American Front (9 page)

“That’d be good,” Brock said, and let it go, from which Ramsay concluded his sergeant had some doubts. He shrugged. Bobby Brock could be a bit of an old lady sometimes, but you didn’t want anybody else along when the fighting got serious.

They rode past a farmhouse. The farmer was out in his fields. He knew right off they were from the Confederate States, and started running like hell back to his farmhouse. “Shall we get rid of him, sir?” Ramsay asked the captain in charge of the raiders.

Captain Hiram Lincoln often made himself out to be the toughest bird around, maybe because he had such an unfortunate last name. But now he shook his head. “Can’t waste the time,” he said. “Fellow doesn’t have any telephone wires goin’ into his house, so he’s not going to get word to anybody. We keep riding. We’ll hit the railroad track pretty soon.”

“Remind me again, sir,” Ramsay said, bowing to the appeal to military necessity. “We going in west of Kingman or east?”

“West,” Captain Lincoln answered. “The blockhouse they built to protect the railroad is on the east side of town. We don’t want to tangle with that. Them damn machine guns, they’re liable to take all the fun out of war.”

The standard-bearer, a kid named Gibbons, pointed ahead to a smudge on the horizon. “Reckon that’s Kingman, sir.”

“Swing left,” Lincoln told him. “We’ll want to set ourselves on the track a couple miles away from town.”

Up ahead, a church bell began ringing as if announcing the end of the world. A machine gun in the blockhouse began to chatter, but the bullets fell far short of the Confederates. Ramsay nodded to himself. Captain Lincoln had known what he was talking about, all right.

He glanced over to Brock. The sergeant nodded back at him. It was nice to have an officer who knew which end was up.

“There’s the track,” Lincoln said. “Let’s go!”

They knew what to do. Some of them had grandfathers who’d done the same thing in the War of Secession. They had better tools for mischief than their grandfathers had used, though. Under Captain Lincoln’s direction, the troopers fanned out to cover the demolition crew. The specialists got to work with their dynamite. One of them hit the plunger on the detonator.

Ramsay’s horse shied under him at the flat, harsh bark of the explosion. Clods of dirt came raining down on him and the animal both; he hadn’t moved back quite far enough. You could make a hell of a hole with dynamite, a hole that would take a long time to fill by pick-and-shovel work. The explosive also did a good job of twisting rails out of shape. Till the Yanks brought in some fresh iron, they weren’t going to be using this line to ship things from one coast to the other.

Dismounting, Ramsay gave the reins to a cavalryman who was already holding two other horses. Then he went over to the pack animals and started pulling crowbars off the panniers they carried to either side. “Come on, boys!” he shouted. “Let’s tear up some more track.”

The Confederates fell to work with a will, laughing and joking and whooping as they separated the iron rails from the wooden ties that bound them. The demolition men used gasoline to start a fire on the prairie. They didn’t worry about its spreading, as they would have back in their own country. If it got out of hand, that was the Yankees’ problem.

“Come on!” Ramsay said again. He lugged a cross tie over to the fire and threw it in. The rest of the troopers followed his example. Then, several men to a rail, they hauled the lengths of track over and threw them in, too. They’d slump in the heat and have to be taken to an ironworks to be straightened.

They had one rail left to cast into the fire when gunshots rang out in the east, over toward Kingman: not just rifle shots, but the hard, quick chatter of a machine gun. “Mount and form skirmish line!” Captain Lincoln yelled. “No more horseplay, not a bit—we’ve got some real work to do now.”

Ramsay reclaimed his horse and sprang into the saddle. He checked to make sure he had a round in the chamber of his Tredegar carbine, then made sure his front pockets were full of fresh five-round clips. He had a cavalry saber, a copy of the British pattern of 1908, strapped to the left side of his saddle, but who could guess whether he’d get a chance to use it against a machine gun?

Captain Lincoln was holding a pair of field glasses up to his eyes. “Looks like they’ve got maybe half a company of horse,” he said. “Half a company of horse and—uh-oh. They got one of those newfangled armored automobiles with ’em, too. That’s where the machine gun is at.” A predatory grin stretched across his face. “Well, let’s go see what the contraption is worth.
Move ’em out!
” His voice rose to a shout again.

