Walk in Hell

IV

Jonathan Moss peered down at his whiskey, then up toward the ceiling of the officers’ club; the rafters were blurry not from the effects of drink-though he’d had a good deal-but because of the haze of tobacco smoke. He knocked back the whiskey, then signaled the colored steward behind the bar for another one.

“Yes, sir,” the fellow said, and passed him a fresh glass full of the magical amber fluid that inflamed and numbed at the same time.

His tentmates sat around the table: Daniel Dudley, who usually went by “Dud,” the flight leader; Tom Innis, fierce as a wolf; and Zach Whitby, new in the tent, replacing a casualty, and still a little hesitant on the ground because of that. None of the four lieutenants was far past twenty. All of them wore twin-winged pilot’s badges on the left breast pockets of their uniform tunics.

Tom Innis got a villainous pipe going. Its fumes added to those already crowding the air. Moss flapped a hand in his direction. “Here,” he said, “don’t start shooting poison gas at us.”

“You should talk, those cheroots you smoke,” Innis retorted, running a hand over his brown, peltlike Kaiser Bill mustache. “They smell like burning canvas painted with aeroplane dope.”

Since that was at least half true, Moss didn’t argue with it. He leaned back in his chair, almost overbalancing. Dud Dudley spotted that, as he might have spotted a Canuck aeroplane with engine trouble trying to limp back toward Toronto. “How are you supposed to handle a fighting scout when you can’t even fly a chair?” he demanded.

“Well, hell.” Moss landed awkwardly. “When I’m up in a fighting scout, I’ll be sober. It does make a difference.”

That struck all four men as very funny, probably because none of them was sober. The weather had been too thick to fly for several days now, leaving the pilots with nothing to do but fiddle with their aeroplanes and gather in the officers’ club to drink. As Moss had found the year before, winter in Ontario sometimes shut down operations for weeks at a time.

He sipped his fresh whiskey and looked around the club. Other groups of pilots and observers had their own circles, most of them raucous enough that they paid little attention to the racket he and his friends were making. On the walls were pictures of the fliers who had served at the aerodrome: some posed portraits, some snapshots of groups of them or of them sitting jauntily in the cockpits of their aeroplanes, a few with their arms around pretty girls. Moss hadn’t had much luck along those lines; most Canadian girls wanted little to do with the Americans who occupied their country.

A lot of the pilots in the photographs were men he’d never known, men killed before he’d joined the squadron as a replacement, new as Zach Whitby. Others had died after Moss came here: Luther Carlsen, for instance, whose place Whitby was taking. The rest were survivors…up till now. The quick and the dead, he thought.

Also on the walls were souvenirs of the aerial action that had accompanied the grinding, slogging American advance through southern Ontario toward-but, all plans aside, not yet to-Toronto: blue, white, and red roundels cut from the canvas of destroyed enemy machines. Some were from British aeroplanes, with all three colors being circles, others from native Canadian aircraft, where the red in the center was painted in the shape of a maple leaf.

Along with the roundels were a couple of two-bladed wooden propellers, also spoils of war. Seeing the souvenirs-or rather, noticing them-made Jonathan Moss proud for a moment. But his mood swung with whiskey-driven speed. “I wonder how many canvas eagles the Canucks and the limeys have in their officers’ clubs,” he said.

“Too damn many,” Zach Whitby said. “Even one would be too damn many.”

“We might as well enjoy ourselves,” Dud Dudley said, “because we aren’t going to live through the damned war any which way.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Innis said, and did.

The quick and the dead, Moss thought again. The hell of it was, Dudley was right, or the odds said he was, which amounted to the same thing. Moss looked again at those photographs of vanished fliers. Back in the observers’ unit from which he’d transferred after his photographer was wounded, they’d had a similar display. One of these days, would Zach be explaining to some newcomer still wet behind the ears who he’d been and what he’d done? Contemplating things like that was plenty to make you want to crawl into a whiskey bottle and pull the cork in after you.

The door to the officers’ club opened. Captain Shelby Pruitt, the squadron commander, walked in. With him came a blast of cold Ontario air. Some of the smoke in the big room escaped, though not enough to do much good.

“I want to tell you miserable drunks something,” Pruitt said loudly, and waited till he got something approaching quiet before going on, “Word from the weathermen in Manitoba is that they’ve had a couple of days of clear weather, and it’s heading our way. We may be flying tomorrow. You don’t want to drink yourselves altogether blind.”

“Who says we don’t?” Tom Innis demanded.

“I say so,” Pruitt answered mildly, and Innis nodded, all at once meek as a child. The squadron commander hadn’t earned his nickname of “Hardshell” by breathing fire every chance he found, but he expected obedience-and got it. Like Moss’ previous CO, he not only commanded the squadron but also flew with it, and he’d knocked down four enemy aeroplanes on his own, even if he was, by the standards of the men who flew fighting scouts, somewhere between middle-aged and downright doddering.

Zach Whitby waved to the bartender. “Coffee!” he called. “I got to sober me up. We run into any limeys up there, I don’t want to do anything stupid.”

“Hell with coffee,” Innis said. “Hell with sobering up too much, too. I’d rather fly with a hangover-it makes me mean.”

“I’ll have my coffee in the morning, and some aspirin to go with it,” Moss said. “If I load up on java now, I won’t sleep for beans tonight. We go up there, we ought to be in the best shape we can.” Dudley nodded. Moss had noticed that he and his flight leader often thought alike.

Under Hardshell Pruitt’s inexorable stare, the officers’ lounge emptied. Fliers scrawled their names on bar chits and strode, or sometimes lurched, off to their cots. Pruitt sped them to their rest with a suggestion that struck Moss as downright sadistic: “Here’s hoping Canuck bombing planes don’t come over tonight.”

His was not the only groan rising into the chilly night. The thought of enduring a bombing raid while hung over was not one to inspire delight. As things were…“The groundcrew will be cleaning puke off somebody’s control panel tomorrow,” he predicted.

“Puke is one thing,” Dudley answered. “Getting blood out of a cockpit is a whole different business. But you know about that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know about that.” Moss remembered Percy Stone, his observer. He remembered how much blood had splashed Stone’s cockpit after he’d been wounded. He’d heard Stone had lived, but the photographer still hadn’t returned to duty.

Enough thick wool blankets stood on Moss’ cot to have denuded half the sheep in Canada. Living under canvas in Canada wasn’t easy half the year. It was, however, a hell of a lot easier than living in the trenches. Aviators who groused too much about how tough they had it sometimes got handed a Springfield, which did wonders for shutting them up.

He took off his boots, burrowed under the blankets like a mole, and fell asleep. Waking up in gray twilight the next morning was something he would sooner have skipped. He gulped coffee and aspirin tablets and began to feel human, in a somber sort of way. Tom Innis’morning preparation consisted of brandy and a raw egg, then coffee. One way probably worked about as well as the other.

