The Grapple

XII

Sergeant Armstrong Grimes looked at Winnipeg from the prairie due south of the city. As usual, smoke shrouded the view. Bombers the Confederates would have hacked out of the sky with ease were more than good enough to lower the boom on enemies who didn’t have fighters or antiaircraft guns. That was as true in Canada as it had been in Utah.

How much good the endless bombing would do…“It’s gonna be craters like on the moon,” Armstrong said, pausing to light a cigarette.

Not far from him, Yossel Reisen was doing the same thing. He said something even worse: “It’s gonna be craters like Salt Lake City.”

“Fuck,” Armstrong muttered, not because Yossel was wrong but because he was right. Every pile of bricks in Salt Lake hid a rifleman or a machine gun. If it worked the same way here…If it worked the same way here, the regiment would take a hell of a lot of casualties.

A harsh chatter rang out in the distance. Armstrong and Yossel looked at each other in dismay. “It’s one of those goddamn machine-gun cunts,” Yossel said, and Armstrong nodded. They hadn’t been in Canada long, but soldiers’ language didn’t need long to hit bottom. Machine-gun pickup went through machine-gun whore on the way down.

An antibarrel cannon boomed. The Canucks on the pickup truck went right on shooting back. Pickups were a lot faster than barrels. On flat ground, they were a lot more mobile, too. And they made much smaller targets. The antibarrel cannon fired again-and missed again.

“Put your spectacles on the next time, dears,” Armstrong said in a disgusted falsetto. Yossel snickered.

The antibarrel cannon boomed one more time. A couple of seconds later, there was a different boom, and a fireball to go with it. “They listened to you!” Yossel exclaimed.

“Yeah, well, that makes once,” Armstrong said.

An officer blew a whistle. Soldiers trotted forward. Armstrong and Yossel veered apart from each other. They both dodged like broken-field runners, and bent as low as they could. They didn’t want to make themselves easy to shoot.

Every time Armstrong saw a motorcar, he shied away from it. The Canadians used auto bombs, as the Mormons had. They’d added a new wrinkle, too: wireless-controlled auto bombs. They loaded a motorcar with explosives, put it where they pleased, and blew it up from a mile away-from farther than that, for all Armstrong knew-at the touch of a button when they saw enough U.S. soldiers near it to make the detonation worthwhile.

Sooner or later, explosives men-most of them borrowed from bomber squadrons-would go over the motorcars one by one to defang the machines that did carry explosives. That was dangerous, thankless work. The Canadians had booby-trapped some of their auto bombs to go off when somebody tried to pull their teeth.

“One thing,” Armstrong said when he and Yossel happened to dodge together again. The fire from up ahead wasn’t bad-he’d known plenty worse. The Canucks didn’t have many defenders in the outermost suburbs of Winnipeg, anyhow.

“What’s that?” Yossel asked.

“If an auto bomb blows up while you’re trying to defuse it, you’ll never know what hit you,” Armstrong said.

A bullet kicked up dirt between the two men. They both flinched. “Yeah, you got something there,” Yossel said. Each of them had seen-and listened to-men die knowing exactly what had hit them, and in torment till death released them. Armstrong had never killed a man to put him out of his misery, but he knew people who had. He knew he would, if he ever found himself in a spot like that. He hoped somebody would do it for him, if he ever found himself in a spot like that.

Which was not the sort of thing he wanted to be thinking when he got shot.

One second, he was loping along, happy as a clam (how happy were clams, anyway?). The next, his left leg went out from under him, and he fell on his face in the dirt. He stared in stupid wonder at the hole in his trouser leg, and at the spreading red stain around it.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said, more in annoyance than anything else. I stay lucky for two years, and then this shit happens, he thought.

Then the pain reached his brain, and he howled like a wolf and clutched at himself. He knew what had hit him, all right, and wished to God he didn’t. He scrabbled for the pouch that held his wound dressing, the sulfa powder he was supposed to dust on the wound before he used the bandage, and the morphine syrette that might build a wall between him and the fire in his leg.

“Sergeant’s down!” somebody yelled.

“Corpsman!” Two or three soldiers shouted the same thing.

Armstrong detached the bayonet from the muzzle of his Springfield and used it to cut away his trouser leg so he could give himself first aid. He felt sick and woozy. He also bit his lip against the pain. The wound hadn’t hurt for the first few seconds after he got it, but it sure as hell did now.

My old man got hit just about like this, he thought as he sprinkled sulfa powder into the hole in his calf. He’d never had a whole lot in common with his father. This wasn’t the way he wanted to start. Merle Grimes still used a cane to take some of the weight off his bad leg. Armstrong hoped that wouldn’t happen to him.

He slapped on the bandage. Then he yanked the top off the syrette, stuck himself, and pushed down on the plunger. He felt more squeamish about that than he had about the bandage, or even the wound. He was hurting himself on purpose. He knew he would feel better soon, but knowing didn’t make a whole lot of difference.

Once he’d done what he could for himself, he looked around for cover. He didn’t see anything close by. He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging. It wouldn’t be much of a hole, no doubt, but anything was better than nothing. He piled the dirt from the scrape in front of him. Enough of it might stop a bullet, or at least slow one down.

He’d just got up a halfway decent dirt rampart when medics crouched beside him. “Here you go, Sergeant,” one of them said. “Can you slide onto the stretcher?”

“Sure.” Armstrong was amazed at how chipper he sounded. He didn’t care about anything. The morphine had taken hold while he was digging. He didn’t slide so much as roll onto the stretcher.

Another medic looked at his wound. The man with the Red Cross armbands and smock and helmet markings poked at it, too, which hurt in spite of the shot. “He did a pretty good job patching himself up,” he reported. “I don’t think the bones are broken. Looks like a hometowner to me.” He gave Armstrong an injection, too, before the wounded man could tell him not to bother.

“Where you from, Sergeant?” asked one of the corpsmen at Armstrong’s head.

“Uh, Washington. D.C., I mean,” Armstrong answered vaguely. That second shot was kicking like a mule. He felt as if he were floating away from himself.

The medic didn’t seem to see anything out of the ordinary in the way he talked. The man laughed. “If that’s your home town, you’re safer staying away. Damn Confederates have worked it over pretty good, I hear.”

“Folks are all right, as far as I know,” Armstrong said. Then the corpsmen picked up the stretcher and carried it away. Armstrong had felt as if he were floating before. Now he floated and bounced.

Red Cross flags flying around the aid station and Red Crosses painted on the tents themselves told the Canucks not to shoot this way-or gave them targets, depending. One of the medics let out a yell: “Doc! Hey, Doc! We got a casualty!”

That’s what I am, all right. With two shots of morphine in him, the idea didn’t bother Armstrong a bit. “Bring him in!” somebody yelled from the other side of the canvas. In Armstrong went. He smelled ether and other chemicals he couldn’t name-and blood, enough blood for a butcher’s shop. “Where are you hit, soldier?” a bespectacled man asked from behind a surgical mask.

“Leg,” Armstrong answered.

The corpsmen slid him off the stretcher and onto the operating table. The doctor peeled off the bandage he’d put on and studied the wound. “You’re lucky,” he said after perhaps half a minute.

“My ass.” Even doped to the gills, Armstrong knew bullshit when he heard it. “If I was lucky, the fucker would’ve missed me.”

“He’s got you there, Doc,” one of the medics said, laughing.

“Oh, shut up, Rocky,” the surgeon replied without rancor. He turned back to Armstrong. “I’m going to give you a shot of novocaine to numb you up. Then I’ll clean that out. It should heal fine. You may not be as lucky as you like, but you’ll do all right.”

