The Grapple

And, when the skipper remembered that, it brought everything flooding back to George. “I did!” he said. “I told you my father was on her.”

“There was a girl along with you, yeah,” Carsten said slowly. “She was younger than you, I think.”

“My sister Mary Jane,” George said.

Carsten shook his head in slow wonder. “Well, if that doesn’t prove it’s a small world, I’ll be damned if I know what would. I wanted to get under that tree so I wouldn’t burn, and your mother was nice enough to let me share it.”

He was almost as fair as a ghost; George had seen him blotched with zinc-oxide ointment several times, and it wasn’t much paler than his skin. No, he wouldn’t have liked summer sun in Boston, not one bit. And…“My mother was a nice person,” George said.

“Nice-looking, too. I remember that,” the skipper said. Would he have tried to pick her up if he’d met her without her children? Had he tried anyhow, in some way that went over the kids’ heads? If so, he’d had no luck. He eyed George. “You say was? I’m sorry if she’s not living any more.”

“She’s not.” That brought memories back, too, ones George would sooner have left submerged. “She took up with the writer who did the book about how she went and shot the Confederate submersible skipper. Bastard drank. They would fight and make up, you know? Except the last time, they didn’t. He shot her and then he shot himself.”

“Jesus!” the skipper said. “I’m sorry. That must have been hell.”

“It was…pretty bad, sir,” George said. “If he wanted to blow his own brains out, fine, but why did he have to go and do that to her, too?”

Carsten set a hand on his shoulder. “You look for answers to stuff like that, you go crazy. He did it because he went around the bend. What else can you say? If he didn’t go around the bend, he wouldn’t have done anything like that.”

“I guess so.” That wasn’t much different from the conclusion George had reached himself. It made for cold comfort. No-it made for no comfort at all. What he wanted was revenge, and he couldn’t have it. Ernie robbed him of it when he turned the gun on himself.

“Sure as hell, you were right about one thing-I did look familiar.” Sam Carsten tried to steer him away from his gloom. “I wouldn’t have known you in a million years, but you were just a kid then. Damned if I don’t recall that day on the Common, though. How about that?” He walked down the deck shaking his head.

“So you weren’t just blowing stack gas when you said you ran into the Old Man once upon a time,” Petty Officer Third Class Jorgenson said. He still had charge of the 40mm mount. “How about that?”

“Yeah, how about that?” George agreed. “I thought so, but I couldn’t pin it down till now.”

The crew for the gun spent as much time working together as they could. Because of casualties, just about everyone was in a new slot. Till they figured out how to do what they had little practice doing, they would be less efficient than the other gun crews. That could endanger the ship.

Because the skipper was a fiend for good gu

The Josephus Daniels went back to patrolling east of Newfoundland. The men who’d been in her for a while told stories of earlier adventures on that duty. If a quarter of what they said was true, she’d had some lively times. The limeys worked harder at smuggling arms into Canada than the USA did at smuggling them into Ireland. Canada and Newfoundland had a much longer coast than the smaller British isle, which gave the enemy more chances to slip through.

Navy Department doctrine was that stopping the arms smuggling would snuff out the Canadian rebellion. The sailors didn’t believe it. “What? The fucking Canucks can’t find any guns of their own? My ass!” Jorgenson said when the talk got around to the patrol.

Klaxons hooted. That killed a bull session. George and Jorgenson raced toward the bow. They got to their gun in a dead heat. The rest of the crew wasn’t more than a couple of steps behind them. “What’s going on?” asked the new shell-jerker, a big blond kid named Ekberg.

“Beats me,” Jorgenson answered. “Maybe it’s a drill.” He was even bigger than Ekberg, and almost as fair, though neither of them matched the skipper.

“Now hear this!” The PA system crackled to life. Lieutenant Zwilling’s harsh voice got no sweeter blaring from the speakers: “Y-ranging gear has picked up an unidentified aircraft approaching from the south. Exercise caution before opening fire, as it may be friendly. Repeat, exercise caution before opening fire, as it may be friendly. But do not endanger the ship.”

George swore, and he wasn’t the only one. The exec wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. Don’t shoot the airplane down, but don’t let it make an attack run, either? How was that supposed to work?

A minute or so later, the PA came on again. “This is the captain,” Sam Carsten said. “The ship comes first. If we have to fish some flyboys out of the drink afterwards, we’ll do that. We’re trying to find out who’s in the airplane, but no luck so far. If we open up on the wireless, we tell everybody in the North Atlantic where we’re at, and we don’t want to do that.”

“See, the skipper tells us what’s what,” Jorgenson said. “The exec just bullshits.”

“Lieutenant Cooley, he was all right,” Ekberg said. “This guy, though-you can keep him.”

“Damn airplane ought to be one of ours,” Jorgenson said. “Don’t see how the limeys could’ve snuck a carrier this far west without us knowing.” He paused. “’Course, sometimes they fly fighters off their merchantmen. One of those assholes carrying a bomb could be real bad news.”

“Confederate seaplane?” George suggested.

Jorgenson frowned. “Right at the end of their range. They couldn’t get home again unless they refuel somewhere.” The frown turned into a scowl. “They might do that, though. Maybe the limeys have a station or two on the Newfoundland coast. We can’t keep an eye on everything. So yeah, maybe. Whatever it is, we’ll find out pretty damn quick.” He swept the southern sky with a gun commander’s binoculars.

Somebody farther astern spotted the airplane first and let out a yell. George had a shell in the breech of each gun in the mount. He was ready to open up as soon as Jorgenson gave the word. The gun chief swung the twin 40mms to bear on the target.

“It is a seaplane,” he said, still peering through the field glasses. George felt smart for about fifteen seconds. Then Jorgenson went on, “It’s one of ours. That’s a Curtiss-37, sure as shit. Stand easy, boys-we’re all right.”

“Don’t shoot! Repeat-do not shoot!” Lieutenant Zwilling blared a few seconds later. “The airplane has been positively identified as nonhostile.”

George needed a moment to translate that into English. Then he realized the exec said the same thing as Jorgenson, though not so clearly.

The seaplane buzzed past, the eagle and crossed swords plainly visible on its sides. It waggled its wings at the Josephus Daniels and flew on toward the north. “Nice not to need to fight for a change,” George said, and none of the other sailors at the mount told him he was wrong.

When a bath meant a quick dip in a creek, Jonathan Moss did what anybody else would: he mostly did without. Sometimes, he got too smelly and buggy to stand himself, and went in for a little while. He came out with his teeth chattering-fall was in the air, even in Georgia.

“Jesus, I miss hot water!” he said.