In At the Death

IV

Major Toricelli stuck his head into Abner Dowling's office. "Sir, you've got a call from Philadelphia."

"Do I?" Dowling viewed the prospect without delight. "What do they think I've gone and done now?" Calls from the War Department, in his copious experience, seldom brought good news.

But his adjutant said, "I don't think it's that kind of call, sir. It's General Abell. Shall I transfer it in here?"

"You'd throw a fit if I said no. So would he," Dowling said. A moment later, the telephone on his desk rang. He picked it up. "Abner Dowling here."

"John Abell, sir," said the voice on the other end of the line, and Dowling recognized the brainy General Staff officer's cool, cerebral tones. "I hope you're well?"

"Tolerable, General, tolerable," Dowling replied. "Yourself?"

"I'll last out the war," Abell said, which might have meant anything or nothing. "I have a question for you: how would you like to come back to the East and command an army in what we hope will be one of the decisive attacks of the war?"

How would you like to go to bed with a beautiful blonde who's passionately in love with you? Yes, there were dumber questions, but not many. "What's not to like?" Dowling asked.

And John Abell told him what there was not to like: "Your army-group commander would be General MacArthur."

"Oh," Dowling said. MacArthur had commanded a division in George Custer's army in the Great War while Dowling was Custer's adjutant general. When MacArthur led an army in northern Virginia this time around, Dowling had commanded a corps under him for a while. The two men didn't get along well-which was, if anything, an understatement.

"We could use you back in Virginia, sir," Abell said. "You have experience with aggressive offensive action, and you have experience fighting Freedom Party Guards. You'd do the country a service if you came back."

"And what would I do to myself?" Dowling asked. Brigadier General Abell didn't answer; he had to figure that out on his own. "Who would take over for me here if I left?" he inquired. "Still lots of work that needs doing."

"We were looking at giving Colonel DeFrancis a star and putting him in charge of Eleventh Army," Abell said. "He should handle it, and his coming from the air-operations side of things would be an advantage on such a broad front. Or do you think I'm wrong?" Is there anything about Terry DeFrancis we don't know? he meant.

"No, I'm sure he'll do a bang-up job." Dowling had to answer that quickly and firmly, so Abell would have no doubts. "He's a fine officer, and he knows the situation here, so he won't have to waste any time figuring out what's going on. He's young to make general, but wars do that."

"So they do," said Abell, who, like Dowling, had waited a long time for stars. "I'll see you here in Philadelphia, then, as fast as you can come. Orders will be cut by the time you get to the airstrip outside of Snyder. Take care." He hung up without waiting for Dowling's good-bye.

"Pack a duffel, Angelo," Dowling called to his adjutant. "We're on our way to Philly, and then to Virginia."

"Who takes over here?" Toricelli asked.

"Terry DeFrancis," Dowling replied. "My guess is, his telephone's ringing right about now."

Sure enough, DeFrancis' auto pulled up in front of Eleventh Army headquarters just as Dowling and Toricelli were ready to leave for the airstrip. "Congratulations on getting back to the real war, sir!" DeFrancis called as he jumped out.

"Congratulations to you, General," Dowling said. They shook hands.

"I've got a hot transport waiting for you at the field," DeFrancis said. "It'll take you up to Wichita. I don't know what they've got laid on for you after that, but General Abell sure sounded like he wants you in Philadelphia fast as you can get there."

Dowling and Toricelli threw duffel bags with enough personal belongings to keep them going for a little while into a command car. After one more handshake with DeFrancis, Dowling told the driver, "Step on it!"

"Yes, sir!" The corporal needed no further encouragement. He drove like a bat out of hell-perhaps like a bat a little too eager to go back there.

The two-engined transport took off with an escort of four fighters. Terry DeFrancis hadn't mentioned that. Dowling was grateful all the same. U.S. air power dominated the skies in west Texas, but the Confederates still got fighters up in the air every now and then. Even a hot transport was no match for a Hound Dog.

Neither the Texas Panhandle nor western Sequoyah had suffered too badly in the war. The fighting in Sequoyah was mostly farther east, where the oil wells were. Where the oil wells had been, rather. The oil fields had changed hands several times during the war. Whenever they did, the side pulling out blew them up to deny them to the enemy. The conquerors would start making repairs and then have to retreat themselves-and carry out their own demolitions. By now, Sequoyah's oil wells were some of the most thoroughly liberated real estate on the face of the globe.