He wasn’t especially gentle, and he didn’t wait for the novocaine to take full effect before he started working with a probe and forceps and a scalpel. Armstrong yipped a couple of times. Then he did more than yip. “Christ on a crutch, Doc, take it easy!” he said.

“Sorry about that.” The surgeon didn’t sound very sorry. He didn’t take it easy, but went on, “No offense, but I want to get you taken care of in a hurry so I can deal with a bad wound if one comes in.”

“Thanks a lot,” Armstrong said. “Easy for you to talk like that-it ain’t your goddamn leg.”

“Well, no,” the medico said. “But it’s not an amputation, either, or a sucking chest, or a belly wound, or a bullet in the head. You’ll be back on duty in six weeks or so. In the meantime, you get to take it easy while you heal. Could be worse.” As he spoke, he did some more snipping. Armstrong yelped again.

After what seemed like forever and was probably about ten minutes, the surgeon gave him a shot. “What’s that?” Armstrong asked suspiciously.

“Tetanus-lockjaw,” the man answered. He eyed Armstrong over his mask. “Locking your jaws might be an improvement, all things considered.”

“Funny, Doc. Har-de-har-har. I’m laughing my ass off, you know what I mean?”

“Get him out of here,” the surgeon told the corpsmen. “Some other poor bastard’ll come along pretty damn quick.”

They carried Armstrong over to a tent next to the aid station and put him on a cot. “Ambulance’ll be along in a while,” one of them said.

“Happy day,” he answered. They were shaking their heads when they left the tent. He couldn’t have cared less.

The tent held a dozen cots. Counting his, five of them were occupied. None of the other wounded men was in any shape to talk. One of them had bloody bandages around his head. One had lost an arm. Two had torso wounds. Three, including the man who’d been shot in the head, were deeply unconscious. The other one moaned from time to time, but didn’t come out with any real words.

Looking at them, listening to them, Armstrong reluctantly decided the smartass surgeon had a point. If he had to get wounded, he could have done a lot worse than catching a hometowner. Despite the morphine and novocaine, his leg barked again. He muttered under his breath. Then he brightened-a little, anyhow. His old man had always thought he wasn’t quite good enough, that he never did enough. If his father tried saying that now, Armstrong promised himself he’d knock his goddamn block off.

Lulu looked into Jake Featherston’s office. “General Forrest is here to see you, Mr. President,” she said.

“Send him in, then,” Jake growled. His secretary nodded and ducked out to bring back the chief of the Confederate General Staff.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked pale and pasty: the look of a man who spent most of his time underground and didn’t see the sun very often. Featherston looked the same way, but he hardly noticed it-he saw himself all the time. Forrest nodded to him. “Mr. President,” he said.

“Hello, General.” Jake leaned forward across the desk. “Are we ready to hit back at those damnyankee sons of bitches?”

“General Patton thinks so, sir, and he’s the man on the spot,” Forrest answered.

“He’s the man on the spot, all right,” Jake Featherston said. His eyes went to the map on the wall of his office. The Confederates had been gathering men and materiel east of the Appalachians for weeks, aiming to strike at the U.S. flank. If everything went the way it was supposed to, they could cut off the Yankees in Tennessee and bundle the ones in Kentucky back to the Ohio. That would put the war on even terms again. But if things didn’t go the way he wanted them to…“We can’t afford to fuck this up.”

“Yes, sir,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said stolidly.

Jake swore under his breath. He’d never thought it would come to this when he ordered his armies into motion against the USA. The Yankees were the ones who were supposed to be fighting for their lives, not his side.

He swore again, on a different note, a moment later. He’d already survived two assassination tries. If the war kept going down the toilet, he knew damn well he’d have to worry about another one. Even a Vice President as pliable as Don Partridge might start getting ideas. So might Clarence Potter-as if he didn’t have them already. But he might decide to do something about them, the cold-blooded son of a bitch. Nathan Bedford Forrest III might get some of his own, too.

“Is security tight?” Jake asked.

“Tight as we know how to make it,” Forest answered.

“It better be. It better be tight as a fifty-dollar whore’s twat,” Jake said, and the chief of the General Staff let out a startled laugh. Featherston went on, “If the damnyankees figure out what we’re up to before we get rolling, they can give us all kinds of grief, right?”

“You’d better believe it, sir. If they’ve got a gopher planted somewhere between here and General Patton’s headquarters, that’s a problem,” Forrest replied. “And if he can pass on whatever he knows, I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jake said impatiently. “What are the odds?”

“Mr. President, I just don’t know.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III spread his hands. “We still have gophers in the USA and with U.S. forces. The Yankees are bound to be doing the same thing to us. Too goddamn hard for one side to root out all the spies from the other. We just sound too much alike. Whether they’ve got somebody in the right place, whether the son of a bitch can pass on what he picks up, if he picks up anything…We’ll have to find out. I hope to God we don’t find out the hard way, but I can’t be sure.”

Most men in Forrest’s place would have told Jake Featherston what they thought he wanted to hear: that everything was fine, that of course the United States had no chance of finding out what was going on. Reluctantly, Featherston respected the younger man’s honesty. If you promised the moon and couldn’t deliver, wasn’t that worse than not promising in the first place?

“All right. We’ll see what happens.” Jake tried telling himself what he wanted to hear: “Maybe the Yankees won’t believe we’d try coming through the mountains even if some stinking spy tells them we will.”

“Maybe.” But General Forrest sounded dubious. “Remember, sir, that’s General Morrell in charge of their spearhead. He won’t be easy to fool. He’s the kind who’d take armor through the mountains himself, so he’s too likely to think we’d try it, too.”

“I suppose.” Featherston forced himself to nod. “No, you’re bound to be right, dammit. I sure wish we’d punched his ticket for good. Some lousy busybody of a sergeant threw him on his back and toted him out of the line of fire, I hear.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest III didn’t say anything. The expression on his face was hard for Jake to fathom-and then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. Sure as hell, Forrest was thinking, Takes one to know one. And sure as hell, he was right. Jake damn well had been a lousy busybody of a sergeant. Clarence Potter remembered that, even if Forrest couldn’t.

“Anything else?” Jake asked.

“No, Mr. President. That’s what’s going on now.”

“We’ll go from there, then. Tell Patton to give ’em hell. Tell him I said so.”

“I will, sir-when I’m sure the damnyankees can’t hear me do it.” Forrest got to his feet, saluted, and left the office.

Once Jake was sure the general was on his way back to the War Department, he stuck his head out and asked, “Who’s next, Lulu?”

“The Attorney General is waiting to see you, Mr. President.”

“Well, you know you can send him in,” Featherston said.

Ferdinand Koenig lumbered into the office a moment later. Unlike Forrest, he was older than Jake, and also much heavier than the President, who retained a whipcord leanness. “Good morning,” Koenig rumbled.

“I hope so,” Jake said. “You couldn’t prove it by me, though.” He pointed at the map. The U.S. thrust aimed straight at Chattanooga. It was getting too close, too.

“I expect you’ll do something about that before too long.” Ferd Koenig didn’t know the details. He didn’t need or want to know them, either.

“I expect I will, too.” Jake said no more than he had to. The less you told people, the less they could blab. Ferd wasn’t the kind of guy who ran his mouth; Featherston wouldn’t have put up with him for a second if he were. But even an inadvertent slip might hurt badly here, so why take chances? The President said, “What’s on your mind today?”

