Drive to the East

XVIII

Mr. President, sir, we have got to break out from Pittsburgh,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “We have got to do it right now, right this minute, the sooner the better, while the machines still have enough gas to go at least partway.”

Jake Featherston scowled at the head of the Confederate General Staff. “We’re doing all right in there,” he said.

“We are now, Mr. President,” Forrest said. “We’ve still got ammo. We’ve still got fuel. When we start running low…” He shook his head. “And it won’t be long, either. They’ve cut the supply routes, same as we cut the USA in half last summer.”

“If we can’t get the shit in by road or railroad, we’ll damn well fly it in,” Jake said. “That’ll keep the men fighting.”

“Sir, we’ve got a whole army in there,” Forrest replied, shaking his head. “No offense, sir, but no way in hell we can bring in enough by air to keep that many men going.”

“That isn’t what the flyboys tell me,” Jake said. “I’ve talked with ’em. They say they’re up for the job.”

“They’re lying through their teeth, Mr. President, on account of they’re scared to tell you you truth,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III declared. “You tell me who you talked to, and I’ll personally go punch the son of a bitch in the nose.”

“You’ll do no such thing. They had diagrams and everything-showed just what they could do,” Featherston said. “Long as they can do it, the boys up there can keep fighting, right? And you can work out some kind of way to break through to ’em. How many damnyankees can there be in that ring, anyhow?”

“Too many,” Forrest said morosely. “They hit us where we were weakest and punched on through.”

“Goddamn Mexicans. I ought to have Francisco Jose’s guts for garters. If he had any guts, by God, I would, too.” Jake was not only furious, he wanted to blame someone-anyone-else for what was going on in Pennsylvania and Ohio. That way, the blame wouldn’t come down on his own head.

The chief of the General Staff didn’t seem interested in casting blame: a blessing and an annoyance at the same time. “Sir, we just didn’t have enough of our own people to go around. That’s the trouble with fighting a country bigger than we are,” he said. “That’s why we’ve got to get as many of our men in and around Pittsburgh out as we can. If we lose them all-”

“They’ll take plenty of damnyankees with ’em,” Jake broke in.

“Yes, sir.” Forrest sounded patient. He also sounded worried. “But if we trade men one for one with the USA, we lose, on account of they’ve got more men than we do. Pretty soon we just run dry, and they keep going. That’s the point of everything we’ve done up till now: to make them pay more than we do. If that whole big army’s stuck inside of Pittsburgh, it can’t play that game anymore.”

Jake Featherston grunted. However little he wanted to see that, Forrest’s picture left him little choice. But trying to break out of Pittsburgh would be a disastrous admission of defeat. “What can we get together in Ohio?” he asked. “What can we use to break through the ring and get those people out?”

Forrest frowned. “It won’t be easy, Mr. President. We put the best of what we had into the attacking force. That’s what you’re supposed to do, sir: make the Schwerpunkt as strong as you can.”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t you go spouting German at me,” Jake said. “Goddamn Kaiser’s got troubles of his own. You’d better believe he does. If we can break in far enough for the men in Pittsburgh to break out and link up, that’ll be all right.” He shook his head. “It won’t be all right, but we can take it. There’s politics in this damn war, too, don’t forget.”

“All right, sir. If that’s all I can get from you, that’s all I can get,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “I’ll… see what we can put together. And the air resupply will do the best job it can. If you’ll excuse me…” He saluted and hurried away.

“Fuck,” Featherston muttered. He scowled at the map on the wall of his underground and armored office. He would have been tougher on Forrest if he hadn’t seen at once that the head of the General Staff wasn’t alibiing-he was telling the truth. Where the devil could they scrape up enough men to relieve Pittsburgh? Wherever it was, they had to do it pretty damn quick.

He turned his head to the bigger map on the far wall, the one that showed the whole frontier from Sonora to Virginia. He could yank some soldiers from…

“Fuck,” he said again, louder this time. The damnyankees were mounting an attack on Lubbock. He didn’t think it would get there, but the town had to be held. They were kicking up their heels in Sequoyah. A column from Missouri was pushing down into Arkansas. It wasn’t a real big column, but it was big enough to keep him from taking men out of the state. General MacArthur was getting uppity just a little north of Richmond, too. The Confederates had already pulled men from the Army of Northern Virginia to load up farther west. They couldn’t very well pull more.

Featherston repeated the obscenity yet again. Early in the war, somebody’d said that whoever could keep two big campaigns going at once would probably win. Both sides seemed to have taken that as gospel. Now, suddenly and painfully, Jake saw it wasn’t necessarily so.

The damnyankees had done one big thing. They were also doing a bunch of little things. By itself, not one of those little things mattered. Added together, though, they kept the Confederates from properly countering the big thrust. It was like being gnawed by rats instead of eaten by a bear. It was ignominious. It was humiliating.

You ended up just as dead either way. That was the point, and he’d taken too damn long to see it. Something, somewhere, would have to give. That was all there was to it. While Jake eyed the map with the big picture, he also scowled at the red pins stuck into the interior of the CSA: from South Carolina all the way west to Louisiana, and some in the mountains of Cuba, too. They marked spots where Negro guerrillas were kicking up their heels.

He swore so foully, he took a hasty look toward the door to make sure Nathan Bedford Forrest III had closed it behind him. He didn’t want Lulu hearing and wagging a finger at him. That was pretty funny when you got right down to it: the most powerful man the Confederate States had ever known, afraid of his own secretary. But Featherston wasn’t laughing at all.

If the blacks in the country had just stayed quiet, he would have had several more divisions to throw at the damnyankees. He wouldn’t be jumping up and down now about where to find men to try to bail out the force trapped in Pittsburgh.

“Those bastards’ll pay,” he growled. “Oh, Lord, how they’ll pay.” He got on the telephone and called Ferdinand Koenig. Ferd had a new secretary, one with a hell of a sultry voice. Jake wondered if the rest of her lived up to it. If it did, Koenig might be finding after-hours work for her, too.

“Office of the Attorney General,” she purred, as if she’d just got out of bed.

Featherston didn’t have time for that, though. “This is the President,” he said. “Get Ferd on the line right this second, you hear?”

“Y-Yes, sir.” Most of that sexy lilt disappeared-most, but not all.

“Ferd Koenig.” The Attorney General’s deep, gruff voice sounded the way it always did. Jake tried to imagine Koenig talking in soft, throaty tones. He couldn’t do it.

“Listen, we have got to get rid of more niggers faster,” he said without preamble. “The damn guerrillas are a running sore. We’ve got to get rid of it, or it’s going to screw us for the rest of the war.”

“Camps are running pretty close to capacity,” Koenig said dubiously.

“Bump it up,” Jake said. “Build more bathhouses. Build more trucks. Hell, build more camps. Whatever it takes, but bump it up. And fast.”

“All right, sir. I’ll handle that,” Koenig said, and he was a man who did what he said he would do. He was an old Party buddy, one of the last ones Jake had, but he was also damn good at his work. He went on, “The more we step it up against the coons, the more they’re liable to try and fight back, you know. That’ll cost us men who could be at the front.”

He was thinking along with Jake, but Jake was a little bit ahead of him. Jake hoped he was, anyhow. “You handle your end of it, Ferd,” he said. “I’ll take care of the other-or if I don’t, somebody’s gonna be mighty goddamn sorry, and it won’t be me or you.”

“I’ll do everything I can. The camps will do everything they can,” Koenig promised.

