Drive to the East

XVII

Autumn was when the leaves turned red and gold and then fell off the trees. It was when the weather got crisp, so your cheeks also turned red and tingled after you’d stayed outside a while. If you were a fisherman on the North Atlantic, it was when the ocean started tossing you around, not knowing-or caring-your boat was out there.

George Enos, Jr., was used to the rhythms of the changing year. A Massachusetts man had to be. In the Sandwich Islands, the year didn’t change much. The sun still rode high in the sky, if not quite so high. Days remained warm. Everything stayed green.

Bigger swells did start rolling in out of the north. The Townsend would slide up over a crest and then down into a trough. That didn’t seem enough to get excited about.

When George said so out loud, Fremont Dalby laughed at him. “Christ, Enos, haven’t you had enough excitement for a while?” the gun chief said. “Far as I’m concerned, I can stay at my station and gather dust for a while, because that’ll mean nobody’s trying to strafe the ship or drop a bomb on her or stick a torpedo up our ass.”

“Japs are out there somewhere,” George said.

“I know, I know. You don’t got to remind me,” Dalby said. “But I don’t like thinking about it every goddamn minute, you know what I mean?”

“Sure, Chief.” George didn’t want to get the CPO ticked off at him. Getting any CPO ticked off at you was a bad idea. When the man in question happened to be your boss, it was four times as bad.

They kept station with three other destroyers and with the Trenton. The escort carrier hadn’t taken too much damage in her last brush with the Japanese. Her airplanes had given out more than she’d got. That was the first real naval victory the USA had had in the islands around the Sandwich Islands for quite a while.

U.S. fighters buzzed overhead. They flew a dawn-to-dusk combat air patrol. The Townsend’s Y-ranging antenna went round and round. Y-ranging gear could spot incoming enemy aircraft while they were still well out to sea. The other destroyers and the carrier all had sets, too. Whatever else happened, the Japs wouldn’t be able to get in a sucker punch at the little flotilla. The Trenton would be able to scramble all her fighters. The destroyers would start throwing up as much anti-aircraft as they could. And after that, what could you do but pucker your asshole and hope?

Fritz Gustafson pointed off to starboard. The loader didn’t bother with words when one finger would do. Fremont Dalby wasn’t shy about words, though. “Dolphins!” he said with a smile. “They’re supposed to be good luck. Here’s hoping, anyway.”

George enjoyed the dolphins for their own sake. They were swift and graceful and, as always, they looked as if they were having a good time out there. “I wonder what they make of us,” he said. “Till we got ships like this, they were some of the biggest, toughest things in the ocean.”

“They figure we’re good for a handout, anyway,” Dalby said, which was true. They would follow ships for scraps and garbage. Sometimes, though, they would track ships for what looked like nothing more than the hell of it. Were they skylarking? Did they really have the brains to play? More to the point, did they have the brains not to want to work? For their sake, George hoped so.

Four hours on, four hours off. When the other crew for the twin 40mm mount replaced Dalby’s, George went below, grabbed himself a couple of sandwiches and some coffee, and then found his hammock. He laughed as he climbed up into it. “What’s so funny?” asked another sailor about to grab some shut-eye.

“Used to be I couldn’t sleep for beans in one of these goddamn things,” George answered. “Used to be I couldn’t hardly get into one without falling out on my ear. But now I don’t even think about it.”

“That’s ’cause you’re a real Navy guy now,” the other sailor said, getting up into his hammock as nimbly as a chimp might have. “You know how to do shit. You aren’t a little lost civilian anymore, looking for somebody to hold your hand and tell you what to do.”

Was I really that green? George wondered, wiggling to get comfortable. He supposed he had been. He knew the sea from his fisherman days, but knowing the sea and knowing the Navy weren’t the same thing-not even close. He settled his cap over his eyes. Two minutes later, he was snoring.

Standing watch and watch wore on a man. He felt groggy, almost underwater, when he slid out of the hammock and down to the deck again. He got rid of some of the coffee he’d drunk just after he came off the last watch, then went back to the galley for more. It might help keep him conscious, anyway.

Fremont Dalby was at the gun when he got there. The CPO looked fresh and fit. Maybe Dalby didn’t need to sleep. George yawned. He damn well did, and he hadn’t done enough of it. “All quiet?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Dalby answered. “We’re getting up toward Midway, too.”

“Uh-huh.” George looked north and west, as if he expected the atoll to come over the horizon any minute now. He didn’t; they weren’t that close, not by three or four hundred miles. “Anything from the Y-range?”

“Quiet as a mouse, far as I know,” Dalby said. “Way it looks to me is, the Japs haven’t got a carrier operating south of the island.”

“Makes sense,” George agreed. “If they did, they would’ve figured out we’re around by now. Hell, we’re almost close enough for land-based air from Midway to spot us.”

“Almost is the word,” the gun chief said. “And if they don’t have a carrier operating south of Midway, we really have made them pull in their horns. Us coming up here is a lot better than them bombing the crap out of Oahu.”

“You better believe it,” George said. “It’d be good if we could push ’em off Midway, too. Where would they go then?”

“Wake,” Fremont Dalby replied at once. “It’s another pissant little bird turd of an island southwest of Midway. But I’ll be damned if I’d want to hop from island to island across the whole stinking Pacific toward Japan.”

“Oh, good God, no!” George shuddered at the very idea. “You’d have to be crazy to try something like that. You’d have to be crazy to want to. As long as they get out of the Sandwich Islands and stay away, that’s plenty. This is a big goddamn ocean. There’s room enough for us and them.”

“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Dalby said. “Of course, how it looks to Philadelphia is anybody’s guess. The big brains back there can screw up anything if they put their minds to it. Minds!” He rolled his eyes. “If they had any, we’d all be better off.”

“Treason,” Fritz Gustafson said. “Off with your head.”

Dalby suggested that the loader lose some other organ important for happiness, if not absolutely necessary for personal survival. Gustafson didn’t say another word. He’d got his lick in, and he was content.

George’s watch passed quietly. No warning shouts of approaching Japanese airplanes came from the loudspeakers. The hydrophones didn’t pick up telltale noises from lurking Japanese submersibles. No torpedoes from lurking submersibles the hydrophone hadn’t picked up arrowed through the water toward the Townsend.

When the other crew took over the gun, George went down to the galley for more sandwiches and coffee. He felt as if he’d done the same thing just a few hours earlier. Of course, he had done the same thing, so no wonder he felt that way. These sandwiches were ham on wheat, not corned beef on rye. Other than that, he might have been running the film over again. Standing watch and watch made time blur. George tried to come up with the name of the artist who’d painted the pocket watch sagging and melting as if it were left out in the rain. It was something foreign, that was all he could remember.

Yawning, he headed for his hammock. “Here we go again,” he said as he climbed up into it.

The sailor he’d talked with the last time he sacked out laughed. “We gotta stop meeting like this,” he said. “People will get suspicious.”

George laughed, too, a little nervously. Was that just a joke, or did something faggoty hide underneath it? Aboard ship, you always wondered. The Townsend went back to Oahu often enough to let the crew get their ashes hauled on Hotel Street, but you wondered anyway. Some guys were flat-out queers, no two ways about it, and they couldn’t have cared less about the floozies on Hotel Street.

But you couldn’t call somebody on what was probably nothing but a harmless joke. If the other guy didn’t make another like it, George figured he would forget about this one. If he did… I’ll worry about that later. With another yawn, an enormous one, George decided to worry about everything later, and went to sleep.