“About what you’d expect: the mess in Texas.”

Jake Featherston grunted. It was a mess, no two ways about it. “When we built Camp Determination way the hell out there at the ass end of nowhere, we never reckoned the damnyankees would give us so much trouble about it.”

“That’s the truth,” Koenig said unhappily.

“Only goes to show the bastards really are a bunch of nigger-lovers,” Jake said. “How far from the camp are they?” He already knew, but didn’t feel like admitting it.

“About forty miles now. They’re throwing everything they’ve got out there into the attack,” the Attorney General said. “They’ve got more out there than we do, too. We need reinforcements, Mr. President. We need ’em bad.”

“I can’t give you more Army men, dammit.” Jake pointed again to the map showing the ominous Yankee bulge. “Everything we can grab, we’re using against that.” He sighed. Talking about Texas meant talking about Kentucky and Tennessee after all. He might have known it would. Things fit together; however much you wished you could, you couldn’t look at any one part of the war in isolation.

“Can I have more Freedom Party Guards, then?” Koenig asked. “I’ve got to do something, Jake, or the damnyankees’ll take the camp away from us. We can’t afford to let that happen-you know we can’t. It screws up the whole population-reduction program, and it hands the USA a propaganda victory like you wouldn’t believe.”

He wasn’t wrong. Sometimes, though, propaganda defeats had to take a back seat when you were nose-to-nose with real military defeat. Jake didn’t want anything to get in the way of cleansing the Confederacy of Negroes, but he didn’t want to lose the war, either. He felt more harried than he’d ever dreamt he could. Never a man who compromised easily, he knew he had to now.

“Yeah, you can raise some more Guards units,” he said. “We aren’t short of weapons and we aren’t short of uniforms, by God. But I’ll tell you something else, too-we better set up a new camp some place where the damnyankees sure as hell can’t get at it. When it’s ready to roll, just move the guard staff and start shipping in niggers.”

“What about the ones who’re already in Camp Determination?” Koenig asked.

“Well, what about ’em?” Jake said. Ferd was a sharp guy, but sometimes even sharp guys missed seeing the obvious.

“Oh.” The Attorney General turned a dull red. To hide his embarrassment, he made a small production of lighting up a Habana. After a couple of puffs, he went on, “Yeah, that’ll take care of itself, won’t it? Jeff Pinkard won’t be happy about moving, though. Camp Determination’s his baby.”

“Tough titty,” Featherston said. “Where it’s at, his baby’s getting to be more trouble than it’s worth. If there’s no camp in west Texas, the United States don’t have any reason for pushing farther in. Except for Determination, what’s there?”

“Lubbock,” Koenig said. “Amarillo.”

“Big fucking deal.” Jake was massively unimpressed. “The United States are welcome to both of ’em. They want to set up their phony state of Houston again, they’re welcome to do that, too. Far as I can see, they got more grief from it last time around than anything else.”

“You’ve got a good way of looking at things,” Koenig said.

“Well, I hope so. Right now, what we’ve got to do is take care of the shit that won’t wait.” Featherston aimed a forefinger at the map one more time. “After we’ve dealt with that, then we go on with the rest of it.” He made everything sound simple and obvious and easy. He’d always had that knack.

Usually, making things sound easy was good enough. In a fight for your life, though…Ferd Koenig could see that, too. “We need to hit the Yankees hard,” he said.

“Bet your sweet ass, Ferd.” Jake was thinking of Henderson V. FitzBelmont, about whom, he devoutly hoped, the Attorney General knew nothing or next to it. “We will, too. You better believe it.”

“I’ve believed you for twenty-five years now,” Koenig said. “I’m not about to quit.”

“Good.” Jake meant it from the bottom of his heart. “You’ve believed in me longer than anybody these days.” That was true. Of people he still knew, Clarence Potter had met him before Ferd did. But Potter hadn’t always followed him. He wasn’t sure if Potter ever really followed him. Potter was loyal to the country, not to the Freedom Party or to Jake Featherston himself.

“We’ve come a long way, you and me,” Ferd said. “We’ve brought the country a long way, too. We’re not nigger-free, but we’re getting there.”

“Damn straight,” Jake said. “We’ll get where we’re going, by God. Even if the damnyankees come up Shockoe Hill and we have to fire at ’em over open sights, we won’t ever quit. And as long as we don’t quit, they can’t lick us.”

“I sure hope not,” Koenig said.

“Don’t you worry about a thing. You don’t see any U.S. soldiers in Richmond, do you?” Featherston waited till his old warhorse shook his head, then went on, “And you won’t, either. Not ever. We’re going to win this son of a bitch. Not just get a draw so we can start over twenty years from now. We’re going to win.”

“Sounds good to me,” the Attorney General said.

It also sounded good to Jake Featherston. He hated relying on a goddamn professor, but knew too well he was.

Irving Morrell dismounted from his command barrel a few miles north of Delphi, Tennessee. His force wasn’t within artillery range of Chattanooga, not yet, but U.S. guns weren’t far from being able to reach the linchpin of the first part of the campaign. The United States had come farther and faster than he’d dreamt they could when the summer’s fighting started. To his mind, that said only one thing: the Confederates had thrown everything they could into their opening offensives, and it hadn’t been enough. They didn’t have enough left to fight a long war.

Which didn’t mean he wasn’t worried about what they did have. The bright young captain whose command car rolled to a stop near Morrell’s barrel wore a uniform with no arm-of-service colors or badges. If a cryptographer got captured, he didn’t want the enemy knowing what he was.

He also didn’t want to spread around what he knew. Morrell’s barrel carried every kind of wireless set under the sun; that was what made it what it was. But if the United States were deciphering C.S. codes, you had to assume the Confederates were doing the same thing to U.S. messages. What the enemy didn’t overhear, he couldn’t very well use against you.

“Hello, Captain Shaynbloom,” Morrell said. “What have you got for me today?”

Sol Shaynbloom was thin and pale, with a bent blade of a nose and thick glasses. He looked too much like someone who would go into cryptography to seem quite real, but he was. He handed Morrell a manila folder. “Latest decrypts, sir,” he said, “and some aerial photos to back them up.”

“Let’s see what we’ve got.” Morrell studied the decoded messages and the pictures. “Well, well,” he said at last. “They are getting frisky over there, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir,” Captain Shaynbloom said. “More of a buildup on our flank than in front of us, as a matter of fact.”

Morrell had a map case on his hip. He pulled out a map and unfolded it. “So-here and here and here, eh?” He pointed. “That’s probably what I’d do in their shoes, too. They’ll try to cut us off and roll us back to the Ohio.”

“Can they?” the codebreaker asked.

“I hope not,” Morrell said mildly. But that wasn’t what the other man wanted to hear. Smiling a little, Morrell went on, “I think we’re ready for them. If we are, your section will have an awful lot to do with it.”

Shaynbloom smiled. “That’s what we’re here for, sir.” Then his smile disappeared. “If we do smash them as they try to break through, I hope they don’t realize how well we’re able to read their codes.”

“No, that wouldn’t be good,” Morrell agreed. “But sometimes the cards aren’t worth anything unless you put them on the table. This feels like one of those times to me.”

“All right, sir. I guess you’re right,” Captain Shaynbloom said.

I’d better be, Morrell thought. Being right in spots like this is what they pay me for. He wasn’t in it for the money, but the extra salary he earned with stars on his shoulder straps acknowledged the extra responsibility he held. And if he was wrong a couple of times, they wouldn’t take the rank or the pay away from him. They would just put him in charge of the beach in Kansas or the mountains in Nebraska and try to forget they’d ever had anything to do with him.

