The Grapple

VIII

George Enos had never crossed the country on a train before. That he could now said the war had come a long way in the past few months. The Townsend sat in drydock in San Diego, getting a refit and repairs. They’d given him enough liberty to go to Boston, stay a few days, and then hop another train heading back to the West Coast.

The one he was on now would have gone faster if it could have made anything better than a crawl at night. But blackouts were strictly enforced. The cars had black curtains. Along with conductors, they had hard-faced blackout monitors who carried.45s and made sure nobody showed a light at night.

Those monitors had good reason to look tough. The farther east the train traveled, the more often George saw wrecks shoved off to one side of the railroad. The government no doubt figured they were part of the cost of making war. The government had a point. George doubted the people in those ravaged trains would have appreciated it.

He came through Ohio during the day, so he could see what the war had done. He stared in astonishment. It looked more like the mountains of the moon than any human landscape. How many years would this part of the country take to recover from the devastation? Would it ever? How could it?

He didn’t go through Pittsburgh. From everything he’d heard, that was even worse. That he could get through at all was plenty. This time last year, things were even worse, he thought. He shook his head. It seemed impossible.

Even Boston had taken bomb damage. He’d heard that, too. Seeing it as the train slowed and then stopped was something else again. Those bastards hit my home town. The fury that stirred up amazed him.

He wasn’t overjoyed about coming into town three and a half hours behind schedule, either. He wasn’t surprised, but he wasn’t overjoyed. He hoped Connie and his sons weren’t waiting for him on the platform. The boys would be bouncing off the walls if they’d had to sit around all that time.

When the train stopped, he jumped up, grabbed his duffel, and slung it over his shoulder. He almost clobbered another sailor. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. Then a sergeant almost clobbered him. He laughed. What went around came around, but not usually so soon.

There was a traffic jam at the door to the car. Everybody wanted to get out first. Eventually, the door opened and people squeezed out. Most of the passengers were soldiers and sailors coming home on leave. Screaming, weeping women rushed toward them.

“George!” That was redheaded Connie-she was there after all. She almost knocked him off his feet when she threw her arms around him.

“Hi, babe,” he said. Then he kissed her, and that took a lot of careful attention. He felt as if he stayed submerged longer than any submersible in the U.S. Navy. At last he came up for air, his heart pounding. He noticed his wife was there by herself. “Where are the kids?” he asked.

“My mother’s got ’em,” Connie answered. “I figured the train would be late, and I was right… What’s so funny?”

“You talk like Boston,” George said. “So do I, but I’m about the only guy on my ship who does. I’m not used to hearing it any more.”

“Well, you better get used to it pretty darn quick, on account of it’s how people talk around here,” Connie said. “What do you think of that?”

He hadn’t let go of her. “Your ma’s got the boys?” he said. His wife nodded. “At her place?” Connie nodded again. George squeezed. “In that case, I know exactly what I think.” He squeezed her again, tighter.

“Oh, you do, do you? And what’s that?” Connie pretended not to know.

“Let’s go back to the apartment. You’ll find out,” he said.

“Sailors.” She laughed. “Sure, let’s go. You won’t be fit to live with till we do.” Her mock-tough tone softened. “And I’ve missed you.”

“Missed you, too, babe,” George said, and it was true. He did his best to forget his occasional visits to whores. He told himself they didn’t really count. He didn’t do anything like that when he was at home. And his visits to pro stations must have worked; he’d passed every shortarm inspection. He wouldn’t be bringing Connie any unexpected presents. That was a relief.

When they got to the subway station, the ticket-seller wouldn’t take his nickel. “Free to men in uniform, sir,” she said. Before the war, everybody who worked in the subway system had been male. One more thing the pressure of fighting had changed.

“I hate these cars. They’re so crowded,” Connie said as the train rattled along. George nodded purely for politeness’ sake. It didn’t seem that bad to him. He’d got used to being packed tight with other people on fishing boats. The Navy pushed men together closer still. No subway car could faze him.

He dropped the duffel inside the front door to the apartment and looked around in amazement. The living room was so big! And the kitchen and the bedrooms lay beyond! And a bathroom just for the family, with a door that closed! “I swear to God, hon, the skipper on the Townsend doesn’t live half this good!” George said.

“I should hope not,” Connie said, and pulled her dress off over her head.

That wasn’t what George meant, but it wasn’t bad, either. He would have dragged her down on the floor and done the deed right there. Why not? With a carpet down, it was softer than the decks he’d been walking since going to sea. But, giggling, she twisted away and hurried back into the bedroom. He followed, standing at attention even while he walked.

A bed was better than even a carpeted floor. Afterwards, sated for the moment, George was willing to admit it. “Wow,” he said, lighting a cigarette and then running a hand along Connie’s sweet curves. “Why’d I go and join the Navy?”

“I asked you that when you went and did it,” Connie said. “See what you’ve been missing?”

“It’s good to be home, all right,” he said. “But the Army would’ve got me if I didn’t put on a sailor suit. If I could’ve gone on doing my job, that would’ve been different. But conscription would’ve nailed me. I’d rather be a sailor than a soldier any day of the week, and twice on Sundays.”

He wondered why. Putting to sea wasn’t safer than staying on dry land. He’d seen as much in the endless clashes with the Japanese over the Sandwich Islands. But he’d been going out to sea since he was in high school. He’d never gone through the middle of the USA till this train trip from the West Coast. He was doing what he was used to.

Connie poked him in the ribs. He jerked. “What was that for?” he asked.

“What do you do when you come into port when you’re halfway around the world from me?” his wife said. “Do you go looking for floozies, the way sailors do when they get into Boston?”

“Not me,” he lied solemnly. If he hadn’t expected that question, he couldn’t have handled it so well. “I’m a married guy, I am. I like being a married guy.” To show how much he liked it, he leaned over and started caressing her in earnest. He wasn’t ready for a second round as fast as he would have been a few years earlier, but he’d gone without for a long time. He didn’t have much trouble.

Smiling in the afterglow, Connie said, “I like the way you argue.”

“Me, too,” George said, and they both laughed. She wouldn’t have liked it so much-which was putting things mildly, with her redhead’s temper-if he’d told her the truth. He never felt like straying if she was anywhere close by. If they were thousands of miles apart, though, if he wasn’t going to see her for months…As long as he didn’t come down with the clap and pass it along, what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. And then he poked her the same way she’d poked him. She squeaked. “What about you?” he asked. “You looking at the handsome delivery guys and truck drivers while I’m gone?”

“That’s a laugh,” she answered. “These days, the delivery guys and truck drivers have white mustaches or hooks or wooden legs-either that or their voices aren’t done changing yet. Besides, if I was stupid enough to do something like that, you’d find out about it. Somebody would blab. Somebody always does. But you’re off in those places where nobody ever heard of you, so who knows what you could get away with if you wanted to?”

She was right. She was righter than she knew-and righter than he ever intended to let her find out. And she was right that word about straying wives did get back to husbands. A couple of men on the Townsend had got that kind of bad news from people in their home towns: either from relatives or from “friends” who couldn’t stand keeping their big mouths shut.

Connie teased him about going off the reservation, but she didn’t really push him, which could only mean she didn’t really think he was doing it. That left him relieved and embarrassed at the same time. She said, “Now that you’ve acted like a sailor who just got home, do you want to see your children?”

“Sure,” George. “Let’s see if they remember me.”

