The Grapple (37 page)

“That’s the idea, yeah,” the lieutenant answered.

“Then I’m up for it,” Cincinnatus declared.

After another pause, the lieutenant—he was younger than Cincinnatus’ son Achilles, which made him seem very young indeed—nodded. “Well, when you put it that way—”

“I do,” Cincinnatus said.

“Fair enough. I can see why,” the lieutenant said. “Good luck.”

Cincinnatus drove within artillery range of the front. Nothing came down too close, for which he thanked God. “What the hell took youse guys so long?” said the quartermaster sergeant who took charge of the supplies the truck convoy delivered. “We been waitin’ for youse.” He was a hairy little Italian guy from New York City. His accent and Cincinnatus’ were a long way from each other.

He was also a long way from any place where bullets flew. His uniform was clean. It was even pressed. “Sorry to disoblige you, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus said, “but before I got down here, bushwhackers hit the convoy I was in. We had trucks blown up an’ men killed, so maybe you better do your grousin’ somewheres else.”

“You gotta lotta noive, talkin’ t’me that way,” the sergeant growled. “Who do you think you are?”

“I’m an uppity nigger tryin’ to kick Jake Featherston’s raggedy ass,” Cincinnatus answered. “We on the same side or not?”

The noncom’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. “You can’t talk to me like that. You can’t, you hear? Tell me your name. I’m gonna put you on report.”

“I’m Cincinnatus Driver. Do whatever you damn well please,” Cincinnatus said calmly. “Whatever you do, it ain’t gonna be worse’n what happened this morning.”

“You want to put him on report, put us all on report,” a white driver said. “He just told you what everybody was thinking. I’m Hal Williamson. Write it down.”

“Bruce Donovan,” another driver said. Everybody in the convoy gave the quartermaster sergeant his name. Somebody in the back of the crowd added, “You sad, sorry chickenshit asshole.”

“That does it! That fuckin’ does it!” the sergeant shouted. “Youse guys have had it.” He stormed off and returned a few minutes later with a captain in tow. “Listen to these wiseguys, sir!”

Cincinnatus and the other truckers were happy to let the captain listen. “We almost got killed today,” Cincinnatus said. “I don’t see him with no Purple Heart or Silver Star or nothin’.” Again, the rest of the drivers chimed in on his side.

After listening to them, the captain turned to his sergeant and said, “Take an even strain, Cannizzaro. It’s not like they were holding you up on purpose.”

“But, sir—” Sergeant Cannizzaro began.

“Take an even strain, I said,” the captain told him, more sharply this time. “The stuff is here now. Let’s get it out to the troops who need it.” He walked away, leaving the quartermaster sergeant staring after him.
An officer with sense,
Cincinnatus thought. He’d run into some before, but it didn’t happen every day.

J
erry Dover had a promotion. He wanted a second star on either side of his collar about as much as he wanted a third leg, but he was now officially a lieutenant-colonel. He was doing everything Colonel Travis W.W. Oliphant did before he went missing and more besides, so the powers that be seemed to have decided he deserved at least some of the vanished Colonel Oliphant’s rank.

Lieutenant-colonel wasn’t enough. To get the boneheads down in Tennessee to pay attention to him, he would have needed to be at least a lieutenant general—not a rank the Confederate States dished out every day.

“Listen, dammit,” Dover snarled over a bad telephone connection, “if you don’t get more ammo and gasoline up here pretty damn quick, you won’t need to worry about me pissing and moaning any more, that’s for sure.”

“You don’t know how bad things are down here,” said the colonel on the other end of the line. “The Yankees are bombing the shit out of the dams President Featherston built. We’ve got floods like you wouldn’t believe. Half the time we don’t have power, on account of they made so much of it. Roads are out, railroads are out—”

“If you don’t send us what we need to fight with,
we’re
out,” Dover interrupted. “You’ll be arguing with some damnyankee quartermaster, not me.” Some damnyankee quartermaster was enjoying the depot he’d put together outside of Covington. Nobody but nobody had dreamt the USA could move so fast.

“We’re trying,” the colonel said.

“You sure are,” Jerry Dover told him, but it went over his head. Dover would have bet on that. He went on, “This is a war, in case you didn’t notice…sir. If we don’t do it, we’re going to fucking lose.” He didn’t care what he said when he talked to a supplier. That was just as true when he talked to C.S. Army quartermasters as it had been when he talked to rascally butchers in Augusta.

