The Grapple

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Irving Morrell rolled into Bowling Green with a smile on his face. The burnt-out Confederate barrels he rolled past were what made him happy. The Confederates had fought hard outside-they’d fought hard, and they’d got smashed. The one thing they managed to do was empty out most of their big supply dump and wreck what they couldn’t take away. The U.S. Army wouldn’t be able to salvage much. Given what the CSA had in Kentucky, logistics was one of the enemy’s strengths. Some capable officer or another probably needed killing.

Almost without thinking about it, Morrell brought his left hand up to his right shoulder. It still twinged every now and again. Now both sides used snipers and bombs and any other way they could find to try to murder their foes’ better leaders. It hardly seemed like war. Neither USA nor CSA seemed to care. Any weapon that came to hand, either side would use. When this war ended, one country or the other would lie flat on its back. The winner would have a booted foot on the loser’s neck, and would try to keep it there as long as he could.

Somebody’d painted FREEDOM! on a wall. Somebody else-or maybe the same Confederate patriot-had added several blue X’s: quick and easy shorthand for the C.S. battle flag. The Stars and Stripes might fly over Bowling Green, but the people still longed for the Stars and Bars.

Only a long lifetime ago, this town-this whole state-belonged to the USA. They spent a generation back in the USA after the Great War. The Negroes in Kentucky had liked that fine. Most of the whites had hated it. They thought of themselves as Confederates, and didn’t want to be U.S. citizens. The ones who did fled north when the CSA won the plebiscite in early 1941.

All of a sudden, Morrell stopped muttering and swore with savage fluency. “What’s wrong, sir?” Frenchy Bergeron asked.

“Nothing,” Morrell said. That was so patently untrue, he had to amend it: “Nothing I can do anything about, anyway.” How many whites-and maybe even blacks-who fled Kentucky after the plebiscite were really Confederate spies? That hadn’t occurred to him till now. He hoped it hadn’t because he was innocent and naive. He intended to send a message to the War Department anyway, on the off chance that everybody else was just as naive.

“Thinking about the next big push, sir?” the gunner asked.

“I’m always thinking about that,” Morrell said, and Sergeant Bergeron chuckled. He was a good gunner, even a very good gunner. He wasn’t quite in Michael Pound’s league, but who was? Now that Pound was an officer at last, he was finding new ways to annoy the Confederates. Seizing the crossing over the Green River between Calhoun and Rumsey probably put the western prong of Morrell’s offensive a couple of days ahead of where it would have been absent that.

A couple of artillery shells burst off to the south. The Confederates were fighting hard-if anything, harder than Irving Morrell had expected. No matter how hard they were fighting, they were still losing ground. They were losing it almost fast enough to suit Morrell’s driving perfectionism-almost, but not quite. When he conceived his plan, he wanted the CSA wrecked in a single campaigning season. Unless the bastards in butternut flat-out collapsed, he didn’t think he could bring that off. He would have to slice the Confederacy in half in two installments. John Abell was right about that.

“Ask you something, sir?” Frenchy Bergeron said.

“Sure,” Morrell answered. “What’s on your mind?”

“When do we go for Nashville?” Bergeron asked. Morrell started to laugh. The gunner coughed reproachfully. “What’s so damn funny, sir? Isn’t that’s what’s coming next?”

“You bet it is,” Morrell said. “And that’s what’s so damn funny. The War Department probably hasn’t figured out where I go from here, but you damn well have. I want to get moving as fast as I can, too, before the Confederates think I’m ready.”

He never denied the military talent facing him. After what happened in Ohio, after what came much too close to happening in Pennsylvania, he would have been a fool to do that (which didn’t always stop some of the more feverishly optimistic U.S. officers). What he wanted to do was make sure the Confederates’ talent didn’t matter much. If they lacked the men and barrels and airplanes to stop his thrusts, what was talent worth?

“Nashville…Nashville could be a real bitch,” Bergeron said. “Uh, sir.”

Why do I always get gunners who think they belong on the General Staff? Morrell wondered wryly. It wasn’t that Frenchy was wrong. The problem, in fact, was that he was right. Along with George Custer, Morrell had planned and executed the attack that crossed the Cumberland and took Nashville in 1917. That wasn’t quite the blow that won the Great War, but it did knock the Confederates back on their heels, and they never got over it afterwards.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Bergeron was waiting for an answer. “I expect we’ll come up with something,” Morrell said.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Frenchy said. “Don’t want to try crossing the river where you did the last time, though. What do you want to bet Featherston’s little chums’ll be laying for us there?”

“Jesus!” Morrell exploded. “You really do belong on the General Staff!”

“Not me, sir. I don’t want to go back to Philly. The people back there, they just talk about what’s supposed to happen. Me, I want to make that shit happen myself. They’re smarter’n I am, but I have more fun.”

“I feel the same way,” Morrell said, which was only partly true. No way in hell did he think the high foreheads back in Philadelphia were smarter than he was. A lot of the time, he thought they thought they were smarter than they really were. Of course, Frenchy might have been sandbagging, too.

“You know what you’re gonna do?” Bergeron persisted. “Anything happens to you, I may be the guy who has to talk through the fancy wireless set for a little while.”

He was about as far removed from the chain of command as a soldier could be. That didn’t necessarily mean he was wrong. If, say, Morrell got hit standing up in the cupola, which could happen easily enough, somebody who knew what things were like at the front might have to do some talking to keep an attack moving smoothly till Brigadier General Parsons could take over. It would be highly unofficial. Chances were it wouldn’t show up in the after-action reports. It could be important, though.

“You’re going to be an officer before this war is done,” Morrell said.

How many times had he tried to promote Michael Pound? How many times had Pound said no? Now Pound was a lieutenant himself, and proving he deserved his rank. Morrell hadn’t expected anything different. As for Frenchy Bergeron, he said, “I hope so, sir.”

“I’ll promote you right now if you want,” Morrell said. “Only thing I don’t like about the deal is that I’ll have to break in a new gunner.”

“Thank you, sir!” Bergeron said. “You want to wait till we get past Nashville, then? I figure there’ll be a lot of fighting up to there, and you’ll need me.”

“Deal,” Morrell said at once. “And I think you’re right. Getting over the Cumberland won’t be fun. But if we made it across the Ohio, we can do that, too.”

The U.S. spearhead broke out of Bowling Green heading south three days later. Air strikes took out a battery of Confederate rockets before they could salvo. Hearing that cheered Morrell no end. Those damn things could hamstring an advance before it really got going.

As usual, Morrell’s place was at the front. He wanted to see what happened, not hear about it later from somebody else. Officers who served on the General Staff didn’t understand that. To them, war was arrows on a map. To Morrell, it was shells going off and machine guns hammering and barrels brewing up and sending pillars of noxious black smoke into the sky and prisoners staggering out of the fight with shell shock on their faces and with their hands in the air. It was exhaust fumes and cordite and the sharp stink of fear. To the men of the General Staff, it was chess. They didn’t understand both sides were moving at once-and trying to steal pieces and knock over the board.

Morrell’s barrels raced by-raced through-a column of refugees U.S. fighter-bombers had hit from above. In 1941, the Confederates gleefully strafed Ohioans who didn’t care to live under the Stars and Bars. Refugees clogged roads. Refugees who’d just been hammered from the air clogged them even better. So the Confederates taught.

