The Grapple

I

Funereal music poured out of the wireless set on Brigadier General Clarence Potter’s desk. For three days, Confederate stations had played nothing but somber tunes and even more somber commentaries praising the courage of the army whose survivors had just surrendered in Pittsburgh.

Potter’s mouth twisted. Behind steel-rimmed spectacles, his cold gray eyes flashed. That army should have taken Pittsburgh away from the damnyankees. With their great industrial center gone, the USA should have had to make peace. From everything the Intelligence officer knew, Pittsburgh was a wreck. That would hurt the United States. But the army that should have conquered it was gone, every man a casualty or a prisoner. That would hurt the Confederate States even more.

The latest dirge-tempo march ended. An announcer came on the air. “Courage, self-denial, modesty, and the willingness to make every sacrifice are the highest virtues of the Confederate soldier,” he said. “It was not the lust for conquest which caused the Confederacy to take up arms. This war was forced upon us by the destructive aims of our enemies.”

Well, what else could the man say? If he came right out and announced that Jake Featherston wanted to go to war long before he became President of the CSA, it wouldn’t look good. Potter knew perfectly well that it was true. He also knew that what was true and what made good propaganda often had not even a nodding acquaintance with each other.

“Our soldiers are completely imbued with the importance and the value of the ideas now championed by the Freedom Party,” the announcer said. For better and for worse, Potter knew how true that was. The announcer went on, “The Confederate soldier is convinced of them to the very depths of his innermost being, and that is why the Confederate armed forces form an invincible bloc having as its spiritual foundation the sublime ethics of a soldierly tradition. It is, moreover, inspired by belief in its high mission of protecting the Confederate States against the longtime enemy to the north, the enemy who would gladly deny our great nation its very right to exist.”

Again, he wasn’t wrong. This was the fourth war between the USA and the CSA in the past eighty years. But if the Confederates were so bloody invincible, what went wrong in Pennsylvania? Potter, a confirmed cynic, would think of something like that. Would the average Confederate who was listening? Maybe not.

“We see the most magnificent example of this in the sacrifice of the troops fighting at Pittsburgh,” the announcer went on. “That let our armies farther west build up new dams to hold back the raging Yankee torrent and continue to preserve the Confederacy from the annihilating rule of the USA. Cut off from all possibility of receiving reinforcements, surrounded by implacable foes, they fought on with bayonets and entrenching tools after their ammunition was exhausted. Truly their courage and devotion will live forever.”

The music swelled once more: yet another sorrowful tune. Potter sighed. Putting a good face on disaster was always hard. He wondered why he kept listening. Knowing what the rest of the country was going through was useful. That had something to do with it. The rest was akin to picking at a scab. The pain held a perverse attraction.

He started a little when the telephone rang. Turning down the music, he picked up the handset. “Potter here.” If anybody needed to know what he did, that person had got hold of him by mistake.

“Hello, Potter there.” The voice on the other end of the line was a harsh rasp every Confederate citizen recognized at once. “I need you to be Potter here, soon as you can get on over.”

“Yes, Mr. President. On my way.” Potter hung up. He turned off the wireless. When Jake Featherston said he wanted to see you as soon as you could come, you needed to get to the Gray House in a hurry.

Potter went upstairs. The door by which he came out on the ground floor had something innocuous painted on the frosted-glass window. You would never open it unless you already knew where it led.

Workmen labored to repair bomb damage. The damnyankees hit the War Department as often as they could. More and more of the business here went on underground-how far underground, even Potter wasn’t sure any more. The men who bossed the work parties were whites too old or too crippled to help the war effort. Some of the men in the crews were colored, though a lot of Negroes had already been removed from Richmond. More workmen were Mexicans, up from Francisco Jose’s ramshackle empire to find better-paying work in the CSA.

Some offices on the ground floor were still usable. The officers and clerks who worked in them took a sour pride in staying at those battered desks as long as they could. Several men waved to Potter as he walked past. He nodded in return.

All the motorcars outside the War Department were ordinary civilian models. Every so often, U.S. fighters streaked low over Richmond in broad daylight, shooting up whatever they could. No point giving them any special targets. As if at a cab stand, Potter got into the forward-most auto. “The Gray House,” he told the driver.

“Yes, sir.” The soldier started the engine and put the Birmingham in gear.

More work crews repaired streets and gas lines and water mains and electric lines and telephone wires and…anything else that could be damaged when bombs fell on it or near it. Hardly any glass windows faced the world these days. Plywood and cardboard covered even the ones the damnyankees hadn’t blown to smithereens.

Again, Mexicans did a lot of the work Negroes would have handled before. The Confederate States would be a different country when the war was through. Whites had anxiously watched blacks for much too long. Well, soon there’d be far fewer blacks to need watching. Potter had long opposed the Freedom Party, but he didn’t mind its taking a shot at the Negro problem. He didn’t know any white man who did.

As he’d expected, the driver had to detour several times before he got to the presidential mansion. Craters made some streets impassable. One block had sawhorses and warning signs all around. DANGER! UNEXPLODED BOMB! the signs shouted in big red letters. Maybe the bomb was a dud. Maybe a time fuse ticked inside it. Either way, Potter didn’t envy the men who worked to get the ordnance out of there. They were skilled technicians. No matter how skilled they were, their average life expectancy was measured in weeks.

The snouts of sandbagged antiaircraft guns poked up from the Gray House grounds. Not much of the building was left above ground. The damnyankees kept doing their best to level it. They wanted Jake Featherston dead, not only because losing him would take the wind out of the Confederacy’s sails, but also because Confederate bombs had killed U.S. President Al Smith.

“Here you are, sir.” The driver pulled to a stop in front of the rubble pile.

“Thanks.” Clarence Potter got out of the Birmingham. With a clash of gears, it rolled away.

Guards waited in among the wreckage. “Let’s see your papers, sir,” one of them said.

No one got anywhere in the CSA without proper papers these days. Potter displayed his. Once the guards were satisfied about who he was, one of them used a telephone. That done, he nodded to his pal. Together, they opened a heavy steel trap door.

Potter went down the stairs. They bent several times to foil blast that might penetrate the door above. In due course, he got to another door, this one even thicker. He pressed the button next to it. It swung open from the inside. More guards nodded to him. “Come with us, sir,” one of them said.

“I know the drill,” Potter said.

They ignored him. He’d figured they would. All of what went on at the Gray House went on underground these days. People who spent a lot of time down there were as pale and pasty as…people who spent a lot of time underground at the War Department. Potter looked at the backs of his own hands, and at the veins clearly visible there. He wasn’t a vampire, to whom the sun was death, but he often behaved as if he were.

Lulu, Jake Featherston’s longtime secretary, nodded to him. “He’ll be with you in a moment, General,” he said.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Potter answered. You treated Lulu with respect or you were sorry. No one ever talked about the authority secretaries and other such people had, which didn’t make it any less real.

The moment stretched to about five minutes. Featherston wasn’t in the habit of making people cool their heels just to be sitting. Something had to be going on. And something was. Nathan Bedford Forrest III, the head of the Confederate General Staff, came out of the President’s office. He didn’t look happy.

He looked even less happy when he saw Potter in the waiting room. Potter wasn’t happy to see him, either. They weren’t quite conspirators. If it looked as if Jake Featherston was dragging the CSA down to ruin, someone would have to try to dispose of him. If that worked, someone would have to try to run the country afterwards. As far as Potter could see, Nathan Bedford Forrest III made far and away the best candidate.

