What really amazed Chester was the speed of the U.S. advance. “It wasn’t like this in the Great War, I’ll tell you,” he said as he sat by a campfire the second night and ate something alleged to be beef stew out of a can. It bore as much resemblance to what Rita called beef stew as boiled inner tube in motor-oil gravy, but it filled him up. “Back then, even in a breakthrough we only made a few miles a day, and nobody figured out how to do even that much till 1917.”
“Better barrels and better trucks now.” That was Second Lieutenant Delbert Wheat, the platoon commander. He spoke with the flat vowels and harsh consonants of Kansas. Odds were he hadn’t been born in 1917. Even so, he wasn’t an obnoxious twerp like the other shavetails Chester had met since reenlisting. He actually seemed to have some idea of what he was doing—and when he wasn’t sure, he didn’t act as if asking questions would cost him a couple of inches off his cock. If he lived and didn’t get maimed, he wouldn’t stay a second lieutenant long. Chester could see a big future ahead of him.
For now, Wheat paused and lit a cigarette. Chester’s nostrils twitched at the fragrant smoke. “You lifted a pack off of one of Featherston’s fuckers, sir,” he said. “The smokes we get with our rations don’t smell that good.”
“Right the first time, Sergeant.” Wheat grinned. His looks were as corn-fed as his accent: he was a husky blond guy, good-sized but not quite so big as Joe Jakimiuk, with a narrower face and sharper features than the PFC’s. He held out the pack to Chester. “Want one?”
“Sure. Thanks a lot, sir,” Chester answered. A lot of lieutenants would have gone right on smoking the good stuff themselves without a thought for their noncoms. Some officers acted as if they were a superior breed of man just because of their metal rank badges. Wheat didn’t have that kind of arrogance—another sign he’d do well for himself if he stayed healthy.
“Sentries all around our position tonight,” he told Chester. “No telling which way the Confederates will come at us. We’re really and truly in their rear, so they could come from any direction at all.”
“Yes, sir,” Chester said. “I’ll take care of it.” In the enemy rear! He didn’t think that had ever happened in the Great War: not to him, anyway. You could beat back the Confederates, but get behind them? Retreating troops had always been able to fall back faster than advancing troops could pursue them through the wreckage of war. Now . . . Now this armored thrust had pierced the zone of devastation and found nothing much behind it.
“You men will want to sleep while you can,” Lieutenant Wheat told his soldiers. “I don’t know how much we’re going to get from here on out.”
“Listen to him, guys,” Chester said. “He knows what he’s talking about.”
He curled up in his own bedroll not long after he stubbed out the mild, flavorful Confederate cigarette. Exhaustion blackjacked him moments later. He forgot the chilly air and the hard, damp ground and everything else. He wished he could have slept for a week. What was hard on the young guys was a hell of a lot harder for somebody of his vintage.
Instead of a week, he got till the end of the wee small hours. Jakimiuk shook him awake, saying, “Sorry, Sarge, but we’re gonna move out.”
“Coffee,” Chester croaked, like a man in the desert wishing for water. The instant coffee that came with rations was nasty, but it did help pry his eyelids open. And it was hot, which was also welcome.
Ham and eggs out of a tin can made the beef stew from the night before seem delicious by comparison. Chester shrugged. The ration would keep him going another few hours. Maybe he’d eat something better then. The really scary thing was, the soldiers who wore butternut had it worse.
As the sky grayed toward dawn, the barrels the platoon had been riding roared to life. Chester clambered aboard the one he’d ridden the past two days. The barrel’s commander popped out of his cupola like a jack-in-the-box. He was a sergeant, too, though a younger man than Chester. “We going to give them another boot in the balls today?” he asked cheerfully.
“Here’s hoping, anyway.” Chester wasn’t about to commit the sin of optimism. Justifiably or not, he feared it would jinx everything.
No one would see the sun even when it rose. Clouds filled the sky. They couldn’t seem to make up their mind whether to give rain or snow or sleet. Since they couldn’t decide, they spat out a little of each at random. Even when nothing was coming down, the wind out of the northwest had knives in it. Chester would have disliked the weather much more than he did if it hadn’t kept C.S. Asskickers from diving on him.
“Here we go!” Lieutenant Wheat shouted when the barrels moved out. He might have been a kid on a Ferris wheel at a county fair. Chester suspected he wouldn’t take long to lose that boyish enthusiasm. Once you’d been through a few fights, once you’d seen a few horrors, you might be ready to go on with the war, but you weren’t likely to be eager anymore.