“Good. That’s what I need to hear. Freedom!” Featherston hung up. His next call was to the Secretary of State. He talked with Herbert Walker much less often than with Ferdinand Koenig. The Secretary of State was a real diplomat, and always looked uncomfortable wearing a Freedom Party uniform instead of striped pants and cutaway coat.

Walker knew better than to keep Jake waiting, though. “Yes, Mr. President? What can I do for you today, sir?”

Again, Featherston came straight to the point: “I need another five divisions of Mexicans from Francisco Jose, and I need ’em yesterday.”

“Mr. President!” The Secretary of State sounded horrified. “After what’s happened to the men he sent you before, you’ll be lucky to get the time of day out of him, let alone anything more.”

“Tell him I won’t use them against the damnyankees. Promise him on a stack of Bibles-it’s the truth,” Jake said. “Tell him I want ’em for… for internal security. That’s what it is, all right. I’m gonna sic ’em on the damn uppity niggers, free up our own men to fight against the USA. That’s what I should’ve done with the last batch of Mexicans, only I didn’t think of it then. Sometimes you’re smarter the second time around.”

“Well, I’ll try, sir,” Walker said. “On that basis, I will try. Even so, I don’t know what the answer will be.”

“We’ve got Mexicans coming up here to get work now, lots of ’em,” Jake said. “Tell Francisco Jose that if he doesn’t want to give us a hand, we won’t just seal the border-we’ll ship the ones who are already here back to Mexico.”

“The way things are, that’s liable to hurt us worse than the Mexicans,” Walker said.

Jake understood what he meant: the Mexicans were doing the scutwork Negroes had done in the CSA for generations. They were also filling more and more factory slots white men would have taken if they weren’t off fighting a war. Even so, he said, “Tell him anyway, by God. If we don’t have Mexicans giving us some help with the work, it’s a pain in the ass. If Francisco Jose’s got a pile of Mexicans who can’t get any work sitting around, it’s a civil war waiting to happen. You reckon he doesn’t know it? He’s dumb, but he’s not that dumb.”

“All right, sir. I’ll tell him. Internal security. It’s a good phrase,” the Secretary of State said.

“He damn well better say yes,” Jake said. A small gasp came from the other end of the line. Hastily, he added, “It’ll be his hard luck if he doesn’t, not yours. I didn’t mean that.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. I’m glad you didn’t. And now I’d better get on with it.” When Jake didn’t say no, Walker hung up. Jake chuckled harshly. He could still make people afraid of him, an essential part of the business of ruling.

But the chuckle cut off as he looked from one situation map to the other. How was he supposed to make the damnyankees afraid of him? He’d hurt them badly. He’d stopped their first big counterattack. Now, though, they were running with the ball, and he was going to have a devil of a time tackling them.

Abner Dowling had spent too long either retreating before the Confederates or banging his head into a stone wall. Now, for the first time since gaining a command of his own, he was going forward-and he was enjoying it, too. So what if the force he had consisted mostly of what nobody else in the USA wanted? The force trying to stop him consisted mostly of what nobody else in the CSA wanted. By the way it had performed so far, it was even more raggedy than his own.

His new headquarters lay in the grand metropolis-say, a thousand people-of Sudan, Texas. He’d been disappointed when one of the locals told him it was named for the kind of grass that fed the local cattle, not for the place in Africa. He supposed the grass was named for the place in Africa, but it didn’t seem the same.

Sudan grass didn’t cover everything. Not far away, a brownish-yellow ridge line ran east and west. It was called, bluntly, the Sand Hills. People from the north side of the hills were supposed to vote differently from those to the south, and each group was supposed to have its own little social sets. Dowling lost not a moment’s sleep about that. People on both sides of the Sand Hills were Confederates, which was everything he needed to know about them.

His line stood about four miles farther down C.S. Highway 84, halfway between Sudan and Amherst, a town of about the same size. Another eight or ten miles down the road was Littlefield, which was the next size up. Lubbock lay thirty-five miles southeast of Littlefield, and Lubbock, with more than 20,000 people, was a real city. If he could take it, people as far away as Richmond would jump and shout and swear.

And if he couldn’t… “News from Pennsylvania and Ohio’s better than what we’ve heard before,” he said to Major Toricelli.

“Yes, sir,” his adjutant agreed. “Now we get to see how tough the enemy is when things don’t go his way.”

Dowling coughed. He wished the younger man hadn’t put it that way. He’d seen the Confederates in adversity during the last war, and they’d fought like sons of bitches. They were sons of bitches, as far as he was concerned, but that didn’t mean they weren’t brave and tough and stubborn.

“We’re playing some little part in what’s going on there, too,” he said. “I like that.”

“Yes, sir. Me, too,” Angelo Toricelli said. “Wherever they get reinforcements from, they won’t get ’em from here. We’re keeping ’em too busy for that.”

“We may even grab Lubbock,” Dowling said. “I didn’t think we could when we got started, but you know what?”

“The Confederates around here are even more screwed up than we are?” Toricelli suggested.

“That’s just exactly what I was going to say.” Dowling raised an eyebrow. “By now, you’ve signed my name with ‘by direction’ after it so many times, you really are starting to think like me. No offense, of course.”

“Did I say anything like that, sir?” Toricelli looked and sounded so innocent, Dowling wouldn’t have been surprised to see a halo suddenly start glowing above his head. The general commanding Eleventh Army chuckled under his breath. If his adjutant had started thinking like him, he could also start thinking like his adjutant. He’d been an adjutant for years, while Toricelli would have to wait for the next war against the Confederates for his turn as a CO.

The next war against the Confederates… The noises Dowling made under his breath when that thought crossed his mind weren’t nearly so amused. When the Great War ended, he’d hoped the USA would never have to worry about the CSA again. He’d been too optimistic once. He would be a fool to make the same mistake twice. Nothing kept a man from making a fool of himself now and again. Dowling did try not to make a fool of himself that way too often.

Half a dozen artillery rounds came down a few hundred yards short of Sudan. “They’re probably after you, sir,” Major Toricelli said.

“They’re a pack of idiots if they are,” Dowling replied. “This attack doesn’t need Julius Caesar or Napoleon at the top. As long as I keep the boys in butternut too busy to head east, I’m a hero.”

“A regular Robert E. Lee,” Toricelli said with malice aforethought. Dowling scowled, his severity more or less real. If his Confederate opposite number talked about officers to emulate, Lee’s name would likely be the first one in his mouth. Why not? Lee trounced every U.S. general he faced in the War of Secession.

When the War of Secession was new, just as Virginia was going from the USA to the CSA, Abe Lincoln offered Lee command of U.S. forces. Had Lee said yes, the USA might well be one country now. Lincoln might not share with James G. Blaine the dubious distinction of being the only Republican Presidents. They also shared the even more dubious distinction of starting wars-and losing them.

Dowling tried to remember. Wasn’t it during Blaine’s term that Lincoln had pulled out of the Republican Party and gone over to the Socialists? He thought so. The Republicans had never been the same since. Now Dowling, a thoroughgoing Democrat, had to hope the Socialists hadn’t started a war they were going to lose. He had to do whatever he could to help make sure they didn’t lose it, too.

More shells crashed down southeast of Sudan. These were closer. Dowling and Major Toricelli both raised eyebrows. Toricelli said, “Sir, I move we adjourn to the storm cellar. You may not think you’re important, but it looks like they do.”