And now they were learning the same lesson for themselves. Kentuckians-or maybe they were Tennesseans by now-who didn’t want to live under the Stars and Stripes fled south as people from Ohio had fled north and east two years earlier. When they got hit by machine guns and cannon fire and bombs from above, it was as horrible as it had been in the USA.

Dead and wounded children and women-and a few men, mostly old-lay in the roadway. Children with dead parents clutched corpses and screamed grief to the uncaring sky. People’s most precious possessions were scattered everywhere. Automobiles burned.

A woman standing by the body of a little girl stared at Morrell with terrible eyes as his barrel rattled past. The shoulder was wide here-the oncoming barrels didn’t need to plow straight through what was left of the refugee column. The woman picked up a rock and threw it at Morrell. It clanged off the barrel’s side. “What the hell?” Frenchy Bergeron said.

“It’s all right.” Morrell ducked down into the turret. “Just a dissatisfied customer. If that was me out there and all I had was a rock, I expect I’d throw it, too.”

He straightened up and looked out again. The Confederates didn’t try to hold back the advancing U.S. troops till they got to a hamlet called Westmoreland. Morrell looked for it on his Kentucky maps, didn’t find it, and checked the sheets for northern Tennessee. That was how he was sure he’d crossed the state line. A sign said, WESTMORELAND-STRAWBERRY CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. Here as May passed into June, the crop was no doubt coming to full, sweet ripeness…or it would have been, anyhow. The treads of Morrell’s barrel and all the others speeding south with it churned the strawberries into jam.

Was that motion, there behind a farmhouse by Hawkins, the street leading into Westmoreland from the northwest? Morrell brought up his binoculars. “Front!” he sang out. “In back of that yellow clapboard house.”

“Identified!” Bergeron said, and then, “Clapboard? That house go to a whorehouse?”

Morrell snorted and wheezed. He had to try twice before he could ask, “What’s the range?”

“Just over a mile, sir.”

“Can you hit it?”

“Bet your ass. I’ll kill the fucker, and he won’t dare open up on us till we get closer.”

“Do it, then.” Morrell ordered the barrel to a halt. The gunner traversed the turret till the long 3?-inch cannon bore on the C.S. barrel. The roar almost took Morrell’s head off. He used the field glasses again. “Hit!” he yelled. “Way to go, Frenchy! Son of a bitch is burning!”

“Damn straight,” Bergeron said. “They got any others hanging around, they’ll know they better clear out.” Other U.S. barrels started finding targets and setting them afire at a range the Confederates couldn’t hope to match. Sullenly, the surviving C.S. machines did pull back. They had to hope for wooded terrain where they had a better chance to strike from ambush. U.S. foot soldiers and barrels pushed into Westmoreland. The streets proved to be mined. That slowed them up, but not for long.

U.S. bombers left two major dams in northern Tennessee untouched-the one by Carthage and the one farther east near Celina. They didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts: they didn’t want the floods downstream to disrupt their own advance. The Confederates, desperate to slow U.S. ground forces however they could, blew both dams as they fell back over the Cumberland.

Michael Pound was not pleased. The floodwaters washed over the banks of the river and flowed across what had been fertile farmland. They turned it into something that more closely resembled oatmeal.

The new U.S. barrels had wide tracks. That meant each part of the track carried less weight than was true in older machines. It also meant they could keep going where older barrels would bog down. It didn’t mean they had an easy time.

Here and there, Confederate antibarrel guns and holdouts with rocket launchers lingered north of the Cumberland. “I hate those damn stovepipes,” Sergeant Mel Scullard said, using the name the men in green-gray had hung on the launchers. “Doesn’t seem fair, one miserable infantry son of a bitch able to take out a whole barrel all by his lonesome.”

“Especially when it’s your barrel-and your neck,” Pound observed dryly.

“You bet,” the gunner said.

“They always could, with a Featherston Fizz,” Pound said.

“That’s different,” Scullard insisted. “You could see those assholes coming, and you had a chance to kill ’em before they got to you. These guys, they stay hidden, they fire the lousy thing, and then they run like hell.”

“I know,” Pound said. “We’ve got to get something just like that so our guys can give the Confederates what-for.” Had he been as mouthy to his superiors when he was a noncom? He smiled reminiscently. He was sure he had.

That evening, he got summoned to an officers’ conclave. This was the sort of thing he’d always had to find out about from his own superiors till he finally couldn’t evade promotion. It proved less impressive than he’d imagined it would. A dozen or so officers, ranging up from his lowly second lieutenanthood to a light colonel, gathered in a barn that smelled maddeningly delicious: the former owners had used it for curing tobacco.

The lieutenant colonel lit a U.S. cigarette, whose nasty smoke seemed all the viler by comparison with the aroma of choice burley. “Intelligence says the Confederates have some Freedom Party Guards units in the neighborhood,” he announced. “You want to watch out for those guys.”

“What’s so special about ’em, sir?” a captain asked. “If you shoot ’em, they go down, right? If you shoot ’em enough times, they stay down, right?” Michael Pound smiled. Meeting someone who thought the way you did was always nice.

After another drag on his cigarette, the senior officer (who was younger than Pound) looked at it in distaste. “I think they made this thing out of camel shit,” he said. How he knew what camel shit tasted like when he smoked it was probably a question for another day. No matter how little he liked the Niagara, he kept on smoking it. “What’s so special?” he echoed. “They’re supposed to be Featherston’s elite force. They’ve got the best men, and they’ve got the best equipment. Just about all of them carry those goddamn automatic rifles, they’ve got plenty of stovepipes”-he used the new handle, too-“and their armor is the best the Confederates have.”

“Not good enough.” Pound and two other U.S. officers said the same thing at the same time.

The lieutenant colonel shook his head. “Even up, out in the open, we’ve got the edge. If they shoot from ambush when we’re out in the open…” He didn’t go on, or need to. Pound nodded reluctantly, but he nodded. A hit from a three-inch gun could kill his barrel. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it could.

“How do we know ’em when we see ’em?” somebody asked.

“They wear camouflage uniforms, not ordinary butternut,” the light colonel said. “They’ve caused a lot of trouble in Texas. This is the first report of ’em east of the Mississippi.”

“Just our luck,” Pound said. A couple of the other men in the barn sent him curious looks. He was the junior officer present. He was also the oldest man there. The combination was odd and awkward-awkward for other people, anyhow. Michael Pound didn’t much care. If they busted him back down to sergeant, he wouldn’t say boo. He’d found he could do more as an officer than as a noncom. That was nice, and the Confederates had reason to regret it on the Green River. But he wouldn’t mind looking through a gunsight again, either. That 3?-incher was a gunner’s delight. High muzzle velocity, a flat trajectory, better sights than earlier barrels had, too…

“You need to be aware they’re around,” the lieutenant colonel said. “And be aware our engineers are in the neighborhood, too. They’ll do their best to make ways for you to go forward where the flooding’s worse than usual.”

Now Pound beamed. That was good news. Army engineers were on the ball. Fighting wasn’t their job, but they did it when they had to. And they worked under fire without a peep. Solid men, sure as hell. He stuck up his hand. The lieutenant colonel nodded. “Sir, will they have bridging equipment to get us over the Cumberland?” Pound asked. “The sooner we can grab a bridgehead on the other side, the more the Confederates’ll have to flabble about.”

“You don’t think small, do you?” the light colonel said.

“No, sir.” Pound took the question literally and answered with a straight face.

