“Lord, what a fuckup,” the PFC said softly. Chester nodded and lit yet another cigarette. That was about the size of it.
Lieutenant Husak, meanwhile, started throwing a fit. “We’ve got to clear these people!” he yelled. “How are we supposed to fight a war if civilians keep getting in the way?” Civilians getting in the way weren’t an accidental consequence of Confederate attacks; Featherston’s men knew they would, and took advantage of it. Husak turned to the soldiers with him. “You men! Fix bayonets and get these refugees off the road. If an Asskicker comes by, we’re sitting ducks, and so are they.”
He wasn’t wrong. Chester hadn’t used his bayonet for anything but a knife and a can opener since the Great War. He put it on the business end of his Springfield now. It was still good for intimidating civilians.
“Get out of the road!” he shouted as he hopped down from the truck. He did his best to sound like a traffic cop. “Come on, people—move it! You’re blocking military traffic! You’ve got to get out of the way!”
Had the truck been full of soldiers, he would have got results faster. It wasn’t so easy with only half a dozen men at his back. The civilians didn’t want to listen. All they wanted was to get away from the Confederates. They returned to the highway as soon as Chester and his comrades went by.
And then a Confederate dive bomber
did
spot the column and the halted truck.
Chester knew what that scream in the sky was as soon as he heard it. “Hit the dirt!” he yelled, and took his own advice, scrambling away as fast as he could. The PFC dove for cover, too. The rest of the soldiers and the civilians were still mostly upright when the Mule machine-gunned them, dropped a bomb right in front of the truck, and roared back toward the west.
Screams. Shrieks. Raw terror. People running every which way. People down and bleeding—some writhing and howling, others lying still. Pieces of people flung improbably far. The truck going up like Vesuvius. Whatever problems Lieutenant Husak had with his temper, he’d never fix them now.
And now there was even more chaos and delay on the road than there had been before. Chester looked around. With the lieutenant dead, he was the highest-ranking man here. He wanted the responsibility about as much as he wanted a root canal. Want it or not, it had just landed in his lap. He got up and started doing what little he could to set things right.
D
espite its quaint name, Tom Colleton found himself liking Beaver, Pennsylvania. The town sat in the middle of a mining and industrial belt near the border with Ohio, but was itself pleasant and tree-shrouded. He’d commandeered the ivy-covered Quay House, former home of a prominent Socialist politician, for his regimental headquarters.
The runner from division HQ, a few miles farther south, caught up with him there. After saluting, the corporal said, “Sir, I have a special order for you.”
It must have been special, or his superiors would have sent it by wireless or field telephone, enciphering it if they thought they had to. Tom nodded. “Give it to me, then.”
He expected the messenger to pull out a piece of paper for him to read and then destroy. Instead, it came orally. The powers that be really didn’t want anything that had to do with it falling into U.S. hands. “Sir, you are ordered to allow a special unit to pass through your lines, and to make sure the troops under your command do nothing to interfere with this special unit in any way.”
That said just enough to leave Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton scratching his head. “Of course I’ll obey, but I’d like to know a little more about what I’m obeying,” he said. “Why would my men want to interfere with this special unit, whatever it is? How can I tell them not to if I don’t know why it’ll cause trouble?”
“Sir, I was told you’d likely ask that question, and that I was allowed to answer it,” the corporal said seriously. “The answer is, this special unit is made up of men who can talk like damnyankees. They wear Yankee uniforms and act like U.S. soldiers.”
“
Son
of a bitch!” Colleton exclaimed. Whatever he’d expected, that wasn’t it. After a moment, he wondered why not. Troops like that could raise merry hell behind enemy lines. Of course, they’d have a short life and not a merry one if they got captured. But that was their lookout, not his. He asked, “How will they get up here without having some overeager kid in butternut shoot their asses off?”
He won a smile from the runner. “They’ve come this far, sir,” the corporal said. “They’ll have escorts who look the way they’re supposed to. And they’ll move up at night, when they’re less likely to be noticed.”
“All right. Makes sense.” Tom wondered if the special unit had come up from the CSA entirely by night, lying quiet and hidden by day. He couldn’t think of any better way to keep his own side from trying to kill them. He asked, “Can you tell me anything about what they’ll be doing?”
