The Grapple (31 page)

“Out!” somebody shouted. “Out and into the trenches!”

That struck Jerry Dover as some of the best advice he’d ever heard. He flew out through the tent flap—not that he was the first man gone, or even the second. The trenches weren’t far away, but one of the men who got out ahead of him stopped a shell and exploded into red mist. Dover tasted blood on his lips as he ran by. He spat and spat, feeling like a cannibal.

He jumped into the trench feetfirst, as if going into a swimming hole when he was a kid. Then he looked around for something to dig with. Being merely a logistics officer, he had no entrenching tool on his belt. A board was better than nothing. He started scraping his own dugout from the side of the trench.

Shell fragments screeched past above his head. A wounded man shrieked. Not everybody made it to the trench on time. Some Confederate guns started firing back. The noise of shells going out was different from the one they made coming in.

Bombs whistled down out of the sky. They were what really scared Dover. If one of them burst in this stretch of trench, that was it. He was safe enough from artillery here, but not from bombs.

Somebody punctuated a momentary lull by screaming, “This is it!”

“Make it stop!” someone else added a moment later, his voice high and desperate and shrill.

Jerry Dover wished it would stop, too, but it didn’t. It went on and on, till it reminded him of one of the unending bombardments from the Great War. He was convinced whoever’d let out that first cry was dead right—or, with better luck, still alive and right. This had to be it. If the damnyankees weren’t coming over the Ohio right here, this was the biggest bluff in the history of the world.

More Confederate guns boomed, but the noise they made seemed almost lost in the thunder of the Yankee barrage. Officers and sergeants shouted for men to move now here, now there. Dover wouldn’t have left his hole for all the money in the world, or for all the love in it. Moving about up there was asking to be obliterated.

Overhead, U.S. airplanes droned south. Dover swore as he listened to them. The Yankees weren’t just going after front-line C.S. troops. They were trying to tear up roads and railroads, too. The better the job they did, the more trouble the Confederacy would have bringing up men and matériel to beat them back.

And the better the job they did, the more trouble Jerry Dover would be in, not only from the U.S. soldiers but also from his own superiors. They wouldn’t believe any disaster that befell the CSA was their fault. God forbid! Easier to blame the major who used to manage a restaurant.

A four-engine bomber fell out of the sky, its right wing a sheet of flame. It smashed down less than a quarter of a mile from where Dover huddled. Its whole bomb load went off at once. The ground shook under him. Blast slammed him into the side of the trench. He tasted blood again. It was his own this time.

“Corpsman!” “Medic!” the shouts rose again and again, from all directions.
God help these poor bastards,
Dover thought. Riflemen and machine gunners—mostly—turned their weapons away from the soldiers who wore Red Crosses. Shells and bombs didn’t give a damn.

After four and a half hours that seemed like four and a half years (Dover kept checking his watch every three months and being amazed only fifteen minutes had gone by), the gunfire let up. He waited for shouts of,
Here they come!
He was surprised he hadn’t already heard those shouts. The damnyankees could have carved out a formidable bridgehead under cover of that barrage.

Then, just when he started to wonder if it was a bluff after all, more shells came in, these close by the river. “Smoke!” Again, the shout came from everywhere at once. U.S. light airplanes buzzed along the southern bank of the Ohio, spraying more smoke behind them. They got away with it, too. They made perfect targets, but the Confederates near Covington were simply too battered and rattled to shoot back.

Slowly, slowly, the smoke screen cleared. Jerry Dover started to look up, but the rattle of machine-gun fire made him duck back into the trench again. Those small airplanes came back and sprayed more smoke. The sound of machine guns and rifles roared from it.

“Reinforcements!” someone bawled. “We got to get us reinforcements, before they break out and go hog wild!”

“Fuck me!” That shout of despair came from close by Dover. “They’ve got barrels over the river!”