He nonplused the colonel. The younger man rubbed his chin. “If we get that far, Lieutenant, I figure we’ll find some way to get over, too. Does that satisfy you?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Pound said. “But as long as those bastards are down, I want to keep kicking them. I want to kick their teeth in.”

Again, he sounded perfectly earnest. Again, he made the lieutenant colonel pause. At last, the man made the best of it, saying, “Your spirit does you credit. You can serve as an example for all of us. Any more questions?” He waited. Nobody said anything. He clapped his hands together once, softly. “All right, then. Let’s go get ’em.”

“What’s the word, sir?” Sergeant Scullard asked when Pound came back from the meeting.

Pound hid a grin. How many times had he asked officers the same question when he was a sergeant himself? More than he could count, that was for sure. “We drive for the Cumberland-and cross it if we can,” he answered, which overstated the case a bit. “The engineers will give us a hand. We may have Freedom Party Guards units in front of us. They’re supposed to be tough, and they’ve got A-number-one equipment, but we’ll make ’em say uncle.”

“Sounds good to me.” The gunner was a man after his own heart.

The attack went in the next morning. Infantrymen in trucks and half-tracked armored personnel carriers kept up with the barrels, though the trucks had trouble with the mud and mostly stayed on the roads. Engineers rode in combat cars and in bulldozers with steel plating welded around the driver’s position. Some of the dozers sported machine guns, too. Those were informal, nonregulation additions, but the engineers were in a position to do that if anybody was.

Resistance was light at first. Pound had just begun to doubt whether that lieutenant colonel knew what he was talking about when all hell broke loose. An enemy barrel nicely hidden behind an overturned truck blew up two personnel carriers in quick succession. The crew, no fools, started to fall back to another position. “Front!” Pound sang out.

“Identified!” Scullard answered. What he identified, he could hit. He could-and he did. The C.S. barrel started to burn. Pound thought some of the men inside got away-it was long range for a machine gun. That was a shame; those soldiers plainly knew what they were doing. As soon as they got a new machine, they’d cause the USA more trouble.

But not now. When an antibarrel rocket took out a green-gray barrel, foot soldiers descended from their conveyances and started hunting the Confederates nearby. The enemy troops were plainly outnumbered, but nobody seemed to have told them anything about retreating. Holding their ground till they were overrun, they died in place, and took a lot of U.S. soldiers with them.

“Those the Freedom Party Guards, sir?” Scullard asked.

“I think so,” Pound said. “Either they’ve all got a lot of mud on their butternut or they’re wearing camouflage. And they fight hard-no two ways about that.”

“We smashed ’em for now, looks like,” the gunner said.

“Yup,” Pound agreed. “And that means we ought to gun for the river fast as we can, before the Confederates bring more troops back to this side.”

He stood up in the cupola and looked around to see if he could spot any engineers. His wireless set couldn’t communicate directly with theirs, which he considered an oversight not far from criminal. But he spotted an armored bulldozer only a couple of hundred yards away. He had his driver go closer so he could shout back and forth with the man inside. The dozer driver waved and nodded.

Then it was on toward the Cumberland for his platoon and the foot soldiers with them, and blast anything that got in the way. The Confederates really didn’t have much left on this side of the river. Michael Pound cheerfully went about reducing what they did have. He wondered how they planned on fighting the war next year and the year after if they were wrecking some of their most productive land and the United States were wrecking some more.

After a bit, he decided the Confederates didn’t care about next year and the year after. If they couldn’t stop the United States now, they were much too likely to lose the war this year. He nodded. Yeah, that might be so. The more he thought about it, the better he liked it. The better he liked it, the harder he pushed his platoon. Other green-gray barrels stormed toward the Cumberland with them. And dozers and other engineering vehicles did their damnedest to keep up.

Even before he got to the river, he realized his chances of seizing a bridge intact, the way he had between Calhoun and Rumsey, were slim and none. The Confederates had blown the bridges over the Cumberland themselves, and were using it for a barrier. And if they hadn’t, the flood they turned loose by blowing the dam upstream would have swept away any surviving spans.

He had hoped the engineers would be able to bridge the river in a hurry. But the Cumberland was too wide for anything engineering vehicles could carry on their backs. It would have to be pontoons, which took longer to rig and let the enemy concentrate his fire.

But Lieutenant Pound wasn’t the only officer with a driving urge for speed. General Morrell had it, too, and had the authority to do something with it. The pontoon bridges started reaching across the river as soon as it got too dark for the Confederates on the southern bank to see what U.S. forces were up to. Morrell or someone else with a good head on his shoulders ordered an artillery barrage laid on several miles to the west. The Confederates naturally replied in kind, and fired star shells to light up the Cumberland there to discover what the men in green-gray were doing. The soldiers and engineers there weren’t doing anything much but shelling. Lulled, Featherston’s men fired back.

At a quarter to four, a captain of engineers asked Pound, “You ready to go like hell, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir!” Pound answered around a yawn. He’d been up all night.

The captain nodded. “Good. That’s the right answer. Won’t be long. Haul ass when you get the word.”

“I can do that, sir,” Pound said. And, ten minutes later, he and his platoon did. They weren’t quite the first U.S. barrels over the Cumberland, but not many were in front of them. Infantry in half-tracks crossed right behind them. By the time the sun came up, they’d carved out a solid bridgehead on the south bank.

“Gas!” somebody shouted as U.S.shells rained down on the Confederate positions south of the Cumberland. Jorge Rodriguez already had his mask on-he’d heard the gurgle gas rounds made flying through the air. He huddled in a hastily dug foxhole and prayed nothing would come down on his head.

Too much had landed on him in the past few weeks, not literally but metaphorically. Virginia had been fairly quiet. Getting transferred to the Tennessee front was like getting a bucket of ice water in the face. But getting word that his father had died in Texas was like getting thrown into ice water with no way out. The telegram gave no details, which only made things worse. Jorge had written to his mother down in Sonora, but he was still waiting for an answer.

He had little time to brood on it. That was the one good thing about getting thrown into combat fierce enough to give him a brush with death almost every day. He’d asked his company commander for compassionate leave. Captain Nelson Cash had looked at the telegram and shaken his head. “I’m mighty sorry, George,” he said, that being what most English-speakers called Jorge. “I’m mighty sorry, but maybe you noticed there was a war on?”

“Yes, sir.” Jorge hadn’t really expected anything different, but he had to try. He thought about going AWOL, thought about it and then thought again. He was a long way from Texas, an even longer way from Sonora. Someone at a train station was bound to check his papers. They were making examples of deserters these days.

Of course, what the Army and the Freedom Party were doing to deserters wasn’t a patch on what U.S. bombs and bullets might do to him. He was in his late twenties, older than a lot of the conscripts who filled out his company, old enough to know God didn’t have a carved stone somewhere that said he would live forever.

Even getting to the front hadn’t been easy. He’d had to go all the way down to Atlanta and then north again, traveling mostly by night. The Yankees had torn up and bombed the railroad lines going west from Virginia into Kentucky, and also the ones going west from Asheville, North Carolina, to Knoxville, Tennessee. They wanted to keep the Confederates from hitting them in the flank while they pushed south. By all the signs, they knew how to get what they wanted, too.