Patrick and Margaret McGillicuddy had a house not far from the Enos’ apartment. Connie’s father was a fisherman, too, and out to sea right now. He was well past fifty; they weren’t going to conscript him no matter what. Connie’s mother was a lot like her, even if she’d put on a little weight and her hair wasn’t so bright as it used to be. Margaret McGillicuddy didn’t take guff from anyone, even her grandsons. To George’s way of thinking, that made her a better grandma, not a worse one.

He missed his own mother-a sudden stab of longing he could never do anything about now. If only she’d never taken up with that worthless, drunken bum of a writer. He’d shot himself, too, not that that did George any good.

When George walked into the McGillicuddys’ place, Leo and Stan were playing with tin soldiers, some painted green-gray, others butternut. Stan, who was younger, had the Confederates. He was losing, and not happy about it. Being a little brother meant getting the dirty end of the stick. George was the older of two children, and he had a sister. He hoped Mary Jane was doing well. He’d find out…soon.

For now, the boys looked up from their game, yelled, “Daddy!” and knocked everything over. They charged him. He picked them both up. That was harder than it had been before he joined the Navy-they’d grown a hell of a lot since.

“Hey, guys!” he said, and kissed each of them in turn. “Are you glad to see me?”

“Yeah!” they screamed, one into one ear, one into the other. The roar from the Townsend’s main battery might have been louder, but not a lot. Leo added, “We don’t ever want you to go away!”

“Neither do I,” Connie said softly.

“I don’t want to, either,” George said. “Sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, though, not what you want to do.”

“That’s so,” Mrs. McGillicuddy said. She turned to Connie and went on, “Do you think I want your father to put to sea and stay away for weeks? But that’s how he keeps us fed, and that’s what he’s got to do.”

Connie couldn’t even say being in the Navy was dangerous and being a fisherman wasn’t. Storms out in the Atlantic claimed too many boats for that to be true. “I know,” she did say. “But I still don’t like it.”

“Well, I don’t like it, either,” George said. He put down his sons. “They’re heavy. I think you must be feeding ’em rocks.” That made Leo and Stan giggle. Connie rolled her eyes. George aimed to enjoy his leave as much as he could. And when it was up…when it was up, he would go back, and that was all there was to it.

With the front stabilized not far southeast of Lubbock, Jefferson Pinkard stopped worrying about the damnyankees. He had more urgent things to worry about instead-making sure Negroes went through Camp Determination in a hurry chief among them. He didn’t have numbers to let him know how the other camps in the CSA were doing, but if his wasn’t the biggest he would have been mightily surprised. One thing seemed clear: they were reducing population faster than blacks could possibly breed. Every day they did that was a victory.

And then the United States started making his life difficult. U.S. bombers and fighters came overhead with little opposition from Confederate Hound Dogs. The antiaircraft guns around the camp boomed and bellowed, but didn’t shoot down many enemy airplanes. Jeff telephoned the local C.S. field commander to ask for more help. “If I could give it to you, I would,” Brigadier General Whitlow Ling said. “I don’t have the aircraft myself, though.”

“Where’d they go?” Jeff asked. He didn’t quite add, Did they fly up your ass? He wanted the Army man to give him the facts, and pissing Ling off wouldn’t help.

“Damnyankees pounded the crap out of ’em, that’s where,” Ling said glumly. “They got a whole new air wing sent in, and it gives ’em a big edge, dammit.”

“Why can’t we get more, then?” Pinkard demanded.

“I’m trying.” Ling sounded harassed. “So far, no luck. Everything we make, they’re keeping east of the Mississippi.”

“But the Yankees can afford to send airplanes out here,” Jeff said.

“That’s about the size of it.”

“And we can’t?”

“Right now, that’s about the size of it, too.”

“Shit,” Jeff said, and hung up. If the USA could do some things the CSA couldn’t match, the Confederacy was in trouble. You didn’t need to belong to the General Staff to figure that out. Only a matter of time before the damnyankees used their air superiority to…do whatever they damn well pleased.

And before long, what they pleased became pretty obvious. They started bombing the railroad lines that led into Snyder. You needed a lot of bombs to tear up train tracks, because the chances of a direct hit weren’t good. The USA had plenty of bombs. And U.S. fighters strafed repair crews whenever they could.

U.S. airplanes started pounding Snyder, too. That terrified Jefferson Pinkard, not for the camp’s sake but for his own. If anything happened to his pregnant wife and his stepsons, he had no idea what he’d do. Go nuts was all he could think of.

The house where Edith and Frank and Willie were staying-the house where Pinkard stayed when he didn’t sleep at Camp Determination-wasn’t that close to the tracks. But when the damnyankees hit Snyder, they didn’t seem to care. They did their best to knock the whole town flat. Maybe they figured that would interfere with the way Camp Determination ran. And maybe they were right, too.

Pinkard got a call from Ferdinand Koenig. “What’s this I hear about niggers piling up on sidings halfway across Texas?” the Attorney General barked. “Doesn’t sound like your camp is doing its job.”

The injustice of that made Pinkard want to reach down the telephone line and punch Koenig in the nose. “Mr. Attorney General, sir, you repair the railroads for me,” he growled, clamping down on rage with both hands. “You get the fighters out here to shoot down the Yankee airplanes that are chewing up the line. You do that stuff, and then if I fall down on the job you can tell me I’m slacking off. Till you do it, though, you just back the hell off.”

“Maybe you want to watch your mouth,” Ferd Koenig said. How often did people talk back to him? Not very-Jeff was sure of that. The Attorney General went on, “I can have your job like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“If you’re gonna blame me for shit that’s not my fault, you’re damn well welcome to it,” Jeff said. “If I screw up, that’s fine. Rake me over the coals on account of it. But if you want me to take the heat because some asshole on the General Staff won’t send airplanes way the hell out here, I’m damned if I’ll sit still for it. Go and find some other whipping boy. Then see how long he lasts. Me, I’ll get the fuck outa here and go someplace safer.”

A long, long silence followed. At last, Koenig said, “Maybe I was hasty.”

“Maybe you were…sir,” Jeff said. “I’ve got my family. Maybe you ought to can me. Then I can send them back to Louisiana, and I won’t have to worry about getting ’em blown to smithereens.”

“I’ll get back to you.” The Attorney General hung up.

He didn’t call back. Pinkard hadn’t really thought he would. Nobody wanted to admit he’d got his ears pinned back. But no more C.S. fighters appeared in the skies above west Texas. Maybe the CSA truly couldn’t spare them, no matter how much this front needed them. If the Confederacy couldn’t…

One more thing Jeff didn’t want to think about.

He was in Snyder for the worst air raid he’d ever gone through. His driver had just delivered him to his house and sped away when the sirens began to howl. Bombs started falling a few seconds later. Snyder boasted no fancy electronic detection gear-or if it did, Pinkard didn’t know about it. Somebody had to eyeball those airplanes before the sirens could cut loose.

He almost knocked down the front door flinging it open. “Get in the cellar!” he roared.

Edith was already herding her boys into it. “Come on, Jeff-you, too,” she said.

“I’m coming.” He tried not to show how scared he was. A storm cellar gave almost perfect protection against a tornado, as long as you got there in time. Against bombs…There was no guarantee. Nothing this side of reinforced concrete gave you a good chance against a direct hit. A wooden trapdoor wasn’t the same.

But going into a cellar was a lot better than staying out in the open. Fragments couldn’t get you. Blast probably wouldn’t, not unless the bomb came down right on top of the house.

“Make it stop, Papa Jeff!” Frank wailed as explosions shook the earth.