Forrest wanted the job as much as he wanted another head. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to do it-he had a strong sense of duty. It meant he hoped everything would turn out all right, even though he was the one who’d first wondered whether Jake Featherston was going round the bend.

Did Featherston know about those wary discussions? If he did, would Nathan Bedford Forrest III still be free? Potter didn’t think so.

“You can go in now, General,” Lulu said.

“Thank you very much,” Potter said. From most Confederates, that would have been, Thank you kindly. He’d never lost the more than half-Yankee way of speaking he picked up to fit in while he was at Yale.

“Hello, Potter,” Jake Featherston said. The President of the CSA was in his early fifties, tall and rawboned, his close-cropped brown hair going gray. His eyes had dark pouches under them that hadn’t been there a few years before. They still blazed, though. If ruthless determination could pull the CSA through, Featherston was the man to give it.

“What’s up, sir?” Potter asked, hoping it had nothing to do with Nathan Bedford Forrest III.

“I need you to light a fire under Professor FitzBelmont. I don’t care if you promise him prime pussy or promise you’ll shoot his kids if he doesn’t get his ass in gear, but get him moving. We really need that uranium bomb,” Featherston said.

The Confederate uranium program had got off to a slow start because the President didn’t believe in it at first. Potter couldn’t blame him for that; who in his right mind would have believed it? But when the Confederates learned the United States were going after uranium explosives as hard as they could, they’d had to follow suit.

“If lighting a fire will do anything, I’ll do it.” Potter wasn’t sure it would. Separating U-235 from U-238 was proving fiendishly hard and fiendishly expensive. “They could use more money and more men, too.”

“Whatever they need, we’ll give it to them,” Featherston vowed. “If the damnyankees are ahead of us on this one, we’re screwed. If we beat ’em to the punch, we win. Even Pittsburgh won’t matter at all. It’s about that simple. Or will you tell me I’m wrong?” He glared a challenge at Potter.

“No, sir.” Potter meant it. He might despise Jake Featherston the man, but Jake Featherston the leader was dead right here.

Major Jonathan Moss became a flier at the start of the Great War because he thought it would prove a cleaner, more chivalrous way of fighting than the mess on the ground. And he was right-for a while.

After a career as a lawyer in occupied Canada, he came back to flying not long before the new-the greater?-war broke out. With his wife and daughter killed by a Canuck bomber, he threw himself into aviation as much to stay sane as for any other reason. And he got shot down over Virginia and spent a while languishing in the Confederates’ Andersonville POW camp. If not for a tornado that flung barbed wire in all directions, he would have been there yet.

Now he was a foot soldier, not because he wanted to be one but because he had no choice. The Negro guerrillas who found him would have killed him if he didn’t join their band.

Chickens and chunks of pork roasted over campfires in the pine woods of southwestern Georgia. The white man from whose farm they’d been taken didn’t need to worry about his livestock any more. Neither did his family. The USA and the CSA followed the Geneva Convention when they fought each other. The USA and the Mormon rebels in Utah played by the rules, too; the Mormons were, if anything, more scrupulous than their U.S. foes about keeping them. Between black guerrillas and Confederates, rules went out the window. It was war to the knife.

“Smells goddamn good,” Captain Nick Cantarella said. The infantry officer, much younger than Moss, had escaped from Andersonville with him. With his knowledge of how to fight on the ground, Cantarella had to be more valuable to the Negroes than Moss was.

“Be ready soon.” The black who led the guerrillas called himself Spartacus. He wasn’t far from Moss’ age. He’d fought for the CSA in the Great War, and reminded Moss of a career noncom in the U.S. Army. Jake Featherston didn’t want any Negroes fighting on his side. Spartacus used everything he’d learned fighting for the Confederacy to fight against it now.

After Moss got outside of some hot, greasy pork and a tin cup of chicory-laced coffee, he asked, “What do you aim to do next?” He had no trouble treating Spartacus as his CO, and it wasn’t just because the black man could kill him with a word. Like most whites in the USA, Moss hadn’t had much to do with Negroes. There weren’t many in the United States, and most whites were happy to keep it that way. He’d always thought of Negroes as inferior; he hadn’t had much reason to think otherwise. But Spartacus would have commanded respect as a man if he were green with blue polka dots.

He tossed a chicken bone back into the fire. “Well, I was thinkin’ o’ comin’ down on Plains again.” His voice was a smooth, rich baritone.

Moss stared. The band had raided the small town the autumn before. “You don’t think they’ll be laying for us?”

“Reckon not.” When Spartacus grinned, his teeth gleamed white in his dark face. “Reckon the ofays don’t think even a nigger’d be dumb enough to come back so soon.”

Nick Cantarella laughed out loud. “I like it. Fuck me if I don’t.” He’d grown up in New York City, and sounded like it. Sometimes he and Spartacus had trouble understanding each other. For that matter, sometimes Moss, who was from Chicago, had trouble understanding Cantarella. He rarely did with Spartacus. The Negro might drawl and slur, but at least he spoke slowly. Cantarella’s harsh consonants and clotted vowels came at machine-gun speed.

“Got me a couple people lookin’ the place over,” Spartacus said. “Don’t seem like nobody doin’ nothin’ special there. They reckon they done got hit once, so they’s immune now.” He grinned again. “It don’t work dat way.”

“All right by me,” Moss said.

But the raid didn’t come off. Spartacus didn’t want to move till he had everything just the way he wanted it. From a Regular Army commander, Moss might have thought that too cautious. But Regular Army commanders had men to spare, and regularly proved it. Spartacus didn’t. He needed to be careful not to walk into a trap.

While he was waiting and getting ready, the situation changed. Two companies of soldiers who wore yellowish khaki uniforms and helmets of unfamiliar shape came into the area. “Mexicans!” Nick Cantarella said in disgust. “Goddamn bean-eating greasers! Wonder how the hell Featherston pried ’em outa Francisco Jose.”

“Screw that.” Spartacus didn’t let the Mexican soldiers faze him. “What I wonder is, can them fuckers fight?”

“When the U.S. Army broke through in Pennsylvania last fall, it broke through against the Mexicans,” Cantarella said.

“Uh-huh, but y’all got barrels an’ airplanes an’ all that good shit.” Spartacus was nobody’s fool. “All we got is us, an’ we ain’t got so many of us.” He frowned in concentration. “Make them come at us, mebbe, an’ see how good they is.”

“Always better to meet them where you want to, not where they want to,” Moss said.

“Make sense,” Spartacus agreed. “Now we got to cipher out how them greasers can reckon they is doin’ what they wants when they is really doin’ jus’ what we aims to have ’em do.”

Arranging to have a letter intercepted in Plains turned out to be the easiest thing in the world. Moss’ only worry was that the Mexicans would decide it was too obviously a fraud. It told a fictitious comrade in the town where Spartacus’ band would be and what they planned to do for the next four days. One of the blacks sneaked into Plains at night and dropped the envelope that held the letter not far from the little hotel where Francisco Jose’s soldiers were garrisoned. Another black, one who lived in town, brought word the envelope had been found.

As Spartacus hoped, the Mexicans moved down the road from Plains toward Preston, the next town farther west. They marched in good order, with scouts well forward and with men out to either side to make sure they didn’t get hit from the flank. But the scouts saw nothing the guerrillas didn’t want them to, and the flank guards weren’t out far enough.

