The Grapple (22 page)

“You’ve had a busy time in the North Atlantic,” McClintock observed. His craggy features and sun-baked skin said he’d spent a lot of time at sea.

“Yes, sir,” Sam answered. What McClintock said was true—and any which way, it was hard to go wrong saying
Yes, sir
to your superiors.

One of the other captains across the table looked down at some papers through bifocals, tilting his head back to read. Sam wore reading glasses, but still saw well enough at a distance. “You’ve done pretty well for yourself, seems like,” said the captain—his name was Schuyler Moultrie.

“Thank you, sir,” Sam said—one more phrase where it was hard to go wrong.

“Have you had any…special disciplinary problems aboard the
Josephus Daniels,
Carsten?” Captain McClintock asked.

Sam knew what that meant. Any mustang would have. “No, sir,” he answered. “I try to keep a tight rein on my CPOs—not tight enough to choke ’em, you understand, because they have to do their jobs, but tight enough so they can’t get away with murder.”

McClintock’s mouth twitched in what looked like a swallowed smile. Sam knew what that meant, too—he’d said the right thing. A mustang who still behaved like a CPO himself was liable to let his chiefs run wild, and that wasn’t good for the ship. One of the best pieces of advice he got after his promotion was to remember he was an officer. He always did his best to follow it.

“How badly are you hurting the British?” Captain Moultrie asked.

“Sir, you would know better than I do,” Sam said. Moultrie raised an eyebrow and waited. Sam went on, “I know what we stop. I’ve got an idea of what the other ships in the squadron stop. But I don’t think any of us knows how much gets through in spite of us.”

“Good answer,” said Ken Davenport, the captain at Sam’s far left.

“Seems to be worthwhile, what we’re doing,” McClintock said. He eyed Carsten from across the table. “Anything special you’d like to tell us, Lieutenant? Anything you’ve found out that other skippers ought to know?”

“Not to trust the limeys as far as you can throw them,” Sam said at once. “That freighter with the big guns, the catapult-launched fighter…They’re sneaky bastards.”

McClintock’s grin startled Sam. He hadn’t thought the rugged badlands of that face could rearrange themselves so. “Then what does that make you?” the senior officer asked. “Whatever they threw at you, you beat.”

“I don’t know that for a fact, sir,” Carsten answered. “I wish I did, but I don’t. If they were sneaky enough, they slid on by me, and I never knew the difference.”

“Not too likely, not with Y-ranging gear,” Captain Davenport said, which only proved he didn’t know much about the North Atlantic in dirty weather. By the way Captain McClintock stirred, he was thinking the same thing. Before he could say anything, Davenport went on, “I will say that recognizing the possibility does you credit.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” McClintock said. “We’ve got ourselves a raft of officers who think they’re smarter than they really are. Finding one who thinks he’s dumber than he really is makes for a refreshing change.” He eyed Sam. “Well, Lieutenant, do you want to go back on patrol when your refit’s finished?”

“Sir, I’ll go wherever you send me,” Sam said. “Real destroyers are probably better suited to that job than escorts like my ship, though. They’ve got more legs, so they can cover more ocean. Fewer things are likely to get past them.”

“He
is
a smart one,” Captain Moultrie remarked.

“So he is. Good for him,” McClintock said placidly. He turned back to Sam. “You aren’t wrong. The only trouble is, we haven’t got enough real destroyers to go around. We’re gaining on it, but we aren’t there yet. And the ones we do have in the North Atlantic, we need farther east. Speed counts for even more there than it does on patrol duty.”

“All right, sir.” Where to send ships wasn’t Sam’s decision. “If you want the
Josephus Daniels
back out there, that’s where she’ll go.”

“You’re the fellow who landed those Marines on that Confederate coastal island, aren’t you?” Moultrie asked.

“Yes, sir, I did that.” Sam wondered if he should have said he was panting to go back out on patrol. Coastal raiding made for exciting films, but if you were doing it for real you kept all your sphincters puckered tight till you got out of range of Confederate land-based air.

“We have anything like that in the hopper?” Davenport asked.

“Well, we
could,
if we had an experienced skipper to handle it,” Moultrie answered. They talked as if Sam weren’t there. He wished he weren’t. He wasn’t eager to volunteer for a dangerous mission, but he knew he wouldn’t turn it down if they gave it to him. You didn’t do that, not if you were an officer. You didn’t if you were a rating, either.