“I can’t. I wish I could,” Pinkard said.

His stepson stared up at him in the dim yellow light of a kerosene lantern. “But you can do anything, Papa Jeff.”

That was touching. If only it were true. “Only God can do everything,” Pinkard said. And the way things were going for the CSA, even God looked to be falling down on the job.

“God and Hyperman,” Willie said. The younger boy sounded utterly confident. There was another comic with a similar name in the USA, but that one was banned down here. Its hero frequently clobbered Confederate spies and saboteurs. But it was so vivid and exciting, banning it wasn’t good enough. People smuggled it over the border till the powers that be in Richmond had to come up with an equivalent. Even now, from what Jeff heard, the Yankee comic circulated underground in the CSA. But Hyperman, who’d wrecked New York City at least three times and Philadelphia twice, made a good enough substitute.

Edith might have explained that God was real and Hyperman only make-believe. She might have, but bombs started falling closer just then. The thunder and boom, the earth rocking under your feet, made you forget about funnybooks. This was real, and all you could do was hope you came out the other side.

One hit so close that the lantern shuddered off the tabletop and started to fall. Jeff caught it before it hit the ground-miraculously, by the handle. He put it back where it belonged. “Wow!” Frank said, and then, “See? I told you you could do anything.”

Catching a lantern was one thing, and-Jeff knew, even if Frank didn’t-he was lucky to do even that. Making the damnyankees stop dropping their bombs was a whole different kettle of fish. Jeff had no idea how to say that so it made sense to a little boy, and so he didn’t try.

All he could do, all anybody in Snyder could do, was sit tight and hope a bomb didn’t come down right on his head. Pinkard also hoped the Yankees weren’t bombing the camp. They hadn’t yet. What did that say? That they valued niggers’ lives more highly than those of decent white folks? Jeff couldn’t think of anything else-and if that was true, then what choice did the Confederacy have but to fight those people to the last cartridge and the last man?

After the longest forty minutes in the history of the world, the bombs stopped falling. “Do you reckon we can go up now?” Edith asked.

“I guess so,” Pinkard answered, though he wasn’t sure, either. His wife seemed to think he’d been through things like this before, and knew what to do about them. He wished it were true, but sitting in a cellar getting bombed was new for him, too. Back in the Great War, airplanes couldn’t deliver punishment like this.

When they opened the door and went up, the house was still standing and still had all the roof. But window glass crunched and clinked under their feet. If they’d stayed up there, it would have sliced them into sausage meat. Edith softly started to cry. The boys thought it was fun-till they cut themselves on some razor-edged fragments. Then they cried, too.

Jeff went outside. “Jesus,” he muttered. The house across the street had taken a direct hit. It had fallen in on itself and was burning fiercely. People stood around staring helplessly. Whoever was in there didn’t have a chance of getting out. One of the houses next door to the wrecked one had half collapsed, too.

A little farther down, a bomb had gone off in the middle of the street. Water welled up onto the asphalt from a shattered main. That would make fighting fires harder, if not impossible. Telephone and power lines were down. He hadn’t noticed that the electricity was out when he came up from the cellar, but he’d had other things on his mind.

And he smelled gas. “Jesus!” he said again. He’d been about to light a cigarette, but he thought better of that. Then he changed his mind and lit up anyhow. If that blaze across the street didn’t set off the gas, his Raleigh wouldn’t.

Plumes and clouds of smoke rose all over Snyder. It was just a little Texas town, lucky to have one fire engine. The siren wailed like a lost soul as the firemen did whatever they could wherever they could.

Edith came out, too, and looked around in disbelief. “This was a nice place,” she said. “It really was. Look what those goddamn sons of bitches went and did to it.”

Pinkard’s jaw dropped. She never talked like that. But she was right, no matter how she put it. Nodding, Jeff said, “Do you want to take the boys back to Alexandria, then? Y’all’d be safer there.”

“No,” she said, which surprised him again. “I want to stay right here with you. And I want us to lick the devil out of the USA.”

Looking around at the wreckage, Jeff knew the Yankees had just licked the hell out of Snyder. And…“They’re liable to come back, you know. I don’t think they’ll just hit us once and go away.” If they wanted to foul up Camp Determination, wrecking the way in would help.

“I’m not afraid,” Edith said. “God will watch over all of us. I know He’s on our side.” Everybody in every war since the world began was convinced God was on his side. Half the people in every war since the world began ended up being wrong. Jeff didn’t know how to say that, either. He did know Edith wouldn’t listen if he tried, and so he let it go.

Major Jerry Dover didn’t know what the hell had happened to Colonel Travis W.W. Oliphant. Dead? Captured? Deserted? He couldn’t say, and he didn’t much care. With Oliphant out of the picture, keeping central Kentucky supplied landed on his shoulders. He could do it. Without false modesty, he knew he could do it better than his thickheaded superior did.

Oliphant, of course, was a Regular. He went to VMI or one of the other Confederate finishing schools for officers. No doubt he was a good enough subaltern during the Great War. But it wasn’t the Great War any more, and Oliphant had had trouble figuring that out.

“Trucks!” Dover shouted into the telephone. “We need more trucks up here, dammit!” He might have been back at the Huntsman’s Lodge, screaming at a butcher who’d shorted him on prime rib.

“We’re sending up as many as we’ve got,” said the officer on the other end of the line, an officer much more safely ensconced down in Tennessee. “Damnyankees are giving us a lot of trouble, you know.”

That did it. Dover blew up, the same way he would have at a cheating butcher. “Give me your name, damn you! Give me your superior’s name, too, on account of I’m going to tell him just what kind of a clueless git he’s got working for him. You want to know what trouble is, come up where you can hear the guns. Don’t sit in a cushy office miles and miles away from anywhere and tell me how rough you’ve got it. Now give me your name.”

Instead of doing that, the other officer hung up on him. Jerry Dover said several things that made the other logistics officers in the tent outside of Covington, Kentucky, look up in amazement. Then he called back. Someone else down in Tennessee picked up the telephone.

“Who was the last son of a bitch on the line?” Dover demanded.

“Brigadier General Tyler just stepped out,” the other man replied. “Who are you, and who do you think you are?”

“Somebody who’s looking for Tyler’s superior,” said Dover, who didn’t back away from anybody. He had a short-timer’s courage: he was a man with no military career to wreck. They wouldn’t shoot him-the damnyankees were much more likely to do that. They wouldn’t jail him for long. The worst they were likely to do was cashier him, in which case he’d go home and be better off than he was now. “I’m going to get what I need up here in Kentucky, or I’ll know the reason why.”

“I’m Major General Barton Kinder,” the officer said. “Now, one more time-who the dickens are you?”

“I’m Major Jerry Dover, and I want Brigadier General Tyler to pull his trucks out of his asshole and get ’em on the road up here,” Dover said.

A considerable silence followed. Then Kinder said, “A major does not speak that way to a general officer.”

“So sue me,” Dover said. “All I know is, the damnyankees are building up like you wouldn’t believe on the other side of the Ohio. We’re lagging, on account of we can’t get what we need where we need it. And one of the reasons we can’t is that you guys won’t turn loose of your trucks. If we get swamped, you reckon anybody in Richmond’s going to give a rat’s ass that you’ve got all your fucking trucks?”

The silence lasted even longer this time. “I could have your head, Major,” General Kinder said at last. “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t?”

“I can give you two, sir,” Dover said. “You give me the boot, you’ll get somebody up here who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, and that’ll screw up the war effort. There’s one. And two is, ten minutes after that new sucker gets here, he’s gonna be on the horn screaming his head off to you, wondering how come you’re not shipping him the shit he needs.”