Night had fallen when he came back up on deck with another mug of coffee. It was cool and quiet: no CAP after dark. Fremont Dalby got to the 40mm mount with a mug of his own. He nodded to George and said, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

Him, too? “Uh, yeah,” George said. He could imagine a lot of things, but the gun chief as a homo? Never in a million years.

“Should be a little easier this time through,” Dalby said. “We don’t have airplanes coming at us with bombs or torpedoes during the night.”

“Or trying to crash into us, either,” George put in.

“Yeah, that was fun, wasn’t it?” Dalby said. Fun wasn’t the word George would have used. He didn’t know which one he would have used, but it wasn’t one he would see in any family newspaper.

“All we gotta worry about now is submarines,” Fritz Gustafson said. As usual, the loader didn’t talk much. Also as usual, he got a lot of mileage out of what he did say.

Fremont Dalby’s suggestion about what submarines could do was illegal, immoral, and impossible. George stared out over the black waters of the Pacific. Starlight glittered off the sea, but the moon was down. A dozen submersibles could have been playing ring around the rosy half a mile from the Townsend and he never would have known it. Out in the tropical Atlantic, a Confederate boat had sneaked up on his father’s destroyer and sunk it in the middle of the night. The same thing could happen to him. At times like this, he knew it much too well.

Then Dalby said, “Those bastards have as much trouble finding us at night as we do finding them.”

That was true enough, and reassuring to boot. Besides, what would a Jap sub be doing out here in the middle of the night? George wished he hadn’t asked the question, because he saw an obvious answer: looking for American ships. If a submersible could, it would probably go after the Trenton ahead of the Townsend, but it might take whatever it could get.

He kept his nerves to himself. He didn’t want his buddies to know he’d got the wind up. Odds were he was flabbling over nothing. He understood that, which didn’t make not doing it any easier.

The watch passed quietly. No airplanes. No submarines. No nothing. Just the wide Pacific and, somewhere not far away, the rest of the flotilla. The other crew took over the gun. George went below for food and coffee and sleep. Coffee had trouble keeping him awake through watch and watch.

He came back on at four in the morning, and watched the sun rise out of the sea. The flotilla turned away from Midway during his watch, and started back towards Oahu. Now the United States were doing the poking. He hoped Japan liked getting poked.

“Hey, Mistuh Guard, suh.”

Hipolito Rodriguez swung the muzzle of his submachine gun toward the Negro who’d spoken to him. The motion was automatic and not particularly hostile. He just didn’t believe in taking chances. “What you want?” he asked.

“What I want?” The skinny black man laughed. “Mistuh Guard, suh, I got me a list long as your arm, but gettin’ let outa here do the job all by its ownself.” Rodriguez waited stonily. That wouldn’t happen, and the Negro had to know it. He did; the laughter leaked out of his face as he went on, “What I wants to ask you, suh, is where them niggers from Jackson is at now. They come through here, but they don’t hardly stop for nothin’.”

“Some go to Lubbock,” Rodriguez answered. “Some go to El Paso.” He was stubborn about sticking to the story the guards told the Negroes in Camp Determination. Not all the mallates believed it. But they weren’t sure what really had happened, which was all to the good.

This prisoner looked sly. “That a really fo’-true fac’, suh?”

“Of course it is.” Rodriguez lied without hesitation. He had as much of an interest in keeping the Negroes quiet as Jefferson Pinkard did himself.

“Ain’t how I hear it,” the fellow said.

“What you hear, then?” Rodriguez asked. “Tell me what you hear. Tell me who you hear it from, too.”

“Well…” The Negro suddenly realized he might have talked more than was good for him. “I ain’t so sure I recollects now.”

“No, eh?” Now the muzzle of Rodriguez’s submachine gun pointed toward the man’s midsection in a businesslike way. “Maybe we take you back. Maybe we ask some questions. We find out who telling lies here, si?”

The black man couldn’t turn pale. If he could have, he would have. If he could have, he would have disappeared. Since he couldn’t, he said, “You don’ need to do nothin’ like that, Mistuh Guard, suh. My memory, it’s much better all sudden-like.”

“Bueno. Glad to hear it,” Rodriguez said dryly. “Tell me, then-what you hear?”

“Well…” the Negro repeated. He licked his lips. “I don’t say this or nothin’-not me. I jus’ hear it.” Rodriguez gestured impatiently with the submachine gun. A weapon that could cut a man in half in the blink of an eye made a hell of a persuader. The black man spoke up in a hurry: “Some folks say them niggers didn’t go nowheres. Some folks say they was kilt.”

Some folks were right-dead right. “Who say stupid things like this?” Rodriguez asked. The Negro hesitated. He didn’t want to squeal on his friends, even with the threat from the submachine gun. Rodriguez asked a different question, one that seemed safer on the outside: “What barracks you live in?”

“I’s in Barracks Twenty-seven, suh,” the Negro said.

“Twenty-seven.” Rodriguez turned to the guards with him. “Remember that.”

“Will do, Troop Leader,” the three of them said as if they were one man. Rodriguez had discovered he liked wearing three stripes on his sleeve. He gave more orders than he took these days. In orders as in many other things, it was better to give than to receive.

He turned back to the Negro. “I find you lie to me about where you at, mallate, this camp ain’t big enough for you to hide. You understand?”

“I ain’t lyin’, Mistuh Guard, suh.” The prisoner practically radiated innocence-and no doubt would keep doing it till Rodriguez looked away or turned his back. “If I’s lyin’, I’s flyin’.”

“If you lyin’, you dyin’.” Rodriguez capped the black man’s rhyme with one of his own. He gestured with the muzzle of the submachine gun once more, this time in dismissal. The prisoner scurried away, glad to be out of the dread eye of officialdom.

“Troop Leader, how come we got to remember that barracks number?” asked one of the guards.

Rodriguez swallowed a sigh. Some of these people had no business looking down their noses at Negroes for stupidity. Patiently, he answered, “Because, Pruitt, we got to do something about Barracks Twenty-seven.”

“Like what, Troop Leader?” Pruitt radiated innocence, too. The trouble was, his was real.

“Ain’t gonna talk about it here.” Rodriguez gestured once more, this time with his left hand. There were four of them in their gray uniforms. All around them were Negroes, thousands of Negroes. Even though the men in gray all carried submachine guns, Rodriguez found himself sweating despite the cooler weather. The Negroes could rush them. Other guards would come try to save them. The machine gunners in the guard towers outside the barbed-wire perimeter would fire till their gun barrels glowed cherry red. They would massacre the blacks. Rodriguez doubted that would do him much good.

But no attack came. He and his companions finished their patrol. When they got back to the guards’ quarters, he reported to an officer what the Negro had told him. “Hmm,” said the chief assault leader-the equivalent of a captain in the Freedom Party guards. “What do you reckon we ought to do?”

“Clean out Barracks Twenty-seven, sir,” Rodriguez answered at once. “Tell them we ship them somewhere else because they talk too much. Then put them in trucks or send them to the bathhouse.”

“Hmm,” the chief assault leader said again. “I can’t decide that. I’ll have to pass it on up the line.”

“Yes, sir,” Rodriguez said resignedly. He’d seen this sort of thing in the Great War. Some officers knew what needed doing, then went and did it. Others knew what needed doing, then waited till somebody over them told them to do it. They weren’t so useful as the first kind, but they weren’t hopeless. The ones who didn’t know what needed doing… those were the officers who got their men killed.