All that meant the C.S. reinforcements from Virginia reached the front a couple of days later than they would have with everything going smoothly. It meant the front was farther south than it would have been had they got there in good time. And it meant that the mission they’d been given when they left Virginia-throwing the U.S. bridgehead south of the Cumberland back over the river-was nothing but a pipe dream by the time they got there.

Jorge knew about all that only because of occasional grumbles from his superiors. He’d never been in Tennessee before. He wasn’t sure where the Cumberland was, let alone any of the towns south of it. The only thing he knew was that his outfit had to fight like hell whenever it got where it was going. In a way, such a state of almost blissful ignorance wasn’t bad for an ordinary soldier.

He got off the train somewhere not far south of Murfreesboro, and climbed into a truck for the journey up to the front. Jorge was sorry to change vehicles; he’d won more than two hundred dollars in the poker game that started back in Virginia. He was a good-tempered, easygoing fellow. A measure of how popular he was with his buddies was that nobody called him a goddamn greaser no matter how much he won.

Murfreesboro had taken a pounding. A lot of the places where Jorge was stationed in Virginia had taken a pounding, too, but they’d been at or near the front since 1941. Some of them had taken a pounding in the Great War, too, and even in the War of Secession.

Murfreesboro…Hell had opened up on Murfreesboro in the past few days. The ruins still had sharp edges. Smoke still curled up from them. The women and kids and old men who grubbed through them still looked stunned, astonished that such things could happen to them. The smell of death was very sweet, very strong. Jorge’s stomach turned over. He gulped, trying to keep his rations down.

The move east from Murfreesboro also came by night. The butternut trucks had most of their headlights covered over with masking tape. The slits that remained shed more light than cigarette coals, but not a whole lot more. The truck convoy had to go slow. Even so, Jorge rattled past one machine that had driven off the side of the road and into a shell hole.

“That driver, he’s gonna catch hell,” he said. His English had an accent different from those of the white men in the truck with him. Every so often, he used a word that wasn’t English anywhere except Sonora and Chihuahua. But the other soldiers understood him. His father spoke mostly Spanish when he went off to fight in 1916. His mother was still more at home in it than in English. But he and his brothers, like most of the younger generation, embraced the tongue the rest of the CSA used.

“Maybe he will,” someone else said, “but the guys he was drivin’, I bet they give him a medal for makin’ ’em late.”

“Wish our driver’d go off the road,” another soldier said. He didn’t sound like a man making a joke. On the contrary-he seemed painfully serious. His name was Gabriel Medwick. He was about six feet three, at least 200 pounds, blond, jut-jawed, and handsome. He could have posed for a Freedom Party recruiting poster, as a matter of fact. And he sounded like a man just this side of shitting himself with fear.

Jorge was afraid, too. Anybody who’d seen combat and wasn’t afraid had some screws loose somewhere. He hadn’t seen a whole lot, and what he had seen wasn’t too intense. The company was probably heading into something worse. But knowing that the all-Confederate boy sitting in the truck with him was more afraid than he was-or less able to hide his fear, which amounted to the same thing-helped steady him.

“Aw, fuck,” Medwick muttered when the truck stopped. It was getting near dawn; gray light had started leaking in through the rear-facing opening in the canvas canopy over the cargo area. That’s what we are-cargo, Rodriguez thought. They use us up, like rations or bullets or barrels. He wished that hadn’t occurred to him.

“Come on. Get out. We got to head on up to the front.” Sergeant Hugo Blackledge would never show up on a recruiting poster. He had hairy ears and more hair sticking out of his nose and a black five o’clock shadow that came out at noon. His eyebrows grew together above that beaky nose. His chin was barely there at all. He was little and skinny and mean. If he was afraid, he never showed it. He ran his squad with no pretense of fairness or justice. But he never sent anyone anywhere he wouldn’t go himself. And he could whip all of them, Gabriel Medwick included. He wouldn’t fight fair to do it, which only made the men more willing to follow his lead. They’d seen enough to know that fighting fair was for civilians and other fools.

“Where the hell are we, anyways?” someone asked as they scrambled out of the truck.

“Where we’re supposed to be,” Blackledge answered. “That’s all you assholes need to know.” He didn’t expect to be loved. That wasn’t his job.

Captain Cash, on the other hand, was friendly to his men. He could afford to be; he had bastards like Blackledge under him to handle the dirty work. “That town up ahead is Sparta,” he told the soldiers piling out of several trucks. “It’s still ours. We’ve got to make sure it stays ours. Any questions?”

A bird piped in a tree. All the birds up here in the north sounded strange to Jorge. Even the jays were peculiar. They acted quite a bit like the black-throated magpie-jays he knew back home, but they were only about half the size they should have been. That meant they could only screech half as loud.

“What are the Yankees throwing at us?” somebody asked after a pause.

“Everything but the outhouse,” Sergeant Blackledge answered before the captain could say anything. “If they figure out a way to dump that shit on us, they’ll use it, too.”

After that, no one seemed to want to know anything else. “Come on,” Captain Cash said into the uncomfortable silence. “Let’s go forward.”

When Jorge and his companions went into the line in Virginia, they’d replaced other soldiers who left the front for rest and refit and recuperation. Here, nobody was coming back as the replacements went forward. That couldn’t mean all the Confederates up there were dead, or the damnyankees would storm through the breach. But it probably did mean the high command couldn’t afford to take anybody out of the line, and that wasn’t good news or anything close to it.

Confederate 105s banged away at the enemy. Jorge was glad to hear them. They meant things hadn’t all gone to the devil, anyhow. The sun came up. It looked like a nice day.

Then U.S. guns started answering the 105s. Jorge knew enough to throw himself flat. He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started a foxhole. He’d long since learned how to dig without raising up more than a few inches off the ground. Pretty soon, he was in a hole, with the dirt heaped up in front of him to help block fragments.

Foxhole or not, though, he was still liable to get killed. The Yankees had more guns than his side did, and they weren’t shy about using them. That was when the gas started coming in. He hadn’t seen this kind of bombardment in Virginia. By the time he got there, the war had settled down to skirmishes, with neither side trying very hard to break through.

It wasn’t like that here. He needed no more than a few minutes to see as much. The damnyankees had already broken through-if they hadn’t driven all the way through Kentucky, they wouldn’t have been over the Cumberland and deep inside Tennessee. The Confederates were doing what they could to counterattack and throw the enemy back.

So far, everything they could do wasn’t nearly enough.

Even before the shelling stopped, fighter-bombers made it worse. Because they flew so low, they could put their bombs almost exactly where they wanted. They hit the C.S. artillery positions hard, and then came back to strafe whatever else looked interesting.

And then, from up ahead, Jorge heard a shout no foot soldier ever wanted to hear: “Barrels!”

The big, snorting monsters advanced in wedges. Jorge needed a little while to realize they weren’t all the same. The damnyankees put the largest and toughest ones in the lead. They blasted the way clear for the older barrels that came behind. Where are our barrels? he wondered. Wherever they were, they weren’t close enough to do anything about these machines.

One of the U.S. machines hit a mine and threw a track. Its machine guns and cannon went on firing even so. Jorge picked off a barrel commander standing up in the cupola with a quick burst from his automatic rifle. That barrel kept on coming, though, and sprayed machine-gun bullets all around.

“Back!” Sergeant Blackledge screamed. “We gotta get back, or we’re all dead!”

“What’s Captain Cash say?” Jorge asked.

“How can you say anything when you got your fucking head blown off?” the noncom said.