Spartacus approached field fortifications with the eye of a man who’d seen plenty of trench warfare. He had eight or ten riflemen dug in at the top of a tiny swell of ground. Jonathan Moss was one of them. He clutched his Tredegar with sweaty palms and hoped none of the blacks in the trench with him noticed how nervous he was.

The one thing he felt he could tell them was “Don’t open up too soon. We want to make the Mexicans bunch up in front of us, remember.” The Negroes nodded. Some of them still automatically acted deferential toward whites when they weren’t trying to kill them. That was a funny business.

Moss had only a few minutes to wonder about it before the Mexicans’ scouts came into sight. Their pale khaki might make good camouflage in northern Mexico, but it didn’t do so well against the green woods and red dirt of Georgia. The guerrillas waited till the scouts got close, then shot all three of them down. Moss thought he hit one of them, and also thought they went down before they were sure where the killing fire came from.

Those gunshots brought the rest of the Mexicans at a trot. They came in loose order, so nobody in front of them could pick off too many men at once. They would soon have overwhelmed the Negroes in that trench-if those were the only men Spartacus had. But their commanding officer did what the guerrilla leader hoped he would: in concentrating on what lay ahead, he forgot all about what might might be waiting off to the flank.

And he paid for it. What waited off to the flank was an artfully concealed machine gun. The Negroes didn’t take it with them everywhere they went; it was heavy and clumsy to move. But when they could set it up ahead of time…

When they could set it up ahead of time, it was the concentrated essence of infantry. The Mexicans hurried forward to deal with the roadblock in front of them. The machine-gun crew couldn’t have had a better target for enfilading fire if they’d set up the enemy themselves.

When the machine gun started stuttering, the Mexicans toppled like tenpins. They were close enough to let Moss hear their cries of fear and dismay and agony. Some of them tried to charge the machine-gun position. That was brave, but it didn’t work. The gun itself might have held them at bay. In case it didn’t, other blacks with rifles were there to help protect it.

Realizing they’d run into a trap helped break the Mexicans. When they took heavy casualties without taking the machine gun, they fled east, back toward Plains. Some of them threw away their weapons to run faster. The guerrillas galled them with gunfire till they got out of range.

After the Negroes emerged from cover, they methodically finished off the wounded Mexicans. Some of the guerrillas carried shotguns or small-caliber hunting rifles. They replaced them with bolt-action Tredegars taken from Francisco Jose’s men. A handful of the Mexicans carried submachine guns. Those also went into the blacks’ arsenal. None of the dead men had the automatic rifles that gave Confederate soldiers so much firepower. Moss wasn’t much surprised; the Confederates didn’t have enough of those potent weapons for all their own front-line troops.

Nick Cantarella went up to Spartacus, who was pulling clips of ammunition from the equipment pouches on a dead man’s belt. “We better haul ass outa here, and I mean now,” the U.S. officer said. “Those greasers’ll be back, either by themselves or with the local Freedom Party stalwarts. Ain’t gonna make the same trick work twice, not here.”

“You don’t reckon so?” The guerrilla leader didn’t sound convinced. “Them Mexicans ain’t smart, an’ the ofays who yell, ‘Freedom!’ all the goddamn time, they’s dumber.”

“Quickest way to end up dead is to think the guy you’re fighting is a damn fool,” Cantarella said. “Second quickest way is to get greedy. You try both at once, you’re askin’ for it, you hear what I’m sayin’?”

Spartacus looked at him. Jonathan Moss thought another quick way to end up dead was by pushing the Negro too far. Spartacus didn’t take kindly to listening to whites. But Cantarella had the certainty that went with knowing what he was doing. He wasn’t trying to show Spartacus up, just to give good advice. And he wasn’t much inclined to back down himself.

Muttering to himself, Spartacus looked along the road toward Plains. “Reckon mebbe you’s right,” he said unwillingly. “We done stuck ’em pretty good, an’ that’ll have to do.” He raised his voice to a shout: “Let’s git! Time to move out!”

The Negroes and their white advisers streamed away from the ambush. Moss didn’t see how Spartacus could have wanted much more. He wondered if the Mexicans would push hard after the guerrillas again, or if one introduction like this would show them that wasn’t a good idea.

When he asked Nick Cantarella, the infantry officer only shrugged. “Have to find out,” he said. “Pretty plain they never saw combat before. Whether they can’t stand up to it or whether they figure they’ve got something to prove now-well, we’ll see before long, I figure.”

“Guerrillas did well,” Moss remarked.

“Yeah.” Cantarella looked around, then spoke in a low voice: “Wouldn’t’ve thought the spooks had it in ’em. But if your ass is on the line, I guess you do what you gotta do, no matter who you are.”

“We just did,” Moss said. Nick Cantarella blinked, then nodded.

Scipio was almost too far gone to notice when the train stopped. The Negro and his wife and daughter were scooped up in Augusta, Georgia, a week earlier-he thought it was a week, but he could have been off by a day or two either way.

Along with so many others from the Terry-Augusta’s colored district-they were herded into a boxcar and the door locked from the outside. It was too crowded in there to sit down, let alone to lie down. Scipio wasn’t off his feet for a minute in all that time, however long it was. He couldn’t make it to the honey buckets that were the only sanitary facilities, so he fouled himself when he couldn’t hold it any more. He wasn’t the only one-far from it.

He got a couple of sips from a dipper of water that went through the miserable throng, but nothing more. If the boxcar held any food, he never saw it. By the time the train finally got wherever it was going, his nose told him the car held dead bodies.

Had they made this journey in high summer, everyone would have died. He was as sure of that as he was of his own name-surer, since he’d gone by Xerxes for many years. Scipio was still a wanted man in South Carolina for his role in the Red Negro uprisings during the Great War.

But it was February, so heat and humidity didn’t add themselves to starvation and overcrowding. What a mercy, Scipio thought.

“Bathsheba?” he croaked through a dust-dry throat. “Antoinette?”

He heard no answer from either of them. Maybe they were dead. Maybe they were just too dry to talk. Maybe they couldn’t hear his husk-filled voice. Or maybe the noise other people were making covered their replies. His ears weren’t what they had been once upon a time. He was getting close to seventy. He’d been born a slave, back in the days before the Confederate States reluctantly manumitted their Negroes.

There was a bitter joke! Technically free, blacks didn’t have a prayer of equality with whites even in the best of times. Here in the worst of times…Scipio wasn’t worried about seeing another birthday now. He wondered if he would see another day, period.

Then what seemed like a miracle happened. The door to the boxcar opened. A cold, biting wind blew in. Fresh air hit Scipio almost as hard as a slug of whiskey would have. His eyes opened very wide. He thought his heart beat a little faster.

“Out!” White men’s voices, harsh as ravens’ croaks, roared out the word. “Come on out o’ there, you goddamn shitty niggers! Form two lines! Men on the left, women and pickaninnies on the right! Move! Move! Move!”

A few people stumbled out of the boxcar. A few corpses fell out. That eased the pressure that had held Scipio upright for so long. He started to sag to the planking of the floor. If he did, though, he didn’t think he’d be able to get up again. And the way these ofays-guards; he could see they were guards-were screaming at people to come out, he could guess what would happen to a man who couldn’t rise.