Another command car pulled up alongside the first. “What’s this?” Morrell said. “I thought they only gave one to a customer.” He made it sound like a joke, but his hand dropped to the butt of the.45 on his belt even so. The Confederates had already tried to assassinate him once. They might well be up for another go at him.

But he recognized the officer who got out. First Lieutenant Malcolm Williamson bore almost a family resemblance to Sol Shaynbloom. Both were skinny and pale and fair, and both looked more like graduate students than soldiers. Williamson also wore an unadorned uniform. Saluting both Shaynbloom and Morrell, he handed the latter an envelope. “We just got this, sir.”

“Let’s have a look.” As Morrell opened the envelope, he asked, “Do you know what’s in it? Can I talk about it in front of you?”

“Yes, sir, and in front of the captain,” Williamson answered. “It’s not that kind of thing-you’ll see in a second.”

“Fair enough.” Nodding, Morrell unfolded the paper in the envelope and read the message someone-maybe Williamson-had scrawled on it. “Well, well,” he said. “So General Patton will be in charge of the Confederate thrust. I’m honored…I suppose.”

“I wondered if he would be,” Shaynbloom said. “He’s sort of fallen off the map the past few weeks.”

“He’s back on it now,” Morrell said. “It’s a compliment to me, I guess, but I could do without it.” He’d heard from someone or other that Patton developed his slashing style by studying his own campaigns during the Great War. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. If it was, it made for another compliment Morrell didn’t really want. Patton was too good at what he did.

“We’ll lick him, sir.” As a lieutenant, Williamson wasn’t prone to the doubts that could cloud a general’s mind. “Who gives a damn how tough he is? We’ve got the horses to ride roughshod over him.” He didn’t even mix his metaphors, a common failing for everyone from the President on down.

“Do we know their precise start time?” Morrell asked. “If we do, we can disrupt them with spoiling bombardments ahead of time. The more we can do to throw their plan and their timing out of whack, the better off we’ll be.”

Williamson and Shaynbloom looked at each other. They even wore the same U.S.-issue steel-framed spectacles, though Shaynbloom’s lenses were noticeably stronger. As one man, they shook their heads. “Haven’t got it yet, sir,” they chorused, Shaynbloom adding, “But it can’t be long.”

“You’re right about that,” Morrell said. “They’ll know they can’t hide a concentration very long. It’ll have to be soon. If you find out exactly when soon is, let me know as fast as you can. We’ll counterpunch if we have to, but getting in the first lick is even better.”

“Yes, sir.” Their voices didn’t sound alike; Williamson’s was an octave deeper. They tore off almost identical salutes, returned to their command cars, and roared off to wherever they worked their code-breaking magic. Morrell didn’t know where that was; what he didn’t know, he couldn’t spill if captured.

As things worked out, the Confederates announced their own attack. They chose early afternoon to open their bombardment, hoping to catch U.S. soldiers off guard. By the rumble from U.S. batteries, they didn’t.

U.S. airplanes roared into the sky. Morrell couldn’t see where they were taking off from; the fields lay farther behind the lines. But he knew they were up there, which was what counted. The Confederates wouldn’t catch them on the ground, the way they’d caught so many fighters and bombers in Ohio. U.S. Y-ranging gear was pointed east, ready to warn the pilots to get airborne before enemy air attackers arrived. And these days, unlike the way things were in 1941, everybody took Y-ranging-and the Confederates-very seriously indeed.

Those fighters and bombers with the eagle in front of crossed swords didn’t get airborne just to escape C.S. attacks, either. They were loaded for bear. The Confederates had to deploy through several gaps in the mountains before they could debouche. The harder they got bombed and strafed while still in column, the slower and clumsier their deployment would be. The less they can bring to the dance, Morrell thought, remembering how he met Agnes not long after the Great War.

She and their daughter, Mildred, were all right. He’d had a letter not long before. The war hadn’t really touched Fort Leavenworth. Out beyond the Mississippi, fighting came in harsh spatters: one that seemed unending over the oil fields in Sequoyah, which each side torched whenever the other seemed about to retake them, and another in west Texas that had heated up lately. Looked at logically, there was no reason on God’s green earth to fight over west Texas. Dark mutters said logic had little to do with it, that the Confederates were up to something really horrible out there, something that needed suppressing regardless of logic.

Having fought without much luck to hold the state of Houston in the USA before Al Smith’s plebiscite, Morrell was ready to believe the worst of west Texas. He was also ready to believe the worst of Jake Featherston and all his Freedom Party pals. The only question in his mind was how bad the worst was out there.

He didn’t even have time to worry about that, except when he got out of the command barrel to stand behind a tree or smoke a cigarette. He spent almost all of the next forty-eight hours in the turret, as a less mobile commander might have spent them in a map room in a headquarters somewhere far behind the line. He was wryly amused to find it worked out about the same either way. Now much of the front-most of the places where the Confederates were trying to break through-lay behind him.

A map room proved better than the turret for at least one reason: it had the space to put up the maps. He was constantly unfolding and refolding them and using cellophane tape to stick them here and there for a little while. Frenchy Bergeron finally lost patience with him. “What happens if the Confederates attack us here, sir?” the gunner asked pointedly. “How am I supposed to fight those fuckers off if I can’t even load my piece?”

“If the fate of this army depends on this barrel and some other one can’t do the job, we’re in a hell of a lot more trouble than I think we are,” Morrell said mildly.

“Well, all right, sir,” Bergeron said. “I can see that. But my own neck might depend on shooting that gun, even if the army doesn’t.”

“I think we’re good even so,” Morrell told him. “With everything the Confederates are throwing at our left, I don’t see how they can have much to use against our front here.”

The gunner grunted. Like almost everyone else in the two opposing armies, Bergeron fancied himself a strategist. He came closer to being right than a lot of other people, some of whom held significantly higher rank than his. And he listened to what Morrell didn’t say as well as to what he did. “They’re hitting us from the one side, sir? Not from both sides at once?”

“That’s right.” Morrell nodded. “They don’t have the men for that. And even if they did, they could never get them into place west of us. The mountains help screen their positions in the east, and the travel’s easier to get there, too. What they’re doing is about as good a counterattack as they can hope to put together.”

“But not good enough, right?” Frenchy Bergeron said confidently.

Morrell yawned. He’d been in the saddle for a devil of a long time. “Don’t quite know yet,” he said. “I hope not, but I can’t be sure yet.”

“What happens if they do break through?” the gunner asked.

“Well, I can give you the simple answer or the technical one,” Morrell said. “Which would you rather?”

“Give me the technical one, sir.” Sure enough, Bergeron figured he knew enough to make sense of it.

He was right, too. “The technical answer is, if that happens, we’re screwed,” Morrell replied.

Bergeron started to laugh, then broke off when he saw Morrell wasn’t even smiling. “You’re not kidding, are you, sir?” he said.

“Not me,” Morrell said. “Not even a little bit. So the thing we want to make sure of is, we want to make sure they don’t break through.”

Brigadier General Clarence Potter thought of himself as a cosmopolitan man. He’d gone to college at Yale, up in the USA. He’d traveled up and down the east coast of the CSA, and west as far as New Orleans. He thought he knew his own country well.

But he’d never been to Knoxville, Tennessee, before. He’d never been anywhere like Knoxville before. The Confederacy’s interior had been a closed book to him. The longer he stayed in and around the town, the more he wanted to get back to Richmond and the War Department. Knoxville made daily U.S. air raids seem good by comparison.

