The Grapple

“Yes, sir,” Potter said. “If you ask me, our goal is to keep the Yankees out of Atlanta. We can’t afford to lose it, partly because of all the factories and partly because it’s such an important rail junction. Transit between the East Coast and everything from Alabama on west goes to hell if Atlanta falls, and that goes a long way toward losing the war for us. Objectives would have to do with containing the U.S. advance as close to the Georgia-Te

“And driving it back,” Patton said.

Potter shrugged. “If we can, at this stage of things. But mostly I want to make the U.S. forces come at us. I want to use the defender’s advantage for everything it’s worth. I want the United States to have casualty lists three, four, five times as long as ours. They’re bigger than we are, but they can’t afford that kind of thing forever. If they bleed enough, maybe they’ll get sick of banging their heads against a brick wall and give us a peace we can live with.”

And if we drop uranium bombs on them a year after that, it’d damn well serve them right, he thought. Would they hit us first? I don’t know. I didn’t used to think so. Now, though, we may have given them too many reasons not to let us have another chance.

“In your opinion, then, we ca

Potter didn’t care. “Sir, they’re in Georgia. Doesn’t that speak for itself? They’re cleaning up the pockets of resistance west of their thrust through Kentucky and Te

“We’re ahead of them in rockets,” Patton said.

“Yes, sir,” Potter said. “Those will hurt them. Those have hurt them. They’ll make us lose slower. Do you really think they can make us win?” Maybe if we put a U-235 bomb in the nose of one. But how much does one of those damn things weigh? When will we have a rocket that can get it off the ground? In time for this war? You’d have to be a wild-eyed optimist to believe anything like that.

“Yours is a counsel of despair,” Patton said.

“I don’t want to throw my brigade away charging their guns,” Potter said. “I want to make them throw their brigades away charging my guns. I don’t think that’s despair. Where we are now, I think it’s common sense.”

“When I give you orders, I expect you to obey them.”

“When I get orders, I expect them to be ones I’m better off obeying.”

They glared at each other. Neither had convinced the other-Potter knew that. Swearing under his breath, Patton stormed out of Potter’s tent. Potter wondered what he would do if Patton commanded him to go over the river line and attack the enemy. I’ll refuse, he decided. Let him do what he wants after that. It’ll keep the brigade in being a while longer, anyhow.

The orders arrived two hours later. Potter’s men were to hold in place. Patton laid on a counterattack farther west. Potter sighed. Patton had grasped the letter, not the spirit. He didn’t know what he could do about that. Well, actually, he did know: he couldn’t do a damn thing.

Guns blazing, the counterattack went in. It drove U.S. forces back a couple of miles, then ran out of steam. Potter wished he’d expected anything different.

The Josephus Daniels rode the waves in the North Atlantic-rode them like a roller-coaster car going up and down ever taller, ever steeper bumps. George Enos took the motion in stride: literally, as he had no trouble making his way around the destroyer escort despite the roughening seas. Though not a big warship, the Josephus Daniels made a platform ever so much more stable than the fishing boats that bobbed on the ocean like little corks in a bathtub…and sometimes sank as if going down the drain.

He wasn’t worried the Josephus Daniels would sink-not on her own, anyhow. She might have help from British, French, or Confederate submersibles, though.

At least she was out of range of British land-based airplanes. George had gone through too many attacks from the air, both here and in the tropical Pacific, ever to want to help try to fight off another one.

“We’re still floating,” the sailors boasted. Most of them were kids. They’d helped rescue men whose ships had gone to the bottom, but they’d never been sunk themselves. They were cocky because of it. It hadn’t happened to them, so they were sure it couldn’t.

With the Townsend at the bottom of the Gulf of California, George knew better. The water there was shallow. Maybe one day somebody would salvage her for scrap metal. Unless someone did, she’d never see the surface again. Neither would the men who’d died aboard her or who hadn’t been able to get off before she went down.

Sam Carsten knew better, too. The captain sometimes talked about how he’d been on the Remembrance when the Japanese sank her. That made George wonder if he’d seen the skipper in the Sandwich Islands.

It seemed logical, but he didn’t think so. The memory, if it was a memory, felt older than his stint there. When he thought of the skipper, he thought of Boston, and not of Boston the way it was now, either: not the Boston he’d occasionally come back to since joining the Navy. When he thought of Sam Carsten, he thought of his home town a long time ago, back in the days when he was a kid.

Sunshine flashing off the gilded dome of the State House, seen from across Boston Common…

When that came back to him, his mouth fell open in amazement. He felt like a man who’d just scratched an itch he’d thought he would never be able to reach. “Son of a bitch!” he said softly. “Son of a bitch!”

Then he wanted to tell the skipper about it. That would have been next to impossible on a battlewagon or an airplane carrier. For an able seaman to get an audience with the captain of a ship like that was like getting an audience with God. It shouldn’t have been that hard on the Josephus Daniels. Sam Carsten was only a two-striper, and a mustang to boot. He should have had-he probably did have-a soft spot for the men from whose ranks he’d risen.

He wasn’t the problem. His exec was. Lieutenant Myron Zwilling seemed convinced God Himself needed to stand in line to see the skipper. As for a mere rating…Well, in Zwilling’s mind the question hardly arose.

But there were ways around the executive officer. The skipper was a gu

Picking a time when Carsten seemed a bit less rushed than usual, George said, “Ask you something, sir?”

“What’s on your mind, Enos?” The captain of a bigger ship wouldn’t have known all his men by name, but Sam Carsten did.

“You’ve been in Boston a good many times, I expect,” George said.

“That’s a fact-I told you so once. Anybody who’s been in the Navy as long as I have, he says he hasn’t been in Boston a lot, he’s a damn liar,” Carsten replied.

“Yes, sir. Do you remember one time when you were out on the Boston Common and you went under a tree to get out of the sun?” George said. “There was a family having a picnic under there-a woman, and a boy, and a girl. This would have been-oh, some time around the start of the Twenties. I was ten, eleven, maybe twelve. Does that ring any kind of bell, sir?”

Sam Carsten’s face went far away as he thought back. “No,” he said, but then, “Wait a minute. Maybe. Damned if it doesn’t. Somebody said something about the Ericsson.” Because of what had happened to the destroyer at the end of the Great War, any Navy man who heard about it was likely to remember.