He wanted to live. He wondered why. After what he’d gone through, dying might have come as a relief. But he stumbled forward and awkwardly got down from the boxcar.

“Men on the left! Women and pickaninnies on the right!” the guards yelled again. Then one of them smacked a black man with a club he pulled from his belt. “You dumb fucking coon, don’t you know which one’s your right and which one’s your left? Get your lazy ass over where you belong!” Blood pouring down his face, the Negro staggered into the proper line.

Somebody touched Scipio’s hand. There stood Bathsheba, with Antoinette beside her. They looked like hell, or maybe a little worse. Scipio tried not to think about what he looked like himself. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that they were all alive.

“We gots to get in our line,” Bathsheba said in a voice like ashes. “The good Lord keep you safe, darlin’. We see you when we can.”

His wife had always been a churchgoing woman. She’d got Scipio to go with her a good many times. They were captured in church, in fact. Education and Marxism had corroded Scipio’s faith. If they hadn’t…Well, the trip he’d just finished would have turned St. Thomas Aquinas into an atheist. Somehow, though, it hadn’t shaken Bathsheba, not that way.

“You move, old man.” The Mexican-looking guard who gave the order had three stripes on the left sleeve of his gray uniform tunic. “You move, or you be sorry.” He didn’t sound particularly mean. He just sounded like a man doing his job-and a man who would do it, whatever that took. Was it better that he didn’t seem to enjoy tormenting his captives? Or did that make it worse?

The guard sergeant (no, in a gray uniform he’d have some kind of silly Freedom Party rank) waited to see if Scipio would obey, or maybe if he could obey. His wife and daughter had already gone off to their line. Nothing held him here except exhaustion, thirst, and starvation.

“I goin’,” he said, and discovered his feet still worked after all. The Mexican guard nodded and went to prod another sufferer into moving.

Standing in line wasn’t easy. Several men begged for water. The guards ignored them. One of the Negroes fell over. A man in a gray uniform kicked him. When the Negro didn’t respond, the guard peeled back his eyelid, then felt for a pulse. The white straightened, wiping his hand on his thigh. “Son of a bitch is dead as belt leather,” he said. “Gotta haul his worthless carcass outa here.”

A skinny black man in ragged shirt and dungarees out at the knee dragged the corpse away by the feet. A crew of similar wraiths were pulling bodies out of the train cars. Once, one of them called, “This here fella ain’t dead.”

A guard stood over the live Negro and fired a burst from his submachine gun. “Sandbagging fucker is now,” he said. The man who’d announced the survival hauled away the body as if such things happened whenever a train came in. They probably did.

“Jesus God, you are the smelliest, most disgusting bunch of niggers I ever seen!” a guard officer shouted. What else could we be? Scipio thought. He knew how filthy he was. He knew he didn’t have any choice about it, either. None of the lurching unfortunates in the line had any choice. The officer went on, “Strip naked and we’ll hose you down, get the worst shit off you.”

“What about our clothes?” somebody asked.

“Clean clothes inside,” the officer said. “Get out of them duds! Move it!”

Despite the cold wind, Scipio was glad to shed the suit in which he’d gone to church. High-pressure hoses played over the black men. He feebly tried to wash and drink at the same time. He got a couple of swallows of water, and he got rid of some of his own filth. When he stood there naked and dripping, the north wind really did cut like a knife.

The blacks who’d hauled away corpses took charge of the discarded clothes, too. Some of the men whose clothes they were pulled long faces. Maybe they’d managed to hang on to money or valuables. Since Scipio hadn’t, he was just as well pleased to be rid of his.

Bins of shirts and trousers and drawers and shoes and socks waited for the black men. As Scipio found clothes that more or less fit, he wondered who’d worn them before and what had happened to him. This time, his shiver had nothing to do with that biting wind. Better not to know, maybe.

Losing his clothes also lost Scipio his passbook. In a way, that was a relief. Without it, he could claim to be anyone under the sun. In another way, though, it was as ominous as those bins of clothing. A Negro couldn’t exist in the CSA without a passbook. If the inmates of this camp didn’t need passbooks…If they didn’t, wasn’t that an argument they didn’t exist any more?

“Line up in rows of ten!” a guard shouted. “Rows of ten, y’all hear? We got to get you coons counted. Soon as we do that, we can get your asses into barracks.”

“Food, suh? Water?” Several men called the desperate question at the same time.

“Y’all can get water once you’re counted,” the guard answered. “Food comes at regular time tonight. Now line up, goddammit. Can’t do anything till we count you.”

Another man fell over dead waiting to be counted. More ragged, skinny Negroes seemed to materialize out of thin air to drag off the body. Would the clothes he had on go back into the bin? Scipio would have bet on it.

He got assigned to Barracks 27, which differed from the halls on either side only by its number. The wind blew right through the thin wallboard. Pails and cups told where the roof leaked when it rained. Bunks went up five and six high. Healthier, younger, stronger prisoners claimed the ones closest to the pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room. Scipio got a miserable bunk in the outer darkness near the wall. The only good thing about it was that it was on the second level, so he didn’t have to climb very high. A burlap bag did duty for a blanket. Another, smaller, one stuffed with sawdust made a pillow of sorts. That was the extent of the bedclothes.

He staggered out and went looking for water. He found lines snaking up to three faucets. The lines were long. He wondered if he’d live till he got to the front of his. He did, and then drank and drank and drank. That brought some small fragment of life back to him. It also made him realize how hungry he was. But he wouldn’t starve to death right away, while thirst had almost killed him.

He went back to his bunk. Lying down seemed a luxury after his time on the train. He fell asleep, or passed out-which hardly mattered. He would have slept through supper-he would have slept the clock around-if somebody didn’t shake him back to consciousness. He wasn’t sure the man did him a kindness. He was almost as weary as he was hungry.

Standing in line in someone else’s clothes, in shoes that didn’t quite fit, was a displeasure all its own. What he got when they fed him was another displeasure: grits and beans and greens. All in all, it wasn’t enough to keep a four-year-old alive. His pants felt a little tight. He didn’t think he’d need to worry about that for long.

After supper came the evening roll call. “Line up in rows of ten!” a guard yelled. Scipio wondered how often he would hear that command in the days to come. More often than he wanted to; he was sure of that.

The count went wrong. For one thing, there’d been the influx of new prisoners. For another…The scrawny Negro standing next to Scipio muttered, “These ofays so fuckin’ dumb, they can’t count to twenty-one without playin’ with themselves.”

In spite of everything, Scipio snorted. “Thank you,” he whispered-he’d already seen making noise during roll call could win you a beating.

“Fo’ what?” the other black man said. “Ain’t nothin’ to thank nobody for, not here. I’s Vitellius. Who you be?”

The real Vitellius, if Scipio remembered straight, had been a fat man. This fellow didn’t live up to the name. “I’s Xerxes,” Scipio replied. That was funny, too, in the wrong kind of way. He’d used Xerxes for years, fearing his own handle might get him sent to a camp. Well, here he was. What more could they do to him? One way or another, he’d find out.

Major General Abner Dowling’s guns pounded Lubbock, Texas. Confederate artillery in and behind the city sent high-explosive death northwest toward Dowling’s Eleventh Army. Back East, the Eleventh Army wouldn’t even have made a decent corps; it had about a division and a half’s worth of men. But the war out here in the wide open spaces ran on a shoestring, as the last one had. Dowling’s men outnumbered the Confederates defending Lubbock.

