Lieutenant Don Griffiths nodded. “You’d better believe it, Sergeant. We’ve done too much falling back.”
“Yes, sir.” Pound wouldn’t have argued with that for a moment. “Looks to me like the Confederates are starting to feel the pinch.”
“Here’s hoping,” Griffiths said. “I wouldn’t want to try reinforcing and supplying an army the size of theirs by air, I’ll tell you that. And I don’t think they’ve got an airstrip left that our artillery can’t reach.”
“My heart bleeds—but not as much as they’re going to bleed before long,” Pound said. “I wonder why they haven’t tried to break out to the west. Somebody in their high command must have his head wedged. Too bad for them.” He had no respect for his own superiors. Finding out some dunderheads wore butternut was reassuring.
A rifle bullet pinged off the barrel’s armored side.
That
wouldn’t do the Confederates any good. As if to prove it wouldn’t, the bow machine gun chattered. Pound peered through his own gunsight, but he couldn’t see what the bow gunner was shooting at—if he was shooting at anything. It hardly mattered sometimes.
Off to the left, something on the Confederate side of the line blew up with a roar loud enough to penetrate the barrel’s thick skin. “That sounded good,” Pound said. “Wonder what it was.”
“Want me to stick my head out and look around?” Lieutenant Griffiths asked.
“Not important enough, sir,” Pound answered. “Who knows if our machine gun took out whoever was shooting at us?” Barrel commander was a dangerous job. Now that Pound had finally found an officer with some notion of what he was doing, he didn’t want to lose him for no good reason. There were too many times when a barrel commander had perfectly good reasons for exposing himself to enemy fire.
Something else blew up, even louder. Griffiths put a hand to his earphones. He often did that when he was getting a wireless message. Sergeant Pound had no idea whether it helped or how it could, but he’d never said anything about it to the officer. It couldn’t hurt.
Lieutenant Griffiths leaned forward to use the speaking tube to the driver’s position: “Forward again, and a little to the left, but slowly,” he said. He turned to Pound. “That was an ammunition dump. They won’t be able to shell us so well for a while.”
“We hope,” said Pound, ever willing to see the cloud next to the silver lining.
“Well, yes. We hope. There’s always that,” Griffiths agreed. “But we’ve got infantry moving up with us. With luck, they’ll keep the short-range trouble away from us. As for the other side’s barrels and antibarrel guns—we’ve done all right so far. Of course, we’ve got a pretty good gunner.”
“So we do.” Pound knew his own talents too well to be modest about them. Half a second later than he should have, he added, “You’re not bad at spotting trouble before it spots us. Best way to get rid of it that I know.”
No sooner had he said that than something clanged against the front of the turret with force enough to shake the whole barrel.
I’m dead,
Pound thought. Only a moment later did he realize he would have been too dead to think if that round had got through.
Thank God for the upgraded armor on the new turret. If this beast hadn’t been retrofitted, I’d be burnt meat right now.
Without waiting for orders, the driver roared forward, looking for cover behind the nearest pile of rubble. Then, abruptly, he slammed on the brakes. “Did you see it, sir?” Pound asked.
“No, goddammit.” Griffiths sounded angry at himself. “That son of a bitch knows where we’re at, and I didn’t spot the muzzle flash. Wherever he is, he’s hidden good.”
“Not sporting,” Pound agreed. He’d been more than happy enough to ambush C.S. barrels from an empty garage, but having them turn the tables on him wasn’t playing fair. Someone with a more objective view might not have found that unfair, but so what? It wasn’t the impartial observer’s neck. It was his.
He traversed the turret, staring through the gunsight as he did. The hatch opened. Lieutenant Griffiths stood up to get a better look than he could through the periscopes in the cupola. This was one of
those
times. Griffiths might get shot, but he also might get a better look at the hidden cannon or barrel that had just come within inches of incinerating him.
It didn’t fire again, which argued that the rubble in front of Pound’s barrel gave pretty good protection. A rifle bullet snapped past; as always, the sound seemed hatefully malicious. Lieutenant Griffiths ducked a little—you did that without thinking—but he didn’t come back inside the steel shell. He had balls. Pound nodded approvingly.
Probably not somewhere close,
the gunner thought, looking for straight lines that broke the irregular pattern of the ruins of Pittsburgh. If the enemy were close, he would have a better shot at the U.S. barrel. And, if he were close, his round likely would have penetrated in spite of the improved turret. A cannon made a damned effective door knocker.
