What happened instead was that Sergeant Stowe shook him awake. The sun still hadn't come up, but the sky behind the mountains to the east was beginning to go gray. "Welcome back to the war," Stowe said.

"Screw the war." Armstrong yawned. "Screw you, too."

"I don't want you. I want a blonde with big tits," Stowe said. "Only trouble is, the gals like that carry rifles around here. They'd sooner blow my brains out than blow me."

As it got lighter, bombers came overhead and started pounding the parts of Provo the Mormons still held. The bombers were not only outmoded but flying above the clouds. Thanks to both those things, they weren't the most accurate bombing platforms God or U.S. factories had ever made. Some of the bombs came down on the U.S. side of the line.

The handful of Mormon antiaircraft guns banged away at the bombers overhead. Firing blind, they didn't have much hope of hitting them. All the same, Armstrong-who'd got dirt down the back of his neck from a near miss by his own side-snarled, "I hope they shoot those fuckers down."

"Bet your ass," Stowe said. "Goddamn bombers can't hit the broad side of a barn."

"Oh, I don't know about that," Armstrong said. "If they're aiming at us, they're pretty good shots."

"Ha! That'd be funny if only it was funny, you know what I mean?"

"Hell, yes," Armstrong said. "If I ever run into one of those flyboys, I hope I come as close to killing him as he just came to killing me."

"Yeah! That's good!" Stowe said. "If I run into one of 'em, I think I would kill him. It's what he was trying to do to me. Only difference is, I'm good at what I do, and those bastards aren't."

Mortar bombs came whispering down on U.S. trenches and foxholes. The Mormons often tried to repay whatever the USA did to them. After the ordnance the bombers had expended on their own men, the mortar rounds hardly seemed worth getting excited about. Again, Armstrong wondered how long he would take to get out of Utah and if he could somehow do it alive and in one piece.

As a lieutenant, junior grade, Sam Carsten had worn a thick gold stripe and a thin one on his jacket cuffs for a long time. A lieutenant wore two full stripes. Carsten didn't give a damn about the promotion. Some things were too dearly bought. He would rather have been a j.g. aboard the Remembrance than a lieutenant waiting for new orders at Pearl Harbor and contemplating a gloomy New Year.

Too many men were gone. He didn't know what had happened to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger. All he knew was that nobody'd fished the chief of the damage-control party out of the Pacific. Eyechart Szczerbiakowicz hadn't made it back to Oahu, either. Somebody had said the sailor was wounded going into the drink and hadn't been able to stay afloat. And Captain Stein, an officer of the old school, had gone down with the Remembrance. Word was that he'd got a Medal of Honor for it. Much good the decoration did him.

Gloomily, Sam trudged over to the officers' club. He intended to see 1942 in smashed. He'd feel like grim death when he sobered up tomorrow morning, but he didn't care. He was too sorrowful to face the world sober.

Despite the loss of Midway-and of the only U.S. airplane carrier in the Pacific-a lot of officers were living it up. Some of them had wives along, others girlfriends. The band played a bouncy tune that mimicked Confederate rhythms without being too blatant about it.

Here and there, though, sat other gloomy men with slumped shoulders, intent on the serious business of getting drunk. At the bar, one of them waved to Sam. Dan Cressy had four stripes on his sleeves these days. They'd promoted him to captain. By all the signs, that delighted him no more than Sam liked his promotion.

"Happy New Year, Carsten." Yes, if Cressy was happy, Sam wouldn't have wanted to see him sad.

Carsten sat down by the Remembrance's exec and ordered a shot over ice. Even before the drink got there, he said, "It's a bastard, sir."

They made an odd pair: the aging lieutenant and the young, promising captain. They'd been through a lot together, though. Cressy said, "It's a bastard and a half, is what it is." He emptied his glass and signaled for a refill. "I'm ahead of you."

"Oh, that's all right," Sam answered. "I expect I can catch up." He got the shot, poured it down, and waved for another.

Both new drinks arrived at the same time. Cressy stared moodily into his. "This isn't how I wanted to get promoted, God damn it." He bit the words off one by one.

"No, sir. Me, neither," Sam said.

"I tried to get him to come away." Cressy was talking more to himself than to Sam. "I tried. I said the Navy needed him. I said the country needed him. I said… Well, it doesn't matter what I said. He looked at me and he told me,, 'This is my ship, and she's sinking. Get off her, Commander. Good-bye and good luck." So I got off her. What else could I do?"

"Nothing I can see. You got me off her the same way," Sam said.

"You." Commander-no, Captain-Cressy seemed to come back to himself, at least a little. He managed a smile of sorts for Sam. "I'd've kicked myself for the rest of my days if anything had happened to you."

That made Sam blink even as he knocked back his shot and waved for another reload. "Me?" His voice squeaked in surprise. He wondered when he'd last squeaked like that. Probably not since he'd joined the Navy, which was a hell of a long time ago now. "Nothing special about me, sir. Just a mustang who's long in the tooth."

With whiskey-fueled precision, Cressy started ticking off points on his fingers. "Item: there aren't that many mustangs to begin with. Coming up through the hawse hole's never been easy. Item: most of the mustangs I've known don't make very good officers. That doesn't mean they're not good men. They are, just about every one of them. And they have fine records as ratings, or they wouldn't have made officer's grade in the first place. But most of 'em don't have the imagination, the, the breadth, to make good officers. You're different."

"Thank you kindly. I don't know that it's true, but thank you. I try to do the best work I can, that's all."

The vehemence with which Captain Cressy shook his head spoke of how much he'd put away. "No. Any mustang, near enough, will do his particular job pretty well. Most of them won't care about anything outside their assignment, though. You aren't like that. How many times did you get chased out of the wireless shack?"

"Oh, maybe a few, sir," Sam allowed. "I like to know what's going on."

"That's what I'm saying," Cressy told him. "And you would always come up with something interesting in the officers' wardroom-always. You don't just want to know what's going on. You think about it, too, and you think straight."

Sam only shrugged. Praise made him uncomfortable. "Sir, you know ten times as much as I do."

"More, yes, but not ten times. How much schooling did you have before you enlisted?"

"Eighth grade, sir. About what you'd expect."

"Yes, about what I'd expect. On the other hand, I've got one of these." Cressy tapped his Annapolis class ring with the forefinger of his other hand. "If you had one of these, you'd hold flag rank now. You've… picked up your learning other ways, and that's a slower, harder business. I was talking about breadth a little while ago. You can make officer's rank with an eighth-grade education, but if you haven't got something more than that on the ball you won't go anywhere even if you do. That's what sets you apart from most mustangs. You've got that extra something."

"Fat lot of good it did me," Sam said bitterly. "I could know everything there was to know and I wouldn't've been able to douse that fire aft on the Remembrance."

"Some things are bigger than you are, that's all," Cressy said. "You weren't the only one trying, you know."