The Grapple (7 page)

Cincinnatus gulped a sandwich and drank coffee while they filled his truck again. There was one other Negro driver in his transport unit. Douglass Butler came from Denver, of all places. He talked like a white man. Cincinnatus’ son and daughter had grown up in Des Moines, and lost a lot of their Confederate Negro accent. Cincinnatus had lost some of it himself; he’d noticed that when he got stuck in Covington. But Douglass Butler didn’t have any, and apparently never had had any. He puffed on a cigar, waiting for his truck to get reloaded.

“My dad went out to Colorado to see if he could get rich mining,” he said, every vowel sharp, every consonant distinct. “He didn’t—only a few people did—and he ended up running a grocery store. I started driving a truck for him, but I found I liked driving more than I liked the grocery business.”

“Folks out there give you a lot of trouble on account o’—?” Cincinnatus brushed two fingers of his right hand across the back of his left to remind the other Negro what color they were.

“Well, I know what
nigger
means, that’s for damn sure.” Butler shrugged. “But Jews are kikes and Chinamen are Chinks and Irishmen are micks and Mexicans are greasers and Italians are wops and even Poles are lousy Polacks, for God’s sake. I don’t get too excited about it. Hell, my brother’s married to a white woman.”

That made Cincinnatus blink. “Work out all right?” he asked.

“They’ve been married almost twenty years. People are used to them,” the other driver said. “Every once in a while, John’ll hear something stupid if he’s standing in line for a film with Helen or out at a diner or something like that, but it’s not too bad.” He chuckled. “Of course, he’s my
big
brother—he goes about six-three, maybe two-fifty. I don’t care if you’re green—you want to be careful what you say around him.” He was of ordinary size himself.

“Does make a difference,” Cincinnatus agreed. He wondered if John Butler was named for John Brown; with two s’s in his first name, Douglass Butler was bound to be named for Frederick Douglass.

Before he could ask, somebody shouted that their trucks were ready to roll. “Got to get moving,” Butler said. “I want to parade through Nashville or Birmingham or one of those places. And if I hear some Confederate asshole yell, ‘Freedom!’—well, I want to pull out my .45 and blow his fucking head off.”

He sounded altogether matter-of-fact about it, the way a U.S. white man would have. But for the color of his skin, he might as well have been a U.S. white man. He seemed as sure of his place in the world and as comfortable with it as any white man, whether from the USA or the CSA. Cincinnatus, whom life had left forever betwixt and between, envied him for that.

He climbed into the cab of his truck, slammed the door, turned the key in the ignition, and put the beast in gear. South and east he rolled, back toward Findlay. No shellfire fell on the road this time. U.S. guns, or maybe dive bombers, had silenced the Confederate batteries that were shelling it. Cincinnatus approved. Unlike Douglass Butler, he didn’t want to use his .45 for anything. He had it. He could use it if he had to. But he didn’t want to.

What if Jake Featherston was right in front of you?
He glanced over to the pistol. Well, you could make exceptions for everything. Dream as he would, though, he didn’t expect to be sharing a diner with the President of the CSA any time soon.

When he rolled into Findlay, he got waved through the town. “What’s goin’ on?” he called to a soldier with wigwag flags.

“We broke through again, that’s what,” the white man answered. “They need their shit farther forward.”

“I like that,” Cincinnatus said, and drove on.

Shells were falling not far from the new unloading area, but they’d been falling in Findlay and beyond it only a couple of hours before. The men who hauled crates out of the back of his truck had an air of barely suppressed excitement. They didn’t seem to think the Confederates would be able to slow this latest push.

Do Jesus, let ’em be right,
Cincinnatus thought. That Ohio should be liberated didn’t matter so much in and of itself—not to him, anyway. But he could see that U.S. soldiers would have to clear the Confederates out of their own country before they started doing what really did matter—to him, anyway. If the United States were going to lick Jake Featherston, they would have to do it on Featherston’s turf.

Cincinnatus thought about the last time he’d driven trucks full of munitions through Kentucky and Tennessee. He thought about the Confederate diehards who’d shot up his column more than once. Then he thought about U.S. artillery and bombers blowing all those people to kingdom come.

