Drive to the East

VI

Snyder, Texas, was a long way north of Baroyeca, Sonora. It could get just as hot, though. Hipolito Rodriguez didn’t know how or why that was so, but he knew it was. He’d seen as much in the summertime in Texas during the Great War.

It wasn’t summer yet, but the hot weather had arrived ahead of the season. Down in Baroyeca, he’d have worn a broad-brimmed straw sombrero, a loose-fitting cotton shirt, baggy trousers, and sandals. He would have been a lot more comfortable than he was in his gray guard uniform, too. The cap he had on didn’t keep the sun off him nearly well enough. And he especially hated his shiny black boots. He didn’t think he would ever get used to them. They pinched his feet at every step he took.

Nothing he could do about it, though. Guards had to stay in uniform. That was one of the rules, and nobody who didn’t stick to the rules had any business being a guard. Along with the rest of his squad, he stood by the train tracks that ran between Camp Determination and the new women’s camp alongside it.

Officially, the women’s camp was part of Camp Determination. Brigade Leader Pinkard-Rodriguez’s old war buddy-was in charge of it, too. Unofficially, the guards called the women’s half Camp Undecided. Despite being married to a thoroughly decisive woman, Rodriguez thought that was pretty funny.

All the guards carried submachine guns. Tower-mounted machine guns also bore on the disembarking point. Prisoners who tried anything cute ended up dead in a hurry. The overwhelming firepower on display helped persuade incoming Negroes that acting up wasn’t smart.

A big, swag-bellied Alabaman named Jerry pointed east down the track. “Look at the smoke,” he said. “Another load of niggers coming in.”

The sergeant in charge of the squad said, “Well, what the hell would we be cookin’ our brains for out here if there wasn’t another goddamn train comin’ in?” Tom Porter, like the men he led, was a Freedom Party guard, so his formal rank was troop leader, not sergeant, but he wore three stripes on the sleeve of his gray tunic, and he acted like every senior noncom Rodriguez had ever known.

Up in the towers, the machine guns swung toward the train when it was still a good half a mile off. A couple of the men in Rodriguez’s squad hefted their weapons. Other guards along the track also grew alert. Dog handlers patted their coon hounds. The dogs were called that because they were most often used to hunt raccoons. The men who used them here had a different sort of fun with the name.

Wheezing and groaning, the train slowed and then stopped. The locomotive had to date back to the turn of the century, if not further. Even in sleepy Sonora, it would have been an antique. More modern machines served closer to the front. This one would do for hauling mallates.

The passenger cars and freight cars it pulled had also seen better decades. Again, they were good enough for this. The passengers cars had shutters hastily nailed up outside their windows. That kept the blacks inside from looking out and people outside from looking in.

All the cars were locked from the outside. Tom Porter pointed to the two closest to his squad. “We’ll take ’em one at a time,” he said, “the front one first.” As he set his beefy hands on the latch, he added, “Be ready for anything. Niggers comin’ out, they’re liable to be a little crazy, or more than a little.”

When he opened the door, the first thing that rolled out was a ripe, rich stench: shit and piss and puke and stale, sour sweat. Rodriguez wrinkled his nose. Far too many people had been packed inside that passenger car for much too long. They came spilling out now, a jumble of misery, blinking and shading their eyes against the sudden harsh sunlight.

If you got the jump on them early, they usually didn’t get it back. “Move!” Porter screamed, and the other guards echoed him. “Men to the left! Women and pickaninnies to the right! Move, God damn you!”

They moved-the ones who could. Some just collapsed by the railroad car. Kicks and punches drove most of those to their feet. The rest were too far gone for even brutality to rouse. “Water!” one of them croaked in a dust-choked voice. “I gots to have water. Ain’t had no water since I dunno when.”

Rodriguez kicked him-not hard enough to cripple, just hard enough to make sure the mallate knew who was boss. “Get up!” he yelled. “No water here. Water inside the camp.” Slowly, the Negro struggled upright and stood swaying.

A plump black woman said, “Dey’s dead folks inside de car dere, poor souls.”

There usually were casualties on a journey like this. The cars carried six or seven times as many people as they were designed to hold. Food was whatever the Negroes managed to smuggle aboard the train. The windows wouldn’t open, and the shutters would have kept out most of the air if they had.

And, all things considered, this carload of blacks had it easy. They could have come to Camp Determination in a cattle car, the way a lot of Negroes in this train had. Nobody bothered cleaning cattle cars very well before loading people into them. They had no windows, shuttered or otherwise. They had no toilets, either, only a honey bucket or two. And they were so jammed with men, women, and children that getting to a honey bucket would have taken a small miracle.

A striking young woman with a dancer’s walk and high cheekbones that argued for an Indian grandparent sidled up to Rodriguez. “You keep me safe in here, I do anything you want,” she purred in a bedroom voice. “Anything at all. My name’s Thais. You look for me. I’m real friendly.”

“Go on. Get moving,” he said stonily, and her face fell. Like most of the guards, he heard something like what she’d said at least once whenever a train came in. Women thought it would help. Sometimes they were even right. Not here. Not now.

“Form lines! Bring your luggage! Form lines! Bring your luggage!” Like every squad leader, Tom Porter yelled the same thing over and over. “You gotta be searched! You gotta be deloused! You gotta be searched! You gotta be deloused!”

The searchers would take away all the weapons and all the valuables they found. That stuff was supposed to go back into the war effort. Some of it, maybe even most of it, did. The rest stuck to the searchers’ fingers. Searchers were senior men. They’d paid their dues, and now they were getting their reward. Some of them were getting to be wealthy men.

Slowly the lines formed. Even more slowly, they moved forward. Men and women too weak to rise in spite of calculated brutality lay by the railroad cars. “Get the stretcher parties out!” an officer shouted. “We’ll move them to the transfer facility!”

None of the guards laughed or winked or nudged one another. They’d got lessons about that. Never do anything to spook the spooks, one trainer had put it. The transfer facility was a killing truck. The only place they’d be transferred was the mass grave not far away. All the prisoners in Camp Determination were heading that way. The ones too weak to rise got an express ticket-that was the only difference.

Black men carried away the weaklings. The story the bearers got was that the trucks would take them to an infirmary a couple of miles away. The infirmary existed. Every once in a while, a Negro came back from it. That kept the inmates from flabbling about what happened to the ones who didn’t. More guards with submachine guns kept an eye on the stretcher bearers. But guards kept an eye on everybody all the time, so that didn’t seem out of the ordinary.

Guards went through the cars to bring out the dead, the dying, and anybody who thought he’d get sneaky and try to hide. It was nasty work, but they couldn’t trust it to the stretcher bearers, who were too soft on their own kind. Some of the dead ones had money or jewelry worth lifting. You never could tell.

Shouts farther down the train said another squad had caught a lurker. More shouts-these of pain-said he was getting what was coming to him. The guards would beat him to within an inch of his life. Then he’d get thrown on the first available truck “to the transfer facility”-and that would take care of the last inch.

“They’re such damn fools,” said a guard heaving bodies out of the car with Rodriguez. “They think we’re not gonna check the fuckin’ cars. Gotta be dumb as rocks if they do.”

