In At the Death

VI

Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover didn't have Atlanta to kick around any more. The senior supply officers there couldn't make his life miserable any more. They'd either fled or died or were languishing in U.S. POW camps. The Stars and Stripes flew over the capital of Georgia. And so…

And so…Alabama. Dover had never figured he would have to try to fight the damnyankees from Alabama. Now he could scream at Huntsville for not getting him what he needed.

It was less fun than screaming at Atlanta had been. The chief quartermaster officer in Huntsville was a brigadier general named Cicero Sawyer. He sent Dover anything he had. When he didn't send it, he didn't have it. Dover could complain about that, but Sawyer complained about it, too.

"Anything that comes from Virginia and the Carolinas, forget it," he told Dover on a crackling telephone line. "They can't get it here."

"Why not?" Dover demanded. "We've still got Augusta. We've still got Savannah. We've still got shipping. Damnyankees can't sink every freighter in the goddamn country."

"Reckon the big reason is all the shit that's going on up in Virginia right now," Sawyer said. "They want to hang on to every damn thing they can so they can go and shoot it at the Yankees there."

"Yeah, well, if they forget this is part of the country, too, pretty soon it won't be any more," Dover said. "Let's see how they like that."

"I know," Sawyer said wearily. "I've got two worries myself. I got to keep the soldiers supplied-that means you. And I've got to keep the rocket works going. We're hurting the USA with those things, damned if we're not."

"That's nice," Dover said. "In the meantime, I need boots and I need raincoats and I need ammo for automatic rifles and submachine guns. When the hell you gonna get that stuff for me?"

"Well, I can send you the ammunition," Brigadier General Sawyer answered. "That comes out of Birmingham, so it's no problem. The other stuff…Mm, maybe I can get some of it from New Orleans. Maybe."

"If you don't, I'm gonna have men coming down with pneumonia," Dover said. "Boots wear out, dammit, and they start to rot when it's wet like it is now. The guys who have shelter halves are wearing them for rain hoods, but they aren't as good as the real thing."

Sawyer sighed. "I'll try, Dover. That's all I can tell you. You aren't the only dumpmaster yelling his head off at me, remember."

"Why am I not surprised?" Dover hung up with the last word.

Dumpmaster was a word that fit him much too well right now. His supply depot was small and shabby. The nearest town, Edwardsville, was even smaller and shabbier. Close to a hundred years earlier, Edwardsville had been a boom town, for there was gold nearby. Then the mother lode in California shot the little Alabama gold rush right behind the ear. Some of the fancy houses built in Edwardsville's first-and last-flush of prosperity still stood, closed and gray and grim.

"Well?" Pete asked when Dover hung up.

"He promised us the ammo," Dover told the veteran quartermaster sergeant. "As far as the rest of it goes, we're screwed."

"Not us. We got the shit for ourselves," Pete said. Supply officers and noncoms lived well. That was a perquisite of the job. Pete went on, "It's the poor bastards a few miles east of here who get the wrong end of the stick."

Jerry Dover nodded unhappily. In the last war, the average Confederate soldier had been about as well supplied as his Yankee counterpart. Through the first couple of years of this fight, the same held true. But the Confederate States were starting to come apart at the seams, and the men were paying for it.

"Ammo's great," Pete went on. "What if everybody's too damn hungry and sick to use it, though?"

"I already told you," Dover answered. "In that case, we're screwed." He looked around to make sure nobody but Pete could hear before adding, "And we're liable to be."

Off to the northwest lay Huntsville, where the rockets came from. Off to the west lay Birmingham, where anything made of iron or steel came from. Off to the east lay damnyankees who knew that much too well. When they got ready to push west, could they go right on through the Confederates standing in their way?

Although Dover hoped not, he wouldn't have bet against it.

"How many niggers in these parts?" Pete asked, not quite out of a clear blue sky.

"Well, I don't exactly know," Dover answered. "I don't think I've seen any, but there could be some skulking around, like."

"Could be, yeah. I bet there are," Pete said. "I bet they get one look at what all we got here, then they light out to tell the Yankees."

"I bet you're right. We saw it often enough farther east," Dover said. "Maybe we ought to do some hunting in the woods around here." He remembered too well the black raiders who'd plundered his dump in Georgia.

"Maybe we should." Pete grinned. "I ain't been coon hunting since I was a kid."

"Heh." Dover made himself grin back. He'd heard jokes like that too many times to think they were very funny, but he didn't want to hurt Pete's feelings.

The hunt was no joke. Jerry Dover feared it was also no success. He couldn't get any front-line troops to join in, which meant he had to do it with his own men, men from the Quartermaster Corps. They could fight if they had to; they were soldiers. They'd had to a couple of times, when U.S. forces broke the lines in front of them. They hadn't disgraced themselves.

But there was a big difference between a stand-up fight and hunting down Negroes who didn't want to get caught or even get seen. Regular troops probably would have had a hard time doing that. It was more than the men from the supply dump could manage. They might have made the blacks shift around. They caught no one and killed no one. The day's only casualty was a corporal who sprained his ankle.

That evening, Birmingham caught hell. The bombers came right over the supply dump, flying from east to west. When the alarms went off, Dover scrambled into a slit trench and waited for hellfire and damnation to land on his head. As the Hebrews in Egypt must have done, he breathed a silent sigh of relief when the multi-engined Angels of Death passed over him, bound for other targets.

He felt guilty about that, and angry at himself, but he couldn't help it. Yes, the Confederacy was still going to get hurt. Yes, other men-and women, and children-were still going to get blown to bits. But his own personal, precious, irreplaceable ass was safe, at least till the sun came up.

He grimaced when he realized just how many U.S. airplanes were heading west. The damnyankees had loaded up their fist with a rock this time. Alabama boasted only two targets worth that much concentrated hate. The bombers' course told him they weren't bound for Huntsville. "Sorry, Birmingham," he muttered.

Birmingham, without a doubt, would be, and shortly was, even sorrier. He cowered in a trench more than seventy miles east of the city. Even from there, he could hear the bombs going off: a low, deep roar, absorbed almost as much through the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet as through the ears.

"Where the hell's our fighters?" Pete howled, as if Dover had a couple of dozen stashed away in the depot.

"We don't have enough," Dover answered. That had been true ever since the front lay up in Tennessee. It was more obviously, more painfully, true now. U.S. factories were outproducing their C.S. counterparts. Dover supposed U.S. pilot-training programs were outpacing their Confederate counterparts, too.

"How're we supposed to lick 'em if we can't go up there and shoot 'em down?" Pete wailed.

Jerry Dover didn't answer. The only thing he could have said was, We can't. While that was liable to be so, it didn't do anybody any good. If the writing was on the wall, Pete would be able to see it as well as anybody else.

The bombers didn't come back by the same route they'd taken going in. When Dover realized they weren't going to, he nodded in grudging respect. The Yankees weren't so dumb, dammit. C.S. antiaircraft guns would be waiting here for the returning airplanes. So would whatever night fighters the local Confederates could scrape up. Maybe Y-ranging gear could send the fighters after the U.S. bombers anyway. Dover hoped so. He was far from sure of it, though.

He wasn't sorry to climb out of the muddy trench. If chiggers didn't start gnawing on him, it would be nothing but dumb luck. Pete came out of his hole at about the same time. "Ain't this a fun war?" the sergeant said.

"Well, I could think of a lot of words for it, but I'd probably have to think a long time before I came up with that one," Dover answered.