Before long, Ramsay could pick out the armored car without any help from field glasses. As it bounced over the prairie, it kicked up more dust than half a dozen horses would have. The Confederate pickets fell back before it; the Yankee horsemen, encouraged by the mechanical monster’s presence, pursued a lot more aggressively than they would have otherwise, considering how outnumbered they were.

The armored car didn’t move much faster than a trotting horse. The machine gun it mounted sat in a steel box on top of the superstructure; the gunner swung it back and forth through a slit in the metal, giving him about a ninety-degree field of fire. Ramsay waved toward the vehicle. “We get around to the side and it can’t hurt us,” he called to the squadmates who rode with him.

He rapidly discovered that wasn’t quite true. Not only did the gun traverse in its mounting, but the driver, by swinging the front end of the armored car this way and that, could bring it to bear on targets it wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise. And the Yankee troopers were doing their best to make sure the Confederates couldn’t outflank the ugly, noisy thing, anyhow.

A bullet cracked past Ramsay’s head. The noise—and the fright it gave him—made him realize this wasn’t practice any more. The U.S. soldiers were doing their damnedest to kill him, and their damnedest, by the way his comrades and their horses were crashing to the ground, was better than he’d expected. He’d never seen combat before, not even fighting Mexican bandits along the frontier with the Empire. His cherry was gone now, by Jesus.

He raised his carbine to his shoulder and fired at a green-gray-clad Yankee. The fellow did not pitch from the saddle, so he had to have missed. He worked the bolt to get rid of the casing and chamber a fresh round, then fired again. Another bullet zipped past him, and another. Now he didn’t bother looking after he fired, to see what effect each round had. The more he put in the air, the better his chance of hitting something.

A lot of bullets were hitting the armored car. The sound of them rattling off its side put Ramsay in mind of hail hitting a tin roof. But the car kept on coming, like an ironclad smashing its way through a navy of wooden ships. The comparison was apt, for it was doing more damage to the Confederates all by its lonesome than all the troopers who came with it.

Bobby Brock made a noise somewhere between a groan and a scream. There was a neat hole in the front of his uniform tunic. As he slumped down over his horse’s neck, Ramsay got a look at the hole the bullet had made going out through his back. That wasn’t neat at all. It looked more as if somebody had set off half a stick of dynamite in his chest.

The trooper right alongside of Brock went down as his horse took three bullets—neck, barrel, and hock—from that damned machine gun in the space of a second and a half. The cavalryman pulled himself free, but he didn’t bounce to his feet. Having a horse fall on your leg wasn’t the best thing that could ever happen to it.

For a couple of dreadful minutes, Ramsay was afraid the armored car would win the little battle all by its lonesome, even though the Confederate troopers were mopping the floor with the damnyankees whenever they could engage them away from the car with its machine gun. But then the vehicle, all of its tires shot out, slowed to walking pace and, when it went into a hole, couldn’t pull itself out no matter how the engine growled and roared and sent up clouds of stinking exhaust.

Ramsay threw back his head and let out the catamount wail of a Rebel yell. “Damn thing is stuck, boys!” he shouted. “Now we can get around behind it and settle the rest of these bastards.”

The Confederates went wide to right and left around the bogged-down armored car, getting away from the deadly arc of fire its machine gun could command. Once that gauntlet was run, chasing the Yankee cavalry back toward Kingman proved the work of only a few minutes.

“And now we settle with this goddamn thing,” Captain Lincoln said, riding toward the armored car from the rear. The machine gunner proved to have a firing port in the back of the steel box that enclosed him. He banged away with a pistol. The range was still long for a handgun, and he missed. Captain Lincoln yelled, “Parley, dammit!” The U.S. soldier held his fire. Lincoln said, “You come out of that damned iron turtle of yours, or we’ll chuck a couple of sticks of dynamite under it and blow y’all to kingdom come.”

With a squeal of metal against metal, a hinged roof on top of the armored car and a door in its side came open. The machine gunner stood up with his hands in the air and the driver stepped out. “All right, you’ve got us,” the gunner said with a grin, sounding and looking a lot more jaunty than he should have, considering how much damage he’d done to good Southern men and horses. “Take us and—”

He never got any farther than that. Somebody’s carbine barked at almost point-blank range. The back of his head blew off in a spray of blood and brain and bone. He collapsed, dead before he knew what hit him. With a cry of horror, the armored-car driver tried to dive back into his machine. Several more shots stretched him lifeless beside it.