“That’s right,” Rodriguez said.

“Damn straight it is,” the other guard said. Buchanan Thornton was his name-he told people to call him Buck. He had no doubts about anything, not as far as Rodriguez could see. Few whites in the CSA did, and Buck Thornton was as white as they came: sandy hair with a lot of gray in it, blue eyes, pointy nose, freckles.

If there weren’t blacks around to revile, he probably whiled away the time cussing at greasers. Where he was, though, he didn’t have the time or energy to worry about anything but Negroes. As a Sonoran, Rodriguez knew he was on the bottom rung of the social ladder. But he was on the ladder; down below lay the ooze and the muck-the blacks on whose back the ladder stood.

He looked down on them all the more because he was closer to them than people higher up the ladder. In an odd way, though, Negroes were an insurance policy for people of Mexican blood. As long as they were there, nobody except a few Texans got excited about his kind.

The first trucks rolled out of Camp Determination. When they came back, the mallates aboard them wouldn’t be there anymore. Rodriguez wouldn’t miss them a bit, either. The first Negroes he’d ever met had had guns in their hands. They’d done their level best to kill him. He’d hated and feared them ever since. If Jake Featherston wanted to get rid of them, more power to him and to the Freedom Party.

As more stretcher bearers hauled away dead and dying blacks, Rodriguez had an odd thought. Suppose Camp Determination and others like it-for there were bound to be others like it-succeeded. Suppose they made the Confederate States Negro-free. What would the country be like then?

It would be a lot safer, was the first answer that sprang into his mind. Mallates were nothing but trouble. Even now, they left car bombs in cities and bushwhacked whites in the countryside. Good riddance to them.

But if they were gone-if they were all gone-what would that social ladder be like? People always needed someone at whom they could look down their noses. Who would fall into that unenviable role?

People like me, Rodriguez thought-people with brown skin and black hair, people who spoke English with an accent. That might not be so good. He wondered why the question hadn’t occurred to him sooner.

He shrugged. That would come later, much later, if it ever happened at all. It wasn’t anything he had to lose sleep over, and he didn’t intend to. He had a job to do, and he was going to do it the best way he knew how.

And maybe he shouldn’t have looked down his nose at that Thais. She wasn’t bad, and he hadn’t seen Magdalena for a long time now. He shrugged again. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of fish in that particular sea.

Air-raid sirens howled, tumbling George Enos, Jr., out of bed much too early on a Sunday morning. Either somebody with a sadistic sense of humor had picked the time for a drill-always a possibility in the Navy-or the Japs were feeling friskier than usual.

When antiaircraft guns not far from the barracks started banging away, George got his answer. He also heard several anguished groans-gunfire and hangovers mixed poorly.

He took the time to throw on tunic and trousers and shoes before running for the closest slit trench. Not everybody bothered. Some people dashed out in nothing but skivvies. Nobody ragged them for it, either. In combat, what you had to do came first, with everything else a long way behind.

A fighter swooped low. Machine-gun bullets chewed up the grass and sent dirt jumping. Some of them kicked into the trench, too. Somebody howled like a coyote when a bullet found him. George scrunched himself up as small and as low as he could. His whites got filthy, but that was the least of his worries.

Most of the action, though, was well away from the barracks. The Japs were aiming for the harbor and the nearby airfield. Warships and airplanes could hurt them. Mere men were an afterthought.

Fremont Blaine Dalby jumped into the trench and just missed pulverizing George’s kidneys with his big feet. He must have dodged the strafing fighter’s bullets like a halfback dodging tacklers. “Bastards are going to pay for this,” he panted, crashing down beside George.

Something blew up with force enough to make the ground shake. “Looks like they’re dishing it out, not taking it,” George pointed out in a bellow that, under those circumstances, did duty for a whisper.

“Yeah, but if they want to yank the lion’s tail, they gotta stick their head in his mouth,” Dalby said. That wasn’t the way George would have gone about pulling a lion’s tail, assuming he were mad enough to try such a thing, but he knew better than to criticize a CPO’s choice of metaphors. And when Dalby went on, he was as concrete as Boulder Dam: “If their airplanes can reach us, ours can reach their carriers. And we must have known they were coming unless every goddamn Y-range operator in the Sandwich Islands is asleep at the switch. So we oughta be good and ready for ’em.”

“Here’s hoping,” George said.

An airplane smashed to the ground not far enough away. He stuck his head up, hoping to watch a Japanese pilot fry in the wreckage. But the burning fighter was American: he could still make out the eagle and crossed swords painted on the fuselage. He hoped the pilot had bailed out before his machine crashed. Then the warm, tropical breeze brought him the stink of burning meat. His stomach did a flipflop worse than any in the North Atlantic in wintertime.

Dalby stuck his head up, too. He was looking along the trench. “We’ve got a lot of our crew here,” he said. “We ought to find us a gun to man.”

The prospect of getting out of the trench did not fill George with delight. He wanted to tell Dalby as much. What came out of his mouth was, “I’ll follow you, Chief.” The desire not to look bad before one’s fellow man is a strange, compelling, and terribly powerful thing.

When Dalby yelled, Fritz Gustafson answered the call right away. George might have known nothing would faze the loader; even if he was scared, he was too damn stubborn to show it, probably even to himself. Dalby looked around again. The rest of the gun crew were either out of earshot or sensibly keeping their heads down and their mouths shut. “Screw it,” Dalby said. “We got a shell-heaver, a loader, and I can damn well aim. Come on.”

He scrambled out of the trench. George did follow him. If he muttered about how many different kinds of damn fool he was, then he did, that was all. There was still a hell of a lot of racket all around. Dalby either didn’t hear him or had a good enough excuse to pretend he didn’t.

“Plenty going on,” Gustafson said: a novel’s worth of words from him.

He wasn’t wrong. American and Japanese warplanes tangled overhead. If anybody had an edge, George couldn’t tell who it was. Both ground-based antiaircraft guns and those mounted on ships in Pearl Harbor were throwing shells up as fast as they could. Shrapnel was starting to come down, pattering and clattering off roofs and sidewalks and thumping into bare ground. George wished he had a helmet. That stuff would rearrange your brains if it hit you in the head.

“Come on,” Fremont Dalby said again. “Let’s find us a gun.” He trotted off as if he knew exactly where to do it.

And damned if he didn’t. Twin 40mm mounts were almost as thick as fleas on land as well as aboard ship. This one had fallen silent because a bomb burst behind it turned the crew to tattered red rags. George gulped. Blood splashed the guns’ breech ends and dappled the shells.

Dalby looked at the fallen gunners. “They’re dead,” he said, which was almost an understatement. “Not a damn thing we can do for ’em-except maybe pay the Japs back. You guys feed and load, I’ll aim, and we’ll all hope like hell.”

George got blood on his hands when he passed shells to Fritz Gustafson. The loader got more on his when he shoved them home. Dalby aimed at a bomber.

The gun roared. Shell casings leaped from the breeches and clanged on the cement sidewalk. With only three men to serve the piece, it couldn’t fire as fast as it would have with a whole crew. Nobody cared. They were hitting back, not just taking a pounding the way they had been.

