The Grapple (46 page)

But another man said, “You’re right, Sarge—it wasn’t easy. They were just…people. They didn’t hurt anybody. I did this once, but I don’t think I ever want to do it again.”

“All right, Lewis. You won’t, then,” Martin promised. “Go off and smoke a cigarette. If you’ve got any booze, take a knock. I’ll look the other way. You earned it.”

“I don’t, Sarge,” Lewis said mournfully.

“Don’t worry about it, Frankie,” another soldier said. “I got a pretty good idea where you can get your hands on some.”

Chester turned his back so they wouldn’t see him smile. They were kids doing a man’s job.
What about me?
he wondered.
I’m no kid any more.
He was trying to do a man’s job, too, and it wasn’t any easier for him than it was for them.

A
rifle on his shoulder, Jonathan Moss trudged along through the muggy hell that was summertime in Georgia. He turned to Nick Cantarella and remarked, “Up at 25,000 feet, where I’m supposed to be fighting, it’s cold enough for me to need fur and leather. Even up above this, it’s still that cold.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how the ball crumbles,” the infantry officer answered. “That’s the way the cookie bounces.”

Spartacus looked from one escaped U.S. POW to the other. “You damnyankee ofays, you fuckin’ crazy, you know dat?” the guerrilla leader said.

“Thanks,” Moss said, which wasn’t likely to convince Spartacus he was wrong. Cantarella chuckled. A couple of the blacks who were close enough to listen to the byplay tapped index fingers against their temples or spun them by their ears to show whom they agreed with.

The guerrillas held the countryside. It did them less good than Moss wished it would. With so many big farms growing one big crop—cotton or peanuts or tobacco—and with so many Negroes taken off the countryside after agriculture was forcibly mechanized, the rebels had a devil of a time feeding themselves. Some of their raids on towns came from no better reason than the need to steal enough food to keep from starving.

Towns were going hungry, too. Trains had cars that mounted machine guns and cannon. Trucks traveled in convoys with machine-gun-toting command cars. Guerrilla bands shot at them and planted explosives under roads and along railroad tracks anyway. Spartacus’ machine-gun-carrying pickup had done some nasty work driving alongside roads and shooting up trucks that stuck to them.

“What are we going to do next?” Moss asked Spartacus. Back in the USA, he wouldn’t have imagined ever taking orders from a black man. But Spartacus unquestionably led this band. A word from him to his followers and both Moss and Cantarella would die the next instant.

But all he said was, “Don’ know fo’ sho’. Wish to Jesus I did. Best thing I kin think of is to keep on movin’ east. Foraging do seem better over dat way.” He had a Tredegar slung over one shoulder—and a ham slung over the other.

“Not so many Mexicans over that way, neither,” Nick Cantarella said. Moss could follow Cantarella when he spoke. He could follow Spartacus when he spoke, too. Trying to follow one of them on the heels of the other sometimes made him feel he was shifting mental gears too fast for comfort.

“Not yet,” Spartacus said. “Dey hear we’s operatin’ in them parts, though, dey git over there pretty damn quick.”

“Maybe,” Moss said. “But maybe not, too. They aren’t what you’d call eager to mix it up with us.”

“Not their fight,” Cantarella said. “I was them,
I
wouldn’t want anything to do with a bunch of crazy-ass smokes.”

“Ofays hereabouts make them greasers fight,” Spartacus said. “Make ’em pretend to fight, anyways. How good they aim, how hard they push when they comes after us…Mebbe a different story.”

“Has been so far,” Moss said. Francisco José’s soldiers showed no more enthusiasm about being in Georgia than Moss would have shown in the Yucatan. And if peasants in the Yucatan tried to kill him when he came after them, he wouldn’t go after them very hard.

“Big worry is, they’re liable to find an officer with a wild hair up his ass,” Cantarella said. “They get a guy who makes his troops more afraid of him than they are of us, they can give us trouble.”

