The Grapple

XV

Jorge Rodriguez and Gabriel Medwick made unlikely friends. Jorge was skinny and swarthy and spoke with a Spanish accent. Medwick was big and blond and handsome in a jut-jawed way. If not for the war, they never would have met. But they’d shared in the grinding Confederate retreat through Tennessee. Now, just outside of Chattanooga, the powers that be were saying C.S. troops wouldn’t fall back another yard. Jorge didn’t know if they were right, but they were saying it.

A lot of men who’d come over from Virginia with Jorge and Gabriel were dead or wounded now. Jorge didn’t think much of their replacements. Old-timers in the company doubtless hadn’t thought much of him when he first joined it, either. Two company commanders had gone down since Captain Hirsch. They were both supposed to recover, but that didn’t help much now. A first lieutenant named Jubal Frisch had the company at the moment, and didn’t seem to know what to do with it.

Sergeant Hugo Blackledge hadn’t got a scratch. He was another reason Jorge and Gabriel were friends-they both hated him. He had a platoon now, not just a squad. That let him spread his bad temper around more, but did nothing to make it good.

“Why don’t they bring in a lieutenant to take over for him?” Medwick mourned.

“Even if they did, he’d still be running the platoon,” Jorge said. “That’s what sergeants do. The officer would just be-how do you say?-the guy in front.”

“The front man,” Medwick said.

“That’s it. Thanks. The front man, yeah,” Jorge said. “Blackledge, he can handle a platoon-no doubt about that.”

“Oh, I know. I know.” Gabriel Medwick looked around carefully and lowered his voice to a near-whisper. “He can run it, sure. That ain’t the problem. The problem is, he’s a fuckin’ asshole.”

“You got that right,” Jorge whispered. They both nodded, satisfied they’d figured out at least one small part of how the universe worked.

Blackledge couldn’t have heard them. He would have come down on them harder than a six-inch shell. Somehow or other, though, they both ended up on sentry-go that night. The front wasn’t quiet. Snipers and raiding parties slipped back and forth. That was the small change of war, and nobody worried much about it one way or the other except the people who got wounded or killed. But sentries were a trip wire, too. If a big push came, they were supposed to get word back to the main force.

Jorge peered out into the darkness, all eyeballs and nerves and apprehension. Every time an owl hooted, he thought it was a damnyankee signal. Every time a firefly blinked, he feared it was a muzzle flash. He clutched his automatic rifle and hoped nothing would happen till his relief took over.

Out of the darkness came a low-voiced call: “Hey! You there! Yeah, you, Confederate!”

Jorge crouched in good cover. Even if a machine gun opened up, he was safe enough. So he cautiously called back: “Yeah? What you want?”

“Got some smokes?” The other man had a funny accent-a Yankee accent. “Wanna swap ’em for rations? I can use coffee, too, if you got it.”

“I got cigarettes,” Jorge answered. “Not much coffee. You got deviled ham?”

“Buddy, I got a dozen cans,” the U.S. soldier said proudly. “I came prepared-bet your butt I did.”

“I got three-four packs I can trade you,” Jorge said. “You see a stump by a rock up in front of you?”

A pause, presumably while the would-be merchant scanned the area. “Yeah, I see it.”

“Bueno,” Jorge said. “Put four cans on it, then go away. I put four packs on it, then I go away. You come back and get ’em.”

“And you shoot my sorry ass off,” the U.S. soldier said. “I’ll put two, you put two, then we do it again. Got to be some kind of way to keep both of us interested in the deal all the way through.”

“All right,” Jorge said, though he didn’t much care whether it went through or not. The only thing that kept him going was the reasonable certainty that killing him would cause more trouble than it was worth. “Go ahead. I don’t shoot.”

“Fuckin’ better not,” the U.S. soldier said, which was true enough under the circumstances.

He moved quietly. When he came, Jorge didn’t know he was there till he got to within a few feet of the stump and boulder. He set down the cans, waved in Jorge’s general direction, and disappeared again. But he had style; he made more noise retreating than he had advancing, so Jorge could be sure he really was leaving.

Even so, Jorge’s heart pounded as he went up to the stump. If more Yankees waited nearby, they could jump out and capture him. He’d picked this spot himself, but…

He grabbed the cans and almost forgot to set down the cigarettes. After he did, he headed back to his foxhole. Up came the U.S. soldier. “Yeah, you play fair,” he said as he snatched up the packs. “Here’s the rest.” He set down two more cans and withdrew again.

After Jorge took them and left the last two packs of Dukes, he was tempted to shoot the U.S. soldier when he came forward. But what was the point? It wouldn’t win the war. It wouldn’t move the war toward being won by even a hair’s breadth. It would only start a firefight in which he was liable to get hurt himself. He would fight when he had to. When he didn’t have to, he didn’t want to.

Like a ghost, the U.S. soldier materialized. “Thanks, buddy,” he said, collecting the last two packs of Dukes. “Stay safe. I won’t plug you unless I’ve got to. Try and do the same for me.” He vanished into the darkness again.

The deviled ham would be good. Jorge could always get more smokes. He wondered how long that would last, though. The United States had overrun a lot of tobacco country. How long could the Confederacy go on turning out cigarettes? There was a scary thought.

When his relief came up, he almost shot the other Confederate soldier. It wasn’t even that his countryman messed up the password; he was just jumpy. He went back to the company’s forward position, rolled himself in his blanket, and slept till sunup.

He got coffee and fried eggs from the company cook. When he spooned deviled ham into his mess kit to go with the eggs, his buddies gave him jealous looks. “Where’d you get that?” Gabe Medwick asked.

“Found it on a tree stump,” Jorge answered, which was technically true but not what anybody would call responsive. Medwick rolled his eyes.

Sergeant Blackledge was blunter: “You trading with the enemy?”

“Uh, yes, Sergeant.” Jorge didn’t have the nerve to lie.

“Didn’t pay more than one pack of smokes for a can, did you?” Blackledge demanded.

“Uh, no, Sergeant.”

“Goddamn well better not. You jack up the price for everybody else if you do.” The sergeant tramped off. Jorge let out a sigh of relief louder and more heartfelt than the one that had escaped him after he finished the deal with the damnyankee.

He was just finishing his coffee when somebody yelled, “Mail call!” He hurried over to see if there was anything from his brothers (POWs were allowed occasional letters, so Pedro sometimes wrote) or from his family back in Sonora. The field-post corporal had a devil of a time pronouncing his last name, but a lot of ordinary Confederates did, so he took that in stride.

“Who’s it from?” Gabe Medwick asked. He had a large family in Alabama, and got letters all the time.

“My mother,” Jorge answered. “Got to remember how to read Spanish.” He said that only for effect. He wouldn’t have any trouble, and he knew it.

When he opened the letter, what he got wasn’t what he expected. They say your father killed himself, his mother wrote. I don’t believe them. I will never believe them, not just because killing yourself is a mortal sin but because your father would not do it. He would only do such a thing if he found out he had committed some great wrong and he had no other way to make up for it. And that is not so. He was doing something great, something wonderful, something important. He always said so when he wrote me. And so it must be a lie. Maybe they tell me these things because he died fighting and he promised me he would not go into any danger when he left to put on the uniform again. I cannot think of anything else that would make them say such things. And they are paying me a pension for him. Would they do that if he really killed himself? I don’t believe it.

Jorge stared at the scrawled words. He read them two or three times, and they made no more sense than they had at the beginning. He couldn’t believe his father would kill himself, either. Some great wrong, his mother said. What could his father have done that was wrong? It wasn’t in his father to do such a thing…was it? He didn’t see how.