George had no idea whether they hit anything. He didn’t have time to look up. He was too busy doing his job, trying to pass as much ammunition as two men would. The loader didn’t complain, and neither did Fremont Dalby. He couldn’t have done too badly, then.

Only when the gun fell silent did he pause, blinking in surprise. “No more targets,” Dalby announced. “They’ve flown the coop.”

When George glanced at his wristwatch, he blinked in amazement. He also took a good, long look to make sure the second hand was going around. “We’ve only been here fifteen minutes?” he said.

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Dalby said. “I think maybe we ran ’em off. Other question is, what did they do to us?”

Whenever George moved, his shoes left bloody footprints. He didn’t want to look at what was left of the gun’s original crew. But, in a fight like this, men were small change. How many airplanes had the Japs lost? Would they lose any carriers? Measure that against the damage they’d done and you’d get some idea of who’d come out on top. Maybe.

“You men!” That was an unmistakable officer’s bark. Along with his shipmates, George turned, came to attention, and saluted. The unmistakable officer-a lieutenant commander, no less-kept on barking: “I haven’t seen you before, and I know damn well this isn’t your proper station. Explain yourselves.”

“Sir, we’re from the Townsend,” Dalby answered. “We were looking for a way to hit back at the enemy. You can see for yourself what happened to the men who were posted here. We fought this gun as well as we could, sir.” He spoke calmly, quietly, respectfully. Only his eyes asked, What were you doing while all this crap was going on?

The lieutenant commander had some mileage on him. By the fruit salad on his chest, he’d started out during the Great War. He knew what the petty officer wasn’t saying. Knowing, he turned red-not so red as George’s footprints, but red enough. “Carry on,” he said in a choked voice, and got out of there in a hurry.

“You showed him,” George said.

“Yeah.” Fremont Dalby didn’t sound happy. “You shouldn’t have to show officers, though, especially not the ones who’ve been around the block. But some of ’em just have to make like they’re God.”

When stretcher bearers came by, the men from the Townsend waved to them. They hurried over, but they didn’t stay. “We’re supposed to be looking for wounded,” one of them said. “Those birds ain’t goin’ anywhere if we leave ’em where they’re at. Sooner or later, the meat wagon will deal with ’em.”

“Not right,” George said. “These guys were doing everything they could till their number came up. Shouldn’t just leave ’em like garbage.” Actually, they reminded him of what was all over the decks of the Sweet Sue after the men on the fishing boat had been gutting big cod.

But Dalby cut the stretcher bearers more slack than he’d given the officer. “Wounded count for more,” he allowed. “You can still save them.”

“Thanks, Chief,” said the man who’d spoken before. The bearers hurried away.

Dalby looked at his shipmates. “Either one of you notice if we had bombers taking off?”

“Not me,” George said at once. “I was too busy trying not to let the Japs blow me to kingdom come, and then trying to shoot ’em down.”

“We did,” Fritz Gustafson said. “They were already airborne when I hit the trench.” Two consecutive sentences from him were a telephone book, an unabridged dictionary, from a noisier man.

Fremont Dalby nodded. “That’s pretty good. We ought to be hitting back pretty damn quick, then. Those bastards need to pay.”

“Bombers should have taken off the minute we picked up the Japs’ airplanes on the Y-range set,” George said.

“Yeah,” Dalby said thoughtfully, and then, in deeper, gruffer, angrier tones, “Yeah!” He kicked at the sidewalk. “Yeah, goddammit. Somebody was asleep at the switch again. That would have been the best way to do it, sure as hell. Christ, there are times when I really do think we want to lose this fuckin’ war.”

“Hey, Dalby, you still in one piece?” The shout came from the direction in which the gunners had come. Only another CPO would have used the gun chief’s naked surname with such relish.

“Yeah, we’re here, Burnett.” Dalby gave back what he’d got. “Leastways we didn’t stay in the trench sucking our thumbs and hanging on to our Theodore bears.”

Chief Burnett’s reply offered an improbable and uncomfortable destination for both thumbs and Theodore bears. Dalby suggested that Burnett’s mother already resided there. Burnett gave forth with an opinion on certain habits of Dalby’s mother about which he was unlikely to have personal knowledge. Then, in the same unruffled tone of voice, he asked, “You cocksuckers hit anything?”

“Damfino,” Dalby answered, also without much heat. “We gave it our best shot, that’s all.” He slapped Gustafson and George on the back, staggering them both-and George was not a small man, and Fritz Gustafson was a big one. “You already knew the squarehead’s solid. And this guy here ain’t half bad.”

George shuffled his feet on the blood-splashed sidewalk. “Thanks, Chief,” he mumbled. A Naval Cross from the hands of an admiral wouldn’t have meant nearly so much as that laconic praise from a man who mattered to him.

“Well, well,” Tom Colleton said. “What have we here?”

What they had there was a company of Confederate barrels: big, snorting machines painted in butternut with swirls and splotches of dark green and dark brown to make them harder to spot and harder to hit. But they were barrels the likes of which hadn’t been seen up in Ohio before.

Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton strolled over for a closer look at the new monsters. They were plainly related to the beasts that had spearheaded the Confederate thrust to Lake Erie the summer before. They were just as plainly bigger and meaner-Tyrannosaurus rex next to the earlier Allosaurus. They seemed more squat, lower to the ground. As Tom Colleton got up to them, he realized they weren’t, but the impression remained. Instead of going straight up and down, most of their armor was cleverly sloped to help deflect shells. And their turret guns were bigger and longer than those of the earlier models.

One of the barrel drivers was head and shoulders out of his machine: no point in buttoning up when the damnyankees weren’t close. “That’s a two-and-a-half-inch cannon you’ve got there?” Colleton asked.

“Three inches, sir,” the man answered, proud as if he’d said eight inches of himself. “Some of those Yankees’ll never know what hit ’em. Seventeen-pound shell.”

“Sweet Jesus!” Tom exclaimed. “Yeah, that’ll make you sit up and take notice, all right. How many of these bastards have we got?”

“Many as we need, I reckon,” the driver said.

“Oh, yeah? I’ll believe that when I see it,” Tom Colleton said. In his experience, nobody ever had as many barrels as he needed. The enemy wrecked a few, some more broke down-and then, just when they would have come in handy to take out some well-sited, well-protected machine-gun nests, there wouldn’t be any for miles around.

But the driver nodded. Why not? He could duck down inside all that lovely armor plating. He didn’t have to look longingly at it from the outside. He didn’t have to worry about machine guns, either, no matter how well protected they were. He said, “Sir, don’t you fret. This time, by God, we’re going to get the job done.”

“Here’s hoping,” Tom said. The driver-a cocky kid-just grinned at him. He found himself grinning back. It wasn’t as if barrel crewmen didn’t have worries of their own. When they were in the field, they were cannon magnets. All the enemy’s heavy weapons bore on them. The armor that kept out small-arms fire could turn into a roasting pan to cook soldiers if something did get through.

“You’ll see.” Yeah, the kid was cocky.

He also sounded like somebody who knew more than he was letting on. “What is the job we’re going to get done?” Tom asked. He commanded a regiment; nobody’d bothered to tell him anything. He should have been miffed that a noncom from another unit knew more about what was going on than he did. He should have been, but he wasn’t, or not very. He’d seen enough in both the Great War and this one to know that kind of crap happened all the time.