Barracks Twenty-seven got cleaned out four days later than it should have, but it did get cleaned out. Rodriguez was part of the crew that took care of it. He wasn’t sorry; he wanted to see the job done. He also wanted to see it done right. “Gotta make sure we don’t spook the spooks,” another guard said. That summed things up, though Rodriguez’s smile was more dutiful than amused: he’d heard that joke, or ones too much like it, too many times before.

A different chief assault leader was in charge of the cleanout. Rodriguez wouldn’t have entrusted it to the man with whom he’d spoken, either. This fellow-his name was Higbe-handled it with aplomb. “We are too goddamn crowded here,” he told the black men lined up in front of the barracks, “so we’re shippin’ your asses down to El Paso. Y’all go back in the barracks and get whatever you need. Much as you can keep on your lap in a truck.” He looked at his watch. “You got ten minutes. Get movin’!”

That was a nice touch. Nothing too bad could happen to a man if he could bring his handful of miserable possessions with him… could it? One Negro hung back. Rodriguez recognized the black who’d spoken to him before at the same time as the mallate recognized him. Instead of hurrying into the barracks, the black man came over to him and said, “Mistuh Guard, suh, I don’t want to go to no El Paso.”

He knows what’s coming, all right, Rodriguez thought. “I think we fix it so you don’t got to,” he said aloud. He didn’t want the Negro kicking up a fuss. The less fuss, the better for everybody-except the prisoners, and they didn’t count. He went on, “Let me talk to my officer. We take care of it. You stay here. Don’t go nowhere.”

“Lawd bless you, suh,” the Negro said.

Rodriguez spoke briefly with Chief Assault Leader Higbe. Unlike the other officer, Higbe didn’t hesitate. He just nodded. “That sounds good to me, Troop Leader. You take care of it like you said.”

“Yes, sir.” Rodriguez saluted and went back to the Negro, who was nervously shifting from foot to foot. He nodded to the black man. “You come with me.”

“Where you takin’ me, suh?”

“Guards’ quarters. Got some questions to ask you.”

“Oh, yes, suh.” The Negro almost capered with glee. “I sings like a canary, long as you don’t put me on no truck.”

“You don’t want to go, you don’t go,” Rodriguez said. “What’s your name?”

“I’s Demetrius, suh,” the Negro answered.

Another fancy name, Rodriguez thought scornfully. The more raggedy the mallate, the fancier the handle he seemed to come with. “Bueno, Demetrius.” His words gave no clue to what lay in his mind. “You come along.”

Demetrius came, all smiles and relief. None of the other prisoners took any special notice; guards pulled blacks out of camp for one reason or another all the time. “What you need to know, suh?” Demetrius asked as they got near the barbed wire that segregated prisoners and guards. “Don’t matter what, not hardly. I tell you.”

“Bueno,” Rodriguez said once more. He waved to the gate crew. They opened up for him and Demetrius. Rodriguez urged the Negro on ahead of him. As soon as buildings hid them from the prisoners’ view, he fired a shot into the back of Demetrius’ head. He waited to see if he would need give him another one to finish him off, but he didn’t. The black man probably died before he finished crumpling to the ground.

“What’s up, Troop Leader?” another guard asked, as casually as if they were talking about the weather.

“Troublemaker,” Rodriguez answered: a response that could bury any black man. “We got to get rid of the body quiet-like.”

“Niggers’ll know he came in here. They’ll know he didn’t come out,” the trooper said.

Rodriguez shrugged. “And so? We say we catch him dealing in contraband, they think he deserve what he get.”

That overstated things a little. The prisoners admired people who could smuggle forbidden things into Camp Determination. But they knew the guards came down hard on the smugglers they caught. Dealers in contraband usually bribed guards to get stuff for them and look the other way. Guards got fired for doing things like that. The Negroes got fired, too: fired on.

“Get the body out of here,” Rodriguez told the man who’d questioned him.

He had stripes on his sleeve. The other guard didn’t. “Yes, Troop Leader,” he said, and took the late, unlamented Demetrius by the feet.

“I want to congratulate Troop Leader Rodriguez for a fine piece of work,” Jefferson Pinkard said at a guards’ meeting a few days later. “He spotted trouble, he reported it, and we dealt with it. Nobody in Barracks Twenty-seven is going to spread rumors anymore, by God. Chief Assault Leader Higbe deserves commendation for making the cleanout run so smooth. A letter will go in his file.”

He didn’t talk about a letter going into Rodriguez’s file, even if they were friends. Rodriguez might get rockers under his stripes, but that was it. All the commendation letters in the world wouldn’t make him anything more than a top kick. The Confederate States were more likely to name a Sonoran peasant an officer than they were to appoint a Negro Secretary of State, but only a little. Rodriguez didn’t worry about it. He knew he’d done a good job, too. He’d saved everybody in camp-except the Negroes-some trouble. That was plenty.

Major General Abner Dowling could see the Confederate States of America from his new headquarters in Clovis, New Mexico. His only major trouble was, at the moment he couldn’t see much of the Eleventh Army, with which he was supposed to go after the enemy. He had a lot of territory to cover and not a lot of men with which to cover it. The war out here by Texas’ western border seemed very much an afterthought.

Back in the lost and distant days of peace, Clovis was a minor trade center on the U.S.-C.S. frontier. The town was founded in the early years of the century with the unromantic handle of Riley’s Switch; a railroad official’s daughter suggested renaming it for the first Christian King of France. Cattle from the West Texas prairie paused at its feed lots before going on to supply the meat markets of California. It had flourished when western Texas, under the name of Houston, joined the USA: those same cattle kept coming west, only now without a customs barrier. Houston’s return to Texas and to the CSA sent Clovis into a tailspin from which it had yet to recover.

Men in green-gray weren’t cattle, even if they were often treated in ways that would have made a rancher blush or turn pale. Feeding them and separating them from the little money the U.S. government doled out to them had produced a small upturn, but the Clovis Chamber of Commerce still sighed for the days when the longhorn ruled the local economy.

The Chamber of Commerce’s sighs were not Dowling’s worry, except when the local greasy spoons all jacked up their prices to gouge soldiers at the same time. He growled then. When growling didn’t work, he threatened to move his headquarters and place Clovis permanently off-limits to all military personnel. A threat to the pocketbook got people’s attention. Prices promptly came back down.

Up till now, that was the biggest victory Dowling had won. Both his side and his Confederate counterparts patrolled the border on horseback. Even command cars were hard to come by in these parts, and some of the terrain was too rugged for anything with wheels. Every so often, cavalrymen in green-gray and those in butternut would shoot at one another. Their occasional casualties convinced both sides they were being aggressive enough.

Dowling was plowing through paperwork and patting himself on the back for getting out from under Daniel MacArthur when his adjutant stuck his head into the office. “Sir, there’s an officer from the War Department here to see you,” Major Angelo Toricelli said.

“There is?” Dowling blinked. “Why, in God’s name?”

“Beats me, sir. He didn’t say,” Toricelli answered cheerfully. “All he said was that his name is Major Levitt and he’s got something he’s supposed to hand-deliver to you.” Toricelli paused. “I had him searched. Whatever it is, it’s not a people bomb.”

“Thank you, Major,” Dowling said. “Maybe you’d better show him in.”

Major Levitt was skinny, sandy-haired, and not particularly memorable. After Toricelli ducked out of the office, he said, “Your adjutant is, ah, a diligent young man.”

“Well, yes,” Dowling said. In a low-key way, Levitt had style. Dowling knew his features would have been much more ruffled if he’d just been frisked. “What can I do for you today, Major?”

