothing. They just aren't here. Three at once! That's crazy."

"Reckon this here gots somethin' to do wid it." Scipio showed him the Constitutionalist.

"Well, shit!" Dover said. "How the hell am I supposed to run a restaurant? Got to get on the phone, get those boys back where they belong." Off he went, to use what pull he and the Huntsman's Lodge had. Because he was doing that, Scipio hardly even minded the boys. But Dover returned with a fearsome scowl on his face. Pull or no pull, he'd plainly had no luck.

Aurelius nodded to Scipio when they bumped into each other in the kitchen. "I was afraid I wasn't gonna see you no more, Xerxes," the other waiter said.

"I been afeared o' the same thing 'bout you," Scipio answered. They clasped hands. Still here, Scipio thought. We're both still here. But for how much longer, if they start cleaning out whole chunks of the Terry at a time?

"The Star-Spangled Banner" blared from the wireless set in Chester Martin's living room. The announcer said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!"

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," Al Smith said. It was nine o'clock back East, but only six here in Los Angeles-evening in the autumn, yes, but just barely, especially since summer time stayed in force all year around now that the war was on. The President continued, "Some of the things I have to tell you are less pleasant than I wish they were, but this has never been a country that lived in fear of bad news. Unlike our enemies, we don't need to lie every time we open our mouths to keep our people in the fight."

At the kitchen table, Carl wrestled with arithmetic homework. To him, that was more important than anything the President had to say. Who was to say he didn't have the right attitude, either? Chester lit a cigarette and held out the pack to Rita. She shook her head. He set the pack on the little table by the sofa.

"Things in Virginia haven't gone as well as we wish they would have," Smith said. "If they had, we'd be in Richmond by now. But we have moved down from the Rappahannock to the Rapidan, and we haven't given up. We still hold the initiative."

Chester blew out a plume of smoke. He'd heard officers talk that way on the Roanoke front in the last war. Add things haven't gone as well as we wish and we haven't given up together, and what did you get? The answer was easier to figure out than Carl's arithmetic problems. What you got was simple-a hell of a lot of dead soldiers.

"I'm not claiming any great victories down there," the President continued. "But we've hurt the Confederate States, and we aim to go right on hurting them. I said when we declared war that they might have started this fight, but we were going to finish it. I said it, and I meant it, and I still mean it." The jaunty New York rasp in his voice made him sound all the more determined.

He paused and coughed. "There's something else you need to know about, something I wish I didn't have to tell you. It says a lot about the people we're at war with, and what it says isn't very pretty. You may have heard this before, but it's the truth, and not the garbage Jake Featherston puts out with that label on it. Those Freedom Party maniacs and butchers really are massacring Negroes. There's no doubt about it, and they're doing more of it, and worse, than even the Confederates have ever before.

"We know this is true because we have photographs that prove it. Some were taken by Negroes who escaped or who came upon piles of bodies before they were buried. Others were taken by Confederate murderers who were proud of what they did. I know that seems incredible, but it's the truth, too."

Chester looked over at Rita. She was also looking his way. Almost at the same time, they both shrugged. Not many Negroes lived in Los Angeles. Come to that, not many Negroes lived anywhere in the USA. Dealing with the ones who'd fled Kentucky when it returned to the CSA had stirred enough hard feelings. He might have been listening to a report about a flood in China. It was too bad, certainly, but it didn't affect him much.

The President tried hard to persuade him that it did: "We can't let people who do these terrible things beat us. Who knows where they would stop? Who knows if they would stop anywhere? We must show them that no one in the world will tolerate even for a moment the crimes against humanity they are committing. We have to stop them. We have to, and with your help and God's we will. Thank you, and good night."

"That was the President of the United States, Al Smith," the announcer said, as if anyone could have imagined it was, say, the mayor of St. Paul. "We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming." Music came out of the speaker.

"He's done better," Rita said.

"He sure has," Chester agreed. "It was like he was saying things weren't going so well in Virginia, so he'd give us something else to get all hot and bothered about. Except I don't think very many people will start flabbling about this."

"Why should we?" his wife said. "It's going on in another country-and when was the last time you saw a Negro around here, anyway?"

"I don't know. I was trying to think of that myself while he was talking," Chester said. "I couldn't-not right away, anyhow."

"I think there was a colored woman at the grocery store a few weeks ago," Rita said. "But she wasn't buying much. She looked like she was just passing through, not like she really lived around here."

"Once during the last war, I passed a Negro through our lines," Chester said. "I expect he was one of the blacks who rose up against the Confederates a little later on. Served 'em right, the way they treated Negroes even back then."

His wife nodded. "I suppose so. But when the colored people down there keep on fighting against the government, why would anybody think the government would want to give 'em a kiss?"