“You all right, buddy?” Gabriel Medwick asked. By the look on his face, Jorge got the idea he’d asked the same question before, maybe more than once, and hadn’t got an answer for it. Gabe went on, “You look like somebody just reduced your population, man. You got bad news from home?”

A white Confederate from Alabama could no more read Spanish than he could fly, Jorge reminded himself. He didn’t want to lie, but he didn’t want to tell the truth, either. “It’s not as good as it could be, anyhow,” he said.

“Not more trouble on top of your dad, I hope?” Medwick knew Hipolito Rodriguez was dead. He didn’t know how-up till this moment, Jorge hadn’t known how himself. I still don’t, dammit, he thought fiercely.

“No, not on top of my father, gracias a Dios,” Jorge said, which was even true. “Just…trouble winding up his affairs, I guess you would say.”

“That’s no good,” Gabe said seriously. “Stuff like that can get a whole family riled up, with lawyers or maybe guns, depending. Some neighbors of ours started feuding over a will, and now everybody hates everybody else. You don’t want something like that to happen.”

“No, no,” Jorge said again. “I don’t think it will. But everything is more…more complicated than anyone thought it would be.”

“Not easy when somebody dies. I’m sorry,” Medwick said.

“No, not easy,” Jorge agreed.

Before he could say anything more, his head went up like a hound’s when it took a scent. He didn’t smell anything, but he heard trouble in the air. Gabe Medwick shouted it louder than he did: “Incoming!” They both dove for the closest hole in the ground.

It wasn’t really big enough for both of them, but they made do. And when the U.S. shells started bursting around them, they both tried to make themselves as small as they could, which made the hole seem bigger. That had to be crazy, but Jorge thought it was true.

The damnyankees had shelled Confederate positions in front of Chattanooga before, but this was different. That had just been harassing fire. This time, they meant it. They wanted to blow a big hole in the Confederate line right here, smash on through it, and head straight for the city the soldiers in butternut had defended so long and so hard.

They were liable to get what they wanted, too. Jorge had never been in a bombardment like this, not here and not back in Virginia, either. Beside him, Gabe Medwick was screaming for his mother. He wasn’t hurt-he was just scared to death. Jorge couldn’t blame him, not when he was scared to death, too.

As suddenly as it had begun, the barrage stopped. “Up!” Jorge said. “We’ve got to get out and fight, or they’ll murder all of us.”

He looked around…and found he might have been in the mountains of the moon. After a pounding like that, could the Confederates fight back?

If you wanted something and the fellow who had it didn’t feel like handing it over, one way to get it was to put a big rock in your fist and then slug him. The USA wanted Chattanooga. The Confederates didn’t feel like giving it up. Lieutenant Michael Pound knew a certain amount of pride at being on the pointy end of the rock.

As soon as the U.S. bombardment let up, he got on the wireless circuit to the other barrels in his platoon: “Let’s go get ’em! They think they can stop us. I say they’re wrong, and I say we’ll prove it.”

In war, proving the other guy was wrong often meant proving he had no business breathing. Pound was ready to use that kind of logic against Jake Featherston’s men. Why not? Featherston had tried using it against the United States.

As his barrel rumbled forward, Pound wondered if he would spot General Morrell. This was Morrell’s operation, and Pound knew how Morrell thought, how he fought, better than anyone else except possibly George Patton. One thing Morrell did was lead from the front. He’d be here somewhere.

“Old home week,” Pound muttered.

“What was that, sir?” Sergeant Scullard asked.

“Nothing. Woolgathering,” Pound said, embarrassed the gunner had overheard him. He still wasn’t used to getting called sir, either.

The bow machine gun chattered, knocking over a couple of soldiers in butternut unlucky enough to get caught away from cover. Another Confederate dropped his submachine gun and raised his hands over his head. “What do I do, sir?” The question came back to Pound over the intercom.

“Let him live,” Pound answered. “We’ve got infantry along to scoop up prisoners, and he doesn’t look like he’ll do any more fighting. We’ll play fair when we can.” And when they couldn’t-and there would be times like that-he would do whatever needed doing, and he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

He stood up in the turret, riding with head and shoulders out so he could see more. Only a little small-arms fire was coming back at the barrels; the barrage had left the Confederates more discombobulated than usual. Maybe they were finally starting to crack. He could hope so, anyhow.

More soldiers in butternut threw away their weapons and surrendered-or tried to, anyway. A machine gun behind them opened up and cut down several of them. Even the enemy’s machine guns packed more firepower than their U.S. equivalents. C.S. machine guns fired too fast to let you hear individual rounds going off; the noise sounded like the Devil tearing a sail in half.

It was enough to make Pound duck down into the turret and slam the cupola lid shut behind him. He didn’t mind taking chances, but he didn’t like taking dumb ones, and you couldn’t get much dumber than to offer that gun a clean shot at you. “Can you spot the son of a bitch?” he asked Scullard.

“Haven’t yet, sir,” the gunner answered. “Shall I give him a round or two of HE if I do?”

“Damn straight,” Pound said. “They’re starting to shoot their own people now. They might as well be Russians or Japs.”

They rolled past wherever the machine gun was concealed without spotting it. Pound wasn’t too worried about that. Another barrel or the infantry would take care of it. He just hoped it wouldn’t cause many casualties before that happened. Any which way, the machine gunners were in more trouble than they knew what to do with. Somehow or other, soldiers who served machine guns-especially soldiers who served them right up to the last minute-had a lot of trouble surrendering.

Pound peered through the periscopes set into the cupola. It wasn’t as good as riding with his head out, but it would have to do. He wondered where the Confederate barrels were. They couldn’t stay very far behind the line, not unless they didn’t intend to fight this side of the Chattanooga city limits. So…where?

“Front!” The gunner spotted the first enemy machine before Pound did. It squatted hull-down behind the rubble of what had been a roadside diner. And its crew had seen this barrel before anyone spotted it. Even as the gunner yelled for an armor-piercing round, the enemy cannon swung toward the barrel and spat fire.

Clang! Less than a second later, the enemy AP round hit the turret. It was like having your head stuck in God’s cymbals when He clashed them together. But the thick, well-sloped armor kept the round from penetrating.

“Thank you, Jesus!” Scullard said.

“Amen!” Michael Pound laughed from sheer relief at being alive. By the shape of its turret, the enemy barrel was an old model, one that carried only a two-inch gun. That cannon was better than good enough when the war started, but not any more. “Give him some of his own medicine, if you please.”

“Yes, sir!” The gunner’s enthusiasm surely also sprang from relief. He fiddled with the gun-laying controls-but not for long, because they’d be reloading with frantic haste in that other barrel, and they might get lucky the second time around.

The U.S. barrel’s gun spoke before the enemy got off his second shot. It wasn’t an easy target, not with only the Confederate machine’s turret showing. Pound wished he were making it himself. Not that Scullard wasn’t a damn good gunner-he was. But Pound knew he was better than a damn good gunner himself. He commanded the barrel, though. He couldn’t hop into the seat on the other side of the turret. Sometimes you had to trust the men under you, no matter how hard that was. Times like this, he wished he had his stripes back. Being an officer was no fun at all.

And then, suddenly, it was. The 3?-inch AP round punched through that old-fashioned turret as if its steel armor were so much cardboard. It knocked the turret half off the ring, knocked the enemy gun all askew. Then the ammunition stored inside the turret started cooking off. Better not to think about what happened to the Confederate barrelmen when a tungsten-pointed projectile started ricocheting around inside that crowded space. Much better not to think about it, because it had almost happened here instead.

