The Grapple (14 page)

“Good. Are the planners working out how much it’ll cost us?” Morrell asked. Abell made a questioning noise. Morrell explained: “They hate us down there. They hate us bad. Maybe they hate their own Negroes worse, but maybe they don’t, too. And it’s awful easy to make a guerrilla war hurt occupiers these days. Auto bombs. People bombs. Land mines. Time bombs. These goddamn newfangled rockets. It was bad when we tried to hold down Houston and Kentucky. It’ll be worse now. ‘Freedom!’” He added the last word with sour emphasis.

General Abell looked pained—not so much for the wit, Morrell judged, as for what lay behind it. “Maybe it’s a good thing you’re here for more than one reason,” Abell said. “You ought to write an appreciation with all that in mind.”

“No one will appreciate it if I do,” Morrell said.

That made Abell look more pained still. But he said, “You might also be surprised. We’re looking at this. We’re looking at it very seriously, because we think we need to. If you point out some pitfalls, that will be to everyone’s advantage—except the Confederates’, of course.”

He was serious. The War Department was serious, then: whatever else you could say about John Abell, he made a good weather vane. “If we occupy the CSA, we won’t even pretend to be nice people any more,” Morrell warned. “It’ll be like Utah, only more so. We’ll have to kill anybody who gives us a hard time, and maybe kill the guy’s brother-in-law to make sure he
doesn’t
give us a hard time afterwards.”

“That is the working assumption, yes,” Abell agreed matter-offactly.

Morrell let out a soft whistle. “Lord!” he said. “If the Confederates are killing off their own Negroes the way we say they are—”

“They are.” Abell’s voice went hard and flat. “That’s not just propaganda, General. They really are doing it.”

However many times Morrell had heard about that, he didn’t want to believe it. Because the Confederates fought clean on the battlefield, he wished they played fair with their own people, too. But Abell’s certainty was hard not to credit. Sighing, Morrell went on, “Well, if they’re doing that, and if we kill off any whites who get out of line, people are liable to get thin on the ground down there.”

“Yes, that’s true.” Spring was here, but Abell remained blizzard-cold. “And so?”

He envisioned massacre as calmly as Jake Featherston did. The only difference was, he might let whites in the CSA live if they stayed quiet. Featherston killed off Negroes whether they caused trouble or not—his assumption was that Negroes
were
trouble, period. The distinction didn’t seem enormous. Morrell clung to it nonetheless.

“Either this town was already as beat-up as it could be or it hasn’t taken a whole lot of new damage since the last time I was here,” he remarked.

“The Confederates still come over,” Abell said. “Maybe not so much—and we can hurt them more when they do.”

“That sounds good,” Morrell said.

But when he got to the War Department, he went underground—far underground. Brigadier General Abell had to vouch for him before he even got into the battered building. The stars on his shoulders meant nothing to the guards at the entrance. That was how it should be, as far as Morrell was concerned. “No one has been able to blow himself up inside yet,” Abell said with what sounded like pride.

They went down endless flights of stairs. Morrell revised his notions about whether people around here ever got exercise. Climbing those stairs on the way back up would be no joke. “How close have they come?” he asked.

“Somebody dressed like a major took out a guard crew at the eastern entrance a couple of weeks ago,” Abell answered. “One of the men there must have seen something he didn’t like, and so….”

“Yeah. And so,” Morrell said. “I wonder how long it’ll be before they start using two-man suicide crews. The first fellow blows himself up, then the next one waits till the place is crowded before he uses his bomb—either that or he uses the confusion to sneak into wherever he really wants to go. It works with auto bombs; I know the Negroes in the CSA have done it. It might work with people bombs, too.”

“You’re just full of happy thoughts this morning, aren’t you?” John Abell said. “Well, put that in your appreciation, too. If you can think of it, we have to believe those Mormon bastards can, too.” He made a sour face. “Probably not going to be many people left alive in Utah by the time that’s all done, either.”

“No,” Morrell agreed. His own name for planning had suffered when a Great War attack against the rebels there didn’t go as well as it might have. He was banished from the General Staff back to the field then—a fate that dismayed him much less than his banishers thought it would. He said, “One thing—if we need to sow the place with salt, we won’t have to go very far to get it.”