Jorge had no answer for that. The Confederates in and around Sparta, Tennessee, had no answer for the oncoming Yankees. Jorge didn’t want to get out of his foxhole, but he didn’t want to get killed where he crouched, either. He ran for a shattered house and made it. Then he ran again. He was lucky. A lot of people weren’t.

Brigadier General Clarence Potter had got used to long faces. Everybody in the War Department looked as if his favorite aunt had just walked in front of a bus. By the news leaking out of Kentucky and Tennessee, the whole Confederacy might have walked in front of a bus.

What goes around comes around, he thought unhappily. Up in Ohio, the CSA had taught the United States a lot of lessons about how to use armor and mechanized infantry and aircraft together. Who would have figured the damnyankees made such good students? Now they were giving lessons of their own.

And they had more in the way of blackboards and chalk and books than the Confederates ever did. Jake Featherston had counted on a quick, victorious war. When he didn’t get one, when he got another grapple instead…A good big man didn’t always lick a good little one, but that was sure as hell the way to bet.

If Potter wore a vinegar phiz, then, and if just about everybody he saw looked the same way-well, so what? People had earned the right to look gloomy. He took frowns as much for granted as he took the smell of smoke and corruption in the air and the sight of plywood or cardboard over almost every window. He hardly even noticed that the corners of everybody’s mouth turned down.

He hardly noticed, that is, till a young lieutenant-who wore the same hangdog expression as everybody else-escorted Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont into his office. No matter how tweedy FitzBelmont was, he looked as happy as if he’d just got engaged to an eighteen-year-old bathing beauty. Seeing his smile was like getting a surprise flashbulb in the kisser. Clarence Potter couldn’t remember the last time he’d met such unalloyed joy.

“What’s up?” he asked. “Whatever you’re drinking, I want a slug, too.”

Professor FitzBelmont had learned the ropes about security. He didn’t let out a peep till the lieutenant saluted, left, and closed the door behind himself. Only after the latch clicked did he say, “General, we are self-sustaining!”

“That’s nice,” Potter answered, deadpan. “So you’re making enough money that you don’t need a handout from the government, are you?”

“No, no, no!” FitzBelmont didn’t quite say, You damned fool, but the thought plainly hovered in his mind. Then he sent Potter a suspicious stare over the tops of his spectacles. “I believe you’re having me on.”

“Who, me?” Potter sounded as innocent as a guilty man could. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he quickly grew serious. “I’m not sure I do know what you’re talking about, so suppose you spell it out for me.”

“We have a lattice of uranium-enriched uranium, with more U-235 than you’d find in nature-and graphite that is producing more neutrons in each generation than it needs to generate in order to produce the next generation.”

“I see…I think. Does that mean it’ll go boom if you pull out all the stops or whatever you need to do?”

“Well-no,” FitzBelmont admitted. “But it is an indispensable first step.”

“Have the United States already done it?” Potter asked.

“You would know for a fact better than I, General,” Professor FitzBelmont said. Potter wished that were true. He knew the damnyankees had that establishment out in Washington State, but that was all he knew. He hadn’t been able to sneak any spies into the project-or, if he had, they hadn’t managed to get any reports out, which amounted to the same thing. U.S. security there was tight, and all the tighter after the Confederates’ bombing raid a few months before. FitzBelmont, meanwhile, went on, “While I don’t know for sure, I’d say it’s highly likely.”

That matched Potter’s opinion better than he wished it did. The United States wouldn’t be committing the kind of resources they were if they didn’t think they had a winner. Were they spending more than the Confederacy was? They hid the budget as best they could (so did his own government), but he thought they were. “So they’re still ahead of us?” he said.

“Again, I can’t prove it. Again, if I were a gambling man, I’d bet that way,” FitzBelmont said.

“We’re all gambling men right now, Professor,” Potter said. “We’re gambling that you and your people can get this done before the damnyankees do-and before they rip our guts out just in the ordinary way of making war.”

“Rip our…?” Henderson FitzBelmont frowned. “Do I take it that the true state of affairs in Kentucky and Tennessee is less salubrious than the press and the wireless make it out to be?”

“Less…salubrious. That’s one way to put it.” Abstractly, Potter admired the professor’s choice of words. The damnyankees were tearing the Confederacy a new asshole out West, and nobody seemed able to slow them down much, let alone stop them. “We are in trouble over there. They’re aiming at Chattanooga right now. They haven’t got there, but that’s where they’re heading.”

“Oh, my,” Professor FitzBelmont said. “That’s…a long way from the Ohio River.”

“Tell me about it,” Clarence Potter said. He’d almost got sent west a couple of times himself, not as an Intelligence officer but as a combat soldier. The War Department was throwing every experienced officer into the fight. Only Jake Featherston’s loud insistence that he needed a spymaster had kept Potter in Richmond this long. Even Featherston’s insistence might not keep him here forever.

“Unfortunate,” FitzBelmont murmured. “Um…You are aware that my team’s experiments require large amounts of electricity?”

“Yes,” Potter said. “And so?”

“The supply has been erratic lately, erratic enough to force delays,” FitzBelmont said. “I have no idea who can do anything about that, but I’d appreciate it if someone would. If you are the person to ask, I hope you’ll pass the word to the proper authorities.”

Clarence Potter didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. He ended up laughing, because he didn’t want Henderson FitzBelmont to see him cry. “Have you been paying attention to the war news, Professor? Any attention at all?”

“I know it’s not good,” FitzBelmont said. “We were just talking about that. But what does it have to do with the electricity supply?”

He was good at what he did. There wasn’t a better nuclear physicist in the CSA. Potter knew that. He’d had every one of the small band of physicists investigated. But outside his specialized field, Henderson V. FitzBelmont lived up to almost every cliche about narrowly specialized professors. As gently as he could, Potter said, “You know we’ve lost a lot of dams on the Cumberland and the Tennessee? The Yankees blew some, and we blew others to try to slow them down.” And it didn’t work well enough, dammit, he added, but only to himself.

“Well, yes, certainly, but…” Much more slowly than it should have, a light went on in FitzBelmont’s eyes. “You’re telling me those dams produced some of the electricity I use.”

“Not just what you use, Professor, and you aren’t the only one feeling the pinch,” Potter said. “Some of our factories have had to cut production, and we just can’t afford that.”

“If we don’t have adequate power, heaven only knows how we can go forward,” FitzBelmont said. “This isn’t something we can do with steam engines and kerosene lamps.”

“I understand that. But you need to understand you’re not the only one with a problem,” Potter said.

How much did that matter? Would the Confederacy let factories work more slowly to make sure the uranium-bomb project stayed on track? Without the weapons the factories made, how were the Confederate States supposed to hold back the latest U.S. thrust? The other side of that coin was, could the Confederates hold back the latest U.S. thrust even with all those factories going flat-out?

If the answer to that was no…If the answer to that is no, what the devil were we doing getting into this war in the first place? Potter wondered. Jake Featherston had counted on his quick knockout. The difference between what you counted on and what you got explained why so many people had unhappy marriages.

But if the Confederate States had to count on the uranium bomb for any hope of victory, and if there was no guarantee they would ever get it built, and if there was a more than decent chance the United States would beat them to the punch…If all that was true, the Confederacy was in a hell of a lot of trouble.

“Do you want to see the President, Professor?” Potter asked. “I’m sure he’d be glad to have this news straight from the horse’s mouth.” Well, straight from some part of the horse, anyhow.