"Beats me," Chester said. "The Confederates treat their Negroes like dirt, so the Negroes raise Cain, and that makes the Confederates treat 'em worse. Of course, the Freedom Party would treat 'em bad no matter how they behave-I know that. It's a mess, yeah. But is it really our mess? I don't think so."

Rita nodded again. "That's a better way to put it. It's terrible, like you say, but it isn't really anybody's fault. It's… one of those things that happen."

Carl looked up from his homework. "Can I have a snack?" The President might have been talking about the cost of cauliflower for all the attention he'd paid to the speech.

"How much have you done?" Rita asked-Carl had been known not to pay too much attention to the homework, too.

He held up the sheet of cheap pulp paper-so cheap it was closer to tan than white, with little bits of wood that hadn't quite been pulped embedded here and there-he'd folded to make individual squares for all twelve problems. "More than half. See?"

"Have you done them right?" Chester asked. Carl nodded vigorously. "We'll check," Chester warned. "Arithmetic comes in handy all sorts of places. A builder like me needs it every day. Go on and have your snack-but then finish your work."

"I will, Dad." And, after Chester had inhaled half a dozen chocolate cookies and a glass of milk, he did buckle down. Fortified, Chester thought. His son waved the paper in triumph to show he'd finished.

Rita went over to check it. "This one's wrong… and so is this one."

"They can't be! I did 'em right." Carl stared at the paper as if his answers had mysteriously changed while he wasn't looking.

"Well, you can darn well do 'em over," Rita told him. "And you'd better not get the same answers this time, or you'll be in real trouble."

"I'll try." Carl might have been sentenced to ten years at San Quentin. He erased what he'd done and tried again. When he was done, he pushed the paper across the table to his mother. "There."

She inspected the revised problems. "That's more like it," she said. Carl brightened. But she wasn't going to let him off the hook so soon. "If these answers are right, that means the ones you got before were wrong, doesn't it?"

"Uh-huh," Carl said unwillingly.

"How come you didn't get 'em right the first time?"

"I don't know. I thought I did."

" 'Cause you were goofing around, that's why. Are you going to goof around when your teacher gives you a test?" Rita asked. He shook his head. He knew that question had only one safe answer. His mother continued, "You'd better not. I'm going to be looking for that test paper when you come home with it. If you only get a C, I'll make you sorry. And don't think you can hide it from me if you do bad, either, 'cause that won't work. I'll call up Mrs. Reilly and find out what you got. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, Mommy," Carl said in a very small voice. Telephoning the teacher was a parent's ultimate weapon. Kids had no defense against it this side of running away from home.

"All right, then." Rita seemed satisfied that she'd bombed him into submission. "Do you have any more homework?" He shook his head again. She ruffled his hair. "Then go take a bath and get into your pajamas, why don't you?"

A spark of resistance flared. "Do I hafta?"

She ruthlessly squashed it. "Yes, you have to. Go on. Scoot." Routed, Carl retreated to his bedroom. He came out in pajamas: the garments of surrender.

"Honestly," Rita said after she and Chester had played with him and read to him and finally kissed him good night. "Getting him to do anything is like pulling teeth." She scowled at Chester. "Why are men always like that?"

"Because women would walk all over us if we weren't," he answered, and tickled her. There was probably something in the Geneva Convention about that, especially since he wasn't ticklish himself, which meant she couldn't retaliate in kind.

They did have a more enjoyable way of unknotting such problems than the earnest diplomats at Geneva had imagined. Afterwards, they both smoked cigarettes. Then Chester turned out the lamp on his nightstand. Rita stayed up a while with a mystery. As he rolled himself into a cocoon of blankets-one more Geneva violation-she said, "You do remember Sue and Otis and Pete are coming over for dinner tomorrow night?"

"I do now," he said, and fell asleep.

He was glad to see his sister and brother-in-law and nephew. Sue had a beaky face much like his. Where he was going gray, her hair remained a time-defying sandy brown. He suspected a bottle helped her defy time, but he'd never asked. Otis Blake had a wide, perfect part along the top of his head-the scar from a bullet crease. An inch lower and Sue never would have had the chance to meet him. Their son was several years older than Carl.

"I'm working with glass again," Otis said. "When they found out I had plate-glass experience, they put me on cockpits." Till the war boom started, he'd been in and out of work since coming to California. He'd spent years in a plate-glass plant in Toledo before the business collapse got him along with so many others.

"Good for you, Otis." Chester meant it. He'd helped out when he could. Otis had done the same for him back in Ohio when Chester lost his steel-mill job there while his brother-in-law still had work.

"You ought to get a war-plant job," Otis said. "I'm making more money than I ever did before."

"I'm doing all right where I am," Chester said. "I like building better than steel, too."

"You're losing money," his brother-in-law declared.

"Not much," Chester answered. "We're getting raises. The contractors know they've got to give 'em to us, or else we darn well will quit and start making airplanes or shells or whatever else the war needs."