Sure enough, the day dawned clear. The pilots swaddled themselves in the leather and fur of their flying suits. It was cold at altitude even in scorching midsummer; during the worst of winter, the flying suits rarely came off. Moving slowly-bending your knees wasn’t easy with all that padding around them-they went out to their aeroplanes.

Groundcrew men had already removed the canvas covers from the Martin one-deckers: U.S. copies of a German design. Also copied from the Fokker monoplane was the interrupter gear that let a forward-facing machine gun fire through the spinning propeller without shooting it off and sending the machine down in a long, helpless glide…or that let the machine gun shoot through the prop most of the time, anyhow.

Clumsily, Moss climbed into the cockpit. A couple of bullet holes in the side of the fuselage from his most recent encounter with an enemy aeroplane had been neatly patched. The machine could take punishment. Had the bullets torn through his soft, vulnerable flesh, he would have spent much longer in the shop.

He nodded to a mechanic standing by the propeller. The fellow, his breath smoking in the cold morning air, spun the two-bladed wooden prop. After a couple of tries, the engine caught. Moss studied his instruments. He had plenty of gas and oil, and the pumps for both seemed to be working well. He tapped his compass to make sure the needle hadn’t frozen to its case.

When he was satisfied, he waved. The airstrip was full of the growl of motors turning over. Dud Dudley looked around to make sure everyone in his flight had a functioning machine, then taxied across the field-ruts through gray-brown dead grass. Moss followed, watching his ground speed. He pulled back on the joystick, lifting the fighting scout’s nose. The aeroplane bounced a couple of more times. After the second bounce, it didn’t come down.

He climbed as quickly as he could, going into formation behind his flight leader and to his left. Zach Whitby held the same place relative to him as he did to Dudley. On the right, Tom Innis flew alone.

Down in the trenches, men huddled against cold and mud and frost. The line ran from southeast to northwest between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. Behind it, on land the United States had had to fight to win, everything had been wrecked by stubborn Canadian and British defense and equally stubborn American attacks. On the other side, the terrain still showed what a fine country this was.

Machine guns spat fire at the aeroplanes from the enemy’s trenches. That was futile; machine-gun bullets reached only a couple of thousand feet, and the Martin single-deckers flew a good deal higher. But soon Canadian and British Archibald-or Archie, as he was more familiarly known-would start putting antiaircraft shells all around them. A lucky hit could bring down an aeroplane. Moss knew that, as he knew of a thousand other ways he could die up here. He did his best to forget what he knew.

Dud Dudley wagged his wings to draw the flight’s attention. He pointed to the south. The enemy was in the air, too. There, buzzing along contentedly, as if without a care in the world, was a Canadian-or perhaps a British-two-seater, an old Avro no longer fit for front-line combat but still good enough to take a photographer over the American lines to see what he could see.

As Moss swung into a turn toward the enemy reconnaissance aircraft, he glanced in the rearview mirror, then up and back over his shoulder. Were scouts lurking up there, waiting to pounce when the Americans attacked the Avro? Keeping an eye peeled for such was really Zach Whitby’s job, but you didn’t get to go back to the officers’ lounge and have more drinks if you took too seriously the notion that you didn’t have to worry about something because someone else would.

On flew the Avro, straight as if on a string. That meant the observer was taking his pictures, and the pilot, a brave man, wouldn’t spoil them even if he was under attack. Moss knew what that took, since he’d piloted observation aircraft himself. He prepared to make the enemy pay for his courage.

He’d just fired his first burst when tracers streaked past him-not from the Avro, but from behind. Zach Whitby’s fighting scout tumbled out of the sky, not in any controlled maneuver but diving steeply, a dead man at the controls, flame licking back from the engine. Sure as hell, the Canucks had had a surprise waiting.

Moss threw his own aeroplane into a tight rolling turn to the right. He was more maneuverable than the two-seater on his tail, but the biplane kept after him, firing straight ahead. That wasn’t right-the enemy wasn’t supposed to have an interrupter gear yet. And they didn’t, but this enterprising chap had mounted two machine guns on his lower wing planes, outside the arc of the propeller. He couldn’t reload them in flight, but while they had ammo he was dangerous any way you looked at him.

Then, all at once, he wasn’t. Tom Innis knocked him down as neatly as he and his chums had ambushed Whitby. Then Innis and Dudley teamed up against one of the other aeroplanes, which caught fire and fell like a dead leaf.

Moss’ own turn brought him close to the decoy observation aircraft. The observer, done with photos now, blazed away at him from a ring-mounted machine gun. He fired a burst that made the observer clutch at himself and slumped the pilot over his joystick, dead or unconscious. If he was unconscious, he would die soon; his weight on the stick sent the aeroplane nosing toward the ground.

Jonathan Moss looked around for more foes. He found none. The last enemy two-seater had streaked away, and had gained enough of a lead while the Americans were otherwise engaged to make sure it would not be caught.

Got no guts, Moss thought with weary anger. But for himself and Dudley and Innis, the sky was clear of aircraft. He turned the nose of his Martin toward the aerodrome. Wonder what they’ll find us to fill the fourth cot in the tent. With Whitby dead, he knew he should have felt more, but for the life of him that was all his weary brain would muster.

Rain drummed down on the big canvas refugee tent. Here and there, it came through the canvas and made little puddles on the cold ground. One of the puddles was right in front of Anne Colleton’s cot. Unless she thought about it, she stepped right into the puddle when she got down.

A couple of little wood-burning stoves in the open space in the middle of the tent glowed red, holding the worst of the chill at bay. One of the women who made the dreary place her home looked at a watch and said, “Five minutes to twelve.”

A couple of women and girls murmured excitedly. Anne knew her own face remained stony. Who cared whether 1916 was only five minutes away? The one thing for which she could hope from the year to come was that it would be better than the one that was dying. She did not see how it could possibly be worse, but what did that prove? She was no longer so confident as she had been that she had such a good grasp on what might lie ahead.

“Come on,” said the woman with the watch-her name was Melissa. “Let’s sing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”

Some of the women did begin to sing: softly, so as not to disturb those who had gone to sleep instead of staying up to see in the new year. Off in the distance, artillery rumbled, throwing shells at the territory still proclaimed to be the Congaree Socialist Republic, the territory that, shrunken though it was in the fighting of late, still included Marshlands.

Before the Red revolt, Anne could not have told that distant artillery from distant thunder, nor the crack of a Springfield from that of a Tredegar. She’d learned a lot, these past few weeks, and would have given a lot to unlearn it.

Melissa looked across the tent at her. “You’re not singing, Miss Colleton,” she said, her voice full of shrill complaint. She was plump and homely, and her hair must have stolen its golden sheen from a bottle, because the part of it closest to her head had grown out mouse-brown.

