Leon Uris by O'Hara's Choice Read Free Book Online Page A

Confederate ports, was the objective.
    Fort Fisher, twenty miles downriver, stood between the Union armada and Wilmington. This assault plan was to achieve the obliteration of Fisher, by naval gunfire; then an invasion would be led by an entire battalion of Marines.
    Second Lieutenant Tobias Storm had remained Second Lieutenant Storm throughout the war, but had been part of the creative planning that improved the accuracy and destructiveness of artillery firepower.
    With the war going the Union’s way, Storm needed his piece of it and nagged his way onto the USS Algonquin as commander of a company. The men loved Storm. He was of medium height but powerful build, and jolly comments came through his great mustache. He had, by doubling a navy requisition illegally, gotten a new rifle-bored, single-shot, lever-action gun to replace their pitiful muskets.
    More good fortune was his when Sergeant Paddy O’Hara was assigned to him. O’Hara had been seething to avenge the disaster at Sumter, and from the looks of this fleet and a Marine battalion to lead the assault, Fisher would fall.
    Fort Fisher was earth and sandbags and logs, surely no match for the Union’s thousand-plus guns.
    A Confederate shell hit the powder stores of the Algonquin, blowing Tobias Storm off the bridge into an inferno on the deck below.
    Fortunately, he landed at the feet of Paddy O’Hara, who carried him to the ship’s rail, held him, and leaped into the water and swam for another ship a moment before the Algonquin exploded.
    Fort Fisher did not fall that day. The Union, no longer as squeamish about casualties, made another assault later, and this time was successful.
    That is how Tobias Storm became a Wart-Hog. After the conflict was done, the nation wanted war no more. Stationed mostly in Washington, he was promoted to first lieutenant and married a robust lady, Matilda Morris, whose inheritance allowed them to establish a home and a family.
    Storm loved the military and refused to resign to open a branch of the family importing firm in Washington. He also thought less of himself for not having seen a single action in a war in which he was tossed overboard just as the battle had commenced.
    * * *
    The Marine Corps was now scraping around, looking for some sort of mission to help keep it relevant, when they were brought in to solve a domestic problem.
    There was growing concern in the government regarding happenings in the territory of Alaska.
    Alaska had been purchased for a pittance from a bankrupt Russian czar. Locked in and frozen a good part of the year as it was, only the most daring adventurer attempted to traverse the uncharted northern passages. Death pointed an icy finger at courageous but ill-advised men who penetrated too far north.
    The current source of riches around the Bering Sea was being plundered by Russian poachers. The Aleutian Islands formed stepping-stones between Russian settlements in Siberia and the Alaskan mainland. The Russians had devastated the fragile Indian civilization, imposed a system of serfdom, and otherwise ravaged the region under their mangling rule.
    Seals, otters, and other fur-bearing animals were the life-support systems of the natives and the victims of savage commercialism by the Russians.
    During nesting season, Russian poachers came over the Aleutians to Alaska, though it was now an American possession, and slaughtered seals by the tens of thousands, often by club, to save ammunition and prevent damage to the valuable skins.
    As with the American buffalo, the massacre of the seals brought the Indians close to ruin. The hunter received a half-dollar or less for a pelt. Three dollars was the rate the Russians got from the fur-hungry Chinese market.
    The Hudson Bay Company was having the same problem with Canadian poachers who sold their pelts for four to five dollars in the exploding London fur industry.
    The tribes who depended upon the seal for survival were in a dire condition and feared that the seal