"Before too long, I'll be able to start paying back some of what I owe you," Otis said. "Haven't wanted to show my face around here till I could tell you that."

Chester shrugged. "Hey, I never worried about it. It's not like you didn't carry me for a while. If you can do it without hurting yourself, great. If you can't-then you can't, that's all."

"You're all right, Chester," Sue said softly.

Framed on the wall of the front room was a note from Teddy Roosevelt hoping Chester would recover from his war wound. They'd met on one of TR's tours of the Great War trenches. From that day to this, Chester had never found any words that mattered so much to him. Now maybe he had.

The USS Remembrance lay at anchor off the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui. The airplane carrier hadn't come back to Pearl Harbor after her cruise up to Midway. Somebody with a lot of braid on his sleeves had decided that putting an extra ninety miles or so between the Remembrance and a Japanese attack from the west would help keep her safe. Sam Carsten wasn't completely convinced, but nobody except the sailors in the damage-control party cared about his opinion.

His boss wasn't thrilled, either. "If they bomb us in Pearl Harbor, we sink in shallow water and we're easy to refloat," Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger grumbled at a general-quarters drill. "If they bomb us here, down we go, and they never see us again. There's a hell of a lot of water underneath us."

"If we can figure that out, how come the brass can't?" Szczerbiakowicz asked.

"Beats me, Eyechart," Sam said. "You want stuff to make sense all the time, why the hell'd you join the Navy?"

"You got me there, Lieutenant," the Pole said. "Why the hell did you join the Navy?"

"Me?" Sam hadn't thought about it for a while. "Mostly because I didn't want to walk behind a horse's ass the rest of my life, I guess. My folks had a farm, and I knew that was hard work. I figured this would be better. And it is-most of the time."

"Yeah, most of the time," Szczerbiakowicz agreed dryly. Everybody laughed, not that it was really funny. You weren't likely to run into dive bombers and battleships and submarines on a farm.

When the all-clear sounded, Sam went up to the flight deck. Destroyers and cruisers flanked the Remembrance to the west; their antiaircraft guns would help defend the vital ship if the Japs figured out she wasn't at Pearl Harbor. To the east lay Maui. Lahaina had been the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii till 1845. It had been a boomtown in whaling days. Now it seemed to have forgotten its lively past, and slumbered the days away-until Navy ships anchored offshore, when it perked up amazingly. Sam had seen the enormous banyan tree in the town square, which had to shade an area a couple of hundred feet across. Any town whose main attraction was a tree wasn't the most exciting place God ever made.

Fighters buzzed high overhead. The Remembrance's Y-ranging antenna swung round and round, round and round. Nobody's going to catch us with our pants down, Sam thought approvingly. But how many carriers did the Japanese have? It was possible-hell, it was easy-to be ready for battle in a tactical sense but to get overwhelmed strategically.

That thought came back to haunt him at supper. He was halfway through a good steak-he couldn't remember the last time he'd had a better one-when the intercom suddenly announced, "Midway reports itself under attack by Japanese aircraft. The island has launched aircraft along the vector given by the enemy machines. We are proceeding to lend our assistance."

No sooner had the metallic words died away than the engines rumbled to life under Sam's feet. Somebody down the table from him said, "Godalmighty-we're not wasting any time, are we?"

Commander Dan Cressy had been swearing under his breath. The officer's remark made him revert to straightforward English: "We've wasted more than three hours just by being here instead of in Honolulu. Now we get to find out how much that costs us."

"We have all the supplies we need, sir?" Sam asked.

"We have enough fuel to get us to Midway, and we have enough aviation gas to fly our airplanes," Cressy answered. "What more do we need past that?"

Carsten said the only thing he could: "Nothing, sir." If they had enough fuel to come home from Midway, the exec hadn't said a word about it. He hadn't said anything about food, either. They could get there, and they could fight once they did. Past that… well, they could worry about everything else afterwards.

Captain Stein came on the intercom a little later, urging men who weren't on duty to go out on the flight deck and keep an eye peeled for periscopes. "We have fancy new sound gear since the last war," the captain said, "but nothing is perfect. One of you may see something everybody else misses. It's worth a try."

Sam would have gone out anyway. If the Japs were attacking Midway, they might well have sent subs out ahead of their fleet to pick off American reinforcements rushing up from the main Sandwich Islands. The Remembrance's anchorage off Lahaina might actually have done the ship and its escorts some good. Submarines would be most likely to prowl the line between Pearl Harbor and Midway. The carrier and her flanking ships would take a different course.

Several sailors called out alarms. None of them came to anything-all they'd seen was an odd wave or a bird diving into the sea or, once, a spouting whale that had three or four men shouting at the same time.