“Damn nuisance,” Dowling grumbled, but he didn’t say no. An unlit kerosene lantern hung on the wall by the trap door to the cellar. Tornadoes tore across the West Texas prairie every now and again. Most houses in these parts-and on the U.S. side of the line in New Mexico, too-had shelters that could save lives… if you were lucky enough or quick enough to get into them fast enough.

Toricelli ceremoniously lifted the trap door. “After you, sir.” A couple of the wooden stairs creaked under Dowling’s weight, but they held. Toricelli followed him down and closed the door behind them. “I’ve got a match, sir,” he said, and lit one.

Dowling hadn’t checked to see if the lamp held fuel. “Just my luck if it’s dry,” he said. But it wasn’t. Buttery light pushed back shadows. It wasn’t very bright, but it would do. Four milking stools comprised the cellar’s furniture. He set the lamp on one and perched himself on another. It also creaked.

“We’ve done what we can do, sir,” Major Toricelli said. One more set of booms came in, some of them very loud and close. “I’m glad we did, too,” he added.

“Well, now that you mention it, so am I,” Dowling allowed. His adjutant smiled. Dowling didn’t think of himself as particularly brave. General Custer, now, had been as brave a man as any ever born, even up into his seventies and eighties. Dowling admired that without being convinced it made Custer a better commander. It might have made him a worse one: since he didn’t worry about his own safety, he also didn’t worry much about his men’s. Daniel MacArthur also had as much courage as any four ordinary people needed, which didn’t make him any less a vain blowhard or any more a commanding general in command of himself. If you weren’t a hopeless coward-more to the point, if the soldiers you led didn’t know you were a hopeless coward-you could function as a commanding officer.

More shells crashed down in Sudan. “I hope the sentries outside the house are all right,” Toricelli said. “They’ve got foxholes, but even so…”

“Yes, even so,” Dowling said. “We ought to be going after the Confederates’ guns. They must have pushed them well forward to land shells this far back of the line. Our own artillery should be able to pound on them.”

“Here’s hoping,” his adjutant said. “Do you want me to go up and get on the telephone with our batteries?”

“No, no, no.” Dowling shook his head. “If the people in charge of them can’t figure that out for themselves, they don’t deserve to have their jobs.”

“That’s always a possibility, too.” Toricelli had seen enough incompetents in shoulder straps to know what a real possibility it was.

So had Abner Dowling. “If they just sit around and waste the chance, that will tell us what we need to know about them,” he said. “And if they do just sit around, we’ll have some new officers in those slots by this time tomorrow, by God.”

“What do we do with the clodhoppers, then?” Toricelli asked. “Not always simple or neat to court-martial a man for moving slower than he should.”

“You’re right-a lot of the time, it’s more trouble than it’s worth,” Dowling agreed. “But somebody who can’t do what he needs to when the chips are down shouldn’t be face-to-face with the enemy. We damn well can transfer people like that out of here. As long as they’re in charge of the coast-defense batteries of Montana, they don’t do much harm.”

“The-” Major Toricelli broke off and sent him a reproachful stare. “Every so often, the devil inside you comes out, doesn’t he?”

“Who, me?” Dowling said, innocent as a mustachioed baby. His adjutant laughed out loud.

About ten minutes later, the Confederate shelling suddenly stopped. “Maybe some of our people had a rush of brains to the head,” Toricelli said.

“Here’s hoping.” Dowling’s devil must still have been loose, for he went on, “ ‘Hmm. They’re shooting at us. What should I do? Why, I’ll-I’ll shoot back!’ ” He snapped his fingers as if that were a brilliant idea arrived at after weeks or maybe months of research. In tones more like the ones he usually used, he went on, “If we need to send people to West Point or Harvard to figure that out, Lord help us.”

“No, sir,” Toricelli said. “If we sent people to West Point or Harvard and they can’t figure that out, Lord help us. And some of them can’t. That’s probably why we’ve got coast-defense batteries in Montana.”

“Wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” Dowling picked up the lantern and started up the stairs. “Let’s see if they’ve blown Sudan to hell and gone. I don’t suppose many people will miss it if they have.”

No shells had landed on the house. When Dowling went outside, he found the sentries just coming out of their holes in the ground. They saluted him and then went back to brushing themselves off.

An irate local shouted at him: “You damnyankee son of a bitch, you trying to get me killed?”

“I don’t know why you’re blaming me. I didn’t shoot at you. Jake Featherston’s men did,” Dowling answered.

“The hell you say!” The Texan wouldn’t believe a word of it. “We used to have to belong to the USA when y’all called this place Houston. Jake Featherston done gave us back our freedom.” The last word wasn’t quite the Party howl, but it came close.

“Watch how you talk to the general, buddy,” one of the sentries warned, swinging his Springfield toward the local.

“It’s all right, Hopkins,” Dowling said. By the look on the sentry’s face, it wasn’t even close to all right. Dowling turned back to the Texan. “Jake Featherston gave you this-all of it. If he was as tough and smart as he said he was, it never could have happened, right? Since it has happened, he’s not so tough and he’s not so smart, right?”

Somehow, that didn’t make the unhappy civilian any happier. Somehow, Abner Dowling hadn’t thought it would. And somehow, he couldn’t have cared less.

About one day in three, the skies above central Ohio cleared. Those were the days when Confederate dive bombers and fighters struck savagely at the U.S. soldiers in and around Lafayette. Chester Martin liked being strafed and bombed no better than anyone else in his right mind.

But the U.S. position was a lot stronger than it had been when troops moving southwest out of Pennsylvania joined hands with men coming up from West Virginia. Antiaircraft guns followed close on the heels of barrels and hard-driving soldiers. They weren’t much use against Hound Dogs; the C.S. fighters more often than not struck and then vanished. But Asskickers, slower and clumsier, paid a high price for screaming down on U.S. entrenchments.

And fighters with the U.S. eagle in front of crossed swords came overhead as often as their C.S. counterparts did. They were a match for Hound Dogs and more than a match for Asskickers. Confederate aircraft hurt the men in green-gray down on the ground, but the Confederates hurt themselves, too, and badly.

“How many airplanes can they throw away to soften us up?” Chester asked, scooping hash out of a ration can with a spoon. He sat by a campfire with several other men from the platoon. Banks of earth shielded the fire from any lurking C.S. snipers.

“That’s only part of the question.” Lieutenant Delbert Wheat lit a cigarette. It smelled good, which meant it was Confederate. After taking a drag, he went on, “The other part is, when do they counterattack on the ground? That’s got to be what they’re softening us up for.”

Chester nodded. He’d been thinking the same thing ever since the linkup here. “I would have looked for them to try it already, sir,” he said. “I wonder why they haven’t.”

“Only one answer I can think of,” Lieutenant Wheat said. “They aren’t strong enough to bring it off.”

“They’ll be sorry if they wait around much longer,” Chester said. “They may be getting stronger, but so are we.” Not far away from the fire lay the wreckage of a downed Asskicker, the crumpled tail pointing pathetically toward the sky.

Del Wheat’s smile made his mouth crooked. “And you’re sorry for this because…?”

Chester laughed. “Not me, sir. Not even a little bit. But this is the first time I’ve seen ’em where it doesn’t look like they know what they want to do. Makes me suspicious-know what I mean?” He’d seen in the last war that the Confederates could be beaten, that their plans didn’t always work. But to find them without any plans… That struck him as a more typical U.S. failing.

“They were taking a chance when they struck at Pittsburgh,” Wheat said. “Taking it away or even wrecking it hurts the USA. Maybe they’ve gone and wrecked themselves, too, though.”

