The Grapple (62 page)

We? You and your pals? You and your tapeworm? You and God?
Dover was silly with sleepiness. “How did she know to disappear, then?” he asked.

“Good question,” Major Nevers said. “I hope we find out—that’s all I’ve got to tell you. You’ve exposed a security leak, that’s for damn sure. I suppose I ought to thank you.” He didn’t sound grateful. Dover, yawning, didn’t suppose he could blame him.

E
very time Major General Abner Dowling saw a pickup truck these days, he winced. The Confederates’ improvised gun platforms had caused him a hell of a lot of grief. Their flanking attacks had stalled his drive on Camp Determination and Snyder. They hadn’t made him fall back on Lubbock, let alone driven him over the border into New Mexico, the way the enemy probably hoped. But his men weren’t going forward any more, either.

And so he grimaced when a pickup truck approached Eleventh Army headquarters out there in the middle of nowhere, even though the truck was painted U.S. green-gray and he could see it had no machine gun mounted in the bed. No matter what color it was painted, guards made sure it wasn’t carrying a bomb before they let it come up to the tent outside of which Dowling stood.

He started to laugh when the truck door opened and a brisk woman not far from his own age got out. “What’s so damn funny, Buster?” Ophelia Clemens demanded, cigarette smoke streaming from her mouth as she spoke.

“The guards were looking for explosives, but they let you through anyhow,” Dowling answered. “You cause more trouble than any auto bomb or people bomb ever made.”

She batted her eyes at him, which set him laughing all over again. “You say the sweetest things, darling,” she told him. “Do you still keep a pint hidden in your desk?”

“It was only a half pint,” he said, “and now I’ll have to put a lock on that drawer.” That made her laugh. “Come on in,” he continued. “I’ll see what I can find. It’s good to see you, by God.”

“People I talk to aren’t supposed to tell me things like that,” the reporter said severely. “They’re supposed to say, ‘Jesus Christ! Here’s that Clemens bitch again!’” She was kidding, and then again she wasn’t.

“I never do things I’m supposed to. Would I be here if I did?” Dowling held the tent flap wide. “Won’t you walk into my parlor, said the fly to the spider?”

“That’s more like it.” Ophelia Clemens ducked inside. Dowling followed her. He did produce some whiskey, and even a couple of glasses. As he’d seen her do before, Miss Clemens—she’d never married—knocked hers back like a man. “And
that’s
more like it, too,” she said. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Dowling said. “I don’t suppose you came way the hell out here just to drink my booze, so suppose you tell me why you did.”

“I want to do a piece on Camp Determination,” she answered. “I want to show people in the USA what that murderous son of a bitch in Richmond is doing to his Negroes.”

“That would be good,” Dowling said carefully, “but a lot of what we know is classified. I don’t know how much I’m authorized to show the press. Some of what we have shows how we got it, which isn’t so good.”

“This will have to pass the censors before it goes out,” she said. “As for authorization…” She fumbled in her purse, which held only a little less than a private’s pack. “Here.” She thrust a folded piece of paper at him.

He unfolded it. It was a letter from Assistant Secretary of War Franklin D. Roosevelt, allowing and indeed requiring him to tell Miss Clemens what he knew “since this information, when widely publicized, will prove valuable to the war effort.” He set it down. “Well, you’ve persuaded me,” he said. “I’m putty in your hands.”

“Promises, promises,” Ophelia Clemens said. They both grinned. The game of seduction played for farce, with neither of them intending to conquer, was almost as fun in its own way as it would have been for real. “What have you got?”

Dowling produced aerial photos. “Here’s the camp. The side north of the train tracks—that’s
this
way—holds women and children. The other side, which is older, is for men.”

“Uh-
huh.
” Like him, the reporter wore bifocals. “How big is this thing?”

“You see these little tiny rectangles here by the men’s side?” Dowling waited for her to nod, then went on, “Those are trucks. They’re about the size of our deuce-and-a-halfs.”

Ophelia Clemens blinked. “The place is
that
big?” Now Dowling nodded. She whistled. “It’s not a camp. It’s a goddamn city!”

“No, ma’am,” Dowling said. “There’s one big difference. A city has a permanent population. People go into Camp Determination, they go through it, but they don’t come out again—not alive, anyway.”

“And your evidence for that is…?”

He passed her more photos. “This is—was—a stretch of Texas prairie not far from the camp. Barbed wire keeps people out, not that anybody who doesn’t have to is likely to want to go out to the back of beyond. The bulldozers give you some idea of scale here. They also dig trenches. You can see that most of those are covered over. The couple that aren’t…Those are bodies inside.” He gave her another picture. “A low-level run by a fighter-bomber got us this one. You can really make out the corpses here.”

