In at the Death (40 page)

With the worst of it done, he repaired the wound in the corporal’s back. “What’s his BP?” he asked as he worked.

“It’s 95 over 68,” Goodson Lord answered, checking the cuff. “Not real great, but it’s pretty steady, anyway.”

“All right.” O’Doull dusted the inside of the chest cavity with sulfa powder, then started closing up. He’d read in a journal that the powder probably helped less than people said it did. He used it anyhow. Why not? It wouldn’t hurt.

“What do you think?” Sergeant Lord asked while he finished. He left a honking big drain in the incision. That could come out later.

“If shock doesn’t get him, if he doesn’t hemorrhage…” O’Doull shrugged, wishing for a cigarette. “I’ve done what I can. Maybe he’ll make it. I can hope so, anyway.” The corporal would be dead for sure if he hadn’t got here. If he lived—
If he lives, score one for me
, O’Doull thought. That wasn’t a bad feeling to have, not even a little bit.

L
ieutenant Michael Pound had fought through the Battle of Pittsburgh. He’d seen what a city looked like after two armies jumped on it with both feet. Now, on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, he was seeing it again.

Confederate General Patton was holed up inside Birmingham, and he wasn’t coming out. The USA had forced him out of Atlanta, but he refused to pull what was left of his army out of the Alabama factory town. He refused to surrender, too. “If you want me, come and take me,” he told the U.S. officers who went in to parley with him.

“I don’t want to dig the son of a bitch out a block at a time,” Sergeant Mel Scullard grumbled. “Expensive goddamn real estate, y’know?”

“Yeah.” Pound nodded. “Maybe we won’t have to.”

“How come, sir?” the gunner asked. “Can’t just leave him there.”

“No, but if we gave one to Newport News and we gave one to Charleston, how long will it be before we give one to Birmingham, too?” Pound said.

Scullard laughed a particularly nasty laugh. “’Bye, George!” he said, waving. “See you in hell, like you deserve!”

“That’d be pretty good, all right,” Joe Mouradian agreed. “But what if they blow us up, too? We ain’t that far outside of town ourselves.”

“Urk.” Pound hadn’t thought of that. The more he did, the more it worried him. The brass would be eager to get rid of Patton. After Jake Featherston and maybe Ferdinand Koenig, he was the most dangerous character the Confederacy had. If one of those superbombs took him out but hurt or maybe killed some of their own guys, how much would the fellows back in Philadelphia care? Not a whole hell of a lot, not unless a dedicated cynic like Michael Pound missed his guess.

He stuck his head out of the cupola for a quick looksee. He wasn’t sure what a superbomb could do to Birmingham that lots and lots of ordinary bombs and artillery shells hadn’t already done. The place had been torn up and burned more times than anybody could count. Everything that wasn’t green was gray or black, and just about all the walls he could see either listed or had chunks bitten out of them or both.

But the remnants of Patton’s Army of Kentucky still lurked in the ruins. They were stubborn men with automatic weapons and stovepipe rockets. They wouldn’t be winkled out easily or cheaply. Maybe a superbomb could get rid of them the way DDT got lice out of clothes.

As if to prove the Confederate States were still in business, somebody squeezed off a burst from one of their carnivorous machine guns. Pound ducked down into the barrel. He didn’t want to win a Purple Heart, not this late in the game. He didn’t want to buy a plot, either.

“Anything worth going after, sir?” Scullard asked.

“Not…right this minute,” Pound answered. He prided himself on being an aggressive soldier. And he was still ready to go forward whenever anybody told him to. Without anything obviously urgent ahead, though, he was just as well pleased to sit tight.

This must be what the end of the war feels like
, he thought. Yeah, you were still willing. But how eager were you when pushing too hard might get you killed just when things wound down?

Sitting tight didn’t mean sticking his head in the sand like an ostrich. Standing up in the open cupola wasn’t smart right now. All right—next best thing, then. That was looking out through the periscopes built into the cupola. He couldn’t see as much with them as he could head and shoulders above there, but…

“Powaski!” he shouted to the bow gunner and wireless man. “Ten o’clock! Somebody sneaking up on us, maybe 150 yards!”

“I’m on it,” Powaski answered over the intercom. The bow gun wasn’t useful very often. Pound had heard talk that the next generation of barrels would dispense with it and go with a four-man crew instead of five. This once, though, it was liable to be a lifesaver.