In the last war, Sequoyah had started out as Confederate territory. C.S. cavalry raids terrorized Kansas till the USA slowly and painfully overran that state's southern neighbor. These days, though, Wichita was a backwater. The arrival of a major general, even if he was only passing through on his way somewhere else, made airport personnel flabble.

"Your airplane is ready and waiting, sir!" said the major in command of the field.

"Thanks," Dowling said. "Where do I go from here?"

"Uh, St. Louis, sir," the major said. "Didn't they tell you?"

"If they had, would I be asking?" Dowling asked reasonably.

He got into St. Louis just as the sun was setting. That was a relief: he wasn't sure they would have turned on landing lights for his airplane. Confederate bombers from Arkansas came up often enough to leave blackout regulations tightly in place.

At the airport there, they offered him the choice of a Pullman berth on a fast train east or a layover and the first flight out in the morning. He chose the layover. A bed that didn't bounce and shake had its attractions.

He spent less time in it than he would have liked. The Confederates came over at eleven and then again at two. Instead of a bed that didn't bounce, Dowling got two doses of a chilly trench. Bombs whistled down and burst too close for comfort. He wondered if he would be able to fly out the next morning.

He did. The raid left the airport with a working runway, and didn't hit the airplane waiting to take him east. On the way, he got a bird's-eye view of what the war had done to the United States.

Only occasional craters showed on the ground till he flew over what had to be eastern Indiana. From there on, it was one disaster after another: deserted, unplowed farmland, with towns and cities smashed into ruins. How long would repairing the devastation take? How much would it cost? What could the country have done if it didn't have to try to put itself together again? He couldn't begin to guess. That was a question for politicians, not soldiers. But a soldier had no trouble seeing the USA-and the CSA, too-would have been better off without a war.

Though Dowling didn't see what had happened to the Confederate States, he knew that had to be worse than what he was looking at. "If they were smart, they would have left us alone," he said to Major Toricelli.

"If they were smart, they never would have elected that Featherston bastard," his adjutant replied. Dowling nodded-there was another obvious truth.

His airplane landed outside of Pittsburgh to refuel. As it spiraled down toward the runway, he got a good look at what the battle had cost the city. His first thought was, Everything. But that wasn't an obvious truth. Smoke rose from tall stacks-and from some truncated ones-from steel mills that were either back in business or had never gone out of business. Nobody had bothered repairing shell-pocked walls or, sometimes, roofs. Those could wait. The steel? That was a different story. Trucks on the roads, trains in the railroad yards, and barges on the rivers took it where it needed to go.

When he got out of the airplane to stretch his legs and spend a penny, his nose wrinkled. He'd expected the air to be full of harsh industrial stinks, and it was. He hadn't expected the stench of death to linger so long after the fighting ended.

"Not as bad as the graves outside of Camp Determination," Toricelli said.

"Well, no. I don't think anything in the whole world is that bad," Dowling replied. "But this is what the Great War battlefields were like. Most of the ones this time around aren't so foul. They move faster and cover more ground, so there aren't so many bodies all in the same place."

"Except here there are," his adjutant said.

Dowling nodded. "Yeah. Except here there are."

Philadelphia was another bomb-pocked nightmare of a city, another place where factories sent up defiant plumes despite the destruction. A green-gray motorcar met Dowling at the airport. "I'll take you to the War Department, sir," said the bright young captain who accompanied the enlisted driver.

"How bad are these long-range rockets we hear about?" Dowling asked as the auto picked its way through streets often cratered and rubble-strewn.

"They sure aren't good, sir," the captain answered. "First thing you know is, they go boom-and if you're there when they do, then you aren't any more."

That was convoluted, but Dowling got the message. Damage grew worse as the auto got closer to the center of town. A lot of the rockets seemed to have fallen there. Dowling saw the finned stern of one sticking up, and curved sheet metal from a couple of more.

The War Department had taken lots of near misses but no direct hits Dowling saw. He had to show his ID before they let him in. Even after he did, they patted him down. No one apologized-it was part of routine. The captain took him down to John Abell's office. "Good to see you, sir," Abell said, his usual bloodless tones sucking the warmth from the words.

"And you," Dowling replied, which wasn't entirely true but came close enough. He pointed to a map of Virginia on Abell's wall. "What are we going to do to them?"

Abell got up and pointed. "This is what we've got in mind."

Dowling whistled. "Well, whoever came up with it sure didn't think small."