"They knocked the shit out of Birmingham," Pete said.

"Can't argue with you."

Pete looked west, as if he could see the damage from where he stood. "You reckon the place can keep going after they hit it like that?"

"Probably," Dover replied. His eyes were well enough adapted to the dark to let him see Pete start. He went on, "Why not? We bombed plenty of Yankee towns harder than that, and they kept going. The USA hit Atlanta day after day, week after week, and it kept making things and shipping them out till just a little while before we finally lost it. Hard to bomb places back to the Stone Age, no matter how much you wish you could."

"Well, I sure as hell hope you're right." Pete pulled a pack of cigarettes from a breast pocket. He stuck one in his mouth and bent his head to light it. The brief flare of the match showed his hollow, unshaven cheeks. Remembering his manners, he held out the pack. "Want a butt, sir?"

"Don't mind if I do. Thanks." Dover flicked a lighter to get the proffered cigarette going. After a couple of drags, he said, "If they flatten Birmingham and Huntsville and maybe Selma, not many factory towns left between here and New Orleans."

"Yeah." Pete grunted. "Whole state of Mississippi's nothin' but farms, near enough. Farms and rednecks, I mean. Used to be farms and rednecks and niggers, but I reckon we took care o' most of the coons there. That's one good thing, anyways."

"Let me guess-you're not from Mississippi." Dover's voice was dry.

"Hope to shit I'm not, sir," Pete said fervently. "I came off a farm about twenty miles outside of Montgomery, right near the edge of the Black Belt. Well, it was the Black Belt then. Likely ain't no more."

"No, I wouldn't think so." Jerry Dover left it there. He thought the Confederacy had more urgent things to do than hunt down its Negroes. Jake Featherston thought otherwise, and his opinion carried a lot more weight than a jumped-up restaurant manager's. But if he'd put those coons into factories instead of getting rid of them, how many more white men could he have put into uniform? Enough to make a difference?

We'll never know now, Dover thought.

"You know how many Mississippians it takes to screw in a light bulb?" Pete asked out of the blue.

"Tell me," Dover urged.

"Twenty-seven-one to hold the bulb, and twenty-six to turn the house round and round."

Dover laughed his ass off-that one did take him by surprise. Here he was, his country crashing down around his ears, and he laughed like a loon at a stupid joke. If that wasn't crazy, he didn't know what would be. He didn't stop laughing, either.

W hen Jonathan Moss heard barrels clanking toward him, he feared it was all over. If the Confederates wanted to put that kind of effort into hunting down Spartacus' guerrilla band, they could do it. Moss knew that all too well. So did all the survivors in the band.

"Got us some Featherston Fizzes?" Spartacus called.

"We'd do better trying to hide," Nick Cantarella said.

"Ain't gonna hide from that many machines," the chieftain said, and Moss feared he was right. He went on, "We headin' fo' heaven, might as well send some o' them motherfuckers down to hell."

Moss wasn't so sure of his own destination, but he'd been living on borrowed time long enough that he didn't worry too much about paying it back. An old bolt-action Tredegar wasn't much use against a barrel, but he hoped a driver or a commander would be rash enough to stick his head out for a look around. If one of them did, Moss hoped to make it the last rash thing he ever tried.

There came one of the big, snorting monsters. Moss swore under his breath. The barrel was buttoned up tight. Just his luck to spot a crew who knew what they were doing. He also saw that barrel design had come a long way while he was on the shelf here in Georgia. This green-gray machine was different from any he'd seen before.

Green-gray…His eyes saw it, but his brain needed several seconds to process it, to realize what it meant.

His jaw had just dropped open when Nick Cantarella, a little quicker on the uptake, let out a joyously obscene and blasphemous whoop: "Jesus fuckin' Christ, they're ours!"

"Them's Yankee barrels?" Spartacus sounded as if he hardly dared believe it. Jonathan Moss knew how the guerrilla leader felt-he hardly dared believe it himself.

"Sure as shit aren't Confederate," Cantarella answered as two more machines rumbled down the road. The ground-pounder took a long look at them. "Wow," he breathed. "They've really pumped up the design, haven't they?"

"I was thinking the same thing. These look like they're twenty years ahead of the ones we were used to," Moss said. War gave engineering a boot in the butt. Moss thought of the airplanes he'd flown in 1914, and of the ones he'd piloted three years later. No comparison between them-and no comparison between these barrels and their predecessors, either.

If he walked out in front of them with a rifle in his hands, he'd get killed. The Negroes in Spartacus' band didn't have that worry. U.S. barrelmen, seeing black faces, would know they were among friends.

Again, the guerrillas figured that out at least as fast as he did. Several of them broke cover, smiling and waving at the oncoming barrels. The lead machine stopped. The cupola lid on top of the smooth rounded turret flipped up. "Boy, are we glad to see youse guys!" the barrel commander said in purest Brooklynese, his accent even stronger than Cantarella's.

"We's mighty glad to see you Yankees, too," Spartacus answered. "We gots a couple o' friends o' yours here." He waved for Moss and Cantarella to show themselves.

Cautiously, Jonathan Moss came out from behind the bush that had hidden him. The barrel's bow machine gun swung toward his belly button. A burst would cut him in half. He set down the Tredegar and half raised his hands.

"Who the hell are you?" the barrel commander asked. "Who the hell're both of youse?"

"I'm Jonathan Moss, major, U.S. Army-I'm a pilot," Moss answered. In scruffy denim, he looked more like a farmer-or a bum.

"Nick Cantarella, captain, U.S. Army-infantry," Cantarella added. "We got out of Andersonville, and we've been with the guerrillas ever since."

"Well, fuck me," the barrel commander said. "We heard there might be guys like you around, but I never figured I'd run into any. How about that? Just goes to show you. How long you been stuck here?"

"Since 1942." By the way Moss said it, it might as well have been forever. That was how he felt, too.

"Fuck me," the kid in the barrel said again. He looked around. "Gonna be some foot soldiers along any minute. We'll give you to them guys, and they'll do…whatever the hell they do with you. Clean youse up, anyway." That confirmed Moss' impression of himself. Cantarella looked even more sinister, because he had a thicker growth of stubble.

Sure enough, infantrymen trotted up a couple of minutes later. At least half of them carried captured Confederate automatic rifles and submachine guns. The lieutenant in charge probably wasn't old enough to vote. "Where are the closest Confederates?" he demanded, sticking to business.

"Down in Oglethorpe, other side o' the river," Spartacus answered. "They got some sojers there, anyways."

"You lead us to 'em?" the young officer asked.

Spartacus nodded. "It'd be my pleasure."

"All right. We'll clean 'em out-or if we can't, we'll call for the guys who damn well can." The lieutenant took a couple of steps towards Oglethorpe before he remembered he hadn't dealt with Moss and Cantarella. He pointed to one of his men. "Hanratty!"

"Yes, sir?" Hanratty said.

"Take these Robinson Crusoes back to Division HQ. Let the clerks deal with 'em." The lieutenant raised his voice: "The rest of you lazy lugs, c'mon! We still got a war to fight."

"Robinson Crusoes?" Moss said plaintively. The infantrymen tramped south, boots squelching through the mud. The barrels rumbled along with them. The Confederates in Oglethorpe were in for a hard time. Nobody paid any attention to the newly liberated POWs, not even the blacks with whom they'd marched and fought with for so long.