“I have this for you, sir.” Levitt set a sealed envelope on Dowling’s desk. “Major Toricelli didn’t find anything obviously lethal about it.”

“I’m so relieved,” Dowling murmured, not about to let the officer from Philadelphia show more sangfroid than he did himself. Levitt smiled. When he did, his whole face lit up. He looked like a human being, and a nice one, instead of a cog in the military machine. Dowling opened the envelope, unfolded the papers inside, and began to read. He suddenly looked up. “Jesus Christ!” he said, and then, “You know what’s in these orders?”

“Yes, sir,” Levitt said. “You’re allowed to discuss them with me.”

“Oh, joy.” Dowling went on reading. When he finished, he looked up again. “I understand what I’m supposed to do. But why on earth am I supposed to concentrate my forces and launch an attack? There’s nothing in West Texas worth having.”

“I know.” Major Levitt smiled another of his charming smiles. “I served there for a while between the wars, when it was Houston.”

“These”-Dowling tapped the orders with the nail of his index finger-“are very strange. When I was sent here, they told me that as long as the Confederates didn’t steal Albuquerque and Santa Fe while we weren’t looking, I’d be doing my job. And now this. What’s going on?”

Levitt told him exactly what was going on, in about half a dozen sentences. “Any questions, sir?” he finished.

“No,” Dowling said. “You’re absolutely right. I can see the need. Just the same, though, Major, and no offense to you, I’m going to keep you here for a while, till Philadelphia confirms that it really did send these orders. They look authentic-but then, they would if they were phony, too. Featherston’s bound to have some good forgers in Richmond, same as we’re bound to be forging Confederate papers.”

“No offense taken, sir,” Levitt said. “As long as your force gets rolling by that date, what happens beforehand doesn’t matter.”

“Ha!” Dowling muttered. Major Levitt was a General Staff officer. To them, logistics was an abstract science like calculus. They didn’t have to worry about moving actual men and guns and munitions and fuel and food. Abner Dowling did, and knew his supply train was as flimsy as the rest of the alleged Eleventh Army. “Major Toricelli!” he called. “Can I see you for a moment?”

“Yes, sir?” Toricelli was in the office in nothing flat, sending Levitt a suspicious look. “What is it?”

Dowling handed him the orders. “Please get confirmation of these from Philadelphia. Until we have it, Major Levitt is not to leave this building.”

“Yes, sir!” Toricelli gave Levitt a real glare this time.

“Highest security,” Dowling added. “Don’t compromise the orders to verify them.” Toricelli saluted and hurried away. Dowling nodded to Levitt. “Care for a cigarette?”

“No, thank you, sir. I never got the habit. I ran track at West Point, and they’re bad for your wind.”

“Ah. I was a football man myself-a tackle,” Dowling said. “Even back in those days, I was built more like a brick than a greyhound.” He lit up. He wasn’t running anywhere.

Not quite half an hour later, the telephone on his desk rang. He picked it up. “Dowling here.”

“Hello, sir. This is John Abell. Do you recognize my voice?”

Even across two-thirds of the country and an indifferent connection, Dowling did. “Yes, indeed, General,” he said.

“Good. That makes things easier,” the General Staff officer said. “I can confirm those orders for you. We did send Major Levitt west with them. Please follow them precisely.”

“I’ll do it,” Dowling promised. “Anything else?”

“No, sir. That covers it,” Abell answered. The line went dead.

Dowling nodded to Levitt. “All right, Major. You are what you say you are, and these”-he tapped the orders again-“are what they say they are. I’ll carry them out.”

“Thank you, sir.” Levitt grinned. “Would you be kind enough to let your adjutant know I don’t have horns and fangs and a spiked tail?”

Dowling smiled, too. “If he frisked you, he should already know that.” But he did get up and let Major Toricelli know the courier was neither a devil nor, worse, a Confederate.

“I didn’t think he was, sir, but you never can tell,” his adjutant said. “I wondered if he was a Mormon in disguise, too, to tell you the truth.”

“Gark,” said Dowling, who hadn’t thought of that. “No wonder you checked to see if he was loaded with explosives.”

“It’s a rum old world, sir,” Toricelli said.

“Ain’t it the truth?” Dowling agreed. “And we’re going to be the busiest people in it the next few days. The Eleventh Army is strung out from the border with Chihuahua to the border with Sequoyah. I want to concentrate here, but I want to leave enough of a screen behind so the Confederates don’t notice we’re concentrating till we go over the border.”

“That would be easier if we had more men,” Major Toricelli said.

“Of course it would. And if pigs had wings we’d all carry umbrellas,” Dowling said, which made his adjutant send him a quizzical look. He ignored it and went on, “Let’s go to the map room and see what we can work out.”

The more he studied the situation, the less happy he got. Major Toricelli had it right: if he left enough men behind to fool the foe, he wouldn’t be able to mount the kind of attack the War Department had in mind. He grumbled and fumed, thinking about bricks without straw. His adjutant seemed sunk as deep in gloom-till Toricelli suddenly started to laugh.

Now Dowling had the quizzical stare. “What’s so funny, Major? Nice to think something is.”

“Sir, I don’t think we need the screening force,” Toricelli said. “If the Confederates see what we’re doing and attack us somewhere else along the line-well, so what? Aren’t they doing exactly what we want them to do?”

Dowling eyed the map a little while longer. Then he laughed, too. “Damned if they aren’t, Major,” he said. “Damned if they aren’t, by God. All right. We’ll keep it just secret enough so Featherston’s fuckers think we’re trying to but we aren’t very good at it. We can’t be too open, or they’ll start wondering what’s up.”

Toricelli nodded. “Got you, sir. I like that.”

“So do I,” Dowling said. “Let’s start drafting orders, then.”

The orders went out. The U.S. Eleventh Army started concentrating on Clovis. U.S. air strength in New Mexico started concentrating on Clovis, too. The fighters would help keep the Confederates from breaking up the concentration with bombers when they noticed it. They didn’t take long. Urgent signals started heading east from the C.S. Army of West Texas. Dowling’s cryptographers couldn’t make sense of all of them, but what they could read suggested the enemy was alarmed.

“If I were in West Texas, I’d be alarmed, too,” Dowling told Angelo Toricelli. “I’d think the U.S. general on the other side of the border had gone clear around the bend. Why stir things up here?”

“Because the USA can fart and chew gum at the same time?” his adjutant suggested.

“That’s what we’re doing, all right.” Dowling had to stop, because he was laughing too hard to go on. “If we had a real army here…” He shrugged. “But we don’t, so we do the best we can with what we’ve got.”

He was ready on the appointed day. He was less than an hour away from issuing the order to start the opening barrage when he got another phone call from John Abell. “Please hold up for three days, sir,” Abell said. Please made the order more polite, but no less an order.

“All right, General. I can still do that-just barely,” Dowling said, and shouted for Major Toricelli to put the brakes on things. Toricelli swore, then started making calls of his own. Dowling asked Abell, “Can you tell me why?”

“Not on a line that isn’t secure,” the General Staff officer replied. Dowling found himself nodding. The Confederates had a couple of thousand miles of wire on which to be listening in. And, after a little thought, he had a pretty fair notion of the answer anyway.

November in the North Atlantic wasn’t so bad as, say, January in the North Atlantic. Nobody would ever have mistaken it for July off the Sandwich Islands, though. The Josephus Daniels climbed over swells, slid into troughs, bounced all the time, and generally behaved like a toy boat in a bathtub with a rambunctious four-year-old.