He’d spent most of his time in Charleston and Richmond. Those were sophisticated places. Back before the Freedom Party seized power, they’d had substantial opposition groups. Chances were they still did, though the opposition had to stay underground these days if it wanted to go on existing.

Knoxville…By all appearances, Knoxville had never heard of, never dreamt of, opposing Jake Featherston. People here were shabby and tired-looking, the way they were in Richmond. The men came in three categories: the very, very young; the ancient; and the mutilated. An awful lot of women wore widow’s weeds. But people in Knoxville greeted one another with, “Freedom!” Potter hadn’t heard them say it without sounding as if they meant it. Jake Featherston’s portraits and posters were everywhere. Even with U.S. soldiers in Tennessee on the other side of the mountains, the locals remained convinced the Confederate States would win the war.

Without sharing their confidence, Potter envied it. He wouldn’t have come to Knoxville himself if the CSA weren’t in trouble. If pulling someone out of Intelligence and expecting him to command a brigade wasn’t a mark of desperation, what was it?

He needed a while to realize that question might not be rhetorical. Jake Featherston could have had reasons of his own in assenting to Potter’s transfer. The first that sprang to mind was the one most likely true: the President of the CSA might not shed a tear if his obstreperous officer stopped a bullet.

Who will rid me of this turbulent priest? Henry II shouted, and in short order Thomas a Becket was a dead man. Featherston was more polite: instead of simply ordering his own men to do Potter in or even hinting that he wanted him dead, he sent the man he mistrusted off to where danger was apt to lie thicker on the ground than it did in Richmond.

Remembering some of the U.S. air raids he’d been through, Potter wondered if that was really so. But his was not to reason why. His was to do or, that failing, to die. He didn’t want to die and he wasn’t sure he could do, which left him in an unpleasant limbo.

He was in limbo another way, too: nobody’d ordered his brigade forward yet. If everything was going according to plan, it would have been committed two days earlier. He didn’t think the officers set over him were keeping the outfit in reserve because it had a green CO. A lot of brigades did these days. No, he feared the outfit hadn’t got the call because things up at the front were going to hell.

Even though he came out of Intelligence, he couldn’t get a handle on what the war west of the mountains looked like. Nobody wanted to say anything. That in itself was a bad omen. When things were going well, people-and the Freedom Party propaganda mill-shouted it from the housetops. When they weren’t…

Good news had a thousand fathers. Bad news was an orphan. The orphanage in Knoxville got more crowded by the day. Potter began to wonder if his brigade ever would get sent to the front. If it didn’t, why the devil had they called him out of Richmond? Had optimism run that far ahead of common sense? Maybe it had.

He was just about convinced he would go back to the capital without ever seeing real action when he got the order to move forward. That amused him about as much as anything ever did, and in the usual sardonic way. He had trucks. He had fuel. He’d made damn sure he did. The outfit was rolling inside of an hour. He might have left a few men behind in Knoxville, men who’d got leave and whom the military police hadn’t scraped out of the bars and whorehouses. He would worry about and, if need be, punish them later. Better to get where he needed to go when he needed to get there with not quite so many men than to wait around for the rest and show up late.

But he showed up late anyhow, though he didn’t intend to. Everything went fine till the brigade rolled past Harriman, about thirty-five miles west of Knoxville. Up till then, Highway 70 had been in pretty good shape. Occasional craters were patched up; Confederate engineers had repaired bombed bridges or set up makeshift spans to do duty for the ones the damnyankees had blown to smithereens.

After Harriman, it was a different story. The Yankees had hit the road hard enough and often enough to get ahead of the repair crews. Potter hadn’t seen such devastation since the Great War…except in Richmond, after a bad air raid. But those raids disrupted civilian life. These delayed soldiers on the way to the front, a much more serious business-especially if you were one of those soldiers.

Going off the roads and into the fields alongside them helped, but only so much. For one thing, the fields were cratered, too. Even trucks with four-wheel drive weren’t barrels; they didn’t laugh off big holes in the ground. And the lead trucks chewed up the ground and made it worse for the ones that came behind.

The worse the bottlenecks got, the more worried Potter grew. “We have to get rolling,” he said to whoever would listen to him, and scanned the western skies like a farmer fearing rain at harvest time. He feared something worse than rain. “If the damnyankees hit us while we’re stuck here…”

“Bite your tongue, sir,” advised the corporal at the wheel of his command car. “You say that kind of stuff, you’re liable to make it come true.”

To Clarence Potter, that was superstitious nonsense. He didn’t say so, though-what was the point? Fifteen minutes later, with the brigade still snarled, what both he and the corporal dreaded came true: the howl of airplane engines, rising swiftly to a scream.

He’d done what he could to get ready for air attack. He’d deployed the antiaircraft guns attached to the brigade and the heavy machine guns. He and his men weren’t caught flatfooted when the U.S. raiders struck them. Things could have been worse. As it worked out, they were only bad. Bad proved grim enough.

The damnyankees didn’t use Asskickers or their equivalents. They just mounted bomb racks under fighters, which turned their explosives loose from not much above treetop height. They hit the trucks on the road and those to either side of it. Fireballs blossomed. Chunks of blazing metal hurtled through the air. So did chunks of blazing flesh.

Like most, Potter’s command car carried a pintle-mounted machine gun. He banged away at the enemy airplanes. He’d gone through the whole Great War without firing a weapon at U.S. forces. Now he could hit back. The shattering noise and the stream of hot brass spitting from the breech filled him with fierce, primitive joy. Whether he hurt the damnyankees any was a different question. The unsleeping rational part of his brain knew that, even as the animal inside him whooped and squeezed the triggers and played the stream of tracers like a hose.

A fighter slammed into the ground not far away. That fireball dwarfed the ones the trucks sent up. Splashes of burning gasoline caught running soldiers. They dropped and writhed and rolled, screaming their torment all but unheard.

After the fighters unloaded their bombs, they came back to strafe the stalled column. The Confederates had invented the tactic two years earlier. Potter could have done without the flattery of U.S. imitation. He got more chances to use his machine gun. And the fighters, armed with four machine guns and two cannon each, got more chances to turn their weapons on him.

They badly outgunned him. They were making better than 300 miles an hour, while he was a sitting duck. The wonder wasn’t that they kept missing him. The wonder was that all their weaponry didn’t chew him to red rags.

Bullets cracked past his head. When bullets cracked, they came too damn close. Others kicked up puffs of dust from the dirt a few feet to the left of the command car, and then, a moment later, from the dirt a few feet to its right. He went on firing. Hardly even knowing he was doing it, he changed belts on the machine gun when the first one ran dry.

After what had to be the longest ten or fifteen minutes of his life, he ran out of targets. The U.S. fighters roared off toward the west. He looked around to see what they’d done-and discovered that what had been a brigade was no more than a shattered mess. Not all the trucks were on fire, but about one in three was. Some of the burning trucks carried ammunition, which started cooking off. Flying rounds would cause more casualties, and likely set more fires, too.

The stinks of cordite and burning fuel and burning rubber and burning meat filled the air. So did the cheerful pop-pop-pop! of exploding cartridges and the not so cheerful screams and moans of wounded men. Officers and noncoms shouted commands, trying to bring order out of chaos by sheer force of will. Order did not want to be born; chaos wasn’t ready to die.

Potter’s driver looked around and summed things up in a handful of words: “Jesus, what a fucking mess!”