Well, there was Hanratty. "You guys were officers?" he said. Jonathan Moss managed a nod. So did Cantarella, who looked as stricken as Moss felt. Hanratty just shrugged. "Well, come on, sirs."

Still dazed, Moss and Cantarella followed. Moss had known the ropes with the guerrillas, and before that in Andersonville, and before that as a flier. Before long, he'd probably be in a situation where he knew them again. For now, he was in limbo.

Division HQ was a forest of tents a couple of miles to the north. Hanratty turned his charges over to the sentries there, saying, "My outfit scraped up these two Crusoes running with the niggers. One's a major, the other one's a captain. They're all yours. I gotta get back to it-can't let my guys down." With a nod, he headed south again.

"Crusoes?" Moss said once more. Not even Robinson Crusoes this time.

"That's what we call escaped POWs who've been on their own for a while, sir," the sentry said. Maybe he was trying to be kind, but he sounded patronizing, at least to Moss' ears. He went on, "You guys come with me, uh, please. I'll take you to the doc first, get you checked and cleaned up, and then they'll start figuring out what to do with you next."

"Oh, boy," Cantarella said in a hollow voice. Moss couldn't have put it better himself.

The doctor wore a major's gold oak leaves, but he didn't look much older than that kid lieutenant. He poked and prodded and peered. "Fleas, lice, chiggers, ticks," he said cheerfully. "You're scrawny as all get-out, too, both of you. Do a lot of walking barefoot?"

"Some, after our boots wore out and before we could, uh, liberate some more," Moss admitted.

"Hookworm, too, chances are. And some other worms, I bet." Yes, the doctor sounded like somebody in hog heaven. "We'll spray you and give you some medicine you won't like-nobody in his right mind does, anyway-and in a few days you'll be a lot better than you are now, anyhow. And we'll feed you as much as you can hold, too. How does that sound?"

"Better than the worm medicine, anyway," Moss said. "You make me feel like a sick puppy."

"You are a sick puppy," the doctor assured him. "But we'll make you better. We've learned a few things the last couple of years."

"When do we get back to the war?" Nick Cantarella asked. "If the United States are down here, Featherston's fuckers have to be on their last legs. I want to be in at the death, goddammit."

"Me, too," Moss said.

"When you're well enough-and when we make sure you are who you say you are." The doctor produced two cards and what looked like an ordinary stamp pad. "Let me have your right index fingers, gentlemen. We'll make sure you're really you, all right. And if you're not, you'll see a blindfold and a cigarette, and that's about it."

"If you think the Confederates would let somebody get as raggedyassed as we are just to infiltrate, you're crazy as a bedbug, Doc," Cantarella said.

"Well, you aren't the first man to wonder," the doctor said easily.

For the next few days, Moss felt as if he'd gone back to Andersonville. He and Cantarella were under guard all the time. The food came from ration cans. The worm medicine flushed it out almost as fast as it went in. That was no fun. Neither was the idea that his own country mistrusted him.

At last, though, a bespectacled captain said, "All right, gentlemen-your IDs check out. Welcome back to the U.S. Army."

"Gee, thanks." Moss had trouble sounding anywhere close to enthusiastic.

The captain took his sarcasm in stride. "I also have the pleasure of letting you know that you're now a lieutenant colonel, sir-and you, Mr. Cantarella, are a major. You would have reached those ranks had you not been captured, and so they're yours. They have been for some time, which is reflected in the pay accruing to your accounts."

"That's nice." Moss remained hard to please. Nobody got rich on an officer's pay, and the difference between what a major and a light colonel collected every month wasn't enough to get excited about.

"When can we start fighting again?" Cantarella demanded, as he had before.

"You'll both need some refresher training to get you back up to speed," said the captain with the glasses. "Things have changed over the past couple of years, as I'm sure you'll understand."

"How much hotter are the new fighters?" Moss asked.

"Considerably," the captain said. "That's why you'll need the refresher work."

"Will I get back into action before the Confederates throw in the sponge?"

"Part of that will be up to you," the captain answered. "Part of it will be up to the Army as a whole, and part of it will be up to Jake Featherston. My own opinion is that you shouldn't waste any time, but that's only an opinion."

"We are going to lick those bastards?" Nick Cantarella said.

"Yes, sir. We are." The captain with the specs sounded very sure.

"What'll happen to Spartacus and his gang?" Moss asked, adding, "They're damn good fighters. They wouldn't have stayed alive as long as they did if they weren't."

"We've started accepting colored U.S. citizens into the Army," the captain said, which made Moss and Cantarella both exclaim in surprise. The captain continued, "Since your companions are Confederates, though, they'll probably stay auxiliaries. They'll work with us, but they won't be part of us."

"And if they get out of line, you won't have to take the blame for anything they do." As a lawyer, Moss saw all the cynical possibilities in the captain's words.

The other officer didn't even blink. "That's right. But, considering everything the enemy has done to them, not much blame sticks to Negroes acting as auxiliaries in the Confederate States."

"Is it really as bad as that?" Having been away from even Confederate newspapers and wireless broadcasts since his escape, Moss had trouble believing it.

"No, sir," the captain said. "It's worse."

S omewhere ahead lay the Atlantic. Cincinnatus Driver had never seen the ocean. He looked forward to it for all kinds of reasons. He wanted to be able to say he had-a man shouldn't live out his whole life without seeing something like that. More important, though, was what seeing the ocean would mean: that the United States had cut the Confederate States in half.

He hadn't been sure it would happen. This thrust east across Georgia had started out in a tentative way. The United States was trying to find out how strong the Confederates in front of them were. When they discovered the enemy wasn't very strong, the push took on a life of its own.

And anywhere soldiers went, supplies had to go with them. They needed ammo. They needed rations. They needed gasoline and motor oil. Cincinnatus didn't like carrying fuel. If an antibarrel rocket-or even a bullet-touched it off…

"Hell, it's no worse than carrying artillery rounds," Hal Williamson said when he groused about it. "That shit goes up, you go with it."

He had a point. Even so, Cincinnatus said, "Artillery rounds blow, they take you out fast. You get caught in a gasoline fire, maybe you got time to know how bad things is."

"Well, maybe," the white driver said. "They give you a truckload, though, I figure it'll go off like a bomb if it goes."

"Mmm…maybe." Cincinnatus paused to light a cigarette. "Got us plenty o' cheerful stuff to talk about, don't we?"

"You wanted cheerful, you shoulda stayed home," Williamson said.

Cincinnatus grunted. That held more truth than he wished it did. But he said, "I tell you one cheerful thing-we're beatin' the livin' shit outa Featherston's fuckers. That'll do for me. Only thing that'd do better'd be beatin' the shit outa Featherston."

"Could happen," the other driver said. "You believe even half of what Stars and Stripes says, he won't be able to stay in Richmond much longer. Where's he gonna run to then?"

With another grunt, Cincinnatus replied, "You believe half o' what Stars and Stripes says, we won the goddamn war last year."

Hal Williamson laughed. "Yeah, well, there is that. Those guys lie like they're selling old jalopies."

"They got a tougher sell than that," Cincinnatus said. "They got to sell the war."

"Soon as the Confederates jumped into Ohio, I was sold," Williamson said. "Bastards tried to knock us flat and steal the war before we could get back on our feet again. Damn near did it, too-damn near."

He was right about that. "Same here," Cincinnatus said. "'Course, they ain't as likely to shoot our asses off as they are with the kids in the front line."

"Still happens, though. You know that as well as I do. We've lost more drivers than I like to think about," Williamson said.