“Here’s hoping,” Chester said.

Rain and a little sleet came in the next morning. That meant the Mules and the Asskickers would stay away till the weather got better. It didn’t mean the throb of airplane engines left the sky. Up above the clouds, Confederate transports were doing what they could to keep Jake Featherston’s surrounded army supplied.

The antiaircraft guns near Lafayette boomed, firing by what one gunner called earsight. It would take a lot of luck to knock down any airplanes that way. As long as the guns had plenty of ammo, though, why not put it in the air? Shoot off enough and you were bound to hit something sooner or later.

Besides, the ring around the Confederates trapped in Pittsburgh was getting thicker as the USA rushed more troops through the gaps the men and barrels in green-gray had torn in the C.S. flank defenses. These weren’t the only antiaircraft guns that would be shooting at the cargo planes on their way to Pennsylvania-far from it. If they didn’t go down in flames here, they might yet farther east.

And U.S. fighters also prowled above the clouds. Transports weren’t made to go fast and be nimble, any more than buses were. If fighters attacked them, their best hope lay in how much damage they could take before they fell out of the sky.

Sometimes the Confederate transports had Hound Dogs of their own to escort them to the target and drive off U.S. Wright fighters. Sometimes they didn’t. When they didn’t, they paid for it.

“Why don’t the Confederates send escorts along all the time?” Chester asked when a burning transport crashed less than half a mile from his foxhole.

“Well, I don’t know for sure, but I think I can make a pretty fair guess,” Lieutenant Wheat answered.

“Sir?” Chester said. He’d served under a couple of platoon commanders whose opinions he didn’t want, but who insisted on giving them anyhow. Del Wheat wasn’t like that. Some of the things he had to say were worth hearing, but he didn’t make a big deal out of them. Those other guys seemed to think they were the Pope speaking ex cathedra.

“Well, my guess is that the Confederate States don’t have enough airplanes-or maybe enough pilots-to be able to do all the things they’d like to do,” Wheat said. “Now they can do this, now they can do that-but it doesn’t look like they can do this and that at the same time.”

Chester thought about it. After a moment, he nodded. “That does make sense, yes, sir.” He paused again, then resumed: “Getting that cargo into Pittsburgh is pretty important for them right now. If they can’t take care of that because of everything else they’ve got going on, maybe they bit off more than they can chew.”

“That’s true. Sergeant. Maybe they did.” Lieutenant Wheat looked like a cat contemplating a saucer of cream.

Civilians came from C.S.-occupied territory farther west. They claimed the Confederates there were building up for an attack on the U.S. ring. Lieutenant Wheat listened to them and sent them on to Intelligence officers back at division HQ. “You’re not flabbling much about this,” Chester remarked.

“Nope, not me,” the platoon commander said. “If the enemy does try to come through here, we’ll do our damnedest to stop him. That’s all we can do. But what do you want to bet that some of those so-called civilians are really Confederate plants, and they’re trying to make us jump at shadows?”

“Ah,” Chester said. “Well, sir, since you put it that way, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“Neither would I,” Delbert Wheat said. “So I’ll worry when my superiors tell me to, but not till then.”

Chester did notice that some of the ammunition coming in for the antiaircraft guns had the black-painted tips of armor-piercing rounds. The Confederates used their antiaircraft guns against barrels with vicious effect. Imitation was the sincerest, and most deadly, kind of flattery.

Not long before Christmas, word came down from on high that the Confederates would be coming soon. The United States had taken advantage of the weather to break through in November. A new snowstorm might give the Confederates the same sort of extra concealment.

The C.S. bombardment had gas shells in it. They were less deadly in cold weather, and gas masks more nearly tolerable-unless your mask froze up. That didn’t mean Chester wanted to put on his mask. Want it or not, he did. He’d seen gas casualties in the Great War, and a few this time, too. Getting shot was bad enough. He knew just how bad it was from twofold experience. By everything he knew except that direct experience, getting gassed was worse.

As soon as the shelling let up, Lieutenant Wheat shouted, “Be ready!” Up and down the U.S. line, that same cry rang out. The troops in green-gray had the advantage of standing behind the Tuscarawas River. Chester hoped that would mean something. The Confederates had more practice crossing in the face of resistance than any Great War army had.

Where Chester’s platoon was stationed, the river, which ran mostly north and south, took an east-west bend. Instead of pressing down on that east-west length, the soldiers in butternut trundled past it to hit the next north-south stretch. “They’re giving us their flank!” Wheat exclaimed in amazement.

True, the Confederates did stay out of effective rifle range of the men on the south bank of the Tuscarawas. But several of their barrels trundled along only a few hundred yards from the antiaircraft guns that could also fire against ground targets. When the gunners got targets that artillerymen mostly only dreamt of, they made the most of them. Four or five barrels went up in flames in a few minutes’ time. U.S. machine guns and riflemen harried the crewmen bailing out of the machines. They were shooting at long range, but with enough bullets in the air some probably struck home.

Some barrels paused, presented their glacis plates to their tormentors, and fired back. Others scooted farther north, so the U.S. guns wouldn’t bear on them any more. Artillery fire fell around those antiaircraft guns. Sometimes it fell on them. Had the weather been better, Asskickers would have gone after them one by one. With clouds huddling low, though, dive bombers were liable to fly straight into the ground instead of pulling up in time.

When yet another Confederate barrel brewed up because it incautiously came too close to the U.S. antiaircraft guns, Chester yelled and pounded the dirt at the front of his foxhole. “Those butternut bastards aren’t buying anything cheap today!” he yelled.

But he could see only his little corner of the fight. Early in the afternoon, orders came to fall back to the east. “Why?” somebody said indignantly. “We’re pounding the crap out of ’em here!”

“Here, yes,” Lieutenant Wheat said. “But Featherston’s fuckers are over the Tuscarawas south of Coshocton-south and west of here. If we don’t give up some ground, they’ll hit us in the flank and enfilade us.”

Taking enfilading fire was like getting your T crossed in a naval battle: all the enemy’s firepower bore on you, but most of yours wouldn’t bear on him. It was, in other words, a damn good recipe for getting killed.

“Have we got positions farther east that face west instead of north?” Chester asked.

“Good question, Sergeant,” Del Wheat said. “We’ll both find out at the same time.” He paused. “I hope we do. We must have known this was coming. If we didn’t get ready for it, then we’ve got the same old muddle up at the top.”

When they came to zigzag trenches hastily dug and bulldozed out of fields, Chester felt like cheering. Somebody with stars on his shoulder straps could actually see a step or two ahead. That made Chester think things might go better than he’d expected.

The Confederates who came up against those trenches went to earth in a hurry when a fierce blast of fire met them. More than a few U.S. soldiers carried captured C.S. automatic rifles for extra firepower. They had to get ammunition from dead enemy soldiers, but there’d been a lot of them around.

Before long, Chester and his comrades needed to fall back again. Again, though, they fell back into prepared positions. In spite of retreating, he felt more confident. The Confederates could overrun any one position, but each one cost them. How many could they overrun before they started running out of men to do it?

Not far from Ellaville, Georgia, ran a stretch of highway locally called the Memorial Mile. Marble stelae stood by the side of the road. Brass plaques mounted on the marble commemorated Sumter County soldiers who’d served in the Great War. WIA by a name meant the soldier had been wounded in action; KIA by a name meant he’d been killed.