“Good shot, Scullard!” Pound said. “Hell of a shot!” You could talk about the shot as if it were part of a game. You could talk about the enemy barrel as if it fought by itself, as if it had no crew inside. That way, you didn’t have to think about what happened to the men in there, what you’d just done to them.

“Thank you, sir.” The gunner laid an affectionate hand on the cannon’s breech. “If our turtle didn’t have a thick shell, those fuckers would’ve done unto us before we could do unto them.”

“First shot is better, but we made-you made-the second one count.” Pound gave credit where it was due.

Scullard sent him a sly grin. “Bet you wished you were doing the shooting yourself.” He knew Pound had been shifting in his seat.

“Well, maybe a little,” the barrel commander admitted-he couldn’t very well deny it. But he went on, “Probably just as well I wasn’t. You know the controls for this weapon better than I do.” That was not only polite but true. He’d fired a few rounds to familiarize himself with the cannon in case something happened to the gunner, but it was Scullard’s baby. Pound always thought he could do anything. Maybe getting reminded every once in a while that that might not be true was good for him.

“You’re a gent, sir,” Scullard said.

Pound laughed. “Only shows you don’t know me as well as you think you do, Sergeant.” He called the driver on the intercom: “Let’s get moving again. We keep sitting around, we give those bastards too good a shot at us.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said. The barrel lurched forward.

A couple of minutes later, machine-gun fire started clattering off the machine’s armored side and the turret. It sounded like hail on a corrugated-iron roof. Pound traversed the turret to the left. There was the machine gun, sure as hell, muzzle flash winking like a lightning bug. It had a damn fool running it-he couldn’t hurt a barrel with all the ammo in the world. “Front!” Pound sang out.

“Identified, sir,” Scullard replied. He spoke to the loader: “HE!”

“You got it.” The high-explosive shell went into the breech.

“Fire!” Pound yelled, and the gunner did. The shell casing leaped from the gun and clattered off the turret floor. Dirt and smoke fountained up a few yards in front of the machine-gun nest. “Short!” Pound said. “Give ’em another round or two. We’ll shut the bugger down, by God.”

“Yes, sir,” Scullard said, and then, “HE again.” His sensitive fingers raised the cannon a hair. He fired the gun. This time, the sandbags that warded the Confederate machine gun went flying. One of the men from the crew started to run. Scullard cut him down with a burst from the coaxial machine gun. “That takes care of that.”

Pound didn’t answer. He was turning his head this way and that, trying to look through all the periscopes set into the cupola. Somewhere not far away, a U.S. barrel was burning. It wasn’t one from his platoon, but that didn’t matter. He watched a rocket with a tail of fire brew up another U.S. barrel.

That made him angry. “Goddammit, where is our infantry?” he said. “They’re supposed to keep those bastards with the stovepipes too far off for them to shoot up our barrels that way.”

Then he forgot about enemy soldiers with rocket launchers. The Confederates weren’t saving all their armor inside Chattanooga-no, indeed. Butternut barrels rumbled forward. So did barrelbusters: self-propelled artillery pieces without turrets, so they had only a limited traverse, but with larger-caliber cannon than barrels carried. The United States were starting to use them, too. They could be dangerous, both because of the punch they packed and because their low silhouette made them easy to hide and hard to spot.

They were well armored, too, but not well enough-as Pound rapidly proved-to hold out a 3?-inch AP round. The armored melee was as wild as anything Pound had ever seen…till U.S. fighter-bombers appeared overhead and tore into the Confederate machines with rockets of their own. The enemy had no answer to those flaming lances slicing down from the sky. Several barrels and barrelbusters went up in flames. Others pulled back toward better cover.

“Forward!” Pound called to his platoon. One of the barrels couldn’t go forward; it had a track shot off, and needed repairs. The other four, including his, pressed on. “They can’t stop us!” he exulted.

Maybe the Confederates couldn’t, but nightfall did. He wouldn’t have minded storming forward after dark, but he got explicit orders to hold in place. He tried to tell himself it might be just as well. If green-gray infantry did come forward in the night, the enemy wouldn’t be able to use their rocket launchers against U.S. armor come morning. And if the infantry didn’t come up, Pound wanted to know why not.

He didn’t mind the chance to get out of the barrel and stretch his legs-and to empty the bottle into which he and the rest of the turret crew had been pissing all day long. He whistled softly when he got a good look at the groove the enemy AP round scored in the hard steel of the turret before bouncing off. “That was closer than I really like to think about,” he said to Scullard.

“Bet your ass-uh, yes, sir,” the gunner answered. He greedily sucked in cigarette smoke. Lighting up inside the turret wasn’t a good idea.

U.S. artillery came down on the Confederates not far ahead. Pound approved of that. Things seemed to be going…well enough, anyhow.

Jorge Rodriguez wasn’t just glad to be alive after everything he’d been through the past few days. He was amazed. The damnyankees were throwing everything they had into their drive on Chattanooga. His own side was throwing in everything it had to stop them. If anyone came out of the collision point still breathing, it meant one side or the other was falling down on the job.

If he saw the U.S. soldier who’d traded him ration cans for cigarettes, he knew he would shoot the son of a bitch in a minute-unless the Yankee shot him first. This wasn’t trading time, not any more.

He’d hoped the coming of night would slow the U.S. armored advance. It did, but U.S. artillery lashed the Confederates in their trenches and holes. Nobody talked about artillery much, but it was a worse killer than gunfire. It reached farther back from the line, and it could kill you even if you stayed in your hole. Staying down kept you out of the way of bullets. If a 105 shell came down where you were…If that happened, then you weren’t, not any more.

During a lull a little before midnight, Gabe Medwick called, “Hey, Jorge! You still alive?”

“I think so.” That was about the most Jorge could say. “How about you?”

“Last time I looked.” His friend’s laugh was shaky. “Way that last barrage came in, I wouldn’t bet on anything.”

“You guys want to shut the fuck up?” Yes, Sergeant Blackledge was still breathing, too. He would be, Jorge thought darkly. Blackledge went on, “You goddamn well better believe there’s damnyankees close enough to hear you runnin’ your mouths. Sniper with a scope on his rifle spots you moving around in your hole, you’re a Deeply Regrets wire waiting to happen.”

He wasn’t wrong. Somehow, that made listening to him more annoying, not less. Voice sly, Gabe Medwick said, “What about you, Sarge? You just now talked more’n both of us put together.”

“Yeah, but I ain’t dumb enough to let those shitheads draw a bead on me, and you dingleberries are,” Blackledge said. Jorge didn’t know what a dingleberry was, but he didn’t think it was anything good. He wouldn’t have sassed the sergeant. He’d been brought up to respect authority, not to harass it. His father’s hard hand made sure of that.

His father…He still didn’t know what to make of his mother’s letter. Why would his father kill himself? He’d jumped at the chance to put on the uniform of the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades. From his letters, he’d been proud to guard the camp in Texas. What could have made him change his mind? Nothing but mallates in the camp, not from what his father had said. It wasn’t as if they were real people or anything. So why would his old man have flabbled about them?

The artillery barrage picked up again. Crouching in his hole with clods of earth thudding down on him from near misses, wondering if the next one in wouldn’t be a near miss, Jorge felt more comfortable than he did wondering what was going through his father’s mind in the last few seconds of his life. He’d learned to master simple terror. Incomprehension was a different story.