Sam Carsten took it all in stride. He’d rounded the Horn more than once, facing seas that made the North Atlantic at its worst seem tame by comparison. But he wasn’t surprised when the destroyer escort’s passageways began to stink of vomit. A lot of men were seasick. He ordered cleaning parties increased. Smelling the result of other men’s nausea helped make sailors sick. The reek diminished, but didn’t go away. He hadn’t expected anything different.

“You’re a good sailor, sir,” Pat Cooley said, watching Sam tear into a roast beef sandwich on the bridge. The exec hadn’t been sick, not so far as Sam knew, but he did look a little green.

“Not too bad,” Sam allowed, and took another bite. “I’ve had plenty of practice, that’s for damn sure.” He looked up at the cloud-filled sky. “Weather’s right for people like us, anyhow.”

The fair, auburn-haired exec eyed the even fairer blond skipper. “Well, that’s true,” Cooley said. “But everything comes with a price, doesn’t it?” Yes, he was green.

“It does.” Sam finished the sandwich and wiped crumbs off his hands. “When we’re up and down so much, and when all this damn spray’s in the air, the Y-ranging set doesn’t give us as much as it would in softer weather.”

Cooley gulped. “I wasn’t thinking of the Y-ranging set, sir.” Sam thought he would have to leave the bridge in a hurry, but he fought down what might have been about to come up. Sam admired that. Carrying on in spite of what bothered you was a lot tougher than not being bothered, which he himself wasn’t.

“I know, Pat,” he said now, more gently than he was in the habit of speaking. “But it also means we have to patrol the hard way, and it means we can’t see as far. I hope it doesn’t mean something slips past us.”

Along with several other destroyer escorts and destroyers, the Josephus Daniels sailed east of Newfoundland. Their goal was simple: to stop the British from sneaking men and arms into Canada to keep the rebellion there sizzling. As with most goals, setting it was easier than meeting it.

The U.S. Navy had bigger fish to fry, or it would have committed more ships to the job. Fortunately, the Royal Navy did, too. If it didn’t keep the USA away from the convoys from South America and South Africa that fed the United Kingdom, Britain would start to starve. Losing that fight had made the U.K. throw in the sponge in the Great War. Under Churchill and Mosley, the limeys were doing their best to make sure it didn’t happen again. They didn’t treat supporting the Canuck rebels as job number one.

But the British had one big advantage: the North Atlantic was vast, and the ships in it relatively tiny. A lot of what they sent got through. And as for what didn’t-well, if it didn’t, what did they lose? A rusty freighter, some munitions, and a few sailors captured or killed. Cheap enough, for a country fighting a war.

Meanwhile, the United States had to pull ships away from attacking Britain’s supply convoys for this thankless job. Carsten didn’t love convoy-hunting; he’d done too much of it the last time around. But it seemed like a trip to Coney Island next to this.

Up to the crest of a wave. As the Josephus Daniels started to slide down into the trough, the Y-range operator stirred in his seat. “Something?” Sam asked.

“I’m-not sure, sir,” the young officer answered. “I thought so for a second, but then we lost the target.”

“What bearing?” Sam tried not to sound excited. He wanted to go after something.

“About 315, sir,” said Lieutenant, J.G., Thad Walters.

“Mr. Cooley.” Now Sam’s voice was sharp and crisp. “Change course to 315. All ahead full. And sound general quarters, if you please.”

“Changing course to 3-1-5: aye aye, sir,” Cooley said. He called, “All ahead full,” down to the engine room. His finger stabbed a button near the wheel. Klaxons hooted. Sailors dashed to their battle stations.

Sam stared northwest. You bastard-you almost snuck past us, he thought. He knew he might be thinking unkind thoughts at a figment of the electronics’ imagination. That was a chance he took. He spoke to the wireless operator on the bridge: “Signal the other ships in the patrol that we are changing course to pursue a possible enemy ship.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The rating at the Morse key reached for the book to find the proper code groups.

Lieutenant Walters watched his set like a cat keeping an eye on a mousehole. He didn’t say anything the first time the Josephus Daniels climbed to the top of a crest. The next time, though, he jerked as if he’d stuck his finger in a light socket. “It’s there, sir!” he exclaimed. “Bearing 310, speed… eleven knots.”

“Change course to 310, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said, and then, to the Y-range operator, “Mr. Walters, give me a range as soon as you can.” Eleven knots. That sure sounded like a lumbering British freighter. He couldn’t think of any other kind of ship likely to be in these waters right now.

After a couple of more climbs to the crest, Walters said, “Sir, range is about six miles.”

“Thank you,” Sam answered. In good weather, the target would have been easily visible. Of course, for the limeys to bet that the weather off Newfoundland in November would be lousy gave odds a hell of a lot better than putting chips down on double-zero at the roulette table.

Before too long, the freighter did come into sight: a big, lumbering tub not much different from what Sam had expected. At his order, the wireless operator sent more code groups.

“Come up alongside, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. “I think we’ll need to put a prize crew aboard.”

The Josephus Daniels was a tub herself, but she seemed all sharklike grace alongside the freighter. Sam handled the blinker himself, signaling, WHAT SHIP ARE YOU? HEAVE TO FOR BOARDING AND INSPECTION.

WE ARE THE KARLSKRONA. WE ARE SWEDISH. WE ARE NEUTRAL, came the reply.

“Fat chance,” Sam said. He signaled, HEAVE TO FOR BOARDING AND CONTRABAND INSPECTION. He called to the forward gun turret: “Put one across her bow if she doesn’t stop.”

She didn’t. The shot rang out. LAST WARNING, Sam signaled. Sailors ran across the Karlskrona’s deck. For a couple of seconds, Sam thought it was panic. Then, suddenly, he didn’t: it was too well organized, too well drilled.

“Sink that ship!” he shouted at the same time as Pat Cooley yelled, “She’s got guns!”

Ever since taking over the Josephus Daniels, Sam had concentrated on gunnery. His men hadn’t been the best then. They were now. He would have matched them against the gunners from any other destroyer escort in the Navy.

And they needed to be. He and Pat Cooley both exclaimed in horror when the armed freighter opened fire. The size of the spout that miss kicked up… “She’s got six-inchers!” Cooley yelped.

“Uh-huh,” Sam said grimly. The enemy outgunned his ship, and they weren’t far from point-blank range. A couple of hits could sink the Josephus Daniels. “Flank speed and zigzag, Mr. Cooley. Let’s not make it easy for them.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Cooley swung the wheel hard to port, then just as hard to starboard. Another great gout of water rose, this one closer to the destroyer escort. The limeys were getting the range.

But the Josephus Daniels’ gunners already had it. Both turrets were firing, and the ship’s violent maneuvers fazed them not a bit. “Hit!” Sam yelled, and then, “Hit!” again. He whooped after the second one-it was near the bow, where the freighter carried one of her guns. The destroyer escort’s twin 40mms opened up, too-they were close enough for them to reach the foe. He felt as if he’d fallen back in time to the War of 1812, when ships went toe to toe at short range and slugged away at each other till one surrendered or sank.

One of those big shells-the damn freighter had a light cruiser’s firepower-burst much too close to the Josephus Daniels’ stern. Shrapnel howled through the air. That one would cause casualties even if it was a miss. If the burst was close enough, it might spring hull plates, too, and make the destroyer escort’s seams leak. But it wouldn’t hurt her badly.

