He felt less and less guilt when he visited the whores on Hotel Street in Honolulu. He couldn’t bring Vera back. If he could have, he would have, and lived happily and faithfully ever after, too-he was sure of that. Being sure of it didn’t make it true, of course-one more thing he didn’t have to dwell on.
Vera was gone, though. He hadn’t even seen her into the ground. He’d been too badly hurt himself. He had to do something with those extra couple of inches. And he did, as often as liberty and the state of his wallet would let him. He felt terrible the first few times. After that, he just felt good, which was, after all, the point of lying down with a woman in the first place.
Those were interludes, though. Most of his time passed aboard the Ranger. He’d never served on a carrier before. His duties stayed the same: the Ranger’s five-inch guns were no different from the ones the Boise had mounted. The ship itself? That was a different story.
Boise’s first order of business had been to steam and to shoot. Ranger’s was to get airplanes where they needed to go. They did the fighting for her. If her own guns went off, it was a sure sign something had hit the fan somewhere.
As Rob Cullum dryly put it, “You notice they gave ’em to us. They figured we’d get into some shit now and again.”
“Think so, do you?” Pete answered, deadpan. The other sergeant grinned and thumped him on the back. It hurt, but Pete didn’t care. It was a sign he was fitting in, and he wanted nothing more.
Being a portable airstrip made Ranger a special kind of seagoing beast. The vast, echoing space of the hangar deck under the flight deck amazed Pete. That it was usually echoing with the snarl of power tools and with Navy mechanics’ inventive bad language as they worked on fighters, dive-bombers, and torpedo planes mattered little. The space was what got to him.
Carrying all those planes meant carrying thousands of gallons of the high-octane gasoline they burned along with the ship’s own fuel oil. Fire at sea was any sailing man’s worst nightmare. Fire at sea aboard an aircraft carrier … “We’re nothing but a torch with a flight deck, are we?” Pete said when he got around to thinking about that.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say so,” Sergeant Cullum answered after a few seconds’ consideration.
“No, huh? What would you call us, then?” Pete challenged.
“More like a furnace with a flight deck,” the other Marine answered. “We’d burn a hell of a lot hotter than some lousy torch.” It was Pete’s turn to consider, but not for long. He nodded. Cullum was right.
No surprise, then, that the Ranger ran more firefighting drills than any other ship Pete had known. No surprise, either, that her sailors and Marines took them more seriously than he was used to. They did their share of goofing off and then some, but not about that.
And no surprise that they were cynical anyhow. “Basically, we better not catch on fire,” Cullum said. “Once we go up, odds are we’re fucked.”
“That’s about what I thought,” Pete said. “I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.”
“Oh, you’re wrong about all kinds of shit,” Cullum answered easily. “But not about that.”
“Japs must know, huh? I mean, their carriers gotta work the same way.” Having already been aboard one warship bombed and sunk from the air, imagining more dive-bombers and torpedo planes going after the Ranger made Pete feel as if a goose were walking over his grave-probably a goose with a radial engine and with meatballs on its wings.
The twist to Rob Cullum’s mouth said he understood the touch of those heavy webbed feet-or were they tires slamming down on a flight deck? “They may suspect,” he agreed. “Yeah, they just may. How many of our flattops did they sink when we slugged it out west of here?”
“Too many.” Pete couldn’t remember the exact number. All of them but Ranger, was what it amounted to. He did his damnedest to look on the bright side of things: “When the shipyards really get rolling, we’ll build ’em faster’n the Japs can hope to sink ’em. What we’ve gotta do is stand the gaff in the meantime.”
Cullum saluted him as if he’d sprouted stars on his shoulders. No, fat gold stripes on his sleeves, for the other sergeant said, “Thank you, Admiral King. Now that you’ve got all our troubles wrapped up with a pretty pink ribbon around ’em, you should write FDR a nice letter and let him know how he needs to be running the goddamn war.”
“Ah, fuck off,” Pete replied without heat. When guys didn’t chin about women or gambling or sports or the crappy chow in the galley, strategy often reared its ugly head. “Tell me this, man. Suppose I was in charge.”
“We’d be really screwed,” Cullum said at once.
“Odds are,” Pete admitted, which made his buddy blink. He went on, “But how could we be screwed any worse’n we already are?”
That did make Cullum stop and think. “Well,” he said at last, “in the big fight the slanties might’ve sunk Ranger, too. Then we wouldn’t have any carriers operating out of Pearl at all. Past that, though, it couldn’t hardly be fubar’d any worse than it is right now.”
“See?” Pete said triumphantly.
“Hey, a stopped clock is right twice a day. That puts it one up on you,” Cullum said. Pete flipped him off. Slowly, without any fuss, they drifted back to work.
Spring was in the air outside of Madrid. All things considered, Vaclav Jezek could have done without it. The bitter cold of winter in central Spain-a nasty surprise, that-kept down the stink of unburied and badly buried bodies, of which there were always far too many. It also fought the reek of latrine trenches, and of the waste that never got as far as the latrine trenches.
Pretty soon, flowers would bloom. They’d smell sweet, but not sweet enough to quell the stenches. Birds would sing, when you could hear them through the rumble of artillery and the machine guns’ deadly chatter.
When Vaclav pissed and moaned about it, Benjamin Halevy eyed him with his usual air of detached amusement. “I didn’t know we had a poet among us,” the Jew said.
“Oh, fuck you!” Vaclav snarled.
Halevy tapped the little metal star that marked him as a second lieutenant. “That’s ‘Oh, fuck you, sir!’ ” he said.
Vaclav laughed. What were you going to do? In the line, you made your own fun. If you didn’t, you sure as hell wouldn’t have any. A few hundred meters away, the Fascist bastards on the Nationalist side were no doubt cracking the same kind of dumb jokes.
Then the Czech sniper stopped laughing. Homesickness and weariness hit him like a blackjack behind the ear. “Christ, I wish I were back in Prague!” he burst out. “I’ve been carrying a gun for three and a half years. I’m fucking sick of it.”
“Here. Have a knock of this.” Halevy offered his canteen. Vaclav took it. It was full of Spanish brandy-not good, but strong. He swigged, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve and handed back the canteen. The Jew went on, “Some of the people here started two years before you did, you know.”
“That’s right!” Vaclav said in surprise. Not many countries had got it before Czechoslovakia did, but Spain was one of them. He looked around. It was the landscape of war, all right: trenches, shell holes, barbed wire, ragged and muddy uniforms. How many times had this stretch of ground gone back and forth between Nationalists and Republicans? How many more would it change hands till somebody finally won, if anyone ever did? Better not to wonder about such things. Instead, Vaclav asked, “Got a cigarette?”
“That’s also ‘Got a cigarette, sir?’ ” the Jew observed, but he pulled out a pack and handed it to Vaclav. The smokes were Spanish: even harsher than the stove polish and barbed wire the French put in their cigarettes. Given a choice, Vaclav would have opted for a better brand. Given a choice, he never would have come to Spain to begin with. Beggars didn’t get choices like that. He took a cigarette, scraped a match against the much-repaired sole of his boot, and hollowed his cheeks to draw in smoke.