Drive to the East (39 page)

Some Confederate barrels clattered and crunched up to the front. Fighting inside one of them was no picnic in weather like this, either, especially when they needed to stay buttoned up tight against gas. But their guns blasted the U.S. soldiers out of the positions to which they’d withdrawn.

“Come on!” Tom shouted, running forward. “We can get to the river. Maybe we can even get over the river.” Before long, he caught up with the barrels, and then ran past them. Soldiers turned to stare at him. In their pig-snouted, portholed masks, they looked like the Martians in that Yankee film that had scared the pants off everybody a few years before the war. But he knew the magic words that would get them moving: “Follow me!”

That spell never failed. Men might balk at going forward alone, but they would go after an officer. Tom’s heart thudded in his chest. He hoped he didn’t fall over dead leading from the front. Middle-aged officers took that chance when they tried to lead young men.

To his relief, the barrels also rumbled forward. Armor and infantry working together were hard to stop. The damnyankees didn’t stop them. Tom whooped. “The river!” he yelled. There was the muddy Cuyahoga, winding its way north and west toward Lake Erie. The tail of a crashed fighter stuck up from the water near the far bank.

On that far bank, U.S. troops didn’t seem to know they had trouble. Tom ordered his men not to shoot across the river. He sent an urgent request back to Division for engineers with rubber boats. If they could cross in a hurry, set up a bridgehead on the far bank . . . Maybe they’d get slaughtered. Troops that tried to do too much too fast sometimes did. But maybe they’d shake the Yankees loose from the river line, too.

For a wonder, the engineers showed up in less than an hour. Soldiers piled into the boats as fast as the engineers could inflate them. The Confederates paddled like men possessed. But their foes didn’t stay bemused long enough. Heavy machine-gun fire from the east bank of the river turned them back with heavy losses.

C.S. barrels waddled forward and shelled the machine-gun nests. “Let’s try it again!” Tom shouted. This time, he scrambled into one of the black rubber boats himself. He’d get over the Cuyahoga or he’d probably die in it. He grabbed a paddle and thrust it into the muddy water.

The machine guns stayed quiet. The barrels had done their job, then. Rifle fire from the far bank was galling, but no worse than galling. Confederate machine guns, some on the barrels and others served by infantrymen, made the damnyankee riflemen keep their heads down.

A bullet cracked past Tom. When you heard that crack, the round came too damn close. He automatically ducked, not that it would have done him any good. Nobody thought anything less of him for ducking. Only a handful of nerveless people lacked that reflex.

Here came the far bank. “Let’s go!” Tom yelled, and paddled harder than ever. As soon as the rubber boat grounded on the mud, he leaped out and ran for the closest wreckage. He threw a grenade into what looked like the mouth of a cave in case any U.S. soldiers lurked there, then dove behind a burned-out truck carcass. “Stay down!” he called to his men. “If they want you, make ’em pay for you!”

More Confederates got over the Cuyahoga. U.S. soldiers rushed up to try to wipe out the bridgehead before it got established. A mortar bomb whispered down much closer to Tom than he would have liked. Fragments of hot, jagged steel snarled through the air. Not far away, somebody shrieked—some of those fragments had snarled through flesh instead.

Asskickers that stooped on the attacking men in green-gray might have been angels in camouflage paint. Tom Colleton yelled exultantly at the chance to get killed farther east in Ohio than other Confederates had before him.

S
ergeant Michael Pound approved of the way Lieutenant Bryce Poffenberger’s combat education was coming. Lieutenant Poffenberger hadn’t gone and killed himself yet. Even more to the point, the barrel commander hadn’t yet gone and killed Sergeant Pound. Pound strongly approved of that.

What he didn’t approve of were the new Confederate barrels. No, that wasn’t quite true. He highly approved of them—as machines. What he didn’t approve of was that the long-snouted monsters had Confederates inside them and not U.S. barrelmen.

“We could have had barrels like that,” he told Lieutenant Poffenberger as they camped somewhere between Akron and Canton. “We could have had them more than ten years ago, but we didn’t want to spend the money.”

Incautiously, Poffenberger said, “And I suppose you were there at the creation.”

“Yes, sir,” Pound said—if the puppy forgot, he had to have his nose rubbed in it. “I was at the Barrel Works at Fort Leavenworth when General Morrell—of course, he wasn’t a general then, just a colonel—designed the prototype for the model we’re using now. If we’d had that then, we would have upgraded long since. I’m sure of it.”