Before Moss or Spartacus could answer, the guerrillas’ point man waved. Everybody stopped. They were coming out of pine woods into more open, more cultivated country. Or maybe they weren’t coming out. “What’s up?” Spartacus asked in a penetrating whisper.

“Somethin’ don’t look right up ahead,” answered the point man, a small, scrawny, very black fellow named Apuleius.

“Don’t look right how?” Spartacus asked. “What you mean?”

Apuleius shrugged. “Dunno. Too quiet-like, maybe.”

“Reckon somebody’s layin’ for us out there?” Spartacus asked. The point man shrugged again. Spartacus frowned. “Can’t go back or stay here fo’ good,” he said. Nobody argued with him; that was self-evidently true. His frown got deeper. “We gonna have to smoke ’em out, then. I’ll go out, see what they do.”

An Army officer would have sent a private, or several privates, into the open to do the same job. Spartacus led by force of personality, not force of military law. He had to show the men who followed him that he was worth following. That meant exposing himself to danger instead of them.

Out of the woods he sauntered. He left his Tredegar and the ham behind; he might have been a happy-go-lucky Negro without a care in the world. He might have been…if Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party hadn’t made Negroes without a care in the world extinct.

Along with the rest of the band, Moss and Cantarella watched from the woods. Moss knew more than a little relief that Spartacus hadn’t told the two white men to scout what was up ahead. If Mexican soldiers lurked in the fields, their color might have done the trick. But their accents would have betrayed them to Confederates as soon as they opened their mouths.

For a moment, Moss thought Apuleius was flabbling about nothing. Spartacus strolled along, and nobody bothered him. Then a shout rang out, seemingly from nowhere. Like a chipmunk popping out of its hole, a gray-haired Confederate in a gray uniform stood up in what looked like a plain old field of peanuts. He pointed a rifle at Spartacus.

Three other white men appeared and went over to the Negro. One of them held out his hand. Spartacus produced papers. They were more or less genuine; the Negro whose picture was on them even looked something like the guerrilla leader. Spartacus pointed east down the road toward Perry, the closest town.

The whites put their heads together. After a minute or two, they waved for him to pass on. He sketched a salute and walked off in the direction toward which he’d pointed.

Back in the woods, the men he led scratched their heads. “What you reckon we should oughta do now?” one of them asked Nick Cantarella. He wasn’t Spartacus’ second-in-command in any formal sense. But the Negroes recognized that he had a professional’s sense of tactics.

“Now we know where they’re at,” Cantarella said, and the black man nodded. The U.S. officer went on, “We could set up the machine gun over there, say”—he pointed—“and attack from a different angle while they’re trying to take it out.”

“Could work,” the Negro agreed.

“Yeah.” Cantarella nodded. “But it’d make a lot of noise, and probably draw everybody and his goddamn dog over this way. That ain’t good news. Other thing that occurs to me is, we could just sit on our asses here till dark and try and get past this position then. Spartacus’ll be waiting up the road for us somewhere—you can count on that.”

After talking it over in low voices, the guerrillas decided to wait it out. Moss thought that was a good idea. “We can’t send for reinforcements if things go sour,” he said. “There’s a saying—there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.”

“Makes sense,” Apuleius said. As point man, he recognized the need for caution more than most of the others. If he got bold when he shouldn’t, he’d end up killing himself, and probably a lot of his comrades, too.

They waited under the trees. Midges and the nasty little biting flies the Negroes called no-see-’ems buzzed around. Eventually, the sun sank. As darkness deepened, Cantarella peered east with a pair of field glasses some Mexican officer didn’t need any more. “Fuck me,” he said softly.

“Now what’s wrong?” Jonathan Moss asked.

“They’ve got somebody cute in charge of them,” Cantarella answered. “They aren’t leaving. They’re moving to new positions closer to the road so they can make sure nobody sneaks by. What I wouldn’t give for a mortar right now.”

“Fight our way through?” Moss didn’t like the idea, and he was sure his dislike showed in his voice.