“You can’t possibly be a Regular,” Major General Kinder said after yet another pause.

“Not me,” Jerry Dover agreed cheerfully. “I come out of the restaurant business. But I’m mighty goddamn good at what I do. Which counts for more…sir?”

“The restaurant business, eh? No wonder you’re such a foulmouthed son of a bitch,” Kinder said, proving he’d had at least one other restaurant manager serve under him. “All right, Major. We’ll see what we can do.”

“Thank you very much, sir.” Dover’s respect for military courtesy rose in direct proportion to how much his superiors were inclined to do what he wanted.

“You almost pushed it too far, Major,” Barton Kinder said. “I wouldn’t try that again if I were you.” He hung up before Dover could answer, which might have been lucky for all concerned.

One of the other logistics officers, who couldn’t possibly have heard what Major General Kinder said, told Dover, “Boy, you like to walk close to the edge, don’t you?”

“The damnyankees can blow me up. The damnyankees will blow me up if we give ’em half a chance-maybe even if we don’t,” Dover answered. “If a brass hat on my own side wants to throw me in the stockade or take the uniform off my back, what the hell do I care? The worst thing my own people can do to me is leave me right where I’m at.”

“I wish I could look at it that way.” The other man had a VMI class ring on the third finger of his right hand, so he was a career officer. That meant he was missing…

“Freedom!” Dover said. He was no Party stalwart, but the slogan rang true here. “Isn’t that what this damn war’s all about? If we aren’t free to do what we want and tell everybody else to piss up a rope, what’s the point?”

Before the VMI graduate could answer, the world blew up. Alarms started howling and screeching. Bombs started dropping. Shells started bursting. Men started screaming, “Gas! Gas!”

“Fuck!” Jerry Dover said, with much more passion than he’d used to say, Freedom! He had to rummage in his desk for a gas mask. As he fumbled it on, he knew what this was. He knew what it had to be. The Yankees had been building up for a long time. They weren’t building any more. They were coming.

Invasion! No word could rouse greater dread in the CSA. For the first two summers of the war, the Confederates had had everything their own way. The United States had a lot of debts to pay. Now it looked as if they were laying their money on the table.

“Out!” somebody shouted. “Out and into the trenches!”

That struck Jerry Dover as some of the best advice he’d ever heard. He flew out through the tent flap-not that he was the first man gone, or even the second. The trenches weren’t far away, but one of the men who got out ahead of him stopped a shell and exploded into red mist. Dover tasted blood on his lips as he ran by. He spat and spat, feeling like a cannibal.

He jumped into the trench feetfirst, as if going into a swimming hole when he was a kid. Then he looked around for something to dig with. Being merely a logistics officer, he had no entrenching tool on his belt. A board was better than nothing. He started scraping his own dugout from the side of the trench.

Shell fragments screeched past above his head. A wounded man shrieked. Not everybody made it to the trench on time. Some Confederate guns started firing back. The noise of shells going out was different from the one they made coming in.

Bombs whistled down out of the sky. They were what really scared Dover. If one of them burst in this stretch of trench, that was it. He was safe enough from artillery here, but not from bombs.

Somebody punctuated a momentary lull by screaming, “This is it!”

“Make it stop!” someone else added a moment later, his voice high and desperate and shrill.

Jerry Dover wished it would stop, too, but it didn’t. It went on and on, till it reminded him of one of the unending bombardments from the Great War. He was convinced whoever’d let out that first cry was dead right-or, with better luck, still alive and right. This had to be it. If the damnyankees weren’t coming over the Ohio right here, this was the biggest bluff in the history of the world.

More Confederate guns boomed, but the noise they made seemed almost lost in the thunder of the Yankee barrage. Officers and sergeants shouted for men to move now here, now there. Dover wouldn’t have left his hole for all the money in the world, or for all the love in it. Moving about up there was asking to be obliterated.

Overhead, U.S. airplanes droned south. Dover swore as he listened to them. The Yankees weren’t just going after front-line C.S. troops. They were trying to tear up roads and railroads, too. The better the job they did, the more trouble the Confederacy would have bringing up men and materiel to beat them back.

And the better the job they did, the more trouble Jerry Dover would be in, not only from the U.S. soldiers but also from his own superiors. They wouldn’t believe any disaster that befell the CSA was their fault. God forbid! Easier to blame the major who used to manage a restaurant.

A four-engine bomber fell out of the sky, its right wing a sheet of flame. It smashed down less than a quarter of a mile from where Dover huddled. Its whole bomb load went off at once. The ground shook under him. Blast slammed him into the side of the trench. He tasted blood again. It was his own this time.

“Corpsman!” “Medic!” the shouts rose again and again, from all directions. God help these poor bastards, Dover thought. Riflemen and machine gunners-mostly-turned their weapons away from the soldiers who wore Red Crosses. Shells and bombs didn’t give a damn.

After four and a half hours that seemed like four and a half years (Dover kept checking his watch every three months and being amazed only fifteen minutes had gone by), the gunfire let up. He waited for shouts of, Here they come! He was surprised he hadn’t already heard those shouts. The damnyankees could have carved out a formidable bridgehead under cover of that barrage.

Then, just when he started to wonder if it was a bluff after all, more shells came in, these close by the river. “Smoke!” Again, the shout came from everywhere at once. U.S. light airplanes buzzed along the southern bank of the Ohio, spraying more smoke behind them. They got away with it, too. They made perfect targets, but the Confederates near Covington were simply too battered and rattled to shoot back.

Slowly, slowly, the smoke screen cleared. Jerry Dover started to look up, but the rattle of machine-gun fire made him duck back into the trench again. Those small airplanes came back and sprayed more smoke. The sound of machine guns and rifles roared from it.

“Reinforcements!” someone bawled. “We got to get us reinforcements, before they break out and go hog wild!”

“Fuck me!” That shout of despair came from close by Dover. “They’ve got barrels over the river!”

Dover looked up. Sure as hell, through the smoke that now thinned again he spied several squat, monstrous shapes. The growl of their engines added more noise to the racketing gunfire.

A Confederate shell burst in front of a barrel-and it ceased to be. It didn’t brew up; it didn’t catch fire. It…vanished. “It’s a goddamn balloon!” Dover exclaimed.

There were no real barrels close by-only more balloons. The noise of engines and gunfire came from phonograph records and loudspeakers. Whoever’d planted them had disappeared. The biggest bluff in the history of the world, Jerry Dover thought again. And it had worked. It froze the Confederates by Covington. Now…Where was the real blow landing?

Irving Morrell was wary of repeating himself. Irving Morrell was wary of repeating himself. The armor commander shook his head, wondering if he was going out of his tree. He wanted to drive Jake Featherston out of his instead. Crossing a river the size of the Ohio wasn’t easy. When George Custer did it in the Great War, he paid a heavy price-and he went on paying a heavy price while his troops ground their way southward a few hundred yards at a time.

Back in 1917, Morrell got men over the Cumberland east of Nashville much more quickly, much more neatly. But he had to figure the Confederates now knew all about what he did then and how he did it. They were bastards, but they weren’t dopes. If he tried the same thing twice, they would hand him his head. And he would deserve it.

