Walk in Hell (4 page)

Scipio didn’t need long to figure out why. With a deliberate effort of will, he abandoned the Congaree dialect: “I suppose you will expect me to speak in this fashion, thereby disconcerting them.”

Cassius laughed and slapped his knee. “Do Jesus, yes!” he exclaimed. “You set your mind to it, you talk fancier’n any o’ they white folks. An’ you don’ git angried up in a hurry, neither. We wants a cool head, an’ you got dat.”

“When we do dis parley?” Scipio asked.

“Right now. I take you up to de front.” Cassius reached into his pocket, pulled out a red bandanna, and tied it around Scipio’s left upper arm. “Dere. Now you
o
fficial.” No doubt because the Confederacy, if you looked at it from the right angle, was nothing but an elaborate hierarchy of ranks and privileges, the Congaree Socialist Republic acted as if such matters did not exist. The revolution was about equality.

The front was just that, a series of trenches and firing pits. Both the black soldiers of the Socialist Republic and their Confederate foes were in large measure amateurs, but both sides were doing their best to imitate what the professionals from the CSA and USA had been doing.

Cassius took Scipio to a tent where the white officer waited. “Ain’t gwine let you cross out of de country we holds,” he said. “Cain’t trust white folks not to keep you an’ give you a rope necktie.”

Considering what had just happened to Jubal Marberry and to many others, Scipio reckoned the barbarism equally distributed. Saying so, however, struck him as inexpedient. And he knew he should have been grateful that Cassius worried about his safety rather than planning to liquidate him.

The tent was butternut canvas, captured Confederate Army issue. Scipio pulled the flap open, ducked his head, and went inside. A man in Confederate uniform sat behind a folding table. He did not stand up for Scipio, as he would have on meeting a U.S. officer during a parley.

“Good day,” Scipio said, as if greeting a guest at Marshlands. “Shall we discuss this matter in a civilized fashion, as it involves the well-being of brave men from both sides?”

Sure enough, the Confederate major’s eyebrows rose. He wasn’t a gray-bearded relic like a lot of the men the CSA was using to try to suppress the revolution; Scipio judged he would have been fighting the Yankees if he hadn’t lost a hand. “Don’t you talk pretty?” he said, and then, as if making a great concession, “All right, I’m Jerome Hotchkiss. I can treat for Confederate forces along this front. You can do the same for your people?”

“That is correct, Major,” Scipio answered. “For the purposes of this meeting, you may address me as Spartacus.”

Hotchkiss let out a bark of laughter. “All you damn Red niggers use that for an alias. Best guess I can give about why is that maybe you reckon we won’t know who to hang once we’ve put you down. If that’s what you think, you’re dreaming.”

Scipio feared the major was right. Showing that fear, though, would put him in Cassius’ bad graces. Cassius being more immediately dangerous to him than were the forces of the CSA, he said, “I suggest, Major, that it is wise to kill your bear before you speak of skinning him.”

“You want to watch the way you talk to me,” Hotchkiss said, as if rebuking a Negro waiter at a restaurant.

“Major, you would be well advised to remember that you are in the sovereign territory of the Congaree Socialist Republic,” Scipio returned. Hotchkiss glared at him. He looked back steadily. The shoe was on the other foot now, and the white man didn’t care for the fit. Scipio understood that. He’d spent his whole life not caring for the fit. He said, “Shall we agree to put other matters aside for the time being, in the hopes of coming to terms on this one specific issue?”

“Fair enough,” Hotchkiss said, making a visible effort to control himself. “Some of our wounded who got left behind when we had to pull back…When we advanced again, we found ’em chopped to bits or burned alive or…Hell, I don’t need to go on. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I also know that your forces are seldom in the habit of taking prisoners of any kind, wounded or not,” Scipio answered. “How many Negroes have been hanged, these past days?”

Plainly, the thought in Hotchkiss’ mind was,
Not enough
. “Negroes caught in arms against the Confederate States of America—”

Scipio surprised him by interrupting: “Lackeys of the oppressors caught in arms resisting the proletarian revolution of the Congaree Socialist Republic…” The Marxist rhetoric he’d learned from Cassius came in handy here, no matter how low his opinion of it commonly was. He went on, “Our causes being as repugnant to each other as they are, is it not all the more important to observe the laws of war with especial care?”