“That’s right. I’m not singing,” Anne replied. Take it or leave it, her tone said. She did not feel like being sociable. Unlike most of the women in the tent, unlike their male kin in other tents, she could have escaped the refugee camp any time she chose. But she could not make herself move any farther from Marshlands than she had to. She had food of a sort, shelter of a sort, clothing of a sort. Yes, she’d been used to better, but she was discovering better, while pleasant, was less than necessary. Here she would stay, till the rebellion collapsed-or till she strangled Melissa, which might come first.

The pale, pudgy woman with the two-tone hair certainly seemed to be trying to promote her own untimely demise. Glaring at Anne, she remarked, “Some people don’t seem to care about anyone but themselves.”

“Some people,” Anne said, relishing the chance to release the bile that had been gathering inside her ever since the Negro uprising began, “some people don’t care about anything except stuffing their faces full of sowbelly till they turn the same color as the meat and the same size as the hog it came from.”

She heard the sharp intakes of breath from all around the tent. “Here we go,” one woman said in a low voice to another. So they’d been expecting a fight, had they? They’d been looking forward to one? Anne had thought only of entertaining herself. But if she entertained other people, too…She showed her teeth in what was more nearly snarl than smile. If she entertained other people, too…that was all right.

Melissa’s mouth opened and closed several times, as if she were a fish out of water. “Weren’t for you damn rich folks, the niggers never would have riz up,” she said at last.

Two or three women nodded at that. Anne Colleton laughed out loud. Melissa couldn’t have looked more astonished had Anne flung a pail of water in her face. For about two cents, Anne would have, and enjoyed it, too.

“It’s the truth,” Melissa insisted.

“In a pig’s eye,” Anne replied sweetly. “It’s you who-”

“Liar!” Melissa squealed, her voice shrill. “If you’d have been born on a little farm like me, nobody would’ve ever heard of you.”

“Maybe,” Anne replied. “And if you’d been born at Marshlands, nobody would ever have heard of you, either.” A classical education came in handy in all sorts of unexpected ways. The jibe was so subtle, the eager listeners needed a moment to take it in. When they did, though, their hum of appreciation made the wait worthwhile.

Melissa needed longer than most of the women around her to understand she’d been punctured. When she did, she sent Anne a look full of hate. That look also had fear in it, as if she’d only now realized she might have picked a dangerous target. Proves you’re a fool, for not seeing it sooner, Anne thought, not that she’d been in any great doubt of that.

But Melissa did not back away from the argument. “Go ahead, make all the smart cracks you want,” she said, “but you rich folks, you-”

“Stop that,” Anne said coldly. “You talk like the Negroes with their red flags, pitting rich against poor. Are you a Red yourself?” Melissa didn’t have the brains to be a Red, and Anne knew it full well. But she also calculated the other woman would need some little while to find a comeback.

That calculation proved accurate. Melissa looked around the tent for support. When she saw she wasn’t getting any-no one there, for good and sufficient reasons, wanted anything to do with either Reds or even ideas possibly Red-she resumed her attack, though she had only one string on her fiddle: “Weren’t for you rich folks, niggers’d just stay in their place and-”

“What a pile of horseshit,” Anne said, drawing gasps on account of the language as she’d known she would. She’d also shocked Melissa into shutting up, as she’d hoped would happen. Into that sudden and welcome silence, she went on, “Yes, I’m rich. So what? If you ask me, it’s the way the po’ buckra”-she dropped into the Negro dialect of the Congaree for those two scornful words-“like you treat the Negroes that-”

Melissa surged to her feet. “Po’ buckra? Who are you calling white trash?”

“You,” Anne told her. “And I don’t need to give you the name, because you give it to yourself by the way you act. You’re the sort of person who treats a Negro like an animal, because if you treated him any different, he might think-and you might think-he was as good as you.”

She rose, too, as she spoke, and just as well, for Melissa rushed over to her, aiming a roundhouse slap at her face. As her brothers had taught her in long-ago rough-and-tumble, Anne blocked the blow with her left hand while delivering one of her own with her right. She didn’t slap, but landed a solid uppercut with a closed fist square on the point of Melissa’s chin.

The other woman staggered back and sat down hard. She’d almost stumbled into one of the stoves, which would have given her even worse hurt than Anne had intended. Blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She stared up at Anne like a dog that rolls over onto its back to present its belly and throat to a stronger rival.

“Before they sent me to this camp,” Anne said, “I asked them to give me a rifle and let me fight alongside our soldiers and militiamen. They wouldn’t let me-men-but I could have done it. And anyone who thinks I can’t take care of myself without a gun is making a mistake, too.”

Nobody argued with her, not now. She’d not only flayed Melissa with words but also thrashed her. The plump woman slowly stood up and went back to her own cot, one hand clutched to her jaw. She sat down on the canvas and blankets and didn’t say a thing.

Anne spoke into vast silence: “Happy New Year.” Before the war, people had celebrated the hour by shooting guns in the air. These past two New Years, they’d shot with intent to kill, not only on the hour but all day long, all week long, all month…

Convinced the trouble in the tent was over for the time being, Anne sat down again. As she did so, the irony of one of the arguments she’d used to discomfit Melissa suddenly occurred to her. She hadn’t been wrong when she’d said that poor whites in the Confederacy were more concerned about keeping blacks down than were the rich, who would stay on top no matter what the relationship between the races happened to be.

A few miles to the north, though, the agitators of the Congaree Socialist Republic were using similar arguments to spur their followers to fresh effort against their white foes. Did that mean the Negroes had been right to rebel?

She shook her head. That wasn’t what she’d had in mind at all. They weren’t building anything up there, just tearing down. She wondered if anything would be left of Marshlands by the time she was finally able to return to it. One way or another, though, she figured she would get along. She wasn’t Melissa, to fall into obscurity. No. Melissa hadn’t fallen into obscurity. She’d never been anything but obscure. Many fates might yet befall Anne Colleton, but not, she vowed, that one.

“Look at that bastard burn,” Ben Carlton said, his voice as full of joy as if he’d never seen anything more beautiful than the flaming factory in Clearfield, Utah.

Watching the Utah Canning Plant go up in smoke felt pretty good to Paul Mantarakis, too. As they had a habit of doing, the Mormons had used the big, strongly built building to anchor their line. Now that it was a blazing wreck, they’d have to abandon it, which meant the United States Army could take one more grinding step on the road toward the last rebel stronghold in Ogden.

“Three quarters of the way there,” Mantarakis muttered under his breath. They were only nine miles from Ogden now. He could see the town from here-or he could have seen it, had the smoke from the great burning here in Clearfield not obscured the northern horizon.

“Soon all the misbelievers shall be cast into the fiery furnace and receive the punishment they deserve,” Gordon McSweeney said. He had the drum and hose of the flamethrower strapped onto his back. He hadn’t been the one who’d set the canning plant on fire, though; artillery had managed that. Had the big guns failed, Paul could easily imagine the other sergeant going out there and starting the blaze.

