The Grapple (17 page)

Great flocks of metallically twittering starlings darkened the sky as they rose when Cincinnatus’ truck convoy rolled by. The war didn’t bother them much, except for the ones unlucky enough to stop bullets or bomb or shell fragments. Those made only a tiny, tiny fraction of the total.

Back when Cincinnatus’ father was a little boy, there were flocks of passenger pigeons instead. Cincinnatus had seen only a handful of those; they were in a steep decline when he was a boy around the turn of the century. They were all gone now, every one of them. Confederate artillery fire killed the last surviving specimen, a female in the Cincinnati zoo, early in the Great War.

By the same token, he remembered starlings arriving in the area not long after the war ended. Some crazy Englishman brought them to the USA in the 1890s, and they’d moved west ever since. He wondered if they filled up some of the hole in the scheme of things that was left when passenger pigeons disappeared.

And then he had more urgent things to wonder about, like whether he’d live long enough to deliver the shells he was carrying in the back of his truck. The Confederates on the far side of the river went right on lobbing their own shells into the ruins of Cincinnati, trying to make them even more ruinous.

Fountains of upflung dirt and smoke rose from not nearly far enough away. Cincinnatus kept on driving. Why not? He was just as likely to stop a fragment standing still as he was moving forward.

The trucks in the convoy stayed well separated from one another. If a shell blew one of them to hell and gone, even one carrying munitions, the blast wouldn’t take out the trucks in front of and behind it. Everybody hoped it wouldn’t, anyhow.

He pulled to a stop in front of the city jail. A lot more than one shell had fallen on that squat, ugly building. The Confederates must have made a stand there. That made sense—a place designed to keep unfriendly people in would also be pretty good at keeping unfriendly people out.

When Cincinnatus got down from the cab of his truck, he was laughing to beat the band. “What’s so funny?” asked one of the other drivers, a white man named Waldo something. “Way you’re going on, anybody would think you did a couple months in there.” He jerked a thumb toward the wreckage of the jail. A big grin took the sting from his words.

“You ain’t so far wrong,” Cincinnatus answered. “Damn Confederates jugged me across the river, over in Covington. But when they went an’ exchanged me, they stopped here an’ got some other guys out, too. So I ain’t sorry to see this place catch hell, not even a little bit.”

“Suits me,” Waldo said. “The more jails they blow up, the happier I am. I’ve done stretches in too goddamn many of ’em. Never any big shit, but I like to drink, and when I drink I like to fight, and so….” His face showed that he’d caught a few lefts and rights, or maybe more than a few, as well as dishing them out. He sounded proud of his escapades. A moment later, in fact, he went on, “I wonder if they got any saloons open in what’s left of this town.”

“You sure you want to find out?” Cincinnatus asked. “You got the government tellin’ you what to do, they can give you a lot more grief if you get in trouble than some city
po
lice can.”

Waldo thought it over. He nodded. “Makes sense. Thanks.” If he’d left it there, everything would have been fine. But then he added, “You’re pretty goddamn smart for a nigger, you know?”

The worst part was, he meant it for a compliment. “Thanks a bunch,” Cincinnatus said sourly.

A few more 105s came whistling in, but none of them burst close to where swarms of young soldiers unloaded the trucks. Watching them, Cincinnatus remembered how he’d done the same thing during the Great War. A lot of years had landed on his shoulders since, a lot of years and that encounter with the motorcar he didn’t see before it almost killed him. He still didn’t remember getting hit. He didn’t suppose he ever would.

A second lieutenant who looked even younger than the soldiers doing pack-mule duty wandered through the unloading zone with a clipboard in his hands. It made him seem official, so official that Cincinnatus got suspicious. The Confederates would have no trouble putting one of their people in a U.S. uniform and sending him up here to see what he could see. They were supposed to do stuff like that all the time. Cincinnatus hoped the USA did it, too.

Then the young lieutenant talked to an officer who came down with the truck convoy. That made Cincinnatus feel better. A spy wouldn’t talk to anybody if he didn’t have to—or so it seemed to Cincinnatus, anyway. The older officer nodded. He said something; Cincinnatus was too far away to make out what.

“Driver!” the second lieutenant yelled, plainly reading the name from his clipboard. “Cincinnatus Driver!”