Some sailors stayed on the flight deck even after the sun went down. That wasn't the worst gamble in the world; a periscope might leave a phosphorescent trail against dark water or might be spotted by moonlight. Sam went over to the wireless shack to see if he could find out what the Remembrance was liable to be walking into. But the yeomen didn't have a lot to say: Midway was under attack from the air, and had launched aircraft against the enemy. That much Sam already knew, and so did everyone else. The men with the earphones wouldn't tell him on which vector the U.S. airplanes had gone out from Midway. They did allow that no Japanese troops had landed on the low, flat island. That was good news, anyhow.

He decided to hit the sack early. Even at top speed, the Remembrance was a day and a half from Midway. When she got there, she'd be busy. Grabbing what rest he could seemed like a good idea. He had no idea how much that would be. An alert or a real attack might bounce him out of his bunk any old time.

Except for shoes and hat, he slept in his uniform. If he looked rumpled when he got up-well, so what? To his surprise, he got most of a full night. He woke at 0400, feeling refreshed and ready for whatever lay ahead. He went to the galley for food and coffee. As with sleep, no telling how soon he'd have a chance for more.

Commander Cressy sat there with a steaming mug in front of him. Sam's guess was that he'd had no sleep since the Remembrance set out. The exec nodded to him. "Midway thinks there are three Jap carriers out there," he said, as calmly as if he were talking about shoelaces.

"Three?" Sam made a face. "That's not so good, sir." He filled his plate with bacon and eggs-real ones, not the powdered kind-and hash browns. "Airplanes from the island do them any harm?"

"They say they did." By Cressy's sour smile, he didn't believe it. After a sip from the thick white mug, he explained why: "The incoming waves haven't stopped, and they aren't getting smaller, either. What does that tell you?"

Sam's smile was sour, too. "No damage to the Jap carriers, sir, or not much, anyway. Uh-where are they?"

"North of Midway, and a little west-about where you'd expect," the exec answered. "Maybe we can give them a surprise. Here's hoping." He raised the mug.

Sam grabbed a nap in the afternoon, and sacked out early in the evening. That proved wise-they went to general quarters about midnight. He ran to his post in his stocking feet and put on his shoes only when he got there. Then it was a long wait for anything to happen. The mess gang brought sandwiches and coffee down to the damage-control party. The men wolfed down the chow.

"Sunday morning," Lieutenant Commander Pottinger said. "I'd rather being going into Lahaina for liberty. I'd really rather be going into Honolulu for liberty."

"Three weeks till Christmas, too," Sam said. "Well, two and a half weeks, if you want to get fancy."

At just past six, airplanes started taking off from the Remembrance's flight deck. "Must be getting light," Pottinger said. Down where they were, day and night had no meaning. He added, "Here's hoping they've got good targets."

An hour and a half went by. The intercom came to life. "Y-ranging gear reports aircraft bound this way, about half an hour out. They are not believed to be friendly. All hands stand by for action."

Not believed to be friendly… They were Japs, for Christ's sake! Japan didn't have Y-ranging gear, or the USA didn't think she did. They'd probably spotted U.S. airplanes coming from the Remembrance or her escorting cruisers and flown along the reciprocal of their courses. That was how the U.S. aircraft from Midway had attacked the Japanese carriers. However they'd done it, they meant trouble.

Even in the bowels of the carrier, Sam heard the ships around the Remembrance start shooting. Then her guns started banging away, too. Her engines revved up to emergency full. She started twisting and dodging for all she was worth. How much was she worth, though? Compared to an airplane, she might have been nailed to the surface of the Pacific.

A bomb burst in the water nearby, and then another. Szczerbiakowicz worked a set of rosary beads. Sam wondered if he knew he was doing it. And then a bomb hit near the bow, and he stopped worrying about things that didn't matter. "Let's go!" He and Pottinger shouted it in the same breath.

Another bomb hit, also well forward, as the damage-control crew rushed to do what they could. The engines kept running, which meant they had power for hoses and pumps. "Gotta get the flight deck fixed," Pottinger panted while he ran. "If our aircraft can't land and take off, we're screwed."

Then a bomb hit near the stern, and all the fire alarms started going off. That was where they stored the aviation fuel. Ice ran through Carsten. They were liable to be screwed any which way.

When he got up on deck, he saw they were. The two hits at the bow were bad enough. The Remembrance didn't have enough steel plates to cover those gaping gaps. But the fierce flames leaping up through the hole in the stern were ten times worse. If they didn't get a handle on that fire right now, it would roar through the whole ship.

Sam grabbed a hose, careless of Japanese fighters whizzing by low overhead and spraying the flight deck with machine-gun bullets. "Come on!" he shouted to a couple of his men, and ran back toward the flames.

But even high-pressure seawater at a range close enough to blister his face wasn't enough to douse that inferno, or to slow its spread very much. "Back!" somebody shouted. Sam ignored him. Then a hand grabbed his arm. He shook it off. "Back, Lieutenant Carsten! That's an order!" He turned his head. There was Commander Cressy. Even as Sam started to yell a protest, the pressure in the hose went from high to zero. "You see?" the exec said grimly. "We aren't going to save her. The abandon-ship order went out five minutes ago."