Pop! Pop-pop! Short, sharp explosions began sounding, deep within the bowels of the Utah Canning Plant. “Some poor dead son of a bitch’s ammo cooking off,” Ben Carlton said.

Paul shook his head. “Doesn’t sound quite right for that.”

Thump! Something slammed into the ground, hard, not ten feet from where he stood. Almost a year and a half of war had honed his reflexes razor-sharp. He was flat on his belly before he had the slightest conscious notion of what that thump was. Better by far to duck and not need to than to need to and not duck. Another thump came, this one from farther away.

Thump! A foot soldier nearby started to laugh. “What the hell’s so funny, Stonebreaker?” Paul demanded. “We’re under bombardment.”

“Yeah, I know, Sarge.” But Dan Stonebreaker was still laughing. He went on, “I damn near got killed by a can of string beans.”

“Huh?” Mantarakis looked at the missile that had landed close to him. Sure as hell, it was a tin can that must have exploded in the fire inside the plant. He examined the goop inside the can. “This one wasn’t beans. Looks more like apricots, something like that.”

In short order, the soldiers also identified beets and peas. Whenever some more cans exploded inside the factory, the men would sing out, “Vegetable attack!” and take cover more melodramatically than they did against artillery or machine-gun fire.

They took casualties from the superheated produce, too. One fellow who wasn’t wearing his helmet got a fractured skull when a one-pound can of peas landed right on his luckless, foolish head. Hot bits of metal, almost as dangerous as shrapnel or shell fragments, burned several more.

Then the U.S. guns opened up with another barrage. When it eased, the soldiers went up and over the top and drove the Mormons out of Clearfield. The men-and women-who fought under the beehive banner and the motto DESERET fought as hard as ever, but there were fewer of them in these trenches than there had been farther south.

“I think we’ve finally got them on the run,” Captain Schneider said. He looked like a Negro with a bad paint job-his face was black with soot, but smeared here and there just enough to suggest he might be a white man after all. Paul Mantarakis looked down at himself. He couldn’t see his own face, but his hands and uniform were as filthy as those of the company commander.

“Come on!” Gordon McSweeney shouted, his voice ringing over the field like a trumpet. “We have the heretics on the run. The more we push them, the greater the punishment we give. Forward!”

Mantarakis’ opinion was that McSweeney was a hell of a lot crazier than the Mormons. He didn’t say so; McSweeney was, after all, on his side. And the shouts were doing some good, pulling U.S. soldiers after the Scotsman as he singlehandedly advanced against the enemy. He would have advanced, though, had not a single man followed.

Crazy, Mantarakis thought again, and tramped north himself.

For the next mile, maybe two, the going was easy. The Mormons had no real line of solid fortifications here. Men retreating before the American advance traded shots with their pursuers, but it was hardly counted as a rear-guard action. “Maybe we do have ’em on the run,” Paul said to nobody in particular. Even the fanaticism of the Mormons had to have limits…didn’t it?

Before long, he was doubting that again. U.S. troops ran up against yet another defensive line prepared in advance and manned by still more determined warriors. Such a line called for spadework in return, and the Americans began turning shell holes into a trench line of their own.

Captain Schneider pointed west, toward some ruins not far from the horizon. “We want to be careful the enemy doesn’t pull a fast one on us. Those buildings, or what’s left of them, are the Ogden Ordnance Depot. It’d be just like the Mormons to pack ’em full of powder and touch ’em off as our forces were moving up to ’em.”

The buildings were not part of the Mormon defensive line, which only increased Mantarakis’ suspicions: the rebels fought from built-up positions till forced out of them by artillery or, more often, by the bayonet. But, before long, U.S. troops had not only occupied the Ordnance Depot buildings, they were firing from them on the Mormon defenses farther north. When an American aeroplane dropped a couple of bombs nearby-whether because it thought the enemy still held the depot or because it simply couldn’t aim worth a damn, Paul never knew-the soldiers shooting from it began waving a big Stars and Stripes to show under whose ownership it had passed.

Maybe the sight of the American flag in the ruins of the Ordnance Depot was some kind of signal. Paul never knew that, either. But, whether by plan or by coincidence, the ground rocked under his feet a couple of minutes later.

He staggered, stumbled, fell. “What the hell…?” he shouted while clods of earth rained down on him from the wall of the trench in which he’d been standing-and from on high, too, or so it seemed. He was afraid the whole trench would collapse.

Through the shaking, through the hideous din, Captain Schneider shouted, “Earthquake! I was in the Presidio in San Francisco ten years ago, and it was almost like this.” He managed to stay on his feet.

“Make it stop! Jesus, make it stop!” Ben Carlton howled. It would have taken Jesus to make it stop; that was surely beyond the power of an infantry captain, or even of Teddy Roosevelt himself.

Mantarakis succeeded in standing. The rumble had faded, leaving behind an awful silence. The sound that came through it was not one he had expected to hear in the wake of a natural catastrophe: it was cheering, and it was all coming from the Mormon lines.

Gordon McSweeney got up on the firing step, or on what was left of it after the ground had shaken. “The misbelievers are coming out of their trenches and moving forward in an attack,” he reported. His head turned to the left, so that he was looking west. For once, not even his stern rectitude was proof against merely human astonishment. “They’ve blown a hole in our lines you could drive a freight train through,” he burst out, his voice squeaking with surprise.

“What?” Paul got up there beside McSweeney. Sure enough, any resistance from the U.S. lines ended perhaps a quarter of a mile west of where he stood. A great haze of dust and smoke hung in the air west of that, but no U.S. gunfire was coming from the ground under the haze. And that ground, what little he could see of it, looked different: sagging, slumped.

Captain Schneider’s mouth fell open when he saw that. “It wasn’t an earthquake,” he said accusingly, as if angry at having been mistaken. “The filthy, stinking Mormons mined the ground under us, and touched off their charge when we got on top of it.”

He went on cursing in a harsh, steady monotone. Mantarakis didn’t blame him. It looked as if a whole great chunk had disappeared from the U.S. line-the U.S. line in an advance that had been, up till then, finally turning into the rout it should have been from the beginning.

Then a bullet cracked past his head. The Mormons weren’t trying to overwhelm only the part of the line they’d blown to kingdom come. They were aiming to take out all of it, to throw the Americans back as far as they could. Of itself, the Springfield jumped to Paul’s shoulder. He aimed and fired. A man in overalls went down, whether hit or diving for cover he couldn’t have said.

“Bad position to try to defend,” Captain Schneider muttered. “We don’t have a whole lot of wire in front of us.” He grabbed Carlton by the arm and pointed him west. “Go on down as far as there are any live men in the trench and tell them to fall back at a right angle to our line-or what used to be our line. We don’t want the Mormons to be able to roll us all up. They’ve got their breakthrough-we have to keep them from exploiting it too much.”

