“No wonder the skipper has us at gunnery practice all the time,” George said.

“No wonder at all,” the gun chief agreed. “’Course, the other thing is, he served a gun himself when he was a rating. He knows what’s going on.”

“He seems like a pretty good guy,” George said.

“Bet your ass,” Thurman said. “He’s on our side-and I’m not just saying that on account of the new exec is a dipshit. Carsten knows what makes sailors tick. He works us pretty hard, but that’s his job. I was in this ship when he took over, and the difference is night and day.”

George had been part of a good gun team on the Townsend. This one could beat it. They went through more live ammo than the Townsend’s skipper would have wanted to use. Sam Carsten’s attitude seemed to be that everything was fine as long as they had enough to fight with when action came.

They went on watch-and-watch a little more than halfway across the Atlantic: at the point where, if they were unlucky enough, a British patrol aircraft flying out of Limerick or Cork might spot them. The Irish rebels were supposed to be trying to sabotage those patrol flights, but who could guess how much luck they’d have?

“Now hear this.” Lieutenant Zwilling’s cold, unpleasant voice came on the PA system. “We have a wireless report that one of our submersibles just torpedoed a British destroyer about 300 miles east of here. No reports of other British warships afloat in that area. That is all.”

“Sounds good to me,” Petty Officer Thurman said. “The gatekeeper’s gone. We hope like hell he is, anyway.”

They made the closest approach at night. At midnight, they lowered a speedboat into the ocean. It replaced two lifeboats; its skeleton crew consisted of men either from Ireland or of Irish blood. They were making a one-way trip to the Emerald Isle. George passed crates of weapons and ammunition to the crane handlers, who lowered them into the speedboat. Each ship in the flotilla was doing the same thing. The irregulars battling the British occupation of their homeland would get a lift…if the munitions and men arrived.

Big, powerful gasoline engines rumbling and growling, the speedboats roared off to the east. The Josephus Daniels turned around and hightailed it back toward the USA. The black gang pulled every rev they could out of her engines. They wanted to get as far away from the Irish coast as they could by the time the sun came up.

She was slower than the Townsend. Thurman had mocked an escort carrier’s eighteen knots. George wasn’t happy with the destroyer escort’s twenty-four or twenty-five. The Townsend broke thirty easy as you please. The flotilla stuck together to help with antiaircraft protection. With really fast ships, it could have got thirty or forty miles closer to home by dawn.

And if it had, maybe the British flying boat wouldn’t have spotted it. The cruisers’ scout airplanes went after the big, ungainly machine. They even shot it down, but the damage was done. George was sure of that. Somewhere in the direction of the rising sun, armorers were loading explosives onto bombers. Maybe fighters would come along as escorts, if they could fly so far. George shuddered, remembering the carrier-launched fighter that shot up his fishing boat.

Waiting was hard, hard. Time stretched like taffy. Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe…

“This is the captain.” Sam Carsten sounded much more sure of himself on the PA than Zwilling did. “The Y-ranging officer says we’ll have visitors in a bit. Give them the kind of friendly American welcome they expect. Do your damnedest, boys. If we ride out this wave, chances are we get past the range where their low-level bombers can hit us. They may send high-altitude heavies after us, but those babies have to be lucky to hit a moving target from three miles up. That’s all.”

George looked back toward Ireland again. He felt silly as soon as he did. Of course the Y-ranging set reached farther than the Mark One eyeball. It wouldn’t be worth much if it didn’t. But those airplanes with the blue-white-red roundels were on the way.

“At least I can shoot back now,” George muttered.

“What’s that, Enos?” Petty Officer Thurman asked.

“When I was a fisherman, a limey fighter shot up my boat. I was lucky-everything missed me. But the son of a bitch killed a couple of my buddies.” George set a hand on the 40mm’s breech. “This time, by God, I’ve got a gun, too.”

Thurman nodded. “There you go. Pay those fuckers back.”

“Hope so,” George said. “Don’t much like the idea of air attack again, though, not when my last ship got bombed out from under me.” The Gulf of California had been warm and calm. The North Atlantic in the latitudes of Ireland was rarely calm and never warm. If the Josephus Daniels went down, how long could he stay afloat? Long enough to get picked up? He had to hope so.

“We’ll get ’em.” Thurman sounded confident. Like a captain, a gun chief was supposed to. Underlings could flabble. The guys in charge stayed above all that.

The Josephus Daniels built up speed. As far as George could judge, pretty soon she was going flat out. Even so, the cruisers in the flotilla could have walked away from her and the other destroyer escorts. They could have, but they didn’t. George was glad to see them stick around. They put a lot of shells in the air-and, he told himself in what was half cold-blooded pragmatism and half shameful hope, they made bigger targets than destroyer escorts did.

“Bandits within ten miles,” Lieutenant Zwilling said over the PA system. “Bearing 090. Won’t be long now.”

Everybody stared back the way they’d come. George pointed and yelled, “There!” as soon as anybody else. And if he could see the enemy airplanes, they could see his ship, too.

One of them flew in low and slow, straight for the Josephus Daniels. “Fuck me if that ain’t a torpedo bomber!” Thurman yelled. He swung the twin 40mm mount around to bear on it. “We’ve got to blast the bastard!”

“Fuck me if it’s not a two-decker!” George exclaimed as he passed shells and the gun began to roar. “Which war are we in, anyway?” Next to Japanese airplanes, it seemed downright primitive.

Tracers shot red, fiery streaks toward the biplane. “It’s what they call a Swordfish,” Thurman said. “Looks like a goddamn stringbag, don’t it? But it can do for us if we don’t knock it down first.”

They did. The Swordfish’s right wing tilted down and touched a wavetop. Then the airplane cartwheeled and broke up. It never got the chance to launch the torpedo.

“One down!” Thurman shouted exultantly. He couldn’t be sure his gun had nailed the British torpedo bomber. Several others were also shooting at it. Another Swordfish, this one trailing smoke, went into the Atlantic. But white wakes in the water said some of the slow, ugly two-deckers managed to launch their torpedoes.

The Josephus Daniels zigzagged as hard as she could. George automatically adjusted as the ship heeled first one way, then the other. He kept passing shells. The gun never ran dry. After this, if there was an after this, he would really be part of its crew-this was baptism by total immersion.

British fighters buzzed overhead like wasps. Every so often, they would swoop down and sting, machine guns blazing on their wings. George had never got a good look at the one that shot up the Sweet Sue. Now he did. The fighters seemed much more up-to-date than the torpedo bombers. He wished they didn’t.

One of them raked the Josephus Daniels from end to end, bullets clanging and whining as they ricocheted off steel and striking home with soft wet thwacks when they met flesh. Wounded men’s shrieks rang through the gunfire.

Petty Officer Thurman caught two bullets in the chest. Looking absurdly surprised, he flailed his arms a couple of times to try to keep his balance. Then, crumpling, he tumbled off the gun mount and splashed into the sea. Only a puddle of blood said he’d ever stood there.