“No, sir,” the messenger answered. “They didn’t tell me, so I couldn’t tell the damnyankees in case I got caught.”
“Fair enough—that makes sense, too,” Tom said. “What time can I expect ’em? My men will need some warning.”
“They should get here about eleven o’clock,” the messenger said. “Please don’t brief your men too soon. If they get captured, or if they just start bragging to damnyankee pickets . . .”
“I understand.” What Tom understood was that he was between a rock and a hard place. His men
did
need warning, or they would do their best to murder the ersatz Yankees. If he had to hold off till the last minute for fear of breaching security, some of them might not get the word. “I’ll do what needs doing.”
“Yes, sir.” The corporal saluted. “If you’ll excuse me . . .” He headed back toward division HQ, presumably bearing word that the special unit could come ahead.
Tom shook his head in wonder. Then he got on the field telephone with his company commanders, trying to find out where U.S. lines in front of him were most porous. “What’s cooking, sir?” one of his captains asked. “We going to sneak raiders through?”
“You might say so, Bobby Lee,” Tom answered. “You’ve got the quiet sector, so you win the cigar. Alert your men that the infiltrators will have escorts, and that they are to follow the orders they get from those escorts. Got it?”
“Well enough to do what I’m told,” the captain answered plaintively. “Something funny’s going on, though, isn’t it?”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Tom didn’t want to go into detail on the telephone. The damnyankees were better than he wished they were at tapping telephone lines. He didn’t know some U.S. noncom with earphones was listening to every word he said, but he didn’t want to elaborate on what was going to happen, not when his own superiors had gone out of their way to keep from sending anything on the air or over the wires.
With his own curiosity aroused, he waited impatiently for nightfall. Somewhere off to the north, artillery rumbled. His own area stayed pretty quiet. He supposed his superiors wanted it that way. If the Confederate soldiers dressed as Yankees were going to cause the most trouble, they ought to go in where the real enemy wasn’t keyed up and ready to start shooting at anything that moved.
Trucks rumbled into Beaver a few minutes past eleven. A Confederate major in proper uniform alighted from the first one and came looking for Tom. After being directed to the Quay House, he said, “Here we are, sir. You’ve been warned about us?”
“I sure have,” Tom Colleton answered.
“Good,” the major said. “Please bring some men with you to form a screen around the, ah, special soldiers as they go forward. We don’t want to have any unfortunate accidents.”
We don’t want the ordinary soldiers shooting up the special men,
he meant. Tom nodded. “I understand, Major. I agree one hundred percent.”
Nobody had got out of the trucks a couple of blocks away. Tom rounded up a couple of squads’ worth of clerks and technicians and other rear-echelon troops and had them surround the silent vehicles. “What’s up, sir?” one of them asked, reasonably enough.
“Don’t be surprised and don’t start shooting when you see who gets out of these trucks,” Tom answered. “No matter what these men look like, they aren’t real damnyankees. They’re infiltrators. They’re going to cause trouble behind the enemy’s lines. If this goes well, it’ll make the advance on Pittsburgh a hell of a lot easier.” He turned to the major. “All right?”
“Couldn’t be better, sir. Thanks.” The major raised his voice: “You can come out now, boys!”
Tom’s men swore softly as the
faux
Yankees emerged. He couldn’t blame them; he muttered under his breath, too. They looked much too much like the real thing. Their uniforms and helmets were the ones he’d been shooting at for more than a year. They wore U.S. shoes and carried U.S. weapons. And, when they spoke, they
sounded
like damnyankees, too. That really made the hair on his arms and at the back of his neck want to stand on end.
One of his men said, “Sir, you
sure
these bastards is on our side?”
“If I was a real Yankee, I’d shoot you for that, you son of a bitch,” one of the men said. He wore a sergeant’s uniform, and sounded like a cocky noncom . . . a cocky noncom from New York City. He could have taken his act to the stage. In fact, he was taking it to the stage—and a bad review would cost him his neck.
“Come on,” Tom said. “I’ll take you up to the line. One of my companies is facing a sector where the enemy doesn’t really have much of a line in place against us—that’s what happens sometimes when you push hard.”