Before the barrel driver could answer, somebody inside the machine said something to him through the intercom. Tom heard the squawk in the kid’s earphones, but he couldn’t make out any words. The driver said, “Sorry, sir-gotta go. Orders are to push up a little closer to the front.”

“Be careful,” Tom warned. “The damnyankees have started sneaking in more and more infiltrators. They like to plant mines, and their snipers try and blow the heads off drivers and commanders who don’t stay buttoned up.”

“Sir, we’ve got us this big ol’ cannon and two machine guns. I reckon we can make any old infiltrators knuckle under,” the driver answered. He ducked down into the barrel, but didn’t close the hatch. The engine’s note deepened as the machine rattled forward with its companions.

Tom stared after them, coughing a little from the noxious exhaust fumes. He would have bet everything he owned that the kid had never seen combat. Nobody who had was that casual about snipers. If the other guy shot first, how big your gun was or how many rounds per minute you could put out didn’t matter.

“Luck,” Tom muttered. If that smiling puppy lived through his first couple of brushes with U.S. soldiers, he had a good chance of living quite a while longer. You got experience in a hurry-or, if you didn’t, they buried you somewhere up here with a helmet stuck on a stick or on a rifle to mark where you lay.

That fancy barrel the kid was driving couldn’t help but improve his odds. If we’d had these when the war started… Tom shook his head. The CSA hadn’t had them, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. The damnyankees hadn’t had them, either. How long would they need to come up with barrels that matched these? How long before both sides sported land dreadnoughts, behemoths that laughed at danger and squashed antlike mortal men under their tracks without even knowing they were there?

Tom shook his head again. Nothing he could do about it except try to make sure he wasn’t one of the poor sorry bastards who got squashed. He had no guarantees of that, either, and he knew it.

The barrels had rolled east out of Sandusky, not west. That said something, anyhow. He’d expected them to go in that direction, but nothing was carved in stone. It did look as if the CSA would have to hit the USA another lick to make the bigger country fall over. Cutting the United States in half hadn’t quite done the job.

Why hadn’t Al Smith thrown in the sponge, dammit? Everybody could have gone home. Tom would rather have been in St. Matthews than in Sandusky. He didn’t know anybody who wanted to be here. But needing to be here was a different story.

Not all the reinforcements that came in were armored units. The infantrymen Tom saw made him raise an eyebrow. They weren’t raw troops in fresh uniforms. They wore butternut frayed at the cuffs and the elbows and knees, faded by the sun, and deprived of all possibility of holding a crease by hard use. Their weapons were well tended, but a long way from factory-new. They were, in other words, just as much veterans as the men he commanded.

Where had they come from? Virginia seemed the only likely answer. Outside of Ohio, it was the only place that could have produced men like this. Fighting went on here and there in the West, but neither side put full force into that effort. The CSA and the USA both seemed sure the decision would come where they were strongest, not at the periphery. As far as Tom could see, the big brains on both sides were likely right.

But the damnyankees were still pounding away in Virginia. Could the Confederate States pull men out of there and go on holding them off? Tom had to hope so.

A day or two later, he realized that wasn’t necessarily the right question. An even more pressing one was, couldn’t the Confederate States do anything in Ohio without bleeding Virginia of men? The answer to that one looked to be no, and it wasn’t the answer Tom wanted to find. Robbing Peter to pay Paul wasn’t a good way to fight a war.

But what choice did the CSA have? None Tom could see. This was the downside of getting into a fight with a country that had a lot more manpower than you did. He called down more curses on Al Smith’s head. The whole idea of storming up through Ohio, of cutting the United States in half, had been to knock the USA out of the fight before numbers really mattered. The Confederates had tried it. They’d succeeded as well as they’d hoped to. Everything had been perfect.

Except the United States hadn’t quit.

Now the Confederate States faced the same sort of grinding struggle as they’d seen in the Great War. What should have been a one-punch KO was a no-holds-barred wrestling match now.

Airplanes droned by overhead. Tom Colleton cast a wary eye up to the heavens. He knew where he’d jump if they turned out to be U.S. airplanes. He looked for shelter as automatically as he breathed. That he looked for shelter so automatically helped keep him breathing.

But they were C.S. machines. Even when the silhouettes were tiny, he recognized them. He wondered what he’d do when his side-or the damnyankees-brought out new models. He had a pretty good notion, too: the first few times, he’d dive for cover whether he needed to or not. After that, he’d be able to tell friend from foe again.

The day was coming. It was probably coming soon. The Confederate States had new, improved barrels. Before long, they were bound to have new, improved airplanes, too. So were the United States.

Where would it end? Probably with both sides flying to the moon, with guns that could strike from five hundred miles away, and with bombs that could blow up whole counties if not whole states. Tom laughed at himself, but then he wondered why. Back in 1917, he couldn’t have imagined the weapons the CSA and the USA were using now. What would the state of the art be in 1967, or in 1992?

He shivered, standing there under the warm spring sunshine. Things were much deadlier now than they had been a generation earlier. If that went on for another twenty-five years, wouldn’t wars end almost before they started? And if not, why not?

“Sir?”

Tom started. He wondered how long the sergeant standing beside him had been trying to get his attention. By the exaggerated patience on the man’s face, he’d done everything but wave wigwag flags. “What is it, Meyers?” Tom asked. “I’m here-I really am.”

“That’s good, sir,” Sergeant Meyers said. “I was going to ask you if you knew when the balloon was going up. Not officially, you understand, but if you knew. It’d help the men get ready.”

“I wish to God I did, Sergeant, but whatever we’re doing, nobody has bothered to tell me about it yet. You can take that for whatever you think it’s worth.” Tom’s laugh was half rueful, half furious. “One of the drivers for those new barrels had a pretty good notion, or reckoned he did. He had to pull out before he could tell me what it was. Damned impressive barrel, though.”

“Oh, yes, sir!” Meyers was not a man given to wild enthusiasms; few sergeants were. That sort of man was much more likely to be a private or a lieutenant. But the sergeant waxed enthusiastic now. “We have enough of those critters, we’ll make the damnyankees say uncle for sure.”

“I hope you’re right, Sergeant.” Tom meant it. After what the C.S. Army had been through the year before, though, and after what it had accomplished, he took nothing for granted. That any one weapon, no matter how wonderful, could knock the USA out of the war struck him as unlikely.

He kept his mouth shut. If Sergeant Meyers thought the Yankees would fall over dead as soon as the Confederates kicked them back one more hill, fine. That made him a more cheerful soldier, a better soldier, at least until the damnyankees did get pushed back past that last hill, if they ever did. If they got pushed back and didn’t fall over dead… Well, in that case Meyers and the other men like him would have some rethinking to do. He might not be such a terrific soldier for a while after that.

Wherever we’re going, we’re going east, Tom thought. Right into the heart of Yankeeland. We’d better make ’em say uncle, by God.

“Steady as she goes, Mr. Cooley,” Sam Carsten told his executive officer.

