Unholy Fire (12 page)

At the War Department on Seventeenth Street, I found a copy of Major Pease's military records in the Adjutant General's Office. He was thirty-six years old, and had served in the army less than a year. A letter in his file indicated that a colonel in the Quartermaster General's Corps had offered him a captain's commission based on his professional experience as a food wholesaler in Philadelphia. After receiving his commission, Pease had been placed in command of the meat-inspection department of the Quartermaster Corps for the Washington District. His promotion to major was accompanied by a commendation letter from the quartermaster general himself, praising his steadfast devotion to duty.

As the date of the trial approached, I could find no hard evidence to support my belief that Mr. Silbernagel was innocent. The day before the trial began, however, I did learn one piece of information that possibly suggested a more sinister reason for Private Boone's death.

It occurred to me that since Mr. Silbernagel had been confined at Fort Marcy since his arrest four months earlier, someone else was supplying fresh beef to the camps in the district. I found myself wondering who it was. Those records were on file at the Quartermaster General's Office.

What I discovered was that a week after Mr. Silbernagel's imprisonment, his contract had been summarily canceled. A day later, an “emergency” contract was entered into with a company named Consolidated Supply and Manufacturing, which was based in Philadelphia. Under the emergency contract, which had not been competitively bid, the new price for freshly slaughtered beef was more than three times what Mr. Silbernagel had been charging. The signature of Major Pease appeared at the bottom of the new contract.

I remembered that he had been a food wholesaler in Philadelphia prior to his commissioning. Back at my office, I wired the Provost Marshal General's Office in Philadelphia to provide me with information about the Consolidated Supply and Manufacturing Company, as well as a list of all the principals in the firm.

That afternoon I was briefing Val on everything I had learned in the case when an enlisted man burst through the closed door.

“Sorry to interrupt you, Colonel, but it's the gun carriages again,” he said, out of breath. “This time at Fort Ward about thirty minutes ago.”

Val stormed out into the corridor, bellowing for his coach to be brought around to the asylum entrance. A few minutes later, we were tearing across the city at breakneck speed, narrowly averting disaster at several intersections because Val could not refrain from craning his head out the window to yell at the driver to go faster.

We crossed the Potomac River at the Long Bridge and thundered down the Columbia Turnpike through the city of Alexandria. At Bailey's Crossroads, we turned east onto the Leesburg Pike and ran on for another mile or so until we reached the southernmost fortifications in the capital's defense ring.

At Fort Ward a sentry waved us through the sally port, and we rumbled across a narrow wooden bridge that spanned a moat leading into the interior defenses. There was no evidence that anyone was on high alert. Off to the left, a soldier was hanging laundry on a clothesline he had stretched between two timbers that formed part of the inner revetments of the massive earthen walls. We pulled to a halt at the foot of a path that led up to the outer parapet of the fort.

An artillery major was waiting for us when we leapt from the coach.

“It happened again, Colonel Burdette, just as you anticipated,” he said, as we followed him up the corduroyed path. “As soon as I received word of the accident, I sent for you.”

The earthen-filled fortification wall rose fully twenty-five feet above the plain and was topped with a wide parapet. Beyond the fortress walls, the flat Virginia countryside stretched for miles into the distance. Every fifty feet along the parapet, cannons faced south to thwart any possible enemy attack.

The two closest gun emplacements looked like they had taken direct hits from enemy artillery. Each had held a twelve-pound bronze Napoleon capable of firing a shell nearly a mile. Both cannons were now lying in the debris of their smashed gun carriages.

“I ordered the men not to touch anything,” said the artillery major.

One of the guns lay canted over to one side, parallel to the fortification wall. The other was still in its embrasure, but pointing straight up in the air. The carriages that had supported them had been reduced to shattered timbers. An artillery sergeant who had been conducting the firing exercise stood waiting for us on the wooden platform that extended along the inner span of the parapet.

“What happened here, Sergeant?” asked Val, without any preliminaries.

“God help me, Colonel, I didn't mean to kill those men,” he said, his voice almost breaking. “We had cleared the range of fire for the training exercise, and I …”

“It wasn't your fault, Sergeant. Just tell us what happened.”

“I don't know, sir. First we had problems with these friction primers,” he said, holding up a thin copper tube no larger than my little finger. “They're supposed to ignite the powder bag inside the barrel, but there was something wrong with the fulminate of mercury in the ones we were using. None of these are any good.”

He threw the primer in disgust toward an open wooden crate. Dozens of the copper tubes were scattered on the ground around it.

“I ordered one of the men to get another crate of them, and those worked all right,” he went on. “That's when we started the exercise.”

I walked over to the wooden packing crate that had held the defective friction primers. Bending down to examine them, I was surprised to see that there were no markings on the crate to identify the name of the manufacturer.

“We had fired four rounds,” the sergeant went on. “There was no warning … both guns were firing fine … but on the fifth salvo, the gun carriages just collapsed … both of them. They just seemed to disintegrate … splinters flying in every direction.”

His eyes roved back toward the gun emplacement.

“The barrel of my own piece pitched hard left as the powder charge exploded, and the shell went about 30 degrees off in that direction,” he said, pointing toward a tree-covered knoll several hundred yards beyond the fortifications. The hill was dotted with white Sibley tents. “That's when it hit those men over there.”

In the middle of the encampment, one small cluster of tents appeared to have been leveled as if by a windstorm. As we watched, men bearing stretchers were heading down the knoll toward the fort.

Val walked over to the pile of debris behind the first gun emplacement and began to examine the shattered timbers of the gun carriage. He spent almost thirty minutes combing through the wreckage before conducting a similar examination of the second one. Picking up one of the defective friction primers from the ground, he put it in his pocket, and said, “I can learn nothing more here.”

