The Grapple

Rhodes came up to Chester a couple of hours later, a small, bemused smile on his face. He glanced around to make sure the new lieutenant wasn’t anywhere close by before remarking, “Looks like we’ve got a tiger by the tail.”

“Yes, sir. I thought so, too,” Martin said. “You going to turn him loose?”

“I sure am,” the company commander answered. “He needs to find out what he can do, and so do we. And if things go wrong, well, you’ve got your platoon again, that’s all.”

“If I come back,” Chester said. “I’m not go

Lieutenant Lavochkin didn’t like that. “I don’t need you to hold my hand, Sergeant.”

“I’m not doing it to hold your hand, sir,” Chester said evenly. “I’m doing it for my men.”

“In case I don’t cut it?”

“Yes, sir.” Martin didn’t beat around the bush.

Lavochkin gave him one of those singularly malignant stares. Chester just looked back. The young officer tossed his head. “Well, come on, then. We’ll see who learns something.”

The raid went in a little before midnight. Lavochkin knew enough to smear mud on his face to darken it. He carried a captured Confederate submachine gun along with the usual officer’s.45. He also had a Great War trench knife on his belt. Was he showing off, or had he been in some really nasty places before he got hurt? We’ll find out, Chester thought.

Lavochkin moved quietly. The Confederate machine-gun nest ahead sat on a small rise, but brush screened one approach most of the way up. Chester would have gone at it from that direction, too. Lavochkin slid forward as if he could see in the dark.

Suddenly, he stopped moving. “They’ve got wire, the bastards,” he said. He didn’t ask for a wire-cutter-he had one. A couple of soft twangs followed. “This way-stay low.” Chester flattened out like a toad under the wheels of a deuce-and-a-half. He got through.

Before long, he could hear the Confederates at the machine gun talking. He could smell their tobacco smoke, and see the glow of a cigarette coal. They had no idea U.S. soldiers were in the neighborhood.

“Everybody ready?” Lavochkin whispered. No one denied it. Chester was close enough to the lieutenant to see him nod. “All right, then,” he said. “At my signal, we take ’em. Remember, we want prisoners, but shoot first if you’re in trouble. Ru

“Yes, sir,” the soldier said softly. He was little and ski

Lavochkin’s signal was nothing if not dramatic. He pulled the pin from a grenade and tossed it about halfway between Ru

Naturally, the Confederates in the machine-gun nest started shooting at the noise and muzzle flashes. Chester saw the flame spurting from their weapons. He hoped Ru

Ru

Too late. Lavochkin cut him down with three accurate rounds from his submachine gun. Then he leaped down into the entrenchment. The rest of the U.S. soldiers followed. Chester hadn’t used a bayonet for anything but opening cans and holding a candle since trench raids a generation earlier. He discovered he still knew how. He stuck a machine gu

Seeing one of their buddies spitted like a pig made the rest of the Confederates quit trying to fight and surrender. “Let’s get ’em out of here,” Lavochkin said. “Get the guns off the tripods and take them, too.”

“Let’s get us out of here,” Chester said. “We woke up the rest of the butternut bustards.”

Sure as hell, shouts and ru

Intelligence officers took the prisoners away for grilling. In the trench from which they’d started out, Lavochkin eyed Chester Martin. “Well, Sergeant?” he said. “Do I pass?”

“So far, so good, sir,” Chester answered. “The other half of the test is, not doing that kind of shit real often. You know what I mean?” Lavochkin scowled at him, but slowly nodded.

George Enos thought the Josephus Daniels was a step down from the Townsend as a ship. She was smaller and older and slower and more crowded. But she seemed a tight ship, and a happy one, too. From what he’d seen and heard, those two went together almost as often as the cliche claimed.

He’d slept in a hammock on the Townsend. Having to sling one on the Josephus Daniels was no surprise, and no great disappointment. He started to make himself at home, learning, for instance, that her sailors hardly ever called her by her last name alone. He also found out that Josephus Daniels had been Secretary of the Navy during the Great War. After all the time he’d spent on the Townsend, he still didn’t know who Townsend was. With the ship at the bottom of the Gulf of California, he wasn’t likely to find out now.

Everyone liked the skipper. Sam Carsten’s craggy face and pale, pale hair kept trying to ring a bell in George’s mind. He’d seen Carsten somewhere before, and not in the Navy. He kept picturing an oak tree…

Nobody had a good word to say about the exec. That was also normal to the point of boredom. But people did speak well of the just-departed Pat Cooley. “This Zwilling item ain’t fit to carry Cooley’s jock,” said Petty Officer Second Class Clem Thurman, who was in charge of the 40mm gun near the bow whose crew George joined.

“No?” George said. Somebody was plainly meant to.

“Fuck, no.” Thurman spat a stream of tobacco juice into the Atlantic. “Cooley was the kind of guy who’d find out what you needed and pull strings to get it for you. This new one, he looks in the book for reasons to tell you no.” He spat again.

“That’s no good,” George said.

“Tell me about it,” Thurman said. “You ask me, this mission we’re on is no damn good, either. Ireland? I got nothin’ against micks-don’t get me wrong. We give them guns so they can yank on Churchill’s nuts, that’s great. We get our ass shot off tryin’ to give ’em guns-that’s a whole different story, Charlie.”

George looked east. Nothing but ocean ahead there. Nothing but ocean all around, ocean and the rest of the ships in the flotilla. None of those ships was a carrier. They didn’t have even a baby flattop along. The cruisers carried scout aircraft, but how much good would those do when enemy bombers appeared overhead? Not enough was the answer that occurred to George.

“Yeah, well, maybe we’re better off without an escort carrier,” Thurman said when he grumbled about it. “Eighteen knots? Hell, they can’t get out of their own way-and if we get jumped, thirty airplanes probably won’t be enough to stop the limeys, especially since most of ’em won’t be fighters.”