Poffenberger stared at him. Firelight shone from the junior officer’s wide eyes. Not for the first time, he asked the question a lot of people had asked before him: “Why the devil aren’t you an officer, Sergeant?” What he meant by it was,
Why the devil aren’t you out of my hair?

“I like what I’m doing, sir,” Pound replied in his best innocent tones. “Things are—looser this way.”

“Hrmp,” Poffenberger said, a noise that might have meant anything at all.

“If you’ll excuse me, sir . . .” Pound waited to be sure the lieutenant wouldn’t hold him, then walked over to the barrel. The driver, a blond from Dakota named Tor Svenson, was fiddling with the engine, wrench in one hand, flashlight in the other. Any good barrel crew did a lot of its own maintenance; the big, heavy machines operated at—or often past—the limits of engine, transmission, and suspension, and they broke down a lot even when coddled and cosseted. “What’s up, Svenson?”

The driver had been so engaged in what he was doing, he needed a moment to realize somebody was talking to him. When he looked up, a smear of grease darkened one Viking cheekbone. “Oh, it’s you, Sarge,” he said, relief in his voice. Relief that it wasn’t Second Lieutenant Bryce Poffenberger? Pound wouldn’t have been surprised. Svenson went on, “You notice how the beast doesn’t quite pick up fast enough when I goose it?”

“Uh-huh.” Pound nodded. “Figure it’s the carb?”

“Yah, but I can’t find anything wrong with the son of a bitch.”

“Let me have a look.” With a grunt, Pound heaved himself up onto the machine so he could look down on the engine. As a matter of fact, he
did
look down on it; it wasn’t powerful enough to let the barrel do everything he wished it could. He had a variety of wrenches and other tools in his coverall pockets. Some of them helped him adjust his beloved gun. The others clanked there because any barrelman who’d been at his trade for a while turned into a pretty fair mechanic.

Svenson had already partly disassembled the carburetor. Pound continued the attack with his own wrenches and, soon, a needle-nosed pliers and a jeweler’s screwdriver. Svenson watched with interest, occasionally offering a suggestion. He wasn’t a bad mechanic himself, but recognized Pound was a better one.

“What do you think?” the driver asked in due course.

“Looks to me like the metering rod’s not quite in synch with the throttle valve, so you get that delay when you want high power,” Pound answered. “I like a power jet better—less to go wrong. But we’ve got what we’ve got. Clean everything out there real well and it should be all right.” He crossed his fingers.

“Yah, I’ll do it, Sarge.” Some of the flat vowels of Scandinavia lingered in Svenson’s speech. “Thanks. I’m not sure I would’ve picked that up myself.”

“I expect you would have.” Pound didn’t know whether the driver would have or not, but Svenson worked hard. He was also a man whom a pat on the back helped more than a boot in the backside. He grinned a dirty-faced grin at Pound as he started setting the delicate mechanism to rights.

When they moved out the next morning, the engine was noticeably smoother. Pound reminded himself to say something nice to Svenson when they stopped somewhere. There wasn’t a lot of really open ground as they moved northwest towards Akron. Ohio was densely settled; suburbs spread from towns like tentacles. That meant a barrel commander had to have eyes in the back of his head to keep from walking into trouble.

Lieutenant Poffenberger did his best. He rode head and shoulders out of the cupola so he could look around in all directions. Staying buttoned up and using the periscopes was safer for the commander but much more dangerous for the barrel as a whole.

The open cupola also let a little fresh air into the machine. That was good; it felt hot enough in there to cook meat. At least the engine had a compartment of its own, which it hadn’t in Great War barrels. Pound wiped sweat off his forehead with a coverall sleeve and thought longingly of blizzards.

Foot soldiers trotted alongside the barrels. If they started yelling about gas—or if they started putting on masks, for they might not be heard no matter how they yelled—the machine would have to button up. That would be . . . even less pleasant than it was already.

For all of Lieutenant Poffenberger’s good intentions, he never saw the C.S. barrel that wrecked the one he commanded. The shot came from the side.
Wham! Clang!
It was like getting kicked by a mule the size of a
Brontosaurus.
The barrel stopped at once. The steel bulkhead between the engine compartment and the crew would hold fire at bay—for a little while.

“Holy Jesus!” Poffenberger yipped, his voice high and shrill.