There! Or Pound thought so, anyhow. “Armor-piercing!” he snapped.
“Armor-piercing,” Cecil Bergman answered. The loader slammed a black-tipped cartridge into the breech. Pound worked the elevation handwheel. Fifteen hundred yards
was
a long shot. As near as he could tell, he fired at the same time as the C.S. gunner. The enemy’s shot snarled past, a few feet high. Pound’s struck home. The enemy barrel started to burn.
“Hit!” Lieutenant Griffiths shouted. “How on earth did you make that shot?”
“Twenty-odd years of practice, sir,” Pound answered. The Confederate gunner hadn’t had so much—though he’d hit Pound’s barrel before Pound even knew he was there. He wouldn’t get another chance now. A great cloud of black smoke was rising, almost a mile away.
The shot ricocheting inside the barrel would have killed or maimed some of the crew. The fire would be searing the rest. By the way the smoke billowed out, that barrel was a total loss. Odds were the crew was, too. Pound had bailed out of a crippled barrel, but then only the engine compartment was burning. Could anyone get out here? He didn’t think so.
I just killed five men.
Most of the time, he didn’t worry about that. When he watched a barrel brew up, it was only a machine that died. But he’d just had his own brush with death, and it reminded him of the soldiers inside the barrels. He knew what they were going through; he’d come close to going through it himself. If he’d met them in a bar, he could have drunk the night away talking shop with them.
But they’d just done their best to kill him, and their best was hideously close to good enough.
They’re dead and I’m alive and that’s how I want it to be.
“We can move up a little more now, sir,” he said.
Griffiths thought about it, then nodded. He called up to the driver. The barrel came out from behind the pile of wreckage and clattered towards another one. Pound tensed when it came out into the open. If the Confederates had drawn a bead on them . . . But no hardened-steel projectile tore into the machine’s vitals. He breathed again as a pile of tumbled bricks came between his machine and the people who wanted to do unto it as he’d done unto theirs.
U.S. foot soldiers ran forward with the barrels. A Confederate machine gunner opened up on them. “Front!” Lieutenant Griffiths shouted.
“Identified!” Pound answered. He turned his head and shouted to the loader: “HE!”
“HE,” Bergman said. A white-tipped high-explosive round went into the breech. Pound lined up the sights on the C.S. machine gun’s winking muzzle. He jerked the lanyard. The cannon bellowed. The shell casing clanked on the floor of the fighting compartment.
A 2.4-inch shell didn’t have room for a whole lot of explosive. A three-incher from one of the Confederate barrels would have held almost twice as much. Sandbags and rubble flew from in front of the C.S. gun, but it kept shooting. Tracers drew fiery lines through the air.
Pound abstractly admired the enemy gunners’ nerve. If a round burst right in front of him, he would have got the hell out of there. They kept doing what they’d been trained to do. “Another round,” he said. In went the shell. He swung the cannon’s muzzle a gnat’s hair to the left and fired again.
Another hit, but the enemy gun went on firing. He needed two more rounds before it fell silent. The stink of cordite was thick in the turret. “Stubborn bastards,” Lieutenant Griffiths said.
“Yes, sir,” Pound agreed, coughing. “They’re the ones you’ve especially got to get rid of.”
With the machine gun knocked out, U.S. infantry moved up some more. They took casualties. With automatic rifles and submachine guns, the Confederate soldiers could outshoot them. But how long could the Confederates keep outshooting them if more ammunition didn’t come into Pittsburgh?
The Confederates couldn’t use captured U.S. ammo unless they also used captured Springfields. They’d chosen different calibers on purpose, to make it harder for U.S. soldiers to turn captured automatic rifles against them. It must have seemed a good idea at the time. It probably was. But it cut both ways.
Off to the left, a U.S. barrel got hit and started burning. Nothing in Pittsburgh came cheap. Nothing came easy. The Confederates weren’t going to quit, and they fell back only when they had no choice. How long could they keep it up?
He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. People with shoulder straps and metal ornaments on them had to fret about such things. All he had to do was shoot whatever he and Lieutenant Griffiths spotted in front of their barrel and hope like hell nobody shot him. He nodded. That would do nicely.
Shells started bursting around them. The bursts weren’t the ordinary kind; they sounded wrong, and even through the gunsight he saw the crawling mist that spread from them. “Gas!” he yelled.
Griffiths clanged down the hatch on top of the cupola. “I saw it,” he said. “I was hoping those fuckers were running short. No such luck, I guess.”