"Thank you," Abell said. That made Dowling blink; the General Staff officer was more likely to see what could go wrong than what could go right. This scheme, though, definitely counted on things going right.

"You really think they're on their last legs, don't you?" Dowling said.

"Last leg," John Abell replied. "They're standing on it in Georgia. If we hit them here, too, the bet is that they fall over."

"It could be." Dowling hesitated, then said the other thing he thought needed saying: "Is General MacArthur really the right man to knock them over?"

"If you want command of the army group, sir, you won't get it." Now Abell's voice was as icy as Dowling had ever heard it, which said a good deal.

"No, no, no. I wasn't asking for myself. After a question like that, I wouldn't take it if you gave it to me on a silver platter," Dowling said. "But if we've got somebody better than that scrawny bastard handy, we ought to use him."

The General Staff officer relaxed fractionally. "Since you put it that way…Well, General Morrell is busy in Georgia, which is also of vital importance. And General MacArthur is the man on the spot, and familiar with conditions."

"All right," Dowling said. It wasn't, not really, but he'd made the effort. "When we're ready down there, I'll do everything I can."

C larence Potter was so glad to get away from Georgia and George Patton that he almost didn't mind shuttling back and forth between Richmond and Lexington every few days. President Featherston couldn't seem to make up his mind whether he wanted Potter to pick up his work in Intelligence again or act as liaison with the uranium-bomb project.

Either way, Potter figured he was better suited to the work than he was to commanding a division under Patton. As far as he could see, the only things that suited a man to command a division under Patton were a rhino's hide and an uncanny ability to turn off one's brain. That probably wasn't fair-Patton had grievances with him, too. Potter didn't much care. Not dealing with Patton was such a pleasure.

Of course, not dealing with the general meant dealing with the President of the CSA-and, incidentally, with Professor FitzBelmont. But Potter had been dealing with Jake Featherston since the Great War, and he scared the living bejesus out of the professor. He could handle both of those jobs without wanting to retread his stomach lining twice a day.

FitzBelmont was a man facing a problem all too common in the CSA these days: he was trying to do a key job without quite enough men or resources, and with the damnyankees pounding the crap out of him from the air. Back before the United States found out what was going on there, Washington University had been a lovely, leafy, grassy campus. Potter remembered what a joy coming to Lexington had been after the devastation visited on Richmond.

Lexington was making up for lost time these days. Everything except the uranium-bomb project had abandoned the university campus, which looked like a real-estate poster for a subdivision in one of the ritzier neighborhoods of hell. The slagged and cratered earth might have caught smallpox. Ruins of what had been elegant, graceful buildings, many dating back before the War of Secession, offered a sorry reminder of better times. Only the square, brutal simplicity of reinforced concrete, ton upon ton of it, had any hope of surviving the Yankees' nightly visits.

Down below that concrete, the pile was turning uranium into jovium, which was what FitzBelmont had christened element 94. Enough jovium would go boom, just like U-235. Making it go boom, though, wasn't so simple.

"With U-235, we could shoot a plug into a hole in a bigger chunk, and then everything would go up," FitzBelmont said.

"Why can't you do that with the jovium, too?" Potter asked.

"Our calculations show it would start going off too soon and get too deformed for a full blast," the physicist answered.

"Well, you seem to think you can make it go off," Potter said, and Henderson FitzBelmont nodded. Potter asked what looked like the next reasonable question: "How?"

"We have to slam a lot of pieces down into a sphere-that's what the math says," FitzBelmont replied. "It's harder than making a U-235 bomb would be, because it's so much more precise. But getting the jovium is easier, because we can chemically separate it from the uranium in the pile."

"My chemistry prof at Yale told me transmutation was nothing but a pipe dream," Potter said.

"Mine told me the same thing." FitzBelmont shrugged. "Sometimes the rules change. They did here. Transmutation isn't chemistry-it's physics."

"It could be black magic, and I wouldn't care," Potter said. "As long as we say, 'Abracadabra!' before the damnyankees do, nothing else counts."

"They're doing their best to make sure we don't. Are we doing the same to them?" the professor asked.

"What we can. Getting to Washington State isn't easy for us, and it got tougher after they went and grabbed Baja California from Mexico," Potter said. Henderson FitzBelmont looked blank. He was no military man. Patiently, Potter explained: "It makes it much harder for us to get ships and subs out of Guaymas. But we did it not so long ago, and we attacked their facility."