And so, in football terms, he was doing his best to fake them out of their jocks. He laid on ferocious barrages in front of Covington and Louisville, and one on an open stretch of river between the two Kentucky towns. He used all the sneaky ingenuity the Army could come up with-and some straight out of Hollywood, too. Inflatable rubber barrels and sound-effects records kept the Confederates guessing a crucial extra little while. So did shells that gurgled as they flew through the air but didn’t hold any gas. A sensible man would figure no one wasted gas shells on a bluff. And a sensible man would be right. Morrell saved the real ones for the genuine assault.

The state of the art of crossing rivers in the face of enemy fire had improved since 1917. You didn’t have to throw pontoon bridges across or send men over in wallowing barges. Armored landing craft delivered soldiers, barrels, and artillery in a hurry. Only a direct hit from a 105 or a bigger cannon yet could make them say uncle. Once the soldiers carved out a lodgement, then bridges could span the river.

No, the tricky part wasn’t the crossing itself. The tricky part was moving men and materiel into southern Indiana without letting the bastards in butternut know what was going on. Lots of trucks made lots of trips carrying nothing to fool Featherston’s fuckers into thinking the real blow would fall farther east. Lots of others carried men who promptly reboarded them under cover of darkness. More inflatable barrels and wooden artillery pieces left the impression of buildups where there were none. So did acres of tents just out of range of C.S. artillery.

Now Morrell had to hope all his deceptions were deceptive enough, his security tight enough. That the Confederates had spies on the northern bank of the Ohio went without saying. That U.S. Intelligence hadn’t rooted out all of them was also a given. How much they reported, how much they were believed…Those were the questions only battle would answer.

So far, everything looked good. The U.S. concentration lay between two tiny Indiana riverside towns with odd names: Magnet and Derby. Magnet hadn’t attracted any particular Confederate attention. That made Morrell want to tip his derby to the men under him who’d made the crossing work.

He wanted to, but he didn’t-he wasn’t wearing a derby. He was wearing a helmet with two stars painted on the front. On a parade helmet, the stars would have been gold so they stood out. Morrell didn’t want them to stand out. One sniper had already hit him. He wasn’t anxious to make himself a target for another one. His rank emblems were dull brown, and invisible from more than a few feet away.

His own headquarters were in Derby, the more southerly of the two towns. People there talked with a twang that reminded him of the wrong side of the border. Intelligence assured him they were no more disloyal than anybody else. He hoped Intelligence knew what it was talking about. But his hackles rose whenever he listened to any of the locals.

Through field glasses, he watched artillery and dive bombers pound northern Kentucky. The Confederates were trying to hit back, but they seemed a little punch-drunk, a little slow. The corners of Morrell’s mouth turned down. Two years earlier, he and Abner Dowling were a beat late when they tried to meet the C.S. thrust into Ohio. About time the other side found out what that felt like.

A soldier from the wireless shack came up to him and saluted. “We’ve reached Objective A, sir,” he reported.

Morrell looked at his watch. Two in the afternoon, a few minutes past. “Almost an hour ahead of schedule,” he said. They’d driven the Confederates out of rifle and machine-gun range of the Ohio: pushed them back more than a mile. Jake Featherston’s men wouldn’t have an easy time driving the invaders into the river now. And Morrell had another reason to beam. “With Objective A taken, I can cross myself.”

“Yes, sir,” the noncom said. Morrell had strict orders from Philadelphia to stay north of the Ohio till the Confederates were cleared from the riverside. He obeyed orders like that only when he felt like it. Here, reluctantly, he saw they made good sense.

“General Parsons!” he shouted now.

His second-in-command came running. “Yes, sir?” Brigadier General Harlan Parsons was short and square and tough. He didn’t have much imagination, but he didn’t have much give, either.

“As of now, you’re in command,” Morrell said. “Keep ’em crossing the river, keep ’em moving forward. When I get south of the Ohio, I’ll take over again. My barrel’s got enough wireless circuits to do the broadcasting for New York City.” He exaggerated, but not by much.

Parsons saluted again. “I’ll handle it, sir,” he said, and Morrell had no doubt he would. “I’ll see you when we get to Objective B.”

“Right,” Morrell said. They would have to drive the Confederates out of artillery range of the Ohio-say, ten or twelve miles back-to meet their second objective. If everything went according to plan, that would take another two days. But who could say what the plan had to do with reality? You went out there and you saw what happened.

Morrell hurried toward his fancy barrel with the eagerness of a lover going to his beloved. The rest of the crew stood around the machine, waiting. As soon as the four enlisted men saw him, they scrambled into the machine. The engine roared to life even as he was slipping down through the hatch atop the cupola and into the turret.

“Take us onto the landing craft,” he called to the driver as soon as his mouth reached the intercom mike.

“Yes, sir!” The barrel rumbled forward, first on the soft riverside earth and then on the steel ramp that led up into the ungainly, slab-sided, river-crossing contraption.

Sailors-they wore Navy blue, not Army green-gray-raised the ramp. It clanged into place, hard enough to make the barrel shake for a moment. A series of clangs meant the ramp was stowed and now had become the boat’s stern or rear end or whatever the hell you called it. The boat’s engine started up. The vibration made Morrell’s back teeth ache. Well, a dentist could wait.

The landing craft was as graceful as a fat man waddling along with an anvil. But a fat man lugging an anvil would sink like a stone if he went into the water. The landing craft didn’t. God and the engineers who designed it no doubt knew why it didn’t. Irving Morrell had no idea. He took the notion on faith. Somehow, believing in the landing craft was easier than his Sunday-school lessons had been.

Crossing the Ohio took about fifteen minutes. A few Confederate shells splashed into the river not far away. Fragments clanged off the landing craft’s sides. Nothing got through. Up front, the barrel driver said, “Thank you, Jesus!” He still believed in what he’d learned in Sunday school.

Then, with a jolt that clicked Morrell’s teeth together, the barrel wallowed up onto dry land again. The ramp thudded down. Morrell hadn’t felt the boat turn in the water, but it faced away from the Ohio. The barrel went into reverse and left its steel nest. Morrell felt like cheering when the tracks bit into soft ground. Here he was, on Confederate soil at last after spending most of the two years trying to defend his own country.

“Forward!” he told the driver. “Toward the fighting!” Then he played with the dials on the big, bulky wireless set that cramped the turret. “Nest, this is Robin,” he said, wondering who’d picked such idiotic code names. “Nest, this is Robin. Do you read?”

“Read you five by five, Robin.” The answer resounded in his earphones. He was back in touch, back in command. After fifteen or twenty minutes of glory-and responsibility-Harlan Parsons could go back to being number two.

“What is the situation?” Morrell asked. “Any changes?”

“Negative, sir,” the wireless man replied. “Everything’s on schedule, or maybe a little ahead of schedule.”

“Sounds good to me,” Morrell said. Before the Nest could answer, a noise like a giant frying bacon filled his earphones. Swearing, he yanked them off his head. The Confederates were starting to jam signals. That was a sign they were getting their wits about them and seriously starting to fight back. Morrell swore some more. He would have liked the enemy to stay stunned a while longer. You didn’t always get everything you wanted. As long as the USA had enough…

The barrel jounced past the burning ruin of a C.S. machine. Four soldiers in blood-soaked butternut coveralls-the barrel crew-sprawled close by in death. Maybe the fifth man got away. Or maybe he never got out, and was nothing but charred meat inside the barrel.

Morrell rode toward the front standing up in the turret, head and shoulders out of the cupola. He wanted to see what was going on. Enemy fire was light. Machine guns and other small arms farther forward chattered. Every Confederate foot soldier carried either an automatic rifle or a submachine gun. The bastards in butternut had plenty of firepower. Did they have enough big guns, enough barrels, enough airplanes, enough men? Morrell and the United States were betting they didn’t.