“Er—no.” Abell didn’t know what to make of foolishness. He never had. To Morrell’s relief, he left the stairwell before they got all the way to China. “The map room is this way,” he said, reviving a little. Separate a General Staff officer from his maps and he was only half a man.

Officers ranging in rank from captain to major general pored over maps on tables and walls. Those maps covered the U.S.-C.S. frontier from Sonora all the way to the Atlantic. Some of the men in green-gray used their pointers decorously, like schoolteachers. Others plied them with brio, like orchestra conductors. Still others might have been knights swinging swords: they slashed and hacked at the territory they wanted to conquer.

Morrell was a slasher himself. He grabbed a pointer from a bin that looked like an archer’s quiver and advanced on a map showing the border between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. “This is what I want to do,” he said, and executed a stroke that would have disemboweled the Confederacy if it went across the real landscape instead of a map.

John Abell’s pale eyebrows rose. “You don’t think small, do you?”

“I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but rarely that,” Morrell said. “We can do it, you know. We should have started building up a little sooner, but I really think we can do it.”

Abell studied the map. He borrowed the pointer from Morrell and walked over to another map. His slash was as surgical as Morrell’s, if less melodramatic. “This would be your follow-up?” he inquired.

“Absolutely.” Morrell set a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “If we’re thinking along the same lines, chances are this will really work, because we never do that. Or we never did—now it’s twice in just a little while.”

“More likely we’re both deluded,” the General Staff officer replied. Morrell laughed, hoping Abell was joking. Abell studied the map himself. “This may be a two-year campaign, you know, not just one.”

“That’s…possible,” Morrell said reluctantly. “But I don’t think the Confederates will have a whole lot more than wind and air once we breach their front. They shot their bolt, and they hurt us, but they didn’t quite kill us. Now it’s our turn, and let’s see how they like playing defense.”

“Defense is cheaper than offense,” Abell warned. “And they have some new toys of their own. These multiple rocket launchers are very unpleasant.” He hadn’t come within a hundred miles of those rocket launchers—he was that kind of soldier—but he spoke with authority even so.

“Where are our new toys?” Morrell asked.

“I thought you might be wondering about that.” With the air of a stage magician plucking a rabbit from a hat, John Abell took a folded sheet of paper out of his breast pocket. “Tell me what you think about this.”

Morrell paused to put on reading glasses, a concession to age he hated but couldn’t do without. He unfolded the paper and skimmed through it. The more he read, the wider his smile got. “Well, well,” he said. “This is more like it! But there isn’t anything about when they’ll be ready. Are we talking about soon, or is this in the great by-and-by?”

“Soon,” Abell said. “Immediately, as a matter of fact. They’re coming off the lines in Pontiac—and in Denver—even as we speak. Whatever you do this summer, you’ll be able to use them.”

“That’s the best news I’ve had in quite a while,” Morrell said. “
Quite
a while. We’ve always had to play catch-up to Confederate armor. If we’ve got better barrels for a change, that just makes it more likely we can give them a good sickle slice and cut ’em off at the roots.”

“Depending on what they’re doing themselves along these lines,” Abell said. “Our intelligence isn’t perfect.”

“Really? I never would have guessed,” Morrell said. Abell gave him a sour stare. But with that piece of paper in his hand, with the idea for that campaign in his head, Irving Morrell wasn’t inclined to pick a fight with his own side. “Perfect or not, General,” he went on, “we’ll manage. I really think we will.”

C
onfederate shells crashed down outside of Lubbock. Inside the Texas town, Major General Abner Dowling was not a happy man. After Lubbock fell to his Eleventh Army, he’d hoped he could go on biting chunks out of west Texas, but it didn’t work out like that. The Confederates, to his surprise—to everybody’s surprise—threw fresh troops into the fight, and those men didn’t seem to care whether they lived or died. They weren’t here in more than brigade strength, but that was plenty to stabilize the line and even to push U.S. forces back toward Lubbock.

Major Angelo Toricelli stuck his head into Dowling’s office. It did belong to a bank manager, but he took a powder before U.S. troops occupied Lubbock. “Sir, you said you wanted to question one of those Confederate fanatics,” Toricelli said. “We’ve got one for you.”

“Do you?” Dowling brightened fractionally. “Well, bring him in. Maybe we’ll have a better notion of what we’re up against.”