"Oh, yeah. I won't try to tell you anything different. All I said was, it ain't as likely, and it ain't," Cincinnatus said. He waited to see if the other driver would keep arguing. When Williamson didn't, Cincinnatus decided he'd made his point.

The next morning, he picked up a load of canned rations and headed for the front. He liked carrying those just fine. The soldiers needed them, and they wouldn't blow up no matter what happened. He couldn't think of a better combination.

About every third Georgia town had Negro guerrillas patrolling the streets along with U.S. soldiers. Whenever Cincinnatus saw some of them, he would tap his horn and wave. The blacks commonly grinned and waved back. "You a Yankee nigger?" was a question he heard again and again.

"I'm from Kentucky," he would answer as he rolled past. Let them figure that out. Yes, he'd grown up in the CSA, but he'd spent most of the second half of his life under the Stars and Stripes. His children were Yankees-no doubt about it. They even sounded as if they came from the Midwest…except when they got upset or angry. Then an accent more like his own would come out. But he was more betwixt and between than any one thing. He probably would be for the rest of his life.

U.S. authorities here took no chances. Bodies hung in almost every town square. That was supposed to make the living think twice about giving the USA any trouble. Seeing how much trouble the living gave the USA, Cincinnatus had his doubts about how much good it did. But those dead men wouldn't bother the United States again. He had no doubts about that at all.

Would the United States need to kill every white male in the Confederate States above the age of twelve? If they did need to, would they have the will to do it? Cincinnatus wasn't so sure about that, either. And even if the United States did set out to slaughter white male Confederates, wouldn't it be the same kind of massacre the Confederate whites had inflicted on their Negroes?

"Damn ofays have it coming, though," Cincinnatus muttered, there in the cab of his deuce-and-a-half.

Reluctantly, he shook his head. You couldn't play God like that, no matter how much you wanted to. Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party really and truly believed blacks had it coming, too. Nothing Cincinnatus had seen while stuck in Covington or while driving a truck through the wreckage of the CSA gave him any reason to think otherwise. Sincerity wasn't enough. What was? What could be?

"We got to stop killing each other. We got to," Cincinnatus said. Then he started to laugh. That would have been a fine thought…if he'd had it somewhere else, when he wasn't hauling food to soldiers dedicated to putting the Confederate States of America out of business for good.

The roads here didn't seem to be mined, the way so many had been in Tennessee. Up there, the enemy had known which way U.S. truck convoys were going. Here, they didn't. Cincinnatus wasn't sure U.S. commanders knew where their forces were going from one day to the next. And if they didn't, how could the Confederates?

Every so often, snipers would take pot shots at the trucks from the woods. When they did, U.S. armored cars and halftracks lashed the pines with bullets. That took care of that…till the halftracks and armored cars drove on. Then, more often than not, the unharmed bushwhackers would climb out of their holes and start banging away at U.S. trucks again.

Cincinnatus watched the woods as closely as he watched the road, then. He kept a submachine gun on the seat beside him, where he could grab it in a hurry if he needed to. He didn't want to get shot, but he really didn't want to get captured. One of the bullets in the captured Confederate weapon might be for him if he had to use it that way.

He wondered how many movies he'd seen where the bad guy snarled, You'll never take me alive, flatfoot! He didn't think he was the bad guy in this particular melodrama, but the Confederate skulkers wouldn't feel the same way about him.

Everything went fine till the convoy got to Swainsboro, Georgia, not far from where the trucks would unload. The woods around Swainsboro were particularly thick. The town itself had a turpentine plant, a couple of planing mills, and a furniture factory to deal with the timber. In the cleared areas, farmers raised chickens and turkeys, hogs and goats. All in all, it was a typical enough backwoods Georgia town-or so Cincinnatus thought till a big bomb went off under a deuce-and-a-half a quarter of a mile in front of him. He was still in town; the other truck had just cleared Swainsboro.

The poor driver never knew what hit him. His truck went up in a fireball that would have been even bigger had he carried anything inflammable. Chunks of metal and asphalt rained down around Cincinnatus as he slammed on the brakes. Something clanged off a fender. Whatever it was, it sounded big enough to leave a dent. He was amazed his windshield didn't blow in and slash his face to ribbons.

No sooner had he stopped-just past the last buildings on the outskirts of town-than he grabbed for the submachine gun. He'd been through bombings before. Usually, the bomb was intended to stall the convoy so bushwhackers could hit it from the sides. His head swiveled. He didn't hear any gunfire, and wondered why not.

As the trucks ahead of him moved forward, he put his back in gear. An armored car went off the road to one side, a halftrack to the other. The light cannon and machine guns the armored vehicles carried were potent arguments against getting gay with the convoy. Cincinnatus hoped they were, anyhow.

He ground his teeth when he had to leave the paving and go off into the mud to the side. The truck's all-wheel drive kept him from bogging down, but getting stuck was the least of his worries. If those bastards had planted more explosives next to the road…He'd seen that before, too.

He'd just got back up onto the road-and breathed a sigh of relief because he'd made it-when an antibarrel rocket trailing fire streaked out of the woods and slammed into the armored car's side. Those rockets were made to pierce much thicker armor than that. The armored car burst into flames.

Cincinnatus fired into the trees again and again. Short bursts, he reminded himself. The muzzle wouldn't pull up and to the right if he didn't try to squeeze off too many rounds at a time. That fire trail pointed right back to where the man with the launcher had to be. If Cincinnatus could nail him…

He growled out a triumphant, "Yeah!" when he did. A man in bloodied Confederate butternut staggered out from behind a loblolly pine and fell to his knees. Cincinnatus squeezed off another burst. The Confederate grabbed at his chest as he toppled. He lay there kicking. How many bullets did he have in him? Men often proved harder to kill than anyone who wasn't trying to do it would imagine.

This bastard, though, had surely killed everybody in the armored car. No hatches opened; no men got out. And the driver hadn't got out of the blasted truck, either. No way in hell he could have. So the Confederate had extracted a high price for his miserable, worthless life. If all his countrymen did the same…

But they couldn't. Cincinnatus had already seen as much. The enemy soldiers had the advantage of playing defense, of making U.S. forces come to them. But the United States also had an advantage. They could pick when and where to strike. And they could concentrate men and barrels where they thought concentrating them would do the most good. Breakthroughs were easier to come by in this war than they had been the last time around.

How many more would the USA need? Cincinnatus thought about that with half his mind while the rest got the truck rolling down the road again, and scanned the woods to either side. He'd spot the Confederates no doubt lurking in there only if they made a mistake-he knew that. Those bastards were human beings just like anybody else, though. They could screw up the same way U.S. soldiers could.

A good thing, too. Cincinnatus' shiver had nothing to do with the nasty weather. If the Confederates hadn't screwed up a couple-three times, they'd be ruling the roost now. A few Negroes still survived in the CSA. Had Jake Featherston won everything his heart desired, everything south of the border would be lily-white.

So…One more push into Savannah, and how long would the butternut bastards go on screaming, "Freedom!" with their goddamn country split in two? The United States could turn north and smash one half, then swing south and smash the other. Or maybe the body would die once the USA killed the head. Cincinnatus patted the submachine gun. He sure hoped so.

J orge Rodriguez and Gabriel Medwick both sewed second stripes onto their sleeves. Jorge was lousy with a needle and thread; back in Sonora, sewing was work for women and tailors. He was surprised to find his friend neat and quick and precise. "How come you can do that so good?" he asked, ready to rag on Gabe.