Carlton went. Mantarakis admired the captain’s presence of mind. In these circumstances, he himself was having enough trouble figuring out what he needed to do. Worrying about the bigger picture was altogether beyond him. Schneider was earning his pay today-assuming he lived to collect it. Right now, that didn’t look like the best bet in the world.

More and more Americans were shooting back at the Mormons now, but the enemy kept coming, some of them singing hymns as they advanced. They’d learned how to move forward against heavy fire, some shooting from cover to make their foes duck while others advanced. And they used their machine guns aggressively, manhandling the heavy weapons forward so they too could make the Americans keep their heads down.

“Jesus, you’d think we’d have killed all the damned Mormons in Utah by now,” Captain Schneider said. He was blazing away with the pistol he wore on his belt, and the enemy was close enough to the trench line for it to be about as effective a weapon as a Springfield.

“I wish we had,” Paul said with great sincerity. He was getting low on ammunition, and heaven only knew when more would come forward.

Three Mormons popped up out of a shell hole not fifty feet away. The winter sun pierced the haze rising from the exploded mine to glitter off the bayonets of the rifles they carried. Shouting the rebel battle cry-“Come, ye saints!”-they rushed for the trench.

Gordon McSweeney laughed the triumphant laugh of a man seeing the enemy delivered into his hands. He fired a single jet of flame that caught all three Mormons in it. Only one of them had even the chance to cry out. All three jerked and writhed and shrank, all in the blink of an eye, blackening into roasted husks like those of insects that littered the street below gas lamps of a summer’s evening.

“Come on!” McSweeney shouted. “Who wants the next dose? You might as well come ahead-you’re all going to hell, anyhow.”

The Mormons kept coming, up and down the line. Machine-gun fire hammered many of them into the ground, and McSweeney got to use his infernal weapon several more times. After that, the rebels avoided the stretch of trench where he was stationed; even their spirit proved to have limits. Here and there, they did break into the trench line, but they did not force the Americans out-not, at least, in the stretch where the line hadn’t been blown sky-high.

Farther west, Paul could trace the progress of the fighting only by where the gunfire was coming from. By the sound of it, the Mormons were pushing on south toward Clearfield through a gap that was bigger than he’d thought.

“How much dynamite did they pack underground, anyway?” he asked, as if anyone nearby had the slightest chance of knowing.

“Tons,” Captain Schneider said-not an exact answer, but one with plenty of flavor to it. “Has to be tons.” He shook his head in disbelief. “And if we’d been over there instead of over here-” That thought had already gone through Paul’s mind. If he’d been over there instead of over here, he’d have been blown up or buried or one of any number of other unpleasant possibilities. As things stood, all he had to worry about was getting shot. He hadn’t imagined that that could seem an improvement, but suddenly it did.

“What do we do now, sir?” he asked.

“Form a perimeter, try to hold on, hope there are enough government soldiers in Utah to patch something together again here,” the company commander answered.

Mantarakis nodded. Schneider gave straight answers, even if they weren’t the sort you were delighted to hear. If he was still alive tomorrow, and if he still remembered (he wondered which of those competing unlikelihoods was less likely), he’d have to tell the captain that.

Roger Kimball looked out from the conning tower of the Bonefish toward the northern bank of the Pee Dee. He hadn’t brought the submersible so far up the river this time as he had on his earlier run against the black rebels of the Congaree Socialist Republic, not yet, but he figured he’d end up going farther now than he’d managed then.

Tom Brearley stood up there with him. “What do you think of the new, improved model, Tom?” he asked his executive officer.

Brearley answered with the same serious consideration he usually showed: “You ask me, sir, the boat looked better before.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that,” Kimball admitted. “But who the hell ever thought they’d have to modify a sub to do gunboat duty?”

The plain truth was, nobody had ever thought of that. Nobody had imagined the need. But need and the Bonefish had been in the same place at the same time, and so…In the Charleston shipyard, they’d put steel armor all around the three-inch deck gun’s mount, so its crew could shelter against bullets from the riverbank. And they’d mounted the machine guns on circular slabs of iron with cutouts in them, so the gunners could revolve them with their feet to bear on any target. More steel armor coming up from the outer edges of the slabs gave the machine guns protection against rifle fire, too.

Kimball pointed toward the bank. “You ask me, that’s where our real improvement is.”

“Oh, the Marines? Yes, sir,” Brearley said. “This whole operation really makes you understand what the Army is talking about when it comes to how important seizing and holding ground is, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Kimball said, and then, under his breath, “To hell with the Army.” As far as he was concerned-as far as almost any Confederate States Navy officer was concerned-the Army was a dismal swamp that sucked up enormous sums of money, most of which promptly vanished without trace: money that could have gone for more battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines…

Marines, of course, were the Navy’s admission that some action on dry land did have to be contemplated every now and again, no matter how distasteful the notion might be. Somehow or other, somebody with pull had arranged to land a couple of companies of them at the mouth of the Pee Dee and have them work their way northwest along the river toward the black heart of the Congaree Socialist Republic.

Had Anne Colleton managed that? It was the sort of thing Kimball would have expected from her, but he didn’t know for a fact that she was alive. Whoever had thought of it, it was a good idea. The insurgent Negroes couldn’t ignore the Marines, and Kimball didn’t think any irregular troops in the world could stand against them.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a brisk pop-pop of small-arms fire broke out along the riverbank. He couldn’t see where the Negroes were; they’d concealed themselves in amongst the heaviest undergrowth they could find. But he knew where the Marines were; they’d made a point of keeping in touch with the Bonefish and apprising him of their position. He didn’t have to be a Jesuit to own enough logic to realize that the fellows who were shooting and weren’t Marines had to be the enemy.

“All right, boys,” he called to the gun crews. “Let’s show the people why they brought us to the dance.”

The machine gun on top of the conning tower opened up a split second before the one mounted on the rear deck. The racket was appalling. Kimball’s head started to ache. He tried to imagine standing next to a machine gun after a good, friendly night in port. The mere thought was plenty to make his headache worse.

He got the response for which he’d been hoping: the Negroes turned a machine gun of their own, either captured from Confederate forces or donated by the damnyankees, on the Bonefish. As soon as it started firing, he and Brearley ducked down the hatch into the conning tower. Being in there under machine-gun fire was like standing in a tin-roofed shed during one hell of a hailstorm.

But, in firing, the Negroes’ machine gun revealed its position. The Bonefish’s machine guns were not the only weapons that opened up on it: so did the deck gun, at what was point-blank range for a cannon. After six or eight shells went into the woods, bullets stopped clanging off the side of the conning tower.

