In at the Death (23 page)

Every so often, snipers would take pot shots at the trucks from the woods. When they did, U.S. armored cars and halftracks lashed the pines with bullets. That took care of that…till the halftracks and armored cars drove on. Then, more often than not, the unharmed bushwhackers would climb out of their holes and start banging away at U.S. trucks again.

Cincinnatus watched the woods as closely as he watched the road, then. He kept a submachine gun on the seat beside him, where he could grab it in a hurry if he needed to. He didn’t want to get shot, but he
really
didn’t want to get captured. One of the bullets in the captured Confederate weapon might be for him if he had to use it that way.

He wondered how many movies he’d seen where the bad guy snarled,
You’ll never take me alive, flatfoot!
He didn’t think he was the bad guy in this particular melodrama, but the Confederate skulkers wouldn’t feel the same way about him.

Everything went fine till the convoy got to Swainsboro, Georgia, not far from where the trucks would unload. The woods around Swainsboro were particularly thick. The town itself had a turpentine plant, a couple of planing mills, and a furniture factory to deal with the timber. In the cleared areas, farmers raised chickens and turkeys, hogs and goats. All in all, it was a typical enough backwoods Georgia town—or so Cincinnatus thought till a
big
bomb went off under a deuce-and-a-half a quarter of a mile in front of him. He was still in town; the other truck had just cleared Swainsboro.

The poor driver never knew what hit him. His truck went up in a fireball that would have been even bigger had he carried anything inflammable. Chunks of metal and asphalt rained down around Cincinnatus as he slammed on the brakes. Something clanged off a fender. Whatever it was, it sounded big enough to leave a dent. He was amazed his windshield didn’t blow in and slash his face to ribbons.

No sooner had he stopped—just past the last buildings on the outskirts of town—than he grabbed for the submachine gun. He’d been through bombings before. Usually, the bomb was intended to stall the convoy so bushwhackers could hit it from the sides. His head swiveled. He didn’t hear any gunfire, and wondered why not.

As the trucks ahead of him moved forward, he put his back in gear. An armored car went off the road to one side, a halftrack to the other. The light cannon and machine guns the armored vehicles carried were potent arguments against getting gay with the convoy. Cincinnatus hoped they were, anyhow.

He ground his teeth when he had to leave the paving and go off into the mud to the side. The truck’s all-wheel drive kept him from bogging down, but getting stuck was the least of his worries. If those bastards had planted more explosives next to the road…He’d seen that before, too.

He’d just got back up onto the road—and breathed a sigh of relief because he’d made it—when an antibarrel rocket trailing fire streaked out of the woods and slammed into the armored car’s side. Those rockets were made to pierce much thicker armor than that. The armored car burst into flames.

Cincinnatus fired into the trees again and again.
Short bursts
, he reminded himself. The muzzle wouldn’t pull up and to the right if he didn’t try to squeeze off too many rounds at a time. That fire trail pointed right back to where the man with the launcher had to be. If Cincinnatus could nail him…

He growled out a triumphant, “Yeah!” when he did. A man in bloodied Confederate butternut staggered out from behind a loblolly pine and fell to his knees. Cincinnatus squeezed off another burst. The Confederate grabbed at his chest as he toppled. He lay there kicking. How many bullets did he have in him? Men often proved harder to kill than anyone who wasn’t trying to do it would imagine.

This bastard, though, had surely killed everybody in the armored car. No hatches opened; no men got out. And the driver hadn’t got out of the blasted truck, either. No way in hell he could have. So the Confederate had extracted a high price for his miserable, worthless life. If all his countrymen did the same…

But they couldn’t. Cincinnatus had already seen as much. The enemy soldiers had the advantage of playing defense, of making U.S. forces come to them. But the United States also had an advantage. They could pick when and where to strike. And they could concentrate men and barrels where they thought concentrating them would do the most good. Breakthroughs were easier to come by in this war than they had been the last time around.

How many more would the USA need? Cincinnatus thought about that with half his mind while the rest got the truck rolling down the road again, and scanned the woods to either side. He’d spot the Confederates no doubt lurking in there only if they made a mistake—he knew that. Those bastards were human beings just like anybody else, though. They could screw up the same way U.S. soldiers could.