In spite of the shelling, he snatched ten minutes of sleep here, twenty there, so that when the sun came up over Missionary Ridge he felt weary but not quite ready to keel over. If the Yankees felt weary, they didn’t show it. Their barrels growled forward even before sunrise. Jorge looked in vain for Confederate armor to throw them back.

An antibarrel gun set one enemy machine afire. A mine blew a track off another. The stovepipe rockets some soldiers were getting stopped a couple of more. But most of the green-gray barrels kept coming, with foot soldiers loping along between them. If you didn’t have a stovepipe, what could you do? You could fall back, or you could die.

Jorge fell back. He fired at enemy infantrymen. He had no idea if he hit anybody, but he made the damnyankees hit the dirt. Even slowing them down felt like a victory. Once, sprawled behind what was left of a stone fence, he saw Sergeant Blackledge on his belly not far away. Blackledge nodded to him. They were both still fighting, even if they were retreating. Jorge looked around for Gabe and didn’t see him. He hoped his buddy hadn’t stopped something for his country.

On that battlefield, an upright man was a prodigy. An upright man in dress uniform seemed like a hallucination. But the officer who came forward wore a chromed parade helmet with a general’s three stars in a wreath on the front in gold plate-or, for all Jorge knew, in solid gold. This spotless apparition also had a pearl-handled revolver in a holster on his left hip, and another one in his right hand.

However magnificent he looked, he sounded like Hugo Blackledge. “Come on, you stinking, cowardly scuts!” he roared. “Drive these Yankee bastards back! They’re not getting into Chattanooga, and that’s flat. It’s ours, and we’re damned well going to keep it. Come on! Do you want to live forever?”

Yes, Jorge thought. Oh, yes. But the general fired that revolver and ran forward.

“Get moving, you sorry bastards!” Sergeant Blackledge yelled. “Anything happens to General Patton, you fuckers’ll wish the Yankees blew your asses off! Move, God damn you!”

General Patton, fighting at the front line? General Patton, fighting like a private soldier? Like a crazy-brave private soldier? Jorge supposed it was possible. He’d heard weird things about Patton. A general who actually liked fighting for its own sake was a rare breed. Patton filled the bill.

Jorge did go forward to protect the crazy general. He believed Sergeant Blackledge. If anything happened to Patton, the unit that let it happen would catch hell. With the damnyankees throwing hell around in carload lots, that wouldn’t be hard to arrange.

“Incoming!” Gabriel Medwick shouted-he wasn’t hurt after all. Then he added, “Hit the dirt, General!” Jorge hit the dirt. He knew what that rising, hateful scream in the air was, whether George Patton did or not. My namesake, he realized. Patton would be one dead namesake if he didn’t get down.

He didn’t. The shell burst not far away. Smoke and dirt fountained up. Splinters knifed out in all directions. None of them touched Patton. Certain madmen were supposed to be able to walk through the worst danger without getting scratched. As far as Jorge was concerned, Patton qualified. You had to be loco to stay on your feet when you heard artillery coming in.

But if you did it, and if by some accident you lived through it, you could pull a lot of soldiers with you. Jorge and the men near him had started forward to try to keep General Patton from getting himself killed. When they saw he didn’t, they kept going forward to share his luck-and they drove the startled U.S. soldiers back before them. The men in green-gray hadn’t dreamt that the battered, pressured Confederates owned this kind of resilience. Jorge couldn’t blame them. He hadn’t dreamt any such thing himself.

And then the spell broke. Patton ran up to a soldier crouched behind a rock. “Come on, son!” he roared. “We’ve got Yankees to kill! Up and at ’em!”

The soldier didn’t move. Jorge was close enough to see he was gray and shaking. Shellshock, he thought, not without sympathy. Sometimes too many horrible things could happen to a man all at once, or a bunch of smaller things could accumulate over time. Then he’d be worthless for a while, or only good for light duty. If you let him take it easy, he usually snapped out of it after a while. If you tried to make him perform while he was at low ebb, chances were you wouldn’t have much luck.

Patton didn’t. His face darkened with anger. “Get up and fight, you shirking son of a bitch!” he bellowed.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the private said. “I’m doing the best I can, but-”

“No buts,” Patton growled. “I’ll boot your butt, that’s what!” And he did, with a jackboot almost as shiny as his helmet. “Now fight!”

Tears ran down the young soldier’s cheeks. His teeth chattered. “I’m sorry I’m not at my-”

He got no further. Patton slapped him in the face, forehand and then backhand. When that still didn’t get the kid moving, the general raised his fancy six-shooter.

“Hold it right there, General!” The shout came from Sergeant Blackledge. But his wasn’t the only automatic weapon pointed somewhere near Patton’s midriff. “Sir, you don’t shoot a man with combat fatigue. You do, you’ll have yourself a little accident.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Patton said.

“Sir, you pull that trigger, it’d be a pleasure,” Blackledge replied. Jorge listened in astonished admiration. He’d known Blackledge wasn’t afraid of the enemy. Knowing he wasn’t afraid of his own brass, either…That took a rarer brand of courage.

Jorge waited for Patton to demand the sergeant’s name. He didn’t know whether the general would want to know to arrest Blackledge or to promote him on the spot. But Patton did neither. “All right, then. If you want to stick with a lousy, stinking coward, you can,” he ground out. “But you’ll see what it gets you.” As if there weren’t U.S. soldiers no more than a hundred yards away, he turned on his heel and stalked off. His gait put Jorge in mind of an affronted cat.

Blackledge called, “Freedom!” after the departing general. Patton’s back stiffened. He kept walking.

“Th-Th-Thank you,” the guy with combat fatigue got out.

“Don’t worry about it, buddy,” Sergeant Blackledge said. “That fancy-pants asshole comes up here for half an hour, so he reckons he’s hot shit. Let him stay in the line for weeks at a stretch like us and see how he likes it. Being brave is one thing. Staying brave when all kinds of shit comes down on you day after day, that’s a fuck of a lot tougher.”

“I-I’ll try and go forward,” the shellshocked soldier said.

Blackledge only laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” he repeated. “We ain’t doin’ any more advancing, not for a while.” He raised his voice: “Everybody dig in! Damnyankees are gonna hear we’re getting frisky in this sector, so they’ll hit us with everything but the kitchen sink.”

“You forget something, Sergeant,” Jorge said.

“Yeah? What’s that?” The sergeant bristled at the idea he could have overlooked anything.

“Any second now, our own side, they gonna start shelling us, too,” Jorge answered.

Sergeant Blackledge stared at him, then grudged a chuckle. “That’d be a good joke if only it was a joke, you know what I mean? Fucking Patton’s probably ciphering out how to get us all killed right this minute.”

“Shoulda scragged him when we had the chance,” Gabe Medwick said. Dirt flew from his entrenching tool as he scraped out a foxhole. Jorge was also doing his best to imitate a mole.

“Nah.” Reluctantly, Blackledge shook his head. “Somebody woulda blabbed, and we’d all be in deep shit then. Deeper shit, if there is shit deeper’n this. Besides, who says the next jerk with stars and a wreath’d be any better? Oh, chances are he wouldn’t grandstand so much, but he’d still do his best to get us killed. Generals get their reputations for getting guys like us killed. Some’re smart assholes and some’re dumb assholes, but they’re all assholes, pretty much.”

“Good thing the enemy, he’s got assholes for generals, too,” Jorge said.

Before Blackledge could answer, U.S. artillery started coming in. The sergeant called that one right on the button. Jorge hoped the Yankees didn’t have barrels to follow up the bombardment. If they did, he knew damn well the outfit would have to retreat. He didn’t think they could hold the line they’d been in before Patton brought them forward, either. If they’d had armor of their own, maybe, but one general in a chromed helmet didn’t make up for what was missing.

