Return Engagement (28 page)

By the time the black Marxists rose in the CSA, Covington and most of Kentucky were under U.S. occupation. The rebellion had been muted here. Lucullus Wood, a Marxist still, would have been irked to hear Cincinnatus compare the Reds to the Freedom Party. Word of what was said in the Brass Monkey was likelier to get back to him than it was to reach the Freedom Party, too. Cincinnatus sighed. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t said what he believed.

“There’s a difference, though,” Menander insisted.

“What’s that?” Cincinnatus asked.

“The ofays, they
deserves
it,” Menander said savagely. “Got my brother, got . . .” His voice trailed away into a slur of curses. How much whiskey
had
he downed?

That was the obvious question. From cursing, Menander started crying again. He’d put down a lot of whiskey, which answered the obvious question. But wasn’t there another related question, maybe not so obvious? Wasn’t Jake Featherston saying,
The niggers, they
deserve
it
over in Richmond? Too right he was.

And what could anybody do about that? In the short run, fight back and hope Featherston couldn’t lick the USA. In the long run . . . In the long run, was there any answer at all to whites and blacks hating each other?

Cincinnatus hadn’t seen all that much hate in Des Moines. But there weren’t that many Negroes in Des Moines, either: not enough to trigger some of the raw reactions only too common in the Confederate States. The United States were happy they didn’t have very many Negroes, too. Immigrants—white immigrants—took care of what was nigger work in the CSA.

Yeah, the USA can do without us,
Cincinnatus thought glumly.
Can the CSA?
Over in Richmond, Jake Featherston sure thought so.

“
K
eep them moving forward, goddammit!” Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Colleton yelled into the mike on his portable wireless set. The company commanders in his regiment, or at least their wireless men, were supposed to be listening to him. If they weren’t, he’d hop in a motorcar and shout sense right into their stupid faces.

In many ways, Ohio was an ideal place for a mechanized army to fight. The country was mostly flat. It had a thick road and railroad net, which was the whole point of pushing up through it in the first place. And if the Confederate Army ever ran short of transport, which happened now and again, motorcars commandeered from the damnyankees often took up the slack. There were even gas stations where autos and trucks and barrels could tank up.

Right now, his regiment stood just outside of Findlay, Ohio. The town lay in the middle of rich farming country punctuated by oil wells. Back in the 1890s, the oil had set off a spectacular boom in these parts. The boom had subsided. Some of the oil still flowed. The Yankees were fighting like the devil to keep the Confederates from seizing the wells that did survive.

Tom didn’t give a particular damn about the oil wells. He would have, but he’d been ordered not to. As far as he was concerned, the only thing that was supposed to matter was getting to Lake Erie. He’d promised the men he would strip naked and jump in the lake when they did.

That had produced a mild protest from the regimental medical officer, Dr. David Dillon. “Why don’t you promise them you’ll jump in an open sewer instead?” Dillon asked. “It would probably be healthier—a little more shit, maybe, but not nearly so many nasty chemicals.”

“Seeing how many nasty chemicals the Yankees have been shooting at us, to hell with me if I’m going to flabble about what they pour in the lake,” Colleton had answered. The medical officer found nothing to say to that.

Now Tom could see Findlay through his field glasses. It had been a nice little city, with a lot of ornate Victorian homes and shops and office buildings left over from the boom-town years. Now bombardment and bombing had leveled some of the buildings and bitten chunks out of others. Smoke from fires in the town and from destroyed wells nearby made it harder to get a good look at the place.

Somewhere in all that smoke, U.S. artillery still lurked. Shells fell a few hundred yards short of where Tom Colleton was standing. If he and his men stayed where they were, they’d get badly hurt when the Yankees found the range.

He wouldn’t have wanted to stay there anyhow. The Confederates hadn’t invaded Ohio to hold in place. “Advance!” he shouted again. “We aren’t going to shift those sons of bitches if we stand around with our thumbs up our asses!”

Behind him, somebody laughed. He whirled. There stood a rawboned man about his own age with the coldest pale eyes he’d ever seen. He wore three stars in a wreath on each side of his collar: a general officer’s rank markings. Among the fruit salad on his chest were ribbons for the Purple Heart and the Order of Albert Sidney Johnston, the highest Army decoration after the Confederate Cross. Also on his chest was the badge of a barrel man, a bronze rhomboid shape like the Confederate machines from the last war.

