American Front

He tried to think like Admiral Dewey. If they could boot the British out of the Sandwich Islands, they booted them all the way across the Pacific, to Singapore and Australia. They'd have only the one chance, though; if things went wrong here, British battleships would be steaming up and down the west coast of the United States for the rest of the war, and there'd be damn all anybody would be able to do about it.

"So-we roll the dice," he muttered. If the Pacific Fleet took the Sandwich Islands away from England, the USA would have an easier time resupplying them than the British did now. They'd run around the chain so the limeys wouldn't spot them on the way in, and now they were picking up fuel for the last run on Pearl Harbor. One good surprise and the islands would be theirs.

One good surprise- Alarms began to ring. "Battle stations! Battle stations!" came the cry. "Aeroplane spotted. Not known whether hostile."

The fleet had launched a pair of aeroplanes a couple of hours before, to scout out what lay ahead. But were these American aeroplanes returning, or British machines doing some scouting of their own? If they were British, the fleet had to knock them out of the sky before they could report back to the Royal Navy and to the land-based guns defending Pearl Harbor.

Carsten's battle station was at the starboard bow, loading five-inch shells into one of the guns of the Dakota's secondary armament. He threw his cigarette over the side as he ran to the sponson. Bringing it in would have been his own funeral, except that the gu

Behind him, the hose went back aboard the Vulcan, as if an elephant had owned a retractable trunk. They had enough fuel on board for the attack, and they could worry about everything else later.

"You ready, Sam?" Kidde asked.

Carsten would have bet any money you cared to name that the gu

"Aye aye, 'Cap'n,' " Carsten answered, with a salute more extravagant than he would have given Dewey. "Cap'n" Kidde chuckled; he'd had the inevitable nickname for as long as he'd been in the Navy.

The sponson was tiny and cramped, with plenty of sharp metal corners to gouge your legs or your arms if you weren't careful. Bare electric bulbs in wire cages on the ceiling shed a harsh, yellow light. The place stank of paint and brass and nitrocellulose and old sweat, odors no amount of swabbing could ever wash away.

Kidde patted the breech of the gun- affectionately, as if it were a trollop's backside in some Barbary Coast dive in San Francisco. "Wish we had some high-explosive shells for this baby along with armor piercing. She'd make a hell of an antiaircraft gun, wouldn't she?"

"Damned if she wouldn't," Carsten said. "Have to fuse 'em just right, to burst around the aeroplane, but damned if she wouldn't. You ought to talk to somebody about that one, Mate, you really should."

"Ahh, it's just stack gas," Kidde said with a shrug. By then, the other loader and the gun layer were in their places. Luke Hoskins, the number-two shell jerker, was slower than he should have been. Kidde reamed him up one side and down the other with a tongue sharp enough to chip paint.

"Have a heart, 'Cap'n' Kidde," Hoskins said. "First decent shit I've had in three days, and the goddamn battle stations sounds when I got my pants around my ankles in the aft head."

"Tough," Kidde said flatly. "Next time, don't waste time wipin' your ass. It won't matter what you smell like-we get into a real scrap and we'll all be shittin' ourselves any which way."

Carsten laughed till he incautiously jerked around and barked his shin on the edge of an ammunition rack. He swore, but kept on laughing. Part of that was good nature, part of it nerves. He didn't try to figure out which part was which.

A ru

The gun crew looked at one another. If they were staying at battle stations, that meant they'd be heading toward Pearl Harbor for the attack. And, sure enough, the rumble of the big steam engines got louder as they picked up steam. The Vulcan and the rest of the support ships would be dropping behind now-this was a job for the warships and the transports that carried a regiment of Marines and a whole division of Army men toward Oahu.

Another man stuck his head inside the blazing-hot metal box where Carsten and his comrades waited for orders. Voice cracking with excitement, the sailor said, "Word is, the limeys ain't done much with their fleet, an' a lot of it's still in the harbor. We caught 'em with their pants down."

"You think it's really true?" Hoskins breathed.

"Why not?" Sam Carsten said. " Battle stations got you that way, didn't it?" The other seaman glared at him, but he wasn't easy to get angry at.

"If it's so," Kidde said, "you can serve those Englishmen up with tea and crumpets, because they're di

Carsten peered through one of the narrow vision slits the sponson afforded. Torpedo-boat destroyers sprinted ahead of the battleships, their creamy wakes vivid against the deep blue of the tropical Pacific. The Dakota and her fellow capital ships were still picking up speed, too; the steel deck hummed and shuddered against his feet as the engines reached full power. They had to be making better than twenty knots. At that rate, it wouldn't be long until "There it is!" he exclaimed excitedly. "Land on the horizon! We'll give 'em what-for any minute now. Well- Holy Jesus!"

"What?" The rest of the gun crew, the ones who weren't looking out themselves, all shouted the question together.

"Harbor defense guns just opened up on us. They may not have known we were here, but they sure as hell do now."

He didn't see the shell splash into the sea. Almost a minute later, though, the sound of the great ca

And then, bare seconds after that, the battleship's main armament cut loose, the two fourteen-inch guns in the forward superfiring turret and then the three from the A turret just below and ahead of it. He'd heard the noise from the distant British ca

Sailors crowded up to see what they could see. The shore and the harbor wouldn't be in range of their secondary armament for some time to come. It was like having a moving picture unreel right before your eyes, Carsten thought, except this had sound-all the sound in the world, not some piano-pounding accompanist-and bright colors.

More thunderclaps came from the guns of the other battleships in the fleet. The shore defenses sent up answering gouts of smoke and flame. This time, Carsten spied the splashes from a couple of shells. If you took a Ford, loaded it with explosives, and dropped it into the sea from a great height, you'd get a plume of water like that. Some of the splashes were close enough to the destroyers for the upthrown seawater to drench the men aboard.