Before leaving the fort, we rode over to the encampment where the errant cannon shell had exploded. The bodies of three dead infantrymen lay side by side, covered with blankets. From inside one of the nearby tents, I could hear the same demented moaning that I remembered so well from Harrison's Island.

“This is an obscenity,” said Val, staring at the carnage around us.

Having served in an infantry unit, I was well aware that powder sometimes didn't explode and that artillery pieces sometimes malfunctioned. But what we saw that day drove home to me just how deadly to an army's success defective equipment could be.

The trial of Simon Silbernagel began a few days later. Up to that time, I had never seen a court-martial case take more than three days from opening arguments until a final verdict from the military court. Yet three days into the trial, Harold Tubshawe had not even finished presenting his so-called evidence.

At one point he spent twenty minutes reading from a breeder's manual on the genetic differences between a steer and a heifer. Witnessing his methodical attack, I became convinced that there was an underlying motive for his overzealous prosecution of the case. I went home beginning to think that an innocent man might be shot for a crime he almost certainly did not commit.

That same evening I learned at Mrs. Warden's dinner table that President Lincoln had chosen General Burnside to replace McClellan as the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, and that General Hooker was now leading two full corps of more than forty thousand men. According to the latest rumors, our army was preparing to launch a new attack from its base near Fredericksburg, Virginia.

As I listened to the other boarders fatuously offering their opinions of the latest war news, it almost seemed as if my night with General Hooker had been nothing more than the product of one of my fevered dreams. I found myself hoping that he would soon have a chance to add to the success he had earned at Antietam.

After finishing dinner, I went upstairs to my room, hoping to read a book until sleep finally overtook my agitated mind. Without laudanum, I had found it almost impossible to sleep more than a few hours at a time.

Lighting the lamp next to my bed, I crawled under the covers with a volume of Dickens, which soon carried me away to a different world. Eventually, rain began spattering the panes of the window, and its rhythmic beat eventually caused me to doze off.

The book still lay propped open on my chest when I was awakened by the sound of someone persistently knocking on my bedroom door. Picking up my watch, I saw that it was almost midnight. I got up and opened the door to find a soldier standing in the corridor, his India rubber cape dripping water onto the hall carpet.

“Colonel Burdette is outside in his coach,” he said. “He asks that you join him there as quickly as possible.”

I put on my uniform and greatcoat and went downstairs. The house was completely dark except for the lamp that Mrs. Warden always left burning in the front parlor window.

Val was waiting for me in the coach.

“I just returned to Washington this afternoon,” he said, “and I read your memorandum on the Silbemagel case. It's time you understood the dimensions of what we are up against.”

The muddy, rain-swept streets were empty of people, except for the poor unfortunates who had no place else to go in the overcrowded city and were forced to find lodging in doorways or under the raised wooden sidewalks.

We had traveled no more than five blocks before turning into a narrow, cobblestoned alley off Pennsylvania Avenue. To the left I could see the west wing of the Treasury Building through the coach window, and then we rolled through a small copse of trees. A large brick stable loomed up on the right, and the carriage swung toward it onto a rutted gravel path. Up ahead I saw two sentries standing by an opening in a high, iron rail fence.

Beyond them sprawled a vast unlit building. Even through the pouring rain, I recognized it immediately as the east wing of the president's mansion. The carriage pulled to a stop at the edge of the path, and we alighted. At the guard post we presented our identification papers to the sentries, one of whom held a lantern in our faces while the other found Val's name on a printed document that he was trying to protect from the rain under his cape.

“You're expected, Colonel,” said the second sentry. He escorted us along a footpath that led around the southeast corner of the mansion. Suddenly, from the dense plantings off to my left, I thought I heard a woman's cry. Something bounded across the path, causing me to stumble into the sentry.

“What was that?” I called out, as the apparition darted into the thicket on the other side of the path.

“Tad's goddamn goat,” the sentry muttered sourly.

He brought us to an unguarded door at the base of the southeast corner of the mansion. A small portico provided us temporary shelter from the driving rain.

“Thank you, Corporal. I know the way from here,” said Val.

“Yes, sir,” said the sentry, heading back to his post.

We went in through a small vestibule and down a dark, silent hallway. Val opened a door at the other end. Behind it was a narrow wooden staircase, and we followed it up to the next floor, coming out in a much wider corridor that was lit every twenty feet by copper-clad oil lamps set into the walls.

A threadbare Oriental carpet covered the floor, and numerous sets of muddy footprints attested to the fact that it had been well traveled that same evening. I was beginning to doubt that anyone was still awake in the mansion when we passed the first brightly lit room. Under a crystal chandelier, a young man with a black beard was working at a small mahogany desk, furiously writing in a large letter book.

We climbed yet another flight of stairs and found ourselves in a corridor that ran parallel to the one we had just traversed. A soldier stood at attention next to the big rosewood door on the right. It was open, and we went on through. There were three men in the room, one standing with his back to us, the second seated behind him, and the third sitting at a long library table. Val headed directly toward the second man. Suddenly nervous, I followed slowly behind him.

“Ahhh … the great mastodon,” came a reedy voice.

I couldn't see his face because an elderly black man was blocking his body. The black man wore a starched white jacket and was cutting the seated man's hair with a pair of shiny scissors. As I crossed in front of him, the enormous head of Abraham Lincoln came into view.

“Speaking as your commander-in-chief,” he said, staring up in mock distaste at Val, “let me say that your uniform is a gross insult to the military profession.”

In fact, I was surprised to note that Val had actually made an effort to improve his normally disheveled appearance. He had combed his hair and buttoned his uniform. Unfortunately, this sartorial splendor was undercut by a matting of orange cat hair that covered the front of his coat.

“I will continue this level of dedication to military decorum until you make me a civilian again,” replied Val.