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out on deck under air attack during the Pacific War. It was just as much fun as he remembered. A Confederate airplane went into the sea almost without a splash. Another flew by nearly low enough to land, spraying machine-gun bullets down the flight deck. Men dove for cover, not that there was much. Screams rose when bullets struck home.
    Sam sprinted up the deck toward the bomb hit. He skidded to a stop at the smoking edge of the damage. The explosion had torn off a corner of the flight deck, exposing one of the five-inch gun positions just below. The gun seemed intact. Red smears and spatters said the gunners were anything but. Sam turned to a petty officer—one of the flight-deck crew—beside him. “Can you still take off and land with the deck like this?”
    “Hell, yes, sir,” the man answered. “No problem. It was a glancing hit—should have been a miss, I think, but we zigged instead o’ zagging.” He didn’t seem very worried.
    “All right.” Carsten gave orders to most of the men he commanded to help set things right. Then he said, “Doheny, Eisenberg, Bengough—follow me. We can still fight that gun, God damn it.” He hadn’t been in charge of a five-inch for years, but he knew how.
    He scrambled down through the wreckage to the gun. He cut his hands a couple of times, but he wouldn’t notice till later. A fighter from the carrier’s combat air patrol, flame licking back from the engine cowling toward the eagle with crossed swords on the tail, cartwheeled into the Atlantic. Another Confederate airplane shot up the
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    “Doheny, jerk shells. Bengough, you load and shoot. Eisenberg, handle azimuth! Can you do that?” Sam waited for a nod, then grabbed the elevation screw. “Come on, you bastards! Like the skipper said, we’ve got company!”
    At his orders, the gun started banging away. Black puffs of smoke dotted the sky. A Confederate airplane, hit square in the fuselage, broke in two. Both burning chunks went into the drink. The pilot never had a chance to hit the silk. Carsten and his makeshift crew cheered like maniacs. Even as he yelled, though, he was looking for a new target. How many waves of attackers would the Confederates send at the
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? And how long till her own bombers and torpedo airplanes came home and she could get the hell out of range? It already seemed like forever.
             
    A nne Colleton looked across the warm blue water of Charleston harbor toward Fort Sumter. A plaque said General Beauregard had stood right here when the Confederacy opened fire on the island fortress the United States and that damned fool Abraham Lincoln refused to surrender. FIRST SHOTS IN THE BATTLE FOR OUR FREEDOM FROM YANKEE OPPRESSION , the plaque declared.
    That little island remained fortified to this day. Big coast-defense guns could reach far out to sea. But they couldn’t reach far enough to smash all the threats the United States might throw at Charleston. Antiaircraft guns bristled on the island and around the harbor. If the damnyankees flew airplanes off the deck of a ship at the ships and the shore installations here, they would catch as much hell as the gunners could give them.
    A Freedom Party stalwart named Kirby Walker stood at Anne’s right hand. “If they try anything, we’ll be ready for ’em,” he declared. Despite the heat and breathless humidity of early summer in Charleston, he looked cool and well pressed in crisp white shirt and butternut slacks. “We know—darn well they can’t lick us.”
    He couldn’t have been more than thirty years old. He would have been a little boy when the Great War ended. She wondered how long it would be till this new one put him in a real uniform instead of the imitation he wore. She also wondered if he had any brains at all. Some stalwarts didn’t—they were all balls and fists, and they didn’t need to be anything else. She said, “We don’t know anything of the sort. If they hadn’t licked us the last