“I don’t want to,” Cantarella said. “Even if we win, it’ll cost us. And it’ll draw more of these militia assholes and Mexican soldiers down on us just like shit draws flies.”

“You say the ofays is by the road?” Apuleius asked. Nick Cantarella nodded. “Is all of ’em there?” the Negro persisted.

“I don’t know for sure, ’cause I don’t know how many of ’em were out there to begin with,” Cantarella said. “But a good many of ’em moved. How come?”

“On account of mebbe I kin git us around ’em in the dark,” Apuleius replied. “Wouldn’t want to try in the daytime. They see us sure. But at night, without no moon…Got a fair chance, anyways.”

“Let’s do it.” Cantarella wasn’t a man to whom hesitation came naturally. “We’ll go in full combat array, ready to fight if we have to, but we’ll sneak if we can.” Then he seemed to remember he wasn’t a U.S. Army captain any more, and couldn’t just give orders. He had much less authority here than Spartacus did. “Is that all right with youse guys?” he asked the guerrillas.

Nobody said no. They got to their feet and shook themselves out into a line from which they could go into action if they needed to. Everyone checked to make sure he had a round chambered and his safety off. Then, as quietly as they could, they left the corner of the pine woods and sneaked left, following Apuleius one man at a time.

The point man found or knew about a track through the fields. A lot of the Negroes were barefoot. They moved as silently as ghosts. Their dark skins also made them harder to spot. Moss, shod and with what didn’t feel like enough dirt on his face and arms, felt conspicuous every time one of his feet came down.

He waited for a shout from near the road, which didn’t seem far away at all. Worse, he waited for a volley from the white men’s rifles, thunder and the lightning of muzzle flashes splitting the night. Those old-timers in gray couldn’t be so blind and deaf…could they?

Maybe they could. Moss spotted a couple of glowing coals in the militiamen’s positions. They were smoking, and they weren’t being careful about it. “Jesus, if I was a fuckin’ sniper…” Cantarella whispered.

Moss didn’t want to say a word, for fear his voice would carry. But he nodded. The same thing had occurred to him. The whites over there should know better. Careless smoking in the trenches got plenty of soldiers killed in the Great War.

No challenge rang out. Nobody fired. None of the guerrillas tripped over his own feet or dropped his weapon or did any of the other simple, deadly things that were all too easy to do. Apuleius led the line back toward the road. If the militiamen had had a deep position…But there weren’t enough of them for that.

Just when Moss thought he was safe, when he could breathe more than tiny sips of air, a human shape loomed out of the darkness ahead. He almost fired from the hip. Then he realized it was Spartacus. “I was hopin’ y’all didn’t run off an’ leave me,” the Negro said dryly.

“Not us. That other gal, she nothin’ but a pretty face,” Apuleius answered. Laughing softly, the guerrillas tramped on through the night.

XII

S
ergeant Armstrong Grimes looked at Winnipeg from the prairie due south of the city. As usual, smoke shrouded the view. Bombers the Confederates would have hacked out of the sky with ease were more than good enough to lower the boom on enemies who didn’t have fighters or antiaircraft guns. That was as true in Canada as it had been in Utah.

How much good the endless bombing would do…“It’s gonna be craters like on the moon,” Armstrong said, pausing to light a cigarette.

Not far from him, Yossel Reisen was doing the same thing. He said something even worse: “It’s gonna be craters like Salt Lake City.”

“Fuck,” Armstrong muttered, not because Yossel was wrong but because he was right. Every pile of bricks in Salt Lake hid a rifleman or a machine gun. If it worked the same way here…If it worked the same way here, the regiment would take a hell of a lot of casualties.

A harsh chatter rang out in the distance. Armstrong and Yossel looked at each other in dismay. “It’s one of those goddamn machine-gun cunts,” Yossel said, and Armstrong nodded. They hadn’t been in Canada long, but soldiers’ language didn’t need long to hit bottom. Machine-gun pickup went through machine-gun whore on the way down.