“Steady as she goes-aye aye, sir,” Pat Cooley replied, his freckled face intent on keeping the Josephus Daniels as steady as she could possibly go. The destroyer escort crept through the hot, muggy night towards a shoreline that was…

Carsten didn’t like to think about how very ready to receive them that Virginia shoreline probably was. Keeping anything secret in these crowded waters required a miracle beyond the power of any Navy Department functionary to provide. Sam wasn’t altogether certain the Holy Ghost could have given him one as big as he needed. Sneaking into Chesapeake Bay without getting either mined or torpedoed hadn’t been the smallest of miracles all by itself.

He spoke into the telephone that connected the bridge with the gun turrets: “Everything ready there? You have your targets?”

“Yes, sir!” the gun chiefs answered together.

“All right, then.” Sam smiled there in the darkness. Even as a rating, he’d been in charge of bigger pieces than these four-inch popguns. “At my order, and give it everything you’ve got… Fire!”

Twin tongues of flame belched from the turrets, lighting up the night for a heartbeat with a hellish orange glow. Recoil made the ship shudder. Those tongues thrust out again, and then again and again, as each gun crew did its best to prove it was faster than the other. First the bow turret took the lead, then the stern. All told, judging a winner was next to impossible.

Splashes of fire inland told of shell hits. Sam knew where the target was, but not what it was. That evidently wasn’t necessary for the mission. He kept an eye on the luminous hands of his watch. When exactly five minutes had gone by, he said, “Cease firing,” into the telephone. An aching silence fell. He turned to the exec. “Mr. Cooley, I do believe we may have worn out our welcome. Get us out of here. All ahead full, course 010.”

“All ahead full, course 010.” Cooley rang the engine room. The Josephus Daniels put on as many revolutions and as much speed as she had. Sam was used to ships with a lot more dash. He felt nailed to the surface of the bay despite the phosphorescent wake streaming from the bow. Destroyer escorts were cheap and easy and fast to build. Considering their liabilities, they needed to be.

On the shore, the Confederates were waking up. First one field gun and then a whole battery started firing at where the Josephus Daniels had been. Those were 105s-guns of about the same caliber as the destroyer escort carried.

The bridge telephone rang. When Sam picked it up, one of the turret chiefs said, “Sir, permission to return enemy fire?”

“Permission denied,” Sam answered, in lieu of screaming, Are you out of your frigging mind? He went on, “We’ve done what we came to do here. Now our job is to get out in one piece so we can come back and do it again one day before long. Shooting back makes us much too visible, and they have more guns than we do. We just scoot. Got that?”

“Yes, sir,” the turret chief said sullenly. Carsten found it hard to fault a man who wanted to raise hell with the enemy, but you needed a sense of proportion. No, I need a sense of proportion. That’s why I’m the Old Man. There were times when he felt like a very old man indeed.

Pat Cooley eyed him from the wheel. Cooley was ten times the ship handler he would ever be. Sam hadn’t taken the wheel of any ship till he became the skipper here. “Your thoughts, Mr. Cooley?” Sam asked.

“Sir, I’d like to shoot back at those bastards,” the exec answered. Sam stiffened. But after a moment Cooley went on, “You’re right, though. Probably a good idea that we don’t. They’re missing us pretty bad-if I were in charge of that battery, I’d be reaming ’em out right now.”

But the man in charge of that C.S. battery-a sergeant or lieutenant tumbled from his blanket when the Josephus Daniels opened up-had a better idea. Two of his guns fired star shells that lit up the bay-and the destroyer escort-with a cold, clear, terrible light.

Men at the antiaircraft guns started shooting at the star shells. If they could wreck the parachutes that supported them in the air, the blazing shells would fall into the sea and sizzle out. The bow turret no longer bore on the Confederate battery. The stern turret opened up without orders. Sam only nodded to himself. With the Josephus Daniels out there in plain sight, a muzzle flash or three didn’t make a rat’s ass’ worth of difference.

And she was out there in plain sight. The Confederate guns on the coast wasted no time correcting their aim. Shells began bursting around and on the destroyer escort. Most of the ships on which Sam had served would have laughed at 105mm shells. But the Josephus Daniels, like any destroyer, was thin-skinned. She had no armor to protect her. Screams made Sam grind his teeth. Men serving the antiaircraft guns topside were vulnerable aboard any ship that floated. He knew that. Knowing it left it no easier to take.

“Smoke, Mr. Cooley,” he said. “We’ll see how much good it does.”

“Smoke. Aye aye, sir.”

More star shells lit up the night. Smoke blossomed around the Josephus Daniels. It helped less than it might have under other circumstances. Sam had feared as much. She was the only thing afloat in this part of Chesapeake Bay. If the smoke screen moved, she had to be at the front end of it. Knowing that, the Confederate gunners didn’t lose a whole lot of accuracy from not being able to see their target anymore.

Nothing to do but take the pounding and try to get away. Sam had heard Great War stories about how raiders caught between their trench line and the enemy’s hated star shells with a purple passion. Now he understood exactly how they felt. There you were, all lit up, naked as a bug on a plate.

A big boom and a flash of light from the shore said the Daniels’ gun had hit something worthwhile-probably the ammunition store for one of the guns shooting at the ship. Before Sam could let out a whoop, a Confederate shell burst just forward of the bridge. He watched a machine-gun crew blown to cat’s meat. Fragments whistled and screeched past him. After pausing to make sure he was still in one piece, he asked, “You all right, Mr. Cooley?”

“Everything’s copacetic here, Skipper,” Cooley said, and then, “Well, almost everything.” He displayed his left sleeve, which had a brand-new gash in it. An inch farther in and he would have gone down to the sick bay with a wounded arm. Six inches farther in and they would have had to carry him to sick bay with a belly wound. Even with all the fancy drugs they had these days, belly wounds were very bad news.

“Good for you, Pat.” That sliced sleeve made Sam less formal than usual. “You don’t really want a Purple Heart, no matter how pretty the ribbon would look on your uniform.”

“Yes, sir,” Cooley said. Another shell screamed in. He and Sam both ducked automatically, not that ducking was likely to do a hell of a lot of good. The shell was a clean miss, bursting a good hundred yards to starboard. A little hesitantly, the exec asked, “Are we going to get out of this, sir?”

Sam thought of talking about the Battle of the Three Navies, when the British and the Japanese hit the Dakota with everything but their purse. He thought about the Remembrance’s last fight, when Japanese air power finally sank the tough old carrier. In the end, though, he just stuck to business: “Unless we take one in the engine room that leaves us dead in the water, we will. Otherwise, those 105s may hurt us, but they won’t be able to kill us before we get out of range.”

Cooley considered that, then nodded. He looked at his wristwatch. “At flank speed, we’ve got to stand the gaff for-what? About another fifteen minutes?”

Carsten checked his watch, too. He laughed ruefully. “Yeah, that’s about right. I didn’t think it would be so long. Aren’t we lucky?”

“Lucky. Right.” Cooley managed an answering grin, but one of a distinctly sepulchral sort. A Confederate shell burst just behind the stern. Those near misses were dangerous, because fragments still flew. Screams from that direction said some of these had struck home.

