Return Engagement (60 page)

When Moss tried to strafe some more infantrymen, his guns emptied in the middle of the burst.
Time to head for home,
he thought, and hoped no Hound Dog would jump him on the way back to Maryland. All he could do was run away.

From the squadron’s wireless traffic, a lot of the other pilots were in the same boat. “Let’s go back,” Moss said. “They can reload us, and then we’ll hit ’em again.” Savage sounds of approval dinned in his earphones.

Finding Texas, Maryland, wasn’t easy, even though the clouds had thinned out up there, too. He knew how things had looked going from north to south. They didn’t look the same coming back from south to north. They never did. Anyone who drove a motorcar knew that. The problem was ten times worse in an airplane.

He finally spotted the town by the nearby ponds that had once been mine shafts. If they were there, then the airstrip was . . . there. He bumped to a landing. It wasn’t pretty, but he’d take it.

Groundcrew men swarmed over the fighters. He got refueled. Armorers took out the empty ammunition belts and loaded in full ones. An officer came out of the headquarters tent with a map. He pointed a few miles west of where Moss and his squadron had been strafing. Moss called his pilots to gather around so they got a look at the map, too. After a little while, everybody nodded. Moss thought he knew how to get there.

As it happened, the squadron never did. They’d come into U.S.-held West Virginia and were heading for Confederate Virginia when they ran into a squadron of Hound Dogs flying north to shoot up the men in green-gray who wanted to invade their country. Fliers from each side spotted the other at about the same time. Both sides started shooting at about the same time, too.

Nobody’d planned the fight. Nobody’d expected it. Nobody backed away from it, either. It was a wild mêlée. Both Wrights and Hound Dogs were already on the deck; they had no altitude to give up. They just darted and swooped and fired. Gunners down below—Moss was damned if he knew
whose
gunners—seemed to blaze away impartially at both sides.

Moss thought he hit a Hound Dog, but the Confederate fighter kept flying. A Wright smashed into the ground. A fireball blossomed where it went down. He swore. That was one of his men surely dead; nobody could hope to bail out this low. A Hound Dog limped off toward the south trailing smoke. Moss hoped it crashed, too.

After several more airplanes went down or had to pull out of the fight, both sides broke off, as if licking their wounds. Moss and his squadron didn’t shoot up the Confederates in northern Virginia. The Hound Dogs didn’t shoot up U.S. soldiers in eastern West Virginia (they would have called it occupied northern Virginia). They’d battled one another to a standstill. At the moment, as far as he was concerned, that would have to do.

A
rmstrong Grimes sat cross-legged in front of a campfire on the outskirts of Provo, Utah. He leaned close to the flames. The night was chilly, and he had his tunic off. He was sewing a second stripe onto his left sleeve, and not having an easy time of it. “My aunt ought to be doing this, goddammit,” he grumbled.

Across the fire from him, Rex Stowe was sewing a third stripe onto his sleeve. He raised an eyebrow. “Your aunt?”

“Yeah.” Armstrong nodded. “She’s only two years older than me. My granny got married again right when the Great War ended, and she had a kid just a little before my ma did. Clara would be good at this—and it would piss her off, too. We fight like cats and dogs.”

“All right.” Stowe laughed and shrugged. “Whatever makes you happy.”

“What’d make me happy is getting the hell out of here,” Armstrong said. “You fix that up for me, Corp—uh, Sarge?”

Stowe laughed again. “In your dreams. And now all the fresh young dumb ones can call
you
Corporal. Looks to me like we’ve got two ways to leave Utah any time soon. We can get wounded—or we can get killed.”

It looked like that to Armstrong, too. He’d hoped Stowe would tell him something different. Not too far away, a machine gun started hammering. Armstrong and Stowe both paused in their sewing. Tunics or no tunics, they were ready to grab their rifles and do whatever they had to do to keep breathing. Then the gunfire stopped. The two noncoms looked at each other. “Is that good or bad?” Armstrong asked.

“Dunno,” Stowe answered. “If they just overran one of our machine-gun nests, it’s pretty bad, though.” He pointed to a couple of privates. “Ustinov! Trotter! Go see what the hell’s going on with that gun. Try not to get killed while you’re doing it, in case the Mormons have got the position.”

“Right, Sarge.” The two men slipped away. Grimes didn’t
think
a machine gun could fall with so little fuss, but the Mormons had already come up with too many surprises to leave him sure of anything.

