In at the Death (28 page)

“If there is, Mr. President, I sure don’t know about him,” Potter answered. “Shall we try disrupting the U.S. program again?”

“What the fuck difference does it make?” Featherston said bitterly. That alarmed Potter, who’d never before heard him back away from anything. Even more bitterly, the President went on, “Shit, they’re licking us without uranium bombs. I never would’ve reckoned they could, but they damn well are. Makes you wonder if we
deserve
to live, doesn’t it?”

“No, sir. I have to believe that,” Potter said. “This is my country. I’ll do everything I can for it.”

Featherston cocked his head to one side. “Ask you something?”

“You’re the President, sir. How can I say no?”

“You sure never had any trouble before. But how come you didn’t throw in with Bedford Forrest III and the rest of those bastards?”

“Sir, we’re in a war. We need you. We need you bad. Whoever they brought in instead would have been worse. Chances are the Yankees wouldn’t have made peace with him, either, not this side of—what do they call it?—unconditional surrender. That kills us. Way it looks to me is, we’ve got to keep fighting, because all our other choices are worse. Maybe the slide-rule brigade can save us. It’s the best hope we’ve got, anyhow.”

He realized he’d just admitted he knew about Forrest’s plot, even if he hadn’t gone along with it. If Jake wanted his head, he could have it. But that had always been true, ever since the Richmond Olympics. “Well, I get straight answers from you, anyway,” the Confederate President said. “Listen, you go back and tell FitzBelmont I don’t care what he does or who he kills—we’ve got to have that bomb, and faster than months. Get his head out of the clouds. Make sure he understands. It’s his country, too, what’s left of it.”

“I’ll do my best, sir. I don’t know how much I can hurry the physicists, though,” Potter said.

“You’d better, that’s all I’ve got to tell you,” Featherston said. Clarence Potter nodded. He’d seen the President of the CSA angry before—Jake Featherston ran on anger the way trucks ran on gasoline. He’d seen him gleeful. He’d seen him stubborn and defiant. But never—never till now, anyway—had he seen him desperate.

N
ext stop, Birmingham!” Michael Pound said exultantly. It wasn’t spring yet, not even here in Alabama, where spring came early. It wasn’t spring, no, but something even sweeter than birdsong and flowers filled the air. When Pound sniffed, he didn’t just smell exhaust fumes and cordite and unbathed soldiers. He smelled victory.

The Confederates hadn’t quit. He didn’t think they knew the meaning of the word. Some of their terrifying new barrels came into the front line without so much as a coat of paint—straight from the factories U.S. bombers and now artillery were still trying to knock out. The crews who fought those shiny metal monsters were brave, no doubt about it. But all the courage in the world couldn’t make up for missing skill.

And, while the Confederate machines trickled from their battered factories in dribs and drabs, U.S. production went up and up. Maybe a new C.S. barrel was worth two of the best U.S. model. If the USA had four or five times as many barrels where it mattered, how much did that individual superiority matter?

Not enough.

Pound guided his barrel past the guttering corpse of a machine that had tried conclusions with several U.S. barrels at once. That might have been a brave mistake, but a mistake it undoubtedly was. The Confederates had made so many big mistakes, they couldn’t afford even small ones any more.

Somebody not far away fired an automatic rifle. Maybe that was a U.S. soldier with a captured weapon. On the other hand, maybe it was a Freedom Party Guard aiming at a barrel commander riding along with head and shoulders out of the cupola. Regretfully, Michael Pound decided not to take the chance. He ducked down into the machine.

“Where the hell are we, sir?” Sergeant Scullard asked. The gunner didn’t get nearly so many chances to look around as the barrel commander did.

Despite having those chances, Pound needed to check a map before he answered, “Far as I can tell, we’re just outside of Columbiana.”

“And where the fuck’s Columbiana?”