Alarm sleeted through Cincinnatus. What the devil did they want with him? And who were they, anyhow? “I’m here,” he said, and picked his way through the rubble over to the shavetail. “What’s up?”

“My superiors need to talk with you,” the baby-faced officer said. He wore green-and-white arm of service colors on his collar, a combination Cincinnatus hadn’t seen before. A badge—a wreath with the letters
INT
inside—gave him a pretty good idea of what those colors meant. Intelligence.

That made him feel better, not worse. He’d got out of Covington—and got out of its colored district—only a little while before. If the U.S. Army was looking for ways to use Covington’s Negroes, he had some ideas. He also had the names of people they could get in touch with—and names of people to stay away from at all costs.

Sentries in green-gray uniforms stood in front of what used to be an office building. The young lieutenant needed to exchange password and countersign with them before they let him in. Nobody trusted anybody these days. Cincinnatus hoped that was just as true on the side of the line where the men wore butternut.

A white-haired fellow in civilian clothes was talking with a lieutenant colonel and a major when Cincinnatus followed the lieutenant into the room where they sat. The man’s eyes were the light, almost golden brown of a hunting dog’s—a most unusual shade for a man. Cincinnatus stiffened. He knew those eyes anywhere, and the clever, engagingly homely face that housed them. Luther Bliss was trouble with a capital T.

When Kentucky belonged to the USA between the wars, Luther Bliss headed the Kentucky State Police, an outfit that hunted Confederate diehards and black radicals with equal enthusiasm. Cincinnatus spent almost two years in a Kentucky State Police jail. Bliss was a law unto himself, and paid attention to other law only when he felt like it.

He nodded to Cincinnatus now. “As long as you’re against the Freedom Party, we’re on the same side,” he said. To the officers, he added, “We’ve had our run-ins, Cincinnatus and me, but he’s all right. I’m glad his card came up.”

Cincinnatus wasn’t sure he was glad his card—what card?—turned up. Forced to choose between Luther Bliss and Jake Featherston, he would choose Bliss. No black man could possibly disagree there. Forced to choose between Bliss and anyone else—anyone else at all…But that wasn’t the choice he had.

Bliss went on, “I was hooked in with Lucullus Wood and the other colored activists, but only from the outside.” He brushed one hand across the back of the other, noting his own white skin. “Cincinnatus here, though, he knows all that stuff from the inside out.”

“Well, that’s what we’re looking for,” the major said. “We want to try to stir things up in Covington so the Confederates will be busy when we go over the river.”

“You gonna stir things up with the whites, too, or just with the blacks?” Cincinnatus asked.

“What business of yours is that?” the lieutenant colonel demanded in a voice like winter.

Cincinnatus scowled at him. When the Negro eyed Luther Bliss, he saw that the secret policeman understood what he was talking about. “Just the niggers rise up,” he told the light colonel, “you let the Freedom Party bastards put ’em down, an’
then
you move. I know how you work. You get the CSA to solve your nigger problem for you, and your own hands stay nice an’ clean.”

The officer with the silver oak leaves on his shoulder straps gaped like a boated bream. Luther Bliss laughed. “You see, Ray?” he said. “He’s nobody’s fool. He didn’t come to town on a load of turnips.”

Cincinnatus had come to town on, or at least with, a load of 105mm shells. “You ain’t got no white folks to rise up, I ain’t talkin’ ’bout no niggers.” His own accent came out more strongly with every sentence. “They got enough troubles—they got too goddamn many troubles—without me givin’ ’em mo’.”

“You are insubordinate,” the major growled.

“Bet your ass,” Cincinnatus said proudly.

“Tell him what’s going on,” Luther Bliss advised. “He won’t blab. He never said anything to me that he shouldn’t have, and I squeezed him, too.”

“Most irregular,” the lieutenant colonel—Ray—muttered. Reluctantly, he said, “The unrest will involve members of both principal racial groupings in Covington.”

“He means whites and Negroes,” Luther Bliss put in.

“Why don’t he say so, then?” Cincinnatus asked. Bliss laughed. The lieutenant colonel looked irate and indignant. Cincinnatus didn’t care. If the man meant whites and Negroes, why did he have to hide it behind a bunch of fancy talk?

