“Beats me,” Jorgenson answered. “Maybe it’s a drill.” He was even bigger than Ekberg, and almost as fair, though neither of them matched the skipper.
“Now hear this!” The PA system crackled to life. Lieutenant Zwilling’s harsh voice got no sweeter blaring from the speakers: “Y-ranging gear has picked up an unidentified aircraft approaching from the south. Exercise caution before opening fire, as it may be friendly. Repeat, exercise caution before opening fire, as it may be friendly. But do not endanger the ship.”
George swore, and he wasn’t the only one. The exec wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. Don’t shoot the airplane down, but don’t let it make an attack run, either? How was that supposed to work?
A minute or so later, the PA came on again. “This is the captain,” Sam Carsten said. “The ship comes first. If we have to fish some flyboys out of the drink afterwards, we’ll do that. We’re trying to find out who’s in the airplane, but no luck so far. If we open up on the wireless, we tell everybody in the North Atlantic where we’re at, and we don’t want to do that.”
“See, the skipper tells us what’s what,” Jorgenson said. “The exec just bullshits.”
“Lieutenant Cooley, he was all right,” Ekberg said. “This guy, though-you can keep him.”
“Damn airplane ought to be one of ours,” Jorgenson said. “Don’t see how the limeys could’ve snuck a carrier this far west without us knowing.” He paused. “’Course, sometimes they fly fighters off their merchantmen. One of those assholes carrying a bomb could be real bad news.”
“Confederate seaplane?” George suggested.
Jorgenson frowned. “Right at the end of their range. They couldn’t get home again unless they refuel somewhere.” The frown turned into a scowl. “They might do that, though. Maybe the limeys have a station or two on the Newfoundland coast. We can’t keep an eye on everything. So yeah, maybe. Whatever it is, we’ll find out pretty damn quick.” He swept the southern sky with a gun commander’s binoculars.
Somebody farther astern spotted the airplane first and let out a yell. George had a shell in the breech of each gun in the mount. He was ready to open up as soon as Jorgenson gave the word. The gun chief swung the twin 40mms to bear on the target.
“It is a seaplane,” he said, still peering through the field glasses. George felt smart for about fifteen seconds. Then Jorgenson went on, “It’s one of ours. That’s a Curtiss-37, sure as shit. Stand easy, boys-we’re all right.”
“Don’t shoot! Repeat-do not shoot!” Lieutenant Zwilling blared a few seconds later. “The airplane has been positively identified as nonhostile.”
George needed a moment to translate that into English. Then he realized the exec said the same thing as Jorgenson, though not so clearly.
The seaplane buzzed past, the eagle and crossed swords plainly visible on its sides. It waggled its wings at the Josephus Daniels and flew on toward the north. “Nice not to need to fight for a change,” George said, and none of the other sailors at the mount told him he was wrong.
When a bath meant a quick dip in a creek, Jonathan Moss did what anybody else would: he mostly did without. Sometimes, he got too smelly and buggy to stand himself, and went in for a little while. He came out with his teeth chattering-fall was in the air, even in Georgia.
“Jesus, I miss hot water!” he said.
“Yeah, no kidding.” Nick Cantarella had just taken a brief bath, too. “We’re both skinny bastards these days, you know?”
Moss ran a hand along his ribs. “You mean this isn’t a xylophone?”
“Funny. Funny like a crutch. And you’ve got more meat on your bones than I do,” Cantarella said.
“Not much,” Moss said. “You started out built like a soda straw, and I didn’t. That’s the only difference.”
They both got back into the ragged dungarees and collarless work shirts that would have been the uniform of black guerrillas in the CSA had the guerrillas enjoyed anything so fancy as a uniform. In one way, the only difference between them and the rest of Spartacus’ band was their lighter skin. In another…
“You ofays!” Spartacus called. He used the word as casually as a white Confederate would have used niggers. Most of the time, it meant the Confederate whites the guerrillas were fighting. But it could mean any white at all, too.
“What is it, boss?” Jonathan Moss asked. The band didn’t run on anything like military discipline, but Spartacus fancied his title of respect.
“How come the United States done lost the War of Secession? You lick them damn Confederates then, nobody have to worry ’bout ’em since.”
Moss and Cantarella looked at each other. Any schoolchild in either country knew the answer to that, or at least the short version. But Spartacus and the rest of the blacks with him were never schoolchildren. The Confederate States always did everything they could to discourage Negroes from getting any kind of education. They didn’t want them to be anything more than beasts of burden with thumbs.
“Shall I do the honors, or would you rather?” Cantarella asked.
“I can, unless you’re hot to trot,” Moss said.
Cantarella waved him forward. “Be my guest.”
“Well, the first thing that happened was, the Confederates had a good general in Virginia and we had a lousy one,” Moss said. “McClellan was never a match for Robert E. Lee-not even close. And Abe Lincoln didn’t get rid of McClellan and put in somebody who knew what he was doing. We blame Lincoln for a lot, and it starts right there.”
“He wanted to be good to niggers, though,” Spartacus said. “Ofays down here don’t reckon so, they don’t secede in the first place.”
That was probably true. From the U.S. viewpoint, it was one more thing for which to blame Lincoln. If someone sensible like Douglas had won the election…In that case, there wouldn’t have been a War of Secession in the first place.
“It gets worse,” Moss said. “Lincoln couldn’t do anything when England and France recognized the CSA after Lee beat McClellan up in Pennsylvania. Neither could anybody else in the United States.”
“What difference recognizing the Confederate States make?” Spartacus said. “They there whether they recognized or not.”
“After the limeys and frogs recognized them, they broke our blockade,” Moss said. “They had better navies than ours. Then they shipped the Confederates whatever they needed, and got cotton back. And they could blockade U.S. ports if we didn’t make peace with the CSA.”
“They could, and they did,” Nick Cantarella put in.
“They ganged up on us again twenty years later, after the Confederates bought Chihuahua and Sonora from Mexico,” Moss said. “When we lost the Second Mexican War, that’s what made us decide to line up with Germany. That way, we had a…what would you call it, Nick?”
“A counterweight,” Cantarella said.
“There you go.” Moss nodded. “With Germany on our side, we had a counterweight to England and France. And that’s how things have been for the last sixty years.”
“How come y’all don’t let niggers in the USA when things is tough fo’ us down here?” Spartacus might not know much about what had happened a long time ago, but he had that piece of recent history straight. Chances were every Negro in the CSA did.
Moss and Cantarella eyed each other again. They both knew the reason. They both feared it would be unpalatable to the Negroes around them. And they both feared the guerrillas would recognize a lie.
Sighing, Moss told the truth: “A lot of whites in the USA don’t like Negroes much better than whites here do.”
A low hum ran through the guerrillas. It was, Moss judged with more than a little surprise, a hum of approval. “Leastways you don’t put no sugar on a spoonful o’ shit,” was how Spartacus put it.
“I don’t care if them Yankee ofays likes us or not,” another guerrilla said. “Ain’t never had no ofays like us. Don’t hardly know what I’d do if’n they did. Long as they ain’t tryin’ to murder us, that’ll do fine.”