"And?" FitzBelmont asked eagerly.

"And past that I don't know," Potter admitted. "The attack went in-that's all I can tell you for sure. The United States keep real quiet about their project, same as we keep quiet about ours. We haven't picked up any leaks to let us know what we did-none I've heard, anyhow."

"We can't hit them the way they hit us," FitzBelmont said mournfully. "And it looks like they started work on this before we did."

Potter had been worrying about those very things for quite a while now. Except for getting the latest strike at the Yankee project started, he couldn't do much but worry. "That means we have to be smarter," he told the physicist. "We're up to that, aren't we? If we make fewer mistakes and don't get stuck in blind alleys, we can still win. You're as good as anybody they've got, right?" You'd better be, or we're history.

"Yes, I think so," FitzBelmont replied. "They may well have more highly competent people than we do, though. And I worry about Germany a good deal. The Kaiser's physicists, and the ones he can draw from Austria-Hungary, are the best in the world. Has the President been able to get any technical help from our allies?"

"If he has, he hasn't told me," Potter said. "I'll ask him next time I'm in Richmond."

That was only a couple of days later. Traveling inside Richmond was safer by day. U.S. airplanes mostly came at night. Confederate defenses and fighters still made daytime raids too costly to be common. The bombers had taken a terrible toll all the same. Intact buildings stood out because they were so rare. The streets were full of holes of all sizes. The smell of death floated through the air.

The grounds to the Gray House might have been hit harder than anything else in Richmond. The United States wanted Jake Featherston dead. They wanted to avenge Al Smith, and they thought the Confederacy would grind to a halt without its leader. Potter feared they were right, too, which made him leery of plots against Featherston.

After going underground, after a couple of unpleasantly thorough searches, he was escorted to the waiting room outside the President's office, and then into Featherston's presence. The President's secretary sniffed as she closed the door behind him.

"Lulu doesn't much fancy you." Jake Featherston sounded amused, which was a relief. "She doesn't reckon you think I'm wonderful enough."

How right she is. But saying that was impolitic. "The country needs you. I know it." Potter could tell the truth without giving away his own feelings.

"What's the latest from Lexington?" Featherston asked, letting Lulu go.

"They're doing everything they know how to do, and the United States are trying to make sure they can't," Potter answered. "Do you know what we did in Washington State?"

"Something," the President answered. "They've had repair crews in there-I know that for a fact. Don't know much more, though."

How did he know even that much? A spy on the spot? Reconnaissance aircraft? Intercepted signals? Whatever the answer was, the word hadn't come through Potter. "How are things in Georgia?" he asked. The wireless didn't say much, which was never a good sign.

"We're going to lose Atlanta," Featherston said bluntly. "They didn't want to come in, so they're sweeping around. They want to trap our army in there and grind it to pieces."

"For God's sake don't let them!" Potter exclaimed. The President had thrown away one army in Pittsburgh. Didn't he see he couldn't afford to do that again?

He must have, for he nodded. "We're pulling out. We're wrecking the place, too. They won't get any use from it when they get in." He paused. "When Patton challenged you to a duel, did you really choose flamethrowers?"

"Yes, sir," Potter answered. "For a little while, I thought he'd take me up on it, too."

"That wouldn't've been pretty, would it?" the President said. Potter shook his head; it would have been anything but. Featherston went on, "He was spitting rivets at you, though. Let me tell you, he was."

"Let him spit rivets at the damnyankees," Clarence Potter said. "It would hurt 'em a lot more than some of the other things he's tried."

"Yeah, I know." Featherston scowled. "But who have I got who'd do better?"

Potter grunted. That, unfortunately, was much too good a question. He found a question of his own: "If we can't lick the USA no matter who we've got in the field, why are we still fighting?"

"Well, for one thing, they want unconditional surrender, and I'll see 'em in hell first," Jake Featherston answered. "And, for another, the longer we hold on, the better the chance FitzBelmont and the other slide-rule boys have of blowing 'em a new asshole."

Reluctantly, Potter nodded. The Confederate States had shown they were too dangerous for the United States to give them another chance to rebuild and try again. It was a compliment of sorts, but one the Confederacy could have done without now. As for the other…"What if they get a uranium bomb first?"

"Then we're fucked." Featherston's response had, at least, the virtue of clarity. "Then we don't deserve to win. But that won't happen, so help me God it won't. We are going to lick those bastards right out of their boots. You wait and see."