“I am certain you are doing everything you can, Colonel,” said the officer down in Tennessee. “Why don’t you give me and my men credit for doing the same?”

Because from up here it looks like you’ve got your head up your ass.
But Dover didn’t say that, though it was a damned near-run thing. What he did say was, “Get as much forward as you can. They’ve promised me they’ll hold on to Bowling Green no matter what.”

They’d also promised they would hold on to Covington no matter what. He’d believed them, which only proved anybody could be a fool now and then. He was more ready to evacuate and wreck this depot than he had been when the line lay farther north. Some Yankee writer once said,
Trust everybody—but cut the cards.
That struck Jerry Dover as good advice.

Even the colonel down in Tennessee, who had to worry about nothing worse than bombers and floods—mere details in Dover’s harried existence—could see they might have promised more than they could deliver. “Keep your options open,” he said, and hung up.

“Options. Right,” Dover said tightly. At the moment, he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, and that about summed up his options. The western U.S. column was already down about even with Bowling Green. The eastern one was still northeast of his current center. In a way, that was good news. It meant that, for the time being, he could resupply both crumbling Confederate fronts. But it also meant both fronts were liable to converge on him here, or even behind him. If that happened…

If that happens, I have to move like a son of a bitch to save anything,
Dover thought glumly.
Take what I can, blow up what I can’t.
He already knew what was what, what would go and what would go up in smoke.

If this turned into the front, he was liable to have to turn into a combat soldier to get free of it. He muttered to himself; like every other white man his age in the CSA, he’d done a spell in the trenches in the last war. He wasn’t eager to repeat it. But if the damnyankees got in his way, he would try his best to run them over.

The telephone jangled. If it was that officious idiot in Tennessee, telling him something wouldn’t show up because somebody’d lost the paperwork…“Dover here,” he growled, a note of warning in his voice.

“This here is Major Kirby Bramlette over by Elkton,” the caller said. Dover had to look at a map to find Elkton southeast of Hopkinsville, which had fallen to the USA only the day before. It was also definitely south of Bowling Green, which wasn’t good news. Bramlette sounded right on the edge of being frantic as he went on, “You got any more o’ them antibarrel rockets, the ones infantrymen can shoot off? Looks like every Yankee barrel in the world is heading right at me.”

“You’ll have some in a couple of hours, if U.S. fighters don’t shoot up my trucks on the way,” Dover answered.

“Sooner’d be better,” Bramlette said. “Two hours from now, I’m liable to be dead.” He didn’t say anything about pulling back. The Confederates did that only when they couldn’t help it.

“Fast as we can get there.” Dover hung up and ran outside, yelling for drivers. When he’d assembled half a dozen, he said, “Load up on antibarrel rockets and get ’em to Elkton on the double.”

“Where the fuck is Elkton?” one of them asked.

“Follow me. I’ll get you there.” By his accent, the man who spoke was from around these parts. You’d have to be, to know where Elkton was.

“Take your trucks to gate number nine,” Dover said. “Go in through there and make the first left you can.” He’d laid out the depot himself. He knew where everything was. If Major Bramlette needed cold-weather socks or prophylactics, he would have known where they were off the top of his head, too.

Confederate soldiers loaded the rockets and their stovepipe launchers onto the trucks. In the last war, Negroes would have done it. Not here, not now. The soldiers didn’t even grumble about nigger work. They just fetched and carried without a second thought. If blacks were working now, most of the soldiers working the depot could have been at the front with automatic rifles in their hands. That seemed obvious to Jerry Dover. The trouble he would land in if he said so out loud seemed even more obvious, so he kept his mouth shut.

Inside of half an hour, the trucks were on the way. Dover went back to his office and telephoned Major Bramlette. “Barring air strikes, they should get there in an hour or so. It’s what, about forty miles from here to where you’re at?” he said.

“Something like that, anyways,” Bramlette answered. “Thank you kindly, Colonel. You’ve done what you could. Now we just have to see if we can hold on that long.” As if to punctuate the comment, explosions came over the telephone line. All of a sudden, he didn’t have a connection. He swore, hoping the trouble was in the line and not because of a direct hit on Bramlette’s headquarters.