Unless you were born and raised in central Alabama, that was another reasonable question. “Twenty, maybe thirty miles from Birmingham, south and a little bit east,” Pound said. “Town’s got a munitions plant in it, run by the C. B. Churchill Company—that’s what the map notes say, anyhow.”

“Fuck,” the gunner repeated, this time as a term of general disapproval. “That means those butternut assholes’ll fight like mad bastards to keep us out.”

“They’ve been fighting like mad bastards for almost three years,” Pound said. “How much good has it done ’em? We’re in the middle of Alabama. We’ve got ’em cut in half, or near enough so it makes no difference. If they had any brains, they’d quit now, because they can’t win.”

“Yeah, and then they’d spend the next hundred years bushwhacking us.” Scullard was not in a cheerful mood.

Pound grunted. The gunner might have meant that for a sour joke. Even if he did, it made an unfortunate amount of sense. In a standup fight, the Confederacy was losing. But how much fun would it be to occupy a country where everybody hated your guts and wanted you dead? After the Great War, the United States hadn’t enjoyed trying to hold on to Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah. If the USA tried to hang on to the whole CSA…

“Well, nobody ever said the Army would go out of style any time soon,” Pound said.

“A good thing, too,” Scullard replied. “If we’re in deep shit now, we’d be in a lot deeper without this baby.” He rapped his knuckles on the breech of the barrel’s main armament, adding, “I just wish we had more like it.”

“They’re coming,” Pound said. “Maybe not as fast as if we’d started sooner, but they are. We can make more stuff than the Confederates can. Sooner or later, we’ll knock ’em flat, and it’s getting on toward sooner.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth before a Confederate antibarrel rocket slammed into a U.S. machine a quarter of a mile away. The green-gray barrel brewed up, sending an enormous and monstrously perfect smoke ring up and out through the open cupola. Fire and greasy black smoke followed an instant later as the barrel slewed to a stop. Pound didn’t think anybody got out.

He swore under his breath. The United States were making more stuff than the Confederate States could, yes. Sometimes, though—too damn often, in fact—the Confederates made better stuff. The automatic rifles their infantry carried, these antibarrel rockets, the screaming meemies that could flatten acres at a volley, the long-range jobs that reached into the USA…The enemy had talented engineers. Their cause stank like a dead fish, but they were good at what they did.

Scullard must have seen the U.S. barrel go up, too. “I hope we knock ’em flat sooner,” he said. “That way, the mothers don’t have the chance to come up with anything
really
nasty.”

“Yeah,” Michael Pound said. That marched with his own thoughts much too well.

Fields and forest surrounded Columbiana. Two routes led up to the town from the south: a county road whose thin blacktop coat the barrels’ tracks quickly wrecked, and a railroad line maybe a hundred yards to the west. They were both nice and straight, and Pound couldn’t have said which he distrusted more. They both let the Confederates see what was coming long before it got there.

And what they could see, they were too likely to be able to hit. That blazing barrel said as much. Of course, banging your way through the woods was asking to get nailed by some kid in butternut crouching behind a pine tree. You’d never spot him till he fired off his stovepipe, and that was too damn late.

Pound stood up in the cupola. He wanted to find out just how much U.S. armor was close enough to follow his platoon’s lead. He hoped the other barrels would follow, anyway. If they didn’t, he was liable to end up slightly dead.

Or more than slightly.

Sometimes, though, a barrel’s engine was as important a weapon as its cannon. This felt like one of those times. Accidentally on purpose, he sent his orders over the all-company circuit instead of the one that linked him to his platoon alone: “Men, we are going to charge up this miserable little road as fast as we can go. We are going to blast anything that gets in our way, and we’ll be inside Columbiana before Featherston’s fuckers figure out what hit ’em.”
I hope
. “Follow me. If this goes wrong, they’ll get my barrel first.” He switched to the intercom so he could talk to his driver: “You hear that, Beans?”

“Yes, sir.” The driver’s name was Neyer, but he rarely had to answer to it. His fondness for one particular ration can had given him a handle he’d keep till he took off his uniform…or till he got blown to smithereens, which might happen in the next couple of minutes.