"My ma learned me," Medwick answered matter-of-factly. "She reckoned I ought to be able to shift for myself, and knowing how to sew was part of it."

That left Jorge with nothing to say. Ragging on his buddy was one thing. Ragging on Gabe's mother was something else, something that went over the line. Instead of talking, Jorge sewed faster-not better, but faster. He wanted to get the shirt back on. Even sitting in front of a campfire, it was chilly out.

Artillery opened up behind him, from the direction of Statesboro. Covington was a long way northwest now, and long gone. Statesboro guarded the approaches to Savannah. The town wasn't that well fortified, not by what Jorge had heard. Why would it be? Back before the war, who would have imagined eastern Georgia would be crawling with damnyankees? Nobody in his right mind, that was for sure.

Imagine or not, though, U.S. soldiers swarmed through this part of the state. Everybody figured they were heading for Savannah. They'd been pushing the Confederates back toward the southeast for weeks. Where else would they be going?

Sergeant Hugo Blackledge appeared in the firelight. He had a gift for not being there one second and showing up out of nowhere the next: a jack-in-the-box with a nasty temper. He commanded the company these days. All the officers above him were dead and wounded, and replacements hadn't shown up. Jorge's promotion to corporal was older than Gabe's, even if their sets of stripes had both arrived at the same time. That meant Jorge had a platoon, while his friend only led a section.

"How's it feel, making like lieutenants?" Blackledge asked with a certain sardonic relish.

"Don't want to be no lieutenant," Gabriel Medwick said. "I got enough shit to worry about already."

"You said it," Jorge agreed.

As if to underline their worries, U.S. artillery came to life. Jorge listened anxiously, then relaxed as the shells roared over his head. That was counterbattery fire aimed at the C.S. guns. As long as the big guns shot at each other, as long as they left the front-line infantry alone, Jorge didn't mind them…much.

Sure enough, the U.S. shells came down well to the rear. Jorge finished sewing on his new stripes and put his shirt back on. Gabe, fussily precise, lagged behind.

"What are we gonna do?" Jorge said.

His buddy looked up from his sewing. "Fight the damnyankees. Keep fighting 'em till we chase 'em back where they came from."

"їComo?" Jorge asked, startled into Spanish. The question sounded every bit as bleak in English: "How?"

"President'll figure out some kinda way." Medwick sounded a hundred percent confident in Jake Featherston.

Sergeant Blackledge lit a cigarette. "Don't get your ass in an uproar about that kind of shit, Rodriguez," he advised. "You can't do nothin' about it any which way. All we got to worry about is the damnyankees in front of us."

"That's bad enough!" Jorge exclaimed, because Blackledge made it sound as if the U.S. soldiers were nothing to worry about. Rodriguez wished they weren't but knew they were.

"Yeah, well, so what? You're still here. I'm still here. Hell, even pretty boy's still here." Blackledge blew smoke in Gabriel Medwick's direction.

"Up yours, too, Sarge," Medwick said without rancor. When he first got to know Blackledge, he wouldn't have dared mouth off like that. Neither would Jorge. And the formidable noncom would have squashed them like lice if they had dared. Now they'd earned the right, not least simply by surviving.

"All we can do is all we can do," Hugo Blackledge said. "We've put up a hell of a fight, seeing as they outweigh us about two to one."

"We'll lick 'em yet," Gabe said as he finally put his shirt back on.

"Uh-huh." Sergeant Blackledge nodded. Jorge had seen nods like that, from doctors in sickrooms where the patient wasn't going to get better but didn't know it yet. You kept his hope up as long as you could. Maybe it didn't do any good, but it didn't hurt, either. And he felt better, for a little while, anyway.

Jorge's dark eyes met the sergeant's ice-gray ones in a moment of complete mutual understanding. Gabe didn't get it, and probably wouldn't till Savannah fell, if then-and if he lived that long. The patient in the sickroom was the Confederacy. And chances were it wouldn't get better.

"Got another one of those Dukes?" Jorge asked Blackledge.

"Sure do. Here you go." The older man held out the pack.

Jorge got to his feet and walked over to take one. As he leaned forward so Blackledge could give him a light, he whispered, "We're fucked, sн?"

"Bet your sorry butt we are," Blackledge answered.

"Thanks." Jorge sucked in smoke. But he was more grateful for the candor than for the cigarette.

When morning came, he looked up the road along which he'd been retreating. A couple of dead Confederates lay there, about three hundred yards in front of the line. Nobody'd tried to retrieve their bodies. For one thing, it was too likely that U.S. snipers would shoot anyone who did. For another, C.S. engineers had booby-trapped the corpses. Any damnyankee who flipped them over looking for souvenirs would regret it.

Nobody'd set up a kitchen anywhere close by. Jorge made do with a ration can. It was U.S.-issue deviled ham, the favorite canned meal on both sides of the front. Jorge hadn't swapped cigarettes to get his hands on this one. He'd taken three or four cans off a dead Yankee. Looking at those bodies out there made him shake his head as he ate. Maybe he'd been lucky not to get blown to kingdom come.

It wasn't as if the damnyankees wouldn't have other chances. Sooner or later-probably sooner-they would start pushing hard toward Savannah again. The only question was whether they'd do it right here or somewhere a little farther west. If they did it right here, Jorge knew he'd have to retreat or die. If they did it farther west, his choices would lie between retreating and getting cut off and trapped.

He didn't think the C.S. line could hold. As for counterattacks…Well, no. When a sergeant commanded a company, when a new corporal was leading a platoon, this army would have a devil of a time holding its ground. Pushing the enemy back seemed far beyond its power.

Too many damnyankee soldiers. Too many damnyankee barrels. Too many airplanes with the eagle and crossed swords. With Atlanta gone, with Richmond in trouble, with Birmingham getting pounded, how could the Confederacy reply?

No U.S. troops came close enough to try to plunder the booby-trapped corpses. That left Jorge more relieved than anything else. Advancing U.S. soldiers would have meant more hard fighting. He'd seen enough-more than enough, in fact-to last him a lifetime. He knew he hadn't seen the end of things here. Either he'd have to do more fighting or he'd have to fall back. Chances were, he'd have to do both. If he didn't have to do either one today, or maybe even tomorrow, so much the better.

Quiet lasted through the afternoon and into the evening. He smoked and ate and dozed and listened to the problems of a soldier in his platoon who had woman trouble back in North Carolina. Somebody'd sent Ray a letter that said his wife (or maybe fiancйe; Jorge wasn't quite sure) was fooling around on him with a mechanic who was back there because he'd already lost an arm in the fighting.

"Shoulda blown off his shortarm instead," Ray said savagely. "What I want to do is, I want to go on home and take care o' that my own self."

"Well, you can't," Jorge said. "They catch you deserting, they shoot you. Then they hang up your body to give other people the message."

"It'd be worth it. Then Thelma Lou'd know how much I love her," Ray said.

Jorge wondered why he'd got stuck listening to this crap. He himself hadn't had a fiancйe, let alone a wife, back in Baroyeca. The few times he'd lain down with a woman, he'd had to put money on the dresser first. But he was the platoon leader. That must have made him seem to Ray like someone who knew what he was doing. He wished he seemed that way in his own eyes.

He knew enough to be sure Ray was talking like a fool. Anybody who wasn't in love with Thelma Lou would have known that. "She just laugh when you get in trouble," Jorge said. "Then she go on fooling around with this asshole."