He didn’t find out till the trucks got back a little before sunset. “We delivered the rockets, sir,” said the head driver, a master sergeant named Stonewall Sloane. (Dover had seen his papers—that was his real name. Why his parents couldn’t have picked a different Confederate hero to name him after…Jerry Dover shrugged. How many babies born between 1934 and now were called Featherston? Too many—he was sure of that.)

“All right—you delivered them,” Dover said. Sloane nodded. He neither looked nor sounded happy. Dover asked the question he had to ask: “What went wrong?”

“Damnyankees had already shoved our guys out of Elkton by the time we got there, sir.” Stonewall Sloane paused to light a cigar. Dover had a cigarette going—but then, he usually did. The sergeant went on, “I
hope
the rockets can help us blow some of the Yankees to hell and gone. If they can’t…” He sent up gloomy smoke signals.

“Shit,” Dover said. “Whereabouts exactly did you make your delivery? Was it south of Elkton or east of it?”

“East, sir,” Sloane answered: a world of bad news in two words.

“Shit,” Dover said again. “They’re heading this way, then.”

“Don’t know if they want to take Bowling Green or get in behind it and cut it off,” Sergeant Sloane said. “They’ve been doing a lot of that crap lately. We did it in Ohio, so I reckon the United States learned their lessons from us.”

“Did they have to learn them so goddamn well?” Dover stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. Stonewall Sloane managed a thin smile. After a deep, savage drag, Dover asked, “You think we’ll have to get out of town? The more time we have, the more stuff we’ll be able to save.”

“Sir, I honest to God don’t know,” Sloane replied. “If you told me a month ago the Yankees could come this far this fast, I would’ve told you you were out of your goddamn tree. Uh—meaning no disrespect.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dover said dryly.

Stonewall Sloane sent him an appraising glance. The cigar twitched. “You’re all right, aren’t you?”

“Well, I try.”

“Yeah.” Sloane scratched his head. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. They’ve already done more than I reckoned they could, so who knows what the fuck they’re liable to do next? Do you want to take chances?”

Before Dover could answer, air-raid sirens wailed. “We’re going to take chances whether we want to or not,” he said, and grabbed his helmet and ran for the closest trench. Sergeant Sloane was right behind him.

Antiaircraft guns around the depot thundered. Dover was glad he had steel between his skull and the chunks of shrapnel that would start falling out of the sky any second now. You were just as dead if your own side killed you as you were any other way.

Fighter-bombers streaked by low overhead, the U.S. eagle in front of crossed swords plainly visible. One trailed fire and smoke. It slammed into the ground and blew up. “That’ll learn ’em!” Sloane yelled.

But other explosions came from the depot not far away. Some were single, others multiple: bombs touching off more explosions on the ground. What Jerry Dover had to say scuttled several commandments. He’d arranged ordnance in small lots with thick earthen dikes between them. That minimized the damage, but didn’t, couldn’t, stop it.

The surviving U.S. airplanes came back for another pass at the depot and the trucks, this time with their cannons and machine guns. Dover said something even worse. He yanked his .45 out of its holster and fired several shots at the U.S. warplanes. That did no good, of course. He’d known it wouldn’t. “Goddamn useless thing,” he growled in disgust.

“Antiaircraft guns aren’t doing a hell of a lot better,” Stonewall Sloane said.

“Fuck them, too,” Dover said. The veteran noncom blinked, then laughed. Dover wasn’t laughing. He was furious. “We ought to have something that really will shoot airplanes down, dammit. All these things do is make noise.” The guns, at the moment, were making a godawful racket.

“Rockets, maybe?” Sergeant Sloane didn’t sound as if he took that seriously, even if he was the one proposing it.

But Dover said, “Why the hell not? They’ve got ’em for barrels. Why not airplanes? They’re a lot easier to wreck.”

“Harder to hit, though,” Sloane said.

“That’s for the guys with the high foreheads and the thick glasses,” Dover said. “I bet we’ve got people working on it. I bet the damnyankees do, too. If they figure it out first, that’s bad news.” He scrambled out of the trench and trotted toward the depot to do what he could to control the damage—and to see how much damage there was to control. Right now, he couldn’t find much good news for the CSA.