And she was chewing up the freighter. Her four-inch guns threw shells that weighed only a third as much as the enemy’s, but she fired much faster and she fired much straighter. “She’s on fire!” Pat Cooley yelled, and then, half a minute later, “She’s struck her colors!”

Sure enough, the freighter’s ensign came down, and a white flag of surrender went up to replace it. “Cease fire!” Sam ordered. The turrets stopped at once; the men at the antiaircraft guns needed a few seconds to get the word-or maybe they just didn’t want to hear it. That went against the rules, but not against human nature. “Approach to pick up survivors, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. He told the men at the gun turrets what the destroyer escort was doing, and added, “If you see anybody going near her guns, open up again.”

But the freighter-Sam didn’t suppose she was really the Karlskrona-had no more fight in her. Her men were taking to the boats-which, in the North Atlantic, was no joke. Sam ordered nets lowered to let the British sailors come up the Josephus Daniels’ side. His own crew, armed with a couple of submachine guns, rifles, pistols, axes, and even some big wrenches, looked like a nineteenth-century boarding party as they took charge of the prisoners. The pharmacist’s mate had groaning wounded men to deal with.

Sam went down to the deck for a closer look at the vanquished enemy. The British skipper, a weary and bedraggled man with a horsy face and bad teeth, recognized him for the destroyer escort’s captain at once. “Well fought, sir,” the limey said, saluting. “Thought we might surprise you, but you maneuvered well-and those bloody guns! Damn me if I think you missed even once.”

“You gave us a nasty start,” Sam said. “You were loaded for bear, all right.” That probably made him sound like Daniel Boone to the Englishman, but he didn’t care. If the freighter’s gunners were better… But the best gun crews were bound to be in the Royal Navy. Little jaunts like this would have to take whoever was left, and whoever was left hadn’t been good enough.

“Kind of you to take us aboard, all things considered,” his opposite number said.

“If you’d fired after the white flag went up, I’d’ve sunk you,” Sam said matter-of-factly. “Short of that, though, I wouldn’t leave a ship’s cat in an open boat on the North Atlantic. I’ve been in the Navy better than thirty years. I’ve seen a few things I’d rather not see again, or think about, either.”

“I believe you, sir. I’m grateful all the same,” the Englishman said.

“Gratitude is worth its weight in gold,” Sam said, and the limey flinched. Sam went on, “You and your men are POWs now. We’ll take you back to the USA. When the war’s over, you can go home. For now…” For now, he thought, you didn’t blow me to hell and gone. I’ll take that.

Irving Morrell looked up into the western sky. A snowflake hit him right between the eyes. “By God, the bastards weren’t lying,” he breathed, and his breath smoked as if he had a cigarette in his mouth. Just this minute, he didn’t, though a pack sat in his pocket.

For once, the weathermen had hit things right on the button. They’d said this early snowstorm would get here now, and they were right. He’d gambled and held up his attack three days to wait for it, and his gamble looked as if it would pay off.

Meadville, Pennsylvania, lay in the foothills of the Alleghenies. Morrell stood on the grounds of Allegheny College. The Georgian and Greek Revival architecture told of timeless elegance and dedication to scholarship. But Confederate bombs and artillery had turned some of the buildings to ruins-not that the Greeks hadn’t wrecked masterpieces in their own wars. And the barrels snorting on the yellowing lawn were not in perfect keeping with an academic atmosphere.

Only a few blocks away stood the world’s biggest zipper factory. Morrell wondered if button manufacturers cursed Meadville whenever they thought of it. That wasn’t his worry, though. He aimed his curses at Jake Featherston, and before long he’d aim them through the barrel of a gun.

He scrambled up into the closest barrel, which was his to command. When the fighting started, he intended to lead from the front. Generals who stayed in back of the line soon lost track of what was really going on. Generals who didn’t stay back of the line often got killed, but Morrell refused to worry about that.

“We just about ready, sir?” asked his gunner, a dark, and darkly clever, corporal named Al Bergeron. He was a good soldier and a good gunner; Morrell missed Michael Pound all the same, and hoped the veteran underofficer was safe. Wherever Pound was, he’d be acting as if he wore three stars, not three stripes.

But Morrell would have to worry about him later, too. “Just about, Frenchy,” he answered. During the Great War, more than a few people with French names changed them to German-sounding ones so their neighbors wouldn’t suspect them. That kind of hysteria hadn’t come again. The Confederate States were the only enemies people flabbled hard about now.

Morrell put on his earphones. This barrel had a fancier wireless setup than any of the rest. He could link up not only to other barrels but also to artillery, infantry, and aviation circuits. He wondered whether being able to talk to so many people at once was part of the privilege of his rank or part of the price of it.

He connected to the artillery web. “Ready at 0730?” he asked. If he got a no, somebody’s head would roll-H-hour was only fifteen minutes away.

But the answer came back at once: “Ready, sir.” The officer who replied sounded young and excited. Morrell wondered if he’d seen action before. Whether he had or not, he would now.

Those fifteen minutes, like the last fifteen minutes before every attack, seemed to crawl by on their bellies. Corporal Bergeron said, “Almost seems a shame to do this to those damn greasers.”

“Almost-but not quite,” Morrell said dryly. The gunner chuckled. Morrell’s mouth stretched in a grin of savage anticipation. No, he didn’t think it was a shame, not even slightly. If Jake Featherston was stretched so thin that he needed to use second-grade troops from the Empire of Mexico to hold part of his line, he had only himself to blame if the USA tried to stomp the stuffing out of them.

No sooner had that thought crossed Morrell’s mind than the artillery opened up. Even here inside the turret, the thunder was cataclysmic. He’d been hoarding guns as hard as he’d been hoarding barrels. The Mexicans would like things even less.

The barrage went on for a precise hour and a half. As soon as the guns let up, Morrell spoke into the intercom to the driver and then over the webs connecting him to the rest of the barrels and to the infantry. He said the same thing every time: “Let’s go!”

Engine roaring, his barrel rumbled forward. Morrell stuck his head out of the cupola so he could see better. That was a splendid way to get shot. He knew as much. It was the chance he took. If he got another oak-leaf cluster for his Purple Heart, then he did, that was all. He needed to see what was going on, as much as he could. And if he stopped one with his face… Well, a general officer’s pension would leave Agnes and Mildred without many worries about money.

Along with the rest of the barrels, his pushed southwest out of Meadville. Some foot soldiers loped along among the big, noisy machines. Others rode in trucks or in lightly armored carriers to keep up more easily. A few infantrymen clambered up onto barrels and let them do the work. That was highly unofficial. Doctrine handed down from on high-which is to say, from Philadelphia-frowned on it. Riding barrels left soldiers vulnerable to the fire they inevitably drew. But it also got them where they were going faster and fresher than marching would have done. No matter what doctrine the War Department laid down, Morrell liked that.

He knew just when they broke into the Mexicans’ lines. The U.S. barrage had come down right on the button. Only a few soldiers in that yellowish khaki were in any shape to fight. Scattered rifle fire and a handful of machine guns greeted the advancing U.S. forces, but that was all. Francisco Jose’s soldiers didn’t carry the automatic rifles that made C.S. infantrymen so formidable. They had bolt-action Tredegars, pieces much like U.S. Springfields.

They didn’t have barrels. They didn’t have much artillery. They didn’t have armored personnel carriers. And they didn’t have a chance. Morrell had loaded up with a rock in his fist. Now he swung it with all his might.