“That’s telling ’em!” he said, his voice all soft Virginia.

“Thank you, sir,” Tom answered. “General Patton, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.” The Confederate officer’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “George Patton, at your service. I’m afraid you have the advantage of me.” Tom gave his own name. “Colleton,” Patton repeated musingly. His gaze sharpened, as if he were peering down the barrel of one of the fancy revolvers he carried in place of the usual officer’s .45. “Are you by any chance related to Anne Colleton?”

“She was my sister, sir.” If Tom had a dime for every time he’d answered that question, he could have bought the Army instead of serving in it.

“A fine woman.” But then Patton’s gaze sharpened further. “, ‘Was,’ you say? She’s suffered a misfortune?”

“Yes, sir. I’m afraid so. She was in Charleston when the Yankee carrier raided it. One of the bombs hit nearby, and—” Colleton spread his hands.

“I’m very sorry to hear that. You have my sincere sympathies.” General Patton reached up to touch the brim of his helmet, as if doffing a hat. The helmet was of the new style, like Tom’s: rounder and more like what the Yankees wore than the tin hats the C.S. Army had used in the Great War. Patton went on, “It’s a loss not only to you personally but also to the Confederate States of America.”

“Very kind of you to say so, sir.”

“I commonly say what I mean, and I commonly mean what I say.” Patton paused to light a cigar. “She helped put the Freedom Party over the top, and we all owe her a debt of gratitude for that. We can’t be too careful about the dusky race, can we?”

Tom Colleton considered that. His politics were and always had been less radical than Anne’s. But when he thought about Marshlands as it had been before 1914 and the ruin it was now . . . “Hard to argue with you there.”

“It usually is.” Patton looked smug. Considering how far north the armor under his command had driven, that wasn’t surprising. He pointed toward Findlay. “Are you having difficulties there?”

“Some, sir,” Tom replied. “The damnyankees want to hold on to the oil in the neighborhood as long as they can. They’ve got machine guns and artillery, and they’ve slowed down our push. If you’ve got a few barrels you could spare, either to go right at them or for a flanking attack, it would help a hell of a lot.”

“I have a few. That’s about what I do have,” Patton said. “I wish I could say I had more than a few, but I don’t. Colonel Morrell, who’s in charge of the U.S. barrels, knows what he’s doing. He wrote the book, by God! If not for him, we’d be swimming in the lake by now.”

Tom decided not to mention his promise to his men, much less the medical officer’s opinion of it. He also marveled that Patton, who’d come so far so fast, was disappointed not to have come farther faster. He said, “Whatever you can do, sir, would be greatly appreciated.”

“Give me an hour to organize and consolidate,” Patton said. “Then I’ll bring them in along that axis”—he pointed west, where a swell in the ground would offer the barrels some cover—“unless the situation changes in the meantime and requires a different approach.”

“Yes, sir.”
This I have to see,
Tom thought. He’d expected Patton would talk about tomorrow, if not the day after. An hour? Could anybody really put together an attack so fast? Tom held up his own troops till he found out.

Patton proved as good as his word. About five minutes before the appointed time, three three-barrel platoons showed up and started shelling the U.S. positions in front of Findlay. Whooping gleefully, Tom Colleton sent his men forward with them. He went forward, too. He fired his .45 a couple of times, but didn’t know if he hit anything.

He did know he wanted Patton to see him at the front. The man plainly had no use for laggards. He wouldn’t have done what he had if he’d tolerated failure, or even incompetence.

The U.S. soldiers blew up the oil wells as they retreated from them. That sent more clouds of black, noxious smoke into the hot, blue summer sky. One of Tom’s men asked, “Should we put on our masks, sir? This here stuff’s got to be as poisonous as mustard gas.”

He was exaggerating, but by how much? When Tom spat, he spat black. The inside of his mouth tasted oily. What
was
that horrible smoke doing inside his lungs? He said, “Do whatever you think best. If you can stand to wear the mask in this heat, go ahead.”