A salvo of those newfangled rockets screamed in from the south. Morrell just had time to duck down into the turret and slam the cupola hatch shut before the rockets burst. Blast rocked the barrel. It could flip even one of these heavy machines right over. It could, but it didn’t this time. Fragments clanged off armor.

“Son of a bitch!” Frenchy Bergeron said. “Those fuckers are no fun at all.”

“Right the first time,” Morrell told the gunner. Yes, the Confederates were fighting back. No reason to expect they wouldn’t, no matter how much Morrell would have liked it if they rolled over onto their backs like whipped dogs.

Another salvo of rockets came down, this one a little farther away. “God help the poor infantry,” Bergeron remarked. Morrell nodded. For plastering a wide area with firepower, those rockets were world-beaters. Bergeron went on, “How many of them have they got, anyway?”

“Good question,” Morrell said. “Best answer I’ve got is, not enough to stop us.” He hoped he was telling the truth. Somewhere in Alabama or Texas or Georgia, the CSA had factories working overtime to turn out the rockets and their launchers, though the latter were simplicity itself: just iron tubing and sheet metal. But the more rockets the Confederates made, the less of something else they turned out. Bullets? Automatic rifles? Barrel tracks? Canned corn? Something-that was for sure. Keep the pressure on them and they couldn’t make enough of everything they needed and keep an army in the field at the same time, not when they were fighting a country more than twice their size.

Things had worked that way in the Great War, anyhow. The United States ought to have a bigger edge this time, because the Confederates were persecuting their Negroes instead of using them. But industrialized agriculture and factory efficiency were both a lot further along than they were a generation earlier. Farms and factories kept fewer men away from the field than they had.

The bow machine gun on Morrell’s barrel fired a quick burst. “Scratch one!” the gunner said. A Confederate who did make it to the battlefield wouldn’t go home again. Morrell nodded to himself. Now-how many more would it take before Jake Featherston said uncle?

Cincinnatus Driver sat in a tent north of Cincinnati, hoping the other shoe would drop here. U.S. forces were already over the river farther west, driving from Indiana into western Kentucky. Meanwhile, Cincinnatus shoved money into the pot. “See you an’ raise you a dollar,” he said. He was holding three jacks, so he thought his chances were pretty good.

One of the other truck drivers still in the hand dropped out. The last driver raised a dollar himself. Cincinnatus eyed him. He’d drawn two. If he’d filled a straight or a flush, he’d done it by accident. Odds against that were pretty steep. Cincinnatus bumped it up another dollar.

Now the other man-a white-eyed him. He tossed in one more dollar of his own. “Call,” he said.

“Three jacks.” Cincinnatus showed them. The other driver swore-he had three eights. Cincinnatus scooped up the pot. The other driver, still muttering darkly, grabbed the cards and shuffled them for the next hand.

He’d just started to deal when artillery, a lot of artillery, roared not far away. All the men in the card game cocked their heads to one side, listening. “Ours,” one of them said. The rest nodded, Cincinnatus included.

“Don’t sound like they’re dicking around,” said the fellow who’d held three eights. He was a wiry little guy named Izzy Saperstein. He had a beard so thick he shaved twice a day and the most hair in his nose and ears Cincinnatus had ever seen.

“Put on a bigger barrage earlier,” another driver said. “Made the bastards in butternut keep their heads down and made sure they wouldn’t move soldiers west. Chances are this is more of the same.”

“Maybe.” Saperstein scratched his ear. With that tuft sprouting from it, he likely itched all the time. Cincinnatus wondered if he couldn’t cut the hair or pluck it or something. It was just this side of disgusting.

They played for another couple of hours, while the guns boomed and bellowed. None of them got excited about that. They’d all heard plenty of gunfire before. As long as nothing was coming down on their heads, they didn’t flabble. Cincinnatus won a little, lost a little, won a little more.

He was up about fifteen bucks when a U.S. captain stuck his head into the tent. “Go to your trucks now, men,” he said. “Head for the depot and load up. We’ve crossed the Ohio, and our boys’ll need everything we can bring ’em.”

“Crossed the Ohio? Here?” Izzy Saperstein sounded amazed.

Cincinnatus was surprised, too. He hadn’t really believed the USA would try to force a crossing here. He didn’t know many people who had, either. If folks on this side were caught by surprise, maybe the Confederates would be, too. “We fighting in Covington, sir?” he asked. “I was born there. I know my way around good. I can lead and show folks the way.”

“Thanks, Driver, but no,” the captain answered. “We’re going to skirt the town, pen up the enemy garrison inside, and clean it out at our leisure. Now get moving.”

Only one possible answer to that. Cincinnatus gave it: “Yes, sir.” Along with the other men, he headed for his truck as fast as he could go.

A self-starter was so handy. A touch of a button and the motor came to life. He remembered cranking trucks in the Great War. That was even more fun in the rain-and if your hand slipped, the crank would spin backwards and maybe break your arm. He didn’t have to worry about that now. No-all he needed to worry about was getting shot or incinerated or blown sky-high. Happy day, he thought.

Soldiers with dollies filled the back of the truck with crates of God knew what. Ammunition, he guessed by the way the truck settled on its springs. “Go get ’em, Pop!” one of the young white men yelled to him. Cincinnatus grinned and waved. He was plenty old enough to be that kid’s father. And Pop didn’t burn his ears the way Uncle would have. The soldier would have said the same thing to a white man Cincinnatus’ age. In the CSA, Uncle was what whites called a Negro too old to get stuck with boy.

The truck convoy rumbled south, toward the river. With so much weight in the rear, Cincinnatus’ deuce-and-a-half rode a lot smoother than it did empty. He drove past gun pits where gun bunnies stripped to the waist worked like men possessed to throw more shells at the Confederates. Some of the U.S. soldiers were already lobster-red from too much sun. Cincinnatus glanced at his own brown arm. There weren’t many things white men had to worry about that he didn’t, but sunburn was one of them.

Every so often, incoming shells burst. Think what you would about the men who followed Jake Featherston, but they had no quit in them. Wherever they could hit back, they did.

“This way! This way!” A sergeant with wigwag flags directed the trucks toward slab-sided boats plainly made to cross rivers no matter what the unpleasant people on the other bank had to say about it. Cincinnatus rolled into one.

“All the way forward!” a sailor told him. “We hold two trucks, by God.” Cincinnatus rolled up till his front bumper kissed the landing craft’s rear wall. The sailor rewarded him with a circle from his thumb and forefinger. Cincinnatus waved and nodded, as he had with the young soldier who loaded the truck. He knew how the man in blue meant the gesture. Whether the sailor did or not, though, Cincinnatus also happened to know that to Germans (many of whom had crossed from Cincinnati to Covington in the easygoing days before the Great War) a very similar hand sign meant you were an asshole.

Another truck followed his into the ungainly boat. It didn’t quite have to bump his machine to let the boat’s crew raise the ramp and dog it shut. “Do I leave my motor on?” Cincinnatus called to the closest sailor.

“Bet your butt, buddy,” the man answered. “You’re gonna wanna hit the ground running, right?”

Cincinnatus didn’t say no. He wished he were someplace where the Confederates couldn’t shoot at him or shell him or drop bombs on his head. Why didn’t you stay in Des Moines, then? he asked himself. A little-no, much-too late to worry about that now. And he knew why he didn’t stay there: he owed the CSA too much. But understanding that and liking it when he headed into danger were two different things.