An antibarrel cannon boomed. The Canucks on the pickup truck went right on shooting back. Pickups were a lot faster than barrels. On flat ground, they were a lot more mobile, too. And they made much smaller targets. The antibarrel cannon fired again—and missed again.

“Put your spectacles on the next time, dears,” Armstrong said in a disgusted falsetto. Yossel snickered.

The antibarrel cannon boomed one more time. A couple of seconds later, there was a different boom, and a fireball to go with it. “They listened to you!” Yossel exclaimed.

“Yeah, well, that makes once,” Armstrong said.

An officer blew a whistle. Soldiers trotted forward. Armstrong and Yossel veered apart from each other. They both dodged like broken-field runners, and bent as low as they could. They didn’t want to make themselves easy to shoot.

Every time Armstrong saw a motorcar, he shied away from it. The Canadians used auto bombs, as the Mormons had. They’d added a new wrinkle, too: wireless-controlled auto bombs. They loaded a motorcar with explosives, put it where they pleased, and blew it up from a mile away—from farther than that, for all Armstrong knew—at the touch of a button when they saw enough U.S. soldiers near it to make the detonation worthwhile.

Sooner or later, explosives men—most of them borrowed from bomber squadrons—would go over the motorcars one by one to defang the machines that did carry explosives. That was dangerous, thankless work. The Canadians had booby-trapped some of their auto bombs to go off when somebody tried to pull their teeth.

“One thing,” Armstrong said when he and Yossel happened to dodge together again. The fire from up ahead wasn’t bad—he’d known plenty worse. The Canucks didn’t have many defenders in the outermost suburbs of Winnipeg, anyhow.

“What’s that?” Yossel asked.

“If an auto bomb blows up while you’re trying to defuse it, you’ll never know what hit you,” Armstrong said.

A bullet kicked up dirt between the two men. They both flinched. “Yeah, you got something there,” Yossel said. Each of them had seen—and listened to—men die knowing exactly what had hit them, and in torment till death released them. Armstrong had never killed a man to put him out of his misery, but he knew people who had. He knew he would, if he ever found himself in a spot like that. He hoped somebody would do it for him, if he ever found himself in a spot like
that.

Which was not the sort of thing he wanted to be thinking when he got shot.

One second, he was loping along, happy as a clam (how happy were clams, anyway?). The next, his left leg went out from under him, and he fell on his face in the dirt. He stared in stupid wonder at the hole in his trouser leg, and at the spreading red stain around it.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said, more in annoyance than anything else.
I stay lucky for two years, and then this shit happens,
he thought.

Then the pain reached his brain, and he howled like a wolf and clutched at himself. He knew what had hit him, all right, and wished to God he didn’t. He scrabbled for the pouch that held his wound dressing, the sulfa powder he was supposed to dust on the wound before he used the bandage, and the morphine syrette that might build a wall between him and the fire in his leg.

“Sergeant’s down!” somebody yelled.

“Corpsman!” Two or three soldiers shouted the same thing.

Armstrong detached the bayonet from the muzzle of his Springfield and used it to cut away his trouser leg so he could give himself first aid. He felt sick and woozy. He also bit his lip against the pain. The wound hadn’t hurt for the first few seconds after he got it, but it sure as hell did now.

My old man got hit just about like this,
he thought as he sprinkled sulfa powder into the hole in his calf. He’d never had a whole lot in common with his father. This wasn’t the way he wanted to start. Merle Grimes still used a cane to take some of the weight off his bad leg. Armstrong hoped that wouldn’t happen to him.

He slapped on the bandage. Then he yanked the top off the syrette, stuck himself, and pushed down on the plunger. He felt more squeamish about that than he had about the bandage, or even the wound. He was hurting himself on purpose. He knew he would feel better soon, but knowing didn’t make a whole lot of difference.