His adjutant saluted. “Yes, sir.”

In came a large, burly Confederate soldier, escorted by three large, burly U.S. soldiers with submachine guns. The Confederate had two stripes on his tunic sleeve. Tunic and trousers weren’t the usual C.S. butternut, but a splotchy fabric in shades of tan and brown ranging from sand to mud. “Who are you?” Dowling asked.

“Sir, I am Assistant Troop Leader Lee Rodgers, Freedom Party Guards,” the prisoner said proudly. He recited his pay number.

“Assistant Troop Leader?” Dowling pointed to Rodgers’ chevrons. “You look like a corporal to me.”

“Sir, they are equivalent ranks,” Rodgers said. “The Freedom Party Guards have their own rank structure. This is to show that they are an elite.” He still sounded proud. He also sounded as if he was rattling off something he’d had to learn by rote.

Dowling had heard that before, though he didn’t know the guards actually went into combat. He thought they were just prison warders and secret policemen and Freedom Party muscle. But they fought, all right, and they fought well. Their tactics left something to be desired, but not their pluck.

“What’s your unit?” Dowling asked.

“Sir, I am Assistant Troop Leader Lee Rodgers, Freedom Party Guards.” Rodgers gave Dowling his pay number again. “Under the Geneva Convention, I don’t have to tell you anything else.”

He was right, of course. Sometimes that mattered more than it did other times. Had Dowling thought Rodgers held vital information, he might have squeezed him. There were ways to do it that technically didn’t violate the Convention. As things were, though, Dowling only asked, “Do you tell the Negroes in that prison camp down the road about their rights under the Geneva Convention?”

“No, sir,” Rodgers answered without hesitation. “They aren’t foreign prisoners. They’re internal enemies of the state. We have the right to do whatever we need to do with them.” He eyed Dowling. “They might as well be Mormons.”

He was sharper than the average corporal. If the Freedom Party Guards really were an elite, Dowling supposed that made sense. “We follow the Geneva Convention with the Mormons we capture,” Dowling said, which was—mostly—true. Then again, the Mormons had more than a few female fighters. They generally fought to the death. When they didn’t, U.S. soldiers often avenged themselves in a way they wouldn’t with Mormon men. That was against regulations and officially discouraged, which didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Assistant Troop Leader Lee Rodgers only snorted. “If you do, it just means you’re weak and degenerate. Enemies of the state deserve whatever happens to them.” That sounded like another lesson learned by heart.

“How many Freedom Party Guards units are in combat?” Dowling asked.

“More every day,” Rodgers said, which gave the U.S. general something to worry about without giving him any real information. The prisoner folded his right hand into a fist and set it on his heart. “Freedom!” he shouted.

The U.S. soldiers guarding him growled and hefted their weapons. Rodgers seemed unafraid, or else more trusting than most new POWs. Dowling scowled. “Take him away,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” one of the men in green-gray said. “Shall we teach him not to mouth off, too?”

“Never mind,” Dowling said. “We’ll see how mouthy he is when we start advancing again.” That seemed to satisfy the soldiers. They weren’t more than ordinarily rough with the Freedom Party Guard, at least where Dowling could see them. The general commanding Eleventh Army sighed. “He’s a charmer, isn’t he?”

“Yes, sir,” Major Toricelli said. “That’s why you wanted to see him, isn’t it?”

“I wonder if they’re all like that. All the Party Guards, I mean,” Dowling said.

“Well, they sure fight like it’s going out of style,” his adjutant answered. “Those people are fanatics, and the Freedom Party is taking advantage of it.”

“Huzzah,” Dowling said sourly. “Do you suppose we have to worry about them turning into people bombs? That’s what fanatics do these days, it seems like.”

Toricelli looked startled. “Hadn’t thought of that, sir. They haven’t done it yet, if they’re going to.”

“Well, that’s good. I suppose it is, anyhow,” Dowling said. “Of course, maybe they just haven’t thought of it yet. Or maybe they’re going to put on civilian clothes instead of those silly-looking camouflage outfits and start looking for the biggest crowds of our soldiers they can find.”

“Or maybe they’ll start looking for you, sir,” Toricelli said. “The Confederates like to assassinate our commanders.”