“Jesus!” She studied it. “How many bodies are in here? Have you got any idea?”

“Only a rough one,” Dowling answered. “Hundreds of thousands of people, that’s for sure. The experts who are supposed to be good at figuring this stuff out say it’s unlikely there are more than a million…so far, anyway.”

“Jesus!” Ophelia Clemens said again, more violently than before. “Give me that bottle again, will you? I need another drink. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million—what did they do to deserve it?”

“They were born colored,” Dowling said. “To the Freedom Party, that’s a capital offense.”

“If that’s a joke, it’s not funny,” she said as he passed her the bottle. Her throat worked when she drank.

“I wasn’t kidding,” he told her. “The other thing you have to remember is, this isn’t the only camp the Confederates have. We think it’s the biggest, but we’ve also been able to disrupt operations here better than anywhere else. The ones farther east, in Louisiana and Mississippi, they go right on working all the time, because we can’t reach them.”

Ophelia Clemens looked from one photograph to another with the kind of horrified fascination a bad traffic accident might cause. But motorcars hadn’t banged together here—whole races had. And one was running over the other. “If they keep this up, there won’t be many Negroes left in the CSA by the time they’re done.”

“No, ma’am. That’s not quite right.” Dowling shook his head. Ophelia Clemens made a wordless questioning noise. He explained: “They don’t aim to leave
any
colored people alive. Not one. That’s what they’re aiming for. They don’t even bother hiding it. Hell, some of the Freedom Party Guards we’ve captured brag about what they’re doing. Far as they’re concerned, it’s God’s work.”

“God’s work.” She spat out the words as if they tasted bad. “If I believed in God, General, these photos would turn me into an atheist. These photos would turn the Pope into an atheist.”

“I doubt it,” Dowling said. “The Vatican kept quiet when the Turks slaughtered Armenians. It hasn’t said boo about the Russian pogroms against the Jews. So why should Pope Pius give a damn about what happens to a bunch of coons who mostly aren’t Catholic on the other side of the ocean?”

“Who mostly aren’t Catholic,” Ophelia Clemens repeated. “Yes, that’s about the size of it, I’m afraid. He’d bellow like a bull if they were. But since he doesn’t care, what are
you
doing about it?”

“I’m trying to take Camp Determination, that’s what,” Dowling answered. “It’s not easy, but I’m trying.”

“Why isn’t it easy? This ought to be one of the most important things we’re doing,” she said. “Hundreds of thousands of bodies…Attila the Hun didn’t kill that many people, I bet.”

“There weren’t so many people to kill back then,” Dowling said. “And why isn’t it easy? Because this is a secondary front, that’s why. I’m short of men, I’m short of barrels, and I’m short of artillery. I used to be short of airplanes, too, but I’m not any more. Of course, the Confederates are even shorter on everything than I am. That’s why I’ve managed to come as far as I have.”

“It’s criminal that you’re short.” Ophelia Clemens’ pencil raced across the notebook page. “That smells as bad as all those bodies put together, and I’m going to let the world hear about it.”

“No!” Dowling exclaimed. She stared at him in surprise, anger, and something not far from hatred. “No,” he repeated. “Don’t raise a fuss about it. Please. Don’t.”

His earnestness must have got through to her. Her voice was hard and flat when she said, “You’re going to have to explain that,” but she didn’t sound as if she would poison a rattlesnake when she bit it.

Glad she didn’t, Dowling said, “I will. I used to think different, but it’s simple, when you get down to it. The best way to put Camp Determination out of business is to lick the CSA. That’s what General Morrell is doing over in Tennessee, and more power to him. More power to him, literally. If I had two or three times the men and matériel I do, I’d be taking them away from him, and I don’t want to do that. I can annoy the Confederates. I can embarrass them. He can win the war. Do you see the difference?”

She didn’t answer for a long time. At last, she said, “I never thought I’d want to punch a man in the nose for being right.”

“It happens,” Dowling said. “Look at George Custer, for instance.”

“A point,” she admitted. “I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to punch him, but he won the Great War, didn’t he?”

“Oh, not all by himself, but more than anybody else, I think,” Dowling answered. “He saw what barrels could do, and he made sure they did it no matter what the War Department said. General Morrell was in on that, too, remember, though he wasn’t a general then, of course.”

She pointed at him. “So were you.”

“Maybe a little.” Dowling’s main role had been to lie through his teeth to the big wigs in Philadelphia. Had Custer’s brutal simplicity failed—as it was known to do—Dowling would have lied away his own career along with his superior’s. But for once Custer was right, and success, as usual, excused everything else.