Dover looked up. Sure as hell, through the smoke that now thinned again he spied several squat, monstrous shapes. The growl of their engines added more noise to the racketing gunfire.

A Confederate shell burst in front of a barrel—and it ceased to be. It didn’t brew up; it didn’t catch fire. It…vanished. “It’s a goddamn balloon!” Dover exclaimed.

There were no real barrels close by—only more balloons. The noise of engines and gunfire came from phonograph records and loudspeakers. Whoever’d planted them had disappeared.
The biggest bluff in the history of the world,
Jerry Dover thought again. And it had worked. It froze the Confederates by Covington. Now…Where was the real blow landing?

I
rving Morrell was wary of repeating himself. Irving Morrell was wary of repeating himself. The armor commander shook his head, wondering if he was going out of his tree. He wanted to drive Jake Featherston out of
his
instead. Crossing a river the size of the Ohio wasn’t easy. When George Custer did it in the Great War, he paid a heavy price—and he went on paying a heavy price while his troops ground their way southward a few hundred yards at a time.

Back in 1917, Morrell got men over the Cumberland east of Nashville much more quickly, much more neatly. But he had to figure the Confederates now knew all about what he did then and how he did it. They were bastards, but they weren’t dopes. If he tried the same thing twice, they would hand him his head. And he would deserve it.

And so, in football terms, he was doing his best to fake them out of their jocks. He laid on ferocious barrages in front of Covington and Louisville, and one on an open stretch of river between the two Kentucky towns. He used all the sneaky ingenuity the Army could come up with—and some straight out of Hollywood, too. Inflatable rubber barrels and sound-effects records kept the Confederates guessing a crucial extra little while. So did shells that gurgled as they flew through the air but didn’t hold any gas. A sensible man would figure no one wasted gas shells on a bluff. And a sensible man would be right. Morrell saved the real ones for the genuine assault.

The state of the art of crossing rivers in the face of enemy fire had improved since 1917. You didn’t have to throw pontoon bridges across or send men over in wallowing barges. Armored landing craft delivered soldiers, barrels, and artillery in a hurry. Only a direct hit from a 105 or a bigger cannon yet could make them say uncle. Once the soldiers carved out a lodgement, then bridges could span the river.

No, the tricky part wasn’t the crossing itself. The tricky part was moving men and matériel into southern Indiana without letting the bastards in butternut know what was going on. Lots of trucks made lots of trips carrying nothing to fool Featherston’s fuckers into thinking the real blow would fall farther east. Lots of others carried men who promptly reboarded them under cover of darkness. More inflatable barrels and wooden artillery pieces left the impression of buildups where there were none. So did acres of tents just out of range of C.S. artillery.

Now Morrell had to hope all his deceptions were deceptive enough, his security tight enough. That the Confederates had spies on the northern bank of the Ohio went without saying. That U.S. Intelligence hadn’t rooted out all of them was also a given. How much they reported, how much they were believed…Those were the questions only battle would answer.

So far, everything looked good. The U.S. concentration lay between two tiny Indiana riverside towns with odd names: Magnet and Derby. Magnet hadn’t attracted any particular Confederate attention. That made Morrell want to tip his derby to the men under him who’d made the crossing work.

He wanted to, but he didn’t—he wasn’t wearing a derby. He was wearing a helmet with two stars painted on the front. On a parade helmet, the stars would have been gold so they stood out. Morrell didn’t want them to stand out. One sniper had already hit him. He wasn’t anxious to make himself a target for another one. His rank emblems were dull brown, and invisible from more than a few feet away.

His own headquarters were in Derby, the more southerly of the two towns. People there talked with a twang that reminded him of the wrong side of the border. Intelligence assured him they were no more disloyal than anybody else. He hoped Intelligence knew what it was talking about. But his hackles rose whenever he listened to any of the locals.