"It did?" Sam stared in amazement. He'd never heard it.

"Yes, it did. Now come on, God damn your stubborn, two-striped squarehead soul, before you cook."

Only when Sam was bobbing in the Pacific did he realize he'd also been promoted. A j.g. was addressed as a lieutenant, yes, but wore only one and a half stripes. Carsten grabbed a line flung from a surviving destroyer. Five minutes after he'd clambered up onto her deck, the Remembrance went to the bottom. He burst into tears.

"Mail call!"

That was always a welcome sound. Dr. Leonard O'Doull looked up from the little chessboard over which he and Granville McDougald sat hunched. "I resign, Granny," he said. "You'd get me anyway."

"Quitter," McDougald said. "You're only down two pawns."

"Against you, that's plenty." O'Doull won some of the time against the other man. If he hadn't, he wouldn't have kept playing him. But if McDougald got an edge, he wasn't the sort to give it up. "Besides, mail's more interesting."

"For you, maybe." McDougald had been in the Army a long time. He didn't have anybody on the outside who wrote him very often. This was his life. To O'Doull's way of thinking, it wasn't much of a life, but Granny didn't lose sleep over what he thought.

Eddie carried a fat wad of envelopes into the tent. "Got three for you, Doc," the corpsman said. "One for you, too, Granny." He passed the rest out to the other medics.

"Holy Jesus," McDougald said. "Somebody must have decided I owe him money." He opened the envelope, unfolded the letter inside, and sadly shook his head. "See? I knew it."

"What is it really?" O'Doull asked. His letters stood out from the rest. They bore bright red stamps from the Republic of Quebec. These all showed General Montcalm fighting bravely against the British during the French and Indian War. His bravery hadn't done him a damn bit of good. He'd lost and got killed, and Quebec had spent the next century and a half as a sometimes imperfectly willing part of British-created Canada.

"Letter from an old-maid cousin of mine in Pittsburgh," Granville McDougald answered. "She complains about everything to everybody, and my number happened to be up. Prices are too high, and there isn't enough of anything, and bombers are annoying when they come over, and why don't I fix all of it? Trudy's kind of stupid, but she makes up for it by being noisy."

"Er-right." O'Doull recognized Nicole's handwriting on his envelopes. He made sure he opened the one with the earliest postmark first. By now, he was so used to English that he had to shift gears to read his wife's French.

Unlike McDougald's cousin, Nicole had better sense than to complain about how things were back in Riviere-du-Loup. Since Pittsburgh was getting bombed, Cousin Trudy had some right to complain-but not to a man who saw at first hand what war did every day and who had to try to repair some of the damage.

Keeping track of her two brothers and three sisters and their families let Nicole ramble for a page and a half before she even got around to town gossip. O'Doull soaked it all in; it had been his life, too, ever since the Great War. Who was putting on airs because she'd got a telephone and who'd knocked over a mailbox because he'd taken his Buick out for a spin while he was drunk was big news in Riviere-du-Loup.

And Lucien sends his love, Nicole wrote. He is home for the holidays from the university, and says he did well on his examinations. O'Doull read that with relief. His son wasn't always an enthusiastic student, and had dawdled a good deal on his way to a bachelor's degree. That he was going to college at all made him an object of wonder to his throng of cousins.

The other two letters had much the same theme. Only the details changed, and not all of them: Jean Diderot had assassinated another mailbox by the time Nicole finished her last letter. Someone should take away his keys before he hurts a person instead, she wrote indignantly. O'Doull was nodding as he read. He'd patched up plenty of drunks and the people they hit-that wasn't quite so bad as battle damage, but it came close.

"I wish I were back there," he said.

"It's your own damn fault that you're not, Doc," Granville McDougald said. "See what you bought for volunteering?"

"You should talk," O'Doull retorted. "How long have you been doing this?"

"A while," McDougald allowed. "I hope your news is better than what's coming out of the Pacific."

"It is, yeah," O'Doull said. "We hurt the damn Japs, anyhow. We sank one of their carriers and damaged another one."

"But they got the only one we had out there, and they got their people ashore on Midway, and that's what counts," McDougald said. "Now they're the ones who can build it up, and we'll have to worry about getting things through to Oahu. We can't send a carrier with our ships for protection till we build more or pull one out of the Atlantic and send it around the Horn."

"If we pull one, that makes things tougher against England and France and the CSA," O'Doull pointed out.

"I didn't say it didn't," McDougald answered. "But we can fly airplanes out of Honolulu and we can fly them out of San Francisco, and there's still that space in between that neither bunch can really cover. And if I can figure that out from the map, you bet your ass some smart Jap admiral can do the same thing and stick a carrier up there somewhere to make our lives difficult."