Henderson FitzBelmont shook his head. “Thank you, but that’s all right. You can deliver it. I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all. President Featherston, uh, intimidates me.”

“President Featherston intimidates a lot of people,” Potter said. That was true. Featherston intimidated him, and he was a lot harder to spook than any tweedy professor ever born. In fairness, though, he felt he had to go on, “I don’t think he would try to be intimidating after news like this. I think he’d be much more likely to pull out a bottle and get drunk with you.”

By the look FitzBelmont gave him, that was intimidating, too. How many years had it been since he went out and got drunk? Had he ever done anything like that? With most people, Potter would have taken the idea for granted. He didn’t with the professor.

“Do I need to know anything else?” he asked. “You’ve got a self-sustaining reaction, and you need all the electricity you can steal. Is that it?”

“That is the, ah, nucleus, yes.” Professor FitzBelmont smiled at his own joke.

So did Clarence Potter, in a dutiful way. As quickly as he could, he eased the professor out of his office. Then he called the President of the CSA-this couldn’t wait. “Featherston here.” That harsh, furious voice was familiar to everyone in the CSA, and doubly so to Potter, who’d heard it in person long before most Confederate citizens started hearing it on the wireless.

The line between his own office and the President’s bunker was supposed to be secure. He picked his words with care all the same: “I just had a visit from the fellow at the university.”

“Did you, now?” Jake Featherston said with sudden sharp interest. “And what did he have to say?”

“He’s jumped through one hoop,” Potter answered. “I’ll send you the details as soon as I can. But we really are moving forward.”

“Hot damn,” Featherston said. “The fucking Yankees are moving forward, too. I swear to God, Potter, sometimes I wonder if this country deserves to win the war. If we let those nigger-loving mongrels kick the crap out of us, we aren’t the kind of people I reckoned we were.”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir,” Potter said, in lieu of something like, I see. It’s not your fault we’re losing the war. It’s God’s fault. Potter didn’t think that was true. But even if it were, it didn’t help, because what could a mere mortal do about God? “I do know our friend thinks he can get this done.”

“Does he think he can get it done in time?”

Hearing that question made Potter feel better. It showed the President still had a feel for the essential. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. It depends on how far along the United States are with their own project.”

“Screw the United States,” the President said. “Question is, can we keep our heads above water any which way till the professors come through?” That showed a feel for the essential, too. All things considered, Clarence Potter wished it didn’t.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull had been with a retreating army. Now he served with an advancing one. From things he’d heard, most people’s morale was sky high these days. His wasn’t. At an aid station, you saw just as much misery going forward as you did going back. The only difference was, he didn’t suppose the Confederates were so likely to overrun the tent while he was operating.

“It doesn’t seem like enough,” he said, looking up from a resection of a kid’s ripped-up lower intestine.

Granville McDougald looked at him over his surgical mask. “Yeah, well, you take what you can get, Doc,” the veteran noncom said. “Only thing worse than fighting a war and winning is fighting a war and losing.”

“Is that really worse?” O’Doull put in another suture, and another, and another. Sometimes he felt more like a sewing machine than anything else. “This poor bastard’s going to be left with a semicolon instead of a colon any which way.”

“A semi-?” McDougald sent him a reproachful stare. “That’s awful, Doc. Period.”

Did he really say awful? Or was it offal? He was right either way. But once you started making puns, you also started hearing them whether they were there or not. And wasn’t that one short step from hearing the little voices that weren’t there?

“Is it better to get shot in a war your side wins than in one where you lose?” O’Doull persisted.

“Better not to get shot at all,” McDougald said, a great and obvious truth to which too many people who went down in history as statesmen were blind. But he went on, “If you have to get shot, better to do it so not so many people on your side will get shot after you. Do you really want to see Featherston’s fuckers opening up with machine guns whenever they feel like target practice all over the USA?”

“Well, no,” O’Doull admitted. He dusted the wounded soldier’s entrails with sulfa powder. Maybe the kid would escape the wound infection that surely would have killed him in any earlier war. Maybe. O’Doull started closing. If the soldier did live, he would have an amazing scar. “Still and all, though, Granny, I wonder if I should have come back from Quebec.”

“So you were thinking about French leave, were you?” McDougald said, and O’Doull winced. Undeterred, McDougald went on, “Can’t say as I blame you.”

“I was tempted,” O’Doull admitted. “I don’t think Quebec would have let the USA extradite me. But I put the uniform on, and I can’t very well take it off again till things are done.” Nicole had a different opinion, but he didn’t mention that.

“Hey, Doc!” That shout from outside the aid tent warned another casualty was coming in. This time, though, Eddie added, “Can you work on a civilian?”

The tent wasn’t far south of Sparta, Tennessee. Not all the Confederate civilians had fled fast enough. O’Doull had already patched up several. Chances were they wouldn’t be grateful, but he figured C.S. surgeons had done the same up in Ohio for equally ungrateful U.S. citizens. So he answered, “Sure, Eddie, bring him in. I’ll do what I can for the miserable bastard.” He paused and turned to McDougald. “Or do you want me to pass gas while you do the honors?”

“Sure. Why not? Thanks, Doc,” McDougald answered.

But when Eddie and the other corpsmen brought in the casualty, it turned out not to be a him but a her. She was about thirty, groaning the way anyone else with a blood-soaked bandage on the belly would have. “Aw, shit,” O’Doull said softly. Most of the time, he didn’t get reminded that whole countries were at war, not just armies. When he did, it was like a slap in the face.

“You take the case, Doc,” Granny McDougald said. “All I know about female plumbing stops about nine inches deep.”

“God, what a braggart you are,” O’Doull said. Eddie snorted. The wounded woman, fortunately, was too far gone to pay any attention to the byplay. “Get her up on the table,” O’Doull told the corpsmen. “I’ll do what I can for her.”

She feebly tried to fight when McDougald put the ether cone over her mouth and nose. How many soldiers had done the same thing? More than O’Doull could count. He and Eddie held her hands till she went limp.

“Get a plasma line into her,” O’Doull said. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Already doing it,” McDougald said, and he was. “I’ll put a cuff on her, too, so we can see what we’ve got.” With unhurried speed, he also did that. “Pressure is…100 over 70-a little low, but not too bad. Pulse is…85. A little thready, maybe, but I think she’s got a chance.”

“Let’s see what’s in there.” O’Doull opened her up-actually, he extended the wound she already had. “Shrapnel, sure as hell,” he said, and then, “I’m going to have to do a hysterectomy.”

“Your case, all right,” McDougald said. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“I haven’t done all that many myself,” O’Doull said. He reached for a scalpel, and then, after he felt the womb, for forceps. “Here’s what did it, all right.” He held up a jagged piece of metal about the size of a half-dollar. “Must have been nearly spent, or it would’ve torn her up worse than this.”

“Happy day. I’m sure she’s real glad of that,” McDougald said.

“Yeah, I know,” O’Doull agreed. “She’s got a tear in her bladder, too, but I can fix it. Guts don’t seem bad. With any luck at all, she’ll make it.”

“That’d be good,” McDougald said. “She’s harmless now. She can’t have any kids to shoot at U.S. soldiers when we try this again in 1971.”

“Christ!” O’Doull’s hand almost jerked. “There’s a cheery thought.”