“You going to give us a hand?” Luther Bliss asked. “This’ll happen with you or without you. It may work a little better, kill more of the right people and not so many of the wrong ones, if you give us a hand. How does that sound?”

“Sounds like the best deal I’m gonna get,” Cincinnatus said. He talked about the Red network centered on Lucullus Wood’s barbecue shack. Bliss already knew a lot about that; he’d dealt with Lucullus himself. Cincinnatus also talked about the probable Confederate informers at the Brass Monkey, a saloon not far from his father’s house. He told the Intelligence officers everything he knew, and he hoped to heaven that it did some good.

V

W
ith a theatrical flourish, Brigadier General John Wade pinned a Silver Star on Michael Pound’s chest. Then he pinned a small gold bar onto each shoulder strap on Pound’s new shirt. The division commander stuck out his hand. “Congratulations, Lieutenant Pound!” he said warmly. A flashbulb flared as a photographer immortalized the moment.

“Thank you, sir.” Pound feared he sounded as enthusiastic as he felt. He didn’t want to be an officer. He’d also done things a lot more dangerous than the ones that got him this medal. Nobody’d paid any attention to them, though. This time, the wounded Lieutenant Griffiths went on and on in writing about what a wonderful fellow he was. And so…He had the decoration, which he didn’t mind, and the promotion, which he did.

“You’ll have a platoon of barrels,” General Wade said. “I’m sure you’ll fight them as bravely and effectively as you fought your own machine after the commander got hurt.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.” Pound liked giving orders only a little better than he liked taking them. The other four barrel commanders in the platoon would be sergeants who didn’t want to hear from a lousy second lieutenant, even if Pound wasn’t your everyday shavetail. Getting them to pay attention to him would be a pain in the neck, or probably points south of the neck.

But then Wade said, “Because of your excellent service and your long experience, Lieutenant, we’ll give you a platoon of the Mark III machines. These are some of the first ones we have, just down from the factories in Michigan.”

Suddenly, Michael Pound didn’t mind the promotion. He didn’t mind the prospect of giving orders to sergeants who didn’t want to take them. He didn’t mind a thing. He tore off a salute that would have turned a drill sergeant green with envy. “Thank you very much, sir!” he exclaimed. “Are they here? Can I see them?” He’d heard about the new machines, but he had yet to set eyes on them.

Brigadier General Wade smiled. He was somewhere close to Pound’s age, with a chestful of medals and service ribbons—and with a scar on his face and a finger missing from his left hand that said he’d really and truly earned his decorations. “I know enthusiasm when I hear it, Lieutenant,” he said. “Why don’t you come with me?”

“Sir, I’d follow you anywhere,” Pound said, and John Wade laughed.

Hamilton, Ohio, was an industrial town of about 50,000 people, maybe a third of the way from Cincinnati up to Dayton. It sat in a bowl of hills on both sides of the Great Miami River. The west side of town was the nice side, or had been before the Confederates made a stand there. Wade had formally commissioned Pound in the Soldiers, Sailors, and Pioneers Memorial Building, a two-story structure of limestone blocks that housed a museum dedicated to U.S. wars. Two cannon from old Fort Hamilton stood in front of the building; the names of the men from Hamilton who’d served in the Mexican War, the War of Secession, the Second Mexican War, and the Great War were carved into the walls.

Now some new military hardware had joined those late-eighteenth-century guns. Michael Pound eyed the sleek lines of the new barrels with as much admiration as he would have given those of Daisy June Lee, even if of a slightly different sort. The armor on the green-gray machines—splotched here and there with darker green to help break up their outlines—was as well sloped as anything the Confederates had ever built. And that long 3½-inch gun would make any C.S. barrel, including the enemy’s latest and greatest, say uncle.

Brigadier General Wade looked as proud of the new barrels as if he’d designed them himself. “Well, Lieutenant,” he said genially, “what do you think?”

Pound knew what he was supposed to say. He was supposed to burble on about how wonderful the new barrels were and what a howling wilderness they would make of the Confederate States. If John Wade expected him to say things like that, it only went to show the general didn’t know his newest and most junior officer very well.

