Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Shortly before 2300, the commander of the Marine detachment came onto the bridge. “About an hour away, eh, Captain?” he said.

“That’s right, Major,” Sam answered. Mike Murphy outranked him-except that nobody on a ship outranked her skipper. Murphy understood that, fortunately. He was a black Irishman with eyes as blue as a Siamese cat’s-bluer than Sam’s, which took doing. Carsten went on, “Your men are ready?”

“Ready as they’ll ever be.” Murphy pointed into the darkness. “They’re by the boats, and they’ll be in ’em in nothing flat.” He snapped his fingers.

“Good enough,” Sam said, and hoped it would be.

Not quite an hour later, the shape of the western horizon changed. It had been as smooth and flat there as in any other direction. No more. That deeper blackness was land: the coast of the Confederate States of America. “Here we are, sir,” Pat Cooley said. “If that’s not Ocracoke Island dead ahead, my career just hit a mine and sank.”

So did mine, Sam thought. The Navy Department might blame an exec who’d been conning a ship for botched navigation. The Navy Department would without the tiniest fragment of doubt blame that ship’s skipper. And so it should. The destroyer escort was his ship. This was his responsibility. Nothing on God’s green earth this side of death or disabling injury could take it off his shoulders.

“Send a petty officer forward with a lead and a sounding line,” Sam said, an order more often heard in the riverboat Navy than on the Atlantic. But he didn’t want the Josephus Daniels running aground, and she drew a lot more water than any river monitor. She needed some water under her keel. Cooley nodded and obeyed.

Feet thudded on the deck. “Sir, we’ve spotted a light about half a mile south of here!” a sailor exclaimed. “Looks like it’s what we want!”

It wouldn’t be the Ocracoke lighthouse at the southwestern tip of the island; that had gone dark at the beginning of the war. If you didn’t already know where you were in these waters, the Confederates didn’t want you here. Major Murphy quivered like a hunting hound. “I’d best join my men, I think,” he said, and left the bridge.

“Very pretty navigation, Pat,” Sam said. “Bring us in a little closer and we’ll lower the boats and turn the Marines loose.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Cooley said, and then, to the engine room, “All ahead one third.” The Josephus Daniels crept southwest.

After a breathless little while, Sam said, “All stop.” The executive officer relayed the order. The ship bobbed in the water. Sam sent a sailor to Major Murphy to let him know everything was ready. Murphy had no doubt figured that out for himself, but the forms needed to be observed.

Lines creaking in the davits, the boats went down to the ocean. For this raid, they’d been fitted with motors. One by one, they chugged toward the shore that was only a low, darker line in the night. North Carolina barrier islands were nothing but glorified sandbanks. Every time a hurricane tore through, it rearranged the landscape pretty drastically. Sometimes, after a hurricane tore through, not much landscape-or land-was left in its path.

“Confederates at that station are going to think a hurricane hit ’em,” Sam murmured.

He didn’t know he’d spoken aloud till Pat Cooley nodded and said, “Hell, yes-uh, sir.”

Grinning, Sam set a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Pat. We’re on the same page.”

Gunfire crackled across the water. Sam tensed. If something had gone wrong, if the bastards in butternut somehow knew the Marines were coming… In that case, the destroyer escort’s guns would have to do some talking of their own. The wireless operator looked up. “Sir, Major Murphy says everything’s under control.”

Sure enough, the gunfire died away. Sam had nothing to do but wait. He drummed his fingers on the metalwork in front of him. Waiting was always a big part of military life. Right this minute, it was also a hard part.

“There we go!” Pat Cooley pointed. Fire rose from the station.

“Yeah, there we go, all right,” Sam agreed. “Other question is, did the Confederates get off an alarm call before we finished overrunning the place?” He shrugged. “Well, we’ll find out.”

Not very much later, sailors peering over the starboard rail called, “Boats coming back!” Sam almost said something like, Stand by to repel boarders! He wondered when the skipper of a ship this size last issued an order like that. But these boarders were on his side-or they’d damned well better be.

Raising boats was harder than lowering them. He had nets out against the sides of the ship for the Marines and their prisoners-he hoped they’d have prisoners-to climb if the crew couldn’t do it. But they managed. He went down to the deck and met Major Murphy there. “Everything go well?” he asked.

“Well enough, Captain,” the Marine officer answered. “We lost one man dead, and we have several wounded we brought back.” The groans on deck would have told Sam that if Murphy hadn’t. The Marine went on, “But we destroyed that station, and we’ve brought back prisoners to question and samples of Confederate Y-ranging gear for the fellows with thick glasses and slide rules to look at. What they do with the stuff is up to them, but we got it. We did our job.”

“Sounds good,” Sam said. “Now my job is to make sure we deliver the goods. Is everybody back aboard ship?”

“I think so,” Major Murphy said.

An indignant Confederate came up to them. “Are you the captain of this vessel?” he demanded of Sam. “I must protest this-this act of piracy!” He sounded like an angry rabbit.

“Go ahead and protest all you please, pal,” Sam said genially. “And you can call me Long John Silver, too.” Major Murphy and several nearby Marines spluttered. Sam went to the rail to make sure no boats or Marines were unaccounted for. Satisfied, he hurried back up to the bridge.

“Are we ready to leave town, sir?” Pat Cooley asked.

“And then some,” Sam said. “Make our course 135. All ahead full.”

“All ahead full,” Cooley echoed, and passed the order to the engine room. “Course is… 135.” He sounded slightly questioning, to let Sam change his mind without losing face if he wanted to.

But Sam didn’t want to. “Yes, 135, Pat,” he said. “I really do want to head southeast, because that’s the last direction the Confederates will look for us. Once we get away, we can swing wide and come back. But I figure most of the search’ll be to the north, and I want to get away from land-based air the best way I know how. So-135.”

Cooley nodded. “Aye aye, sir-135 it is.” The Josephus Daniels steamed away from the North Carolina coast at her sedate top speed.

Brigadier General Irving Morrell did not like getting pushed around by the Confederates. They’d done it in Ohio, and now they were doing it in Pennsylvania. They had the machines they needed to go forward. He didn’t have as many machines as he needed to stop them. It was as simple as that.

Men… Well, how much did men count in this new mechanized age? The United States had more of them than the Confederate States did. The question was, so what?

A nervous-looking POW stood in front of Morrell. In the other man’s beat-up boots, Morrell would have been nervous, too. He said, “Name, rank, and pay number.”

An interpreter turned the question into Spanish. A torrent of that language came back. The interpreter said, “His name is Jose Maria Castillo. He is a senior private-we would say a PFC. His pay number is 6492711.”

“Thanks.” Morrell studied Senior Private Castillo. The prisoner from the Empire of Mexico was medium-sized, skinny, swarthy, with mournful black eyes and a big, bushy mustache like the ones a lot of Confederate soldiers had worn during the Great War. His mustard-yellow uniform would have given good camouflage in the deserts on Mexico’s northern border. Here in western Pennsylvania, it stood out much more. Morrell said, “Ask him what unit he’s in and what their orders were.”