“That’d mean admitting you have the right to rebel,” Hotchkiss said.

But Scipio shook his head. “The USA did not admit the CSA had that right in the War of Secession, yet treated Confederate prisoners humanely.”

He could see Hotchkiss thinking,
White men on both sides
. But the major didn’t say that. What he did say was, “Maybe.”

Taking that for assent, Scipio said, “Very well. We undertake to exchange under flag of truce men too badly wounded to go on fighting at a place and time you may choose, said men to have been treated as well as possible by the side capturing them. Is it agreed?”

“Agreed,” Hotchkiss said, “but only as a war measure. It doesn’t mean we say you have any right to do what you’re doing. After we smash you, you’ll still hang for rebellion and treason.”

“First catch the bear, Major,” Scipio answered. He’d done what Cassius wanted. He thought it would bring some good. How much? For how long? He wished he knew how the revolution fared across the rest of the Confederacy.

The adobe farmhouse outside Bountiful, Utah, sat on a low rise, so that it commanded the ground in front of it. The Mormon rebels against the authority of the United States had had months of hard fighting in which to learn their craft. They’d learned it all too well, as far as Paul Mantarakis was concerned. When they found a position like this, they fortified it for everything it was worth, then stayed in it and fought, sometimes men and women both, until U.S. forces finally overwhelmed them.

A machine gun inside the farmhouse opened up, spitting death down at the trenches Mantarakis and his comrades had dug. He ducked, making sure the top of his head was below the level of the parapet. The fancy new helmet he wore didn’t keep out direct hits. People had found out about that the hard way.

He waited till the machine gun’s fire was directed elsewhere along the trench, then stood up on the firing step and popped a couple of rounds from his Springfield at the adobe. He didn’t think they were likely to accomplish much: the mud brick in a lot of these Utah farmhouses was thick enough to stop a bullet, though it had been intended to keep out heat and cold, not flying lead. And, for good measure, the Mormons had put up corrugated iron sheets over the windows, turning them into first-rate firing slits.

Ben Carlton came up to Mantarakis. “Hey, Sarge, you want to come check the stew pot?”

“Sure.” Paul followed him down the line of trench. Carlton was the official company cook, and had a gift for scrounging from sources both official and unofficial. But Mantarakis really had been a cook back in Philadelphia, though getting stripes on his sleeve kept him from exercising his talents these days as often as he would have liked.

The pot smelled more savory than it often did. “Chickens and a couple rabbits,” Carlton said, “and potatoes and beets and onions and—all kinds of things. It’s downright—bountiful around here.” He laughed at his own joke.

“Yeah.” Mantarakis tasted the stew. “Not bad,” he said. “Just kind of bland, you know what I’m saying? You need some garlic and some basil, maybe, or oregano, to perk it up. Not too much,” he added hastily as Carlton started to pour most of a tin of garlic powder into the pot. “You want to make the stew taste better—you don’t want to just taste the spice, either.” Little by little, he was educating Carlton.

He suddenly stopped worrying about the stew, for U.S. artillery opened up on the adobe and the line it anchored. The noise was terrific, overpowering, enough to drive a man mad. To Mantarakis, it was also sweet as fine wine. Without artillery, his guess was that U.S. forces would still be bogged down somewhere south of Provo. It was the one thing government troops had in prodigal supply and the Mormon rebels largely lacked.

Captain Cecil Schneider hurried up into the frontmost trench. Schneider still wore single silver bars, not double; he’d won his promotion just after the ruins of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City passed into government hands. With him came Gordon McSweeney, who, like Mantarakis, had started the war a private and who, also like Mantarakis, now sported sergeant’s stripes.

“When the barrage lets up, we go after that farmhouse,” Schneider said. He didn’t sound enthusiastic—no one who’d been through the fall of Salt Lake City was apt to be enthusiastic about fighting ever again—but he sounded determined. Casualties had made him a company commander the same way they’d made Paul and McSweeney noncoms, but he’d turned out to be a pretty good one.

Because of that, the first thing out of Paul’s mouth was, “Yes, sir.” The second thing, though, was, “What the devil is he got up as, sir?” He pointed to Gordon McSweeney, who instead of a pack wore a big metal drum on his back and carried in his hands a hose attached to it.

