“Nah, it’s nothing like that, ‘Cap’n,’” Carsten answered. “I was hoping I’d get out of the damn sun for a while, but Vic here just reminded me the seasons do a flip-flop down there.”
Kidde let out an undignified snort. “Old son, that ain’t gonna matter a hill of beans. How long you think we’re going to stay in Valparaiso? Not anywhere near long enough to get to know the senoritas, I bet. Once we refit and refuel there, we’re gonna head south to join the Chilean fleet. I don’t care whether it’s summer or not, your poor, miserable hide won’t burn in the Straits of Magellan.”
Sam considered that. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said happily-so happily that Kidde snorted again.
“Listen, Sam,” he said, “sunburn’s not the only thing that can go wrong with you, you know. We get down there, you’ll find out what kind of a sailor you are. The Dakota’s a good sea boat, and she’s gonna need to be. Down in the Straits, they’ve got waves that’ll toss around a ship as big as this one like she was a wooden toy in a tin tub with a rambunctious five-year-old in it. I’ve made that passage a couple-three times, and you can keep it for all of me.”
“‘Cap’n,’if I start puking, I know it’ll be over sooner or later, no matter how bad I feel while it’s going on,” Carsten said. Ever so gently, he touched his flaming face. “This here sunburn never stops.”
“I’m gonna remember you said that,” Vic Crosetti told him, “and if I ain’t too sick myself, I’m gonna throw it in your face.”
“And if you are that sick, you’ll throw somethin’ else in his face,” Hiram Kidde said. “I’ve done my share of puking down in that part of the world, I’ll tell you. You take a beating there, you and the ship both.”
That made Sam think of something else: “How’s our steering mechanism going to do if we take a pounding like that? The repairs were a pretty quick job.”
Kidde grunted. “That’s a good question.” He laughed without humor. “And we get to find out what the good answer is. Hope we don’t have to do it the hard way.”
“Can’t be any harder than the last time,” Crosetti said. “No matter what Argentina’s got, we ain’t sailin’ straight at the whole British and Japanese fleets-and a damn good thing we ain’t, too, anybody wants to know.”
“Amen,” Sam said solemnly. Hiram Kidde nodded. After a moment’s contemplation, Crosetti crossed himself.
“New York took the next biggest beating in the Battle of the Three Navies after us, now that I think about it,” Kidde said. “Looks like they’re sending what they can most afford to be rid of at the Sandwich Islands.”
“That makes sense to me,” Carsten said. “It probably means they don’t think the Argentines are very good, either.”
“Listen,” Hiram Kidde said positively, “if we fought the goddamn Royal Navy to a standstill, we ain’t gonna play against a tougher team anywhere in the whole damn world-and that includes the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet. The limeys are bastards, but they’re tough bastards.”
Vic Crosetti started to say something-maybe agreement, maybe argument-but klaxons started hooting all over the ship, summoning the sailors to battle stations. Everyone ran, and ran hard. Sam ran as hard as he could. He’d never yet beaten Hiram Kidde to the five-inch gun they both served. Since the two of them were starting from the same place, and since he was younger than Kidde and had longer legs, he thought this was going to be the time.
It wasn’t. Kidde stuck to him like a burr on the deck. Once they went below, the gunner’s mate’s broad shoulders and bulldog instincts counted for more than Sam’s inches and youth. The “Cap’n” shoved men aside, and stuck an elbow in their ribs if they didn’t move fast enough to suit him. He got to the sponson a couple of lengths ahead of Carsten.
The rest of the gun’s crew tumbled in seconds later. “All right, we’re ready,” Luke Hoskins said, his hand on a shell, ready to heave it to Sam. “What do we do now?”
Kidde was peering out of the sponson, which gave a very limited field of view through a couple of slit windows. “I don’t see anything,” he said, “not that that proves one hell of a lot. Maybe somebody here or aboard one of the destroyers heard a submersible through the hydrophones or spotted a periscope.”
“If they’d spotted a periscope,” Sam said, “we’d be making flank speed, to get the hell away from it.” Hoskins and the rest of the shell-heavers and gun-layers nodded emphatic agreement.
But Hiram Kidde spoke in thoughtful tones: “Maybe, maybe not. Remember how that aeroplane decoyed us out of Pearl and into that whole flock of subs? They might be letting us see one so we don’t think they’ve got any more waiting up ahead.”
“Mm, maybe,” Sam said. “Wouldn’t like to charge straight into a pack of ’em, and that’s the Lord’s truth.” His wave encompassed the vast empty reaches of the Pacific. “This isn’t the best place to get torpedoed.”
Hoskins spoke with great authority: “Sam, there ain’t no good place to get torpedoed.” Nobody argued with that, either.
The klaxons stopped hooting. Commander Grady stuck his head into the sponson a moment later. “Good job, men,” the commander of the starboard secondary armament said. “Only a drill this time.”
Luke Hoskins let out a sigh of relief. Sam was relieved, too: relieved and angry at the same time. “Damnation,” he said. “It’s almost like the shore patrol raiding a cheap whorehouse when you’re the next in line. I’m all pumped up and ready, and now I don’t get to do anything.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Kidde said. “Nothing wrong with shore leave in Valparaiso, no sir. Nothing wrong in Concepcion farther south, either. There’s some pretty, friendly-and pretty friendly, too,” he amended, noting his own pause, “senoritas in Chile, and that’s the truth.”
In more than twenty years in the Navy, Kidde had been to just about every port where U.S. warships were welcome-and some where they’d had to make themselves welcome. He had considerable experience in matters pertaining to senoritas, and wasn’t shy about sharing it.
Sam hadn’t been so many places. His working assumption was that he’d be able to find something or other in the female line almost anywhere, though, and he hadn’t been wrong about that very often. So, instead of asking about women, he said, “What’s Valparaiso like?”
“Last time I was there was-let me think-1907, I guess it was,” Kidde answered. “It was beat up then; they’d had themselves a hell of an earthquake the year before, and they were still putting things back together.”
“That’s the same year as the San Francisco quake, isn’t it-1906, I mean?” Sam said.
“Now that I think about it, I guess it is.” Kidde laughed. “Bad time to be anywhere on the Pacific Coast.”
Luke Hoskins said, “What were the parts that weren’t wrecked like?”
“Oh, it’s a port town,” the gunner’s mate answered. “Good harbor, biggest one in Chile unless I’m wrong, but it’s open on the north. When it blows hard, the way it does in winter down there-June through September, I mean, not our winter-the storms can chew blazes out of ships tied up there. I hear tell, though, they’ve built, or maybe they’re building-don’t know which-a breakwater that’ll make that better’n it was.”
“Not storm season now, then,” Hoskins said.
“Not in Valparaiso, no,” Kidde answered. “Not in Concepcion, either. Down by the Straits of Magellan, that’s a different story.”
“You know what I wish?” Sam said. “I wish there was a canal through Central America somewhere, like there is at Suez. That would sure make shipping a lot easier.”
“It sure would-for the damn Rebs,” Hiram Kidde said. “Caribbean’s already a Confederate lake. You want them moving battleships through so they could come up the West Coast? No thanks.”
“I meant in peacetime,” Carsten said. For once, his flush had nothing to do with sunburn. He prided himself in thinking strategically; his buddies sometimes told him he sounded like an officer. But he’d missed the boat this time.