When he said it, Potter just about believed it-a telling measure of how persuasive Featherston could be. But afterwards, coming up aboveground once more, seeing the devastation that had been a great city, Potter shivered. How often lately had Jake Featherston taken a good long look at what had become of his capital and his country?

That afternoon, Potter and Nathan Bedford Forrest III walked through the disaster that was Capitol Square. Washington's statue still survived; not even a mountain of sandbags had saved Albert Sidney Johnston's. "What the hell are we going to do?" the chief of the General Staff said-quietly, so no passerby could hear.

"What the hell can we do?" Potter answered. "We're stuck between the Yankees and Jake Featherston. If we dump Featherston-if we kill him, I mean, because he won't be dumped-the United States land on us with both feet. And if we keep fighting-"

"The United States land on us with both feet anyhow," Forrest finished bitterly.

"They won't let us quit," Potter said. "They aim to wipe us off the map, same as they did in the War of Secession."

"Featherston never should have started this damn war," Nathan Bedford Forrest III said.

"Oh, cut the crap…sir," Potter said. His superior gaped. Not caring, he went on, "You aren't mad at him for starting the war. You were all for it. So was I. So was everybody. You're just mad because we aren't winning."

"Aren't you?"

"Sure, but at least I know why. I-" Clarence Potter broke off.

"What?" Forrest said, but then he heard it, too: the distant rumble of artillery suddenly picking up. He frowned. His eyes, which were more like his famous great-grandfather's than any other feature, narrowed. "Damnyankees haven't done that much firing for quite a while."

"They sure haven't," Potter agreed. "I wonder if they think they can catch us with our pants down here because we've moved so much stuff to Georgia." I wonder if they're right. He didn't say that out loud. Nathan Bedford Forrest III had enough to worry about, and the same thought was bound to be going through his mind.

The chief of the General Staff stood there listening, his head cocked to one side. After a minute or so, he shook himself; he might almost have come out of a trance. "I'd better get back to the War Department, find out what the hell they're up to," he said.

"I'll come with you," Potter said. Forrest didn't tell him no, even though he didn't have a formal place there any more. The gunfire went on and on. Halfway back to the War Department building, both men broke into a trot.

C assius and Gracchus strode through the streets of Madison, Georgia. They both wore U.S. Army boots on their feet and green-gray U.S. military-issue trousers. Only their collarless chambray work shirts said they weren't regular U.S. soldiers-those and their black skins, of course. Even the shirts had Stars-and-Stripes armbands on the left sleeve. The Negroes were at least semiofficial.

Gracchus carried a captured C.S. submachine gun; Cassius still had his bolt-action Tredegar. Both of them were alert for anything that looked like trouble. Madison had only recently fallen to the United States. The whites here didn't like seeing their own soldiers driven away. They were even less happy about Negroes patrolling their streets.

A couple of days earlier, somebody'd fired at one of Gracchus' men. The guerrilla got his left hand torn up. Madison got a lesson, a painful one. The U.S. commandant, a cold-eyed captain named Lester Wallace, grabbed the first ten white men he could catch, lined them up against a brick wall, and had them shot without even blindfolding them first.

"Nobody fucks with anybody under U.S. authority in this town," he told the horrified locals in a voice like iron, while the bodies still lay there bleeding. "Nobody, you hear?"

"Jesus God, it was only a nigger!" a woman shrilled.

"Anybody who comes out with that kind of shit from now on, I figure you just volunteered for hostage duty," Wallace said. "Far as I can see, the black folks around here are worth at least ten of you assholes apiece-I mean at least. They didn't start murdering people for the fun of it. You 'Freedom!'-yelling cocksuckers did."

"We didn't know what happened to the colored folks who got shipped out," an old man quavered.

"Yeah-now tell me another one. You give me horseshit like that, you're a volunteer hostage, too," Captain Wallace said. "You didn't know! Where'd you think they were going, you goddamn lying bucket of puke? To a fucking football game?"

Cassius didn't know what he'd thought Yankees would be like. This chilly ferocity wasn't it, though-he was sure of that. A lot of U.S. soldiers hated the enemy with a clear and simple passion that shoved everything else to one side.

"You know, I never had much use for smokes," a skinny corporal who needed a shave told Cassius out of the blue one day. "But shit, man, if Featherston's fuckers have it in for you, you gotta have somethin' going for you."

Was that logical? Cassius wondered what his father would have thought of it. But there was a brutal logic that beat down the more formal sort. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That was working here.