“Now that you mention it, yes.” Potter sounded dazed, even to himself. He thought he’d earned the right. He’d had reports of what air strikes could do to troops. He’d read them carefully. He’d imagined he understood them. So much for that, went through his mind. The difference between reading about an air strike and going through one was about like the difference between reading about love and making love.

“You did good, sir,” his driver said. “That took balls, standing up there and firing on those bastards. A lot of guys would’ve run for the trees fast as they could go.”

Not far from the command car lay the corpse of a soldier who’d been running for the trees when a cannon round caught him in the middle of the back. The corpse was in two pieces-top half and bottom half. They lay several feet apart. “Running’s not guaranteed to keep you safe,” Potter said. Standing your ground and shooting back at the enemy didn’t guarantee it, either. A bomb had landed right by one of the brigade’s antiaircraft guns. The blast blew the gun itself ass over teakettle. Not much was left of the men who’d served it.

“Can we still go forward?” the driver asked.

“We have to,” Potter said. The question and the automatic answer helped get his brain working again. He hopped down from the command car and started adding orders of his own to the ones that came from his subordinates. Fighting fires, getting the wounded and the dead off to one side, clearing wrecked vehicles from the roadway…It all took time, time the brigade should have used to travel. They were going to be late getting where they were supposed to go.

And they wouldn’t get there at better than two-thirds strength. The Great War was a war of attrition, a war the CSA lost. Attrition had just fallen out of the sky and jumped on his brigade. A few minutes of air strikes, and it was barely combat-worthy. It wouldn’t be able to do the things planners assumed a fresh brigade of reinforcements could do. It couldn’t come close.

How many other Confederate units were in the same boat? And which boat was it, anyway? One that just stopped a torpedo? It sure looked that way to Clarence Potter.

He did the best he could, praying all the while that U.S. fighter-bombers wouldn’t come back. He was agnostic leaning toward atheist, but he prayed anyhow. It can’t hurt, he thought. And enemy aircraft did stay away. The brigade, or what was left of it, got moving again. The men could still do their best…however good that turned out to be.

Lieutenant Michael Pound was not a happy man. He’d been happy driving the Confederates from Pittsburgh back into Ohio and then down into Kentucky and Tennessee. Forcing the CSA to dance to the USA’s tune made him happy.

Now, instead of pushing on toward Chattanooga, he and his armored platoon had to leave the front line and shift to the east. If they didn’t, the Confederates were liable to drive in the U.S. flank. If that happened, very bad things would follow. Pound could see as much. He took it as a personal affront.

“We’ll make them pay-you see if we don’t,” he growled when his platoon stopped to rest and-at his orders-to maintain their barrels. “If they think they can sidetrack us-”

“They’re right, aren’t they?” Sergeant Frank Blakey asked. The barrel commander had a large wrench in his hands. He was tightening the links in his barrel’s left track.

Pound approved of a commander who could do his own maintenance. He also approved of a noncom who talked back to officers. He’d done plenty of that when he had stripes on his sleeve instead of these silly gold bars on even sillier shoulder straps. A lot of men who became officers late in their careers did their best to ape the style and ambitions of those who’d gained the privilege sooner. Not Michael Pound. He still thought like a top sergeant, and didn’t labor under the delusion that those little gold bars turned him into a little tin god.

So he just laughed and nodded. “Yeah, they are-right this minute, anyhow. But when we get through with them, they’re going to be worse off than if they never tried this attack in the first place.”

“How do you figure, sir?” That was Mel Scullard, his own gunner. His crew had learned even faster than the others that he didn’t get pissed off when people spoke their minds.

“We’ve got air superiority. We’ve got more barrels than they do, and better ones now. We’ve got more artillery than they do, too, in spite of their damn rockets,” Pound answered. “If they come out and slug toe-to-toe with us, they just make themselves better targets. They’re harder to get rid of when they hang back and make us come at them. It worked like that in the Great War, and it still does.”

Sergeant Scullard grunted. “Well, that makes sense.” He gave Pound a crooked grin. “How did you come up with it?”

“Accidents will happen,” Pound said dryly, and everyone laughed. Pound went on, “What we have to do is, we have to clobber the Confederates for coming out in the open to bang with us, and then we have to get back down to the real front and push on to Chattanooga.” Everything always sounded easy when he started talking about it. It sometimes didn’t turn out like that for real, but he was convinced that was never his fault.

“We’ll put a lot of driving miles on our barrels,” Sergeant Blakey pointed out.

“Sure.” Pound nodded. Barrels were complex machines that performed right at their limits all the time. This war’s models were less prone to breakdowns than the lumbering monsters of a generation earlier, but they still failed much more often than he wished they would. He said, “The better we take care of them while we’re on the road, the less trouble they’ll give us.”

All the men he led nodded at that. A barrel crew that took care of its machine spent a lot more time in combat than one that let things slide. Barrels were the logical successors to horsed cavalry. Back in the old days, Pound had heard, a mounted trooper took care of his horse before he worried about himself. The same rule held good with armored units, though Pound would sooner have used a curry comb on his barrel than a screwdriver. He was old enough to remember the way horses responded when you groomed them. Barrels never would do anything like that.

But, in an age of mechanized warfare, horsed cavalry couldn’t hope to survive. Soldiers in barrels stayed alive and hurt the enemy. That was what the game was all about.

“Are we ready to get rolling?” Pound asked. Nobody said no. The soldiers got back into their steel shells and rumbled northeast.

Before long, they passed a barrel whose men were busy replacing a track. “We hit a mine,” one of the soldiers in coveralls said in response to Pound’s shouted question. “Lucky this is all that happened to us.”

“You’d better believe it,” Pound said. “Well, hurry along-we’ll need everybody we can get our hands on before long.” The other barrelman waved in agreement and returned to his backbreaking work.

The northeast road ran from Dalton toward Pikeville, at the head of the Sequatchie Valley, where the Confederates were trying to break out. Pikeville was a county seat-a sign still standing near the edge of town so declared. All the same, the place couldn’t have held much more than 500 people before the fighting started. Michael Pound doubted it had half that many now. The locals, like most people with half an ounce of sense, didn’t want to stick around while bullets chewed up their houses and bombs and shells came down on their heads. They’d lit out for the tall timber, wherever the tall timber was-probably in the mountains to the east.

U.S. artillery was set up south and west of Pikeville, throwing shells at the Confederates as they tried to push forward. The gun bunnies, most of them naked to the waist, nodded to Pound as he and his barrels rattled past. U.S. fighter-bombers roared past overhead. Pound smiled to hear bombs going off not too far away. The harder the enemy got hit before he made it to Pikeville, the less trouble he’d be when he finally did.

Bomb craters said Confederate aircraft were hitting back as best they could. A burnt-out Hound Dog had crashed in a field just outside of town. The front half of the fighter was a crumpled wreck. The Confederate battle flag on the upthrust tail was as much of a grave marker as the pilot was likely to get.

Houses on the east side of Pikeville faced the mountains from which the enemy would come. Pound’s barrel pushed its way into one of those houses-literally, knocking down the western wall and poking the gun out through a window on the east side. The other machines in his platoon deployed close by, behind fences and piles of wreckage. They weren’t the only barrels taking up positions there. If the Confederates wanted Pikeville and what lay beyond, they would have to pay.

Pound peered out through the now glassless window, waiting. He would have been happier if the enemy never made it as far as Pikeville. If the artillery and fighter-bombers could stop Featherston’s columns in their tracks, so much the better. It would let him turn around and head back toward important fighting-fighting that led to advances into the heart of the Confederacy.