He waited. If Ustinov and Trotter didn’t come back pretty soon, the Army was going to need a lot more than two guys to set things right. Stowe must have thought the same thing. He put his tunic back on even though his new stripes were only half attached. So did Armstrong.

No gun suddenly turned the wrong way started spitting bullets. A sentry not far from the fire called a challenge. Armstrong heard a low-voiced answer. He couldn’t make out what it was. That was good, because one of the Mormons’ little games was to steal countersigns and use them to sneak infiltrators in among the U.S. soldiers. If Armstrong couldn’t hear the countersign, odds were the enemy couldn’t, either.

He shook his head at that. Up till a few weeks before, the Mormons hadn’t been the enemy. They’d been his fellow citizens. But they didn’t want to stay in the USA, any more than the Confederates had. The Confederates had made secession stick. They were genuine, sure-as-hell foreigners these days. The Mormons wanted to be, but the United States weren’t about to let them go.

Ustinov and Trotter came back in. Trotter said, “Gun’s still ours, Sergeant. He squeezed off a burst on account of he thought he saw something moving out in front of him.”

“Thanks,” Stowe said. “You guys did good. Sit your butts down and take it easy for a couple minutes.”

Ustinov laughed. He was a big bear of a man; the noise reminded Armstrong of a rockslide rumbling down the side of a valley. “You take it easy around here, you start talking out of a new mouth,” he said, and ran a finger across his throat in case anybody had trouble figuring out what he meant.

He wasn’t wrong, either. The Mormons were playing for keeps. They’d tried rising up once before. The USA had pushed their faces into the dirt and sat on them for twenty years afterwards. They had to know that whatever happened to them if they lost again would be even worse. And they had to know the odds were all against their winning. They’d risen again anyhow. That spoke of either amazing stupidity or undying hatred—maybe both.

Hardly any Mormons surrendered. Not many U.S. soldiers were in much of a mood to take prisoners even when they got the chance. Every now and again, the Mormons took some. Oddly, Armstrong had never heard that they mistreated them. On the contrary—they stuck to the Geneva Convention straight down the line.

When he mentioned that, Sergeant Stowe spat into the campfire. “So what? Bunch of holier-than-thou sons of bitches,” he said. Heads bobbed up and down. Armstrong didn’t argue. How could he? If the Mormons hadn’t been a pack of fanatics, would they have rebelled against all the might the United States could throw at them?

Later that night, U.S. bombers paid a call on Provo. They weren’t the most modern models. Those went up against the Confederates—Armstrong hoped the attack in Virginia was going well. But the Mormons didn’t have any night fighters, and they didn’t have much in the way of antiaircraft guns. Second-line airplanes were plenty good enough for knocking their towns flat.

After the explosions to the north and west had stopped, a couple of Mormon two-deckers buzzed over the U.S. lines and dropped small—probably homemade—bombs on them. “Goddamn flying sewing machines,” Armstrong grumbled, jolted out of a sound sleep by the racket.

Antiaircraft guns and machine guns turned the sky into a fireworks display with tracers. As far as Armstrong could tell, they didn’t hit anything. If they fired off a lot of ammo, people would think they were doing their job. The racket killed whatever chance he’d had of going back to sleep.

When morning came, the Mormons started firing the mortars they used in place of conventional artillery. Like what passed for their air force, the mortars weren’t as good as the real thing. Also like the makeshift bombers, the ersatz artillery was a lot better than nothing. And cries of, “Gas!” made Armstrong snarl curses as he put on his mask.

He wasn’t the only one. “How are we supposed to fight in these goddamn things?” Trotter demanded.

Sergeant Stowe took care of that: “Can’t very well fight if you suck in a gulp of mustard gas, either.” He already had his mask on. From behind it, his voice sounded as if it came from the other side of the grave, but he wore the mask to make sure it didn’t.

U.S. artillery wasted little time in answering. Some of the shells the U.S. guns flung gurgled as they flew: they were gas rounds, too. In a way, that pleased Armstrong; he wanted the Mormons to catch hell. In another way, though, it mattered very little, because the U.S. bombardment didn’t do much to stop the hell he was catching.

Somebody not nearly far enough away started screaming like a damned soul. That was a man badly wounded, not somebody who’d been gassed. The ordinary Mormon mortar rounds produced a hail of nasty fragments and splinters when they burst. Some poor bastard had stopped at least one.