It started to chatter now. Pound watched tracers spang off brickwork and fly every which way. The turret hummed as Scullard traversed it so he could bring the coaxial machine gun—and maybe the cannon, too—to bear.

Like any well-trained gunner, Powaski squeezed off short bursts. You didn’t want to burn out your machine-gun barrel and have to change the son of a bitch. But the butternut bastard behind the bricks got the bow gunner’s rhythm quicker than he had any business doing. As soon as Powaski eased off the trigger after a burst, he popped up and let fly with a stovepipe rocket.

“Aw, shit!” Pound said. It was a long shot for one of those babies. Maybe this one would fall short or fly wide left or right like a bad field goal…

Maybe it would, but it didn’t. It caught the barrel right in the glacis plate. The thick armor there nearly kept the hollow-charge warhead from penetrating.
Nearly
mattered with everything but horseshoes and hand grenades—and, it turned out, hollow-charge warheads, too.

Powaski and Neyer both screamed. Pound didn’t think either of them had a prayer of getting out. And inside a barrel, nine million different things could catch fire, especially when a white-hot gout of flame played across them.

Pound screamed himself: “Out!” Some of the things that could catch fire were his boots and his coveralls. They could, and they did. He screamed again, without words this time. Then he shot out through the cupola. He never remembered opening it, but he must have.

Next thing he knew, he was on the ground beside the burning barrel, on the ground and rolling away. Mel Scullard had got out, too. More of his clothes than of Pound’s were burning.

Drop and roll and beat out the fire
. That was what they taught you. Doing it while you were actually burning…Well, if you could do that, you were disciplined indeed. Michael Pound surprised himself—he was. He got some more burns on his hands putting out his boots and the legs to his coveralls, but he did it.

Easy, when it’s either that or make an ash of yourself
, he thought, and started to laugh. Then he realized it wasn’t just his clothes—he’d been on fire, too. He howled like a wolf instead.

A foot soldier in green-gray ran up to Mel Scullard with a bucket of water and put him out. Scullard was already shrieking—yes, he’d got it worse than Pound. “Corpsman!” the soldier yelled, and then, “Hold on for a second, buddy, and I’ll give you a shot.”

What about me?
Pound wondered. He fumbled for the wound kit on his belt. That was a brand new hell—an inferno, in fact—because his hands
were
burned. He managed to get out the syringe and stick himself. He wanted instant relief. Hell, he wanted a whole new carcass. Every second he had to wait seemed an eternity.
Maybe this is what Einstein means about relativity
.

Inside the burning barrel, ammunition started cooking off. He hoped it wouldn’t keep medics back. The first team that got there carried Sergeant Scullard away. “We’ll be right back for you, pal,” a little bespectacled guy called to Pound. He didn’t wait for an answer.

Right back
turned out to be something more like fifteen minutes. By then, the morphine syrette had kicked in. It didn’t make the pain disappear, but did shove it into a dark closet so Pound didn’t have to give all of his attention to it. Anything was better than nothing.

Here came that same stretcher team. “Ease onto the litter, there,” the little guy said—he seemed to be in charge. He looked at Pound’s legs with experienced eyes. “Not
too
bad.”

“It’s never too bad when it happens to somebody else,” Pound snarled, in no mood for sympathy.

The little guy blinked, then nodded. “Well, I’m not gonna tell you you’re wrong.” He turned to the other bearers. “On three…One…Two…Three!” Up went the stretcher.

“How come we get the heavy guy
after
the light one, Eddie?” a bearer grumbled.

“’Cause we’re lucky, that’s why,” said the guy with the glasses. “Come on. Let’s move.”

They took Pound back to an aid station a few hundred yards behind the line. Morphine or no morphine, he yelled and swore whenever a stretcher-bearer missed a step. He felt ashamed at being such a slave to pain, which didn’t mean he could do anything about it.

Red crosses flew everywhere on and around the aid-station tent, which didn’t keep bullet holes from pockmarking the canvas. “Doc’s still busy with your buddy,” Eddie said. “Want another shot?”

“Yes, please!” Pound said, in lieu of grabbing him by the shirtfront and making him use the syrette. He hardly noticed the bite of the needle. The second shot really did send the pain off into some distant province.

He thought so, anyway, till they picked him up again and lugged him inside. That hurt in spite of all the morphine. “How’s Mel?” he asked the doctor, who was scrubbing his hands in an enameled metal basin.