The Negro guerrillas who’d attached Jonathan Moss and Nick Cantarella to their number hated the Memorial Mile with a fierce and terrible passion. “How many names you reckon they be if they put up all the niggers from here they done killed?” asked their chief, who went by the name of Spartacus. Moss suspected that was a nom de guerre; it was, as far as he was concerned, a damn good one.

“If you’re gonna keep on playing this game, you’ll put some more crackers’ names on some kinda stones,” Nick Cantarella said. His clotted New York vowels and Spartacus’ lazy-sounding drawl hardly seemed to belong to the same language. Sometimes they had to pause so each could figure out what the other was saying. But they had something in common: they both wanted to cause the Confederates as much grief as they could.

A convoy of trucks rumbled along the road from Ellaville towards Americus. Command cars with machine guns shepherded the trucks along. Opening up on them would have invited massive retaliation. “One advantage you’ve got with these pine woods,” Moss said.

“What’s that?” Spartacus asked.

“They don’t lose their leaves this time of year,” Moss replied. “Easier to hide here than it would be in a forest full of bare-branched trees.”

“Not gonna be much snow on the ground, neither,” Cantarella said. “It’s really a bitch, tryin’ to cover your tracks in the snow.”

Spartacus pursed his lips, then slowly nodded. He was about forty-five, just going gray at the temples, with a scar that looked like a bullet crease on his right forearm. If he hadn’t been black, he would have put Moss in mind of a career noncom-he had that air of rough, no-nonsense competence about him. Suddenly, Moss asked, “Did you fight for the CSA the last time around?”

“Sure enough did,” Spartacus answered. “Got shot fo’ mah country-reckoned it was mah country in them days. Case you wonderin’, ain’t no niggers’ names on them goddamn memorials, neither. I even vote once-they let me do it in ’21, on account of they was afeared that Featherston fucker was gonna win then. But he los’, an’ I never seen the inside o’ no votin’ booth since. Ain’t seen nothin’ but trouble since the Freedom Party come in.”

A boxy, old-fashioned Birmingham with a white-haired white man at the wheel drove by. “You could nail somebody like him easy enough, make the Confederates try and go after you here, then hit somewhere else,” Cantarella said.

“Don’t want to shoot that there ofay,” Spartacus said. “That there’s Doc Thomason, an’ he been settin’ bones an’ deliverin’ babies for buckra and niggers for damn near fifty years. If you can only pay him a chicken, he take your chicken. If you can’t pay him nothin’, he set your arm anyways. Ain’t all white folks bad-jus’ too many of ’em.”

“All right. Fine. We don’t shoot the doc. He ain’t gonna be the only guy on the road, though,” Cantarella said. “Shoot somebody else. Maybe even hang around to shoot at the first fuckers who come to see what you went and did. Then when they’re all flabbling about that, kick ’em in the nuts some other place. Make them react to you.”

“We done some o’ that,” Spartacus said. “We done a couple of people bombs, too, over by Americus. Them Freedom Party assholes, they don’t like people bombs none.” He spoke with a certain grim satisfaction.

Moss looked at Cantarella. The Army captain was looking back at him. Moss didn’t need to be able to read minds to know what Cantarella was thinking. They didn’t like people bombs, either. But as weapons the weak could use against the strong, they were hard to match.

“How do you get people to volunteer to blow themselves up?” Moss asked carefully, not sure if the question would offend Spartacus.

But the guerrilla leader looked at him-looked through him, really-and answered, “Don’t gotta drug ’em none or get ’em drunk. Don’t gotta say we’s gonna kill their wives an’ chillun, neither. Dat’s what you mean, ain’t it?” Moss gave back an unhappy nod. Spartacus went on, “See-you is a white man, even if you comes from the US of A. You is happy most o’ the time, an’ you reckons everybody else happy most o’ the time. Ain’t like dat if you is a nigger in these here Confederate States. Somebody blow hisself up here, he a lucky man. Do Jesus! — he mighty lucky. He go out quick-it don’t hurt none. He make the ofays pay. And he don’t go to no goddamn camp where they let him in but he don’t come out no mo’. I got mo’ people wants to be people bombs’n I got ’splosives an’ chances to use ’em.”

“Shit,” Nick Cantarella said softly. His comment was at least as reverent as Spartacus’. He added, “That explains the Mormons up in the USA, too-to hell with me if it doesn’t.”

“We is powerful jealous o’ them Mormons,” Spartacus said.

“Because they thought of people bombs and you didn’t?” Moss asked.

“No, no.” Spartacus waved that aside. “On account o’ they is white, jus’ like the rest o’ you damnyankees. Can’t tell who a Mormon is jus’ by lookin’. He go where he please before he press the button. Nobody worry about him none till too late.”

Moss and Cantarella looked at each other again. The Negro wasn’t wrong. And he understood the difference between deaths and effective deaths. A lot of Great War generals hadn’t-their method for smothering fires was burying them in bodies. Some officers in this war had the same disease; Daniel MacArthur’s name sprang to mind. Had Spartacus worn stars on his shoulder straps instead of a collarless shirt with rolled-up sleeves and dungarees out at the knees, he might have made a formidable officer, not just a sergeant.

But the United States didn’t let Negroes enlist in the Army as privates, let alone send them to West Point to learn the art of command and the fine points of soldiering. In a troubled voice, Moss said, “You make me wonder about my own country, Spartacus, not just yours.”

“Good,” the black man rumbled. “Wonderin’s good. Ain’t nothin’ gonna change till you wonder if it oughta.”

A band of his raiders slipped south from Ellaville toward Plains, a small town west of Americus. Moss and Cantarella went along with them, bolt-action Tredegars in their hands. They were moving south and west from Andersonville: deeper into the Confederacy. In a way, that was good-the camp guards and county sheriffs and whoever else went after escaped POWs were less likely to look for them there. But they had to move cautiously. Negroes walking through peanut fields could be sharecroppers looking for work, but whites doing the same thing were bound to rouse suspicion.

Burnt cork, the staple of minstrel shows for generations, solved the problem. Up close, Cantarella and especially the fairer Moss made unsatisfactory Negroes, but they passed muster at a distance.

“What do we do when we get there?” Moss asked Spartacus.

“Much as we kin,” Spartacus replied. “Burn, kill, and then git.” That seemed to cover everything that needed covering, as far as he was concerned.

Real sharecroppers and farm laborers put the guerrillas up for the night. The way the other blacks accepted them said everything that needed saying, as far as Moss was concerned. Not all the Negroes in the CSA would fight against the Freedom Party. That took more spirit than some people owned. He couldn’t imagine a black betraying those who would fight to the authorities, though.

Negroes raised eyebrows at him and Cantarella, but relaxed when they heard the white men were escaped U.S. POWs. “Damnyankees is all right,” said an old man with only a few teeth. He didn’t seem to know any other name for people from the United States. Sowbelly, fatback, hominy, sweet potatoes, harsh moonshine-the locals fed them what they had.

“Gots to make the ofay pay.” Moss heard that again and again.

The band that approached Plains numbered about fifty-a platoon’s worth of men. Moss worried as he trudged through the night toward the little town. If the Confederates had a real garrison there, they could slaughter the raiders. “Don’t flabble about it,” Nick Cantarella said when he worried out loud. “First thing is, the smokes around here would know if they were layin’ for us. Second thing is, they don’t have enough guys to garrison every little pissant burg, not if they want to fight a war with us, too.”

Logic said he was right. Sometimes logic let you down with a thud, but… “Sounds good,” Moss said.