“Can you give us any more down there?” Sam yelled to the engine room through a speaking tube.

“Sir, she’s flat out,” the chief engineer said. “Shit, we’ve got the valves tied down the way they did on the old paddle-wheel riverboats.”

“All right-thanks.” Sam sighed. He shouldn’t have expected anything different. He hadn’t really, but he’d hoped for something like, Oh, yes, sir, we’ll dreelspayl the paragore and get you two more knots easy as you please. Two more knots? He snorted. He wanted ten more. Well, sonny boy, you ain’t gonna get ’em. He turned back to the exec. “Do you think we ought to throw some zigzags into the course?”

“Straight gets us out of range faster,” Cooley said doubtfully.

“Yeah, but it lets them lead us, too,” Sam answered. “Ever hunt ducks?”

“Once or twice, but I didn’t like it. It’s not all it’s quacked up to be.”

“Ouch. Don’t do that again. I think I’d rather-” Sam broke off. However bad Cooley’s occasional puns were, he didn’t prefer being under Confederate gunfire to listening to them.

The exec did start zigzagging at random. That would have been better with another ten knots, too, but you did what you could with what you had. Sam thought it helped. They took another hit and a couple of more near misses, but nothing that slowed them down. And, even though those were some of the longest fifteen minutes of Sam’s life, they finally ended.

By then, all the shells were coming in astern of the Josephus Daniels. When the Confederates realized as much, they ceased fire.

“Now we’re home free, if one of their airplanes doesn’t find us,” Sam said.

“You’re full of cheerful thoughts, aren’t you, sir?” Cooley said.

“Like a sardine can is full of sardines, son,” Sam answered. “Straighten out and head for home. I’m gong to assess the damage. Keep straight unless we’re attacked. If they jump us before I’m back to the bridge-” He broke off again. “Belay that. I’ll take the conn. You go assess the damage and report back.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Cooley didn’t question him. The Josephus Daniels was his, Sam Carsten’s, no one else’s. Responsibility for her was his, too. He couldn’t stand the idea of anything happening if he wasn’t there when it did. Cooley said, “I’ll hustle, sir.”

Sam stared at the Y-range screens as the ship sped up toward Maryland. No aircraft heading his way, nothing on the water. He didn’t think the Confederates had anything bigger than a torpedo boat operating in the bay, but a torpedo boat could ruin you if you didn’t spot it till too late.

Cooley came back. “Sir, looks like four to six dead, a couple of dozen wounded. We’ve got one wrecked 40mm mount-that’s the worst of the damage. The rest is mostly metalwork. All things considered, we got away cheap.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. We got away cheap. The dead and the maimed would not agree with the exec. Sam found that he was inclined to. War measured what you dished out against what you took. By that grim arithmetic, the Josephus Daniels had got away cheap.

Hyrum Rush had gone back to Utah and been passed through the lines into Mormon-held territory under flag of truce. As far as Flora Blackford was concerned, even that was better than he deserved. His parting words before getting on the train that would take him west were, “You people will see what this costs you.” If he hadn’t been under safe-conduct, that would have been plenty to make Flora lock him up and throw away the key.

“The nerve of the man!” she spluttered when his warning-his threat? — got back to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. “We should never have talked with him in the first place!”

“There I agree with you completely,” Robert Taft said. “You will have more luck persuading the administration than I’m likely to, though.”

Taft was a famously acerbic man, and also one given to understatement. He remained the leading hard-line Democrat in the Senate. Flora worried about agreeing with him. He no doubt also worried about agreeing with her.

“I’ve never said Socialists can’t make mistakes,” Flora answered. “I have said they aren’t the only ones who can make mistakes. Some people don’t recognize the difference.”

He gave her a tight smile-the only kind his face had room for. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” he said, and she found herself smiling back.

They had plenty to do, questioning officers and men about the bloody fiasco at Fredericksburg. About the most anybody-including Daniel MacArthur-would say to defend it was, It seemed like a good idea at the time. Trying to pin down why it had seemed a good idea was like trying to scoop up water with a sieve. The committee remained very busy and accomplished very little.

Like anyone else these days, Hyrum Rush had to go up through Canada to travel from east to west. Flora kept track of his progress through Franklin Roosevelt. “I hope you’re making him cool his heels up there,” she told the Assistant Secretary of War.

“We thought about it, Congresswoman,” he said. “We thought about it long and hard-believe you me we did. Finally, though, we decided that showing him how bad our bottleneck up there really is would only encourage him. And so we hustled him through instead.”

Flora thought about that. Reluctantly, she nodded. “You’re inconveniencing him most by inconveniencing him least,” she said.

Even over the telephone, his laugh made her want to laugh along with him. “That’s just what we’re doing, Flora,” he said between chortles. “The only thing is, I didn’t know it was what we were doing till you told me just now. I’m going to steal your line every chance I get, and most of the time I’m not going to give you any credit.”

“Who in politics ever does give anybody else any credit?” Flora said, which only set him laughing again.

She stopped worrying about Hyrum Rush once she heard he’d got back to what his people called Deseret. Sooner or later, the U.S. Army would grind it out of existence-for good this time, she hoped. Utah and the Mormons had been a running sore on the body politic for much too long.

The biggest question facing the Joint Committee was whether it would have the nerve to tell the War Department to put somebody besides Daniel MacArthur in charge in Virginia. Flora was convinced the man didn’t deserve his command. But she also saw he had an aura of invulnerability about him-not because of his battlefield talents but because of his personality.

George Custer had had an aura like that during the Great War. Even Teddy Roosevelt had moved carefully around him. Of course, Custer and Roosevelt-the other Roosevelt-had been rivals for years, ever since the Second Mexican War. But no one in the present administration had anything close to TR’s own strength of character. That being so, any decisive steps without prodding from the Joint Committee struck even Flora, a good Socialist, as unlikely.

She was saying so, pointedly enough to dismay Chairman Norris, when an explosion made the building shake. Plaster pattered down from the ceiling. Somebody said, “That was a close one.”

Somebody else said, “Damn Confederates haven’t sent any day bombers for a while-begging your pardon, Congresswoman.”

“Oh, I damn them, too,” Flora said. “You don’t need to doubt that for even a minute, believe me.” She looked down at her notes. “May I continue, Mr. Chairman?”

“You have the floor, Congresswoman.” Senator Norris looked as if he wished she didn’t.

“Thank you, sir.” The florid politeness that had once seemed so unnatural to her was now second nature. “As I was saying-”

But before she could say it, a man in a guard’s uniform stuck his head into the meeting room. “We’re evacuating the building. That was an auto bomb near the front entrance. We don’t know if they’ve got any more close by.” He grimaced. “We don’t even know who they are, dammit.” He didn’t apologize for swearing in front of Flora.

They. The enemy within never went away. Who was it this time? Confederate saboteurs? Mormons living up to Hyrum Rush’s promise? Rebellious Canadians? British agents? Any combination of those groups working together? Flora didn’t know. Somebody was going to have to find out, though.

“Please come with me,” the guard said.

“Before we do, let’s see your identification,” Robert Taft snapped. Flora reluctantly allowed that that made good sense. If the man in the uniform was part of the plot… People were going to start looking under beds before they went to sleep if this went on.