One of Patton’s barrels hit a mine and blew up. Colleton didn’t think any of the crew got out. The rest of the barrels pounded Findlay from the edge of town. They didn’t actually go in. Tom couldn’t blame them for that. Barrels weren’t made for street fighting.

For that matter, he didn’t send his own men into Findlay, either. Now that the way around it was open, he gladly took that. The U.S. soldiers inside would have to fall back to keep from being cut off or wither on the vine, holding a little island in a rising Confederate sea. There were still islands like that all the way back to the Ohio River, though they went under one by one, subdued by second-line troops.

A few of them, the larger ones, still caused trouble. Tom knew that, but refused to worry about it. Someone else had the job of worrying about it. His job was to push toward the Great Lakes with everything he had. If he did that, if everybody at the front did that, the islands would take care of themselves.

The U.S. soldiers in Findlay seemed to think so. They pulled out of the town instead of letting themselves be surrounded. Their rear guard kept the Confederates from taking too big a bite out of them. Tom Colleton regretted that and gave it the professional respect it deserved at the same time.

He was glad to flop down by a fire when the sun went down. One drawback to a war of movement for a middle-aged man was that you had to
keep
moving. He could keep up with the young soldiers he commanded, but he couldn’t get by on three hours’ sleep a night the way they could. He felt like an old car that still ran fine—as long as you changed the oil and the spark plugs every two thousand miles.

His men had liberated some chickens from a nearby farm. Chicken roasted over an open fire—even done as it usually was, black on the outside and half raw on the inside—went a long way towards improving the rations they carried with them. Tom gnawed on a leg. Grease ran down his chin.

In the darkness beyond flames’ reach, a sentry called a challenge. Tom didn’t hear the answer, but he did hear the sentry’s startled, “Pass on, sir!” A few seconds later, George Patton stepped into the firelight.

“Good thing there aren’t wolves in this country, or the smell would draw them,” he said. “You boys think you can spare a chunk of one of those birds for a damn useless officer?”

“You bet we can, General,” Tom said before any of his men decided to take Patton literally. “If it weren’t for those barrels you loaned us, likely we’d still be stuck in front of Findlay.”

Patton sprawled in the dirt beside him and attacked a leg of his own with wolfish gusto. As he had been earlier in the day, he was perfectly dressed, right down to his cravat and to knife-sharp trouser creases. Off in the distance were spatters of small-arms fire. Telling the two sides apart was easy. The Yankees still used bolt-action Springfields, as they had in the last war. With submachine guns and automatic rifles, Confederate soldiers filled the air with lead whenever they bumped into the enemy.

“Your boys did handsomely yourselves,” Patton said, throwing bare bones into the bushes. “You understand the uses of outflanking.” His eyes glittered in the firelight. “Were you in the Army all through the dark times?”

“No, sir,” Tom answered. “They took the uniform off my back in 1917, and I didn’t put it back on till things heated up again.”

“That’s what I thought,” Patton said. “I would have heard of you if you’d stayed in. Hell, you’d probably outrank me if you’d stayed in. You may not be a professional in name, but by God you are in performance.” Maybe he meant it. Maybe he was just making Tom Colleton look good to his men. Either way, Tom felt about ten feet tall.

A
bout the only thing Armstrong Grimes knew these days was that the United States were in trouble. He shook his head. He knew one other thing: he was still alive. He hadn’t the faintest idea why, though.

“I figured we were going to keep that fucking Findlay place,” he said as he lay down by a campfire somewhere north of the fallen town.

“We would have, if those stinking barrels hadn’t shown up,” said a new man in the squad, a New York Jew named Yossel Reisen. He was a few years older than Armstrong. He’d been conscripted in the peaceful 1930s, done his time, and been hauled into the Army again after the shooting started.

They’d fallen back to the northeast through the hamlet of Astoria toward the larger town of Fostoria. Five rail lines fanned through Fostoria. It also boasted a carbon electrode factory and a stockyard. It was not the sort of place the USA wanted to see in Confederate hands.

“Where the hell were
our
barrels?” Armstrong demanded of everyone within earshot. “What were they doing? I’m sick of getting run out of places because the other guys have barrels and we can’t stop ’em.”