A train ahead chugged east.
On its way to Pittsburgh?
Chester wondered. He couldn’t think of any other reason why an engine pulling a lot of passenger cars should be on its way through what had been territory firmly under the Confederate thumb.
The barrel commander evidently decided the same thing. The big, snorting machine stopped. The turret—one of the massive new models, with a bigger gun—slewed to the left, till it bore on the locomotive. When the cannon fired, the noise was like the clap of doom. Hearing it, a man with a hangover might have his head fall off—and if he didn’t, he might wish he did. The shot was perfect. It went right through the boiler. Great clouds of steam rose from the engine. Only momentum kept it moving after that; it wasn’t going anywhere under its own power.
Other barrels started shelling and shooting up the passenger cars. Chester had an abstract sympathy for the soldiers in butternut who tumbled out like so many ants when their hill was kicked. The Confederates had been going toward battle, yes. They’d been thinking about it, worrying about it, no doubt. But they hadn’t expected it, not yet. Too bad for them. Life was what you got, not what you expected.
“Come on, boys,” Chester said to the men on the barrel with him. “Let’s make them even happier than they are already.”
They got down and started shooting at the dismayed Confederates from behind the barrels and whatever other cover they could find. The machine guns in the turret and at the bow of each barrel raked the scattering soldiers in butternut, too. Every so often, for variety’s sake, a cannon would lob a high-explosive shell or two into the Confederates.
A few bullets came back at the U.S. barrels and foot soldiers, but only a few. A lot of the Confederates probably hadn’t even been able to grab their weapons before they spilled from the train. Some of the ones who had were bound to be casualties. And others, instead of returning fire, were doing their best to disappear, keeping the battered railroad cars between themselves and their tormentors as they ran for the woods.
Chester wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t have done the same thing. Sometimes going forward, or even staying where you were, was asking to be killed. He’d retreated more than once in the Great War, and by Fredericksburg not so long ago. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he did it again before too long.
Now, though, he was going forward. That was better. He didn’t suppose even the Confederates could disagree with him. They’d done more advancing than retreating in this war. He hoped they enjoyed going the other way.
The sergeant in charge of the barrel he rode popped out of the cupola again. “We’ve got orders to get moving,” the other noncom said. “Faster we put a ring around Pittsburgh, faster we can pound Featherston’s fuckers inside to pieces.”
Somebody was driving the U.S. forces as if a pack of wolves ran right behind them. Chester didn’t mind. They probably needed driving. If they weren’t driven, they wouldn’t do what needed doing. Even if they were, they might not.
On they went. Every so often, Confederate soldiers would shoot at them. That caused a few casualties, but only slight delays. Machine-gun and small-arms fire didn’t make the barrels slow down. They had somewhere important to go, and they wanted to get there in a hurry. More foot soldiers would be coming along behind them, and artillerymen, too. People like that could deal with the odd set of holdouts.
From everything Chester heard, Featherston’s men and barrels fought that way when they stormed through Ohio to Lake Erie, and then again this summer when they smashed east to Pittsburgh. He didn’t think the United States had ever done anything like this before. He wondered why not.
The barrels and the men who rode them and the men who tried to keep up with them did have to slow down when they passed through towns. That usually wasn’t because Confederate soldiers made stands there. Most towns held hardly any Confederates. But the people who hadn’t fled ahead of the advancing Confederate tide came out in droves to welcome the U.S. Army’s return.
Chester got handed eggs, an apple pie, a chunk of home-cured ham, and a pouch of pipe tobacco. He got snorts of booze ranging from good Scotch to raw corn liquor. He got his hand shook and his back slapped. Several pretty girls kissed him. What Rita didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. If he could have stayed in any one place for a little while . . . But the speed of the advance helped hold him to the straight and narrow.
Locals hauled down the Stars and Bars and burned it. Up went the Stars and Stripes in its place. Chester hoped the CSA didn’t retake any of these towns. People would catch it if the Confederates did. They didn’t seem to care. “Them bastards would just as soon shoot you as look at you,” an old man said. “My pa, he fought ’em in the War of Secession. He always said they fought fair then. No more. They hanged one poor son of a bitch for thumbing his nose at ’em when they rode down the street. Hanged him from a lamppost, like he was a nigger.”