"Not if I kill him, she don't." Ray was as stubborn as he was stupid, which took some doing.

"Then she fool around with somebody else," Jorge said. "A gal who cheats on you once, she cheats on you lots of times. You don't get her back like she never screwed around at all." Ray's jaw dropped. Plainly, that had never crossed his mind. Dumb as rocks, Jorge thought sadly. He went on, "Or maybe this letter you got, maybe it's bullshit. Whoever sent it to you, there ain't no return address, right?"

"I dunno," Ray said, which covered more ground than he realized. "You might could be right, but I dunno. Kinda sounds like somethin' Thelma Lou'd go and do."

So why do you give a damn about her? Jorge didn't scream it, however much he wanted to. He could tell it would do no good. "You can't go nowhere," he said. "You don't want to let your buddies down, right?" Ray shook his head. He wasn't a bad soldier. Jorge pressed on: "You can't get leave, and there's lots of military police and Freedom Party men between here and your home town. So stay. All this stuff, if it really is anything, it'll sort itself out when the war's done. Why worry till then?"

"I guess." Ray didn't sound convinced, but he didn't sound like someone on the ragged edge of deserting, either.

Sergeant Blackledge swore when Jorge warned him of the trouble. "This ain't the first time he's had trouble with that cunt," he said. "But you were dead right-if he does try and run off, he ain't gonna get far, and he'll land in more shit than Congress puts out."

Half an hour after that, a captain and a second lieutenant and six or eight enlisted men showed up: a new company CO, a platoon commander, and some real live (for the moment, anyhow) reinforcements. Would wonders never cease? The captain, whose name was Richmond Sellars, walked with a limp and wore a Purple Heart ribbon with two tiny oak-leaf clusters pinned to it.

"I told 'em I was ready to get back to duty," he said, "so they sent my ass here." He pointed to the lieutenant, who had to be at least forty and looked to have come up through the ranks. "This is Grover Burch. Who's in charge now?"

"I am, sir. Sergeant Hugo Blackledge." Blackledge likely wasn't happy to see company command go glimmering. Jorge wasn't thrilled about losing his platoon. The good news was that he wouldn't have to listen to complaints like Ray's so much. They'd be Burch's worry, and Sergeant Blackledge's, too.

"Well, Blackledge, why don't you fill me in?" Sellars said. He'd seen enough to know he'd be smart to walk soft for a while.

The sergeant did, quickly and competently. He said a couple of nice things about Jorge, which surprised and pleased the new corporal. Then Blackledge pointed northwest. "Not really up to us what happens next, sir," he said. "The damnyankees'll do whatever the hell they do, and we've got to try and stop 'em. I just hope to God we can."

F orward to Richmond! That had been the U.S. battle cry in the War of Secession. It would have been the battle cry during the Great War, except the Confederates struck north before the USA could even try to push south. And in this fight…

In this fight, the CSA had held the USA in northern Virginia. The Confederate States had held, yes, but they weren't holding any more. Abner Dowling noted each new U.S. advance with growing amazement and growing delight. After U.S. soldiers broke out of the nasty second-growth country called the Wilderness, the enemy just didn't have the men and machines to stop them. The Confederates could slow them down, but the U.S. troops pushed forward day after day.

A command car took Dowling and his adjutant past burnt-out C.S. barrels. Even in this chilly winter weather, the stink of death filled the air. "I didn't believe I'd ever say it," Dowling remarked, "but I think we've got 'em on the run here."

"Yes, sir. Same here." Major Angelo Toricelli nodded. "They just can't hold us any more. They'll have a devil of a time keeping us out of Richmond."

"I hope we don't just barge into the place," Dowling said.

He glanced over at the driver. He didn't want to say much more than that, not with a man he didn't know well listening. His lack of faith in Daniel MacArthur was almost limitless. He'd served with MacArthur since the Great War, and admired his courage without admiring his common sense or strategic sense. He doubted whether MacArthur had any strategic sense, as a matter of fact.

"I've heard we're trying to work out how to get over the James," Major Toricelli said.

"I've heard the same thing," Dowling replied. "Hearing is only hearing, though. Seeing is believing."

A rifle shot rang out, not nearly far enough away. The driver sped up. Toricelli swung the command car's heavy machine gun toward the sound of the gunshot. He didn't know what was going on. He couldn't know who'd fired, either. The shot sounded to Dowling as if it had come from a C.S. automatic rifle, but about every fourth soldier in green-gray carried one of those nowadays-and the other three wanted one.

Toricelli relaxed-a little-as no target presented itself. "Back in the War of Secession, they would have had a devil of a time taking the straight route we're using," he remarked. "The lay of the land doesn't make it easy."

"Around here, the lay of the land's got the clap," Dowling said. His adjutant snorted. So did the driver. An adjutant was almost obligated to find a general's jokes funny. A lowly driver wasn't, so Dowling felt doubly pleased with himself.

He'd been exaggerating, but only a little. The rivers in central Virginia all seemed to run from northwest to southeast. Major Toricelli was right. Those rivers and their bottomlands would have forced men marching on foot to veer toward the southeast, too: toward the southeast and away from the Confederate capital.

But barrels and halftracks could go where marching men couldn't. And U.S. forces were pushing straight toward Richmond whether Jake Featherston's men liked it or not.

So Dowling thought, at any rate, till C.S. fighter-bombers appeared. The driver jammed on the brakes. Everybody bailed out of the command car. The roadside ditch Dowling dove into was muddy, but what could you do? Bullets spanged off asphalt and thudded into dirt. Dowling didn't hear any of the wet slaps that meant bullets striking flesh, for which he was duly grateful.

A moment later, he did hear several metallic clang!s and then a soft whump! That was the command car catching fire. He swore under his breath. He wouldn't be going forward to Richmond as fast as he wanted to.

He stuck his head up out of the ditch, then ducked again as machine-gun ammo in the command car started cooking off. Embarrassing as hell to get killed by your own ordnance. Embarrassing as hell to get killed by anybody's ordnance, when you came right down to it.

After the.50-caliber rounds stopped going off, Dowling cautiously got to his feet. So did the driver. Dowling looked across the road. Major Toricelli emerged from a ditch there. He wasn't just muddy-he was dripping. His grin looked distinctly forced. "Some fun, huh, sir?"

"Now that you mention it," Dowling said, "no."

"We'd better flag down another auto, or a truck, or whatever we can find," Toricelli said. "We need to be in place."

He was young and serious, even earnest. Dowling had been through much more. With a crooked grin, he replied, "You're right, of course. The whole war will grind to a halt if I'm not there to give orders at just the right instant."

Who was the Russian novelist who'd tried to show that generals and what they said and did was utterly irrelevant to the way battles turned out? Dowling couldn't remember his name; he cared for Russian novels no more than he cared for Brussels sprouts. With the bias that sprang from his professional rank, he thought the Russian's conclusions absurd. He remembered the claim, though, and enjoyed hauling it out to bedevil his adjutant.

"They do need you, sir," Major Toricelli said. "If they didn't, they would have left you in Texas."

"And if that's not a fate worse, or at least more boring, than death, I don't know what would be," Dowling said.

While he and Toricelli sparred, the driver, a practical man, looked down the road in the direction from which they'd come. "Here's a truck," he said, and waved for it to stop.

Maybe he was persuasive. Maybe the burning command car was. Either way, the deuce-and-a-half shuddered to a halt, brakes squealing. Over the rumble of the engine, the driver said, "You guys look like you could use a lift."