“Chew our people up and make like it’s a game you can just walk away from, will you?” Ramsay said. He hadn’t fired at the men who’d surrendered, but he didn’t miss them a bit, either.

“You want to fight us, get on a horse and fight fair,” somebody else added, which made troopers’ heads bob up and down in agreement.

Captain Lincoln set his hands on his hips and snarled in exasperation. “God damn it to hell, now we got to blow up that machine,” he said. “Otherwise the Yankees’ll find the bodies like that and start shootin’ our prisoners, too.”

The armored car went up in a ball of flame as a stick of dynamite set off the gasoline in the fuel tank. Machine-gun bullets, ignited by the fire, added brisk popping sounds as they cooked off one after another.

“All right, we did what we came to do,” Lincoln said, looking from the funeral pyre of the armored car to the wrecked stretch of track. “Let’s get back home.”

Ramsay was happy to obey. Yes, they’d done what they’d come to do, but the cost—Of every three men who’d left Sequoyah, only two were going back, and one of them was wounded. And all that, or almost all of it, from one armored car that bogged down pretty fast.

He spurred his horse up close to Captain Lincoln’s. “Sir, what’s cavalry supposed to do when we run into four or five of those machine gun-totin’ machines, not just the one like we fought today?”

Lincoln didn’t answer for so long, Ramsay started to wonder if he’d heard. The captain looked back over his depleted command. “I don’t know, Corporal. I just don’t know.”

“Come on! Come on! Come on!” Captain Irving Morrell urged his men forward. Dust spurted up under his boots as, with every stride, he penetrated deeper into Confederate Sonora. “The faster we move, the less chance they have of setting up lines against us.”

One of his soldiers, sweat soaking through his uniform as he slogged through the desert under the weight of a heavy pack, pointed up into the sky. “They already got their lines set, sir,” he said.

Morrell hadn’t heard the buzz of a spying Confederate aeroplane, but looked up anyhow. He burst out laughing. No aeroplane up there, just half a dozen vultures, all of them circling hopefully. “
They
won’t get us, Altrock,” he said. “They’re waiting for us to feed ’em some Rebs.”

“That must be how it is, sir,” the infantryman agreed. He stepped up his pace to match that of his commander.

“You bet that’s how it is,” Morrell said, kicking at the light brown sandy dirt. “Didn’t we give ’em a blue-plate special when we crossed from Nogales into New Montgomery?”

Several men nodded enthusiastically in response to that. The bombardment of the Confederate town had done everything it was supposed to do, silencing the enemy’s guns and sending civilians streaming away in panic—white Confederates, their black servants and laborers, and the brown folk who’d lived there since the days before the Rebels bought Sonora from a Mexico strapped for cash to pay England and France what it owed. The garrison had fought, but they’d been outnumbered as well as outgunned. The way into Sonora, toward Guaymas and the Pacific end of the Confederate railway net, lay open.

Morrell meant to do everything he could to make sure that line got cut. He was a lean man in his mid-twenties, with a long face, light eyes, and sandy hair he wore cropped close to his skull. He gulped a salt tablet and washed it down with a swig of warm water from his canteen. Other than that, he ignored the sweat gushing from every pore. He ignored everything not directly concerned with the mission, and pursued everything that was with a driving energy that brought his men along, too.

“Come on!” he called again, stepping up the pace. “We’ve cracked the shell. Now we get to suck the meat out.”

One of his first lieutenants, a big, gangly fellow named Jake Hoyland, moved up alongside him, map in hand. “Next town ahead is Imuris,” he said, pointing. “There’s some mines around there, too: copper mines. Cocospera.” He read the name off the map with the sublime disregard for Spanish pronunciation growing up in Michigan gave him.

“The division will secure those, and the United States will exploit them,” Morrell said. “We have an advantage over our German allies here, Jake.”

“Sir?” Hoyland wasn’t much given to strategic thought. He’d make captain one day, but he probably wouldn’t rise much further than that.

Patiently, Morrell explained: “Germany is attacking France on a narrow front, and the French and the damned English can be strong against them all along it. We have about the population of Germany, and the Confederacy and Canada together close to the population of France, but we have thousands and thousands of miles of frontier with our enemies, not a few hundred. Except in a few places, defense in depth becomes impossible.”