Here and there, the Mexicans fought bravely. Knots of them held up Morrell’s forces wherever they could. Stubborn men who would die before they yielded a position were an asset to any army, and the Empire of Mexico’s had its share. But the Mexicans didn’t have enough men like that, and the ones they did have couldn’t do what they might have done with better equipment. More often than not, the U.S. advance flowed past those stubborn knots to either side. They could be cleaned up at leisure. Meanwhile, the push went on.

“Keep moving!” Whenever Morrell ducked down into the turret, he spread his gospel over the wireless. “Always keep moving. Once we get in among ’em, once we get behind ’em, they’ll go to pieces. And then we’ll be able to move even faster.”

And he had the pleasure of watching his prophecy come true. Till the early afternoon, the enemy soldiers in front of his barrels and infantry did everything they could to stop them and even to throw them back. After that… After that, it was like watching ice melt when spring came to a northern river. Once the rot started, it spread fast. By that first nightfall, he was seeing the enemy’s backs.

He didn’t want to stop for the darkness. He kept going till his driver couldn’t see any farther. He sent infantry ahead even after that. And he had the barrels moving again as soon as the first gray showed in the east.

The Mexicans kept trying to fight back early in the second day. But when they saw barrels coming at them out of the swirling snow, a lot of them lost their nerve. Morrell would have lost his nerve, too, trying to stand up against barrels with no more than rifles. Some of the men in the yellowish khaki ran away. Others dropped their rifles and raised their hands. A lot of them looked miserably cold. They didn’t have greatcoats, and probably didn’t have long johns, either. Down in the Empire of Mexico, they wouldn’t have needed them. They were a long way from home.

By the end of that second day, Morrell’s barrels had smashed through the crust of enemy resistance. Behind it lay… not much. Morrell had a gruesomely good time shooting up a Confederate truck convoy. The big butternut trucks rolled right up to his barrel, sure it had to be on their side even if it was the wrong color.

They found out how wrong they were in a hurry. At Morrell’s orders, Frenchy Bergeron wrecked the first truck in the convoy with a well-aimed cannon shell. The second truck tried to go around it. Bergron blasted that one, too, effectively blocking the road. Then he and the bow gunner used their machine guns to shoot up the rest of the trucks. More U.S. barrels came up and joined the fun.

It wasn’t much fun for the poor bastards on the receiving end. Soldiers spilled out of some of the trucks and tried to find shelter from the storm of bullets wherever they could. Other trucks carried munitions, not men. When they burned, they sent tracers flying every which way. Standing up in the cupola again, Morrell whooped. Corporal Bergeron got the view through his gunsight. He pounded Morrell gently on the leg, which also amounted to a whoop.

Desperate to escape the trap, some of the trucks went off the road and into the fields on either side. Like their U.S. counterparts, they had four-wheel drive. That gave them some traction on the wet ground, but only some. Great gouts of mud flew from their tires as they struggled forward. While they did, the green-gray barrels went right on shooting at them, and they couldn’t shoot back. Without antibarrel cannon, the only weapons foot soldiers had against armor were grenades through the hatches and Featherston Fizzes. They couldn’t get close enough to use anything like that here.

Once he’d smashed the column of trucks, Morrell got on the wireless circuit to the barrels closest to his: “Let’s get rolling again. We’ve got to keep moving.” He popped up again and cast a wary eye at the sky. So far, the promised storm was still rolling through. When the weather got better, the Confederates were going to throw anything that could fly at his armored forces. From what he could see, air strikes had the best chance of slowing him down-if anything could. Now that he’d broken through the C.S. line, he saw nothing in the rear that had much chance of doing the job.

As his armored column pushed south and west from Meadville, another, slightly smaller, U.S. force was driving north from Parkersburg, West Virginia. If everything went according to plan, Morrell’s men and the troops advancing from West Virginia would clasp hands somewhere in eastern Ohio. And if they did, the Confederate Army infesting Pittsburgh would find itself in a very embarrassing position indeed.

Surrounded. Cut off from reinforcements, except perhaps by air. Cut off from resupply, with the same possible exception. Could Featherston’s men fly in enough fuel and ammo to keep a modern army functioning? Morrell didn’t know, but this whole two-pronged attack was based on the assumption that it was damned unlikely. And even if the Confederates could at first, would they be able to build transports as fast as U.S. fighters shot them down? He didn’t think so.

What would he do if he were Jake Featherston? Try to pull out of Pittsburgh and save what he could? Try to break the ring around the city from the outside? Try to do both at once? Did the CSA have the men and machines to do both at once? With every mile his barrels advanced, Irving Morrell doubted that more and more. At the front, Confederate armies remained formidable, even fearsome. But they were like an alligator that went, “I’ve been sick,” in an animated cartoon: all mouth, with no strength anywhere else. If you concentrated on the puny little legs and tail instead of the big end that chomped… “Well, let’s see how Jake likes this,” Morrell murmured, and he rolled on.

During the Great War, Chester Martin would never have imagined hitching a ride on a barrel. For one thing, there hadn’t been so many of the lumbering monstrosities in the last fight. For another, a Great War barrel going flat out was faster than a man, but not by a whole hell of a lot.

Here at the end of 1942, though, things had changed. Most of Chester’s new platoon had attached itself to a platoon of barrels. They rumbled through Pennsylvania-or maybe they were in Ohio by now. One state didn’t look a whole lot different from another, especially when you were crashing along at fifteen or twenty miles an hour.

Every once in a while, the platoon had to fight. Sometimes the men would drop down from the barrels and shoot at startled Confederates. Sometimes they wouldn’t bother descending. A PFC from Chicago carried a captured Confederate submachine gun and sprayed bullets around from the back of a barrel. Chester kept thinking he should have been called Vito or something like that, but he was a big blond Pole named Joe Jakimiuk.

What really amazed Chester was the speed of the U.S. advance. “It wasn’t like this in the Great War, I’ll tell you,” he said as he sat by a campfire the second night and ate something alleged to be beef stew out of a can. It bore as much resemblance to what Rita called beef stew as boiled inner tube in motor-oil gravy, but it filled him up. “Back then, even in a breakthrough we only made a few miles a day, and nobody figured out how to do even that much till 1917.”

“Better barrels and better trucks now.” That was Second Lieutenant Delbert Wheat, the platoon commander. He spoke with the flat vowels and harsh consonants of Kansas. Odds were he hadn’t been born in 1917. Even so, he wasn’t an obnoxious twerp like the other shavetails Chester had met since reenlisting. He actually seemed to have some idea of what he was doing-and when he wasn’t sure, he didn’t act as if asking questions would cost him a couple of inches off his cock. If he lived and didn’t get maimed, he wouldn’t stay a second lieutenant long. Chester could see a big future ahead of him.

For now, Wheat paused and lit a cigarette. Chester’s nostrils twitched at the fragrant smoke. “You lifted a pack off of one of Featherston’s fuckers, sir,” he said. “The smokes we get with our rations don’t smell that good.”

“Right the first time, Sergeant.” Wheat grinned. His looks were as corn-fed as his accent: he was a husky blond guy, good-sized but not quite so big as Joe Jakimiuk, with a narrower face and sharper features than the PFC’s. He held out the pack to Chester. “Want one?”

“Sure. Thanks a lot, sir,” Chester answered. A lot of lieutenants would have gone right on smoking the good stuff themselves without a thought for their noncoms. Some officers acted as if they were a superior breed of man just because of their metal rank badges. Wheat didn’t have that kind of arrogance-another sign he’d do well for himself if he stayed healthy.