On land, the landing craft ran well enough to get down into the river. On the Ohio, it ran well enough to cross. On the other side, it got up onto the bank. It didn’t do any of those things very well. That it could do all of them, even if badly, made it a valuable machine. The wall against which Cincinnatus’ truck nestled also proved to be a ramp. It thudded down. He put the truck in gear and rolled off. The other truck in the landing craft followed him.

A corporal pointed at him, and then at some other trucks. “Follow them!” the man yelled. Cincinnatus nodded to show he understood. He wasn’t sure those other trucks came from his unit. That wasn’t his worry, not right now. Somebody’d told him what to do. He just had to do it.

He began to wonder if they’d caught the Confederates flatfooted. There wasn’t a lot of incoming enemy fire. He didn’t miss it, and he hoped that what there was kept missing him. Whenever he could, he glanced east, toward Covington. He could see…exactly nothing. He hoped the police and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards hadn’t shipped all the Negroes in town off to camps farther south. He hoped Lucullus Wood and the other black Reds were finding ways to give the Confederates a hard time, even from behind barbed wire. All he could do was hope. He couldn’t know.

The convoy stopped by a battery of 105s. Soldiers swarmed aboard his truck and unloaded it with locustlike intensity. He waited to see if they would start swearing, the way they might if, say, he carried crates full of machine-gun belts. When they didn’t, he decided the corporal had sent him to the right place after all.

“Where do I go now?” he asked when the truck was empty. “Back across the river to load up again?”

“No, by God.” A U.S. soldier pointed south and west. “We just took a Confederate supply depot. I mean to tell you, the guy who was running it must’ve been a fucking genius. Everything from pencils to pecans to power tools. Ammunition out the ass, too.”

“That don’t do us much good,” Cincinnatus said. “They don’t use the same calibers as we do.”

“Yeah, but we got a lotta guys carrying their automatic rifles. Damn things are great, long as you can keep ’em in bullets,” the soldier said. “We got enough of their ammo at this here dump to keep a lot of our guys going for a long time.”

Cincinnatus liked the way that sounded. When he got to the depot, he decided the soldier who’d sent him there was right: the quartermaster who’d set it up was a genius. If he was still alive, he was bound to be gnashing his teeth that everything he’d labored to gather now lay in U.S. hands. The Confederates hadn’t even got the chance to blow up the ammunition.

This time, Cincinnatus could see what went into the back of his truck. RATIONS, CANNED, the crates said. No doubt U.S. authorities would use them to feed soldiers in green-gray. And no doubt the soldiers in green-gray would grumble when they got them. U.S. canned goods were better than their C.S. equivalents. But Confederate rations were ever so much better than no rations at all.

Confederate prisoners marched glumly up the road toward the Ohio. The U.S. troops in green-gray who herded them along got them off the highway and onto the shoulder to keep them from slowing down the southbound trucks. Some of the men in butternut stared at Cincinnatus’ dark face in the cab of his truck. He sent them a cheery wave and went on driving. So they didn’t think Negroes were good for anything, did they? Well, he hoped he gave them a surprise.

The U.S. soldiers who unloaded the truck didn’t seem so happy. “We’ve got our own canned goods, dammit,” one of them said. “We don’t want this Confederate shit.” His pals nodded.

“Don’t blame me, friends,” Cincinnatus said. “I just brung what they told me to bring.”

“Why didn’t they tell you to bring us a shitload of Confederate cigarettes?” the soldier said. “That woulda been worth somethin’.”

“Fuck it,” said another young man in green-gray. “We’re heading down into tobacco country. We’ll get our own smokes before long.”

“Yeah!” Two or three U.S. soldiers liked the sound of that. So did Cincinnatus, for different reasons. They weren’t more than ten or twelve miles south of Covington, but they thought they could go a lot farther. He’d seen that arrogance in Confederate soldiers before, but rarely in their U.S. counterparts. If they thought going into a fight that they could lick the enemy, that made them more likely to be right.

“General Morrell, he knows what the hell he’s doing,” the first soldier said. Again, he got nothing but agreement from his buddies. Again, Cincinnatus wondered if he was hearing straight. U.S. soldiers usually thought of their generals as bungling idiots-and usually had good, solid reasons for thinking of them that way.

Up ahead, Confederate guns boomed. A few shells came down not too far away. The soldiers laughed. “If that’s the best those bastards can do, they won’t even slow us down,” one of them said.

“They pulled this shit on us two years ago,” another one added. “Hell, I was in Ohio then. They caught me, but I slipped off before they took me very far. We didn’t know how to stop ’em. And you know what? I bet they don’t know how to stop us, either.”

No sooner had he spoken than several rocket salvos screamed down out of the sky. They didn’t land on the trucks, but half a mile or so to the east. Where the artillery hadn’t, they sobered the U.S. soldiers. “Well, maybe it won’t be quite so easy,” the first one said. “But I bet we can do it.”

Lieutenant Michael Pound thought he was getting the hang of commanding four other barrels instead of doing the gunning for one. He hoped he was, anyhow. None of the other barrel commanders in the platoon was complaining. They’d plunged deep into Kentucky, and all five machines were still intact.

He studied the map. The next town ahead, on the north bank of the Green River, was called Calhoun. The hamlet on the south side of the river, Rumsey, was even smaller. They probably didn’t have a thousand people put together.

John Calhoun, Pound remembered, was a Southern politician before the War of Secession-and, therefore, a son of a bitch by definition. A town named after him deserved whatever happened to it. Pound didn’t know who Rumsey was. Nobody good, probably.

Calhoun and Rumsey together wouldn’t have mattered if not for the bridge between them. The James Bethel Gresham Memorial Bridge, the map called it, and noted that it was named for a Kentuckian who was one of the first Confederate soldiers to die in the Great War. He had it coming, Pound thought unkindly.

He eyed the bridge from the edge of the woods that encroached on Calhoun from the north. Binoculars made it seem to leap almost to within arm’s length. Some Confederate soldiers milled around in Calhoun, but not many, and they didn’t seem very well organized.

As usual, Pound didn’t need long to make up his mind. He got on the all-platoon circuit of his wireless: “Men, we are going to take that bridge away from the enemy.”

“How, sir?” That was Sergeant Frank Blakey, the next most senior barrel commander. “Won’t they just blow it when they see us coming?”

“Sure-if they recognize us,” Pound answered. “But if they don’t…” He explained what he had in mind.

When he finished, Sergeant Blakey whistled. “You’ve got the balls of a burglar, sir. If we try it, though, we just have to hope you don’t get ’em draped over a doorknob.”

“If you think it won’t work, sing out,” Pound said. “I spent years telling officers they were a bunch of damn fools-and they mostly were, too. My ears won’t fall off if you tell me the same thing.”

Despite reassurances, none of the noncoms under him spoke up right away. At last, Blakey said, “I think we’ve got a chance, sir. Like you say, they sure as hell won’t be expecting it.” He laughed. “I wouldn’t-you better believe that.”

“Let’s go, then.” When an idea struck Pound, it struck hard. This one was no exception. He threw open the cupola lid and climbed out of the barrel. “Come on,” he called to his gunner and loader. “Time’s a-wasting.”

They descended from the machine, too. They both looked faintly dubious, or more than faintly, but they went along. Crewmen also got out of the other four barrels. Like Michael Pound and his men, they started cutting down bushes and leafy branches and tying them to the decking and turrets of their machines, breaking up their silhouettes and hiding a lot of the green-gray paint that covered them.