Mortar bombs were still falling, too. Some of them made the ground shake when they hit. Armstrong didn’t know much about earthquakes, not when he’d grown up in Washington, D.C. He did know he wanted
terra
to stay
firma
under him.

The wounded man kept screaming. Armstrong swore under his breath. Someone had to go get the sorry son of a bitch and bring him in. Someone, at the moment, looked remarkably like him. He was no hero. All he wanted to do was get out of this war with a whole skin. But if that were him screaming, he would also have wanted his buddies to bring him in if they could.

Scrambling out of his hole was one of the hardest things he’d ever made himself do, and he’d been in combat since the Confederates bombed Camp Custer. Once in the open, he flattened out like a toad after a steamroller ran over it. His belly never left the ground as he crawled ahead and sideways. Sharp rocks poked him in the stomach. With bullets and sharper fragments snarling by much too close overhead, the pebbles were the least of his worries.

He found the wounded man. It was Ustinov. His left arm ended just above the wrist. He was holding on to the stump with his right hand, slowing the bleeding. “Oh, shit,” Armstrong said softly. He bent and pulled the lace out of one of Ustinov’s shoes. “Hang on, pal. I’ll fix you a tourniquet.” Ustinov nodded. He didn’t stop screaming.

Armstrong tied the tourniquet as tight as he could. Maybe that cost Ustinov some extra agony. Maybe he was already feeling as much as one man could. The noise he made never changed. Armstrong fumbled at his belt till he found the morphine syringe every soldier carried. Awkwardly, he stuck the wounded man and pushed the plunger home.

He hoped for some immediate change, but didn’t see one. Shrugging, he said, “We’ve got to get you out of here. I’ll help you out of the hole. Then you climb on my back, and I’ll do the best I can.” He was a good-sized man himself, but Ustinov was bigger.

Getting Ustinov out of the foxhole was a bitch. Again, Armstrong wasn’t sure whether he hurt the other man worse by shoving him up. He was afraid he did. But it had to be done. When Ustinov got on top of him, he felt as if he’d been tackled. He crawled on anyhow. He was about halfway back to his own foxhole when Ustinov sighed and stopped screaming. The morphine must have taken hold at last.

Trotter and Yossel Reisen were on their way out after him when he brought Ustinov in. When Trotter saw what had happened to Ustinov, he said some of the same things as Armstrong had.

“Where the hell are the corpsmen?” Armstrong growled.

“They were coming up,” Reisen answered. “A mortar burst caught them. They’re both down.”

“Oh.” With news like that, Armstrong had nothing else to say.

“Neither one of them is as bad off as he is.” Reisen pointed to Ustinov.

“One second I was fine. The next . . . I looked down, and my hand was gone.” Ustinov sounded quiet and calm. That was the morphine talking.

“Take him back, you two,” Armstrong told Trotter and Reisen.

“Right, Corporal,” the privates said together. They couldn’t complain. Armstrong had already done his share and then some.

He got back into his foxhole with nothing but relief. “You ought to pick up a Bronze Star for that,” Sergeant Stowe said. “Maybe a Silver Star.”

“Fuck it,” Armstrong said. “Not a guy here who wouldn’t do the same for his pals. I don’t give a damn about the medal. He was making a racket, and I wanted him to shut up.”

“There you go.” Stowe laughed, or at least bared his teeth and made noises that sounded amused. “You were a brand new conscript when this shit started, weren’t you?” Armstrong nodded. The sergeant said, “Well, you’re sure as hell not a raw conscript any more, are you?”

“Doesn’t look that way,” Armstrong allowed.

Dive bombers roared down on the Mormon positions at the southern edge of Provo. Armstrong hoped they were blowing up the mortars that had caused so much torment. He wouldn’t have bet too much on it, though. Unlike ordinary artillery pieces, mortars broke down easily into man-portable loads. They were made to shoot and scoot.

Three barrels of Great War vintage waddled up to the front. Their crews must have been wearing masks, for the gas didn’t faze them. A Mormon with a bottle of burning gasoline—a Featherston Fizz—incinerated one at the cost of his own life. The other two led U.S. foot soldiers, Armstrong among them, deeper into Provo.

L
ike most of Richmond, Clarence Potter lived suspended between hope and fear. The damnyankees were coming—everybody knew that. Whether they’d get there was a different question. Brigadier General Potter hoped it was, anyhow.