“It’ll happen unless we really knock ’em flat and sit on ’em,” McDougald said. “You hope we will, but what are the odds?”

“Beats me,” O’Doull said. “But we’d have to be crazy to give them a third chance to cream our corn for us.”

“Yeah? And your point is…?”

O’Doull winced again, but went on suturing. “What are we supposed to do? We can’t occupy the whole CSA. They’ll shoot at us from behind trees and throw Featherston Fizzes at us forever if we try. But how do we hold ’em down without occupying them?”

“Kill ’em all,” McDougald said. “Resettle the place from the USA.”

“Congratulations,” O’Doull told him. “You get an A in Jake Featherston lessons.”

“Them’s fightin’ words,” McDougald said. “Put up your dukes.”

“Later,” O’Doull said. “Let me finish sewing this gal up first.”

“This is a funny business, isn’t it?” McDougald said. “She’s not bad-looking, and there are you messing with her private parts, but she’s not a broad or anything. She’s just a patient.”

“Yeah, that crossed my mind, too.” O’Doull paused for a moment to make sure a suture was good and tight. “Once upon a time, between the wars, I went to a medical conference in Montreal, and I got to talking with this hotshot gynecologist. I asked him if he ever got tired of looking at pussy all day. He kind of rolled his eyes and said, ‘Oh, Jesus, do I ever!’”

The medic laughed. “Well, all right. I guess I believe that. Of course, a lot of what he’s looking at belongs to little old ladies. The young, healthy, pretty gals mostly don’t bother coming to him.”

“I wasn’t finished yet.” O’Doull put in another stitch, then went on, “A couple of years later, this guy’s wife divorced him. Not easy to do in Quebec-it’s a Catholic country. She had to prove infidelity, and she did-with three different patients of his. So not all the young, pretty ones stayed away.”

That made Granville McDougald laugh some more. “See, I know what happened. You asked the wrong question. Maybe he got tired of looking, but do you ever get tired of touching?”

“Good point.” O’Doull looked down at the wounded woman. “I do believe she’ll pull through. Haven’t had to try that particular surgery for quite a while.”

“You looked like you knew what you were doing, whether you really did or not,” McDougald said.

“Thanks a lot, Granny. You really know how to make a guy feel good about himself.” As O’Doull started closing the outer wound and the incision that had widened it, a new thought struck him. “Where are we going to put her? Can’t just dump her with the wounded POWs, you know.”

“No, that wouldn’t work,” McDougald agreed. “Where’s the closest civilian hospital?”

“Beats me. Somewhere north of us-that’s all I can tell you. Oh, there are bound to be some farther south, too, but passing her through the lines won’t be easy. And if we keep moving forward, we’re liable to blow wherever she’s staying to hell and gone.”

“Be a shame to waste your hard work,” McDougald said. “Tell you what we ought to do-we ought to just send her back to the division hospital and let them figure out what to do with her. They’ve got more room for her and more people to deal with her than we do, anyway.”

O’Doull had dealt with the military bureaucracy long enough to know a perfect solution when he heard one. “We’ll do that, all right,” he said. “Fixing her up was my worry. Let the guys in back of the line figure out where she’s supposed to go.”

She went off to the rear in an ambulance with the wounded soldier on whom O’Doull had operated not long before. “They’ll probably be pissed off,” McDougald remarked.

“Too damn bad,” O’Doull answered. They both stood outside the tent, watching the ambulance head off toward Sparta. “What’s the worst they can do? Write me a reprimand, right? Like I give a shit.”

“There you go, Doc,” McDougald said. “That’s one nice thing about coming in for the duration-you don’t care what the brass hats who run things think of you. Must be nice.” He sighed wistfully.

“You’re in about the same place, aren’t you?” O’Doull pulled out a captured pack of Raleighs. “They probably won’t bump you up to lieutenant, and you’d really have to screw up big for them to take your stripes away. You’re free.” He lit a cigarette and smiled as he inhaled.

“Let me have one of those, would you?…Thanks.” McDougald leaned close for a light, then took a deep drag of his own. “You’re right and you’re wrong, Doc. Yeah, I can tell ’em where to head in, I guess. But I don’t really want to most of the time, ’cause this is my outfit. I’ll be here till they don’t want me any more. You’re freer than that.”

“I suppose.” One of O’Doull’s hands touched the oak leaf on his other shoulder. He didn’t feel very free. “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk. That’s what the fellow said when they tarred and feathered him and rode him out of town on a rail, isn’t it?”

“You know who told that joke the first time?” McDougald asked, and O’Doull had to shake his head. “Abraham Lincoln, that’s who.”

“Did he?” O’Doull decided he wouldn’t tell it again. Eighty years ago, the things Lincoln did-and the things he didn’t do-made sure the USA and the CSA would go at each other till the end of time. Few Presidents were better remembered: Washington and Jefferson, perhaps (their memories somewhat tarnished in the USA because they were Virginians), and undoubtedly Teddy Roosevelt. But only James G. Blaine came close to Lincoln as a failure, and Blaine wouldn’t have had the chance to botch the Second Mexican War if Lincoln hadn’t botched the War of Secession. Yes, that was one joke Leonard O’Doull would forget.

Jefferson Pinkard eyed the letter in front of him with several different kinds of pained incomprehension. He understood that it was from Magdalena Rodriguez down in Sonora. But he didn’t understand much that was in it because, although she tried to write English, what they thought of as English in Sonora wasn’t the same as it was in the rest of the CSA. Still, he knew what she had to be asking: why the devil did her husband go and shoot himself?

“I wish to Christ I knew,” Pinkard muttered. Every once in a while, a guard couldn’t stand what he was doing, and he ate his gun or got rid of himself some other way. Pinkard knew that-nobody knew it better. If it weren’t true, he wouldn’t be married to Chick Blades’ widow. But that Hip Rodriguez should blow off the top of his head…“Goddammit, he fucking hated niggers!”

Still muttering, Jeff wondered if he ought to call in another guard from Sonora or Chihuahua to get an exact translation. After a few seconds, he shook his head. Whatever was in the letter would be all through the guard barracks in nothing flat if he did. He shook his head again. He didn’t want that to happen. Hipolito Rodriguez was a good man. He didn’t deserve to get his name dragged through the mud any more than it had to be. And that wasn’t Jeff’s only reason…

“He was a friend, dammit,” Jeff said. And that scared him a couple of different ways. Anything that happened to Hip might happen to him, too. Ever since Rodriguez shot himself, the weight of the ceremonial.45 on Jeff’s hip seemed larger and more ominous than it ever had before. And when he picked up a submachine gun to walk through Camp Determination, he often shivered. What was Hip thinking when he turned his the wrong way?

And Jeff hadn’t realized how much having a real friend here mattered till he suddenly didn’t any more. He could talk about stuff with Hip without fearing that Ferd Koenig or Jake Featherston would find out what he said. He could use his war buddy as a back channel to the guards-and they could use Rodriguez as a back channel to him, too. It worked well for everybody.

Except now it didn’t. And under all that lay the hole one friend’s death left in the life of another who survived. Hip and Jeff went through desperate and deadly times together. No one else remembered them-no one else Jeff knew, which was all that mattered. When he and Hip talked, they both understood the mud and the blood and the stinks and the fear and the occasional flashes of crazy fun that lit up the horror and the wild drunken furloughs they’d got to take too seldom. Now all that stuff was locked inside Jefferson Pinkard’s head. He could explain it to other people, but that was the point. He never needed to explain it to Hip. Hip knew.