Sentries did patrol the peanut fields around Plains. With almost contemptuous ease, the Negroes disposed of the one who might have discovered them. The gray-haired man died almost before he knew someone was drawing a knife across his throat. Only a small, startled sigh escaped him. A guerrilla threw aside his own squirrel gun and appropriated the sentry’s Tredegar. “Too good a piece to waste on a damn fool,” he said.

“Let’s go,” Spartacus said.

They trotted silently into Plains. The silence didn’t last long. They started firing into some houses and tossing Featherston Fizzes into others. Fires roared to life. Alarm bells started ringing. Volunteer firemen emerged from their houses to fight the flames. The raiders picked them off one after another.

“Niggers!” somebody shouted. “Holy Jesus, there’s niggers loose in Plains!”

“Phone wires cut?” Cantarella demanded of Spartacus.

“We done took care of it,” the guerrilla leader said with a savage grin. “Don’t want no help comin’ from nowhere else.”

Here and there, townsfolk fired from windows with rifles or shotguns. Those houses got volleys of fire from the Negroes, as well as gasoline bombs to kill the resisters or drive them out in the open where they made easier prey. Moss also heard women’s screams that sounded more outraged than terrified. “You won’t find any fighting force in the world where that shit doesn’t happen,” Cantarella said. Moss nodded, which didn’t mean he liked it any better.

Somebody in Plains organized defenders who fought as a group, not as so many individuals. “Over here, Jimmy!” a woman called. “We got trouble over here!”

“Be there real quick, Miss Lillian!” a man answered. Moss got a glimpse of him in the firelight: a kid with a mouthful of teeth, wearing a dark gray C.S. Navy tunic over pajama bottoms. Home on leave? Whatever the reason he was here, he was tough and smart and brave, and he’d make real trouble if he got even half a chance.

He didn’t. Moss made sure of that. The Tredegar’s stock didn’t fit his shoulder quite the same way as the U.S. Army Springfield he’d trained with, but the difference didn’t matter. He pulled the trigger gently-he didn’t squeeze it. The rifle bucked. Jimmy, the Navy man here in the middle of Georgia, spun and crumpled.

“Good shot!” Spartacus yelled.

Without a commander who sounded as if he knew what he was doing, the defenders went back to fighting every man for himself. Spartacus’ raiders weren’t well disciplined, but they had a better notion of what they were doing than their foes. They killed as many whites as they could, started fires all over town, and faded back into the countryside. “Well,” Moss said, “we yanked their tails pretty good.”

“Sure did,” Nick Cantarella agreed. “Now we see how hard they yank back.”

Clarence Potter had been going at a dead run ever since he put on the Confederate uniform again. He’d been going even harder than that since the war started. And he was going harder still these past few weeks, since things started turning against the CSA.

To make matters worse, he and Nathan Bedford Forrest III flinched whenever they saw each other even if they were just getting bad fried chicken in the War Department cafeteria. He wished Forrest had kept his mouth shut. Now the chief of the General Staff had him thinking-always a dangerous thing to do.

What if Jake Featherston wasn’t crazy like a fox? What if he was just plain crazy, period? Around the bend? Nutty as a fruitcake? Two cylinders short of a motor?

“Well, what then?” Potter muttered. He wouldn’t have been surprised if there were microphones in his subterranean office. The President of the CSA wouldn’t need to be crazy to mistrust him, not after everything that had happened between them over the past twenty-five years. Featherston wouldn’t need to be crazy to mistrust his spymasters, either, no matter who they were. But that handful of words seemed safe enough; Potter could have been wondering about any number of things.

He laughed, as people will laugh when the other choice is crying their eyes out. The rescue drive toward Pittsburgh was moving forward. The map on his wall showed that. But it wasn’t moving forward fast enough. And the cargo airplanes that were supposed to supply the Confederates trapped in the Pittsburgh pocket were taking an ungodly beating. Potter didn’t know what the officers who’d promised transports could do the job had been smoking. Whatever it was, he wished he had some now. Reality needed some blurring.

And Featherston still wouldn’t let the men in the pocket fight their way west to meet their would-be rescuers, either. “What we have, we hold!” he said, over and over again. Clarence Potter didn’t know what he’d been smoking, either.

Just to make matters more delightful, Lubbock was liable to fall. Some of the nuisance drives the USA had launched to keep the Confederates from strengthening themselves for the rescue effort in Ohio and Pennsylvania were turning into bigger nuisances than even the generals who’d launched them probably expected.

The Attorney General’s office, of all things, was having conniptions about this one. Somewhere southeast of Lubbock was something called Camp Determination. Clarence Potter didn’t know what that was, not in any official way. He didn’t want to know, not in any official way. He had a pretty good unofficial idea.

He also saw the need for places like that. Negro raiders were getting more and more annoying. That Navy man in that little Georgia town, shot down in front of his mother… Half the town was wrecked, too, and it wasn’t the only one guerrillas had hit. Two people bombs in Augusta, one in Savannah, another in Charleston…

Potter whistled tunelessly between his teeth. The really alarming part was, things could have been worse. The USA did only a halfhearted job of supplying black guerrillas. Whites up there didn’t love them, either. If the damnyankees had gone all-out, they could have caused even more trouble than they did.

One bit of good news-Mexican troops would take some of the spook-fighting off the CSA’s hands. Potter didn’t know what Jake Featherston said to Maximilian. Whatever it was, it got the Emperor of Mexico moving. It probably scared the living bejesus out of him, too. Jake Featherston was not a subtle man.

Someone knocked on Potter’s door. He paused to put a couple of papers into drawers before he said, “Come in.”

“Here you are, sir.” A lieutenant handed him a manila envelope.

“Thanks,” Potter said. “Do I need to sign for it?”

“No, sir,” the junior officer answered, which surprised him.

“All right, then.” The lieutenant saluted and disappeared. When Potter opened the envelope, he understood. It was a progress report from Henderson V. FitzBelmont. That project was so secret, it didn’t have a paper trail. This way, no Yankee spy filing sign-off sheets would wonder about it. Better safe.

He quickly read through the report. It was, for the most part, an account of technical difficulties. Uranium hexafluoride was poisonous and savagely corrosive. FitzBelmont and his people were still working out techniques for handling it. Till they did, separating U-235 from U-238 couldn’t even start.

Do you have any idea how the U.S. project is proceeding? FitzBelmont wrote. Potter didn’t. He wished he did. He didn’t think anyone in the Confederate States did. If someone did, the report would have come through him… wouldn’t it? If it didn’t, it would have gone only one place: straight to Jake Featherston. The President knew Potter was loyal to the CSA-otherwise, he wouldn’t have got involved in this uranium business in the first place. So everyone else in the country was probably as ignorant as he was about Yankee progress, if any.

Featherston didn’t seem to have found out he and Nathan Bedford Forrest III had met, there in Capitol Square. If the President did know, neither man would still be free. Potter’s first thought was that neither would still be alive. After a moment, he realized that wasn’t necessarily so. Some of the people Ferd Koenig bossed could keep a man alive and hurting for a long, long time before they finally gave him peace-or maybe just made a mistake and hit him too hard or once too often.

Potter rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter on his desk and started an answer to Professor FitzBelmont. If he worked on something important, he wouldn’t have to think about some of the people who took the Attorney General’s orders. Dear Professor, he typed, I hope you and your fmaily are well. The error in the first sentence assured FitzBelmont the letter really came from him: a simple code, but an effective one. Thank you for your recent letter, which I have just received. I wish I were more familiar with the Japanese project you mention, but I am afraid I cannot tell you how close they are to invading the Sandwich Islands.