But no such luck. Less than an hour after Pound got to Pikeville, U.S. infantrymen who’d been screening the way ahead fell back into the little town. “Up to us now, I’d say,” Pound remarked. Without the foot soldiers and the artillery and the airplanes, the Confederates would have been in Pikeville ahead of him, and probably spilling out to the west. He didn’t think about that, only about what needed doing next.

“Front!” he called as a Confederate barrel rolling through the cornfields made itself plain.

“Identified!” the gunner sang out. “Range just over a mile, sir.”

“Can you hit the son of a bitch?” Pound asked.

“Hell, yes!” Scullard sounded confident as could be, the way a good gunner should.

“Then fire when ready.” Pound almost nagged Scullard about leading his target-at that range, the shell had a flight time of a second and a half, and the enemy barrel could move enough to make remembering it matter. But in the end he kept his mouth shut. The gunner knew what he was doing. He’d remember to lead the barrel…or if he didn’t, Pound would come down on him after he screwed up.

The gun swung slightly. Then it roared. Michael Pound thought his head would come off. He was head and shoulders out of the turret but still in an enclosed space, and the noise was cataclysmic.

Was it a hit or…? Smoke spurted from the enemy barrel. “Got him!” Pound yelled. “Good shot! You led him just right!” He laughed at himself. He was going to get the lesson in come hell or high water, wasn’t he?

Other barrels opened up on the advancing Confederates. Several more enemy barrels brewed up. The longer U.S. barrelmen used the 3?-inch gun on the new models, the better they liked it. It fired a flat, fast round that could kill anything it could reach. And the improved gunsight made hits more likely. Pound wished he were shooting it himself.

Little by little, he’d decided he might be able to do more good as an officer than he had as a noncom. Coordinating five barrel crews wasn’t the piece of cake he’d thought it was till he tried it himself. He kept shouting into the wireless, finding out what was going on with all the others and making sure they did what he wanted them to do. And he had to fight his own barrel, too. It was enough to give the one-armed paperhanger a galloping case of the hives.

And the Confederates wanted Pikeville. They needed Pikeville. And they were doing their damnedest to take it back from the U.S. soldiers inside it. Their barrels didn’t swarm forward to be massacred in the open, the way Pound hoped they would. Instead, smoke rounds from C.S. artillery back in the mountains came down between the advancing Confederate forces and the defenders in the little town. Before long, the streamers came together in a ragged fogbank that hid most of what lay behind it.

Out of the fogbank came…trouble. Confederate foot soldiers armed with antibarrel rockets and launching tubes ran through the smoke, flopped down behind the closest cover, and started working their way forward. U.S. machine-gun fire picked off some of them, and more of the riflemen who protected them, but they kept coming in the little rushes experienced troops used.

Before long, rockets trailing tails of fire flew toward Pikeville. More than one U.S. barrel that had stayed too long in its original firing position got hit. Michael Pound’s platoon came away unscathed; he’d ordered the machines back to secondary firing positions in the lull the smoke screen gave them.

A rocket slammed into the house where his barrel had been hiding. The house started to burn. Pound smiled to himself. The Confederates would think they’d killed the barrel. They might make some embarrassing mistakes if they thought their mischief-makers had done more than they really had.

And sure enough, a few minutes later a couple of platoons of C.S. barrels charged through the thinning smoke ready to break into Pikeville or die trying. Michael Pound earnestly preferred the second alternative. He was standing in the cupola of a machine that could make his preferences felt. The leading barrels were the latest Confederate model: excellent in their own right, but half a step behind his. They were out in the open. He had cover. It hardly seemed fair. But then, he didn’t want a fair fight. He wanted a fight he’d win.

“Front!” he shouted.

“Identified!” Sergeant Scullard continued with the ritual.

Three shots from Pound’s barrel killed two Confederate machines, and they were the leading two. One turned into a fireball. A couple of men got out of the other barrel. Machine-gun bullets reached for them, but they might have made cover. Part of Pound hoped they did. He’d bailed out of a stricken barrel himself. He knew what it was like. They were enemies, but they were also men doing the same job he was.

The Confederates kept coming. Another U.S. barrel set the last of theirs on fire less than a hundred yards outside of Pikeville. Several more green-gray barrels were also burning by then, some from enemy cannon fire, others from those damnable antibarrel rockets.

But the Confederates didn’t get into the town. They didn’t get around it, either. U.S. reinforcements poured in to make sure they couldn’t. Pound was only half glad to see them. He wished they’d stayed farther south and stormed toward Chattanooga.

Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover had the ribbon for the Purple Heart. He didn’t much want it. Nobody on either side much wanted a Purple Heart, but Dover didn’t think he’d earned his. A chunk of shrapnel had torn a bloody line across his forearm. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t worth fussing about. But the rule was that you got a medal if you bled. And so he had one.

Not a lot of officers in the Quartermaster Corps owned a decoration that said they’d been in combat. In a way, it was handy: it made line officers-and even line noncoms-take him seriously. But the wound was so trivial, the decoration embarrassed him.

It did when he had time to think about it, anyway. More often than not, he barely had time to breathe, let alone eat. He smoked like a chimney. As long as he kept breathing, he could do that. It didn’t keep him from doing the usual seventeen other things at the same time.

He knew before almost anyone else that the Confederate thrust from the east wasn’t going as well as the planners back in Richmond wished it were. As soon as the front just north of Chattanooga got its supply priority restored, he realized the Confederates either had an extravagant success and would soon swarm up from the south or had failed and would soon need to hold on for dear life here. The shipments of barbed wire and land mines said they wouldn’t be advancing.

He sent out the supplies as front-line units shouted for them. In the meantime, he quietly swore under his breath. A generation earlier, he’d seen what a losing war looked like. Now he stared another one in the face. He hadn’t thought Jake Featherston would land the Confederacy in a mess like this. Who had? Surely Featherston himself hadn’t. And a whole fat lot of good that does anybody, Dover thought.

Confederate gunboats came up the Tennessee River as far as Chattanooga and fired big shells at U.S. forces to the north. Then they turned around again and scooted south as fast as they could go, for U.S. airplanes struck at them whenever they got the chance. Land-based guns couldn’t be as big or move as fast as the ones the gunboats carried. But the boats had trouble moving fast enough to stay safe.

Dover could cheer for them without worrying that their performance reflected on him. The C.S. Navy was responsible for keeping them in fuel, hardtack, and munitions. Some Navy commander had to flabble about that. Dover just hoped their shells blew plenty of damnyankees to hell and gone.

His own worries were the usual sort: getting munitions and other supplies up from the rear and then making sure they reached the front. Keeping his dumps as close to the fighting as he could went a long way toward solving the second problem. The first was harder, especially since he had to deal with new sets of gatekeepers. The dumps in southern and western Tennessee that had nourished the Confederate armies were now withering themselves. Most of Dover’s shipments came up from Atlanta, and the quartermasters there had carved out a tidy little empire for themselves, one they didn’t care to disturb just because there was a war on.

“Your demands are excessive,” a colonel safely behind the lines told Jerry Dover. “You can’t possibly be expending so many antiaircraft shells.”

“No, huh?” Dover said. “What do you think I’m doing with ’em, pounding ’em up my ass?” Had that colonel in Atlanta been handy, Dover might have done some pounding with him.

Even though he didn’t say it, that message must have got across. In frigid tones, his superior said, “You are insubordinate.”