“Gives us something else to think about.” Captain McClintock sounded pleased. Of course he did—he’d be giving somebody else the shitty end of the stick. But the ribbons on his chest said he’d done warm work himself. He nodded to Sam. “We need to talk to some people ourselves, Lieutenant. If you stay in port an extra day or two, I’m sure it’ll break your crew’s hearts, won’t it?”

“Sir, you’ll probably hear them crying all the way over in Providence,” Sam said.

That made two or three of the captains snort. McClintock said, “I’m sure I will. All right, Carsten—you’ll hear from us one way or the other before long. You have anything to say before we let you go?”

“Whatever you give me, whatever you give my ship, we’ll take a swing at it,” Sam said. “I guess that’s it. Oh—and my exec is ready for a command of his own. Past ready. I hate to say it because I hate to lose him, but it’s true.”

“We know about Lieutenant Cooley—indeed we do,” the senior captain replied. The others nodded. Just how fast a track
was
Pat on? McClintock continued, “As for the other—well, plenty of worse things you could tell us. All right—dismissed for now.”

When Sam got back to the
Josephus Daniels,
Lieutenant Cooley asked, “What’s up, Skipper?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know,” Sam answered. He didn’t say anything about the senior officers’ regard for Cooley. That would come out in its own time, if it did. “Maybe they’ll send us out on patrol again, or maybe they’ll give us something else to do.”

“Something hush-hush and sneaky?” Cooley said. “Something where our ass is grass if the bad guys find out about it?”

“They didn’t say that in so many words,” Sam said. “It sounded that way to me, though. They remembered that time we carried the leathernecks.”

“They would,” the exec said darkly. “They didn’t tell you what, huh?”

“Nope.” Sam shook his head.

“Doesn’t sound good.”

“Nope,” Sam repeated. “Sure doesn’t. Way I figure it, we’ll sail up the James to Richmond, land our Marines to scoop up Jake Featherston, and shell the Tredegar Iron Works while we wait for them to bring the son of a bitch back.”

Cooley looked at him. “I hope you didn’t tell the brass anything like that. They’d take you up on it in a red-hot minute—and if they did, we wouldn’t sail up the James. We’d go up that other creek instead—without a paddle, too.”

“Don’t I know it!” Sam said. “No, I didn’t give them any fancy ideas. I may be dumb, but I’m not
that
dumb. Besides, they can come up with all kinds of fancy ideas all by themselves. They don’t need any help from me.”

“Maybe they’ll shift the whole crew to a river monitor so we can help when our guys go over the Ohio,” Cooley suggested.

“There’s a cheery thought.” Carsten shivered. During the Great War, both sides put monitors on the Ohio and the Mississippi. Some of them carried guns worthy of a battleship. They gave heavy cannon mobility the big guns couldn’t get any other way, but even then they were vulnerable to mines, which both sides sowed broadcast in the rivers. And monitors were even more vulnerable these days. They were slow and they had little room to maneuver, which meant dive bombers cleaned up on them. Sam supposed he would rather command a river monitor than try to defuse unexploded bombs, but neither job was his idea of fun.

While waiting for orders, Sam did some discreet roistering at places where officers could roister discreetly. He enjoyed himself. He would have had more fun at the raucous joints where he went before he became an officer, but he kept that to himself. A mustang who still behaved like a petty officer wasn’t a good officer. Sam had seen enough men who proved the point.

Pat Cooley plainly had a good time at those discreet establishments. But then, he was an up-and-comer with an Annapolis ring. He was supposed to know how to enjoy himself like a gentleman.

They both happened to be aboard the
Josephus Daniels
when the orders arrived, as if from On High. Sam read them. Without a word, he passed them on to Cooley. “Well, well,” the exec said brightly when he finished going through them. “Doesn’t this look like fun?”

“Now that you mention it,” Sam said, “no.”

T
roop Leader Hipolito Rodriguez was starting to dread duty on the women’s side of Camp Determination. Whenever he went over there, Bathsheba and Antoinette looked for him so they could give him messages to take to Xerxes over on the men’s side. And he had to make up messages from Xerxes to give to them. Otherwise, they would realize the truth.