A good thing, too. Cincinnatus’ shiver had nothing to do with the nasty weather. If the Confederates hadn’t screwed up a couple-three times, they’d be ruling the roost now. A few Negroes still survived in the CSA. Had Jake Featherston won everything his heart desired, everything south of the border would be lily-white.

So…One more push into Savannah, and how long would the butternut bastards go on screaming, “Freedom!” with their goddamn country split in two? The United States could turn north and smash one half, then swing south and smash the other. Or maybe the body would die once the USA killed the head. Cincinnatus patted the submachine gun. He sure hoped so.

J
orge Rodriguez and Gabriel Medwick both sewed second stripes onto their sleeves. Jorge was lousy with a needle and thread; back in Sonora, sewing was work for women and tailors. He was surprised to find his friend neat and quick and precise. “How come you can do that so good?” he asked, ready to rag on Gabe.

“My ma learned me,” Medwick answered matter-of-factly. “She reckoned I ought to be able to shift for myself, and knowing how to sew was part of it.”

That left Jorge with nothing to say. Ragging on his buddy was one thing. Ragging on Gabe’s mother was something else, something that went over the line. Instead of talking, Jorge sewed faster—not better, but faster. He wanted to get the shirt back on. Even sitting in front of a campfire, it was chilly out.

Artillery opened up behind him, from the direction of Statesboro. Covington was a long way northwest now, and long gone. Statesboro guarded the approaches to Savannah. The town wasn’t that well fortified, not by what Jorge had heard. Why would it be? Back before the war, who would have imagined eastern Georgia would be crawling with damnyankees? Nobody in his right mind, that was for sure.

Imagine or not, though, U.S. soldiers swarmed through this part of the state. Everybody figured they were heading for Savannah. They’d been pushing the Confederates back toward the southeast for weeks. Where else would they be going?

Sergeant Hugo Blackledge appeared in the firelight. He had a gift for not being there one second and showing up out of nowhere the next: a jack-in-the-box with a nasty temper. He commanded the company these days. All the officers above him were dead and wounded, and replacements hadn’t shown up. Jorge’s promotion to corporal was older than Gabe’s, even if their sets of stripes had both arrived at the same time. That meant Jorge had a platoon, while his friend only led a section.

“How’s it feel, making like lieutenants?” Blackledge asked with a certain sardonic relish.

“Don’t want to be no lieutenant,” Gabriel Medwick said. “I got enough shit to worry about already.”

“You said it,” Jorge agreed.

As if to underline their worries, U.S. artillery came to life. Jorge listened anxiously, then relaxed as the shells roared over his head. That was counterbattery fire aimed at the C.S. guns. As long as the big guns shot at each other, as long as they left the front-line infantry alone, Jorge didn’t mind them…much.

Sure enough, the U.S. shells came down well to the rear. Jorge finished sewing on his new stripes and put his shirt back on. Gabe, fussily precise, lagged behind.

“What are we gonna do?” Jorge said.

His buddy looked up from his sewing. “Fight the damnyankees. Keep fighting ’em till we chase ’em back where they came from.”

“¿Como?”
Jorge asked, startled into Spanish. The question sounded every bit as bleak in English: “How?”

“President’ll figure out some kinda way.” Medwick sounded a hundred percent confident in Jake Featherston.

Sergeant Blackledge lit a cigarette. “Don’t get your ass in an uproar about that kind of shit, Rodriguez,” he advised. “You can’t do nothin’ about it any which way. All we got to worry about is the damnyankees in front of us.”

“That’s bad enough!” Jorge exclaimed, because Blackledge made it sound as if the U.S. soldiers were nothing to worry about. Rodriguez wished they weren’t but knew they were.

“Yeah, well, so what? You’re still here. I’m still here. Hell, even pretty boy’s still here.” Blackledge blew smoke in Gabriel Medwick’s direction.

“Up yours, too, Sarge,” Medwick said without rancor. When he first got to know Blackledge, he wouldn’t have dared mouth off like that. Neither would Jorge. And the formidable noncom would have squashed them like lice if they had dared. Now they’d earned the right, not least simply by surviving.

“All we can do is all we can do,” Hugo Blackledge said. “We’ve put up a hell of a fight, seeing as they outweigh us about two to one.”

“We’ll lick ’em yet,” Gabe said as he finally put his shirt back on.