“Yes, sir,” Dover said proudly. “People keep telling me that. But the ones who do are always farther from the fighting than I am. The guys who really have to go out and shoot things at the Yankees, they like me fine. And you know what, sir? If I have to choose between them and you, I’ll take them any old time.”

“Have a care how you speak to me.” The colonel in Atlanta sounded like a man on the verge of apoplexy. “You’d better have a care, by God. I can have you court-martialed like that-like that, I tell you.” He snapped his fingers.

“Big fucking deal…sir.” Dover had heard such threats before. “If you do, they’ll kick my ass out of the Army. I’ll go to prison, where it’s safe, or I’ll go home to Augusta, where it’s safe. And I hope they ship you up here to take my place. It’d goddamn well serve you right. And if I don’t get those shells, my next telegram goes to Richmond, not to you.”

“You can’t do that!” the colonel gabbled. “It violates the chain of command!”

No doubt that would have impressed an officer who’d had proper training. It didn’t bother Jerry Dover one bit. “You think Jake Featherston will give a damn about the chain of command when he hears somebody isn’t doing his job and won’t do it? I think he’ll have you for breakfast…without salt.”

He was bluffing. He didn’t think any telegram of his would reach the President of the CSA. No doubt the colonel down in Atlanta didn’t, either. But there was always that chance… And if Featherston did descend in wrath on an obstructive colonel, that man would end up nothing but a smear on the bottom of his shoe.

Dover got his antiaircraft shells. That meant the front got its antiaircraft shells. If he had enemies down in Atlanta, he didn’t give a damn.

He camouflaged his supply dump as elaborately as he could. Netting and mottled tarps covered crates and boxes and stacks. Branches and uprooted saplings made the place next to invisible from the air. That wasn’t just Jerry Dover’s opinion. He sent up a Confederate artillery spotter in a light airplane to look the place over from above. The man said he had a devil of a time finding it. Dover felt proud.

Proud, however, had nothing to do with anything. Dover was also paranoid. Half a mile from the concealed dump, he ordered a dummy depot built right out in the open. He made some token efforts at camouflaging it: the kinds of things a busy, not very bright, not very diligent officer would do so his superiors couldn’t come down on him for not doing anything, but nothing that would really keep enemy bombers from spotting the site.

His men grumbled at the extra work. That ticked him off. “Look,” he said. “The name of the game is being able to hang on to our shit till we have to move it up to the front. If the damnyankees drop bombs on the wrong place, we’ve got a better chance of doing that. Or do you want the bastards to plaster us here?”

Nobody said yes to that. He would have got rid of any man who did. A lot of officers would have given a man like that a rifle and sent him up to the forwardmost positions to see how he liked things there. As Dover had shown at the Huntsman’s Lodge, though, he was more vindictive toward superiors than toward subordinates. He would have palmed reluctant enlisted men off on some other supply officer; sending them up to the front to get shot didn’t cross his mind.

U.S. reconnaissance aircraft buzzed above Chattanooga almost every hour of the day. Antiaircraft fire didn’t discourage them. There weren’t enough Confederate fighters to drive them away. West of the Appalachians, the United States had air superiority. The Confederates could harry and harass, but they couldn’t stop the Yankees from doing most of what they wanted to do.

Bombs rained down on the dummy depot, smashing it to hell and gone. “You see?” Dover said to anybody who would listen. “You see? We fooled the sons of bitches!” He got busy repairing the dump, just as if it were the real one. He was proud of his realism. He’d even had a few barrels of waste oil at the dummy site so they could send up convincing plumes of greasy smoke.

Enemy bombers hit the fake depot again two days later, even harder. Jerry Dover was so pleased with himself, he could hardly even breathe. He felt like dancing because he’d done such a good job of fooling the damnyankees. How many tons of bombs had they thrown away, smashing up worthless tents and empty crates? Enough to make some of their supply officers very unhappy if they found out about the waste-he was sure of that.

Again, he had his crew run around as if trying to set things to rights. After two wasted U.S. raids, they’d found some enthusiasm for trying to trick U.S. fliers. Antiaircraft guns sprouted like toadstools around the dummy depot. Only a handful of the guns were real. The rest were Quaker cannons: logs trimmed and painted to look like the real thing, on mounts made from whatever junk the soldiers could scrounge. Close up, they were jokes. From a couple of miles in the air, or from a fighter-bomber streaking by as fast as it could go, they seemed damned convincing.

When he heard the thrum of U.S. bomber engines overhead yet again, Jerry Dover smiled: a smug, complacent grin. The good humor behind that smile went up in smoke-literally-when the Yankees blasted the kapok out of his genuine dump. All the antiaircraft guns around the real installation were in good working order. They knocked down a few bombers, but not nearly enough. The USA clearly won the exchange.

“How?” he shouted, even as firemen poured streams of water on the smoking wreckage. “How the fuck did they know where we were at?”

“I bet some goddamn nigger tipped ’em off that we were running a bluff,” a sergeant answered.

Dover started to say that was ridiculous, but he stopped with the words unspoken. It wasn’t ridiculous, not one bit. Every black man-and woman-in the CSA had to hate the present government as much as the government hated blacks. Not many Negroes were left in these parts. Even one would have been plenty if he reached the damnyankees.

“I bet you’re right,” was what came out of his mouth.

“Fucking black bastards,” the noncom said. “Freedom Party should’ve done a better job of cleaning ’em out. What did we elect those assholes for, anyway?”

Politics didn’t rear its head so often in this war as it had in the last. A lot of people in the CSA were afraid to talk politics these days. They worried-and with reason-that they could end up in camps if they said the wrong thing to the wrong person. Anything that criticized the government or the Freedom Party was too likely to be the wrong thing, although Jerry Dover hadn’t expected anybody to come down on the Party for not doing enough to get rid of blacks.

“You want to kind of watch your mouth, Pete,” Dover told the sergeant. “Some of these Party people, they don’t take things the right way.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t figure you for a stalwart or anything like that,” Pete answered. “You don’t sound like you’re ready to come when you go, ‘Freedom!’”

“No, huh?” Dover said dryly.

“Nope.” The sergeant shook his head. He stuck a chaw of Red Man in his mouth. His jaw worked; he might have been a cow chewing its cud. But a cow wouldn’t have spat a stream of brown the way he did. He winked at Dover. “Besides, sir, if you turn me in, you’ll get stuck with some dumb shithead who doesn’t know his ass from the end zone. You like people with a little something upstairs. Me, I like broads with a little something upstairs.” He held his hands in front of his chest.

Dover laughed. “Go on, get out of here,” he said. “You’ve got other things to do besides driving your CO crazy.”

With a sketched salute, Pete ambled off. Jerry Dover stared after him. No wonder people didn’t talk politics any more. Whenever you did, you felt you were suddenly part of a plot. Say anything bad about the powers that be-even listen to someone else saying bad things about the powers without denouncing him on the instant-and you were complicit in indiscretion. You had a hold on the other guy, and he had a hold on you.

“Shit,” Dover muttered. “It shouldn’t be this way.” He felt that very strongly. Not being able to speak your mind had to hurt the war effort. Having people go after people who did speak their minds had to hurt the war effort, too. All the labor wasted in chasing down grumblers could have been turned against the damnyankees instead.

The effort used in chasing down Negroes? Dover wasn’t like Pete; he didn’t think the Freedom Party wasn’t doing enough. But the question of whether the Party should be doing anything at all along those lines never crossed his mind. He might despise the numskulls set over him, but he was still a man of his country and his time and his color.