That, of course, was also code. It might be obvious to anyone who intercepted the letter that Potter wasn’t talking about Japan. What he was talking about wouldn’t be so obvious, though. He wondered if the Japanese were working on nuclear fission. They weren’t white men, but they’d proved they could play the white man’s game. He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. It was probably the USA’s nightmare. If one bomb could wreck Pearl Harbor or Honolulu, how did you defend them?

Back to what was his problem. He clacked away at the big upright machine. It had a stiff action, but that didn’t matter; he was a two-fingered typist with a touch like a tap-dancing rhinoceros. You did not state when we could expect success from your own work. Its early completion could result in a major increase in efficiency. Hoping to hear from you soon on this point, I have the honor to remain… He finished the flowery closing phrases on automatic pilot, took out the sheet of paper, and signed the squiggle that might have been his name.

He put the letter in an envelope, sealed it, and wrote Professor FitzBelmont’s name and Washington University on the outside. Then he took it down the hall to the couriers’ office, first carefully locking the door to his own office behind him. He nodded to the major in charge of the War Department’s secret couriers. “Morning, Dick,” he said. “I need one of your boys to take this out of the city.”

“Yes, sir. We can do that.” The dispatching officer took the envelope, glanced at the address, and nodded. “Do you want someone who’s been there before, or a new man?” That was the only question he asked. Who Henderson V. FitzBelmont was and what the professor was working on were none of his business, and he knew it.

“Either way will do,” Potter answered. FitzBelmont might recognize a courier he’d seen before. Then again, he might not. He wasn’t quite the absentminded professor people made jokes about, but he wasn’t far removed, either. Potter got the feeling subatomic particles and differential equations were more real to him than most of the human race.

“We’ll take care of it, then,” the major said. “You’ll want the courier to report delivery, I expect?”

“Orally, when he gets back here,” Potter said.

The major raised an eyebrow. Potter looked back as if across a poker table. He held the high cards, and he knew it. So did the major. “Whatever you say, sir.”

“Thanks, Dick.” Potter went back to his own office. Whatever you say, sir. He liked the sound of that. As a general, he heard it a lot. The more he heard it, the more he liked it.

How long had it been since Jake Featherston heard anything but, Whatever you say, sir? Since he took the oath of office in 1934, certainly. In most things, nobody’d tried arguing with him for years before that. And he was a man who’d liked getting his own way even when he was only an artillery sergeant.

If somebody had tried telling the President more often, the country might be in better shape right now. Or it might not-Featherston might just have ordered naysayers shot or sent to camps. He’d done a lot of that.

Potter lit a cigarette and blew a meditative cloud of smoke up toward the ceiling. Two questions: was Jake Featherston leading the Confederate States to ruin, and could anybody else do a better job if Featherston came down with a sudden case of loss of life?

With the building disaster in Pittsburgh, with Featherston’s stubborn refusal to cut his losses and pull out (which looked worse now than it had when Nathan Bedford Forrest III and Potter sat on the park bench), the answer to the first had gone from unlikely through maybe and on toward probably, even if it hadn’t got there yet.

As for the second… Potter blew out more smoke. That wasn’t nearly so obvious. Nobody could wear Jake Featherston’s shoes. The Vice President? Don Partridge was a cipher, a placeholder, somebody to fill a slot because the Confederate Constitution said you needed to fill it. His only virtue was knowing he was a lightweight. Ferdinand Koenig? The Attorney General would have the Freedom Party behind him if the long knives came out. He was able enough, in a gray, bureaucratic way, but about as inspiring as a mudflat. As a leader…? Potter shuddered. Ferd Koenig was one of those people who made a terrific number two but a terrible number one. Unlike some of them, he had the sense to realize it.

Which left-who? Congress was a Freedom Party rubber stamp. Potter couldn’t think of any governor worth a pitcher of warm spit. Besides, most people outside a governor’s home state had never heard of him.

What about Forrest? Clarence Potter blinked, there in the privacy of his office. He was surprised the idea had taken so long to occur to him. He laughed at himself. “You old Whig, you,” he murmured. If the armed forces were going to overthrow the President-and it wouldn’t happen any other way-who better to take over the government than the chief of the General Staff? The Freedom Party had danced on the spirit of the Constitution while holding on to most of the letter. Throwing it out the window altogether seemed not just unnatural but wicked. But Forrest just might do.

Losing the war is wicked. Anything else? Next to losing this war to the USA, anything else looks good. Anything at all. Potter nodded decisively. About that, he had no doubts at all. The United States had forced a harsh peace on the Confederate States in 1917, but hadn’t kept it going for very long. Terms would be even worse this time, and the United States would make sure the Confederates never got off their knees again.

The next time Potter saw Nathan Bedford Forrest III in the cafeteria, he nodded casually and said, “Something I’d like to talk to you about when we have the chance.”

“Really?” Forrest said, as casually. “Can we do it here?”

Potter shook his head. “No, sir,” he answered. “Needs privacy.” From one general to another, that wasn’t a surprising thing to say. For a split second, Forrest’s eyes widened. Then he nodded and put some silverware on his tray.

Michael Pound grinned as his barrel rumbled forward, jouncing over rubble and grinding a lot of the big chunks into smaller ones. “Advancing feels good, doesn’t it, sir?” he said.

Lieutenant Don Griffiths nodded. “You’d better believe it, Sergeant. We’ve done too much falling back.”

“Yes, sir.” Pound wouldn’t have argued with that for a moment. “Looks to me like the Confederates are starting to feel the pinch.”

“Here’s hoping,” Griffiths said. “I wouldn’t want to try reinforcing and supplying an army the size of theirs by air, I’ll tell you that. And I don’t think they’ve got an airstrip left that our artillery can’t reach.”

“My heart bleeds-but not as much as they’re going to bleed before long,” Pound said. “I wonder why they haven’t tried to break out to the west. Somebody in their high command must have his head wedged. Too bad for them.” He had no respect for his own superiors. Finding out some dunderheads wore butternut was reassuring.

A rifle bullet pinged off the barrel’s armored side. That wouldn’t do the Confederates any good. As if to prove it wouldn’t, the bow machine gun chattered. Pound peered through his own gunsight, but he couldn’t see what the bow gunner was shooting at-if he was shooting at anything. It hardly mattered sometimes.

Off to the left, something on the Confederate side of the line blew up with a roar loud enough to penetrate the barrel’s thick skin. “That sounded good,” Pound said. “Wonder what it was.”

“Want me to stick my head out and look around?” Lieutenant Griffiths asked.

“Not important enough, sir,” Pound answered. “Who knows if our machine gun took out whoever was shooting at us?” Barrel commander was a dangerous job. Now that Pound had finally found an officer with some notion of what he was doing, he didn’t want to lose him for no good reason. There were too many times when a barrel commander had perfectly good reasons for exposing himself to enemy fire.

Something else blew up, even louder. Griffiths put a hand to his earphones. He often did that when he was getting a wireless message. Sergeant Pound had no idea whether it helped or how it could, but he’d never said anything about it to the officer. It couldn’t hurt.

Lieutenant Griffiths leaned forward to use the speaking tube to the driver’s position: “Forward again, and a little to the left, but slowly,” he said. He turned to Pound. “That was an ammunition dump. They won’t be able to shell us so well for a while.”