Kimball, who was closer to the top than Brearley, grinned down at his exec. “With luck, we just wrecked their gun. Even without luck, we just put a crew who knew how to serve it out of action.”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley said. “The Negroes can’t have a whole lot of trained fighting men. The more of those we eliminate, the faster the rebellion as a whole will fall apart.”

“That’s right,” Kimball said. “Hell, these niggers haven’t been through conscription. Where are they going to come by the discipline they need to stand up against some of the best fighting men in the Confederate States?”

“Don’t know, sir,” Brearley answered. Then he went on, perhaps unwisely, “I never thought they had the discipline to stand up against whites any kind of way. If I’d known they could fight the way they’ve already shown, I’d have been for conscripting them along with us and letting ’em kill some Yankees.”

Kimball shook his head, so sharply that he almost smacked it against the inside of the conning tower. “Mr. Brearley, I have to tell you that’s a mistake.” He hadn’t called his executive officer by his surname since the first couple of days they were working together. “Suppose niggers do make soldiers. I don’t believe it for a minute, but suppose. Suppose we send ’em up into the trenches and they do help us lick the damnyankees and win the war. Then they come back home. Right? You with me so far?”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley answered. He sounded like a puppy that doesn’t understand why it’s just been paddled.

Normally, Roger Kimball would have felt some sympathy for him. Not now. He continued, “All right, the war is over, we whipped the Yankees, and we got, say, five divisions of nigger soldiers coming on home. What the hell do we do with ’em, Mr. Brearley? They’ve been up at the front. They’ve been killing white men. Hell, we’ve been payin’ ’em to kill white men. What are they gonna do when we tell ’em, ‘Good boys. Now go on back to the cotton field and the pushbroom and forget all about that business of shooting people’? You reckon they’re gonna pay much attention to us?”

The junior lieutenant didn’t answer right away. When at last he did, he said, “Seems to me, sir, if they fight for us, it’d be mighty hard to make ’em go back to being what they were before the war started. Thing of it is, though, it’s already gotten to be hard to put ’em back where they were. So many of ’em have gone to factories and such, making ’em into field hands again is going to be like putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.”

“Yeah, well, it’d be a lot worse if they were toting guns,” Kim-ball insisted. The executive officer’s response hadn’t been what he’d expected or what he’d wanted. “Hell, one of the reasons we fought the War of Secession-not the only one, but one-was so we could do what we wanted with our niggers, not what anybody else wanted us to do.”

“Yes, sir, that’s true,” Brearley said. “When we decided to manumit them twenty years later, after the Second Mexican War, we did it on our own. And if we wanted to reward them for fighting for us, would it be so bad, sir?”

Kimball stared down at the innocent-looking youngster perched on the steel ladder a few rungs below him. It was as if he’d never seen Brearley before-and, in some important ways, maybe he hadn’t. “You’d let ’em all be citizens, wouldn’t you, Mr. Brearley? You’d let niggers be citizens of the CSA.”

He might have accused Brearley of eating with his fingers, or perhaps of practicing more exotic, less speakable perversions. The executive officer bit his lip, but answered, “Sir, if they fought for us, how could we keep from making them into citizens? And if it’s a choice between having them fight for us or against us, which would you sooner see?”

That wasn’t the way the argument was supposed to go. “They’re niggers,” Kimball said flatly. “They can’t fight whites, not really.”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley said, and said no more. He needed to say no more. If Negroes couldn’t fight, why was the Bonefish coming up the Pee Dee for a second run against them? Even more to the point, why hadn’t the Congaree Socialist Republic and the other Red rebel outfits the blacks had set up collapsed weeks before?

Would all this have been prevented had the Confederacy let blacks join the Army and, strange as the notion felt, let them vote? Kimball shook his head. “The Army laborers are Reds, too. And if the black bastards voted, they’d have elected that damn lunatic Arango last year.”

This time, Brearley didn’t say anything at all. When your commanding officer had expressed his opinion and you didn’t agree with it, nothing was the best thing you could say.

Clang! A bullet hit the outside of the conning tower. The deck machine guns opened up, blasting away at where they thought the fire had come from. And then, defiantly, a machine gun-maybe the same machine gun that had shot at the Bonefish before-began hosing the submersible down again.

Boom! Boom! Boom! The deck gun roared out its reply. Kim-ball looked down at Brearley again. The exec still didn’t say anything. But a silent reproach was no less a reproach because it was silent.

A portly colonel sporting the little medal that said he’d fought in the Second Mexican War looked down his nose at Irving Morrell. “Not as smart as we thought we were, eh, Major?” he said. Instead of a Kaiser Bill mustache, he sported white wraparound whiskers that, with his bald head, gave him a striking resemblance to Franz Joseph, the elderly Austro-Hungarian Emperor.

“No, Colonel Gilbert,” Morrell answered tonelessly. Longtime General Staff officers had been saying things like that to him ever since the Mormons exploded their mines south of Ogden. The only safe response he had was agreeing with them, and also the only truthful one. The Mormons had done a hell of a lot of damage with those mines, and he hadn’t anticipated them.

He looked glumly at the situation map for Utah. The drive toward Ogden, the last major rebel stronghold, no longer proceeded nearly north, with east and west ends of the line parallel to each other. The eastern end of the line was still about where it had been, anchored against the Wasatch Mountains, but now the line ran back on a ragged slant, the western end touching the Great Salt Lake a good ten miles farther south than it had been. Only frantic reinforcement had kept the disaster from being even worse than it was.

Colonel Gilbert studied the map, too. “If we hadn’t had to pull those troops out of Sequoyah and Kentucky, Major, our progress against the Confederates would have been a good deal greater than it is.”

“Yes, sir,” Morrell said. The USA should have been taking advantage of the uprising within the enemy’s territory, not quelling an uprising of its own. He knew that as well as the white-whiskered colonel. Knowing it and being able to do anything about it, unfortunately, were two different things.

Captain John Abell came into the room, too. Seeing Morrell and Colonel Gilbert examining the Utah situation, he came over and looked at the map himself. He put his hands behind his back and interlaced his fingers; his face assumed an expression of thoughtful seriousness. What he looked like, Morrell thought, was a doctor hovering over the bed of a patient who had taken a turn for the worse. Morrell had seen plenty of doctors with that expression, when it had looked as if he would lose his leg.

“Unfortunate,” Abell murmured. He couldn’t very well say anything more; Morrell outranked him. But what he was thinking was plain enough.

And there was nothing Morrell could do about it. He’d gained the credit for his notion of hitting the Mormons from several directions at once to weaken their resistance to the main line of effort. Because the notion had worked, he’d come to be thought of as the expert on Utah. And when something happened there that he hadn’t allowed for, he found blame accruing to him as readily as credit had before.

No, more readily than credit, for credit had come grudgingly even after his success was obvious. No one blamed him only grudgingly. Here he was, an outsider, a newcomer, who’d dared to presume himself more astute, more clever, than General Staff veterans. When he turned out not to have thought of everything, it was as if he hadn’t thought of anything.