It had a flip side. The friend of my enemy is my enemy. As Cassius and Gracchus patrolled Madison, Cassius said, "Ain't never gonna be safe for niggers around here without Yankees close by from now on."

"Reckon not," Gracchus said, "but how safe was it for us 'fore the damnyankees done got here?"

That question answered itself. His family hauled out of church and taken off to a camp. His own life on the run ever since. The precarious life black guerrillas led, knowing there would be no mercy if they got caught.

"Well, you got me," Cassius said.

They tramped into the town square. A bronze plaque was affixed to a small stone pillar there. Somehow, the little monument had come through the fighting that leveled half the town without even a nick. Gracchus pointed to the plaque. "What's it say?" he asked. Cassius had taught him his letters, but he still didn't read well.

"Says it's the Braswell Monument," Cassius said. "Says in 1817 Benjamin Braswell done sold thirteen slaves after he was dead so they could use the money to educate white chillun. Says they raised almos' thirty-six hundred dollars. Ain't that grand?"

"Sold niggers to help ofays. That's how it goes, sure as hell." Gracchus strode up to the Braswell Monument, unbuttoned his fly, and took a long leak. "Show what I thinks o' you, Mr. Benjamin fuckin' Asswell."

A couple of white women with wheeled wire shopping carts were hurrying across the square. They took one look Gracchus' way and walked even faster. "They don't like your dark meat," Cassius said.

"My meat don't like them, neither," Gracchus replied. "I start fuckin' white women, I ain't gonna start fuckin' no ugly white women, an' they was dogs."

They hadn't been beautiful. Some Negroes in U.S. service didn't care. They took their revenge on Confederate women for everything Confederate men had done to them. A few U.S. officers reacted as badly to that as Confederate men might have. Not everyone in the USA loved Negroes, not by a long shot. But most men who wore green-gray uniforms hated the enemy worse than the blacks he'd oppressed.

"Know what I feel like?" Gracchus said as he and Cassius resumed their patrol. "I feel like a dog that jus' pissed somewhere to say, 'This here place mine.'"

"Dunno if it's yours or not," Cassius said. "Sure as shit don't belong to the Confederate ofays no mo'."

As if to emphasize that, the U.S. troops had run up a barbed-wire stockade just outside of Madison to hold C.S. prisoners of war. Cassius wasn't the only Negro drawn to that stockade as if by a magnet. Seeing soldiers in butternut-and, better still, seeing Freedom Party Guards in brown-splotched camouflage-on the wrong side of the wire, stuck inside a camp, disarmed and glum while he carried a weapon, was irresistibly sweet.

"They gonna reduce your population!" a Negro from a different band jeered at the POWs. "They gonna put you on a train, an' you ain't never gettin' off!"

Some of the captured Confederates looked scared-who could know for sure what the soldiers on the other side would do? Some swore at the black guerrilla. One stubborn sergeant said, "Fuck you in the heart, Sambo. They already put your nappy-headed whore of a mama on the train, and she deserved it, too."

A few seconds later, he lay dead, a bullet through his chest. A U.S. corporal, hearing the shot, came running. "Jesus!" he said when he saw the corpse. "What the hell'd you go and do that for?"

The Confederates in the stockade were screaming and pointing at the Negro who'd fired. The guerrilla was unrepentant. "He dogged my mother," he said simply. "Ain't nobody gonna dog my mother, 'specially not some goddamn ofay fuckhead."

"Christ, I'm gonna have to fill out papers on this shit," the noncom groaned. "Tell me what the fuck happened."

Several POWs tried to. They did their best to outshout the guerrilla who'd killed the sergeant. Cassius weighed in to balance them if he could.

"He said that to this guy?" the corporal said when he finished.

"He sure did," Cassius answered.

"Shit on toast," the noncom said. "He told me that, I bet I woulda blown his fuckin' head off." The POWs screamed at him, too. He flipped them off. "Listen up, assholes-something you better figure out. You lost. These guys"-he pointed at Cassius and the other Negro-"they won. Better get used to it, or a hell of a lot of you are gonna end up dead. And you know what else? Nobody's gonna miss you, either."

"We won't ever put up with bein' under niggers!" a captive shouted.

"That's right!" Two or three more echoed him.

"Then I figure you'll be underground." The corporal pointed to the corpse. "Take your carrion over to the gate. We'll put him where he belongs."

