“Sons of bitches!” he burst out. “The bastards are shooting back. One just splashed into the water a few hundred yards short of us.”
One of the shell-jerkers, Joe Gilbert—like most in his slot, a big, muscular fellow—said, “Goddamn limeys must have smuggled in some more guns.”
“Yeah,” Carsten said. “And if we call ’em on it, they’ll say they never did any such thing—their pet micks must’ve come up with the guns and the shells under a flat rock somewhere, or else made ’em themselves.”
Officially, Britain recognized Ireland’s independence. She’d had to; the United States and the German Empire had forced the concession from her. The Royal Navy never ventured into the Irish Sea to challenge the Remembrance or any other U.S., German, or Irish warship.
But hordes of small freighters and fishing boats smuggled arms and ammunition and sometimes fighting men into the loyalist northeastern part of Ireland. The British Foreign Office blandly denied knowing anything about that. However many ships stood between Ireland on the one hand and England and Scotland on the other, the gun runners always found gaps through which they could slip.
Willie Moore said, “The damn micks—our damn micks, I mean—had better start doing a better job of patrolling, that’s all I’ve got to tell you. It’s their goddamn country. If they can’t hang on to it all by their lonesome, I can tell you we ain’t gonna hang around forever to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.” He adjusted the elevation screw again. “Let ’em have the next one now.”
“Aye aye.” Sam fired the five-inch gun again. He had to step smartly to keep the casing from landing on his toes.
Joe Gilbert passed him another shell. He was bending to load it into the breech when a shell from the shore slammed into the sponson. That he was bending saved his life. Most of the shell’s force was spent in penetrating the armor that protected the sponson, but a fragment gutted Willie Moore as if he were a muskie pulled from a Minnesota lake. Another one hissed over Sam’s head and into Gilbert’s neck. The shell-jerker fell without a sound, his head almost severed from his body. Moore screamed and screamed and screamed.
Sam could look out through the hole the shell had torn and see the ocean and, beyond it, burning Belfast. He wasted only a tiny fraction of a second on that. What to do when the sponson got hit had been drilled into him during more than ten years in the Navy. No fire—he checked that first. Inside the sponson, it was just bare metal, with no paint to burn. That didn’t always help, but it had this time. The ammunition wouldn’t go up.
Next, check the gun crew. Joe Gilbert was beyond help. Blood dripped from Sam’s shoes when he picked up his feet. Calvin Wesley, the other shell-hauler, hadn’t been scratched. He gaped at Gilbert’s twitching corpse as if he’d never seen one before. He was a veteran—everybody aboard the Remembrance was a veteran—so that was hard to imagine, but maybe it was so.
Willie Moore kept shrieking. One glance at what the shell had done told Sam all he needed to know. He opened the aid kit on the wall of the sponson; a shell fragment had scarred the thick metal right beside it. From the kit, he drew two syringes of morphine. One might have been enough, but he wanted to make sure.
He stooped beside Moore. “Here, Chief, I’ll take care of you.” He gave the gunner’s mate all the morphine in both syringes. After a very little while, Moore fell silent.
“That’s too much,” Wesley said. “It’ll kill him.”
“That’s the idea,” Sam said. He watched Moore’s chest. It stopped moving. Like a man waking up from a bad dream, Carsten shook himself. “Come on, God damn it. We’ve got this gun to fight. You know how to load, right?”
“I better,” Wesley answered. “I seen you guys do it often enough.”
“All right, then. You load and fire, and I’ll aim the damn gun.” Sam had seen that done often enough, too, and practiced it himself when he got the chance during drills. The hit had torn the left side of the sponson too badly for the gun to track all the way in that direction. Otherwise, though, he was still in business. “Fire!”
Calvin Wesley sent on its way the shell Sam had been loading when they were struck. He was setting the next round into the breech when someone out in the