In the field, the Confederates played by the rules most of the time. Up till now, Chester hadn’t seen what they did behind the lines. It didn’t make him like them any better. It did make him think the atrocity stories he heard were more likely to be true.
Lafayette, Ohio, was a little town notable only for the red-brick tavern in the middle of it—the place looked older than God. As Chester’s barrel paused in the village square, more green-gray machines rumbled up from the south. Barrel crews and the infantrymen with them exchanged backslaps and cigarettes. “Lafayette,” Chester said happily. “Here we are!” They’d encircled the Confederates. Now—would the ring hold?
XVIII
M
r. President, sir, we have got to break out from Pittsburgh,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “We have got to do it right now, right this minute, the sooner the better, while the machines still have enough gas to go at least partway.”
Jake Featherston scowled at the head of the Confederate General Staff. “We’re doing all right in there,” he said.
“We are
now,
Mr. President,” Forrest said. “We’ve still got ammo. We’ve still got fuel. When we start running low . . .” He shook his head. “And it won’t be long, either. They’ve cut the supply routes, same as we cut the USA in half last summer.”
“If we can’t get the shit in by road or railroad, we’ll damn well fly it in,” Jake said. “That’ll keep the men fighting.”
“Sir, we’ve got a whole army in there,” Forrest replied, shaking his head. “No offense, sir, but no way in hell we can bring in enough by air to keep that many men going.”
“That isn’t what the flyboys tell me,” Jake said. “I’ve talked with ’em. They say they’re up for the job.”
“They’re lying through their teeth, Mr. President, on account of they’re scared to tell you you truth,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III declared. “You tell me who you talked to, and I’ll personally go punch the son of a bitch in the nose.”
“You’ll do no such thing. They had diagrams and everything—showed just what they could do,” Featherston said. “Long as they can do it, the boys up there can keep fighting, right? And you can work out some kind of way to break through to ’em. How many damnyankees can there be in that ring, anyhow?”
“Too many,” Forrest said morosely. “They hit us where we were weakest and punched on through.”
“Goddamn Mexicans. I ought to have Francisco José’s guts for garters. If he had any guts, by God, I would, too.” Jake was not only furious, he wanted to blame someone—anyone—else for what was going on in Pennsylvania and Ohio. That way, the blame wouldn’t come down on his own head.
The chief of the General Staff didn’t seem interested in casting blame: a blessing and an annoyance at the same time. “Sir, we just didn’t have enough of our own people to go around. That’s the trouble with fighting a country bigger than we are,” he said. “That’s why we’ve got to get as many of our men in and around Pittsburgh out as we can. If we lose them all—”
“They’ll take plenty of damnyankees with ’em,” Jake broke in.
“Yes, sir.” Forrest sounded patient. He also sounded worried. “But if we trade men one for one with the USA, we lose, on account of they’ve got more men than we do. Pretty soon we just run dry, and they keep going. That’s the point of everything we’ve done up till now: to make them pay more than we do. If that whole big army’s stuck inside of Pittsburgh, it can’t play that game anymore.”
Jake Featherston grunted. However little he wanted to see that, Forrest’s picture left him little choice. But trying to break out of Pittsburgh would be a disastrous admission of defeat. “What can we get together in Ohio?” he asked. “What can we use to break through the ring and get those people out?”
Forrest frowned. “It won’t be easy, Mr. President. We put the best of what we had into the attacking force. That’s what you’re supposed to do, sir: make the
Schwerpunkt
as strong as you can.”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t you go spouting German at me,” Jake said. “Goddamn Kaiser’s got troubles of his own. You’d better believe he does. If we can break in far enough for the men in Pittsburgh to break out and link up, that’ll be all right.” He shook his head. “It won’t be all right, but we can take it. There’s politics in this damn war, too, don’t forget.”
“All right, sir. If that’s all I can get from you, that’s all I can get,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “I’ll . . . see what we can put together. And the air resupply will do the best job it can. If you’ll excuse me . . .” He saluted and hurried away.
“Fuck,” Featherston muttered. He scowled at the map on the wall of his underground and armored office. He would have been tougher on Forrest if he hadn’t seen at once that the head of the General Staff wasn’t alibiing—he was telling the truth. Where the devil
could
they scrape up enough men to relieve Pittsburgh? Wherever it was, they had to do it pretty damn quick.
He turned his head to the bigger map on the far wall, the one that showed the whole frontier from Sonora to Virginia. He could yank some soldiers from. . . .