Barrels painted green-gray did come clanking south. Jorge retreated, machine-gun bullets nipping at his heels. His other choice was dying. Patton would have approved of that for him. For himself, he didn’t like it for beans.

Irving Morrell’s barrel rattled forward. The Confederates had done everything they could to fortify the ground in front of Chattanooga. He was doing his best to show them that everything they could do wasn’t nearly enough.

“Time to make some more of those poor sorry bastards die for their country, Frenchy,” he told the gunner.

Sergeant Bergeron nodded. “Long as I don’t have to die for mine, sir, that sounds real good to me.”

“You’ve got the right attitude.” Morrell knew there were times when a soldier didn’t have much choice about dying for his country. Sometimes you had to lay down your life to keep lots of your buddies from losing theirs. Frenchy Bergeron knew that, too; Morrell had seen him in enough action to be sure of it. Only a man who did know about it could joke about it. But you could also get killed from stupidity or plain bad luck. You not only could, it was much too easy. That was the kind of thing Frenchy was talking about.

The Confederates weren’t crumbling, the way Morrell had hoped they would. They were fighting hard even as they fell back. They knew where he was headed, and they had a pretty good notion of how he would try to get there. That made for slow, expensive combat, not what Morrell wanted at all.

John Abell warned me slicing them up might take two campaigning seasons, Morrell remembered. He hadn’t wanted to believe it. He still didn’t. But there was a pretty fair chance the General Staff officer knew what he was talking about.

“Sir, an infantry counterattack just pushed us back a few hundred yards in Sector Blue-7,” someone said in his earphones.

“Blue-7. Roger that,” Morrell said. “I’ll pass the word on to the people who can do something about it.” Thanks to the fancy wireless gear that crowded the turret of his barrel, he could. The artillerymen at the other end of the connection promised him 105mm fire and brimstone would start dropping on that map sector in a couple of minutes. The Confederates wouldn’t enjoy the little gains they’d made. Satisfied, Morrell went back to commanding his barrel.

It was plowing through what had been the last major land defenses in front of the Tennessee River. Crossing the river and getting into Chattanooga itself would be another adventure, but just getting to it would give the war effort a kick in the pants. From the north side of the river line, the 105s now punishing Sector Blue-7 would be able to knock Chattanooga flat and leave it useless to the Confederate States.

A lot of U.S. generals would have been delighted to do that much. Morrell was a different kind of officer, and always had been. Doing what most people expected and no more didn’t interest him. He didn’t want to wound the Confederates here. He wanted to ruin them. Chattanooga wasn’t a goal in itself, not to him. It was a gateway. With it in his hands, with communications over the Tennessee secured, he could plunge his armored sword into the Confederacy’s heart.

Unfortunately, somebody on the Confederate General Staff, or maybe Jake Featherston himself, had seen that as plainly as Morrell had. The depth of these trench lines; the barbed wire; the minefields-now marked by signs painted with skull and crossbones-and the concrete pillboxes, some of them sporting antibarrel cannon, told the story very clearly. So did the stench of death. The fancy filters that were supposed to keep the barrel’s interior free of poison gas if it was buttoned up tight were powerless against the stink.

The barrel clattered past a dead pillbox. Scorch marks around the slit that let a machine gun traverse in there told what had happened. Morrell was a brave soldier, an aggressive soldier. Not for all the money in the world would he have strapped the fuel and gas cartridges for a flamethrower on his back. The men who did were either a little bit nuts-sometimes more than a little bit-or didn’t know the odds against them.

Along with disposing of unexploded bombs, lugging a flamethrower was one of the military specialties where the average soldier lasted a matter of weeks, not months. Using men who didn’t know as much seemed unfair. That didn’t stop the Army. Maybe ignorance was bliss-for a little while.

A U.S. helmet sat on top of a rifle stock. The rifle’s bayonet had been plunged into the ground above a hastily dug grave. Did the flamethrower man lie there? Morrell wouldn’t have been surprised. He saw two other pillboxes that covered the burned-out one. Of course the Confederates would have interlocking fields of fire; they weren’t amateurs. An armor-piercing round had put paid to one of those pillboxes. He couldn’t make out what happened to the other one, but a U.S. soldier leaned against it eating from a ration can, so it was under new management.

A salvo of rockets screamed in from the south. The soldier dove into a hole. Morrell hoped that would keep him safe. Sometimes blast from the screaming meemies killed even if shrapnel didn’t. As the explosives in the rockets’ noses burst, Morrell’s barrel shook like a ship on a stormy sea. He hoped he would stay safe himself. Those damn things could flip a fifty-ton barrel like a kid’s toy.

“Fun,” Frenchy Bergeron said when the salvo ended.

Morrell looked at him. “How many times did your mother drop you on your head when you were little?”

The gunner grinned. “Oh, enough, I expect…sir.”

“I guess so,” Morrell said with feeling, and the gunner laughed out loud.

Were Morrell in Patton’s shoes, he would have pulled back over the Tennessee and made the U.S. commander figure out how to get at him on the south bank. Patton seemed to want to fight it out as far forward as he could. Some of the things Morrell was hearing from Intelligence suggested Patton had to worry about political pressure from Richmond: or, in plain English, Jake Featherston was screaming his head off.

Fighting the enemy was hard enough. Fighting the enemy and your own leaders had to be ten times worse. Morrell had had his arguments and squabbles with the War Department himself. The suspicion with which he and John Abell had watched each other ever since the middle of the last war proved that-as if it needed proving. But when a president ran the war himself, something was bound to get screwed up somewhere.

Being sure of that made Morrell keep his eyes open in a special way. If Patton goofed, or even if he didn’t but a U.S. attack threw his men north of the river into disarray, Morrell’s troops might be able to get over the Tennessee before the Confederates knew they’d done it. And if they could, Chattanooga would fall.

How angry would that make Jake Featherston? Angry enough to sack General Patton? Morrell hoped so. Patton made no bones about having learned armored warfare from him. Morrell could have done without the compliment, because the Confederate officer made much too good a pupil. The drive into Ohio was a small masterpiece. The one into Pennsylvania almost worked, too. And the counterattack through the mountains in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee was well conceived; Patton just didn’t have the men and materiel to bring it off.

Through a cupola periscope, Morrell watched a U.S. barrel commander leading a platoon of new-model barrels toward the hottest fighting. The sergeant or lieutenant or whatever he was stood head and shoulders out of his cupola. Morrell knew a stab of jealousy. He wanted to fight the same way. Only a cold calculation of his own value to the advance kept him buttoned up in here. That fellow out ahead of him had the freedom insignificance could bring.

“Son of a bitch,” Morrell muttered.

“What’s cookin’, sir?” Sergeant Bergeron asked.

“Nothing,” Morrell said. It wasn’t quite a lie-it was nothing that would matter to Frenchy. But damned if the broad shoulders on that barrel commander didn’t remind Morrell of Michael Pound. He knew they’d finally dragged his old gunner up into officer country, kicking and screaming all the way. Pound was on this front, too. So why wouldn’t he be in charge of a platoon of barrels? No reason. No reason at all.

That barrel stopped and fired. Something too far away for Morrell to make it out very well burst into flames. Morrell slowly nodded. He wouldn’t want to be Michael Pound’s gunner, not for anything. Pound knew the business too well. Chances were he made an impossibly demanding commander. But the gunner in that machine had scored a hit. Pound couldn’t complain there.