Jake Featherston’s soldiers were fighting with everything they had, though. He couldn’t push them out of Lubbock, and he couldn’t flank them out, either. Up till recently, it hadn’t mattered. As long as he kept them too busy to send reinforcements east to help rescue their army in Pittsburgh, he was doing his job.

But now Pittsburgh wouldn’t fall to the CSA. Now Lubbock became valuable for its own sake, or as valuable as a city of 20,000 in the middle of nowhere could be. Dowling’s headquarters lay in Littlefield, the last town northwest of Lubbock. He studied the map. He’d tried outflanking the Confederates to the south. Maybe if he swung around to the north this time…

His adjutant stuck his head into the map room. “I’ve got some new aerial recon photos, sir,” Major Angelo Toricelli said. Toricelli was young and handsome and spry. Dowling was in his sixties, built like a breakfront, and wore a large, unstylish gray mustache. Even when he was young, he hadn’t been spry. He’d played in the line at West Point just before the turn of the century. No, he hadn’t been spry, but he’d been tough.

Several chins wobbled as he nodded to Toricelli. “Let’s see ’em,” he said. Both sides here were short on airplanes, too. Both sides here were short on everything under the sun, as a matter of fact.

“These are the deep-penetration photos, sir,” Toricelli said as he spread out the prints on top of the map. “They go all the way down to Snyder, and to that…thing outside it.”

Snyder lay southeast of Lubbock. It was a bigger town than Littlefield, but not a whole lot bigger. Normally, Dowling wouldn’t have worried about it, not where he was now. It was too small, and too far away.

Snyder was too small, yes. The…thing was another story altogether. It was called Camp Determination-so Intelligence said, anyhow. And it was not small at all. “How many niggers have they got crammed in there?” Dowling asked.

“Many, many thousands. That’s the best Intelligence is willing to do, sir,” Toricelli said. Dowling thought he put it an interesting way, but didn’t push him. The younger officer went on, “There’s a lot of incoming train traffic, too.”

“If there is, then this place must get fuller all the time, right?” Dowling said. Toricelli shook his head. Dowling raised an eyebrow. “Not right?”

“No, sir.” His adjutant pointed to another photo. “Looks like the overflow goes here.”

Dowling studied the picture. Trucks-they looked like ordinary C.S. Army trucks-stood next to a long, wide trench. The scale they provided gave him some notion of just how long and wide the trench was. It seemed to be full of bodies. Dowling couldn’t gauge its depth, but would have bet it wasn’t shallow.

The photo also showed several similar trenches covered over with dirt. The trenches went out of the picture on either side. Dowling couldn’t tell how many filled-in trenches it wasn’t showing, either.

“They go there, huh?” His stomach did a slow lurch. How many corpses lay in those trenches? How many more went into them every day? “Any idea how they get from the camp to the graveyard?”

“How they get killed, you mean?” Toricelli asked.

“Yes, dammit.” Dowling usually despised the language of euphemism that filled military and bureaucratic life. Here, though, the enormity of what he saw made him unwilling to come out and say what he meant.

“Intelligence isn’t quite sure of that,” his adjutant said. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“It does to them.” Dowling jerked a thumb at that photo with the trenches. “Lord knows I’m no nigger-lover, Major. But there’s a difference between not loving somebody and setting up a factory to turn out deaths like shells for a 105.”

“Well, yes, sir,” Major Toricelli said. “What can we do about it, though? We aren’t even in Lubbock, and this Snyder place is another eighty miles. Even if Lubbock falls, we’ll be a long time getting there. Same with our artillery. And what good would bombers do? We’ll just be killing spooks ourselves if we use ’em.”

“I know what I’m going to do,” Dowling said. “I’m going to send these photos back to Philadelphia, and I’m going to ask for reinforcements. Now that Pittsburgh’s ours again, we ought to have some men to spare. We need to advance on this front, Major. We need it a lot more than we do some other places.”

“Yes, sir. I think you’re right,” Toricelli said. “But will they listen to you back East? They see things funny on the other side of the Mississippi. We found out about that when we were trying to hold the lid down on the Mormons.”

“Didn’t we just?” Dowling said. “Tell you what-let’s light a fire under the War Department’s tail. Can you get another set of those prints made?”

“I’m sure I can, sir.”

“Bully!” Every once in a while, Dowling still came out with slang whose best days lay back before the Great War. Toricelli loyally pretended not to notice. Dowling went on, “Send the second set of prints to Congresswoman Blackford. She’s been up in arms about how the Confederates are treating their niggers ever since Jake Featherston took over. If she starts squawking, we’re likelier to get those troops.”

“That’s…downright byzantine, sir.” Major Toricelli’s voice held nothing but admiration.

Dowling resolved to look up the word to see whether it carried praise or blame. He nodded to his adjutant. “Get me those extra prints. I’ll draft the letter to the General Staff. We’ll want to encrypt that before we send it.”

“Oh, yes,” Toricelli said. When you were fighting a war with somebody who spoke the same language you did, you had to be extra careful about what you said openly. The only good news there was that the enemy had to be as careful as you were. Sometimes he slipped, and you could make him pay. Sometimes he pretended to slip, and you could outsmart yourself in a hurry if you weren’t careful.

“Do that yourself, if you’d be so kind, Major,” Dowling said.

“Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.” Dowling’s adjutant didn’t even blink. This was a hell of a war all kinds of ways. When you couldn’t be a hundred percent sure of the men in the cryptography section-you did without them whenever you could, or whenever you had something really important.

Rolling a sheet of paper into his Underwood upright, Dowling banged away at it, machine-gun style, with his forefingers. The machine was at least twenty years old, and had an action stiff as a spavined mule’s. Fancy typists used all ten fingers. Dowling knew that-knew and didn’t care. Being able to type at all put him ahead of most U.S. generals.

He tried to imagine George Custer pounding on a typewriter. The man under whom he’d served as adjutant during the Great War and for some years afterwards would have counted himself progressive for using a steel pen instead of a quill. Dowling wondered how many letters he’d typed up for Custer over the years. A whole great pile of them, anyhow. The old Tartar had had a legible hand. Dowling, who could fault him for plenty of other things, couldn’t deny that.

Of course, Custer had spent more than sixty years in the Army. He was one of the longest-serving soldiers, if not the longest-serving, in the history of the United States. Back when his career started, you had to be able to write with tolerable neatness. If you couldn’t, no one would be able to make out what you were saying.

Dowling read through his draft, pen-corrected a typo that had escaped him while the paper was on the platen, and took it to Major Toricelli. “Get this off to Philadelphia as fast as you can,” he said.

“I’ll tend to it right away.” Toricelli had already taken the code book out of the small safe that accompanied Eleventh Army as it advanced-and, at need, as it fell back, too.

“Good. Thanks. Now I need to get a letter ready for those photos that’ll go to Flora Blackford.” Dowling had met her before, in that she’d questioned him when he testified before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. He hadn’t appreciated her prodding then. If he could get her to prod in a way that did him some good, though, that was a different story. He wagged a finger at Toricelli. “Make sure we get that other set of prints pronto, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Now his adjutant sounded resigned. Dowling knew he was guilty of nagging. How often had he sounded like that when Custer gave him the same order for the fourth time? At least he-sometimes-noticed when he repeated himself. He wrote the letter, signed it, and gave it to Major Toricelli. The younger officer, who was deep in five-letter code groups, nodded abstractedly.