“Fuck,” he said again, louder this time. The damnyankees were mounting an attack on Lubbock. He didn’t think it would get there, but the town had to be held. They were kicking up their heels in Sequoyah. A column from Missouri was pushing down into Arkansas. It wasn’t a real big column, but it was big enough to keep him from taking men out of the state. General MacArthur was getting uppity just a little north of Richmond, too. The Confederates had already pulled men from the Army of Northern Virginia to load up farther west. They couldn’t very well pull more.
Featherston repeated the obscenity yet again. Early in the war, somebody’d said that whoever could keep two big campaigns going at once would probably win. Both sides seemed to have taken that as gospel. Now, suddenly and painfully, Jake saw it wasn’t necessarily so.
The damnyankees had done one big thing. They were also doing a bunch of little things. By itself, not one of those little things mattered. Added together, though, they kept the Confederates from properly countering the big thrust. It was like being gnawed by rats instead of eaten by a bear. It was ignominious. It was humiliating.
You ended up just as dead either way. That was the point, and he’d taken too damn long to see it. Something, somewhere, would have to give. That was all there was to it. While Jake eyed the map with the big picture, he also scowled at the red pins stuck into the interior of the CSA: from South Carolina all the way west to Louisiana, and some in the mountains of Cuba, too. They marked spots where Negro guerrillas were kicking up their heels.
He swore so foully, he took a hasty look toward the door to make sure Nathan Bedford Forrest III had closed it behind him. He didn’t want Lulu hearing and wagging a finger at him. That was pretty funny when you got right down to it: the most powerful man the Confederate States had ever known, afraid of his own secretary. But Featherston wasn’t laughing at all.
If the blacks in the country had just stayed quiet, he would have had several more divisions to throw at the damnyankees. He wouldn’t be jumping up and down now about where to find men to try to bail out the force trapped in Pittsburgh.
“Those bastards’ll pay,” he growled. “Oh, Lord, how they’ll pay.” He got on the telephone and called Ferdinand Koenig. Ferd had a new secretary, one with a hell of a sultry voice. Jake wondered if the rest of her lived up to it. If it did, Koenig might be finding after-hours work for her, too.
“Office of the Attorney General,” she purred, as if she’d just got out of bed.
Featherston didn’t have time for that, though. “This is the President,” he said. “Get Ferd on the line right this second, you hear?”
“Y—Yes, sir.” Most of that sexy lilt disappeared—most, but not all.
“Ferd Koenig.” The Attorney General’s deep, gruff voice sounded the way it always did. Jake tried to imagine Koenig talking in soft, throaty tones. He couldn’t do it.
“Listen, we have got to get rid of more niggers faster,” he said without preamble. “The damn guerrillas are a running sore. We’ve got to get rid of it, or it’s going to screw us for the rest of the war.”
“Camps are running pretty close to capacity,” Koenig said dubiously.
“Bump it up,” Jake said. “Build more bathhouses. Build more trucks. Hell, build more camps. Whatever it takes, but bump it up. And fast.”
“All right, sir. I’ll handle that,” Koenig said, and he was a man who did what he said he would do. He was an old Party buddy, one of the last ones Jake had, but he was also damn good at his work. He went on, “The more we step it up against the coons, the more they’re liable to try and fight back, you know. That’ll cost us men who could be at the front.”
He was thinking along with Jake, but Jake was a little bit ahead of him. Jake hoped he was, anyhow. “You handle your end of it, Ferd,” he said. “I’ll take care of the other—or if I don’t, somebody’s gonna be mighty goddamn sorry, and it won’t be me or you.”
“I’ll do everything I can. The camps will do everything they can,” Koenig promised.
“Good. That’s what I need to hear. Freedom!” Featherston hung up. His next call was to the Secretary of State. He talked with Herbert Walker much less often than with Ferdinand Koenig. The Secretary of State was a real diplomat, and always looked uncomfortable wearing a Freedom Party uniform instead of striped pants and cutaway coat.
Walker knew better than to keep Jake waiting, though. “Yes, Mr. President? What can I do for you today, sir?”
Again, Featherston came straight to the point: “I need another five divisions of Mexicans from Francisco José, and I need ’em yesterday.”
“Mr. President!” The Secretary of State sounded horrified. “After what’s happened to the men he sent you before, you’ll be lucky to get the time of day out of him, let alone anything more.”