The door to the map room opened. The newcomer was a lieutenant so junior, he hardly seemed to have started shaving. He too made a beeline for the map of Utah. That didn’t surprise Morrell, not any more; misery loved company.

But the lieutenant wasn’t interested, or wasn’t chiefly interested, in the strategic situation there. He was interested in Irving Morrell. Saluting, he said, “General Wood’s compliments, sir, and he would like to see you at your earliest convenience.”

“I’m coming,” Morrell said; when the chief of the General Staff wanted you at your earliest convenience, he wanted you right now. The lieutenant nodded; he might have been even greener than his uniform, but he understood that bit of military formality.

Behind Morrell, Colonel Gilbert spoke to Captain Abell: “Maybe the general is trying to figure out how we can get blown up on the Ontario front, too.” Maybe he hadn’t intended Morrell to hear that. Maybe. But when Abell snickered, Morrell knew he was supposed to have heard that. The young captain was too smooth to offer insult by accident.

Escape, then, became something of a relief. The lieutenant led him through the maze of General Staff headquarters without offering a word of conversation, and responded only in monosyllables when Morrell spoke. That made Morrell fear he did not stand in General Wood’s good graces.

He clicked his tongue between his teeth. He thought he should still have had credit in his account with the head of the General Staff. Utah wasn’t the only matter concerning which he’d come to Wood’s notice. Along with a doctor back in Tucson, New Mexico, he’d suggested the steel helmets that by now had been issued to just about every U.S. front-line soldier. That should have counted for something against the troubles in Utah.

Wood’s adjutant sat at a desk in an outer office, pounding away at a typewriter hard and fast enough to make the rattle of the keys sound almost like machine-gun fire. Idly, Morrell wondered if the adjutant had ever heard real machine-gun fire. They led sheltered lives here.

“Major Morrell,” the adjutant said, rising politely enough. “I’ll tell the general you’re here.” He went into Wood’s private office. When he returned a moment later, he nodded. “Go on, sir. He’s expecting you.” The staccato typing resumed as Morrell walked past him.

Morrell came to stiff attention before General Leonard Wood. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, saluting.

“At ease, Major,” Wood answered easily. “Smoke if you care to. It’s not the firing squad for you, or the guillotine, either.” One of his hands went to the back of his neck. “That’s what a Frenchman comes up with when he thinks about efficiency. Let it be a lesson to you.”

“Yes, sir.” Morrell wouldn’t have minded a cigar, but didn’t light up in spite of Wood’s invitation.

The general sighed and studied Morrell with that same sickroom expression he’d come to loathe. From the chief of the General Staff, the look came naturally: he’d earned an M.D. before joining the military. He sighed again. “It didn’t quite work out, did it, Major?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” Morrell replied, though he’d long since reached the same conclusion.

“It’s too bad,” Wood said. “I honestly don’t know if this place is good for you, but you’ve certainly been good for it. We get insulated against the soldier in the field and what he needs. You’re a breath of fresh air here.”

“Too fresh, I’d say by what’s happened lately.” Morrell spoke without rancor.

“Major, it’s not your fault we did not anticipate the Mormons’ mining us,” Wood said. “No blame for that will go into your record, I assure you. But Utah had turned into your baby, and when the baby turned out to have warts-”

“More than warts, I’d say, sir,” Morrell answered. “They wrecked most of a division there, and we only had two in the front line.”

“That is very much in people’s minds right now,” Wood agreed. “I think it’s unfortunate, but it’s true. As a result, your usefulness here has been compromised through what is, I repeat, no fault of your own.”

“Sir, if my usefulness here is compromised, could you please return me to the field?” Morrell could hear the eagerness in his own voice. A chance to get out of Philadelphia, to get back to real action-

And General Wood was nodding. “I’m going to do exactly that, Major. As you know, I would have liked you to stay around longer, to learn some more tricks of the trade, so to speak. But situations have a way of changing, like it or not. My eye is still on you, Major. Now, though, I think it best to have it on you at a distance for a while. I assure you once more, no imputation of blame will appear in your personnel file.”

Morrell barely heard that. It mattered little to him. What did matter was that he would be able to fight his way now, out in the open, face to face with the foe. He had learned a few things here, and was eager to try them out along with everything he’d known before he came.

“Where do you plan on sending me, sir?” he asked. “Someplace where things are busy, I hope.”

“You’ve given the Rebels a hard time through the first year of the war,” Wood said, which was true only if you neglected the months during which Morrell had been flat on his back. Being the chief of the General Staff, Wood was allowed to neglect details like that. He said, “You’ve shown a knack for mountain warfare. What would you say if they sent you up to the Canadian Rockies and helped us cut the Pacific Coast off from the rest of the Canucks?”

“What would I say? Sir, I’d say, ‘Yes, sir!’” Morrell knew he was all but quivering as he stood there. The mountains in eastern Kentucky had been little gentle knobby things. The Canadian Rockies were mountains with a capital M, full of ice and snow and jagged rocks. Nobody would figure you could accomplish much on that kind of terrain at this time of year. All the more reason to go out and prove people wrong.

“I’ll make the arrangements, then,” Wood said. “Good luck, Major.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” Morrell said, much more for the promised arrangements than the polite wishes. The Canadian Rockies…The prospect sang in him. John Abell would think him a fool. He didn’t care what John Abell thought.

After not too hard a day doing not too much-although anyone who heard him talking about it might conclude he’d been at slave labor since he tumbled out of his bunk-Sam Carsten lined up for evening chow call.

“We been out here a long time, wherever the devil ‘here’ is,” he said. “I want to get back to Honolulu, spend some of the money I’ve earned. I can feel it burnin’ a hole in my pocket while I’m standing here.”

“Yeah, well, if it gets loose, it can come to me,” Vic Crosetti said. “I got one pocket in every set of dungarees lined with asbestos, just for money like that.”

Carsten snorted. So did everybody else who heard Crosetti. The sailor in front of him, a big, rangy fellow named Tilden Winters, said, “Wish my stomach had a pocket like that. The slop they’ve been giving us the past few days, I wouldn’t feed it to a rat crawling up the hawser.”

“You tried feedin’ it to a rat crawling up the hawser, he’d crawl back down-rats aren’t stupid,” Carsten said. That got a laugh, too, but it was kidding on the square. The Dakota had indeed been out on patrol a long time, and gone through just about all the fresh food with which she’d left port. Sam went on, “Some of the things the cooks come up with-”

“And some of the things the purchasing officers bought, figuring we’d be stupid enough to eat ’em,” Winters added. “That salt beef yesterday tasted like it had been in the cask since the Second Mexican War, or maybe since the War of Secession.”