War was a filthy business for everybody, no doubt about it. Cincinnatus wanted a little more filth to come down on the other side. He didn’t think that was too much to ask.

B
rigadier General Irving Morrell was a man in a hurry. He always had been, ever since his days as a company commander at the start of the Great War. He took the first position he ever attacked—and he got shot charging with the bayonet when he ran out of ammunition. That taught him an important lesson: like anything else, being in a hurry had its disadvantages.

It also had its advantages, though. Massing barrels and smashing Confederate lines made the CSA say uncle in 1917. At the Barrel Works at Fort Leavenworth after the Great War, Morrell designed a machine with all the features a modern barrel needed: a reduced crew, a powerful engine, a big gun in a turret that turned through 360 degrees, and a wireless set.

He designed it—and he found nobody in the USA much wanted it. The Great War was over, wasn’t it? There’d never be another one, would there? Being a man in a hurry sometimes put you too far ahead not only of the enemy but also of your own side.

By the time it became clear the Great War wouldn’t be the last one after all, the state of the art all over the world had caught up with Morrell’s vision. Germany and Austria-Hungary built barrels incorporating all the features he’d envisioned more than fifteen years earlier. So did France and England and Russia. And so did the Confederate States.

So did the United States, but belatedly and halfheartedly. When the fighting started, Morrell had to try to defend Ohio without enough machines—and without good enough machines. He failed. Even in failure, he alarmed the Confederates. A sniper gave him an oak-leaf cluster for his Purple Heart and put him on the shelf for weeks.

Returning to duty, he didn’t have much luck in Virginia, a narrow land bristling with fortifications. But he was the architect of the U.S. thrust that cut off, surrounded, and destroyed the Confederate army that fought its way into Pittsburgh. Now the armored force he led was driving west through Ohio. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. If, somewhere south of Columbus, his force could meet up with the one pushing southeast from northwestern Ohio and Indiana, they would trap all the Confederates to the north of them in another pocket.

He didn’t think Jake Featherston could afford to lose one army. He knew damn well the President of the CSA couldn’t afford to lose two. What could be better, then, than giving Jake exactly what he didn’t want?

Right this minute, Morrell was bivouacked with his lead barrels atop Mount Pleasant, in Lancaster, Ohio. The 250-foot sandstone rise looked down on the whole town. It had not lived up to its name. Not being fools, the Confederates put an observation post and several artillery batteries atop the rise, and protected them with pillboxes and machine-gun nests.

Clearing them out was a slow, bloody, expensive job. Morrell believed in bypassing enemy strongpoints wherever he could, letting slower-moving infantry clean up in the armor’s wake. Some strongpoints, though, were too strong to bypass. This, unfortunately, was one of them.

Dive bombers helped pound it into submission. Several 105s sprawled in the snow, knocked ass over teakettle by 500-pound bombs. Dead soldiers in butternut lay there, too. Some of them wore white camouflage smocks over their uniforms, which struck Morrell as a good idea. Good idea or not, it didn’t save them. Along with soot, their blood streaked the snow.

Crows and a couple of turkey vultures were feeding on the bodies. Standing up in his barrel’s cupola, Morrell waved his arms and yelled, “Yaaah!” A few of the birds flew away. Most of them ignored him.

The gunner tapped him on the leg. “What the hell, sir?” Corporal Al Bergeron said plaintively. “You scared the crap out of me there.”

“Sorry, Frenchy,” Morrell answered. Bergeron was a good man and a good gunner—maybe not quite so good as Michael Pound, who was one of a kind in several different ways, but damn good just the same. Morrell explained why he made his horrible noise.

“Oh.” Bergeron thought about that for a little while. Then he said, “Yeah, those damn things are filthy, all right. Tell you one thing, though: I’m glad they’re chowing down on Featherston’s fuckers and not on us.”

“Me, too,” Morrell said, though he knew the carrion birds didn’t care whether their suppers came wrapped in butternut or green-gray. For that matter, the crows and vultures feasted on dead civilians, too.

“What’s it look like off to the west?” Bergeron asked.

Before answering, Morrell scanned the way ahead with binoculars. Visibility wasn’t everything he wished it were, but he could see enough to get some idea of what was going on. “Sure looks like they’re pulling back,” he said.