“Steer left a little,” Morrell called to his driver. “Follow that platoon up ahead of us. They look like they’re going places.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said, and he did.

Sweat rivered off Morrell. He wished he were on the cool north German plain, pushing the British back through Holland. You could stand staying buttoned up in a barrel in weather like that. Doing it in late summer in southern Tennessee was a recipe for hell on earth, or possibly a New England boiled dinner. Barrelmen poured down water by the gallon and gulped salt tablets like popcorn. It helped…some.

Michael Pound’s barrel-if that was Pound in the cupola-fired again. Something else blew up. Morrell mentally apologized to that gunner. He was good enough to meet anybody’s standards.

A shell clanged off another barrel in the platoon. The round didn’t penetrate; the sparks that flashed as it ricocheted away made a pretty fair lightning bolt. The barrel kept moving forward. That hit would have wrecked one of the early models, and probably would have killed a second-generation machine, too. But these babies didn’t just dish it out. They could take it, too.

“I’ll be goddamned,” Morrell said: one of the more reverent curses he’d ever used. “There’s the river.”

“The Tennessee, sir?” Bergeron said.

“Damn straight. Maybe half a mile ahead,” Morrell answered.

“Let’s go grab the bank.” Yes, Frenchy’s promotion was way overdue-he had plenty of aggressive spirit.

And Morrell nodded. “Yeah. Let’s. Then we see what happens next.”

Getting there wasn’t easy. An antibarrel round disabled one of the machines from the platoon ahead. The barrel lost a track; the crew, safer than they would have been if they bailed out, stayed inside and fired back. Machine-gun rounds clattered off Morrell’s barrel. He had an advantage over junior officers: he could call in air strikes and artillery and get what he wanted when he wanted it. He could also summon reinforcements. He did all those things, and resistance faded.

“Careful, sir,” Frenchy Bergeron said when he opened the hatch and stood up in the cupola. He was being careful-or he thought he was, anyhow.

The loop of the Tennessee River protecting Chattanooga was summer-narrow, but still too broad and swift to be easy to cross. Beyond lay the city. Smoke from the pounding it had taken partly veiled Lookout Mountain to the south. Morrell wasn’t sorry to see that, not in the least. The Confederates would have observation posts and gun emplacements up there. If they had trouble seeing his men, they would also have trouble hitting them.

He cupped his hands and shouted to the platoon commander whose barrel idled not far away: “That is you, Michael! You did a good job getting here.”

“Thanks, sir. I was hoping to see you again.” Pound patted the top of his turret. “We’ve finally got what you could have given us twenty years ago. They should have listened then.”

“Ifs and buts,” Morrell said with a shrug. He wasn’t done being angry, but he was done thinking being angry made any difference.

Pound pointed south, toward Chattanooga. “How do we get over the river?” Even more than Frenchy, he had a grasp of the essential.

Morrell shrugged again. “I don’t know yet, but I expect we’ll think of something.”

“Georgia,” Jerry Dover muttered “I’m back in fucking Georgia.”

He wasn’t very far inside of Georgia, but he was south of the Tennessee line. There was no place in southeastern Tennessee Yankee artillery couldn’t reach. Bombers were bad enough. But you couldn’t keep a major supply depot in range of the enemy’s guns. They would ruin you.

As Dover had farther north, he built another dump, a dummy, not far from the genuine article. Experience made him sneakier. Instead of leaving this one out in the open, he camouflaged it…not too well. Instead of leaving it empty, he stored things he could afford to lose there: umbrellas, condoms, a good many cigarettes, cornmeal. He put more noncoms at the dummy depot, too, though he made sure they had the best bomb shelters they could. The more realistic the dummy seemed, the better its chance of fooling spies and reconnaissance aircraft.

It got bombed, but not too heavily. The real depot also got bombed-again, not too heavily. The damnyankees dropped explosives on anything that looked as if it might be dangerous, even a little bit. Dover wished his own side could use bombs-and bombers-with such reckless abandon.

One reason the depots didn’t get hit harder was that the United States seemed to have decided the most dangerous things in northwestern Georgia were the highway and railroads up from Atlanta. In their place, Jerry Dover probably would have decided the same thing. If reinforcements and ammunition and rations couldn’t get close to Chattanooga, supply dumps didn’t matter.

Dover felt sorry for whoever was in charge of keeping the railroad line supplied with rails and crossties and switches and whatever the hell else a railroad line needed. That included everything you needed to fix bridges and reopen tunnels, too. He laughed to himself, imagining that harried officer requisitioning a new tunnel from somewhere, waiting till he got it, and then driving it through a mountain.

When he told the joke to Pete, the quartermaster sergeant laughed fit to bust a gut. Then he said, “You know, sir, nobody who ain’t in the business would reckon that was funny.”

“Yeah, that crossed my mind, too,” Dover answered. “But what the hell? There are doctor jokes and lawyer jokes. Why not supply jokes?”

“Beats me,” Pete said. “Just having anything to laugh about feels pretty goddamn good right now, you know?”

“Tell me about it,” Dover said.

The more antibarrel cartridges and rockets he sent to the front, the more trouble he figured Confederate forces were in. Gunboats had almost stopped going up the Tennessee to shell U.S. positions. Fighter-bombers descended on them like hawks on chickens when they tried. The gunboats couldn’t steam far enough south by daybreak to get out of danger. Several lay on the bottom of the river. The day of the river warship had come and gone.

A field-post truck brought the mail to Dover’s depot. That kicked most people’s morale higher than any jokes could. Men who heard from home glowed like lightbulbs. The handful who didn’t seemed all the gloomier by contrast.

Jerry Dover had two letters from his wife. He also had one from Savannah. He put that one aside. His family came first. He read the letters from home in order of postmark. Everything back in Augusta was fine. His son and daughter were flourishing. He wasn’t sorry that Jethro, at thirteen, was too young to worry about conscription. No, he wasn’t one bit sorry, not the way things were going.

But he read Sally’s letters with only half his attention. His eye kept going back to the envelope from Savannah. At last, having gone through the news from home three times, he picked up the other envelope. It looked no different from the ones from Augusta, not on the outside: same cheap, coarse paper on the envelope, same four-cent stamp with a barrel and the word FREEDOM printed across it. No matter how it looked, he picked it up as warily as an Army engineer dug up a land mine.

Yes, it was from Melanie. He’d known that as soon as he saw the handwriting, let alone the postmark. It wasn’t so much that he’d once had a lady friend his wife didn’t known about. If that were all…If that were all, he wouldn’t have opened the envelope with so much trepidation.

It wasn’t even that she wanted money every now and then. She never asked for more than he could afford-and she seemed to know just how much that was. He’d sent Xerxes down to Savannah with cash one time when he couldn’t get away himself.

Sometimes, though, Melanie didn’t want money. When he was managing the Huntsman’s Lodge, she’d sometimes been interested in knowing who came to eat there and what they had to say. She’d made it much too plain that she would talk to Sally if he didn’t tell her. So he did. Why not? If she was blackmailing other people besides him, he wouldn’t lose much sleep over it.

But what could she want now that he was back in uniform? If it was only money, he’d pay off. If it was anything besides money…In that case, he had a problem. If she wasn’t just a homegrown blackmailer, if she was looking for things another government-say, the USA’s (yes, say it-say it loud)-might find interesting, then having Sally find out about her was the least of his worries.

She knew where to find him. He hadn’t told her. He didn’t know anyone who would have told her. She knew, though. He didn’t think that was a good omen.