Again, loud, profane agreement came from everybody in earshot. There were several conversations farther back in the chow line that Carsten couldn’t make out, but their tone suggested other people were also imperfectly delighted with the bill of fare they’d been enjoying-or rather, not enjoying-lately.

Vic Crosetti’s long, fleshy nose twitched; his nostrils dilated. “Whatever that is they’re gonna do to us, it ain’t salt beef.” He made the pronouncement in a way that brooked no disagreement.

A moment later, Carsten caught the whiff, too. “You’re right, Vic.” He made a sour face. “That’s fish, and it’s been dead a long, long time.”

Tilden Winters delivered his own verdict: “You ask me, one of the cooks got diarrhea again.”

“If that joke ain’t as old as the Navy, it’s only on account of it’s older,” Sam said. The closer he got to the pots from which the horrible smell was coming, though, the more he wondered if it was a joke this time.

He took a tray with more reluctance than he’d ever known. As he came up to one of the cooks, the fellow ladled a dollop of stinking yellowish stuff onto the tray, then added some sauerkraut, a hard roll, and a cup of coffee. Sam pointed at the noxious puddle. “You got a sick cat, Johansen?”

“Funny man. Everybody thinks he’s a cotton-picking funny man,” the cook said. “It’s herrings in mustard sauce, and I’ll say ‘I told you so’ when you come back for seconds.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Sam told him, which, considering the stench, was a curse of no mean proportion. He took the tray over to a table, sat down, and looked dubious. “Hey, Vic, maybe the padre ought to give it the last rites.”

Crosetti shook his head. “Way it smells up the galley, it’s been dead a hell of a lot too long for that to do any good.”

Ever so cautiously, Carsten scooped up a forkful and brought it to his mouth. “Jesus!” he exclaimed. “It tastes as lousy as it smells.” He looked down at the tray with loathing that was almost admiration. “I didn’t figure it could.”

Tilden Winters made the taste test, too, then gulped down his coffee as if it were the only thing standing between him and an early grave. Seeing their reaction, Crosetti said, “I don’t think I want any. Never was much for sauerkraut, but tonight-”

Most of the time, such grumbling would have got them in Dutch with the cooks. This evening, their complaints went unnoticed in the wider tide of revolted complaint echoing through the galley. “Do the officers eat this shit, too?” somebody shouted.

Carsten’s eyes lit up. He knew he could trust Crosetti for what he had in mind, and Winters was a pretty square guy, too. “Listen,” he said, “if they try and feed us this kind of slop, they oughta know what we think of it, right?”

“Sounds good to me,” Winters said. “Sounds damn good to me.” Crosetti nodded, too. Carsten gestured to both of them. They all put their heads together. After they were done laughing, they solemnly clasped hands to seal the bargain.

Tilden Winters got up first. He slammed his tray down on the stack, then started saying to the cooks what everybody else had been saying to one another. He had a talent for abuse, and certainly a fitting subject for it, too. A good many other sailors joined in his vehement griping. That brought several cooks over, both to defend their honor, such as it was, and to keep the men from getting any creative ideas like flinging the herrings around the galley.

Carsten, however, had already had a more creative idea than that. He and Crosetti took advantage of the confusion to slip behind the galley counter, grab one of the kettles full of the herring-and-mustard mixture-fortunately, one with a lid-and slip off before anyone noticed what they were doing. As soon as they were away, they looked like a couple of sailors on some assignment or other; the kettle wasn’t that different from any of a number of containers aboard the Dakota.

No one paid them the least attention as they headed up into officer country. Again, looking as if you belonged was more important than actually belonging. In a prison-yard whisper, Crosetti said, “Only slippery part is gonna be if he’s in there.”

“Hey, come on,” Carsten said. “If he is, we go, ‘Sorry, sir, wrong cabin,’ and we ditch the stuff instead of dumping it. Either way, we’re jake.”

The cabin door bore a neatly stenciled inscription: LIEUT.-CMDR. JONATHAN Y. HENRICKSON, CHIEF SHIP’S PURCHASING OFFICER. Sam knocked, his knuckles ringing off steel. Nobody answered. He turned the latch. The cabin door opened easily. He grinned again. He’d been wondering if Henrickson was the sort who locked his door. But no.

Inside, the cabin was as neat as a CPO’s dreams of heaven, with everything in its place-exactly in its place-and a place for everything. Somehow, that only made what they were about to do the sweeter.

“Come on, let’s get going,” Crosetti said. “Our luck ain’t gonna hold forever.” That might have been cold feet, but it didn’t sound as if it was-just a steady professional warning his comrade (no, his accomplice, Sam thought) of things that could go wrong.

They took the lid off the kettle. Instantly, the stink of the herrings filled the cabin. They proceeded to make sure the stink wasn’t all that filled it: they methodically poured herrings and mustard sauce over everything they could, desk, bedding, clothes, deck, everything. As soon as they’d finished, they got the hell out of there.

An officer in the passage would have spelled disaster. Sam’s shoulders sagged in relief when the long, gray-painted metal corridor proved bare. “Now all we got to do is look ordinary.”

“You’re too ugly to look ordinary,” Crosetti retorted. But Carsten took not the slightest offense-they’d pulled it off. When they got back down to their proper part of the ship, Tilden Winters looked a question at them. They both nodded. So did he. That was all he did, too, before returning to the friendly argument about Honolulu whores in which he’d been involved before his partners in crime returned.

The hue and cry started about an hour later. Grim-faced petty officers started escorting cooks and galley helpers up to officer country near the bridge. When the first batch of them returned, rumor of what had happened started spreading through the sailors. The general reaction was delight.

“If I knew who done that,” Hiram Kidde declared, although no one yet was quite sure of what that was, “the first thing I’d do is kick his ass.” He was, after all, a CPO himself. But he’d suffered through the herrings in mustard sauce, too. “And after that, by Jesus, I’d pick him up and buy him a beer. Hell, I’d buy him all the beer he could drink.” The gunner’s mate roared laughter. “What I wouldn’t give to see Henrickson’s face.”

None of the cooks knew anything. Carsten carefully didn’t look at Crosetti. Somebody might have noticed them lifting the kettle. But it didn’t seem as if anyone had. That didn’t stop the officers from trying to get to the bottom of who had perpetrated the atrocity. They kept right on trying, all the way up until the Dakota docked in Honolulu.

Carsten went up before Lieutenant Commander Henrickson himself. “No, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry, sir. All I know is ship’s scuttlebutt.”

“What did you think of the fish?” the purchasing officer demanded, his thin mouth set in a tight, bloodless line.

“Sir, beg your pardon, but I didn’t like it worth a damn,” Carsten told him.

He sighed. “I’m afraid everyone says that. I hoped the bastards who did this would sing songs about how good it was, to try to turn looks away from them. No such luck, though. Damn sailors are too damn sly.” That last was an angry mutter. Carsten carefully did not smile.