Corporal Bergeron summed up his reaction to that in two words: “Well, shit.”

“You said a mouthful, Frenchy.” Morrell really had hoped he could cut off as many Confederates with this thrust as he had in and around Pittsburgh. Then, Jake Featherston forbade his men to withdraw. Morrell had hoped he would do it again. But evidently he was able to learn from experience.
Too bad,
Morrell thought. The Confederates were heading south in anything that would roll: truck convoys, barrels, commandeered civilian motorcars. Bombers and artillery and saboteurs did everything they could to knock the railroads out of action, but Ohio had such a dense net of tracks that it wasn’t easy. Every soldier, every barrel, every gun, every truck that got out now was a soldier, a barrel, a gun, a truck the USA would have to put out of action later on.

Morrell scanned the horizon again. He knew he was being foolish, but he did it anyhow. If he could have seen the U.S. forces coming down from the northwest, the Confederates would have been in even worse trouble than they really were. When he sighed, the vapor threatened to cloud the field glasses’ lenses. That western column wasn’t so strong or so swift as this one. Even so…

“We get the country put back together again,” Frenchy Bergeron said.

You didn’t need to be a general to see that; a noncom would do just fine. The Confederates’ armored thrust had carried them all the way from the Ohio River up to Sandusky. They cut the United States in half. For more than a year and a half, goods and men moved from east to west or west to east by air (risky), on the waters of the Great Lakes (also risky, with C.S. airplanes always on the prowl), and over the Canadian roads and railroads north of the lakes (of limited capacity, and vulnerable to sabotage even before the Canucks rebelled).

“It’ll be better,” Morrell agreed. It probably wouldn’t be a whole lot better any time soon. The Confederates were professionally competent. They would have done their best to wreck the east-west highways and railroad lines they were now sullenly abandoning. Putting the roads and railways back into action wouldn’t happen overnight, especially since C.S. bombers would go right on visiting northern Ohio.

But now the Confederates were reacting to what Morrell and his countrymen did. For the first year of the war and more, the enemy had the United States back on their heels. The CSA called the tune. No more.

As Morrell watched, artillery rounds began falling near the Confederate convoy. The first few shells missed the road, bursting in front of or behind it. The trucks sped up. If they could get out of trouble…But they couldn’t, not fast enough. A round hit the road. The convoy had to slow down to go onto the shoulder. And then a truck got hit, and began to burn.

That was all Morrell needed to see. He was commanding a large, complex operation. But he was also a fighting man himself. When he saw trucks in trouble, he wanted to give them more.

His barrel carried a large, complicated wireless set. He could talk with his fellow armored units, with artillery, with infantry, or with bombers and fighters. He didn’t want to, not here. He used the company circuit any barrel commander might have clicked to: “We’ve got a Confederate convoy stalled on the road a few miles west. Let’s go get ’em!”

Along with the others nearby, his own machine rumbled down off Mount Pleasant. Even after giving up the high ground, they had no trouble tracking their quarry: the pyre from that one burning truck—and maybe from more by now—guided them straight to it.

They met a warm reception when they got there. The Confederates had to know trouble was on the way. They didn’t stay in the trucks waiting around to get shot up. Some of them made their way south on foot. And others had manhandled an antibarrel gun into position, and opened up on the U.S. machines as soon as they came into range.

The Confederates hit one, too, fortunately with a round that glanced off instead of penetrating. “Front!” Morrell said.

“Identified!” Frenchy Bergeron answered. “HE!” the gunner called to the loader. The barrel stopped. He fired a couple of high-explosive shells at the gun. He wasn’t the only barrel gunner shooting, either. The Confederates serving the cannon had only a small splinter shield to protect them. They soon went down.

Brave bastards,
Morrell thought, watching with his head and shoulders out of the cupola. Small-arms fire came his way, but not a lot of it. He ignored it with the stoicism of a man who’d known worse. One bullet was all he needed to make this as bad as it could be, but he didn’t think about that.

Then something different happened. A projectile trailing smoke and flame seemed to come out of nowhere. It slammed into a U.S. barrel and set it afire. Morrell couldn’t see if any of the men got out. He didn’t think so.