Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Two other destroyers cruised with the Townsend, a reconnaissance in force north of Kauai. The American powers that be wanted to tell the Japs the Sandwich Islands weren’t going to be their ham and cheese on rye. That was what the American authorities wanted to say, yeah, but they were liable to be offering the patrol up as an hors d’oeuvre.

Fritz Gustafson kept things short and to the point: “Give me lots of ammo. Can’t do much without it.” There was a loader’s notion of practicality.

As usual, the time between the call to general quarters and the appearance of enemy fighters seemed an eternity and an eyeblink at the same time. One of the 40mm mounts on another destroyer opened up. Tracers tiger-striped the sky. Shells burst here, there, everywhere. The only trouble was, George couldn’t spot any airplanes but the U.S. fighters.

“Spring fever,” Dalby said scornfully.

“Better too soon than too late,” Gustafson said. That was thoroughly practical, too.

And then everybody spotted the Japs. The American fighters zoomed toward them. All three destroyers put up a curtain of anti-aircraft fire. Japanese fighters rushed ahead to hold the enemy away from the torpedo-carriers and dive bombers they shepherded. Almost at the same time, two fighters plunged into the Pacific. One carried the Rising Sun, the other the eagle in front of crossed swords.

George pointed. “Torpedo bomber, coming at us!”

He didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so ugly in all his life. In fact, the airplane carrying the torpedo under its belly-offset slightly to the left-was smoothly streamlined. The torpedo itself was a straight tube with a bluntly curved nose and with fins at the stern: a splendid piece of industrial design. But it was designed to sink his ship and to kill him. If that didn’t make it ugly in his sight, nothing could.

Streams of tracers converged on the Japanese aircraft. George wasn’t the only one who’d spotted it. The pilot had to fly straight and low to launch his fish. That left him a perfect, and perfectly vulnerable, target while he did it. He was a brave man; he did what he’d been trained to do. His airplane exploded into fire. But the torpedo was in the water by then.

“HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththee-” George prayed in a rapid gabble. The prayer he chose took him by surprise. He’d turned Catholic because Connie made it plain she wasn’t about to marry him if he didn’t. He hadn’t thought he took it seriously, not till now. Somebody’d said there were no atheists in foxholes. The deck of a ship under torpedo attack evidently counted.

The Townsend was a greyhound of the sea, capable of well over thirty knots. Why, then, did she feel as if she were nailed in place? The heeling, surging turn she made might have been filmed in slow motion. It might have been, but it wasn’t. It took her out of harm’s way, for the torpedo raced past her stern.

“Thank you, Jesus.” Fritz Gustafson used words as if he had to pay for them. He packed a lot of meaning into those three.

Meatballs on its wings and fuselage, a Jap fighter shot up the destroyer. Bullets clanged and snarled and whined in wild ricochets. Wounded men screeched. Every antiaircraft gun on the ship tried to knock the pilot into the Pacific. He darted away just above the wavetops, untouched or at least still flying.

Fremont Dalby gave credit where it was due: “He’s a motherfucking son of a bitch, but he’s a motherfucking son of a bitch with balls. I hope he gets home.”

“I don’t.” George was not inclined to be chivalrous.

Then, suddenly, the sky was full of airplanes-airplanes blazoned with the American eagle and swords. They threw themselves at the Japs. The Army was on the ball after all. Ignoring the enemy fighters where they could, the fighters bored in on the torpedo-carriers and dive bombers-those were the ones that could sink ships. The Americans outnumbered the Japanese aircraft. Before long, the Japanese decided they’d had enough and flew off in the direction from which they’d come.

No dive bombers had attacked the Townsend. George was pretty sure of it. Even near misses kicked up great columns of water and threw splinters of bomb casing every which way. He couldn’t have ignored anything like that in his singleminded ammunition-passing… could he?

One of the other destroyers hadn’t been so lucky. Black, greasy smoke poured from her. A bomb had burst near her bow. She wasn’t dead in the water, but she couldn’t do much more than crawl. Even as he watched, her starboard list got worse.

Sailors bobbed in the water not far from her. The bomb blast had blown them off her deck. Some-corpses-floated face down. Others struggled to stay above the surface. Still others, in life jackets, didn’t have that worry.

As the Townsend swung toward her stricken comrade, the exec’s voice blared from the intercom: “All hands! Lower lines and nets and life rings for rescue!”

Sailors rushed to obey. The other destroyer slumped lower in the water. They weren’t going to be able to save her. Men started coming up on her deck from below. Some of them helped wounded buddies. They were going to abandon ship.

“That could be us,” George said.

He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud till Dalby nodded. “That damn near was us last year,” the gun chief said. “We pick up these sorry bastards and then figure out what to do next.”

Pausing to take on survivors carried risks of its own. If a Japanese submersible prowled these waters, the Townsend would be a sitting duck for it. George thought of his father. But the senior George Enos thought the war was over when his destroyer went down. George, Jr., knew better. Again, he kept an eye peeled for periscopes. This time, no one reproved him. He was a long way from the only sailor doing the same thing.

“Pull hard, you lazy fuckers! Put your backs into it! Haul that line!” a petty officer screamed. By his orders, he might have been serving aboard a nineteenth-century ship of the line. But the destroyer’s men weren’t swinging from one tack to the other; they were bringing a sailor up on deck.

He clung to the rope for dear life. His feet thudded against the side of the ship. “God bless you!” he gasped when he came aboard. He got down on hands and knees and puked his guts out. Nobody could possibly have blamed him for that; he was covered from head to foot in heavy fuel oil, so that he looked as if he’d just escaped from a minstrel show. But if you swallowed much of that stuff, it would kill you as surely as a bullet would. Heaving up your guts was one of the best things you could do.

“Ain’t this a fuckup?” one of the rescued men said as he stood there dripping. “Ain’t this just a grand fuckup? We wanted to see if there was Japs there. We found out, all right. Didn’t we just?”

Didn’t we just? The mournful words echoed inside George’s head. He turned to Fremont Dalby and said, “I wonder if we’ll be able to hang on to the Sandwich Islands.”

“We wouldn’t have any trouble if the Japs were the only thing on our plate,” Dalby said. “We could lick ’em easy enough. But this is the ass end of the goddamn war. Whatever they can spare from fighting the CSA and the big mess in the Atlantic and holding Canada down-whatever they can spare, we get that.”

“It’s not enough,” George said.

Dalby shrugged. “They haven’t thrown us out yet. They’re not fighting anybody else, either. But the Sandwich Islands are even harder for them to get at than they are for us.”

“I guess so.” George knew he sounded dubious. He felt dubious. He’d seen too much to feel any other way. And if he hadn’t, one look at the draggled survivors from the other destroyer would have been plenty to show him.