Once he’d done what he could for himself, he looked around for cover. He didn’t see anything close by. He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging. It wouldn’t be much of a hole, no doubt, but anything was better than nothing. He piled the dirt from the scrape in front of him. Enough of it might stop a bullet, or at least slow one down.

He’d just got up a halfway decent dirt rampart when medics crouched beside him. “Here you go, Sergeant,” one of them said. “Can you slide onto the stretcher?”

“Sure.” Armstrong was amazed at how chipper he sounded. He didn’t care about anything. The morphine had taken hold while he was digging. He didn’t slide so much as roll onto the stretcher.

Another medic looked at his wound. The man with the Red Cross armbands and smock and helmet markings poked at it, too, which hurt in spite of the shot. “He did a pretty good job patching himself up,” he reported. “I don’t think the bones are broken. Looks like a hometowner to me.” He gave Armstrong an injection, too, before the wounded man could tell him not to bother.

“Where you from, Sergeant?” asked one of the corpsmen at Armstrong’s head.

“Uh, Washington. D.C., I mean,” Armstrong answered vaguely. That second shot was kicking like a mule. He felt as if he were floating away from himself.

The medic didn’t seem to see anything out of the ordinary in the way he talked. The man laughed. “If that’s your home town, you’re safer staying away. Damn Confederates have worked it over pretty good, I hear.”

“Folks are all right, as far as I know,” Armstrong said. Then the corpsmen picked up the stretcher and carried it away. Armstrong had felt as if he were floating before. Now he floated and bounced.

Red Cross flags flying around the aid station and Red Crosses painted on the tents themselves told the Canucks not to shoot this way—or gave them targets, depending. One of the medics let out a yell: “Doc! Hey, Doc! We got a casualty!”

That’s what I am, all right.
With two shots of morphine in him, the idea didn’t bother Armstrong a bit. “Bring him in!” somebody yelled from the other side of the canvas. In Armstrong went. He smelled ether and other chemicals he couldn’t name—and blood, enough blood for a butcher’s shop. “Where are you hit, soldier?” a bespectacled man asked from behind a surgical mask.

“Leg,” Armstrong answered.

The corpsmen slid him off the stretcher and onto the operating table. The doctor peeled off the bandage he’d put on and studied the wound. “You’re lucky,” he said after perhaps half a minute.

“My ass.” Even doped to the gills, Armstrong knew bullshit when he heard it. “If I was lucky, the fucker would’ve missed me.”

“He’s got you there, Doc,” one of the medics said, laughing.

“Oh, shut up, Rocky,” the surgeon replied without rancor. He turned back to Armstrong. “I’m going to give you a shot of novocaine to numb you up. Then I’ll clean that out. It should heal fine. You may not be as lucky as you like, but you’ll do all right.”

He wasn’t especially gentle, and he didn’t wait for the novocaine to take full effect before he started working with a probe and forceps and a scalpel. Armstrong yipped a couple of times. Then he did more than yip. “Christ on a crutch, Doc, take it easy!” he said.

“Sorry about that.” The surgeon didn’t sound very sorry. He didn’t take it easy, but went on, “No offense, but I want to get you taken care of in a hurry so I can deal with a bad wound if one comes in.”

“Thanks a lot,” Armstrong said. “Easy for you to talk like that—it ain’t your goddamn leg.”

“Well, no,” the medico said. “But it’s not an amputation, either, or a sucking chest, or a belly wound, or a bullet in the head. You’ll be back on duty in six weeks or so. In the meantime, you get to take it easy while you heal. Could be worse.” As he spoke, he did some more snipping. Armstrong yelped again.

After what seemed like forever and was probably about ten minutes, the surgeon gave him a shot. “What’s that?” Armstrong asked suspiciously.

“Tetanus—lockjaw,” the man answered. He eyed Armstrong over his mask. “Locking your jaws might be an improvement, all things considered.”

“Funny, Doc. Har-de-har-har. I’m laughing my ass off, you know what I mean?”

“Get him out of here,” the surgeon told the corpsmen. “Some other poor bastard’ll come along pretty damn quick.”

