In at the Death (39 page)

Chester gestured with the muzzle of his rifle. As it pointed to the young soldier’s midsection, a dark stain spread across his crotch.

“Oh, Jesus!” he wailed. “I went and pissed myself!”

“It happens,” Chester said. He’d done it himself in two wars now, but he wasn’t going to tell that to a kid he was capturing. He gestured with the rifle again. “Go on back there, and they’ll take care of you one way or another.”

“Thank you! Thank you! God bless you!” Hands still high, the boy trudged off toward the rear.

And, one way or another, they would take care of him. Maybe they’d take him all the way back to a POW camp. Or maybe they’d just shoot him. Whatever they did, it wasn’t Chester’s worry any more.

The damned Confederates kept fighting as hard as they could. Chester captured another guy who had to be older than he was. The National Assault Force soldier had lost his upper plate, and talked as if he had a mouthful of mush. “Maybe we fought each other the lasht time around,” he said.

“Could be,” Chester allowed. “I was on the Roanoke front, and then in northern Virginia. How about you?”

“Nope. I wash in Tenneshshee,” the Confederate retread said. “Never reckon you bashtards’d get into Shouf Carolina.”

“You fuck with us, Pops, and that’s what happens,” Chester told him. “Go on back to the rear. They’ll deal with you.”

“Uh-huh,” the old-timer said bleakly. Unlike the kid, he knew what could happen to him. But he went. He’d passed the first key test: he hadn’t got killed out of hand. All the others would be easier. Of course, you only had to fail one and that was all she wrote.

“Come on!” Lieutenant Lavochkin shouted. “We push hard, we’ll be in Charleston tomorrow! Maybe even by sundown!” Chester thought he was right, too. Try as they would, the Confederates didn’t have enough to stop the men in green-gray.

All of which turned out to have nothing to do with anything. The wireless man shouted for Captain Rhodes: “Sir, we’ve got a stop order! Nobody’s supposed to advance past map square Gold-5.”

“Oh, yeah?” the company CO said. “Let me talk to Division.” He talked. He listened. He talked some more. Then he did some shouting of his own: “All troops halt! I say again, all troops halt! We have to stop right here.”

“No!” Lieutenant Lavochkin said. “We’ve got ’em licked! The brass can’t screw us out of this.”

“Lieutenant, the halt order comes straight from the War Department,” Captain Rhodes said. “You can write ’em a nasty letter when this is all over, but for now we are damn well going to halt.”

“No!” Lavochkin repeated.

“That is an order, Lieutenant.” Rhodes’ voice turned icy. “From the War Department and from me. Is that plain enough? Next stop, the stockade.”

“They can’t keep us out of Charleston!” Lavochkin raged. “The enemy hasn’t got a chance! The dumbshit brass hats in Philly don’t know diddly-squat. I’m going forward anyway, and taking my men with me. We’ll see you in Charleston, too.”

“No, sir,” Chester Martin said. Lavochkin stared at him, caught between fury and astonishment. But a first sergeant was there to keep a lieutenant in line. Chester went on, “I think we better follow the order.”

“You’ll pay for this, Sergeant,” Lavochkin said.

Chester shrugged. Slowly and deliberately, he sat down on the muddy ground and lit a cigarette. “I’ll take my chances…sir.” He wondered whether Lavochkin would go on by himself. The rest of the platoon was stopping. The lieutenant’s face had murder all over it, but he stopped, too.

He fumed and swore for the next three hours. “God damn it to hell, I could have been in Charleston by now. We all could,” he said. Chester didn’t think so, but the lieutenant wasn’t so far wrong. Why
had
the brass called a halt with the city so close?

When the fireball rose over Charleston, when the toadstool cloud—weirdly beautiful and weirdly terrifying—rose high above the town where the War of Secession started, he understood. So did Captain Rhodes. “Lieutenant, do you really want to get any closer to that place?” Rhodes asked.

“Uh, no, sir,” Boris Lavochkin answered in an unwontedly small voice.

“Do you think following orders might be a good idea every once in a while, even if you don’t happen to like them personally?” Captain Rhodes persisted.

“Uh, yes, sir.”

“Congratulations. That
is
the right answer, Lieutenant. Do you realize you and whoever you dragged with you would have ended up dead if you did manage to break into Charleston?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Lavochkin said again, still more softly than usual.

“Then remember that, goddammit,” Rhodes barked.