"Makes sense," O'Doull said. "That doesn't mean it's true, mind you, but it makes sense." He hesitated, then went on, "Hey, I've got one for you, Granny."

"Shoot," the medic told him.

"What do you think about what Smith said on the wireless a little while ago-about the Confederates slaughtering their Negroes, I mean?"

Granville McDougald frowned. "Well, I don't know. In the last war, the limeys told stories about how the Germans marched along with Belgian babies on their bayonets, called 'em Huns, and that was a crock of shit. I figure it's about even money that he's trying to whip things up on the home front because the offensive in Virginia isn't going the way he hoped it would. The Confederates are bastards, yeah, but are they crazy bastards?"

"Featherston is," O'Doull said, to which McDougald only grunted. O'Doull added, "Smith said he had photos. The limeys never said that about the Germans."

"I haven't seen any photos." McDougald shrugged. "Come to think of it, that Congresswoman-you know, the one who was poor damned Blackford's wife-said she had photos. I didn't see those, either. I wonder if they're the same ones. Till I see the evidence with my own eyes, I'm going to keep this one in the, 'not proven' column."

"All right." O'Doull had trouble quarreling with that, even though he wanted to. As far as he was concerned, Jake Featherston should have been locked up in a loony bin instead of running a country. He struck O'Doull as nuttier than a three-dollar fruitcake, and he'd driven the Confederate States nuts along with him.

Up at the front, several machine guns started stuttering. Everybody in the tent with the Red Crosses on it swore with varying degrees of imagination. It had been quiet up there for a while. The weather'd been nasty, and both sides were throwing most of their energy into the fighting back East. But now one side or the other had put on a raid-or maybe somebody'd just imagined he'd seen something and opened up on it, which made everybody else open up, too.

"Come on," Eddie told the other corpsmen. "We better shag ass up there. Sure as hell, somebody's gonna be bleeding." Off they went.

"You and me," Granville McDougald said to O'Doull.

"Let's hope it stays that way," O'Doull answered. "My best kind of day here is one where I don't do a goddamn thing."

But the first casualty came back about ten minutes later. He got there under his own power, clutching a wounded hand. Trying to encourage him, McDougald said, "It could have been worse-it could have been the other one."

"Screw you," the soldier said. "I'm a lefty."

"Let's get him under, Granny," O'Doull said. Looking as nonplused as O'Doull had ever seen him, McDougald nodded. Because it was the man's skilled hand, O'Doull took special pains to do the best job of patching it up he could. With so many bones and tendons in the palm smashed up, though, he didn't know how much use the soldier would have when he recovered. Hope for the best, he thought.

"That's very neat work, Doc," McDougald said when O'Doull finished at last. "I'm not sure I could handle anything that delicate myself."

"Nice of you to say so," O'Doull answered. "I don't know what kind of result he'll get out of it, though. He'll just have to wait and see how he heals." O'Doull himself would probably never find out; the wounded man would be sent farther back of the line as soon as possible.

He and McDougald dealt with three more wounded soldiers in the course of the afternoon, none of them, luckily, with life-threatening injuries. Knowing someone would come back to something approaching full health once he recovered was a good feeling. For a day, at least, O'Doull could pretend he'd won a round against death.

Darkness fell early-not so early as it would have up in Riviere-du-Loup at this season of the year, but early enough. The gunfire died away to occasional spatters. It had never been a full-strength exchange; neither side brought barrels and artillery into it. That strengthened O'Doull's impression that the firefight had started more by accident than for any real reason.

He was spreading a can of deviled ham over a couple of crackers when a runner stuck his head into the tent. He wasn't a man O'Doull remembered seeing before. "Get ready to shut this place down," he announced. "Whole division's pulling out of the line here and heading for Virginia."

"Jesus!" O'Doull exclaimed. "Nice to give people a little warning, isn't it?"

"You've got a little warning, sir," the runner answered. "This is it." He wasn't even sarcastic. He meant it. As far as O'Doull was concerned, that made things worse, not better.

"Who's taking our place?" Granville McDougald asked.

"Two regiments from a new division-the 271st," the runner said. Two regiments from a full-strength division would match the number of effectives facing the Confederates, all right. Even casual firefights like the one earlier in the day caused casualties, and they happened all the time.

"Why didn't they ship the 271st to Virginia?" O'Doull asked bitterly. The runner didn't answer that. O'Doull had no trouble finding his own answers. The obvious one was that they wanted to send veteran troops up against the Confederate defenders. That was a compliment of sorts, but one O'Doull could have done without. If they kept feeding veteran units into the sausage machine, they wouldn't have any veteran units left before too long.

Nobody cared about a Medical Corps major's opinion. He looked at McDougald. The Army medic shrugged and said, "Looks like we've got to take care of it. I hear Virginia is really shitty this time of year."

"Wouldn't be surprised," O'Doull agreed. But the other man was right-they had to take care of it.