They carried Armstrong over to a tent next to the aid station and put him on a cot. “Ambulance’ll be along in a while,” one of them said.

“Happy day,” he answered. They were shaking their heads when they left the tent. He couldn’t have cared less.

The tent held a dozen cots. Counting his, five of them were occupied. None of the other wounded men was in any shape to talk. One of them had bloody bandages around his head. One had lost an arm. Two had torso wounds. Three, including the man who’d been shot in the head, were deeply unconscious. The other one moaned from time to time, but didn’t come out with any real words.

Looking at them, listening to them, Armstrong reluctantly decided the smartass surgeon had a point. If he had to get wounded, he could have done a lot worse than catching a hometowner. Despite the morphine and novocaine, his leg barked again. He muttered under his breath. Then he brightened—a little, anyhow. His old man had always thought he wasn’t quite good enough, that he never did enough. If his father tried saying that now, Armstrong promised himself he’d knock his goddamn block off.

L
ulu looked into Jake Featherston’s office. “General Forrest is here to see you, Mr. President,” she said.

“Send him in, then,” Jake growled. His secretary nodded and ducked out to bring back the chief of the Confederate General Staff.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked pale and pasty: the look of a man who spent most of his time underground and didn’t see the sun very often. Featherston looked the same way, but he hardly noticed it—he saw himself all the time. Forrest nodded to him. “Mr. President,” he said.

“Hello, General.” Jake leaned forward across the desk. “Are we ready to hit back at those damnyankee sons of bitches?”

“General Patton thinks so, sir, and he’s the man on the spot,” Forrest answered.

“He’s the man on the spot, all right,” Jake Featherston said. His eyes went to the map on the wall of his office. The Confederates had been gathering men and matériel east of the Appalachians for weeks, aiming to strike at the U.S. flank. If everything went the way it was supposed to, they could cut off the Yankees in Tennessee and bundle the ones in Kentucky back to the Ohio. That would put the war on even terms again. But if things didn’t go the way he wanted them to…“We can’t afford to fuck this up.”

“Yes, sir,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said stolidly.

Jake swore under his breath. He’d never thought it would come to this when he ordered his armies into motion against the USA. The Yankees were the ones who were supposed to be fighting for their lives, not his side.

He swore again, on a different note, a moment later. He’d already survived two assassination tries. If the war kept going down the toilet, he knew damn well he’d have to worry about another one. Even a Vice President as pliable as Don Partridge might start getting ideas. So might Clarence Potter—as if he didn’t have them already. But he might decide to do something about them, the cold-blooded son of a bitch. Nathan Bedford Forrest III might get some of his own, too.

“Is security tight?” Jake asked.

“Tight as we know how to make it,” Forest answered.

“It better be. It better be tight as a fifty-dollar whore’s twat,” Jake said, and the chief of the General Staff let out a startled laugh. Featherston went on, “If the damnyankees figure out what we’re up to before we get rolling, they can give us all kinds of grief, right?”

“You’d better believe it, sir. If they’ve got a gopher planted somewhere between here and General Patton’s headquarters, that’s a problem,” Forrest replied. “And if he can pass on whatever he knows, I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jake said impatiently. “What are the odds?”

“Mr. President, I just don’t know.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III spread his hands. “We still have gophers in the USA and with U.S. forces. The Yankees are bound to be doing the same thing to us. Too goddamn hard for one side to root out all the spies from the other. We just sound too much alike. Whether they’ve got somebody in the right place, whether the son of a bitch can pass on what he picks up, if he picks up anything…We’ll have to find out. I hope to God we don’t find out the hard way, but I can’t be sure.”

Most men in Forrest’s place would have told Jake Featherston what they thought he wanted to hear: that everything was fine, that of course the United States had no chance of finding out what was going on. Reluctantly, Featherston respected the younger man’s honesty. If you promised the moon and couldn’t deliver, wasn’t that worse than not promising in the first place?