Through field glasses, he watched artillery and dive bombers pound northern Kentucky. The Confederates were trying to hit back, but they seemed a little punch-drunk, a little slow. The corners of Morrell’s mouth turned down. Two years earlier, he and Abner Dowling were a beat late when they tried to meet the C.S. thrust into Ohio. About time the other side found out what that felt like.

A soldier from the wireless shack came up to him and saluted. “We’ve reached Objective A, sir,” he reported.

Morrell looked at his watch. Two in the afternoon, a few minutes past. “Almost an hour ahead of schedule,” he said. They’d driven the Confederates out of rifle and machine-gun range of the Ohio: pushed them back more than a mile. Jake Featherston’s men wouldn’t have an easy time driving the invaders into the river now. And Morrell had another reason to beam. “With Objective A taken, I can cross myself.”

“Yes, sir,” the noncom said. Morrell had strict orders from Philadelphia to stay north of the Ohio till the Confederates were cleared from the riverside. He obeyed orders like that only when he felt like it. Here, reluctantly, he saw they made good sense.

“General Parsons!” he shouted now.

His second-in-command came running. “Yes, sir?” Brigadier General Harlan Parsons was short and square and tough. He didn’t have much imagination, but he didn’t have much give, either.

“As of now, you’re in command,” Morrell said. “Keep ’em crossing the river, keep ’em moving forward. When I get south of the Ohio, I’ll take over again. My barrel’s got enough wireless circuits to do the broadcasting for New York City.” He exaggerated, but not by much.

Parsons saluted again. “I’ll handle it, sir,” he said, and Morrell had no doubt he would. “I’ll see you when we get to Objective B.”

“Right,” Morrell said. They would have to drive the Confederates out of artillery range of the Ohio—say, ten or twelve miles back—to meet their second objective. If everything went according to plan, that would take another two days. But who could say what the plan had to do with reality? You went out there and you saw what happened.

Morrell hurried toward his fancy barrel with the eagerness of a lover going to his beloved. The rest of the crew stood around the machine, waiting. As soon as the four enlisted men saw him, they scrambled into the machine. The engine roared to life even as he was slipping down through the hatch atop the cupola and into the turret.

“Take us onto the landing craft,” he called to the driver as soon as his mouth reached the intercom mike.

“Yes, sir!” The barrel rumbled forward, first on the soft riverside earth and then on the steel ramp that led up into the ungainly, slab-sided, river-crossing contraption.

Sailors—they wore Navy blue, not Army green-gray—raised the ramp. It clanged into place, hard enough to make the barrel shake for a moment. A series of clangs meant the ramp was stowed and now had become the boat’s stern or rear end or whatever the hell you called it. The boat’s engine started up. The vibration made Morrell’s back teeth ache. Well, a dentist could wait.

The landing craft was as graceful as a fat man waddling along with an anvil. But a fat man lugging an anvil would sink like a stone if he went into the water. The landing craft didn’t. God and the engineers who designed it no doubt knew why it didn’t. Irving Morrell had no idea. He took the notion on faith. Somehow, believing in the landing craft was easier than his Sunday-school lessons had been.

Crossing the Ohio took about fifteen minutes. A few Confederate shells splashed into the river not far away. Fragments clanged off the landing craft’s sides. Nothing got through. Up front, the barrel driver said, “Thank you, Jesus!” He still believed in what he’d learned in Sunday school.

Then, with a jolt that clicked Morrell’s teeth together, the barrel wallowed up onto dry land again. The ramp thudded down. Morrell hadn’t felt the boat turn in the water, but it faced away from the Ohio. The barrel went into reverse and left its steel nest. Morrell felt like cheering when the tracks bit into soft ground. Here he was, on Confederate soil at last after spending most of the two years trying to defend his own country.

“Forward!” he told the driver. “Toward the fighting!” Then he played with the dials on the big, bulky wireless set that cramped the turret. “Nest, this is Robin,” he said, wondering who’d picked such idiotic code names. “Nest, this is Robin. Do you read?”