The Grapple (48 page)

Those fighters and bombers with the eagle in front of crossed swords didn’t get airborne just to escape C.S. attacks, either. They were loaded for bear. The Confederates had to deploy through several gaps in the mountains before they could debouche. The harder they got bombed and strafed while still in column, the slower and clumsier their deployment would be.
The less they can bring to the dance,
Morrell thought, remembering how he met Agnes not long after the Great War.

She and their daughter, Mildred, were all right. He’d had a letter not long before. The war hadn’t really touched Fort Leavenworth. Out beyond the Mississippi, fighting came in harsh spatters: one that seemed unending over the oil fields in Sequoyah, which each side torched whenever the other seemed about to retake them, and another in west Texas that had heated up lately. Looked at logically, there was no reason on God’s green earth to fight over west Texas. Dark mutters said logic had little to do with it, that the Confederates were up to something really horrible out there, something that needed suppressing regardless of logic.

Having fought without much luck to hold the state of Houston in the USA before Al Smith’s plebiscite, Morrell was ready to believe the worst of west Texas. He was also ready to believe the worst of Jake Featherston and all his Freedom Party pals. The only question in his mind was how bad the worst was out there.

He didn’t even have time to worry about that, except when he got out of the command barrel to stand behind a tree or smoke a cigarette. He spent almost all of the next forty-eight hours in the turret, as a less mobile commander might have spent them in a map room in a headquarters somewhere far behind the line. He was wryly amused to find it worked out about the same either way. Now much of the front—most of the places where the Confederates were trying to break through—lay behind him.

A map room proved better than the turret for at least one reason: it had the space to put up the maps. He was constantly unfolding and refolding them and using cellophane tape to stick them here and there for a little while. Frenchy Bergeron finally lost patience with him. “What happens if the Confederates attack us here, sir?” the gunner asked pointedly. “How am I supposed to fight those fuckers off if I can’t even load my piece?”

“If the fate of this army depends on this barrel and some other one can’t do the job, we’re in a hell of a lot more trouble than I think we are,” Morrell said mildly.

“Well, all right, sir,” Bergeron said. “I can see that. But my own neck might depend on shooting that gun, even if the army doesn’t.”

“I think we’re good even so,” Morrell told him. “With everything the Confederates are throwing at our left, I don’t see how they can have much to use against our front here.”

The gunner grunted. Like almost everyone else in the two opposing armies, Bergeron fancied himself a strategist. He came closer to being right than a lot of other people, some of whom held significantly higher rank than his. And he listened to what Morrell didn’t say as well as to what he did. “They’re hitting us from the one side, sir? Not from both sides at once?”

“That’s right.” Morrell nodded. “They don’t have the men for that. And even if they did, they could never get them into place west of us. The mountains help screen their positions in the east, and the travel’s easier to get there, too. What they’re doing is about as good a counterattack as they can hope to put together.”

“But not good enough, right?” Frenchy Bergeron said confidently.

Morrell yawned. He’d been in the saddle for a devil of a long time. “Don’t quite know yet,” he said. “I hope not, but I can’t be sure yet.”

“What happens if they do break through?” the gunner asked.

“Well, I can give you the simple answer or the technical one,” Morrell said. “Which would you rather?”

“Give me the technical one, sir.” Sure enough, Bergeron figured he knew enough to make sense of it.

He was right, too. “The technical answer is, if that happens, we’re screwed,” Morrell replied.

Bergeron started to laugh, then broke off when he saw Morrell wasn’t even smiling. “You’re not kidding, are you, sir?” he said.

“Not me,” Morrell said. “Not even a little bit. So the thing we want to make sure of is, we want to make sure they don’t break through.”

B
rigadier General Clarence Potter thought of himself as a cosmopolitan man. He’d gone to college at Yale, up in the USA. He’d traveled up and down the east coast of the CSA, and west as far as New Orleans. He thought he knew his own country well.

But he’d never been to Knoxville, Tennessee, before. He’d never been anywhere like Knoxville before. The Confederacy’s interior had been a closed book to him. The longer he stayed in and around the town, the more he wanted to get back to Richmond and the War Department. Knoxville made daily U.S. air raids seem good by comparison.

He’d spent most of his time in Charleston and Richmond. Those were sophisticated places. Back before the Freedom Party seized power, they’d had substantial opposition groups. Chances were they still did, though the opposition had to stay underground these days if it wanted to go on existing.

Knoxville…By all appearances, Knoxville had never heard of, never dreamt of, opposing Jake Featherston. People here were shabby and tired-looking, the way they were in Richmond. The men came in three categories: the very, very young; the ancient; and the mutilated. An awful lot of women wore widow’s weeds. But people in Knoxville greeted one another with, “Freedom!” Potter hadn’t heard them say it without sounding as if they meant it. Jake Featherston’s portraits and posters were everywhere. Even with U.S. soldiers in Tennessee on the other side of the mountains, the locals remained convinced the Confederate States would win the war.

Without sharing their confidence, Potter envied it. He wouldn’t have come to Knoxville himself if the CSA weren’t in trouble. If pulling someone out of Intelligence and expecting him to command a brigade wasn’t a mark of desperation, what was it?

He needed a while to realize that question might not be rhetorical. Jake Featherston could have had reasons of his own in assenting to Potter’s transfer. The first that sprang to mind was the one most likely true: the President of the CSA might not shed a tear if his obstreperous officer stopped a bullet.

Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?
Henry II shouted, and in short order Thomas à Becket was a dead man. Featherston was more polite: instead of simply ordering his own men to do Potter in or even hinting that he wanted him dead, he sent the man he mistrusted off to where danger was apt to lie thicker on the ground than it did in Richmond.