“Sentries all around our position tonight,” he told Chester. “No telling which way the Confederates will come at us. We’re really and truly in their rear, so they could come from any direction at all.”

“Yes, sir,” Chester said. “I’ll take care of it.” In the enemy rear! He didn’t think that had ever happened in the Great War: not to him, anyway. You could beat back the Confederates, but get behind them? Retreating troops had always been able to fall back faster than advancing troops could pursue them through the wreckage of war. Now… Now this armored thrust had pierced the zone of devastation and found nothing much behind it.

“You men will want to sleep while you can,” Lieutenant Wheat told his soldiers. “I don’t know how much we’re going to get from here on out.”

“Listen to him, guys,” Chester said. “He knows what he’s talking about.”

He curled up in his own bedroll not long after he stubbed out the mild, flavorful Confederate cigarette. Exhaustion blackjacked him moments later. He forgot the chilly air and the hard, damp ground and everything else. He wished he could have slept for a week. What was hard on the young guys was a hell of a lot harder for somebody of his vintage.

Instead of a week, he got till the end of the wee small hours. Jakimiuk shook him awake, saying, “Sorry, Sarge, but we’re gonna move out.”

“Coffee,” Chester croaked, like a man in the desert wishing for water. The instant coffee that came with rations was nasty, but it did help pry his eyelids open. And it was hot, which was also welcome.

Ham and eggs out of a tin can made the beef stew from the night before seem delicious by comparison. Chester shrugged. The ration would keep him going another few hours. Maybe he’d eat something better then. The really scary thing was, the soldiers who wore butternut had it worse.

As the sky grayed toward dawn, the barrels the platoon had been riding roared to life. Chester clambered aboard the one he’d ridden the past two days. The barrel’s commander popped out of his cupola like a jack-in-the-box. He was a sergeant, too, though a younger man than Chester. “We going to give them another boot in the balls today?” he asked cheerfully.

“Here’s hoping, anyway.” Chester wasn’t about to commit the sin of optimism. Justifiably or not, he feared it would jinx everything.

No one would see the sun even when it rose. Clouds filled the sky. They couldn’t seem to make up their mind whether to give rain or snow or sleet. Since they couldn’t decide, they spat out a little of each at random. Even when nothing was coming down, the wind out of the northwest had knives in it. Chester would have disliked the weather much more than he did if it hadn’t kept C.S. Asskickers from diving on him.

“Here we go!” Lieutenant Wheat shouted when the barrels moved out. He might have been a kid on a Ferris wheel at a county fair. Chester suspected he wouldn’t take long to lose that boyish enthusiasm. Once you’d been through a few fights, once you’d seen a few horrors, you might be ready to go on with the war, but you weren’t likely to be eager anymore.

A train ahead chugged east. On its way to Pittsburgh? Chester wondered. He couldn’t think of any other reason why an engine pulling a lot of passenger cars should be on its way through what had been territory firmly under the Confederate thumb.

The barrel commander evidently decided the same thing. The big, snorting machine stopped. The turret-one of the massive new models, with a bigger gun-slewed to the left, till it bore on the locomotive. When the cannon fired, the noise was like the clap of doom. Hearing it, a man with a hangover might have his head fall off-and if he didn’t, he might wish he did. The shot was perfect. It went right through the boiler. Great clouds of steam rose from the engine. Only momentum kept it moving after that; it wasn’t going anywhere under its own power.

Other barrels started shelling and shooting up the passenger cars. Chester had an abstract sympathy for the soldiers in butternut who tumbled out like so many ants when their hill was kicked. The Confederates had been going toward battle, yes. They’d been thinking about it, worrying about it, no doubt. But they hadn’t expected it, not yet. Too bad for them. Life was what you got, not what you expected.

“Come on, boys,” Chester said to the men on the barrel with him. “Let’s make them even happier than they are already.”

They got down and started shooting at the dismayed Confederates from behind the barrels and whatever other cover they could find. The machine guns in the turret and at the bow of each barrel raked the scattering soldiers in butternut, too. Every so often, for variety’s sake, a cannon would lob a high-explosive shell or two into the Confederates.

A few bullets came back at the U.S. barrels and foot soldiers, but only a few. A lot of the Confederates probably hadn’t even been able to grab their weapons before they spilled from the train. Some of the ones who had were bound to be casualties. And others, instead of returning fire, were doing their best to disappear, keeping the battered railroad cars between themselves and their tormentors as they ran for the woods.

Chester wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t have done the same thing. Sometimes going forward, or even staying where you were, was asking to be killed. He’d retreated more than once in the Great War, and by Fredericksburg not so long ago. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he did it again before too long.

Now, though, he was going forward. That was better. He didn’t suppose even the Confederates could disagree with him. They’d done more advancing than retreating in this war. He hoped they enjoyed going the other way.

The sergeant in charge of the barrel he rode popped out of the cupola again. “We’ve got orders to get moving,” the other noncom said. “Faster we put a ring around Pittsburgh, faster we can pound Featherston’s fuckers inside to pieces.”

Somebody was driving the U.S. forces as if a pack of wolves ran right behind them. Chester didn’t mind. They probably needed driving. If they weren’t driven, they wouldn’t do what needed doing. Even if they were, they might not.

On they went. Every so often, Confederate soldiers would shoot at them. That caused a few casualties, but only slight delays. Machine-gun and small-arms fire didn’t make the barrels slow down. They had somewhere important to go, and they wanted to get there in a hurry. More foot soldiers would be coming along behind them, and artillerymen, too. People like that could deal with the odd set of holdouts.

From everything Chester heard, Featherston’s men and barrels fought that way when they stormed through Ohio to Lake Erie, and then again this summer when they smashed east to Pittsburgh. He didn’t think the United States had ever done anything like this before. He wondered why not.

The barrels and the men who rode them and the men who tried to keep up with them did have to slow down when they passed through towns. That usually wasn’t because Confederate soldiers made stands there. Most towns held hardly any Confederates. But the people who hadn’t fled ahead of the advancing Confederate tide came out in droves to welcome the U.S. Army’s return.

Chester got handed eggs, an apple pie, a chunk of home-cured ham, and a pouch of pipe tobacco. He got snorts of booze ranging from good Scotch to raw corn liquor. He got his hand shook and his back slapped. Several pretty girls kissed him. What Rita didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. If he could have stayed in any one place for a little while… But the speed of the advance helped hold him to the straight and narrow.

Locals hauled down the Stars and Bars and burned it. Up went the Stars and Stripes in its place. Chester hoped the CSA didn’t retake any of these towns. People would catch it if the Confederates did. They didn’t seem to care. “Them bastards would just as soon shoot you as look at you,” an old man said. “My pa, he fought ’em in the War of Secession. He always said they fought fair then. No more. They hanged one poor son of a bitch for thumbing his nose at ’em when they rode down the street. Hanged him from a lamppost, like he was a nigger.”

In the field, the Confederates played by the rules most of the time. Up till now, Chester hadn’t seen what they did behind the lines. It didn’t make him like them any better. It did make him think the atrocity stories he heard were more likely to be true.

Lafayette, Ohio, was a little town notable only for the red-brick tavern in the middle of it-the place looked older than God. As Chester’s barrel paused in the village square, more green-gray machines rumbled up from the south. Barrel crews and the infantrymen with them exchanged backslaps and cigarettes. “Lafayette,” Chester said happily. “Here we are!” They’d encircled the Confederates. Now-would the ring hold?