“Sir, we’ve got to get out of here right now,” Michael Pound said urgently.

“Yes,” Poffenberger said. Had he said no, Pound would have clipped him and then got out anyway. Poffenberger started up through the cupola. A burst of machine-gun fire from that same Confederate barrel—or so Pound thought—made his body jerk and twitch. The lieutenant let out a thin, startled bleat and slumped back down into the turret.

He blocked Pound’s escape and the loader’s. Swearing, Pound heaved his body up again so he himself could get at the escape hatch on the far side of the turret. His hands left blood on the steel as he undogged the hatch. “Come on!” he shouted to the man who sat below him and to his left.

“What about the lieutenant?” asked the loader—his name was Jerry Fields.

“He’s gone. Get moving, goddammit! Next one hits right here.” Pound hauled himself out of the turret with his muscular arms. He crouched on the stricken barrel’s chassis, then dropped to the ground. The loader was right behind him. They used the barrel as cover against enemy fire from the flank. Flame and black smoke boiled up from the engine compartment. That would help hide them from Confederates trying to do them in.

A hatch opened at the front of the barrel. Tor Svenson and the bow gunner tumbled out one after the other. Pound shouted and waved to them. That enemy machine gun blew off the top of the bow gunner’s head. Svenson’s dash turned into a limp, and then a crawl.

As Pound crouched to bandage the driver’s leg, another armor-piercing round slammed into the barrel, just as he’d known it would. Ammunition started cooking off inside, the cheerful
pop-pop-pop
of machine-gun cartridges—like a string of firecrackers on the Fourth of July—mingling with the deeper roars of the shells for the main armament. The explosions blew what was left of Lieutenant Poffenberger’s body off the turret. More flames and smoke burst from the cupola—including a perfect smoke ring, as if Satan were puffing on a stogie.

“How is it, Svenson?” Pound asked.

“Hurts like a bastard,” the driver answered with the eerie matter-of-factness of a just-wounded man.

Pound nodded. The bullet had taken a nasty bite out of Svenson’s calf. Pound gave him a shot of morphine, then yelled for a corpsman.

“Feel naked outside the machine,” the loader said.

“No kidding,” Pound replied with feeling. He felt worse than naked—he felt like a snail yanked out of its shell. The infantrymen around him knew how to be soft-skinned slugs, but he had no idea. The .45 on his belt, a reasonable self-defense weapon for a barrel crewman, suddenly seemed a kid’s water pistol.

The war went on without him. Nobody cared that his barrel had been smashed, or that Lieutenant Poffenberger was nothing but torn, burnt, bleeding meat and the bow gunner’d had his brains blown out. Other U.S. barrels kept grinding towards Akron. For all he knew, some of them were hunting the C.S. machine that had put him out of action. Foot soldiers loped past. None of them stopped for the deshelled snails; as proper slugs, they had worries of their own.

A couple of corpsmen did come up. “All right—we’ll take charge of him,” one of them said. “Looks like you done pretty good.”

“Thanks,” Pound said. He turned to Jerry Fields. “Come on. Let’s get moving.”

“Where to?” the loader asked reasonably.

“Wherever we can find somebody who’ll put us back in another barrel, or at least give us something to do,” Pound answered. “We can’t stay here, that’s for damn sure.”

He couldn’t have been righter about that. The Confederates on the U.S. flank ripped into the advancing men in green-gray. A shell from a C.S. barrel slammed into the turret of a U.S. machine, letting him see what he’d been afraid of a couple of minutes earlier. The high-velocity round almost tore the turret right off the barrel. The men inside never had a chance. They had to be hamburger even before their ammo started cooking off.

“Jesus,” Fields said beside him. “That could’ve been us.”

“Really? That never occurred to me,” Pound said. The loader, for whom sarcasm was a foreign language, gave him a peculiar look.

In the face of concentrated automatic-weapons fire, U.S. foot soldiers went down as if to a reaper.
A reaper is right—a grim one,
Pound thought. All he knew about infantry combat was to stay low. That didn’t seem to be enough. He pulled out the .45, in case any Confederate soldiers got close enough to make it dangerous. It didn’t seem to be enough, either.

The attack unraveled. It quickly grew obvious the U.S. soldiers weren’t going to make it to Portage Lake, let alone into Akron. Instead of going northwest, they started going southeast as fast as they could. The question became whether they would be able to hang on to Canton, and the answer looked more and more like no.