… Here it might have been happening in a distant room. The only difference was, what happened in that distant room might kill him.
Later, he wished he hadn't had that thought at that moment. The Remembrance shuddered when a bomb burst on her flight deck. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger said, "Oh, shit," which summed up Sam's feelings perfectly. Then Pottinger added, "Well, time for us to go to work."
"Yes, sir," Carsten agreed.
That was how he got up to the flight deck in the midst of combat. He wanted to be there, but not under those circumstances. The flight crew were already doing what they had to do: manhandling steel plates across the hole the bomb had torn in the deck and doing everything they could to flatten out the torn lips of steel.
"Well done," Pottinger shouted. "We have to be able to land aeroplanes and get them in the air again."
"Yes, sir," Sam said again. His boss might be new to carrier duty, but he'd just proved he understood the essence of it. Sam went on, "They could have done a lot worse if they'd fused the bomb differently."
"What do you mean?" Lieutenant Commander Pottinger asked.
"If they'd given it an armor-piercing tip and a delayed fuse, it would have gone through before it blew up," Sam answered. "Then we'd really be in the soup."
"Urk," Pottinger said, which again matched Sam's thought.
Sam said, "They're like us: they're still learning what all they can do with aeroplanes and carriers, too."
An aeroplane with the red Rising Sun of Japan painted on wings and fuselage roared overhead, machine guns in the wings blazing. The engine was even louder than the guns; the fighter couldn't have been more than fifty feet above the deck. Bullets struck sparks from the new steel plates. Others smacked flesh with wet thuds. Men shrieked or crumpled silently. Streams of tracers from the Remembrance 's antiaircraft guns converged on the Japanese machine. For a dreadful moment, Sam thought it would get away in spite of all the gunfire. But then flames and smoke licked back from the engine cowling toward the cockpit. The fighter slammed into the sea.
"Scratch one fucker!" Sam shouted exultantly.
A sailor next to him was down and groaning, clutching his leg. Red spread over his trousers. "It hurts!" he groaned. "It hurts bad!"
"George!" Sam's exultation turned to dismay in the space of a heartbeat. He'd known George Moerlein ever since first coming aboard the Remembrance. Seeing him down with a nasty wound made Sam's stomach turn over. By the way the petty officer was bleeding, he needed help right away. Sam tore off his belt and wrapped it around Moerlein's thigh above the bullet wound, tight as he could. "Give me a hand over here!" he yelled.
"Let's get him down to sick bay, sir," a sailor said. He helped Carsten haul George Moerlein up. Moerlein moaned and then, mercifully, passed out. As they hauled the petty officer towards a passageway, another Japanese fighter strafed the Remembrance. Bullets cracked past Sam and clattered off the flight deck. He breathed a sigh of relief when he had steel between him and the deadly chaos overhead.
As soon as he saw a sailor, though, he said, "Here, take over for me. Get this man below. I've got duty topside." He hurried back up to put his life on the line again, though he did his best not to think of it like that.
Off to starboard, one of the American destroyers was on fire from bow to stern and sinking fast. Boats and men in life jackets bobbed around her. Even as Sam watched, the destroyer rolled over and went to the bottom. In these waters, the bottom was a long, long way down. Sam shivered at how far down it was.
A bomb burst in the sea not far from the Remembrance, drenching Carsten and most of the others on deck. Even so, a sailor with wigwag signals guided an aeroplane to a landing. Maintenance men fueled it. Its prop started spinning again. Down the flight deck it rolled, bumping over the hasty repairs, and up into the air again.
"Didn't think we could do that," Sam said to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger.
"He must have been flying on fumes, or he never would have tried coming in," Pottinger agreed. "Lucky the Japs have let up a little."
"I wonder what we're doing to them," Sam said. "Worse than this, I hope. We'd better be, by God."
"Yes, we'd better be. But how can we know?" Pottinger said. "They're over the horizon. The only ones who have any real idea how the fight's going are our pilots."
"No, sir-not even them," Sam said. His superior raised an eyebrow. He explained: "They don't know what the Jap pilots are doing to us, just like the Japs can't be sure what we're doing to them. Maybe the fellows in the wireless shacks-ours and theirs-have the big picture. Maybe nobody does. Wouldn't that be a hell of a thing?"
Lieutenant Commander Pottinger laughed. "We won't know who won till day after tomorrow, when we read it in the newspapers."
"Yeah." It wasn't exactly funny, but Carsten laughed, too. "As long as we live through it, we've come out all right." A Japanese aeroplane and an American machine both splashed into the Pacific within a quarter of a mile of the Remembrance. Sam hoped somebody would live through the fight.
T he Kansas City Star was the daily published closest to Leavenworth that was actually worth reading. Irving Morrell had discovered that during his last stay in Kansas. Now, of course, the wireless supplemented the paper. Back then, wireless had only started passing from Morse code to voice. Even now, the newspaper gave him a far more detailed picture than the quick reports on the wireless could.
"I don't think anybody knows who won this stupid battle, Agnes," he said two days after reports about the sea fight north of the Sandwich Islands started coming in. "I really don't. If you look at our claims, we sank the whole Jap fleet and didn't take a scratch. If you look at theirs, they did it to us."
His wife shrugged and poured him another cup of coffee. "My bet is, both sides are lying as hard as they can."
"My bet is, you're right," Morrell answered. "I suppose we'll sort it out in time for Mildred's children to study about it in school."
Hearing her name made his daughter look up from her scrambled eggs. "Study what in school?" she asked.
"A big naval battle in the Pacific," her father said.
She rolled her eyes. "For heaven's sake, who cares?"
Agnes laughed. "If everybody felt that way, we wouldn't have to fight any more wars. That wouldn't be so bad, would it?"
"That would be wonderful," Morrell said with the deep conviction of a man who'd seen-who'd taken part in-the worst man could do to his fellow man. He gulped the scalding coffee. "That would be wonderful, but it's not going to happen any time soon, no matter how much I wish it would. Speaking of which, I'm off to the Barrel Works."
"All right, dear." Agnes got up, too, and came over to give him a kiss. "I'll see you when you get back. Some more things should be out of boxes by then."
"Good." Morrell was convinced he could no more escape from boxes than a bug could get out of a spiderweb. He wondered how many times he'd moved in the course of his military career. He didn't try to count them all up. That way lay madness.
Barbed wire enclosed a field in which sat the experimental barrel he'd been working with ten years earlier. The machine hadn't been in the field all those years; it would have been a rusted, useless hulk if it had. Even though the Socialists had stopped work on new barrels for so long, the Army had carefully greased this one and stored it in a garage, in case it was ever wanted again. Morrell gave the General Staff-not his favorite outfit-reluctant credit for that. He didn't know what he would have done if he'd had to start altogether from scratch.
Sentries at the gate saluted. "Good morning, Colonel," they chorused.