Don’t think about it
, Pound told himself.
If you think about it, you’ll get cold feet
. “Then gun it,” he said. He was sure his own platoon would come with him. The rest…
Don’t think about that, either
.

The engine roared. The barrel zipped forward. Flat out, it could do better than thirty. On rough ground, going like that would have torn out the kidneys of the men inside. On the road, it was tolerable…barely.

“Shoot first if you see anything,” Pound advised, shouting over the noise.

“Going this fast, the stabilizer ain’t worth shit,” the gunner answered.

“Shoot first anyway. Even if you miss, you make the other guy duck. Then you can make your second shot count.”

Scullard grunted. Pound knew damn well he was right, but he could see that it wasn’t the sort of thing where you’d want to bet your life if you didn’t have to.

As they neared Columbiana, they found there were Confederate soldiers on the road. The men in butternut hadn’t figured the Yankees would be dumb enough or crazy enough to thunder down on them like that. The bow machine gun and the coaxial machine gun in the turret both started jackhammering. The C.S. troops scattered.

“Give ’em a couple of rounds of HE, too,” Pound said. “Something to remember us by, you know?”

“Yes, sir!” Scullard said enthusiastically, and then, to the loader, “HE!”

The main armament thundered twice. A 3½-inch shell carried enough cordite to make a pretty good boom when it burst. One round went off in the middle of a knot of fleeing Confederates. Men and pieces of men described arcs through the air.

“Nice shot!” Pound yelled. Only later did he remember he was cheering death and mayhem. They were what he did for a living, his stock in trade. Most of the time, he took them for granted. He wondered why he couldn’t quite do it now.

Then he did, because the barrel roared into Columbiana. He had no time to think about killing—he was too busy doing it. The barrel crew might have been an extension of his arm, an extension of his will.

“Where the hell is Lester Street?” he muttered. That was where the C. B. Churchill Company was, and had been since 1862. A glance through the periscopes built into the cupola told him what he needed to know. The biggest building in town, the one with the Stars and Bars flying over it, had to be the munitions factory. “Send a couple of HE rounds in there, too,” he told the gunner. “Let ’em know they’ve just gone out of business.”

“Right.” But before Scullard could fire, machine-gun bullets rattled off the barrel’s sides and turret, clattering but doing no harm. The bow gunner sent a long burst into a general store with a big
DRINK DR. HOPPER!
sign out front. Pound had tried the fizzy water, and thought it tasted like horse piss and sugar. The enemy machine gun abruptly cut off.

Boom! Boom!
Pound watched holes appear in the munitions plant’s southern wall. He giggled like a kid. Sometimes destruction for its own sake was more fun than anything else an alleged adult could do. He wondered whether Jake Featherston had an advanced case of the same disease.

And then he got more in the way of destruction than even he wanted. Maybe one of those HE rounds blew up something inside the factory. Maybe somebody in there decided he’d be damned if he let the plant fall into U.S. hands. Any which way, it went sky high.

Pound and his barrel were more than half a mile away. Even through inches of steel armor, the roar was overwhelming. The barrel weighed upwards of forty tons. All the same, the front end came off the ground. The machine might have been a rearing horse, except Pound was afraid it would flip right over onto its turret. Scullard’s startled “Fuck!” said he wasn’t the only one, either.

But the barrel thudded back down onto its tracks. Pound peered out through the periscopes again. One of the forward ones was cracked, which said just how big a blast that was. It must have knocked half of Columbiana flat.

“Well,” he said, “we liberated the living shit out of this place.”

F
lora Blackford was listening to debate on a national parks appropriation bill—not everything Congress did touched on the war, though it often seemed that way—when a House page hurried up to her. His fresh features and beardless cheeks said he was about fifteen: too young to conscript, though the Confederates were giving guns to kids that age, using up their next generation.