“No, sir,” Pound said as he put on his mask. Out in the open, U.S. infantrymen paused to do the same. Pound went on, “Now we’ll throw some at the Confederates, just to make sure they have to wear masks, too. As long as both sides have it, it doesn’t change anything.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” Griffiths answered. He had his mask on, too. “But I am saying it’s out there.” Pound couldn’t very well quarrel with that. The barrel commander started to wave to emphasize his point. He choked off the gesture before it was well begun. The inside of a turret was a crowded place.
Michael Pound made a good prophet, as he often did. A U.S. gas barrage followed in short order. It was heavier than the one the enemy had laid down. Infantrymen advanced in short rushes. The barrel moved up to the next decent firing position. Another block of Pittsburgh, cleared of Confederates.
XIX
N
ew Year’s Eve. One more day till 1943. Flora Blackford was back in her Philadelphia apartment. She hadn’t expected to be anywhere else. Even if she hadn’t campaigned at all, she thought she would have beaten Sheldon Vogelman. People in her district were used to reelecting her. She nodded to herself. It was a nice habit for them to have.
Joshua was out with friends. “I’ll be back next year,” he’d said. How long had people been making that joke? Probably as long as people had divided time into years. He was liable to come back drunk, too, even if he was underage. Well, if he did, the hangover the next morning ought to teach him not to do it again for a while. She could hope so, anyhow.
“Underage,” she muttered, and clicked her tongue between her teeth. He would turn eighteen in 1943. Old enough to be conscripted. And conscripted he probably would be. He was healthy. He didn’t have flat feet, a punctured eardrum, or bad eyes. Nothing could keep him out of the war—except being a Congresswoman’s son.
And he was as stubborn and as stupid as her brother had been in the last war. He didn’t want her to do anything to keep him out. Not even Uncle David’s artificial leg could make him change his mind. He didn’t believe anything like that would happen to him. No one ever believed anything would happen to him—till it did.
The telephone rang. It made her start. She hurried towards it, more relieved than anything else. If she was talking to somebody, she wouldn’t have to worry about Joshua . . . so much. “Hello?”
“Flora?” That cheerful baritone could belong to only one man.
“Hello, Franklin,” she said. “What can I do for you?” Roosevelt had never called her at the apartment before.
“How would you like to ring in the New Year with me at the War Department?”
She hesitated only a moment. “I’ll be over as soon as I can get a cab.”
“See you in a little while, then.” He hung up.
She didn’t think the USA’s military planners had a fancy party waiting for her. But the Assistant Secretary of War wasn’t going to go into detail about why he wanted to see her, not over the telephone. She called the cab company. They started to tell her she would have to wait half an hour. “It’s our busiest day of the year, lady. Sorry.” The dispatcher didn’t sound the least bit sorry.
“This is Congresswoman Blackford.” Flora didn’t tell him he would be sorry if she didn’t get a cab sooner than that, but she didn’t need to, either. He got the message, loud and clear.
A cab sat waiting when she got to the street. An ordinary person wouldn’t have been able to summon one so fast. Remembering that chafed at her Socialist sense of equality. She consoled herself by thinking she carried more responsibility than an ordinary person.
From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.
Right now, she needed to get to the War Department in a hurry.
The cabby hopped out and held the door open for her. “Where to, ma’am?” he asked. She told him as she got in. He nodded. “Fast as I can,” he promised; the dispatcher must have let him know who she was.
He kept his word, but he couldn’t go very fast. Confederate bombers had been over the night before, so some of the roads had fresh craters, while sawhorses and red tape closed off others so specialists could try to defuse time bombs. Flora had heard their life expectancy was measured in weeks. That information was secret from the public, but she feared the specialists knew it.
Not far from downtown, the wreckage of a downed C.S. airplane further snarled traffic. “Nice to see we nail one every once in a while,” the taxi driver said. “Those . . . people need to pay for what they do.” The little pause said he’d remembered just in time that he carried someone important.
“Yes.” Flora almost spoke more strongly herself. There wasn’t enough plywood and cardboard in Philadelphia—there probably wasn’t enough in the world—to cover up all the windows the Confederates had blown out. So many buildings had pieces bitten from them, or were only charred ruins. Ordinary bombs could start fires, and the Confederates dropped incendiaries, too. One popular propaganda poster showed a long, skinny incendiary bomb with Jake Featherston’s bony face at one end clamped in a pair of tongs and about to go into a bucket of water. Underneath the sizzling Confederate President were three words:
COOL HIM OFF!