And they did. It wasn't as if they had no practice moving the aid station; they'd done it whenever the front went forward or back. They weren't doing it under fire this time, and, though it was chilly, it wasn't raining. Things could have been worse. The medics bitched, but O'Doull would have thought something was wrong with them if they hadn't. He bitched, too; he didn't like climbing into a truck at two in the morning any better than anybody else. Like it or not, he did it. The truck jounced off down a road full of potholes. He was leaving the war behind-and heading straight towards it.

George Enos, Jr., slung his duffel bag over his right shoulder. Leaning to the left to balance the weight, he strode up the Boston Navy Yard gangplank to the USS Townsend. He felt good about coming home to Boston to get a ship, and felt even better to have a ship at last.

When he stepped from the gangplank to the destroyer, he saluted the colors and the officer of the deck and said, "Permission to come aboard, sir?"

"Granted," the OOD said, returning the salute. "And you are…?"

"Seaman George Enos, Junior," George said, and rattled off his pay number.

"Enos." The OOD looked down at his clipboard and made a checkmark. "Yeah, you're on the list. Specialty?"

"Antiaircraft gunnery, sir."

The young j.g. wrote something beside his name. "All right. Gather with the other new fish there, and one of our petty officers will take you to your bunk."

"Thank you, sir." About a dozen men stood by the rail. Some were raw kids. Others, like George, had been around the block a few times. Two or three of them had good-conduct hashmarks on their sleeves that spoke of years in the Navy. Part of George felt raw when he saw those. Telling himself he'd been going to sea for years helped some, but only some.

Five or six more men came aboard after him. The OOD stared down at his clipboard and muttered to himself. George didn't need a college degree to figure out what that meant: a few sailors hadn't shown up. They were probably out drunk somewhere. George didn't know just what the Navy did to you for missing your ship. He didn't want to find out, either.

Finally, still muttering, the officer of the deck called, "Fogerty! Let's get this show on the road. If they show up, they show up. If they don't…"-he muttered some more, grimly-"it's their funeral."

"Aye aye, sir." Fogerty was a CPO with a big belly and an impressive array of long-service hashmarks. He glowered at the new men as if they were weevils in the hardtack. "Come on, youse guys. Shake a leg."

The Townsend was larger and bound to be faster than the Lamson, the Great War relic on which George had trained. She was every bit as crowded as the training ship, though: with her bigger displacement, she carried more weapons and more men. They ate up the space.

George's bunk turned out to be a hammock. He did some muttering of his own. What fun-he could sleep on his back or fall on his face. And he lay on his belly when he had a choice. No help for it, though. If he got tired enough, he'd sleep if he had to hang himself by his toes like a bat.

"Youse guys know your way around?" Fogerty asked, and then answered his own question: "Naw, of course youse don't. Come on, if you want to after you all get your bunks, and I'll give youse the tour."

When George accompanied him, he got more than he'd bargained for. Fogerty prowled from bow to stern and from the Y-ranging antenna down to the bilges. George hoped he would remember everything he'd seen.

One thing he made sure he'd remember was the OOD reaming out a hung-over sailor who'd shown up later than ordered. He didn't want that happening to him. And at least one man was still missing, because the officer had spoken of they to Chief Fogerty.

With or without the missing man or men, the Townsend sailed that afternoon. The Lamson's engines had wheezed. These fairly thrummed with power. Asking one of the men who'd been aboard her for a while, George discovered that she was rated at thirty-five knots, and that she could live up to the rating. The training ship had been a tired old mutt. This was a greyhound.

He got assigned to an antiaircraft gun near the Townsend's forward triple five-inch turret. They made him an ammunition passer, of course; men with more experience held the other positions, all of which took more skill. A shell heaver just needed a strong back-and the guts not to run away under attack.

They steamed south. Men not on duty stood at the rail. Some were watching for submersibles. Others were just puking; the Atlantic in December was no place for the faint of stomach. George took the heaving sea in stride. He'd known plenty worse, and in a smaller vessel.

"Not sick, Enos?" asked the twin 40mm's loader, a hulking kraut named Fritz Gustafson.

"Nah." George shook his head. "I was a Boston fisherman since before I had to shave. My stomach takes orders."

"Ah." Gustafson grunted. "So you're a sailor even if you're not a Navy man." He let out another grunt. "Well, it's something."

"Sure as hell is." The gun chief was a petty officer called Fremont Blaine Dalby-he described himself as a Republican out of a Republican family. With most of the USA either Socialist or Democrat, that made him a strange bird, but he knew what he was doing at the gun mount. Now he went on, "There's guys who've been in since the Great War who still lose their breakfast when it gets like this. North Atlantic this time of year ain't no joke."

"That's the truth. I've been on a few Nantucket sleigh rides myself." George had been on more than a few, riding out swells as high as a three-story building. He didn't want to brag in front of men senior to him, though. They were liable to make him pay for it later. That turned out to be smart, as he found out when he asked, "You know where we're headed?"