“Uh-huh.” Sergeant Blackledge nodded. Jorge had seen nods like that, from doctors in sickrooms where the patient wasn’t going to get better but didn’t know it yet. You kept his hope up as long as you could. Maybe it didn’t do any good, but it didn’t hurt, either. And he felt better, for a little while, anyway.

Jorge’s dark eyes met the sergeant’s ice-gray ones in a moment of complete mutual understanding. Gabe didn’t get it, and probably wouldn’t till Savannah fell, if then—and if he lived that long. The patient in the sickroom was the Confederacy. And chances were it wouldn’t get better.

“Got another one of those Dukes?” Jorge asked Blackledge.

“Sure do. Here you go.” The older man held out the pack.

Jorge got to his feet and walked over to take one. As he leaned forward so Blackledge could give him a light, he whispered, “We’re fucked,
sí
?”

“Bet your sorry butt we are,” Blackledge answered.

“Thanks.” Jorge sucked in smoke. But he was more grateful for the candor than for the cigarette.

When morning came, he looked up the road along which he’d been retreating. A couple of dead Confederates lay there, about three hundred yards in front of the line. Nobody’d tried to retrieve their bodies. For one thing, it was too likely that U.S. snipers would shoot anyone who did. For another, C.S. engineers had booby-trapped the corpses. Any damnyankee who flipped them over looking for souvenirs would regret it.

Nobody’d set up a kitchen anywhere close by. Jorge made do with a ration can. It was U.S.-issue deviled ham, the favorite canned meal on both sides of the front. Jorge hadn’t swapped cigarettes to get his hands on this one. He’d taken three or four cans off a dead Yankee. Looking at those bodies out there made him shake his head as he ate. Maybe he’d been lucky not to get blown to kingdom come.

It wasn’t as if the damnyankees wouldn’t have other chances. Sooner or later—probably sooner—they would start pushing hard toward Savannah again. The only question was whether they’d do it right here or somewhere a little farther west. If they did it right here, Jorge knew he’d have to retreat or die. If they did it farther west, his choices would lie between retreating and getting cut off and trapped.

He didn’t think the C.S. line could hold. As for counterattacks…Well, no. When a sergeant commanded a company, when a new corporal was leading a platoon, this army would have a devil of a time holding its ground. Pushing the enemy back seemed far beyond its power.

Too many damnyankee soldiers. Too many damnyankee barrels. Too many airplanes with the eagle and crossed swords. With Atlanta gone, with Richmond in trouble, with Birmingham getting pounded, how could the Confederacy reply?

No U.S. troops came close enough to try to plunder the booby-trapped corpses. That left Jorge more relieved than anything else. Advancing U.S. soldiers would have meant more hard fighting. He’d seen enough—more than enough, in fact—to last him a lifetime. He knew he hadn’t seen the end of things here. Either he’d have to do more fighting or he’d have to fall back. Chances were, he’d have to do both. If he didn’t have to do either one today, or maybe even tomorrow, so much the better.

Quiet lasted through the afternoon and into the evening. He smoked and ate and dozed and listened to the problems of a soldier in his platoon who had woman trouble back in North Carolina. Somebody’d sent Ray a letter that said his wife (or maybe fiancée; Jorge wasn’t quite sure) was fooling around on him with a mechanic who was back there because he’d already lost an arm in the fighting.

“Shoulda blown off his shortarm instead,” Ray said savagely. “What I want to do is, I want to go on home and take care o’ that my own self.”

“Well, you can’t,” Jorge said. “They catch you deserting, they shoot you. Then they hang up your body to give other people the message.”

“It’d be worth it. Then Thelma Lou’d know how much I love her,” Ray said.

Jorge wondered why he’d got stuck listening to this crap. He himself hadn’t had a fiancée, let alone a wife, back in Baroyeca. The few times he’d lain down with a woman, he’d had to put money on the dresser first. But he was the platoon leader. That must have made him seem to Ray like someone who knew what he was doing. He wished he seemed that way in his own eyes.

He knew enough to be sure Ray was talking like a fool. Anybody who wasn’t in love with Thelma Lou would have known that. “She just laugh when you get in trouble,” Jorge said. “Then she go on fooling around with this asshole.”

“Not if I kill him, she don’t.” Ray was as stubborn as he was stupid, which took some doing.