The guard showed Senator Taft his identity card without a word of protest. Satisfied, Flora nodded. Flora wondered what Taft would have done if the man had gone for his pistol instead. Probably thrown himself at it-he had the courage of his convictions, as well as plenty of courage of the ordinary sort.

Following the guard, the members of the Joint Committee hurried out of the massive building Congress used in Philadelphia-wags called it the box the Capitol came in. They emerged on the side opposite the one where the auto bomb had gone off. Along with several others, Flora started around the building so she could see the damage for herself. “That isn’t safe!” the guard exclaimed.

“And how do you know standing here is?” she answered. “Any one of these motorcars may be full of TNT and ready to blow up.” The guard looked very unhappy, which didn’t mean she was wrong.

“You told him,” Taft said approvingly.

“So I did,” she said, and hurried on. A makeshift police and fire line stopped her and the others before they got very close to the site of the explosion. Even what they could see from there was bad enough. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay everywhere. The front of the hall had taken heavy damage. It all seemed worse than the aftermath of an air raid, perhaps because the auto’s chassis turned into more, and more lethal, shrapnel than a bomb casing did. One of Flora’s colleagues was noisily sick on his shoes.

“Someone will pay for this.” Robert Taft sounded grim.

No sooner had he spoken than half the facade of the Congressional hall crashed down to the cratered street. A great gray-brown cloud of dust rose. Soldiers and policemen rushed into it to rescue whoever lay buried under the rubble. Flora covered her face with her hands.

A reporter chose that moment to rush up to her and ask, “Congresswoman, what do you think of this explosion?”

“I hope not too many people got hurt. I hope the ones who did will recover.” Flora realized the man had a job to do, but she didn’t feel like answering foolish questions right now.

That didn’t stop the reporter from asking them. With an air of breathless anticipation, he said, “Who do you think is to blame for this atrocity?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure there will be an investigation,” Flora said.

“But if you had to guess, who would be responsible?” he persisted.

“If I had to guess right now, I would be irresponsible,” Flora told him.

The answer should have made him take a hint and go away. No such luck. He was not one of those reporters who recognized anything as subtle as a hint. And that turned out to be just as well, for his next question told Flora something she didn’t know: “What do you think of the explosions in Washington and New York and Boston and Pittsburgh and Chicago and-other places, too?”

“What explosions?” Flora and Robert Taft spoke together, in identical sharp tones.

“Whole bunch of auto bombs.” The reporter seemed as willing to give information as to try to pry it out of other people. “The Capitol and Wall Street and the State House in Boston and I don’t know what all else. Lots of damage, lots of people dead. All about the same time as this one. News was coming over the wire and by wireless when I got the call to get my, uh, fanny over here.”

“Jesus Christ!” Taft burst out. Flora didn’t echo him, but her thoughts amounted to something similar. He went on, “This has the smell of a conspiracy.” Flora wouldn’t have argued with that, either.

The reported scribbled in his spiral-bound notebook. “Smell of a conspiracy,” he repeated, and dipped his head. “Thank you, Senator-that’s a good line.” He hurried off.

“A good line,” Taft echoed bitterly. “That’s all he cared about. But my God-if what he said about those other places is true…”

“That would be very bad,” Flora said, one of the larger understatements of her own political career. “The Confederates have had a lot of trouble with auto bombs. I wonder if they’re paying us back, or if it’s someone else.”

As she had to the reporter, Taft said, “I don’t know.”

She nodded. But her conscience niggled at her all the same. She’d applauded when she heard about auto bombs going off in the Confederate States. The Confederates, after all, deserved it for the way they treated their Negroes.

Again, who thought the United States deserved it? The Confederates, because the USA had had the gall to win the Great War? The Mormons, because the United States wouldn’t leave their precious Deseret alone? She would have bet one them, but what did she have for proof? Nothing, and she knew it. The Canadians, because the United States still held their land? The British, because the Americans had taken Canada away from them?

All of the above? None of the above?

Sounding both furious and frightened, Robert Taft went on, “We’d better get a handle on this business in a hurry. If we don’t, any damn fool with an imaginary grievance will think he can load dynamite into a motorcar and get even with the world.”

Flora’s thoughts hadn’t gone in that direction, which didn’t mean the Senator from Ohio was wrong. She said, “We’d better get a handle on this for all kinds of reasons.” Two firemen carried a moaning, bloody woman past her on a stretcher. She pointed. “There’s one.”

“Yes.” Taft tipped his fedora to her. “We have our differences, you and I, but we both love this country.”

“That’s true. Not always in the same way, but we do,” Flora said. Cops helped a wounded man stagger by. Flora sighed. “At a time like this, though, what difference does party make?”

Sergeant Michael Pound was not a happy man. His barrel-and, in fact, his whole unit of barrels-had finally escaped from the southern Ohio backwater where they’d been stuck for so long. They were facing the Confederates farther north. That should have done something to improve the gunner’s temper. It should have, but it hadn’t.

No, Pound remained unhappy, and made only the slightest efforts to hide it. He was a broad-shouldered, burly man: not especially tall, but made for slewing a gun from side to side if the hydraulics went out. He had a deceptively soft voice, and used it to say deceptively mild things. When he thought the men put above him were idiots, as he often did, he had a way of making sure they knew it.

What really irked him was that he’d been the gunner on Irving Morrell’s personal barrel. Whatever Morrell found out, Pound had learned shortly thereafter. Morrell hadn’t minded his sarcastic comments on the way the brass thought (if the brass thought at all: always an interesting question). And Michael Pound hadn’t thought Morrell was an idiot. Oh, no-on the contrary. The only thing wrong with Morrell was that his superiors hadn’t seen how good he was.

The Confederates had. After their sniper put a bullet in Morrell, Pound was the one who’d carried him out of harm’s way and back to the aid tent. Scuttlebutt said Morrell was finally back in action. That was good. The CSA would be sorry.

But Morrell wasn’t back in action here. That wasn’t good, and it especially wasn’t good for Michael Pound. He’d declined a commission several times. Now he was paying for it. Because of his reputation as a mouthy troublemaker, he didn’t even command his own barrel, though a lot of sergeants did. They’d put him under a young lieutenant instead. Pound didn’t know if they’d deliberately intended to humiliate him, but they’d sure done the job.

Bryce Poffenberger might have been born when Pound joined the Army, but probably hadn’t. But he owned a little gold bar on each shoulder strap, and Pound had only stripes on his sleeve. That meant Poffenberger was God-and if you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask him.

He never asked for Pound’s opinion. He didn’t seem to think the War Department had issued opinions to enlisted men. If he’d had a better notion of what he was doing himself, Pound wouldn’t have minded so much. But he never had been able to suffer fools gladly, and he never had been able to suffer in silence, either.

When Poffenberger ordered the barrel to stop on the forward slope of a hill, Pound said, “Sir, we would have done better to halt on the reverse slope.”

“Oh?” The second lieutenant’s voice already had a defensive quaver to it, and he’d known Pound for only a few days at that point. “Why, pray tell?”