“Modest at your age?” Ophelia Clemens jeered. “How quaint. How positively Victorian.”

“You say the sweetest things,” Dowling told her. “Just don’t say I want more men, because honest to God I don’t. I’m keeping the Confederates busy. They can’t send reinforcements east from this front. They’ve had to reinforce it, in fact, to keep me away from Camp Determination. And every man they send out here to the far end of Texas is a man they don’t have in Tennessee.”

“‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’” she quoted.

“Is that Shakespeare?” To Dowling, anything that sounded old had to be Shakespeare.

But she shook her head. “Milton, I think.”

“If you say so. It’s true here, though. Except I’m not standing. I’m staying busy with what I’ve got. I think I can go another forty miles.”

“If you go thirty, you can shell the camp,” she said.

“We haven’t bombed it because we don’t want to go into the Negro-killing business ourselves,” Dowling said. “Same problem with shelling. The people in the camp would be on our side if they got guns. They
are
on our side. They just can’t do anything about it.”

“Any way to change that?” Ophelia Clemens asked.

“I don’t see one,” Dowling said regretfully. “I wish I did.”

XVI

A
rtillery was coming down not far from the supply dump where soldiers unloaded Cincinnatus Driver’s truck. The Army had put everything as close to the front as it could. With U.S. soldiers on the north bank of the Tennessee River, with the big brass trying to work out how to get across, nobody wanted to run short of anything.

“You need me to, I take this shit right up to the fellas doin’ the fighting,” Cincinnatus called to the quartermaster sergeant checking things off on a clipboard.

“That’s awright, buddy,” the noncom said in a big-city accent. “We’ll move it forward—that ain’t no skin off your nose. What you gotta do is, you gotta go back, get some more shit, and bring it down to us here.”

“I’ll do that, then,” Cincinnatus said. This fellow didn’t mock him. He argued from efficiency, which was reasonable enough.

As soon as the big trucks were empty, the convoy did start north to fill up again. Armored cars and half-tracks escorted it. By now, U.S. forces had a pretty good grip on the roads leading down to Chattanooga. But pretty good wasn’t perfect. Holdouts or civilians fired at the convoy. They knocked out two windows and gave a truck a flat. Cincinnatus didn’t think they hit anybody, though, which made the northbound journey a success.

When the convoy got to the supply dump, soldiers in green-gray surrounded it.
Something’s up,
Cincinnatus thought, and wondered what. A full colonel came forward to lead the trucks to tents that hadn’t been pitched when they set out a few hours earlier. The troops the colonel commanded spread out; they set up cloth barriers to make sure no one outside the depot could watch what was going on inside.

“What the hell?” Hal Williamson shouted from the cab of his deuce-and-a-half. Cincinnatus was glad to find he wasn’t the only driver wondering if somebody’d slipped a cog—or more than one.

“This is a special transport mission,” the colonel shouted. “You are not to talk to anybody about what you’re going to see. Do you understand that? Anyone who doesn’t care to go along can withdraw now without prejudice.”

Nobody withdrew. After that buildup, Cincinnatus was too curious to back out. He and the other truckers hauled vital munitions all the time. What could be more special than the stuff soldiers needed to blow Featherston’s fuckers to hell and gone?

“All right!” the colonel said. “The other thing I need to warn you about is, don’t panic and don’t reach for your weapons when you see what’s going on. These men are on our side, the side of the United States of America.”

If he hadn’t said so, Cincinnatus wouldn’t have believed it. As things were, Cincinnatus had trouble believing it anyway. The soldiers who came out of the tents wore Confederate uniforms. They had on Confederate helmets. They all carried submachine guns or automatic Tredegars.

“The fuck?” Cincinnatus was far from the only driver to say that or something very much like it.

“They’re on our side,” the colonel repeated. “This is the 133rd Special Reconnaissance Company. They’re all U.S. citizens who grew up in the CSA or lived there for years. They look like Confederates, they act like Confederates, they talk like Confederates—and they’re going to screw the Confederate States to the wall. The enemy did this to us in Pennsylvania last year. Turnabout, by God, is fair play.”

Cincinnatus stared at the pseudo-Confederates. “Do Jesus,” he said softly. Little by little, a wide, predatory grin spread across his face. If these fellows sounded as good as they looked, they could cause the Confederates a world of grief.

Were they going to cross the Tennessee? If anyone could do it on the sly, this was the outfit. If they got caught, they’d get killed—probably an inch at a time. You had to have balls to try something like this.

Even so, Cincinnatus’ hackles rose when some of them got into the back of his truck. Those uniforms, those weapons, that accent…They all screamed
Murderers!
to him.