“Good,” the major said. “Can you start a little firefight somewhere else to distract the Yankees some more?”
The request made sense, even if it would get some of his men wounded or killed. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, and sent the order over the field telephone. A machine gun and some riflemen opened up off to the right. The enemy returned fire. Springfields sounded very different from automatic Tredegars. Machine guns differed, too. The U.S. weapons were closely related to their Great War ancestors. The C.S. model was lighter, cooled by air rather than a clumsy water jacket, and designed to put out absolutely as much lead as possible. It sounded like nothing so much as a giant tearing up an enormous sheet of cloth: the individual rounds going off blended into an almost continuous roar.
“All right, Major,” Tom told the officer in charge of the imitation Yankees when they got to the perimeter. “I’ve done what I can do. The rest is up to you and your boys. Good luck.”
“Thank you kindly, sir.” The major, at least, sounded like a proper Confederate. He turned to the men in his charge. “Come on. Y’all know the drill.”
“Yeah.” “Sure thing.” “No problem.” Those laconic grunts sounded as if they came from the wrong side of the border. One of the men muttered, “Goddamn cowflop cigarettes from now on.” Tom sympathized with that. Everybody knew how eager Yankees were for Confederate tobacco.
A few at a time, the Confederates in U.S. uniform slipped off into the night. Tom waited tensely. If gunfire erupted right in front of him, something had gone wrong up there. But everything stayed quiet. Could they have the passwords for this sector? If the enemy had any brains, he would change those every day. Tom knew his own side wasn’t perfect at that. He supposed the Yankees also were unlikely to be.
Everything stayed quiet. However the infiltrators were doing it, they were doing it. The company commander said, “If that doesn’t buy us a breakthrough, nothing will.”
Even talking about breakthroughs made a Great War veteran nervous. “We’ll see what happens, that’s all, Bobby Lee,” Tom answered. “And I reckon we’d better tighten up our own procedures.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Bobby Lee asked.
“What goes around comes around,” Tom answered. “You don’t suppose the damnyankees have men who sound like they come from the CSA? You don’t suppose they can get their hands on our weapons and uniforms? Like hell they can’t. I think we came up with this one first—I hope to God we did—but we’re liable to be on the receiving end one day.”
“Son of a bitch,” the young captain said. “My hat’s off to you, sir.” He took himself literally, doffing his helmet.
Tom snorted. “Never mind that. Just have our men ready to move fast if the order comes.”
“Yes, sir. They will be, sir,” Bobby Lee promised.
By the time Tom got back to Beaver, the buses that brought in the phony U.S. soldiers had gone. But Confederate barrels—with, he devoutly hoped, real Confederates inside them—were rumbling into town.
The storm broke the next afternoon. The barrels slammed into the shaky U.S. position, and it turned out to be even shakier than anybody would have expected. Enemy reinforcements showed up late, showed up in the wrong places, or didn’t show up at all. Unlike a lot of people, Tom Colleton had a pretty good notion of why that was so. He wondered what it was costing the Confederates in U.S. green-gray.
We’d better make it worthwhile,
he thought, and pushed his own men forward without mercy.
J
onathan Moss mooched back toward the barracks at the Andersonville POW camp from the latrine trenches. Nick Cantarella was coming the other way. He gave Moss a sour nod. “They still have guys looking up your ass when you take a crap?” he asked.
“Just about,” Moss answered. They both rolled their eyes. Ever since that downpour made part of the U.S. escape tunnel fall in on itself, the Confederates had been as jumpy as mice at a cat’s wedding. Moss knew they had every reason to be. Knowing it didn’t make him like it any better.
“Such fun,” Cantarella said. The Confederates still didn’t know who’d built the tunnel. That Cantarella kept on walking around proved as much. If the guards had had any idea what was what, he would have been in solitary confinement or manacles or leg irons or ball and chain or whatever else they thought up to keep POWs from absquatulating.
“I wonder if anyone has anything else going on,” Moss remarked.
“You never can tell,” said the captain from New York. “One of these days, the guards are liable to wake up and find out we’ve all flown the coop. What do they do then? Jump off a cliff? Here’s hoping.”