McSweeney spoke for himself: “This is a device for sending the misbelievers into the fiery furnace.” As far as he was concerned, anyone less grimly Presbyterian than himself was heading straight for hell. That included papists and the Orthodox Paul Mantarakis, but it also most especially included Mormons, who, as far as he was concerned, were not Christians at all.

Captain Schneider amplified that, saying, “The gadget’s supposed to be able to deal with strongpoints that laugh at rifles and machine guns. If the artillery doesn’t punch the ticket on that farmhouse, we’ll send Gordon up to see what he can do. Only disadvantage is, it’s a short-range weapon.”

“I will bring it close enough to the farmhouse to be used,” McSweeney promised. Whatever the thing was, he sounded quiveringly eager to use it. Mantarakis had no idea what the Mormons felt about Gordon McSweeney, or even whether they knew he existed among the multitude of soldiers in the U.S. force. He knew McSweeney scared him to death.

Ever so warily, he peered up over the parapet. The rebels’ line was taking quite a pounding; through dust and smoke, it looked as if several large bites were gone from the farmhouse. Maybe it would be easy this time. It had been, once or twice. Some of the other times, though…

He would have liked to see the artillery go on for days, for weeks, killing all the Mormons without any need for the infantry to do their work. But, for one thing, there wasn’t enough ammunition for a bombardment like that, not on a secondary front like Utah. And, for another, he’d seen fighting the Confederates that even the longest, most savage barrages didn’t kill all or even most of the enemy soldiers at whom they were aimed.

After an hour or so, the guns fell silent. Captain Schneider blew a whistle. Up out of the trenches swarmed his company and several others. “Come on!” Mantarakis called to the men of his squad. “We don’t want to spend a lot of time in between the lines where they can shoot us down. We want to get right in there with ’em.”

The ground was chewed up from previous failed assaults on the Mormon position, and chewed worse by short rounds from the latest shelling. None, for once, seemed to have come down on the U.S. trenches, which Paul reckoned a small miracle. He dashed past stinking corpses and pieces of corpses, some still in green-gray often stained black with old blood. Flies rose in buzzing clouds.

Sure enough, some of the Mormon defenders remained alive and angry at the world, or at least at that portion of the United States Army attacking them. All along their line, flames showed riflemen shooting at the soldiers in green-gray heading their way. Somewhere not far from Paul, a man took a bullet and began shrieking for his mother.

And, sure enough, the machine gun in the adobe farmhouse started up, too. As he dove headlong into a shell crater, Mantarakis was convinced the racket a machine gun made was the most hateful noise in the world.

He looked toward the farmhouse. He and however many men still survived from his squad had come well past the high-water mark of earlier U.S. attacks. He was, he thought, within a hundred yards of that infernal device hammering out death up ahead. He was also damned if he knew how he was going to be able to get any nearer than that.

Somebody thudded down into the crater beside him: Gordon McSweeney. “I have to get closer,” the dour Scotsman said. “Twenty yards is best, though thirty may do: one for each piece of silver Judas took.”

Mantarakis sighed. He too knew they had to take out that machine gun. If McSweeney had a way—“I’ll go left. You go right a few seconds later. We’ll keep moving till you’re close enough.”
Or until you get killed—or until I do
. He wished he could take out his worry beads and work them.

They weren’t the only soldiers pushing up toward the adobe. The Mormons in there had even less idea than Paul did of what the strange contraption on McSweeney’s back was. Working his way to within twenty yards of the machine gun was slow and dangerous work, but he managed.

To Mantarakis’ horror, McSweeney stood up in the hole where he’d sheltered. He aimed the nozzle end of the hose he carried at the machine gun’s firing slit. Before the gun could cut him down, a spurt of flame burst from the nozzle, played over the front of the farmhouse, and went right through the narrow slit at the crew serving the machine gun.

Paul heard the lyingly cheerful sound of rounds cooking off inside the farmhouse. McSweeney dashed toward it. He stuck the nozzle right up against the slit and let loose another tongue of fire.

Along with the sound of cartridges prematurely ignited came another—the sound of screams. Gordon McSweeney’s face was transfigured with joy, as if he’d just taken Jerusalem from the pagans. And then something happened that Paul had never before seen in Utah: three or four men came stumbling out through a hole in the side of the adobe, their hands lifted high in surrender.