“Don’t worry, pal,” one of them said through the little window between the rear and the cab. “We don’t bite, honest.” He sounded like an Alabaman, which didn’t help.

After the 133rd Special Reconnaissance Company boarded the trucks, the guards at the depot took down the screens. No one from outside could hope to see into the deuce-and-a-halfs. But then everybody just sat there. The trucks didn’t roll south. Cincinnatus wanted to
go.
He wanted to get these men out of his truck. They looked so much like the enemy, they gave him the cold horrors, and he couldn’t do anything about it.

He must have been wiggling on his seat, because that counterfeit Confederate spoke up again: “Don’t flabble, man. It’s better if we get there after dark. If those fuckers don’t see us coming, we can surprise ’em better.”

“I guess,” Cincinnatus said. “Makes sense.” And it did. No matter how sensible it was, nothing could make him like it.

Sundown seemed to take forever. He knew it didn’t, but it sure seemed to. At last, as twilight deepened, the lead truck rumbled to life. Cincinnatus thumbed the starter button with vast relief. The engine caught at once. He wouldn’t have been heartbroken had it died. The false Confederates could have found another truck, and he would have stayed here. No such luck.

He turned on his headlights. He might as well not have bothered. The thin strip that masking tape didn’t cover gave a little more light than a smoldering cigarette, but not much. The truck convoy wouldn’t hurry down toward Chattanooga, not at night it wouldn’t.

It did keep its escort. That was good. In case anything went wrong, soldiers in real U.S. uniforms in the half-tracks might protect the impostors from men who didn’t know who and what they were. Those soldiers might protect the drivers, too. If ordinary U.S. troops spotted these fellows in butternut, everybody anywhere near them would need a hell of a lot of protecting. Cincinnatus was sure of that.

He rattled along at about fifteen miles an hour. Every once in a while, on a straight stretch of road, he got up to twenty or so. No shots came from the woods. Maybe all the bushwhackers went to bed early. He could hope, anyway. He followed the narrow stripe of tail light the truck ahead of him showed, and hoped that driver didn’t get lost. If he did, all the trucks behind him would follow him straight into trouble.

After a while, Cincinnatus went past the depot he’d visited earlier in the day. He thought it was the same one, anyhow. The artillery duel seemed to have flagged with the coming of night. A mosquito bit him on the arm. He swore and slapped and didn’t squash it. Next to the bite of a shell fragment, though, it seemed almost friendly.

Those stripes of red got a little brighter: the truck ahead was hitting the brakes. Cincinnatus did the same. The driver in back of him was paying attention, too, because that truck didn’t smack his rear bumper.

Somebody by the side of the road gestured with a dimmed flashlight. “You guys with the special cargo—over this way!” he called.

Like the rest of the convoy, Cincinnatus went over that way. The trucks were crawling along now. That made them quieter, but not what anybody would call quiet. With luck, though, gunfire masked most of their noise. This was about as close to the front as Cincinnatus had ever come. Peering through the windshield, he could see muzzle flashes across the river.

Another soldier with a feeble flashlight said, “Lights out!” Cincinnatus hit the switch and went from dimness to darkness. His eyes adapted fast, though. He soon spotted strips of white tape somebody—engineers?—had put down to guide the convoy to where it was supposed to go. He nodded to himself. They’d done things like that during the Great War, too.

“Here we are!” A loud, authoritative voice, that one. If it didn’t belong to a veteran noncom, Cincinnatus would have been amazed. He hit the brakes.

“Let’s go!”
That
voice came from the back of the truck. The U.S. soldiers in butternut piled out. They gathered with their pals from other trucks.

“Good luck.” Cincinnatus almost couldn’t force the words out.

Had the ordinary U.S. soldiers here been briefed? If they hadn’t, there’d be hell to pay in nothing flat. The thought had hardly crossed his mind before gunfire broke out. Some of the weapons were U.S., others Confederate. Shouts and screams filled the air.

“Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus burst out. He’d feared things might go wrong, but he hadn’t imagined they could go as wrong as this.
Only shows what I know,
he thought bitterly. The Army could screw anything up.

And then, little by little, he realized the chaos and the gunfire weren’t screwups after all. They were part of a plan. The fake Confederates got into rubber rafts and paddled across the Tennessee toward the southern bank, which real Confederates held. Tracers came close to those rafts, but Cincinnatus didn’t think they hit any of them.

He started to laugh. If the shooting fooled him, wouldn’t it fool Jake Featherston’s troops on the far bank? Wouldn’t they think some of their buddies were getting away from the damnyankees? And wouldn’t the phonies be likely to have all the passwords and countersigns real Confederates should have?