The faintest whiff of perfume came from the stationery she used. Unlike the envelope, the paper was of excellent quality. It had to date back to before the war. He unfolded the letter and apprehensively began to read.

Her script was fine and feminine. Dearest Jerry, she wrote, I hope this finds you well and safe. I know you are doing all you can to keep our beloved country strong. Freedom!

He muttered under his breath. Did she mean that, or was it window dressing to lull any censors? He didn’t think the envelope was opened before he saw it, but he could have been wrong. Only one way to find out: he kept reading.

Things here haven’t changed much since the last time I wrote, she went on. Prices have gone up some, though, and the stores don’t have as much as I wish they did. If you could send me a hundred dollars, it would help a lot.

He breathed a sigh of relief. He had a hundred dollars in his wallet. He’d had good luck and a good partner at the bridge table two nights before. If that was all…

But it wasn’t. He might have known it wouldn’t be. Hell, he had known. You ought to tell me about your friends, she wrote. I never hear about how things really are at the front. Where are you exactly? Dover snorted. As if she didn’t know! What are you doing? How are you going to lick the damnyankees?

Jerry Dover didn’t snort this time. He sighed. He feared he knew what she was asking for. He’d wondered if she would. He hadn’t wanted to believe it, but here it was.

And he was liable to end up in trouble on account of it. He’d end up in worse trouble if he told her the things she wanted to know, though. He sent a soldier after his second-in-command here, a bright, eager captain named Rodney Chesbro. “Don’t let them steal this place while I’m gone,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to the Intelligence people.”

“Find out how we’re going to kick the damnyankees in the slats?” Chesbro asked-yes, he was eager. “If they tell you, will you tell me, too?”

“If they say I can,” Dover answered, which was less of a promise than it sounded like.

He drove a beat-up Birmingham north toward Chattanooga. The road was in bad shape. He was glad no U.S. fighter-bombers showed up to strafe him or drop explosives on his head. It was only a few miles to Division HQ, but getting there took twice as long as he’d thought it would.

As always, the tent where the G-2 men worked was inconspicuous. Intelligence didn’t advertise what it was up to. If you didn’t need to talk to those people, they didn’t want you around. Dover wished he didn’t. But he did. A few words to a scholarly-looking noncom got him sent over to a Major Claude Nevers. “What can I do for you, Colonel?” Nevers asked.

“I have a problem, Major,” Dover answered. “I’ve got a lady friend who’s been quietly squeezing me for money for quite a while. I wouldn’t waste your time if that were all, but now she’s trying to get information out of me, too.” He showed the Intelligence officer the letter.

Nevers read it and nodded. “I think you’re right. She’s smooth, but that’s the way it looks to me.” He eyed Dover. “You realize we’re going to have to look at you, too?”

“Yeah,” Dover said without enthusiasm. “But you’d look a lot harder, and you’d have some nastier tools, if I kept mum and you found out about this anyway. So do whatever you need to do, and I’ll worry about that later.”

“All right, Colonel.” Nevers didn’t call him sir. “Most of the time, I’d remove you from active duty, too. But we’re strapped for men now, and I’ve heard more than a few people who ought to know talk about what a good job you’re doing. So give me the particulars about this, ah, Melanie.”

“Melanie Leigh.” Dover spelled the last name. “Brunette. Blue eyes. Maybe thirty-five, maybe forty. About five feet four. Nice figure. You’ve got the address there. I’ve been sending her cash now and then for years so my wife wouldn’t hear about her. She can’t live on what I give her, though. I have no idea if she has other guys on the string, or how many. I don’t know how she’d get word out, either-but she likely has a way.”

“Uh-huh,” Nevers said. “Send her this hundred she wants. Write her a chatty letter about the kind of stuff you do. Tell her funny stories, nothing she can really use. With luck, we’ll drop on her before she can write back saying that isn’t what she wants.”

“Tunnel requisitions,” Dover murmured. Major Nevers looked blank. “I understand what you’re talking about, Major,” Dover told him. “I’ll do it. Maybe I’m seeing shadows where nothing’s casting them, but…”

“Yes. But,” Nevers said. “Go tend to it, Colonel. We’ll be in touch.”

“Right,” Dover said unhappily.

When he got back to the dump, he had to explain to Captain Chesbro that he didn’t know how the Confederate States were going to drive the Yankees back to the Ohio by Wednesday next. Writing a cheery, chatty letter to a woman he feared was a spy wasn’t easy, but he managed. He let Major Nevers vet it before he sent it out; he didn’t want the G-2 man thinking he was warning Melanie. He left it and the money and an envelope with the major to mail. Then he tried to worry about logistics.

He got a call from the major that night-in the middle of the night, in fact. A noncom woke him to go to the telephone. Without preamble, the Intelligence officer said, “She flew the coop, dammit.”

Dover said the first thing that came into his mind: “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I know that,” the Intelligence officer answered. “We’ve had you under surveillance since you came to me earlier today.”

We? You and your pals? You and your tapeworm? You and God? Dover was silly with sleepiness. “How did she know to disappear, then?” he asked.

“Good question,” Major Nevers said. “I hope we find out-that’s all I’ve got to tell you. You’ve exposed a security leak, that’s for damn sure. I suppose I ought to thank you.” He didn’t sound grateful. Dover, yawning, didn’t suppose he could blame him.

Every time Major General Abner Dowling saw a pickup truck these days, he winced. The Confederates’ improvised gun platforms had caused him a hell of a lot of grief. Their flanking attacks had stalled his drive on Camp Determination and Snyder. They hadn’t made him fall back on Lubbock, let alone driven him over the border into New Mexico, the way the enemy probably hoped. But his men weren’t going forward any more, either.

And so he grimaced when a pickup truck approached Eleventh Army headquarters out there in the middle of nowhere, even though the truck was painted U.S. green-gray and he could see it had no machine gun mounted in the bed. No matter what color it was painted, guards made sure it wasn’t carrying a bomb before they let it come up to the tent outside of which Dowling stood.

He started to laugh when the truck door opened and a brisk woman not far from his own age got out. “What’s so damn funny, Buster?” Ophelia Clemens demanded, cigarette smoke streaming from her mouth as she spoke.

“The guards were looking for explosives, but they let you through anyhow,” Dowling answered. “You cause more trouble than any auto bomb or people bomb ever made.”

She batted her eyes at him, which set him laughing all over again. “You say the sweetest things, darling,” she told him. “Do you still keep a pint hidden in your desk?”

“It was only a half pint,” he said, “and now I’ll have to put a lock on that drawer.” That made her laugh. “Come on in,” he continued. “I’ll see what I can find. It’s good to see you, by God.”

“People I talk to aren’t supposed to tell me things like that,” the reporter said severely. “They’re supposed to say, ‘Jesus Christ! Here’s that Clemens bitch again!’” She was kidding, and then again she wasn’t.

“I never do things I’m supposed to. Would I be here if I did?” Dowling held the tent flap wide. “Won’t you walk into my parlor, said the fly to the spider?”

“That’s more like it.” Ophelia Clemens ducked inside. Dowling followed her. He did produce some whiskey, and even a couple of glasses. As he’d seen her do before, Miss Clemens-she’d never married-knocked hers back like a man. “And that’s more like it, too,” she said. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Dowling said. “I don’t suppose you came way the hell out here just to drink my booze, so suppose you tell me why you did.”

“I want to do a piece on Camp Determination,” she answered. “I want to show people in the USA what that murderous son of a bitch in Richmond is doing to his Negroes.”