“Tell him I won’t use them against the damnyankees. Promise him on a stack of Bibles—it’s the truth,” Jake said. “Tell him I want ’em for . . . for internal security. That’s what it is, all right. I’m gonna sic ’em on the damn uppity niggers, free up our own men to fight against the USA. That’s what I should’ve done with the last batch of Mexicans, only I didn’t think of it then. Sometimes you’re smarter the second time around.”
“Well, I’ll try, sir,” Walker said. “On that basis, I will try. Even so, I don’t know what the answer will be.”
“We’ve got Mexicans coming up here to get work now, lots of ’em,” Jake said. “Tell Francisco José that if he doesn’t want to give us a hand, we won’t just seal the border—we’ll ship the ones who are already here back to Mexico.”
“The way things are, that’s liable to hurt us worse than the Mexicans,” Walker said.
Jake understood what he meant: the Mexicans were doing the scutwork Negroes had done in the CSA for generations. They were also filling more and more factory slots white men would have taken if they weren’t off fighting a war. Even so, he said, “Tell him anyway, by God. If we don’t have Mexicans giving us some help with the work, it’s a pain in the ass. If Francisco José’s got a pile of Mexicans who can’t get
any
work sitting around, it’s a civil war waiting to happen. You reckon he doesn’t know it? He’s dumb, but he’s not that dumb.”
“All right, sir. I’ll tell him. Internal security. It’s a good phrase,” the Secretary of State said.
“He damn well better say yes,” Jake said. A small gasp came from the other end of the line. Hastily, he added, “It’ll be his hard luck if he doesn’t, not yours. I didn’t mean that.”
“Thank you, Mr. President. I’m glad you didn’t. And now I’d better get on with it.” When Jake didn’t say no, Walker hung up. Jake chuckled harshly. He could still make people afraid of him, an essential part of the business of ruling.
But the chuckle cut off as he looked from one situation map to the other. How was he supposed to make the damnyankees afraid of him? He’d hurt them badly. He’d stopped their first big counterattack. Now, though, they were running with the ball, and he was going to have a devil of a time tackling them.
A
bner Dowling had spent too long either retreating before the Confederates or banging his head into a stone wall. Now, for the first time since gaining a command of his own, he was going forward—and he was enjoying it, too. So what if the force he had consisted mostly of what nobody else in the USA wanted? The force trying to stop him consisted mostly of what nobody else in the CSA wanted. By the way it had performed so far, it was even more raggedy than his own.
His new headquarters lay in the grand metropolis—say, a thousand people—of Sudan, Texas. He’d been disappointed when one of the locals told him it was named for the kind of grass that fed the local cattle, not for the place in Africa. He supposed the grass was named for the place in Africa, but it didn’t seem the same.
Sudan grass didn’t cover everything. Not far away, a brownish-yellow ridge line ran east and west. It was called, bluntly, the Sand Hills. People from the north side of the hills were supposed to vote differently from those to the south, and each group was supposed to have its own little social sets. Dowling lost not a moment’s sleep about that. People on both sides of the Sand Hills were Confederates, which was everything he needed to know about them.
His line stood about four miles farther down C.S. Highway 84, halfway between Sudan and Amherst, a town of about the same size. Another eight or ten miles down the road was Littlefield, which was the next size up. Lubbock lay thirty-five miles southeast of Littlefield, and Lubbock, with more than 20,000 people, was a real city. If he could take it, people as far away as Richmond would jump and shout and swear.
And if he couldn’t . . . “News from Pennsylvania and Ohio’s better than what we’ve heard before,” he said to Major Toricelli.
“Yes, sir,” his adjutant agreed. “Now we get to see how tough the enemy is when things don’t go his way.”
Dowling coughed. He wished the younger man hadn’t put it that way. He’d seen the Confederates in adversity during the last war, and they’d fought like sons of bitches. They
were
sons of bitches, as far as he was concerned, but that didn’t mean they weren’t brave and tough and stubborn.
“We’re playing some little part in what’s going on there, too,” he said. “I like that.”
“Yes, sir. Me, too,” Angelo Toricelli said. “Wherever they get reinforcements from, they won’t get ’em from here. We’re keeping ’em too busy for that.”
“We may even grab Lubbock,” Dowling said. “I didn’t think we could when we got started, but you know what?”
“The Confederates around here are even more screwed up than we are?” Toricelli suggested.
“That’s just exactly what I was going to say.” Dowling raised an eyebrow. “By now, you’ve signed my name with ‘by direction’ after it so many times, you really are starting to think like me. No offense, of course.”