Pray tell? Pound thought. Had anyone since the Puritans really said that? Bryce Poffenberger just had, by God. Patiently, the sergeant answered, “Because on the reverse slope we’re hull-down to the enemy, sir. This way, the whole barrel makes a nice, juicy target.”

Lieutenant Poffenberger sniffed. “I don’t believe there are any Confederates close by.” He stood up in the turret to look out through the cupola. That was something good barrel commanders did. It took a certain nerve. Poffenberger might have been a moron, but he wasn’t a cowardly moron.

Not half a minute later, a round from a Confederate antibarrel gun assassinated an oak tree just to the barrel’s left. Poffenberger ducked back down with a startled squeak. Sometimes-not often-Sergeant Pound was tempted to believe in God. This was one of those times.

“Reverse!” Poffenberger ordered the driver. “Back up!” The Confederates got off one more shot at the barrel before it put the hill between itself and the gun. Lieutenant Poffenberger eyed Michael Pound. “How did you know that was going to happen, Sergeant?”

“I have more combat experience than you do, sir,” Pound answered matter-of-factly. So does my cat, and I haven’t got a cat.

“They warned me about you,” Poffenberger said. “They told me you had a big mouth and were insubordinate.”

“They were right, sir.” Pound knew he shouldn’t sound so cheerful, but he couldn’t help it.

The young lieutenant went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “They told me you were all puffed up because you’d served with Colonel Morrell for so long, and he used to let you get away with murder. They told me you’d started to think you were a colonel yourself.”

That did hold some truth, which Sergeant Pound also knew. He said, “Sir, there was one difference between when I talked to Colonel Morrell and when I talk to you.”

“Oh?” What’s that?” Poffenberger sounded genuinely intrigued.

“When I said something to the colonel, sometimes he’d believe me before the barrel almost blew up.”

Poffenberger was a fair-haired, fair-skinned youngster from somewhere in the upper Midwest. When he turned red, it was easy to see. He turned red as a traffic light now. “Maybe you have a point, Sergeant,” he choked out. “Maybe. But I command this barrel. You don’t. There’s no getting around that.”

“I don’t want to get around it, sir,” Pound answered earnestly. “I don’t want to be an officer. I could have been an officer years ago if I wanted to put up with the bother.” Watching Lieutenant Poffenberger’s jaw drop was amusing, but only for a little while. Pound added, “I don’t want to be an officer, but I don’t want to get killed, either. Not even sergeants like getting killed… sir.”

“I didn’t think they did.” Poffenberger couldn’t have sounded any stiffer if he’d been carved out of marble.

Pound pretended not to notice. He said, “Well, in that case, sir, don’t you think we ought to scoot to one side or the other? We’re hull-down here, but we’re not turret-down, and if those butternut bastards get a halfway decent shot at us, they’ll remind us the hard way.”

He waited. How stubborn was the lieutenant? Stubborn enough not to listen to somebody with a lower rank even if not listening made getting nailed with a high-velocity armor-piercing round much more likely? Some officers-more than a few of them-were like that. They wanted to be right themselves, even if it meant being dead right. Short of knocking them over the head, what could you do?

But Poffenberger spoke to the driver, and the barrel shifted position. Quietly, Pound said, “Thank you, sir.”

“I didn’t do it for you.” The lieutenant was testy. “I did it for the sake of the barrel.”

Like a man who’d sweet-talked a girl into bed with him, Sergeant Pound cared little about the whys and wherefores. All he cared about was that it had happened. He didn’t point that out to Lieutenant Poffenberger. He didn’t want the lieutenant thinking he’d been either seduced or screwed. And if Poffenberger hadn’t done it for love… well, so what?

No steel dart came hurtling toward them. That was the only thing that mattered. A little later, a platoon of U.S. foot soldiers went over the hill and chased away the antibarrel cannon. A tiny triumph, no doubt, but anything that looked even a little like a victory pleased Pound.

Lieutenant Poffenberger had an extra circuit on his wireless set, one that hooked him to division headquarters. When he started saying, “Yes, sir,” and, “I understand, sir,” and, “We’ll be careful, sir,” Pound started worrying. Something had gone wrong somewhere, and what was even a tiny triumph worth?

“What’s up, sir?” the sergeant prompted when his superior showed no sign of passing along whatever he’d learned.

Poffenberger gave him a resentful look, but maybe the lesson from the antibarrel gun was sticking, at least for a little while. “There are reports the Confederates are stirring around,” the lieutenant said unwillingly. Even more unwillingly, he added, “There are reports they’ve got a new-model barrel, too.”

Michael Pound nodded. “Yes, sir, I’ve heard about that. Did they give you any details on the beast?”

“What do you mean, you’ve heard about it?” Poffenberger’s eyes seemed ready to start from his head. “I just this minute got word of it.”

“Well, yes, sir.” Pound smiled. That only unnerved the lieutenant more, which was what he had in mind. “Trouble is, you have to wait for the wireless to tell you things. Enlisted men have their own grapevine, you might say. From what I’ve heard, the new enemy barrel’s supposed to be very bad news: bigger gun, better armor, maybe a bigger engine, too.”

“Jesus,” Poffenberger muttered, more to himself than to his gunner. “What the hell do we bother with espionage for? Put a few corporals on the job and they’d have Jake Featherston’s telephone number in nothing flat.”

“It’s FReedom-1776, sir,” Pound answered seriously. Poffenberger stared at him, convinced for one wild moment that he meant it. That told Pound everything he needed to know about how much he’d intimidated the lieutenant. In a gentle voice, he said, “I’m only joking, sir.”

“Er-yes.” Lieutenant Poffenberger gathered himself. The process was very visible, and so funny that Pound had to bite down on the inside of his lower lip to keep from laughing out loud. Carefully, Poffenberger asked, “How did Colonel Morrell ever put up with you?”

“Oh, we didn’t have any trouble, sir,” Pound answered. “Colonel Morrell wants to go after the bad guys just as much as I do. I hear they’ve sent him to Virginia. The people over there must be keeping him under wraps, or else we would have heard a lot more out of him.”

“I… see.” Poffenberger eyed Pound the way a man wearing a suit made of pork chops might eye a nearby bear. More than a little plaintively, the lieutenant said, “I want to go after the enemy, too.”

“Of course, sir,” Pound said in tones meant to be soothing-but not too soothing. “The point is, though, to be as sure as we can that we get them and they don’t get us.”

Poffenberger started to say something. After what had almost happened on the forward slope of the hill, though, he couldn’t say a whole lot, not unless he wanted Pound to blow a hole in it the way the antibarrel cannon had almost blown a hole in the machine he commanded. What he finally did say was, “You are a difficult man, Sergeant.”

“Why, thank you, sir!” Pound exclaimed, which only seemed to complete Lieutenant Poffenberger’s demoralization.

An officer? Who needs to be an officer? Pound thought, more than a little smugly. As long as you’ve got the fellow who’s supposed to be in charge of you eating out of the palm of your hand, you have the best of both worlds.

Bombers rumbled by overhead. Antiaircraft guns started up behind the U.S. lines-they were Confederate airplanes. By the way Poffenberger looked up at them through the cupola, they didn’t worry him nearly so much as the man with whom he shared a turret. Michael Pound… smiled.