“We hope,” said Pound, ever willing to see the cloud next to the silver lining.

“Well, yes. We hope. There’s always that,” Griffiths agreed. “But we’ve got infantry moving up with us. With luck, they’ll keep the short-range trouble away from us. As for the other side’s barrels and antibarrel guns-we’ve done all right so far. Of course, we’ve got a pretty good gunner.”

“So we do.” Pound knew his own talents too well to be modest about them. Half a second later than he should have, he added, “You’re not bad at spotting trouble before it spots us. Best way to get rid of it that I know.”

No sooner had he said that than something clanged against the front of the turret with force enough to shake the whole barrel. I’m dead, Pound thought. Only a moment later did he realize he would have been too dead to think if that round had got through. Thank God for the upgraded armor on the new turret. If this beast hadn’t been retrofitted, I’d be burnt meat right now.

Without waiting for orders, the driver roared forward, looking for cover behind the nearest pile of rubble. Then, abruptly, he slammed on the brakes. “Did you see it, sir?” Pound asked.

“No, goddammit.” Griffiths sounded angry at himself. “That son of a bitch knows where we’re at, and I didn’t spot the muzzle flash. Wherever he is, he’s hidden good.”

“Not sporting,” Pound agreed. He’d been more than happy enough to ambush C.S. barrels from an empty garage, but having them turn the tables on him wasn’t playing fair. Someone with a more objective view might not have found that unfair, but so what? It wasn’t the impartial observer’s neck. It was his.

He traversed the turret, staring through the gunsight as he did. The hatch opened. Lieutenant Griffiths stood up to get a better look than he could through the periscopes in the cupola. This was one of those times. Griffiths might get shot, but he also might get a better look at the hidden cannon or barrel that had just come within inches of incinerating him.

It didn’t fire again, which argued that the rubble in front of Pound’s barrel gave pretty good protection. A rifle bullet snapped past; as always, the sound seemed hatefully malicious. Lieutenant Griffiths ducked a little-you did that without thinking-but he didn’t come back inside the steel shell. He had balls. Pound nodded approvingly.

Probably not somewhere close, the gunner thought, looking for straight lines that broke the irregular pattern of the ruins of Pittsburgh. If the enemy were close, he would have a better shot at the U.S. barrel. And, if he were close, his round likely would have penetrated in spite of the improved turret. A cannon made a damned effective door knocker.

There! Or Pound thought so, anyhow. “Armor-piercing!” he snapped.

“Armor-piercing,” Cecil Bergman answered. The loader slammed a black-tipped cartridge into the breech. Pound worked the elevation handwheel. Fifteen hundred yards was a long shot. As near as he could tell, he fired at the same time as the C.S. gunner. The enemy’s shot snarled past, a few feet high. Pound’s struck home. The enemy barrel started to burn.

“Hit!” Lieutenant Griffiths shouted. “How on earth did you make that shot?”

“Twenty-odd years of practice, sir,” Pound answered. The Confederate gunner hadn’t had so much-though he’d hit Pound’s barrel before Pound even knew he was there. He wouldn’t get another chance now. A great cloud of black smoke was rising, almost a mile away.

The shot ricocheting inside the barrel would have killed or maimed some of the crew. The fire would be searing the rest. By the way the smoke billowed out, that barrel was a total loss. Odds were the crew was, too. Pound had bailed out of a crippled barrel, but then only the engine compartment was burning. Could anyone get out here? He didn’t think so.

I just killed five men. Most of the time, he didn’t worry about that. When he watched a barrel brew up, it was only a machine that died. But he’d just had his own brush with death, and it reminded him of the soldiers inside the barrels. He knew what they were going through; he’d come close to going through it himself. If he’d met them in a bar, he could have drunk the night away talking shop with them.

But they’d just done their best to kill him, and their best was hideously close to good enough. They’re dead and I’m alive and that’s how I want it to be.

“We can move up a little more now, sir,” he said.

Griffiths thought about it, then nodded. He called up to the driver. The barrel came out from behind the pile of wreckage and clattered towards another one. Pound tensed when it came out into the open. If the Confederates had drawn a bead on them… But no hardened-steel projectile tore into the machine’s vitals. He breathed again as a pile of tumbled bricks came between his machine and the people who wanted to do unto it as he’d done unto theirs.

U.S. foot soldiers ran forward with the barrels. A Confederate machine gunner opened up on them. “Front!” Lieutenant Griffiths shouted.

“Identified!” Pound answered. He turned his head and shouted to the loader: “HE!”

“HE,” Bergman said. A white-tipped high-explosive round went into the breech. Pound lined up the sights on the C.S. machine gun’s winking muzzle. He jerked the lanyard. The cannon bellowed. The shell casing clanked on the floor of the fighting compartment.

A 2.4-inch shell didn’t have room for a whole lot of explosive. A three-incher from one of the Confederate barrels would have held almost twice as much. Sandbags and rubble flew from in front of the C.S. gun, but it kept shooting. Tracers drew fiery lines through the air.

Pound abstractly admired the enemy gunners’ nerve. If a round burst right in front of him, he would have got the hell out of there. They kept doing what they’d been trained to do. “Another round,” he said. In went the shell. He swung the cannon’s muzzle a gnat’s hair to the left and fired again.

Another hit, but the enemy gun went on firing. He needed two more rounds before it fell silent. The stink of cordite was thick in the turret. “Stubborn bastards,” Lieutenant Griffiths said.

“Yes, sir,” Pound agreed, coughing. “They’re the ones you’ve especially got to get rid of.”

With the machine gun knocked out, U.S. infantry moved up some more. They took casualties. With automatic rifles and submachine guns, the Confederate soldiers could outshoot them. But how long could the Confederates keep outshooting them if more ammunition didn’t come into Pittsburgh?

The Confederates couldn’t use captured U.S. ammo unless they also used captured Springfields. They’d chosen different calibers on purpose, to make it harder for U.S. soldiers to turn captured automatic rifles against them. It must have seemed a good idea at the time. It probably was. But it cut both ways.

Off to the left, a U.S. barrel got hit and started burning. Nothing in Pittsburgh came cheap. Nothing came easy. The Confederates weren’t going to quit, and they fell back only when they had no choice. How long could they keep it up?

He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. People with shoulder straps and metal ornaments on them had to fret about such things. All he had to do was shoot whatever he and Lieutenant Griffiths spotted in front of their barrel and hope like hell nobody shot him. He nodded. That would do nicely.

Shells started bursting around them. The bursts weren’t the ordinary kind; they sounded wrong, and even through the gunsight he saw the crawling mist that spread from them. “Gas!” he yelled.

Griffiths clanged down the hatch on top of the cupola. “I saw it,” he said. “I was hoping those fuckers were running short. No such luck, I guess.”

“No, sir,” Pound said as he put on his mask. Out in the open, U.S. infantrymen paused to do the same. Pound went on, “Now we’ll throw some at the Confederates, just to make sure they have to wear masks, too. As long as both sides have it, it doesn’t change anything.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” Griffiths answered. He had his mask on, too. “But I am saying it’s out there.” Pound couldn’t very well quarrel with that. The barrel commander started to wave to emphasize his point. He choked off the gesture before it was well begun. The inside of a turret was a crowded place.

Michael Pound made a good prophet, as he often did. A U.S. gas barrage followed in short order. It was heavier than the one the enemy had laid down. Infantrymen advanced in short rushes. The barrel moved up to the next decent firing position. Another block of Pittsburgh, cleared of Confederates.