The telephone rang. Pinkard jerked in his swivel chair. “Son of a bitch!” he burst out. His hand shook as he reached for the telephone. I’m jumpy as a goddamn cat, he thought. Can’t let anybody see that, or I’m in big trouble. “Pinkard here.” His voice came out as a satisfactory growl. “What’s up?”

“Sir, we’ve got a new shipment coming in.” The guard officer at the other end of the line sounded both pleased and more than a little astonished. “Should be here in an hour or two.”

“Good God!” Pinkard said. “Why the hell didn’t somebody tell us sooner?”

“Only thing I can think of, sir, is that they didn’t want the damnyankees listening in,” the officer replied.

Jeff grunted-that did make some sense. “Could be,” he said. “And maybe they’ll let up on this place for a while anyway. They’ve had their damn propaganda offensive. It’s not like they really give a rat’s ass about niggers. I mean, who does, for Christ’s sake?”

“Not me, sir,” the youngster on the other end of the line replied with great conviction.

“Didn’t reckon you would,” Pinkard said. “Let everybody know what’s what. We want to give these coons a nice, juicy Camp Determination hello-and then a nice, juicy good-bye, too.”

If he had to, he aimed to raise hell to make sure the guards were ready. Because of the way U.S. airplanes had pummeled the railroads coming west to Snyder and the camp, things had been painfully slow lately. It would have been easy for the men in gray uniforms to slack off. But they didn’t, which made Pinkard proud. He could tell when the call reached the barracks. Guards exploded out, almost as if they were in a comedy film.

But it wouldn’t be funny when that train got here. Pinkard was at the railroad spur watching when it pulled into the camp. He didn’t say anything. He would if he had to, but the men in charge of the welcoming committee-he chuckled when he thought of it that way-deserved the chance to handle things themselves till they showed they couldn’t.

Engine puffing, brakes squealing, the train stopped right where it was supposed to. The engineer was on the ball, then. That was good, because he didn’t fall under Jeff’s command. Doors opened. The familiar rank stench that rolled out of the jam-packed cars was even richer and riper than usual: the weather was warming up.

“Out!” guards screamed, gesturing with their submachine guns. “Move, you lousy, stinking coons! Move!”

“Men to the left!” officers added. “Men to the left, women and brats to the right!” One of them kicked a dazed black man, who fell with a groan. “Get up!” the officer roared. “Get up, you dumb fucking prick! You too goddamn stupid to know which is your left and which is your right?”

The Negro probably was. How many days had he been stuck in that jam-packed car, with nowhere to turn around, nowhere to sit down, nowhere to ease himself, nothing to eat, nothing to drink? How many bodies would the guards and the Negro trusties find when they went through the train? There were always a good many. Because summer was here, there would probably be more than there had been on runs earlier in the year.

A submachine gun stuttered out a quick burst. Jefferson Pinkard nodded to himself. Every trainload, a few Negroes thought they could beat the odds by playing possum. Every trainload, they found out they were wrong.

“No, you stupid fuck, you can’t carry your suitcase into the camp!” Every time, some Negroes managed to bring things along. What was confiscated was supposed to go straight into the war effort. Some of it did. The guards took what they wanted first, though. That was one of the perquisites that went with this job.

Many of them barely able to stay on their feet, the black men shambled through the gate and into the southern half of the camp. The women and little children went into the northern half. Every time, men and women waved to one another and promised they would be together again soon. Yeah, you will, all right-in hell, Jeff thought.

He sighed. Sure as hell, the senior female guard officer would come around and complain that her girls didn’t get a chance to help with the unloading. She’d done that at least half a dozen times. She wanted them to get what she thought was their fair share of the loot.

“Too damn bad,” Pinkard muttered. In case something out here went wrong, he didn’t want a bunch of flabbling women trying to fix it, even (or maybe especially) if they carried submachine guns, too. They were all right with barbed wire to back them up. They even had advantages over men. Fewer of them had affairs with Negro women. But when they did, they really fell in love with their colored partners. That happened much less often with the men.

By now, the female guards knew how to get the colored women and children into the asphyxiating trucks and the bathhouse on that side of the camp without panicking them. The ones who couldn’t manage that were gone. Jeff had had to be firm about that; the guards in skirts had powerful backers in Richmond. But nobody was more powerful than Ferd Koenig and Jake Featherston, and he’d got his way.

Camp Determination got another shipment of Negroes the next day, and two more the day after that. It seemed like old times again. Barracks started filling up as prisoners came in faster than the camp could process them. That was how Jeff thought of it, and that was how it went down on every report. It seemed so much more…sanitary than talking about killing.

There was some trouble with the prisoners from the last trainload on the second day. As they lined up to “get deloused and bathed,” a man shouted, “You ain’t gwine give us no baths! You gwine kill us all!”

He wasn’t wrong, either in general or in particular. Two guards emptied their submachine guns at him. By the time they got done, he had more holes than a colander. They hit other prisoners, too-only fool luck kept them from hitting other guards. Nobody could stay smooth and polite after that. The only way the guards got the Negroes into the bathhouse was by threatening to kill them all on the spot if they didn’t get moving.

“An ugly business,” Jeff said when he got to the bottom of it. “I hope that damn troublemaking nigger cooks in hell forever. All his fault.”

“Yes, sir,” agreed the guard officer in charge of those prisoners. “We did everything we could.”

“We got the job done-that’s what counts most,” Pinkard said. “Maybe things’ll slow down again so all the spooks who saw this get processed. Then they won’t have the chance to say anything to anybody else. That’s what really matters.”

“Yes, sir,” the guard said.

“We’ll have endless trouble if we don’t keep it smooth. I mean endless,” Jeff went on. “Most of the guards I’ve got here, they didn’t serve at a place like Camp Dependable. They don’t know what it’s like when you have to reduce populations by hand.” He meant marching Negroes out into the swamp and shooting them. Saying what he said was easier on the spirit. “They don’t know what it’s like to have the niggers knowing their population’s gonna get reduced, neither. It’s like sitting on a bomb with the fuse primed, that’s what. You hear me?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” the guard officer said once more. He was getting more than he bargained for, more than he wanted, but he couldn’t do a thing about it.

And Jefferson Pinkard still wasn’t through. “If any little thing goes wrong then, the fuse catches and the bomb goes up. And then it blows your fuckin’ ass off. You aim to let that happen? We gonna let that happen?”

“No, sir!” Now the guard got to say something else. It was the right answer, too.

“All right, then,” Jeff growled. “Get the hell out of here, and we’ll see if we can pick up the processing. More niggers we do handle before we get the next trainload in, easier things’ll be from then on out.”

Instead of agreeing this time-or even disagreeing-the guard got the hell out of there, as Jeff had said. Pinkard nodded to himself. Telling other people what to do was an awful lot better than getting told. Where he was now, the only people who could tell him what to do were the Attorney General of the CSA and the President. No wonder I don’t like getting calls from Richmond, he thought.

Then he laughed, because somebody else could tell him what to do: his wife. He laughed again. That was true of any ordinary family man, and what else was he? “Got a new young one on the way,” he said wonderingly. He hadn’t expected that, but he liked it pretty well, even if Edith did have morning sickness all day long. He looked out over the camp and nodded. “I’m doing this for him, by God.”