“Yes, sir,” the young lieutenant said one more time. And no doubt he would…for a while. How long?
Not long enough, I bet
, Chester Martin thought.

P
ortable wireless sets would have been a lot better if they lived up to their name. Luggable was more like it, as far as Leonard O’Doull was concerned. The damn things were too damn big and too damn heavy, and so were the batteries that powered them. Those batteries didn’t last long enough, either.

Still, having a wireless set was better than not having one, especially since U.S. Wireless Atlanta went on the air. USWA had the power to punch through all the jamming the Confederates put out, and it brought the word—or the U.S. version of the word—into the heartland of the CSA: over near Birmingham, for instance.

It also gave U.S. personnel something to listen to besides Confederate Connie. Her sultry voice kept reminding O’Doull he’d been away from home too damn long. He knew she told lies every time she opened her mouth. Like hundreds of thousands of other guys, he kept listening to her anyway. She sounded like bottled sex.

When he said something like that one evening, Eddie nodded. Then the corpsman said, “She’s probably sixty and fat and ugly.”

“Yeah, she probably is—life works that way too goddamn often,” O’Doull agreed. “But she sure
sounds
hot.”

“She doesn’t do that much for me,” Sergeant Goodson Lord said.

O’Doull reached for his wrist. “Do you have a pulse, man?” Sergeant Lord jerked his arm away. Not for the first time, O’Doull wondered whether the senior medic was a fairy. How could you like women and not like Confederate Connie?

Eddie looked at his wristwatch. “Seven o’clock,” he said. “Time for the news.” He switched the wireless from Confederate Connie’s music to USWA.

He couldn’t have timed it better if he tried for a week. “Hello,” said a deep voice with a distinctive U.S. accent. “I’m Eric Sevareid, and I’m here to tell you the
real
truth.” All the men in the aid station grinned. How many times over how many years had they heard Jake Featherston open up a can of worms with that bullshit?

“Hope the Confederates listen up,” Goodson Lord said. “They’d better.” He might be a queer, but if he was, he was a patriotic queer.
Long as he doesn’t grab
my
ass, I can live with that
, O’Doull thought, and felt proud of his own tolerance.

“Today, President La Follette again called for the surrender of the Confederate States,” Sevareid said on the wireless. “In his words, ‘Only by quitting the war now can the CSA hope to escape destruction of a sort the world has never seen before. Newport News and Charleston are just the beginning. We
will
put an end to this evil regime one way or another. Which way that will be is the only thing left for existing Confederate officials to decide.’”

“That’s telling ’em!” Eddie said. He was as mild and inoffensive a little guy as ever came down the pike, but he hated the CSA. He wouldn’t have had to see so much misery if not for Jake Featherston.

“Featherston’s reply was, ‘We aren’t going to lay down for the United States, and they can’t make us do it,’” Sevareid continued. “He is believed to have broadcast that reply from somewhere in North Carolina. Richmond, of course, is in U.S. hands. Featherston narrowly escaped the Newport News bomb, and U.S. forces are now pushing toward Hampton Roads. Before long, he will be a president without a country.” The broadcaster’s voice showed unmistakable satisfaction.

“In the European half of the war, German drives against Russia continue,” Sevareid said. “The Tsar’s army shows signs of disintegration, but Petrograd Wireless—now broadcasting from Moscow after the destruction of Petrograd—denies reports that the Tsar is seeking an armistice from Germany.”

“If Russia bails out, England and France are done,” Lord opined.

“France is about done anyway,” Eddie said. “Bye-bye, gay Paree.” He waved.

Half a lifetime spent in the Republic of Quebec speaking French almost all the time made O’Doull look at France differently from most Americans. It was the sun around which Quebec revolved whether they were on the same side or not. And when the heart of the sun was torn out…

“Despite the loss of Paris, France also denies any plan to leave the conflict,” Eric Sevareid said. “The new King of France, Louis XIX, vows revenge against Germany. And Winston Churchill was quoted by the BBC as saying, ‘We can match the Hun bomb for bomb. Let him do his worst, and we shall do our best. With God’s help, it will be good enough.’”

“With him and Featherston, the bad guys have all the good talkers,” Sergeant Lord said. “Doesn’t seem fair.”

“Churchill’s a better speaker than Featherston any day,” O’Doull said. “He’s not such a bastard, either.”

“That’s what you say, Doc,” Eddie put in. “Ask the Kaiser, and I bet he’d tell you different.”