“That would be good,” Dowling said carefully, “but a lot of what we know is classified. I don’t know how much I’m authorized to show the press. Some of what we have shows how we got it, which isn’t so good.”

“This will have to pass the censors before it goes out,” she said. “As for authorization…” She fumbled in her purse, which held only a little less than a private’s pack. “Here.” She thrust a folded piece of paper at him.

He unfolded it. It was a letter from Assistant Secretary of War Franklin D. Roosevelt, allowing and indeed requiring him to tell Miss Clemens what he knew “since this information, when widely publicized, will prove valuable to the war effort.” He set it down. “Well, you’ve persuaded me,” he said. “I’m putty in your hands.”

“Promises, promises,” Ophelia Clemens said. They both grinned. The game of seduction played for farce, with neither of them intending to conquer, was almost as fun in its own way as it would have been for real. “What have you got?”

Dowling produced aerial photos. “Here’s the camp. The side north of the train tracks-that’s this way-holds women and children. The other side, which is older, is for men.”

“Uh-huh.” Like him, the reporter wore bifocals. “How big is this thing?”

“You see these little tiny rectangles here by the men’s side?” Dowling waited for her to nod, then went on, “Those are trucks. They’re about the size of our deuce-and-a-halfs.”

Ophelia Clemens blinked. “The place is that big?” Now Dowling nodded. She whistled. “It’s not a camp. It’s a goddamn city!”

“No, ma’am,” Dowling said. “There’s one big difference. A city has a permanent population. People go into Camp Determination, they go through it, but they don’t come out again-not alive, anyway.”

“And your evidence for that is…?”

He passed her more photos. “This is-was-a stretch of Texas prairie not far from the camp. Barbed wire keeps people out, not that anybody who doesn’t have to is likely to want to go out to the back of beyond. The bulldozers give you some idea of scale here. They also dig trenches. You can see that most of those are covered over. The couple that aren’t…Those are bodies inside.” He gave her another picture. “A low-level run by a fighter-bomber got us this one. You can really make out the corpses here.”

“Jesus!” She studied it. “How many bodies are in here? Have you got any idea?”

“Only a rough one,” Dowling answered. “Hundreds of thousands of people, that’s for sure. The experts who are supposed to be good at figuring this stuff out say it’s unlikely there are more than a million…so far, anyway.”

“Jesus!” Ophelia Clemens said again, more violently than before. “Give me that bottle again, will you? I need another drink. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million-what did they do to deserve it?”

“They were born colored,” Dowling said. “To the Freedom Party, that’s a capital offense.”

“If that’s a joke, it’s not funny,” she said as he passed her the bottle. Her throat worked when she drank.

“I wasn’t kidding,” he told her. “The other thing you have to remember is, this isn’t the only camp the Confederates have. We think it’s the biggest, but we’ve also been able to disrupt operations here better than anywhere else. The ones farther east, in Louisiana and Mississippi, they go right on working all the time, because we can’t reach them.”

Ophelia Clemens looked from one photograph to another with the kind of horrified fascination a bad traffic accident might cause. But motorcars hadn’t banged together here-whole races had. And one was running over the other. “If they keep this up, there won’t be many Negroes left in the CSA by the time they’re done.”

“No, ma’am. That’s not quite right.” Dowling shook his head. Ophelia Clemens made a wordless questioning noise. He explained: “They don’t aim to leave any colored people alive. Not one. That’s what they’re aiming for. They don’t even bother hiding it. Hell, some of the Freedom Party Guards we’ve captured brag about what they’re doing. Far as they’re concerned, it’s God’s work.”

“God’s work.” She spat out the words as if they tasted bad. “If I believed in God, General, these photos would turn me into an atheist. These photos would turn the Pope into an atheist.”

“I doubt it,” Dowling said. “The Vatican kept quiet when the Turks slaughtered Armenians. It hasn’t said boo about the Russian pogroms against the Jews. So why should Pope Pius give a damn about what happens to a bunch of coons who mostly aren’t Catholic on the other side of the ocean?”

“Who mostly aren’t Catholic,” Ophelia Clemens repeated. “Yes, that’s about the size of it, I’m afraid. He’d bellow like a bull if they were. But since he doesn’t care, what are you doing about it?”

“I’m trying to take Camp Determination, that’s what,” Dowling answered. “It’s not easy, but I’m trying.”

“Why isn’t it easy? This ought to be one of the most important things we’re doing,” she said. “Hundreds of thousands of bodies…Attila the Hun didn’t kill that many people, I bet.”

“There weren’t so many people to kill back then,” Dowling said. “And why isn’t it easy? Because this is a secondary front, that’s why. I’m short of men, I’m short of barrels, and I’m short of artillery. I used to be short of airplanes, too, but I’m not any more. Of course, the Confederates are even shorter on everything than I am. That’s why I’ve managed to come as far as I have.”

“It’s criminal that you’re short.” Ophelia Clemens’ pencil raced across the notebook page. “That smells as bad as all those bodies put together, and I’m going to let the world hear about it.”

“No!” Dowling exclaimed. She stared at him in surprise, anger, and something not far from hatred. “No,” he repeated. “Don’t raise a fuss about it. Please. Don’t.”

His earnestness must have got through to her. Her voice was hard and flat when she said, “You’re going to have to explain that,” but she didn’t sound as if she would poison a rattlesnake when she bit it.

Glad she didn’t, Dowling said, “I will. I used to think different, but it’s simple, when you get down to it. The best way to put Camp Determination out of business is to lick the CSA. That’s what General Morrell is doing over in Tennessee, and more power to him. More power to him, literally. If I had two or three times the men and materiel I do, I’d be taking them away from him, and I don’t want to do that. I can annoy the Confederates. I can embarrass them. He can win the war. Do you see the difference?”

She didn’t answer for a long time. At last, she said, “I never thought I’d want to punch a man in the nose for being right.”

“It happens,” Dowling said. “Look at George Custer, for instance.”

“A point,” she admitted. “I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to punch him, but he won the Great War, didn’t he?”

“Oh, not all by himself, but more than anybody else, I think,” Dowling answered. “He saw what barrels could do, and he made sure they did it no matter what the War Department said. General Morrell was in on that, too, remember, though he wasn’t a general then, of course.”

She pointed at him. “So were you.”

“Maybe a little.” Dowling’s main role had been to lie through his teeth to the big wigs in Philadelphia. Had Custer’s brutal simplicity failed-as it was known to do-Dowling would have lied away his own career along with his superior’s. But for once Custer was right, and success, as usual, excused everything else.

“Modest at your age?” Ophelia Clemens jeered. “How quaint. How positively Victorian.”

“You say the sweetest things,” Dowling told her. “Just don’t say I want more men, because honest to God I don’t. I’m keeping the Confederates busy. They can’t send reinforcements east from this front. They’ve had to reinforce it, in fact, to keep me away from Camp Determination. And every man they send out here to the far end of Texas is a man they don’t have in Tennessee.”

“‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’” she quoted.

“Is that Shakespeare?” To Dowling, anything that sounded old had to be Shakespeare.

But she shook her head. “Milton, I think.”

“If you say so. It’s true here, though. Except I’m not standing. I’m staying busy with what I’ve got. I think I can go another forty miles.”

“If you go thirty, you can shell the camp,” she said.

“We haven’t bombed it because we don’t want to go into the Negro-killing business ourselves,” Dowling said. “Same problem with shelling. The people in the camp would be on our side if they got guns. They are on our side. They just can’t do anything about it.”

“Any way to change that?” Ophelia Clemens asked.

“I don’t see one,” Dowling said regretfully. “I wish I did.”