"You mean you're not selling sandwiches?" Dowling said. "Damn!"

The driver eyed his rotund form. "You look like you've had plenty already…" As his eyes found the stars on Dowling's shoulder straps, his voice trailed off. Too late, of course, and the glum look on his face said he knew it. "Uh, sir," he added with the air of a man certain it wouldn't help.

"Just get me to Army HQ in a hurry, and I won't ask who the hell you are," Dowling said.

"Pile in. You got yourself a deal." Now the driver sounded like somebody'd who'd just won a reprieve from the governor.

Before long, Dowling repented of the bargain. The trucker drove as if he smelled victory at the Omaha 400. He took corners on two wheels and speedshifted so that Dowling marveled when his transmission didn't start spitting teeth from the gears. Other traffic on the road seemed nothing but obstructions to be dodged.

"What are you carrying?" the general shouted. The engine wasn't rumbling any more-it was roaring.

"Shells-105s, mostly," the driver yelled back, leaning into another maniacal turn. "How come?"

Major Toricelli crossed himself. Dowling wondered who was more dangerous, the Confederate fighter-bomber pilot or this nut. Well, if the shells went off, it would all be over in a hurry. Then, brakes screeching now, the driver almost put him through the windshield.

"We're here," the man announced.

"Oh, joy," Dowling said, and got out of the truck as fast as he could. Toricelli and the soldier who'd driven the command car also escaped with alacrity. The truck drove off at a reasonably sedate clip. The madman behind the wheel probably felt he'd done his duty.

A sentry with a captured C.S. submachine gun came up. "I know you, sir," he said to Dowling. "Do you vouch for these two?" The muzzle swung toward Toricelli and the driver.

Never saw 'em before. The words passed through Dowling's mind, but didn't pass his lips. The sentry was too grim, too serious, to let him get away with them, and too likely to open fire before asking questions. "Yes," was all Dowling said.

"All right. Come ahead, then." The sentry gestured with his weapon, a little more invitingly than he had before.

Familiar chaos enveloped Dowling as he stepped into the big tent. The air was gray with tobacco smoke and blue with curses. People in uniform shouted into telephone handsets and wireless sets' mikes. But they just sounded annoyed or angry, the way they were supposed to sound when things were going well.

He remembered headquarters in Columbus, back in the first summer of the war. He remembered the panic in officers' voices then, no matter how they tried to hold it at bay. They couldn't believe what the Confederates were doing to them. They couldn't believe anyone could slice through an army like a housewife slicing cheddar. They didn't know how to do it themselves, and so they'd figured nobody else knew, either.

They almost lost the war before they realized how wrong they were.

Now they knew what was what. Now they had the barrels and the bombs and the artillery and the men to turn knowledge into action. Better still, they had the doctrine to turn knowledge into effective action. Yes, they'd learned plenty of lessons from the enemy, but so what? Where you learned your lessons didn't matter. That you learned them did.

One of the men at a field telephone lifted his head and looked around. When he spotted Dowling, he called, "Message for you from General MacArthur, sir."

"Yes?" Dowling tried not to show how his stomach tightened at that handful of words. Daniel MacArthur often seemed incapable of learning anything, and the lessons he drew from what happened to him verged on the bizarre. His scheme to land men at the mouth of the James and march northwest up the river to Richmond…

I managed to scotch that one, anyhow, Dowling thought. I earned my pay the day I did it, too.

"Well done for your progress, and keep it up," the man reported. "And the general says he's over the Rapidan River east of Fredericksburg and rapidly pushing south. 'Rapidly' is his word, sir."

"Is it?" Dowling said. "Good for him!" The Confederates had given MacArthur a bloody nose at Fredericksburg in 1942. There wasn't much room to slide troops east of the town. Abner Dowling wouldn't have cared to try it himself. But if MacArthur had got away with it, and if he was driving rapidly from the Rapidan and punning as he went…"Sounds like Featherston's boys really are starting to go to pieces."

"Here's hoping!" three men in Army HQ said in one chorus, while another two or three added, "It's about time!" in another.

Dowling liked prizefights. People said of some boxers that they had a puncher's chance in the ring. If they hit somebody squarely, he'd fall over, no matter how big and tough he was. That was the kind of chance the CSA had against the USA. But when the United States didn't-quite-fall over, the Confederate States had to fight a more ordinary war, and they weren't so well equipped for that.

Did Featherston have one more punch left? Dowling didn't see how he could, but Dowling hadn't seen all kinds of things before June 22, 1941. He shrugged. If the United States seized Richmond and cut the Confederacy in half farther south, what could Featherston punch with?

"Tell General MacArthur I thank him very much, and I look forward to meeting him in front of the Gray House," Dowling said. Forward to Richmond! Things really were going that way.

A s far as Dr. Leonard O'Doull was concerned, eastern Alabama seemed about the same as western Georgia. The hilly terrain hadn't changed when he crossed the state line. Neither had the accents the local civilians used. Shamefaced U.S. soldiers caught social diseases from some of the local women, too.

This penicillin stuff knocked those down in nothing flat, though. It was better than sulfa for the clap, and ever so much better than the poisons that had been medicine's only weapons against syphilis.

"Move up, Doc!" a noncom shouted at O'Doull one morning. "Front's going forward, and you gotta keep up with it."

"Send me a truck, and I'll do it," the doctor answered. Sergeant Goodson Lord played a racetrack fanfare on his liberated trombone. The soldier who brought the news thumbed his nose at the medic. Grinning, Lord paused and returned the compliment, if that was what it was.

By now, O'Doull had moving down to a science. Packing, knocking down the tent, loading stuff, actually traveling, and setting up again went as smoothly as if he'd been doing them for years-which he had. He was proud of how fast he got the aid station running once the deuce-and-a-half stopped. And every forward move meant another bite taken out of the Confederate States.

He hadn't been set up again for very long before he got a hard look at what those bites meant. "Doc! Hey, Doc!" Eddie the corpsman yelled as he helped carry a litter back to the aid station. "Got a bad one here, Doc!"

O'Doull had already figured that out for himself. Whoever was on the litter was screaming: a high, shrill sound of despair. "Christ!" Sergeant Lord said. "They go and find a wounded woman?"

"Wouldn't be surprised, not by the noise," O'Doull answered. "It's happened before." He remembered an emergency hysterectomy after a luckless woman stopped a shell fragment with her belly. What had happened to her afterwards? He hadn't the faintest idea.

When he first saw the wounded person, he thought it was a woman. The skin was fine and pale and beardless, the cries more contralto than tenor. Then Eddie said, "Look what they're throwing at us these days. Poor kid can't be a day over fourteen."

This time, O'Doull was the one who blurted, "Christ!" That was a boy. He wore dungarees and a plaid shirt. An armband said, NATIONAL ASSAULT FORCE.

"You damnyankees here're gonna shoot me now, ain't you?" the kid asked.

"Nooo," O'Doull said slowly. He'd seen National Assault Force troops before, but they were old geezers, guys with too many miles on them to go into the regular Army. Orders were to treat them as POWs, not francs-tireurs. Now the Confederates were throwing their seed corn into the NAF, too.

"They said you'd kill everybody you got your hands on," the wounded boy said, and then he started shrieking again.

"Well, they're full of shit," O'Doull said roughly. He nodded to the stretcher-bearers. "Get him up on the table. Goodson, put him out."