An infantry lieutenant came up to Pound. “What the hell are you guys doing?” he asked. “Playing Queen of the May?”

“I hope not.” Pound pointed to the span between Calhoun and Rumsey. “I aim to take that bridge. I’ll probably need your help to do it.” He told the other officer-who was at least twenty years younger than he was-his plan.

“You got your nerve, don’t you?” The infantry lieutenant echoed Sergeant Blakey. But he nodded. “Yeah, we can do that. Keep quiet till you make it onto the bridge or you get in trouble, then open up with everything we got.” He had a tough-guy, big-city accent-Pound guessed he was from Chicago. He added, “You know that’s liable to be kinda too late, don’t you?”

“Chance you take.” Pound’s broad shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “If we go down, we’ll go down swinging.”

“Hope you don’t. We’ll back your play.” The other lieutenant stuck out his hand. “Luck.” He didn’t say, You’ll need it, but it was written all over his face.

Pound shook hands with him anyway. “Thanks. If this does work, come on down once we’re where we need to be and help us take charge of things.”

“Right,” the infantry lieutenant said. Fat chance, his face declared.

When the barrels were camouflaged to Pound’s satisfaction, he led the parade down into Calhoun. The other four machines stayed buttoned up. He couldn’t stand that. He wanted to see everything that was going on-and he thought he might need to talk his way past some of the men in butternut.

Along State Highway 81 they rumbled, past Seventh, Sixth, Fifth, Fourth. Calhoun didn’t seem to have any street with a number bigger than Seventh. They got down to Mayberry, four blocks past the county seat and only a block away from the river, before anybody thought to challenge them. A Confederate sergeant stepped out into the narrow road and called, “What do y’all reckon you’re doin’?”

“Securing the bridge, of course.” As usual, Michael Pound acted as if he had not a doubt in the world.

Frowning, the sergeant hefted his automatic rifle. The barrel’s bow machine gun could cut him in half before he started shooting…Pound hoped. “You talk funny,” the noncom said. “Where you from?”

“New Orleans,” Pound answered. The Crescent City’s half-Southern, half-Brooklyn speech pattern was different from anything else in the CSA. His own accent was much closer to Canadian than anything else; he’d grown up not far from the border. It didn’t sound much like that of a native Louisianan, but if this Confederate wasn’t expecting anybody from the USA…

And he wasn’t. He stepped aside, saying, “Wish to God somebody woulda told us we were getting barrels sent in.”

Life is full of surprises, Pound thought, but he didn’t say anything out loud-the less he opened his mouth where Confederates could hear, the better. The barrel turned right on First and rumbled west toward the bridge to Rumsey. The bridge was about a quarter of a mile away. Pound’s machine had covered a little more than half the distance when somebody shouted, “Holy Jesus! They’re Yankees!”

“Shit!” Pound said, without originality but with great sincerity. A burst of submachine-gun fire clanged off the side of the barrel. He dove down into the turret. “Gun it for the bridge!” he yelled to the driver. To the bow gunner, he added, “Shoot anybody who gets in our way or tries to blow the bridge!”

“Yes, sir,” both men answered. The barrel’s engine went from rumble to roar. The ponderous machine couldn’t leap, but it could scoot pretty fast. It could-and it did.

“What if they can blow the damn thing from the Rumsey side, sir?” the gunner asked.

“There’s a technical term for that, Sergeant,” Pound answered. “In that case, we’re screwed.” He startled a laugh out of Mel Scullard. A moment later, he added, “Once we’re on the bridge, I want you to make sure nothing alive has the chance to come up from Rumsey and blow it. Can you do that for me?”

“Yes, sir,” Scullard said, which was the right answer. He gave the loader a one-word order: “Canister!”

“Canister,” Private Joe Mouradian echoed. The shell went into the breech. Barrels carried only three or four rounds of canister in their racks because they needed it so seldom. When they did need it, though, they were liable to need it bad. It turned the main armament into an enormous shotgun. Anybody who came within a hundred yards or so was asking to get blown to bits.

The driver turned left onto the bridge so sharply, Pound thanked the God in Whom he only sporadically believed for not letting the barrel throw a track. One of the machines behind him fired a round from its main armament. He couldn’t see what it was shooting at-he had his eyes on the forward-facing periscopes that showed the far end of the bridge and the village of Rumsey beyond.

“Stop just at the end of the bridge,” he told the driver.

“At the end of the bridge-yes, sir.” No sooner had the driver stopped than soldiers in butternut started running toward the barrel. The bow machine gun chattered. The Confederate soldiers went down, some dead or wounded, others diving for cover. Civilians appeared in the streets, too, but they were running for cover.

After the first impromptu charge from Rumsey failed, the Confederates paused to put together a proper attack. Whoever led it was plenty smart. He had plenty of people with automatic rifles and submachine guns going forward in front of the men with Featherston Fizzes and the Confederates’ newfangled antibarrel rockets. If the troops making the racket with the small arms could distract the barrel crew…

But the Confederate commander reckoned without canister. Pound waited till the closest enemy soldiers were very close indeed before he shouted, “Fire!”

Even he was awed by the carnage a 3?-inch canister shell could cause. Men and pieces of men lay and writhed, broken, in front of the barrel. Several dropped Featherston Fizzes added flames to the horror. “Shall I give ’em another round, sir?” Scullard asked.

“By all means,” Pound answered.

The second round of canister, when added to the steady rattle of death from the bow machine gun, convinced the handful of Confederates still on their feet to get away if they could. “Give me one more round,” the gunner told the loader.

“Hold up on that.” Pound overrode him. “Use HE instead, and start knocking down the houses closest to us. I don’t want one of those bastards with a rocket to be able to get off an easy shot at us.”

“I’ll do it, sir,” Scullard said, and he did, with the peculiar gusto a man has when destroying property that belongs to the other side. A secondary explosion from inside one of those houses in Rumsey made Pound think he’d barely beaten the Confederates to the punch: if that wasn’t a rocket blowing up, what was it?

Sergeant Blakey’s barrel came up alongside Pound’s. The other three in the platoon held the north end of the bridge against the Confederates in Calhoun. Their cannon and machine guns thundered and barked. Pound hoped the U.S. foot soldiers in the woods north of Calhoun were pressing down into the town. Squeezed between them and the barrels on the bridge, what could Featherston’s men do but get out?

The Confederates inside Rumsey had an antibarrel cannon: an inch-and-a-halfer from the days when the war first started. It had two virtues-it was easy to haul around, and it fired rapidly. Against one of the new U.S. barrels, though, it was hardly more than a doorknocker. Its shells had no hope of penetrating that thick, well-sloped armor.

“There it is, sir!” Scullard said. “In the bushes by that big house.”

“You’re right,” Pound said. “Do the honors, then.”

“Yes, sir,” the gunner said, and then, to the loader, “HE!” Two shells sufficed to upend the gun and send a couple of the men who served it flying. Pound nodded to himself in somber satisfaction. If the other side wanted to play the game but didn’t have good cards…well, too bad for them.

He looked through the periscopes facing back toward Calhoun. Alarm tingled through him. Soldiers were on the bridge. Could he traverse the turret fast enough to fire at them before they reached the barrel? But then he relaxed-they wore green-gray, not butternut.

“We have Calhoun,” he said happily. “And we have the bridge-intact, by God. We can keep rolling right on through Kentucky. Let’s see Featherston stop us. Let’s see anybody stop us.”