This is what you get for being kind even once,
Rodriguez thought unhappily. He delivered one message. After that, he took the old
mallate
to the bathhouse. Xerxes didn’t care about anything any more. And he wasn’t about to send messages back to the women’s side on his own.

But how was Rodriguez supposed to tell the man’s wife and daughter that he was dead? He saw no way, however much he wished he did. They would wail and scream and blame him. And he was to blame, too. Didn’t he shepherd everybody in that barracks into the bathhouse? It needed doing; more Negroes filled the building now. Pretty soon, they would get what was coming to them, too.

When Rodriguez sent swarms of men and women he didn’t know into the bathhouse or into the trucks that asphyxiated them, it was only a job, the way planting corn and beans on his farm outside of Baroyeca was only a job. He didn’t think about it; he just did it. Didn’t he back the Freedom Party because it promised to do something about the Negroes in the CSA, and because Jake Featherston kept his promises?

When it came to Bathsheba and Antoinette, though, they weren’t just
mallates
any more. They were people. And thinking about killing people was much harder and much less pleasant than thinking about getting rid of abstractions, even abstractions with black skins.

Part of him hoped they would go in a population reduction while he was over on the men’s side. Then they would be gone, and he wouldn’t have to worry about it any more. But they kept hanging on. No matter what the guards’ orders were, they didn’t clean out the women’s side as efficiently as the men’s. Even those hard-bitten men found their hearts softening—some, at least.

Naturally, that meant the women’s side got more crowded than the men’s. Just as naturally, Jefferson Pinkard noticed. Rodriguez remembered when Jeff came back from what was plainly a disastrous leave during the Great War. Pinkard went hard and merciless himself after that. He hadn’t changed since—if anything, he was more so now. What with the job he had to do, that wasn’t surprising.

He lectured the guards about not softening up—once. When that didn’t work, he found a new way to solve the problem. A work gang—male prisoners—ran up new barracks on the women’s side of Camp Determination. Before long, new guards filled them. They wore the gray of Freedom Party Guards…but instead of gray tunics and trousers, they wore gray blouses and skirts. Jefferson Pinkard or somebody set above him decided that female guards would be as tough on women as male guards were on men.

And it worked. To Hipolito Rodriguez’s way of thinking, it worked appallingly well. The new guards were all whites—no women from Sonora or Chihuahua. They were all tough-looking; Rodriguez would much rather have dallied with colored prisoners than with any of them. They carried the same submachine guns as their male counterparts, and they knew how to use them.

They wasted no time proving it to the Negro women, either. The first few days they started patrolling the north side of Camp Determination, they shot three women in separate incidents. It was as if they were warning,
Don’t give us any guff. You’ll pay for it if you try.

And they didn’t waste any time sending Negro women to the bathhouse on that side and for one-way rides in the asphyxiating trucks. They hardly bothered pretending the eliminations were anything but eliminations. The women’s side began to bubble with terror.

With the female guards building up numbers over there, Rodriguez took a turn on that side less and less often. That wasn’t bad; in a lot of ways, it was a relief. But he didn’t like what he saw when he did a shift there, and he especially didn’t like what he felt. The hair on his arms and at the back of his neck kept wanting to stand on end. That side was an explosion waiting to happen.

Because he was who he was, he had no trouble getting in to see Jeff Pinkard. Saluting his buddy from the trenches always felt funny, but he did it. “What’s on your mind, Hip?” Pinkard asked. “You aren’t one of those people who flabble for the fun of flabbling.”

“I hope not,
Señor
Jeff,” Rodriguez answered. “But those guards on the women’s side, those
lesbianos
”—he didn’t know if they were or not, but if
some
of them weren’t, he’d never seen any—“they make trouble there.”

That got Pinkard’s attention, all right. “How do you mean?” he rapped out.

“They don’t—how you say?—they don’t keep the secret. You make the men do it. The lady guards, they should do the same thing,” Rodriguez said.

Pinkard drummed his fingers on the desk. “That’s not so good.” He got out of his chair, stuck his hat on his head, and grabbed his submachine gun. “I’ll have a look for myself.”

He said that whenever he found a problem. Rodriguez admired him for it. He didn’t let things fester. If something was wrong, he went after it right away. He had no trouble making up his mind.