“Sir, they’re fine machines,” Pound said, and General Wade beamed—his new lieutenant was on the right track. Pound promptly proceeded to drive off it: “I’d like them a lot better if we had them at the beginning of the war. And we could have, you know.”

General Wade’s smile faded. “That wouldn’t have been easy,” he said, the geniality leaking out of his voice word by word. “In fact, I doubt it would have been possible.”

“Oh, yes, it would, sir.” Pound didn’t mind correcting an officer with a star on each shoulder strap—Wade was wrong, and anybody who was wrong needed correcting. (No wonder he went gray before making officer’s rank himself.) He went on, “We had everything we needed in place to build machines like this twenty years ago—and then we turned our backs on barrels, because they were too expensive and we probably wouldn’t need them any more. If we’d just followed up, this is where we would have been going into the war, this or better.”

“And what makes you so sure of that, Lieutenant?” Brigadier General Wade asked unwisely.

“Sir, I was General Morrell’s gunner at the Barrel Works in Fort Leavenworth—he was only a bird colonel back then, of course,” Pound answered. “I remember the prototype he designed. It was just a one-off, in mild steel, but it pointed straight ahead to those machines. About the only thing missing was the sloped armor, and that would have come. Or if it didn’t, we would have built thicker instead and used a stronger engine to haul around the extra weight.”

“I…see,” Wade said in slightly strangled tones. Officers often used those tones when talking to or about Michael Pound. Wade aimed a forefinger at him. “If you were there then, Lieutenant, why in God’s name aren’t you a major or a colonel by now?”

“I liked being a noncom.” Pound spread his hands, as if to say,
There! Isn’t that simple?
“I’ve turned down more promotions than you can shake a stick at. If you gave me any chance to do it, I would have turned this one down, too.”

“My God,” John Wade muttered. He’d never even dreamt of turning down a promotion. No one who aspired to high rank ever did. “Didn’t you ever want to use your expertise on a wider scale?”

“My expertise is barrel gunnery, sir—and everything that has to do with keeping a barrel running, too, but anybody who’s been in barrels a while gets good at that,” Pound said. “But I can only shoot one cannon at a time, and the gun doesn’t care whether I’m a sergeant or an officer. Besides, now that I’m going to be commanding a platoon, I won’t get the chance to do my own shooting any more.”

“My God,” Wade said again. “You’re an unusual man, Lieutenant. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.”

“I’ll shoot the next so-and-so who tries,” Pound agreed, which only seemed to fluster the division commander more. He went on, “When do we go into Kentucky and start chewing up the Confederates? Soon, I hope, so they don’t have much time to strengthen their defenses. We push southeast, maybe we can cut
them
in half.”

If General Wade gaped before, he downright goggled now. Pound had seen that expression on officers’ faces before. They often didn’t believe men in the ranks—or, in his case, just up from the ranks—could think on their own. Wade managed a ragged laugh. “I put bars on your shoulders, and you think you’re ready for the General Staff.”

“Oh, no, sir.” That might have sounded suitably modest had Pound left it there. But he didn’t: “I was wondering about this when I was still a sergeant. As long as we’ve got the initiative, we need to use it. Jake Featherston is the world’s biggest son of a bitch, but he understands that. Do we?”

John Wade gave him a wry grin. “If I tell you that, I tell you things I haven’t told some members of my own staff. You tend to your knitting there, and I’ll tend to mine. I don’t think you’ll end up disappointed.”

Michael Pound ended up disappointed with most of what his superiors did. Even he could see that saying so wouldn’t win him any points. And he did have new knitting to tend to. He saluted and said, “Yes, sir.” This time, Wade’s smile wasn’t wry. Pound smiled, too, if only to himself. Yes, they always liked that.

But the general wasn’t wrong. Without waiting for permission, Pound started crawling all over the new barrel. He eyed the driver’s seat and the bow gunner’s spot next to it. Then he went into the turret. He sat in the gunner’s seat, then got up from it with a sigh of real regret. Up till now, U.S. barrels were always outgunned. A U.S. machine’s main armament could defeat a C.S. barrel most of the time (though taking on a new-model C.S. barrel’s frontal armor with the 1½-inch gun on the oldest U.S. barrels was an invitation to suicide—you had to hit them from the flank to have any kind of chance). Now, though, he would have the advantage.
This
gun would penetrate enemy armor at ranges from which the Confederates couldn’t hope to reply.