Remembering some of the U.S. air raids he’d been through, Potter wondered if that was really so. But his was not to reason why. His was to do or, that failing, to die. He didn’t want to die and he wasn’t sure he could do, which left him in an unpleasant limbo.

He was in limbo another way, too: nobody’d ordered his brigade forward yet. If everything was going according to plan, it would have been committed two days earlier. He didn’t think the officers set over him were keeping the outfit in reserve because it had a green CO. A lot of brigades did these days. No, he feared the outfit hadn’t got the call because things up at the front were going to hell.

Even though he came out of Intelligence, he couldn’t get a handle on what the war west of the mountains looked like. Nobody wanted to say anything. That in itself was a bad omen. When things were going well, people—and the Freedom Party propaganda mill—shouted it from the housetops. When they weren’t…

Good news had a thousand fathers. Bad news was an orphan. The orphanage in Knoxville got more crowded by the day. Potter began to wonder if his brigade ever would get sent to the front. If it didn’t, why the devil
had
they called him out of Richmond? Had optimism run that far ahead of common sense? Maybe it had.

He was just about convinced he would go back to the capital without ever seeing real action when he got the order to move forward. That amused him about as much as anything ever did, and in the usual sardonic way. He had trucks. He had fuel. He’d made damn sure he did. The outfit was rolling inside of an hour. He might have left a few men behind in Knoxville, men who’d got leave and whom the military police hadn’t scraped out of the bars and whorehouses. He would worry about and, if need be, punish them later. Better to get where he needed to go when he needed to get there with not quite so many men than to wait around for the rest and show up late.

But he showed up late anyhow, though he didn’t intend to. Everything went fine till the brigade rolled past Harriman, about thirty-five miles west of Knoxville. Up till then, Highway 70 had been in pretty good shape. Occasional craters were patched up; Confederate engineers had repaired bombed bridges or set up makeshift spans to do duty for the ones the damnyankees had blown to smithereens.

After Harriman, it was a different story. The Yankees had hit the road hard enough and often enough to get ahead of the repair crews. Potter hadn’t seen such devastation since the Great War…except in Richmond, after a bad air raid. But those raids disrupted civilian life. These delayed soldiers on the way to the front, a much more serious business—especially if you were one of those soldiers.

Going off the roads and into the fields alongside them helped, but only so much. For one thing, the fields were cratered, too. Even trucks with four-wheel drive weren’t barrels; they didn’t laugh off big holes in the ground. And the lead trucks chewed up the ground and made it worse for the ones that came behind.

The worse the bottlenecks got, the more worried Potter grew. “We have to get rolling,” he said to whoever would listen to him, and scanned the western skies like a farmer fearing rain at harvest time. He feared something worse than rain. “If the damnyankees hit us while we’re stuck here…”

“Bite your tongue, sir,” advised the corporal at the wheel of his command car. “You say that kind of stuff, you’re liable to make it come true.”

To Clarence Potter, that was superstitious nonsense. He didn’t say so, though—what was the point? Fifteen minutes later, with the brigade still snarled, what both he and the corporal dreaded came true: the howl of airplane engines, rising swiftly to a scream.

He’d done what he could to get ready for air attack. He’d deployed the antiaircraft guns attached to the brigade and the heavy machine guns. He and his men weren’t caught flatfooted when the U.S. raiders struck them. Things could have been worse. As it worked out, they were only bad. Bad proved grim enough.

The damnyankees didn’t use Asskickers or their equivalents. They just mounted bomb racks under fighters, which turned their explosives loose from not much above treetop height. They hit the trucks on the road and those to either side of it. Fireballs blossomed. Chunks of blazing metal hurtled through the air. So did chunks of blazing flesh.

Like most, Potter’s command car carried a pintle-mounted machine gun. He banged away at the enemy airplanes. He’d gone through the whole Great War without firing a weapon at U.S. forces. Now he could hit back. The shattering noise and the stream of hot brass spitting from the breech filled him with fierce, primitive joy. Whether he hurt the damnyankees any was a different question. The unsleeping rational part of his brain knew that, even as the animal inside him whooped and squeezed the triggers and played the stream of tracers like a hose.

A fighter slammed into the ground not far away. That fireball dwarfed the ones the trucks sent up. Splashes of burning gasoline caught running soldiers. They dropped and writhed and rolled, screaming their torment all but unheard.

After the fighters unloaded their bombs, they came back to strafe the stalled column. The Confederates had invented the tactic two years earlier. Potter could have done without the flattery of U.S. imitation. He got more chances to use his machine gun. And the fighters, armed with four machine guns and two cannon each, got more chances to turn their weapons on
him.

They badly outgunned him. They were making better than 300 miles an hour, while he was a sitting duck. The wonder wasn’t that they kept missing him. The wonder was that all their weaponry didn’t chew him to red rags.

Bullets cracked past his head. When bullets cracked, they came too damn close. Others kicked up puffs of dust from the dirt a few feet to the left of the command car, and then, a moment later, from the dirt a few feet to its right. He went on firing. Hardly even knowing he was doing it, he changed belts on the machine gun when the first one ran dry.

After what had to be the longest ten or fifteen minutes of his life, he ran out of targets. The U.S. fighters roared off toward the west. He looked around to see what they’d done—and discovered that what had been a brigade was no more than a shattered mess. Not all the trucks were on fire, but about one in three was. Some of the burning trucks carried ammunition, which started cooking off. Flying rounds would cause more casualties, and likely set more fires, too.

The stinks of cordite and burning fuel and burning rubber and burning meat filled the air. So did the cheerful
pop-pop-pop!
of exploding cartridges and the not so cheerful screams and moans of wounded men. Officers and noncoms shouted commands, trying to bring order out of chaos by sheer force of will. Order did not want to be born; chaos wasn’t ready to die.