“Here you go, ma’am.” The driver pulled up in front of the War Department. It had taken plenty of damage, too, even if it was built from the best reinforced concrete taxpayer dollars could buy. Most of its business went on underground these days. Flora didn’t know how far underground the tunnels ran. She didn’t need to know. Not many people did.
She paid the cabby. Her breath smoked as she went up the battered steps. She showed the sentries her identity papers. “I’m here to see Assistant Secretary Roosevelt,” she said.
“Hold on for a minute, ma’am.” One of them picked up a telephone and spoke into it. After not much longer than the promised wait, he hung up and nodded to her. “You can go ahead, ma’am. You’re legit, all right. Willie, take her to Mr. Roosevelt’s office.”
Willie looked younger than her own Joshua. He led her down endless flights of stairs. All she knew when he walked her along a corridor was that at least one more level lay below the one she was on. He stopped at a door with
ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR
neatly painted on the frosted-glass window. “Here you are, ma’am. When you need to come up, call the front desk and somebody will come down to guide you.”
Don’t go wandering around on your own,
he meant. “All right,” Flora answered. Willie looked relieved.
She opened the door. “Hello, Flora! Come in,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said. Sitting at his desk, a cigarette holder in his mouth at a jaunty angle, he looked strong and virile. But he sat in a wheelchair, and went on, “You’ll have to excuse my not rising, I’m afraid.” A shrug of his broad shoulders might have added,
What can you do?
“Of course,” Flora said quickly, and then, “Happy New Year.” She couldn’t go wrong with that.
“Same to you,” Roosevelt answered. “And I hope it will be a Happy New Year for the country, too. We’re in better shape now than we were when 1942 started, anyhow. I don’t think the Confederates will be able to get out of the noose around Pittsburgh, and that will cost them. That will cost them plenty.”
“Good,” Flora said. “Lord knows they’ve cost us plenty. Is that what you wanted to talk about tonight?”
“As a matter of fact, no. I wanted to tell you Columbus has discovered America.”
Flora didn’t know how to take that. With a smile seemed the best way. “I thought he might have,” she agreed. “Otherwise we’d be doing this somewhere else and speaking a different language—a couple of different languages, I expect.”
Roosevelt’s big, booming laugh filled the office. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right. But that’s the message we got back from Washington State—Hanford, the name of the town is—the other day. It means they’ve done the first big part of what they set out to do.”
“And what is that, Franklin?” she asked. “I’ve sat on the secret for so long, don’t you think I’m entitled to find out?”
“
That’s
what I wanted to talk about tonight,” he answered. “I have clearance from the President to tell you what’s what.” He cocked his head and gave her a coy, even an arch, smile. “So you want to know, eh?”
“Maybe a little,” Flora said, and Roosevelt laughed again.
“Tell me everything you know about uranium,” he said.
Flora sat silent for perhaps half a minute. “There,” she said. “I just did.”
This time, Roosevelt positively chortled. “Well, that’s what I said when this whole thing started—my exact words, to tell you the truth. Now I’m going to tell you what the professors with the slide rules told me.”
And he did. He was a lively, well-organized speaker. He could have lectured at any college in the country. Flora’s head soon started spinning even so. Uranium-235, U-238, uranium hexafluoride, centrifuges, gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion . . . It all seemed diffuse to her, and quite a bit of it seemed gaseous.
“What have they done out there now?” she asked.
“They’ve enriched enough uranium to have a self-sustaining reaction,” Roosevelt replied. Enriched, Flora had learned, meant getting a mix with more U-235—the kind that could explode—and less U-238, which couldn’t. A sustained reaction wasn’t an explosion, but she gathered it was a long step on the way towards one.
“If everything goes right and we get the weapon soon enough, this could win us the war, couldn’t it?” Flora said.
“Well, nobody knows for sure,” Roosevelt answered, “but the professors seem to think so.”
“The Germans are working on it, too?” she asked.
“Yes. No doubt about it. They’re the ones who found fission in the first place,” he said.
“All right. What about the Confederates?” Flora asked.
“We think they have something going on,” the Assistant Secretary of War said carefully. “We don’t know as much about it as we wish we did. We’re trying to find out more.”
“That sounds like a good idea.” Flora’s own calm meant she would have started screaming at him if he’d told her anything else. “How much do they know about what we’re doing?”