When Dowling walked out of the house he’d commandeered for a headquarters, the sentries in front of the porch stiffened to attention. “As you were,” Dowling said. The sentries had foxholes into which they could dive in case C.S. artillery reached Littlefield or enemy bombers came overhead.

A thick barbed-wire perimeter isolated headquarters from the rest of the small west Texas town. The wire was far enough from the house to keep an auto bomb from doing too much damage if one blew up outside it. Soldiers and matrons frisked people entering the perimeter to make sure none of them carried explosives. Dowling didn’t think he was important enough to make much of a target for a people bomb, but he didn’t take chances, either.

Headquarters occupied one of the few undamaged houses in Littlefield. The Confederates had made a stand here. They fought wherever they could find an advantageous position. They didn’t like retreating. But this country was so wide, they didn’t have enough men to hold on to all of it. He’d flanked them out here. He wasn’t having so much luck with that around Lubbock.

The Stars and Stripes floated above the house. Littlefield had been in the U.S. state of Houston till the Confederacy won the plebiscite here a little more than two years earlier. Now it was back in U.S. hands, and the locals liked that no better than they had before.

Dowling cordially despised the locals, too. He wished he could put up photographs of the murder camp and the mass graves outside Snyder-put ’em up all over town. He wished he could parade everybody in Littlefield past those graves, let people see what thousands of bodies looked like, let them find out what thousands of bodies smelled like. You sons of bitches, this is what you bought when you went around yelling, “Freedom!” all the goddamn time. How do you like it now?

What really scared him was, they were liable to like it just fine. He could easily imagine them looking down at all those contorted corpses and saying, Well, so what, you lousy damnyankee? They’re only niggers, for cryin’ out loud.

He scowled out at Littlefield, wishing his imagination didn’t work quite so well. All at once, he wanted nothing more than to wipe the town and everybody in it off the face of the earth.

Major Jerry Dover knew how to give men orders. He’d commanded at about the platoon level during the years between the wars. Bossing the cooks and waiters and busboys at the Huntsman’s Lodge in Augusta, Georgia, gave him most of the experience he needed to put on the uniform and tell people in the Confederate Quartermaster Corps what to do.

Being white and the boss had given him authority over the staff at the restaurant. Military law made a good enough substitute in the field. Dover hadn’t been out there long before one of his subordinates exclaimed, “Jesus, sir, you work us just like a bunch of niggers!”

“Good,” Dover answered, which made the grumbling corporal goggle and gape. “Good, goddammit,” Dover repeated. He was a foxy-featured man, wiry and stronger than he looked, with graying sandy hair and mustache. “We’ve all got to work like niggers if we’re going to whip those bastards on the other side.”

He drove himself at least as hard as he drove anybody under him. He left a trail of chain-smoked Raleigh butts and empty coffee cups behind him. He tried to be everywhere at once, making sure all sorts of supplies got to the men at the front when they were supposed to. The men who worked under him didn’t need long to figure that out. They swore at him as they shivered in the snow in southern Ohio, but his kitchen staff had sworn at him the same way while they sweltered over their stoves. The soldiers might not love him, but they respected him.

His superiors didn’t know what to make of him. Most of them were Regulars, men who’d stayed in butternut all through the lean times before Jake Featherston started building up the C.S. Army again. A colonel named Travis W.W. Oliphant-he got very offended if you left the W.W. out of any correspondence addressed to him, no matter how trivial-said, “You know, Major, you’ll just kill yourself if you try to run through every brick wall you see instead of going around some of them.”

“Yes, sir.” Dover ground a cigarette out under the heel of his left boot (Boot, Marching, Officer’s Field, size 9?C). He lit another one and sucked in smoke. Without a cloud of smoke around him, he hardly felt real. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, those damned idiots south of the Ohio finally got us about half as many of the 105 shells we’ve been screaming for as we really need. Gotta move ’em up to the people who shoot ’em out the guns.”

Travis W.W. Oliphant scratched his head. He looked like a British cavalry colonel, or what Jerry Dover imagined a British cavalry colonel would look like. “See here, Dover, are you trying to mock me?” he said.

“Mock you? No, sir.” Dover scratched his head, too. “Why would you say that? I’m just trying to do my job.”

“You’re not a Regular,” the senior officer said.

“No, sir,” Dover agreed. “So what? I can still see what needs doing. I can still get people to do it, or else do it myself.”

“There are people in this unit who think you’re trying to show them up,” Colonel Oliphant said.

Dover scratched his head again. He blew out another stream of smoke. “Sir, don’t the Yankees give us enough trouble so we haven’t got time to play stupid games with ourselves? I work hard. I want everybody else to work hard, too.”

“We won’t get the job done if we wonder about each other-that’s for sure,” Oliphant said. “We’ve all got to pull together.”

“What am I supposed to do when I see some people who won’t pull?” Dover asked. “You know some won’t as well as I do, sir. Plenty of men in the Quartermaster Corps who like it here because they’re in the Army, so nobody can complain about that, but they aren’t what you’d call likely to see a damnyankee with a piece in his hand and blood in his eye.”

“You’re in the Quartermaster Corps,” Colonel Oliphant pointed out.

“So are you, sir.” Dover stamped out the latest cigarette and lit a replacement. “You want to send me up to a line battalion, go right ahead. I happen to think I help the country more where I’m at, on account of I really know what the fuck I’m doing here. But if you want to ship me out, go on and do it. I was in the line last time around. Reckon I can do it again. Where were you…sir?”

Travis W.W. Oliphant didn’t answer right away. He turned red, which told Dover everything he needed to know. Had Oliphant ever fired a rifle, or even an officer’s pistol, in anger? Dover didn’t believe it, not even for a minute.

“You are insubordinate, Major,” Oliphant said at last.

“About time somebody around here was, wouldn’t you say?” Dover saluted and walked away. If the high and mighty colonel wanted to do something about it, he was welcome to try. Jerry Dover laughed. What was the worst Oliphant could do? Get him court-martialed? Maybe they’d drum him out of the Army, in which case he’d go back to the restaurant business in Augusta. Maybe they’d throw him in a military prison, where he’d be housed and fed and out of the war. About the worst thing the goddamn stuffed shirt could do was leave him right where he was.

Did Oliphant have the brains to understand that? Did the colonel know his ass from his end zone? Dover only shrugged. He didn’t really care. Oliphant would do whatever he did. In the meantime, Dover would do what he had to do.

As soon as he stepped out of the butternut tent, a cold breeze from the northwest started trying to freeze his pointed nose off his face. “Fuck,” he muttered. He hadn’t been up in Ohio long, but the weather was really and truly appalling. Augusta got a cold snap like this maybe once in five years. Ohio could get them any time from November to March, by what he’d seen. He wondered why the hell the CSA wanted to overrun country like this in the first place.

Not all the trucks into which cursing Confederates were loading crates of shells had started life down in Birmingham. Some were captured U.S. machines, with slightly blunter lines, slightly stronger engines, and suspensions that would shake a man’s kidneys right out of him on a rough road. They had butternut paint slapped on over the original green-gray. They had butternut paint slapped on their canvas canopies, too. Rough use and rough weather were making it peel off. Dover hoped that wouldn’t get some luckless driver shot by somebody on his own side.