“He’s the other burned man?” The doctor had a funny accent, half New England, half almost French-sounding. He waited for Pound to nod, then said, “I think he’ll make it. He won’t be happy for a while, though.” He turned to Eddie. “Get this one up on the table, and we’ll see how happy he’ll be.”

“Right, Doc,” Eddie said.

Somebody—a medic, Pound supposed—stuck an ether cone over his face. The gas didn’t just smell bad; it smelled poisonous. Even as consciousness faded, he tried to tear off the cone. They wouldn’t let him.

When he woke up, his legs hurt so bad, he wasn’t sure he’d really been anesthetized. But he lay in a bed somewhere that wasn’t the aid station. His groan brought a real, live female nurse. She wasn’t beautiful or anything, but she was the first woman from the USA Pound had seen in a devil of a long time. “In pain?” she asked briskly.

“Yes,” he said, thinking,
What the hell do you expect?

Even though she’d asked a dumb question, she had the right answer: “I’ll give you a shot.” As she injected him, she went on, “The tannic-acid dressings do hurt, I know, but you’ll heal much better because of them. Your burns won’t weep so much, and you’re less likely to get infected.”

“Oh, boy,” Pound said. Everything else seemed secondary to the way he felt. He tried to look around, but his eyes weren’t tracking real well yet. “Is Mel Scullard here?” he asked, adding, “He’s my gunner.”

“Yes, he’s three beds down,” the nurse said. “He hasn’t regained consciousness yet.”

Poor Mel. He
did
get it worse than I did
, Pound thought. Then the morphine started to kick in. It struck faster now than it had right after he got burned. Maybe that meant he wasn’t fighting so much pain. He could hope so, anyhow. “Ahh,” he said.

“We have to be careful with this stuff,” the nurse told him. “We don’t want you getting hooked.”

Right then, Pound couldn’t have cared less if he had to stick a needle in his arm every hour on the hour for the rest of his life. If it made him stop hurting, that struck him as a good deal. Down underneath, there wasn’t much difference between people and animals. War brought that out all kinds of ways. Pound wished like anything he hadn’t found out about this one at firsthand.

T
he officers’ POW camp to which the Yankees took Jerry Dover was somewhere not far from Indianapolis. The train trip that brought him there wasn’t much fun, but it was instructive just the same. Confederate wireless went on and on about all the sabotage that raiders behind U.S. lines were still perpetrating in Georgia and Tennessee and Kentucky.

Well, maybe they were. Even so, the train didn’t have to stop once. It didn’t even have to slow down. As far as Dover could tell, it didn’t make any detours. Yes, bridges and overpasses were guarded. Yes, concrete blockhouses with machine guns sticking out of them protected some stretches of track. But trains seemed to get wherever they needed to go, and to get there on time.

Jerry Dover’s train also had no trouble crossing the Ohio. All the bridges across what had been the C.S.–U.S. border should have been prime targets. They probably were. If this one, near Evansville, had ever been hit, it had also been efficiently repaired.

Evansville itself had been bombed. But it hadn’t been flattened, the way so many Confederate cities were. It lay in the western part of Indiana, well away from the early thrust north that almost won the war for the CSA.

“They should have done a better job here,” complained the artillery captain sitting next to Dover.

“It’s a big country,” Dover said. “They couldn’t get all of it.”

“Well, they should have,” the younger man repeated glumly.

He wasn’t wrong. But if the United States turned out to be too big to let the Confederacy smash them all up, didn’t that go a long way toward explaining why the war was going as it was? It sure looked that way to Dover.

Actually reaching the camp also told Dover his country was fighting out of its weight. He knew how the CSA housed prisoners of war. The Confederacy’s camps were no sturdier than they had to be, because his country had nothing to spare. They probably didn’t break Geneva Convention rules—you didn’t want to give the enemy an excuse to take it out on POWs from your side—but he would have been amazed if they didn’t bend them.

Camp Liberty! (with the exclamation point—a sardonic name if ever there was one) wasn’t like that. Dover wouldn’t have wanted to assault it with anything less than an armored brigade. It didn’t just have a barbed-wire perimeter: it had a wall and a moat, with barbed wire on top of the wall and outside the machine-gun towers beyond the water. You got in there, you weren’t going anywhere.