"Yes, sir," Lord said. When the mask went over the kid's face, the ether made him think he was choking. He tried to yank off the mask. O'Doull had seen that before, plenty of times. Eddie and Goodson Lord grabbed the boy soldier's hands till he went under.

He'd taken a bullet in the belly-no wonder he was howling. O'Doull cut away the bloody shirt and got to work. It could have been worse. It hadn't pierced his liver or spleen or gall bladder. He'd lose his left kidney, but you could get along on one. His guts weren't too torn up. With the new fancy medicines to fight peritonitis, he wasn't doomed the way he would have been a few years earlier.

"I think he may make it." O'Doull sounded surprised, even to himself.

"I bet you're right, sir," Goodson Lord said. "I wouldn't have given a dime for his chances when you got to work on him-I'll tell you that."

"Neither would I," O'Doull admitted as he started closing up. His hands sutured with automatic skill and precision. "If he doesn't come down with a wound infection, though, what's to keep him from getting better?"

"Then we can kill him," Lord said. O'Doull could see only the medic's eyes over his surgical mask, but they looked amused. The kid had been so sure falling into U.S. hands was as bad as letting the demons of hell get hold of him.

"Yeah, well, if we don't kill him now, will we have to do it in twenty years?" O'Doull asked.

"He'll be about old enough to fight then," Sergeant Lord said.

That was one of too many truths spoken in jest. But what would stop another war between the USA and the CSA a generation down the road? After the United States walloped the snot out of the Confederates this time around, would the USA stay determined long enough to make sure the Confederacy didn't rise again? If the country did, wouldn't it be a miracle? And wouldn't the Confederates try to hit back as soon as the USA offered them even the smallest chance?

"Once you get on a treadmill, how do you get off?" O'Doull said.

"What do you mean, sir?" Lord asked.

"How do we keep from fighting a war with these sons of bitches every twenty years?"

"Beats me," the medic said. "If you know, run for President. I guaran-damn-tee you it'd put you one up on all the chuckleheads in politics now. Most of 'em can't count to twenty-one without undoing their fly."

O'Doull snorted. Then, wistfully, he said, "Only trouble is, I don't have any answers. I just have questions. Questions are easy. Answers?" He shook his head. "One reason old Socrates looks so smart is that he tried to get answers from other people. He didn't give many of his own."

"If you say so. He's Greek to me," Goodson Lord replied.

They sent the wounded Confederate kid off to a hospital farther back of the line-all the way back into Georgia, in fact. O'Doull, who had a proper professional pride in his own work, hoped the little bastard would live even if that meant he might pick up a rifle and start shooting at U.S. soldiers again twenty years from now…or, for that matter, twenty minutes after he got out of a POW camp.

The front ground forward. Before long, Birmingham would start catching it from artillery as well as from the bombers that visited it almost every night. O'Doull wondered how much good that would do. The Confederates might be running short of men, but they still had plenty of guns and ammunition. The bombing that was supposed to knock out their factories didn't live up to the fancy promises airmen made for it.

Featherston's followers still had plenty of rockets, too. Stovepipe rockets blew up U.S. barrels. O'Doull hated treating burns; it gave him the shivers. He did it anyway, because he had to. Screaming meemies could turn an acre of ground into a slaughterhouse. And the big long-range rockets threw destruction a couple of hundred miles.

"Hell with Birmingham," Sergeant Lord said, picking screaming-meemie fragments out of the thigh and buttocks of an anesthetized corporal. "We've got to take Huntsville away from those fuckers. That's where this shit is coming from."

"No arguments from me." O'Doull held out a metal basin to the senior medic. Lord dropped another small chunk of twisted, bloody steel or aluminum into it. Clink! The sound of metal striking metal seemed absurdly cheerful.

"Well, if you can see it and I can see it, how come the brass can't?" Lord demanded. He peered at the wounded man's backside, then dug in with the forceps again. Sure as hell, he found another fragment.

"Maybe they will," O'Doull said. "They swung a lot of force south of Atlanta to make the Confederates clear out. Now we're better positioned to go after Birmingham than we are for Huntsville, that's all."

"Maybe." Lord sounded anything but convinced. "Me, I think the brass are a bunch of jerks-that's what the trouble is."

Of course you do-you're a noncom, O'Doull thought. He too was given to heretical thoughts about the competence, if any, of the high command. Yes, he was an officer, but as a doctor he wasn't in the chain of command. He didn't want to be, either. There often seemed to be missing links at the top of the chain.

Missing links…His memory went back to biology classes in college, in the dead, distant days before the Great War. He remembered pictures of low-browed, chinless, hairy brutes: Neanderthal Man and Java Man and a couple of others thought to lie halfway between apes and Homo laughably called sapiens. He imagined ape-men in green-gray uniforms with stars on their shoulder straps and black-and-gold General Staff arm-of-service colors.

The picture formed with frightening ease. "Ook!" he muttered. Sergeant Lord sent him a curious look. O'Doull's cheeks heated.

He also imagined hulking subhumans in butternut, with wreathed stars on their collars. Confederate Neanderthals also proved easy to conjure up. A good thing, too, O'Doull thought. We'd lose if they weren't as dumb as we are.

And wasn't Jake Featherston the top Pithecanthropus of them all? "Ook," Leonard O'Doull said again, louder this time. Then he shook his head, angry at himself for swallowing his own side's propaganda. Sure, Featherston had made his share of mistakes, but who in this war hadn't? The President of the CSA had come much too close to leading his side to victory over a much bigger, much richer foe. If that didn't argue for a certain basic competence, what would?

"You all right, sir?" Goodson Lord asked, real concern in his voice.

"As well as I can be, anyhow," O'Doull answered. What worried him was that Jake Featherston could still win. The Confederates had come up with more new and nasty weapons this time around than his own side had. The fragments Lord was cleaning up-another one clanked into the bowl-showed that. If the enemy pulled something else out of his hat, something big…

"Hey, Doc!" That insistent shout from outside drove such thoughts from his mind. No matter what the Confederates who weren't Neanderthals came up with, all he could do was try to patch up the men they hurt.

"You all right by yourself?" he asked Lord.

"I'll cope," the senior medic said, which was the right answer.

The new wounded man had had a shell fragment slice the right side of his chest open. The corpsmen who brought him in were irate. "It was a short round, Doc," Eddie said. O'Doull could all but see the steam coming out of his ears. "One of ours. It killed another guy-they'll have to scrape him up before they can bury him."

"That kind of shit happens all the time," another stretcher-bearer said.

"Happens too goddamn often." Yeah, Eddie was hot, all right.

"I think so, too." O'Doull had also seen too many wounds on U.S. soldiers inflicted by other U.S. soldiers. He hated them at least as much as Eddie did. All the same…"Let's get to work on him. The less time we waste, the better."

Collapsed lung, lots of bleeders to tie off, broken ribs. O'Doull knew what to expect, and he got it. The wound was serious, but straightforward and clean. O'Doull knew he had a good chance of saving the soldier. By the time he finished, he was pretty sure he had. If the war lasted long enough, the man might return to duty.

"Won't he be proud of his Purple Heart?" Eddie was a little rabbity guy. Somehow, that only made his sarcasm more devastating.

"He's here to get one, anyway," O'Doull said. "You told me he had a buddy who bought the whole plot, right?"

"Yeah." Eddie nodded.

"Well, this is better. This guy'll probably end up all right," O'Doull said. Eddie didn't answer, which might have been the most devastating comeback of all.