The drivers were safe if those trucks didn’t get moving. Dover rounded on a quartermaster sergeant. “What’s the slowdown about?” he demanded.

“Sir, we were suppose to get a couple dozen military prisoners to help us load, and they ain’t showed up,” the sergeant said stolidly. “We’re doin’ what we can with what we got. Ain’t like the last war-no nigger labor gangs up here.”

Jerry Dover muttered discontentedly. He’d never been a big Freedom Party man; he thought Jake Featherston was more a blowhard than anything else. Without Negroes, the Huntsman’s Lodge either couldn’t have operated at all or would have had to charge three times as much. Negroes had done a lot for the Army in the Great War. Not this time around. Featherston didn’t trust them-and he’d given them abundant good reason not to trust him.

Before saying anything, Dover eyed the quartermaster sergeant’s hands. They were muddy and battered, with a couple of torn fingernails. He’d been humping crates just like everybody else. Nobody could complain about effort. “All right, Sergeant. Do the best you can. I’ll track those damn convicts for you.”

“Thank you, sir,” the noncom said.

The convicts wouldn’t work the way Negroes would have in the last war. They’d know they were doing nigger work, and they’d do it badly just to remind people they weren’t niggers and the work was beneath their dignity. That they might get their countrymen killed because they worked badly wouldn’t bother them. That they might get themselves killed wouldn’t bother them, either. Showing they were good and proper white men counted for more.

Were Dover a convict, he knew he would act the same way. No less than the men who’d fallen foul of military justice, he was a Confederate white man. He’d probably had more experience with Negroes than any white since the days of overseers. That had nothing to do with the price of beer. There were some things a Confederate white man wasn’t supposed to do.

Of course, one of the things Confederate white men weren’t supposed to do was lose a war to the USA. If not losing meant they had to do some other things they wouldn’t normally, then it did, that was all. So Dover thought, anyhow. Some of his countrymen seemed to prefer death to dirtying their hands.

Shells burst a few hundred yards away. Dover didn’t flinch, didn’t duck, didn’t dive for cover. They’d have to come a lot closer than that before he started flabbling. Back in the last war, he’d learned to gauge how dangerous incoming artillery was. The knack came back in a hurry this time around.

Most of the older men working with these crates had it. Some of the younger ones didn’t. What did worry Dover was that the damnyankees’ guns were close enough to strike what should have been the Confederates’ safe rear in Ohio. That showed how badly things had gone wrong. With so many men dead or captured in and around Pittsburgh, the defenses farther west were crumbling. One U.S. thrust was coming west from Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, the other southeast from northern Indiana and northwestern Ohio. If they met, they would enfold even more irreplaceable Confederate troops in a pocket.

Dover went over to the field telephone station. The state of the art there had improved a lot since the Great War. Then people used Morse more often than they shouted into field telephones, just to make sure their message got through. Now you knew the guy on the other end of the line would hear you.

Whether he felt like listening to you might be a different story. For years, Dover had battled people who tried to palm off lower-quality meat and seafood and vegetables on him and to give him what he needed later than he needed it. Now he turned all his suavity and charm on the Confederate military policemen who hadn’t delivered the promised convicts on time.

“This here’s Major Dover in the Quartermaster Corps south of Columbus,” he rasped. “Where the hell are they? You lazy sons of bitches, y’all tryin’ to lose the war for us? How’re we supposed to get the shit to the front if you hold out on us?…What do you mean, I can’t talk to you that way? I’m doin’ it, ain’t I? An’ if those convicts don’t show up in the next hour, I’ll sic my colonel on you, and we’ll see how you like that!” He slammed down the phone without giving the MP he was talking to the chance to answer back-always a favorite ploy.

He knew Travis W.W. Oliphant was useless in these turf battles. He knew it, but the MP didn’t. And the unhappy fellow evidently didn’t care to take chances with an angry senior officer. The convicts arrived less than half an hour later.

“About fucking time,” Dover snarled at the driver who brought them. “You should have got ’em here when you said you would, and saved everybody the aggravation.”

“Sir, I don’t have nothin’ to do with that,” the driver said. “They load the truck, they tell me where to go an’ how to git there, an’ I do it.”

Dover wanted to tell him where to go and how to get there, too. He feared he’d be wasting his breath. Instead, he glowered at the convicts. “You are going to work like mad sons of bitches, or else.”

“Or else what?” one of them said scornfully.

“Or else I will personally shoot your worthless ass off, and I’ll laugh while I do it, too,” Dover replied. “You reckon I’m funnin’ with you, you go ahead and try me.” He waited. The convicts worked. He’d expected nothing else.

Sergeant Michael Pound had been in the U.S. Army a long time. He’d spent a lot of that time getting barrels to do what he needed them to do. He wasn’t just one of the better gunners who wore green-gray coveralls, though he was that. He was also a damn good jackleg mechanic. A lot of barrel men were. The more repairs you could make yourself, the less time you had to spend in the motor pool. The less time you were out of action, the more trouble you could give the Confederates.

“Distributor cap, I bet,” he said when the mechanical monster wouldn’t start up one rainy morning east of Columbus, Ohio. “Damn thing gets wet inside too easy. It’s a design flaw-it really is.”

“Can you fix it?” asked Second Lieutenant Don Griffiths, the barrel commander. He was perhaps half Pound’s age: a puppy, like most second lieutenants. Unlike a lot of shavetails, he had a fair notion of what he was doing. He also didn’t seem to think asking questions threatened his manhood.

“Yes, sir.” Along with a.45, Pound carried a formidable set of tools on his belt and in his pockets. He had the engine louvers off in nothing flat, and got the distributor cap off the engine almost as fast. One glance inside made him nod. “Condensation, sure as hell.” The loader, Cecil Bergman, held a shelter half over his hands while he worked. The rain would only make things worse.

“What can you do about it?” Griffiths asked. “A dry rag?”

“Even better than that, sir,” Pound said. He was stocky and wide-shouldered-built like a brick, really. His brown hair had begun to go gray and to retreat at the temples. His eyes were pale in a broad face more Scots than English: marksman’s eyes. He pulled out a small bottle half full of clear liquid. “Absolute alcohol,” he explained. “I’ll rub a little where it’ll do the most good. It evaporates like anything, and it’ll take the moisture with it.” He suited action to words.

The distributor cap went back on. So did the louvers that protected the engine from small-arms fire while letting its heat escape. Pound scrambled down from the engine compartment. “Fire it up!” Bergman yelled to the driver.

There was a cough, a bang, and then the flatulent roar of a barrel engine coming to life. “Nicely done, Sergeant!” Griffiths said.

“Thank you, sir.” Pound clambered up to the turret and opened his hatch. He paused before climbing in and sitting down behind the gun. “Shall we get on with it?”

“I hope so, anyway,” Griffiths answered. “If this rain starts thawing out the ground, though, we’re liable to bog down.”

Pound didn’t think that likely. It was a little above freezing, but only a little. He guessed the rain would turn to sleet or snow before long. But he didn’t want to argue with Griffiths-which, considering how firmly armored in his own competence he was, was no small compliment to the young officer.