Since he was bound to be right—what did the Kaiser care about the CSA?—O’Doull didn’t argue with him. He gave his attention to the wireless: “Japan has sent Russia an ultimatum over several Siberian provinces. If the Tsar’s forces do not evacuate them, the Japanese threaten to take them by force.”

“Wait a minute!” Lord said. “The Japs and the Russians are on the same side.”

“They’re on the same side against us,” Leonard O’Doull said. “Otherwise? Forget it. The Japs already screwed England in Malaya. They’ve got Australia sweating bullets. They’re the ones who’ve done the best for themselves in this war. If they’d driven us out of the Sandwich Islands, nobody could ever touch ’em.”

“Won’t be easy, even the way things are,” Eddie said.

“They haven’t used any of these new superbombs yet,” O’Doull said. “I wonder how close they are to building one.”

“Well, if they weren’t working on ’em before, they sure as hell are now,” Goodson Lord said. That was another obvious truth.

Back before the Pacific War, people in the USA would have wondered whether the Japanese were smart enough to do something like that. Not any more. The Pacific War was a push, or as close as made no difference, but Japan bombed Los Angeles while the United States never laid a glove on the home islands. This time around, the United States hadn’t tried breaking through the Japs’ island barricade, either. All the fighting had been on U.S. soil and in U.S. waters. The United States was too busy fighting for their life against the Confederacy to give Japan more than a fraction of their attention.

It had been quiet up at the front. Suddenly, it wasn’t any more. Machine guns and automatic weapons started banging away. “It’s getting dark outside!” Lord exclaimed. “What the hell do they think they’re shooting at?”

“They don’t care,” O’Doull answered. “Somebody imagined he saw something, and as soon as one guy starts shooting they all open up.”

“We better get up there,” Eddie told his fellow corpsmen. They scurried out of the aid station. Before long, they’d likely be back with wounded men.

Eric Sevareid went on talking about the world and the USA. He had a good wireless voice, a voice that made you think he was your friend even though you’d never met him and never would. You wanted to believe what he said. You wanted to believe what Jake Featherston said, too, even after you knew what a liar he was. If he didn’t believe it himself, he put on one hell of an act.

“Will the corpsmen be able to find us in the dark?” Goodson Lord asked.

“Don’t know,” O’Doull answered. “But I’ll tell you something—I’m not gonna put on a light. If our own side doesn’t shoot us because of it, the enemy would.”

Not even fifteen minutes later, he heard the too-familiar shout of “Doc! Hey, Doc!” from somewhere off to the left.

“Hey, Eddie!” he yelled back. A battery of 105s was thundering behind the U.S. lines. Pretty soon, C.S. artillery would open up, too, or they’d start shooting off screaming meemies, and then hell really would be out to lunch.

In the meantime…“We got a sucking chest, Doc!” Eddie said.

O’Doull swore. That was a bad wound, one that would kill the soldier who had it unless everything went right—and might kill him anyway. “How are we fixed for plasma?” he asked Sergeant Lord.

“We’ve got enough,” Lord answered.

“Good,” O’Doull said. “Grab a big needle—chances are we’ll want to pour it in as fast as we can.”

Sweat made the corpsmen’s faces shine when they brought in the wounded soldier. Heat and humidity were starting to build toward summer. O’Doull noticed only out of the corner of his eye; most of his attention focused on the corporal on the stretcher. The man had bloody foam on his lips and nostrils. Sure as hell, he’d taken one through the lung.

“Get him up on the table,” O’Doull told the corpsmen. To Goodson Lord, he said, “Get him under.”

“Right,” Lord said. He jammed the ether cone down on the noncom’s face as soon as the corpsmen put him in position. The plasma line went in next. The corporal already seemed unconscious, so O’Doull started cutting even before the anesthetic would have fully taken hold. Seconds counted here.

When he opened the guy up, he found the chest cavity full of blood. He hadn’t expected anything different. He had a fat rubber tube ready to go to siphon it out of there. How bad was the wound? Did he have time to tie off the major bleeders in the lung, or would he have to do something more drastic?

He needed only a moment to decide he couldn’t do anything that took a long time. His vorpal scalpel went snicker-snack and took out the bottom two lobes of the right lung. That left him with just a few vessels to tie off, and he knew where they were—he didn’t have to go looking for them. You could live with a lung and a third. You could live with one lung if you had to, though you wouldn’t have an easy time if you did anything strenuous for a living.