So what would happen to the genuine Confederates who greeted the troops they thought were their countrymen? They would get a brief, painful, and probably fatal surprise.

And what would happen
then
? Cincinnatus didn’t know, not in detail, but he could make some pretty good guesses. When he did, he laughed some more. The only thing he wished was that he were a white man in one of those rafts, carrying a Confederate automatic rifle. He wanted to see the look on the face of the first real Confederate he shot.

The counterfeits in butternut would be getting close. He couldn’t hear the shouts across the water, not for real, but he could imagine them in his mind’s ear. He sat in the cab of his truck and swatted at more mosquitoes. He wished for a smoke, but didn’t light up. He waited and waited and…

Sudden gunfire on the south bank of the Tennessee. As if that was a signal—and no doubt it was—U.S. artillery opened up. Cincinnatus could see where the shells came down by the flashes of bursting shells across the river. It made a tight box around the place where Featherston’s phony fuckers had come ashore. The artillerymen would have range tables and maps marked with squares so they could put their bombardment right where they needed it.

And more boats started across the river. These weren’t paddle-powered rubber rafts; Cincinnatus could hear their motors growling. They would land real U.S. soldiers in real U.S. uniforms and, no doubt, everything the troops needed to fight on the far side of the Tennessee: mortars and antibarrel guns and ammo and command cars and maybe even barrels. The invaders would secure the bridgehead, punch a hole in the enemy defenses, and then try to break out. And the whole enormous force on the north bank would slam in right behind them.

Cincinnatus waved, there in the deuce-and-a-half. “So long, Chattanooga!” he said. “Next stop, fuckin’ Atlanta!”

If things worked. Why wouldn’t they, though? Somebody’d planned this one to a fare-thee-well. Once the U.S. forces punched through the lines the Confederates had fortified, what could stop them? They’d be fighting in the open, and the enemy would have to fall back or get rolled up.

Small-arms fire on the other side of the river suddenly picked up. Cincinnatus whooped. He knew what that meant, knew what it had to mean. U.S. soldiers in green-gray were across the Tennessee. “Go, you bastards!” he yelled, as if they were his favorite football team. “Go!”

J
ake Featherston didn’t order Clarence Potter court-martialed and shot for his failure in the flanking attack on the damnyankees in Tennessee. There was plenty of failure to go around. Featherston extracted a nastier revenge on the Intelligence officer: he kept him in a combat slot.

Potter protested, saying—accurately—that he was more valuable back in Richmond. No one felt like listening to him. The Confederate States needed combat officers. He wasn’t the only retread—far from it. Officers from the Quartermaster Corps, even from the Veterinary Corps, commanded regiments, sometimes brigades. When you ran short of what you needed, you used what you had.

They were using Potter. He hoped they didn’t use him up.

He wanted to do in Chattanooga what the United States had done in Pittsburgh. He wanted to tie the enemy down, make him fight house by house, and bleed him white. He thought Jake Featherston wanted the same thing. He hoped that, even if Chattanooga fell, the Confederates could take so much out of the U.S. forces attacking them that the Yankees would be able to go no farther. That would give the CSA a chance to rebuild and regroup.

With C.S. forces holding Lookout Mountain to the south and Missionary Ridge to the east, the defensive position should have been ideal. But Potter couldn’t get anybody to listen to him.

George Patton had gone up to talk to the President. Even so, he kept fighting the campaign his own way: hurling troops and—worse—armor into fierce counterattacks, trying to throw the men in green-gray back over the Tennessee. (Potter hated to learn that U.S. soldiers in butternut had confused Confederate defenders long enough to help the main U.S. push get over the river in the first place. That was one more trick the enemy had stolen from his side. As he’d feared from the beginning, any knife that cut the USA would also cut the CSA.)

“Dammit, we can hit them in the flank and smash them!” Patton shouted, again and again. “It worked in Ohio! It worked in Pennsylvania till they got lucky! It’ll work here, too!”

He didn’t mention that it hadn’t worked in Kentucky and here in Tennessee not long before. And he didn’t seem to realize that the Confederates enjoyed the edge in firepower and doctrine in Ohio and also, for a while, in Pennsylvania. Now the U.S. forces understood what was what as well as their C.S. counterparts.

And the Yankees had the firepower edge, damn them. Whenever the Confederates surged to the attack, they got hit by artillery fire the likes of which they’d never seen in the fondly remembered days of 1941. Fighter-bombers roared across the battlefield, adding muscle to the bombardment. They had a much better chance of getting away to do it again than the slow, ungainly Confederate Asskickers did.