They rattled west in company with six or eight more barrels and several squads of foot soldiers. Only two of the barrels were the old models, with an inch-and-a-half gun. The improved machines, of which Pound’s was one, featured an upgunned, uparmored turret and a more powerful engine to handle the extra weight. Their 2.4-inch cannon still weren’t a match for the three-inchers new Confederate barrels carried, but they were the biggest guns the turret ring in the chassis would allow. And they were good enough to give the U.S. machines a fighting chance against the best the enemy could throw at them.

“After Pittsburgh, moving so fast seems strange,” Griffiths said.

“Yes, sir.” Pound nodded. In Pittsburgh, they’d measured progress in blocks per day, sometimes houses per day, not miles per hour. That was a fight of stalks and ambushes and strongpoints beaten down one by one. Now they were out in the open again, rolling forward. “Only a crust here,” Pound said. “Once we break it, they haven’t got so much behind it.”

As if to give him the lie, a Confederate machine gun opened up ahead of them. Even through the turret, Pound had no trouble telling it from a U.S. weapon. It fired much faster, with a noise like ripping canvas. The Confederates, with fewer men than the USA, threw bullets around with reckless abandon.

“Can you see where that’s coming from, sir?” he asked Lieutenant Griffiths.

Griffiths peered through the periscopes built into the commander’s cupola. He shook his head. “Afraid not, Sergeant,” he answered. “Want me to stick my head out and have a look?”

He didn’t lack for nerve. The barrel was buttoned up tight now. You could see more by opening the hatch and looking around, but you also ran a formidable risk of getting shot-especially anywhere in the neighborhood of one of those formidable machine guns.

“I don’t think you need to do that, sir,” Pound said. Now that he’d found a junior officer he could stand, he didn’t want the youngster putting his life on the line for no good reason. Sometimes you had to; Pound understood as much. Was this one of those times? He didn’t think so.

But Griffiths said, “Maybe I’d better. That gun’ll chew hell out of our infantry.” He flipped up the hatch and stood up so he could look around, head and shoulders out of the cupola. Along with a flood of cold air, his voice floated down to Pound: “I don’t like staying behind armor when the foot soldiers are out there naked.”

Michael Pound made an exasperated noise down deep in his throat. Yes, a crewman in a barrel had face-hardened steel between himself and the enemy’s attentions. An infantryman had nothing but his helmet, which wouldn’t even keep out small-arms fire. On the other hand, nobody used antibarrel cannon or antibarrel mines or Featherston Fizzes to try to knock out individual foot soldiers. Lieutenant Griffiths wasn’t thinking about that.

“There it is-about one o’clock,” Griffiths said. “Do you see it now, Sergeant?”

As Pound traversed the turret, he looked through the gunsight. Sure enough, there was the malignantly flashing machine-gun muzzle. “Yes, sir,” he said, and then, to the loader, “HE!”

“HE!” Bergman loaded a white-tipped high-explosive round into the breech.

The gun roared. The noise was tolerable inside the turret. To Lieutenant Griffiths, out there in the open, it must have been cataclysmic. Soldiers joked about artilleryman’s ear, but they were kidding on the square.

When the machine gun kept firing, Pound swore. A 2.4-inch HE shell just didn’t carry a big enough bursting charge to be very effective. He’d seen that in Pittsburgh, and he was seeing it again in among the trees here. “Give me another round,” he told Cecil Bergman.

“You got it, Sarge.” The loader slammed the shell home.

An instant before Pound fired, Don Griffiths groaned. Pound didn’t let himself pay attention till the second HE round was on the way. He saw the Confederate machine gun fly one way and a gunner, or some of a gunner, fly another. But he had no time to exult; Griffiths was slumping down into the turret.

“How bad is it, sir?” Pound asked, swearing at himself-if he’d knocked out the gun first try, the lieutenant might not have got hit.

“Arm,” Griffiths answered through clenched teeth. He had to be biting down hard on a scream. Sure as hell, his left sleeve was bloody, and blood dripped from his hand down onto the shell casings on the fighting compartment floor.

“Can you wiggle your fingers?” Pound asked. Griffiths tried, but gasped and swore and shook his head. He’d had a bone shattered in there, then-maybe more than one. Pound took a morphine syrette from the wound pouch on his belt, stuck it into Griffiths’ thigh, and pushed home the plunger. Then he said, “Let’s bandage you up.”

He had to cut away the sleeve to get at the wound. He dusted it with sulfa powder and packed it with gauze. As soon as he could, he’d get Griffiths out of the barrel and send him to the rear with some corpsmen.

“You’ve got yourself command here whether you want it or not.” The lieutenant sounded eerily calm, which meant the morphine was taking hold.

“Even if I did want it, sir, I wouldn’t want it like this,” Pound said, which was true. “You’ll be back soon.” He hoped that was true.

He stuck his own head out of the cupola. With the machine gun gone, all he had to worry about were ordinary Confederate infantrymen and maybe snipers in the trees. He looked around. Sometimes luck was with you, though he wished it would have shown up a little sooner. But he did see a couple of corpsmen with Red Crosses on smocks and armbands and helmets. He waved to them.

“What’s up?” one of them yelled.

Before Pound could answer, a bullet cracked past. He ducked. He knew it was a useless reflex, which didn’t mean he could help himself. He hoped it was a random round. If it wasn’t, the medics would have two casualties to deal with. Unless, of course, I get killed outright, he thought cheerily.

“Got a wounded officer. Forearm-broken bones,” he called after he straightened up.

“All right-we’ll take care of him,” the corpsman said. “Can you swing sideways so the barrel covers him while you get him out of the hatch?”

Pound liked that idea about as much as he liked a root canal. Expose the barrel’s thin side armor to whatever guns the goons in butternut had up ahead? But the medics weren’t armored at all. Neither was Lieutenant Griffiths, and he’d gone and proved it.

Sometimes you needed a root canal. It was no fun, but you had to go through with it. This wouldn’t be any fun, either. If they hustled, though, they ought to get away with it. “Will do,” Pound called to the medics. He ducked down into the turret and told the driver to make a hard right and stop.

“Jesus! You sure?” The protest came back through the speaking tube.

“Damn straight. I wouldn’t ask you if I wasn’t,” Pound answered. “Come on. Step on it. The lieutenant’s bleeding all over everything back here.”

“It’s not so bad now.” Griffiths sounded as if he hadn’t a care in the world. The morphine must have hit him hard. Well, good.

Snorting, the barrel turned. The movement wasn’t so sharp as it might have been. Try too tight a turn and you might throw a track, in which case you wouldn’t go anywhere for a while. When Pound was satisfied, he yelled, “Stop!” and the barrel did. He undogged the side hatch and sketched a salute to Don Griffiths. “Out you go, sir. You did good. Hope I see you again one day.” He meant it. He wasn’t the sort to waste compliments on people who didn’t deserve them.

“Thank you, Sergeant.” Awkwardly, Griffiths scrambled out of the barrel. Pound helped him leave. The corpsmen took charge of him once he got through the hatch. They eased him down to the ground and got him moving away from the front. They were probably relieved to help somebody able to move on his own: they didn’t have to lug him in a stretcher.

After waiting till they’d gone some distance from the barrel, Pound clanged the hatch shut and dogged it. He yelled into the speaking tube: “All right, Miranda-square us up again.”

“You bet, Sarge!” The barrel jumped as the driver put the thicker steel of the glacis plate and the turret between the crew and the enemy.

Peering through the periscopes in the commander’s cupola, Pound saw the heaviest action off to his left. He ordered the barrel over that way. For now, it was his.