"Me, too," Sam said. "We must've spotted that British carrier."
"I can't think of anything else," Pottinger said. "Their pilot was probably stupid, shooting up that fishing boat."
"One of ours would've done the same thing to their boat off the coast of England," Sam said. "Flyboys are like that."
In the light of the bare bulb in its wire cage overhead, Pottinger's grin was haggard. "I didn't say you were wrong. I just said the limey was stupid. There's a difference."
The throb of the Remembrance's engines deepened as the great ship picked up speed. One after another, airplanes roared off her flight deck. Some of those would be torpedo carriers and dive bombers to go after the British ship, others fighters to protect them and to fight off whatever the limeys threw at the Remembrance and the Sandwich Islands.
As usual once an action started, the damage-control party had nothing to do but stand around and wait and hope its talents weren't needed. Some of the sailors told dirty jokes. A petty officer methodically cracked his knuckles. He didn't seem to know he was doing it, though each pop sounded loud as a gunshot in that cramped, echoing space.
Time crawled by. Sam had learned not to look at his watch down here. He would always feel an hour had gone by, when in fact it was ten minutes. Better not to know than to be continually disappointed.
When the Remembrance suddenly heeled hard to port, everybody in the damage-control party-maybe everybody on the whole ship-said, "Uh-oh!" at the same time. If the antiaircraft guns had started banging away right then, Sam would have known some of the British carrier's bombers had got through. Since they didn't…
"Submersible!" he said.
Lieutenant Commander Pottinger nodded. "I'd say the son of a bitch missed us-with his first spread of fish, anyhow." He added the last phrase to make sure nobody could accuse him of optimism.
Not much later, explosions in the deep jarred the Remembrance. "They're throwing ashcans at the bastard," one of the sailors said.
"Hope they nail his hide to the wall, too," another one said. Nobody quarreled with that, least of all Sam. He'd seen more battle damage than anybody else down there. If he never saw any more, he wouldn't have been the least bit disappointed.
Another depth charge burst, this one so close to the surface that it rattled everybody's teeth. "Jesus H. Christ!" Pottinger said. "What the hell are they trying to do, blow our stern off?"
Nobody laughed. Such disasters had befallen at least one destroyer. Sam didn't think anybody'd ever screwed up so spectacularly aboard a carrier, but that didn't mean it couldn't happen.
Then the intercom crackled to life. "Scratch one sub!" Commander Cressy said exultantly.
Cheers filled the corridor. Carsten shouted as loud as anybody. A boat with somewhere around sixty British or Confederate or French sailors had just gone to the bottom. Better them than me, he thought, and let out another whoop. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger stuck out his hand. Grinning, Sam squeezed it.
Thuds on the deck above told of airplanes landing. One of the sailors said, "I wonder what the hell's going on up there." Sam wondered the same thing. Everybody down here did, no doubt. Until the intercom told them, they wouldn't know.
An hour later, the all-clear sounded-still with no news doled out past the sinking of the one submarine. Sam would have made a beeline for the deck anyway, just to escape the cramped, stuffy, paint- and oil-smelling corridor in which he'd been cooped up so long. The added attraction of news only made him move faster.
He found disgusted fliers. "The limeys hightailed it out of town," one of them said. "We went to where they were supposed to be at-as best we could guess and as best we could navigate-and they weren't anywhere around there. We pushed out all the way to our maximum range and even a little farther, and we still didn't spot the bastards. They're long gone."
"Good riddance," Sam offered.
"Well, yeah," the pilot said, shedding his goggles and sticking a cigar in his mouth (he wasn't fool enough to light it, but gnawed at the end). "But that's a hell of a long way to come to shoot up a goddamn fishing boat and then go home."
"I think they were trying to lure us out to where the submarine could put a torpedo in our brisket," Sam said. "The Japs did that to the Dakota in the Sandwich Islands, and she spent a lot of time in dry dock after that."
"Maybe," the pilot said. "Makes more sense than anything I thought of."
"It didn't work, though," Sam said. "We traded one of our fishing boats for their sub-and I hear they didn't even sink the fishing boat. I'll make that deal any day."
IV
Clarence Potter's promotion to brigadier general meant inheriting his luckless predecessor's office. Not being buried under the War Department had a couple of advantages. Now he could look out a window. There wasn't much point to one when all it would show was dirt. And now a wireless set brought in a signal, not just static.
He knew, of course, that Confederate wireless stations said only what the government-that is, the Freedom Party-wanted people to hear. Broadcasters could not tell too many lies, though. If they did, U.S. stations would make them sorry. Unjammed, U.S. broadcasts could reach far into the CSA, just as C.S. programs could be heard well north of the border.
And so, when a Confederate newsman gleefully reported that the Confederate Navy and the Royal Navy had combined to take Bermuda away from the United States, he believed the man. "In a daring piece of deception, HMS Ark Royal lured two U.S. carriers away from the island, making the joint task force's job much easier," the newscaster said.
Slowly, Potter nodded to himself. That must have been a nervy piece of work. The Royal Navy must have believed that Bermuda was worth a carrier. It hadn't had to pay the price, but it might have.
Eyeing a map, the Intelligence officer decided the British were dead right. The game had been worth the candle. With Bermuda lost, U.S. ships would have to run the gauntlet down the Confederate coast to resupply the Bahamas. He didn't think the United States could or would do it. Taking them away from the USA would probably fall to the Confederacy rather than Britain, but it would eliminate a threat to the state of Cuba and make it much harder for U.S. ships to move south and threaten the supply line between Argentina and the United Kingdom. Cutting that supply line was what had finally made Britain throw in the sponge in the Great War.
And if we take the Bahamas, what will we do with all the Negroes there? he wondered. That was an interesting question, but not one he intended to ask Jake Featherston. If he was lucky, Featherston would tell him it was none of his goddamn business. If he was unlucky, something worse than that would happen.
He didn't waste a lot of time worrying about it. As Confederates went, he was fairly liberal. But Confederates-white Confederates-did not go far in that direction. What happened to Negroes-in the Confederate States or out of them-wasn't high on his list of worries. Blacks inside the CSA deserved whatever happened to them, as far as he was concerned.
There, Anne Colleton would have completely agreed with him. He shook his head. He made a fist. Instead of slamming it down on the desk, he let it fall gently. He still couldn't believe she was dead. She'd been one of those fiercely vital people you thought of as going on forever. But life didn't work like that, and war had an obscene power all its own. What it wanted, it took, and an individual's vitality mattered not at all to it.
His fist fell again, harder this time. He was damned if he knew whether to call what he and Anne had had between them love. There probably wasn't a better name for it, even if the two of them had disagreed so strongly about so many things that they'd broken up for years, and neither one of them ever really thought about settling down with the other. Anne had never been the sort to settle down with a man.