He shook his head.
He
wouldn’t have the advantage. His gunner would.
He’d
be stuck telling other people what to do.

With another sigh, he sat down in the commander’s seat. He stood up so he could look out of the cupola. Seeing what was going on mattered more than maybe anything else on the battlefield. Sometimes, though, you would get killed if you tried to look out. He closed the cupola’s lid and peered through the built-in periscopes. The view wasn’t nearly so good, but it wasn’t hopeless, either.

This barrel happened to have a platoon commander’s wireless set like the one he’d be using. He studied that with extra care. He would have to keep track of four machines besides his own. They would have to become extensions of his will, all working together to give the bastards in butternut a good kick in the teeth.

He frowned thoughtfully. He’d never tried anything like this before. Maybe officers earned their money after all.

He climbed out of the turret with a certain sense of relief. Brigadier General Wade eyed him with amusement. “You’re thorough,” Wade said.

“Sir, it’s my neck,” Pound answered. Again, were he speaking to a less exalted personage, some other part of his anatomy would have occurred to him.

Yes, escaping the turret did bring relief with it. He felt as if he were leaving a platoon commander’s responsibilities behind. Logically, that was nonsense, but logic and feelings had little to do with each other. He peered down through the engine louvers at the powerplant. “Anything special I should know about the motor, sir?” he asked. “Have they found any gremlins?”

“Some growing pains with the fuel pump, I’ve heard,” Wade answered. “Engine seems fairly well behaved, though—it’s a scaled-up model of the one we’ve been using in the older barrels.”

“I thought so from the look of it,” Pound said. “Well, we’ll see how it goes. How soon will we see how it goes?” One more probe couldn’t hurt.

It also didn’t help much. Chuckling, General Wade said, “It won’t be too long,” and Pound had to make what he could of that.

A
rmstrong Grimes still had his platoon. No eager young second lieutenant had come out of the repple-depple to take his place. He would have bet the replacement depot had no eager young second lieutenants. He was still very young himself, but not very eager. Nobody who’d been in Utah for a while was eager any more except the Mormons. They were getting pounded to bits a block at a time, but they had no give in them.

A commendation letter sat in Armstrong’s file for capturing the corporal who turned out not to be a corporal. They’d promoted Yossel Reisen to sergeant for his part in that. Armstrong didn’t flabble about not getting bumped up to staff sergeant. For one thing, he cared more about coming out in one piece than he did about rank. And, for another, getting promoted up to sergeant was pretty easy. Adding a rocker to your stripes wasn’t.

His whole regiment was out of line for R and R, or what passed for R and R in Utah: real beds, food that didn’t come out of cans, hot showers, and a perimeter far enough out to make it hard for the Mormons to snipe at you or drop mortar bombs on your head. No women, but there was an NCOs’ club where Armstrong could buy beer. Rank did have its privileges. He enjoyed them while he could.

Now he couldn’t any more. In a clean uniform, he trudged back up toward the fighting. The dirty, ragged, unshaven men coming south for R and R of their own eyed him and his comrades with the scorn veterans gave to anybody who looked new and raw. “Does your mama know you’re here?” one of them jeered—the oldest gibe in the world.

“Ah, fuck you,” answered one of the privates in Armstrong’s platoon. It wasn’t even a challenge—more an assertion that the man who’d spoken wasn’t worth challenging.

The vet coming back understood that tone. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “You didn’t look like you’d been through it before.”

“Yeah, well, fuck you anyway,” the private said. This time, he did smile when he said it.

“Come on, keep moving,” Armstrong said. “We’ve got so much to look forward to.”

“Funny,” Yossel said.

“Tell me about it,” Armstrong said. “I’m gonna grow a long blue beard and join the Engels Brothers.” That made his buddy shut up. Armstrong could see the wheels going round in Yossel’s head. He would be thinking that Armstrong had to know the Engels Brothers dyed their beards all the colors of the rainbow…didn’t he? He would also be wondering how Armstrong intended to grow a blue beard. Since Armstrong was wondering the same thing himself, he let it go there.