“That
is
the question.” Maybe Roosevelt was quoting
Hamlet,
maybe just answering her. “The truth is, we’re not sure. Counterintelligence hasn’t picked up whatever intelligence they’ve gathered on us.”
“I hope you’re trying everything under the sun,” Flora said, again in lieu of yelling.
“Oh, yes,” Roosevelt said. “So far, we’ve only figured out one defense against these atomic explosions.”
“Really? That’s one more than I’d imagined,” Flora said. “What is it?”
“To be somewhere else when they go off.”
“Oh.” Flora laughed. But Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t laughing now. He meant it. Another thing she hadn’t imagined was a race where the winners won everything and the losers were probably ruined forever. “How long between the, uh, sustained reaction and a real bomb we can use?”
Roosevelt spread his hands. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. The physicists say anywhere between six months and ten years, depending on how fast they can solve the engineering problems.”
“That’s no good!” Flora said. “If it’s ten years for us and six months for the CSA, we’ll never get the chance to finish.”
“They tell me it’s more likely to be the other way around,” Roosevelt said. “For one thing, we do seem to have started before the Confederates did. For another, we’ve got three times as many physicists and engineers and such as they do.”
“Serves them right for not educating their Negroes.” Flora stopped and grimaced. These days, the Confederates were doing worse with their Negroes than not educating them. Thinking of what they were doing made her say, “We’d better win this race.”
“I think we will.” Franklin Roosevelt sounded confident—but then, he usually did. “Whether we’ll win it in time to use one of those bombs in this war . . . That I don’t know, and I’d be lying if I said I did.”
“What about Germany and England and France? What about Japan?” Flora asked.
“As I said, we have to guess the Kaiser is somewhere ahead of us. How far, I don’t know,” Roosevelt said. “The others? I don’t know that, either. If we have intelligence about what they’re doing, it doesn’t come through me.” Flora thought it should have, but that wasn’t her province. She decided she had done the right thing by not making a fuss about the budget entry she’d found. If this worked, it
would
win the war.
And if it didn’t, how many hundreds of millions of dollars would they have thrown down a rathole? As 1942 passed into 1943, she tried not to think about that.
A
rmstrong Grimes had charge of a platoon. In the middle of Salt Lake City in the middle of winter, he could have done without the honor. But Lieutenant Streczyk was somewhere far back of the line, his left leg gone below the knee. He’d been unlucky or incautious enough to step on a mine.
One of these days, they might send another junior officer out to the front to take charge of things. But the Utah campaign got what other fronts didn’t want or need, and these days didn’t get a whole lot of that. Till some luckless and probably brainless lieutenant showed up, Armstrong had the job.
Yossel Reisen commanded the squad that had been his. “If this shit keeps up, we’ll be majors by the time we got out of here,” Armstrong said.
“I don’t even care if I’m a corporal when I get out of here,” Yossel answered. “As long as I get out, that’s all that matters.”
“Well, yeah. I’m not gonna tell you you’re wrong, on account of you’re not,” Armstrong said. “Wish to God the Mormons would pack it in and quit. They gotta know ain’t no way in hell they can win.”
“I don’t think they care. I think all they’ve got left is going down swinging.” Yossel paused to light a cigarette. He and Armstrong sprawled behind a stone wall that protected them from snipers. If Armstrong stuck his head up, he could see the rebuilt and rewrecked Mormon Temple ahead. He didn’t—if he were so foolish, a Mormon rifleman would put a round in his ear. After a drag, Yossel went on, “Jews were like that once upon a time. They rose up against the Romans whenever they saw the chance . . . and the Romans handed them their heads every damn time.”
Palestine, these days, was a sleepy Ottoman province. It had lots of Arabs, some Jews, and just enough Turks to garrison the towns and collect taxes. No matter how holy it was, nothing much ever happened there. Odds were nothing ever would.
Something erupted from behind the Mormon lines. “Screaming meemie!” Armstrong yelled.
The spigot-mortar bomb came down a few hundred yards away. Even that was close enough to shake him with the blast. “They really do love you,” Yossel Reisen said. “Ever since you had that Mormon strip, we’ve got more little presents like that than anybody else.”
“Oh, shut up,” Armstrong said, not because Reisen was wrong but because he was right. Armstrong wished he hadn’t given the Mormon a hard time, too. Fighting these maniacs was hard enough when you were just one enemy among many. When they were trying to kill you in particular . . . The most Armstrong could say was that they hadn’t done it yet.