Dalby and Gustafson both stared at him. "They didn't tell you?" Dalby asked.

"Nope. Just to report aboard."

Fritz Gustafson grunted again. "Sounds like the Navy, all right. We're heading for the Sandwich Islands. We get to go around the Horn. You think the waves up here are bad? The ones down there make this look like a dead calm."

Now it was George's turn to grunt. He'd heard stories about going around the Horn-who hadn't? "Have to see what that's like," he said. "I've been east a ways, but I haven't been south."

"So you're a polliwog, are you?" Gustafson asked with a cynical laugh. Enough fishermen came out of the Navy and had crossed the Equator to let George know what that meant. He nodded. Gustafson laughed again. "Well, you'll get yours."

"Rounding the Horn shouldn't be too bad," Dalby said. "It'll be summer down there, or what passes for it. Going through in winter is worse. Then it's just mountains of water kicking you in the teeth, one after another after another."

"People have been talking about a canal through Central America damn near forever," Gustafson said. "I wish they'd finally get around to building the fucker."

"Yeah, but who'd run it?" George said.

Gustafson and Dalby looked at each other. "He's no dope," Dalby said. No doubt it was possible to build a canal through Colombia's upper neck or through Nicaragua. The USA and the CSA had both examined the project. Each had threatened war if the other went ahead with it. It might have happened after the Great War, when the Confederate States were weak, but the United States had been putting themselves back together then, too. And after the bottom fell out of the economy, nobody'd had the money or the energy for a project like that.

The Townsend joined three more destroyers and a heavy cruiser that came out of New York harbor. The flotilla also picked up a pair of oilers from Philadelphia. The ships would have to refuel before they swung around the southern tip of South America. The Empire of Brazil was technically neutral, but wasn't friendly, not when it was getting rich off fees from Argentine, British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese freighters hauling beef and wheat through its territorial waters for the dash across the Atlantic to Dakar in French West Africa. There were no guarantees that U.S. ships would be able to top off there.

My father went this way, George thought. He didn't go around the Horn-I don't think he did, anyhow-but he was here before me. He nodded to himself. I'll pay 'em back for you, Pa.

"Gonna be a little interesting, sliding past Bermuda and the Bahamas," Dalby said. "Yeah, just a little. How many ships and patrol airplanes do the limeys and the Confederates have?"

George's father hadn't had to worry about airplanes, or not very much. Warships were terribly vulnerable from the air. The loss of the Remembrance drove that home, in case anyone had forgotten. "What do we do if they spot us?" George asked.

Fremont Blaine Dalby let his hand rest on the right barrel of the twin 40mm. "Why, then, we give 'em a big, friendly hello and we hope for the best," he said. "That's why we're here, Enos-to make sure they get that big hello."

"Right," George said, as nonchalantly as he could. The rest of the men in the gun crew laughed at him. He kept his mouth shut. He knew they'd go right on laughing till he showed what he was worth. He'd had the same thing happen the first time he went out on a fishing run-and, in the days since, he'd jeered at other first-timers till they showed they were worth something.

As the flotilla went down past Maryland and Delaware toward Virginia and the CSA, it swung ever farther from shore, both to avoid Confederate patrol aircraft and to take a course halfway between the Bahamas and Bermuda. The men on the hydrophones worked around the clock. Sailors stayed on deck whenever they could, too, watching for death lurking in the ocean.

They ran between the enemy's Atlantic outposts on a dark, cloudy midnight. No bombs or bullets came out of the sky. No torpedoes slid through the sea. The farther south they went, the calmer that sea got, too. That mattered less to George than to some afflicted with seasickness, but he didn't enjoy swinging in his hammock like a pendulum weight when the rolling got bad.

Not that he was in his hammock when the Townsend ran the gauntlet. He stayed at his battle station through the long night. When the east began to lighten, Fritz Gustafson let out a long sigh and said, "Well, the worst is over."

"May be over," Fremont Dalby amended.

"Yeah. May be over." Gustafson pointed up to the gray sky. "Long as the ceiling stays low like this, nothing upstairs can find us."

Having been shot up aboard the Sweet Sue, George wouldn't have been sorry never to see another airplane carrying guns. He said, "Which means all we've got to worry about is submarines. Oh, boy."

"We can shoot subs, or drop ashcans on 'em, or even run away from 'em if we have to," Dalby said. "Can't run from a goddamn airplane-looks like that's the number one lesson in this war so far."

Gustafson shook his head. "Number one lesson in this war so far is, we should've been ready for it five years before it started. And we weren't. And we're paying for it. We ever make that mistake again…" He spat over the rail.

"But Featherston's a nut," George said. It wasn't quite a protest. He answered himself before the others could: "Yeah, I know. It's not like he didn't advertise." Dalby and Gustafson both nodded. George sighed. The Townsend steamed south.