He got more curses and jeers, and ignored all of them. After he went away, the other Negro stuck out his hand to Cassius. "Thanks for backin' me. I'm Sertorius."

"My name's Cassius." Cassius took the proffered hand. As he had with Gracchus, he asked, "Reckon we ever be able to do anything down here without the Yankees backin' our play?"

"No," Sertorius said calmly. "But so what? Yankees don't come down here, fuckin' Confederate ofays kill us anyways. They really did take my mama, God damn them to hell an' gone."

"Mine, too, an' my pa, an' my sister," Cassius answered.

"How come they miss you?"

"On account of I didn't go to church. That's where they got everybody else."

"I heard stories like that before," Sertorius said. "If there's a God, He got Hisself a nasty sense o' humor."

"Reckon so." Cassius had wondered about God even before the ofays got his family. He'd always kept quiet, because he knew his mother didn't want him saying-or thinking-things like that. He had the feeling his father was sitting on the same kind of doubts. The older man never talked about them, either. One of these days, the two of them might have had some interesting things to say to each other. They never would now.

The black guerrillas had a camp alongside that of the U.S. soldiers who guarded the POWs and made sure the lid stayed on in Madison. They slept in U.S. Army tents, and used U.S. Army sleeping bags. Those gave them better, softer nights than they'd had most of the time on their own.

They got U.S. Army mess kits, too, and ate U.S. Army chow with the men from north of the Mason-Dixon line. They didn't have to wait till the soldiers in green-gray were served before they got fed. They just took their places in line, and the cooks slapped down whatever they happened to have. Sometimes it was good, sometimes not. But there was always plenty. For Cassius, whose ribs had been a ladder, that was plenty to keep him from complaining.

When he went into Madison, kids would ask, "Got any rations? Got any candy?"

No. Starve, you little ofay bastards. That was always the first thought that went through his head. But hating children didn't come easy. They hadn't done anything to him. And some of them looked hungry. He knew what being hungry was all about.

Then one of them called, "Hey, nigger! Got any candy?"

He didn't shoot the boy, who must have been about eight. That would have got him talked about. He did say, "You call me a nigger, brat, you can damn well starve for all I care."

The kid looked at him as if he were crazy. "Well, what are you if you ain't a nigger?"

"A colored fellow, or a Negro, or even a black man," Cassius answered. "Call somebody a nigger, it's an insult, like."

"You're a nigger, all right, an' you suck the damnyankees' cocks," the brat squeaked. He didn't get a handout from Cassius, or a lesson. He also still didn't get shot, but he came much closer to that than to either of the other two.

He'd likely feel the way he did till the day he died. So would countless others just like him. In the face of hate like that, what were the surviving Negroes in the CSA supposed to do? After the war ended, how could they settle down and make a living? If U.S. soldiers didn't back them, how long would they last? Not long-that seemed only too obvious.

And if U.S. soldiers did back them, the white majority-much larger now than before the murders started-would hate Negroes more than ever…assuming such a thing was possible.

"We is fucked," Cassius said sorrowfully. "We is so fucked."

"What? On account o' that ofay kid?" Gracchus said. "Little shithead run his mouth like that, he get hisself killed goddamn quick, an' nobody be sorry, neither."

"No, not on account o' him," Cassius said, which wasn't exactly true. "On account of everything." He started to explain, then gave up. What was the use? Once upon a time, he would have found a place in Augusta-not the place he would have had if he were white, but a place. He would have fit in. Now?

Now he carried a Tredegar, and he was ready to kill any white who got in his way. That too was a place…of sorts.

Chester Martin smoked a cigarette outside of Monroe, Georgia, and waited for the next raiding party to head east. The company-strength expedition had proved what the brass thought before-the Confederates hadn't had anything worth mentioning to oppose a U.S. thrust. Why not try it again, in greater strength?

To Chester, the answer seemed obvious enough. If you hit them there once, wouldn't they get ready to make sure you couldn't do it again?

Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin looked at him-looked through him-with those cold, pale Slavic eyes. "You're welcome to stay behind when we go, Sergeant," he said.

"You know I don't want to do that, sir," Chester said. "But I don't want to get my tit in a wringer, either, not when I don't have to."

"No guarantees in this business," Lavochkin said.

He wouldn't listen. Everything had come his way for a long time now. He thought it would keep right on happening. And he wasn't the only one. The brass never would have signed off on a raid if they didn't think it would fly. Maybe they were right. Chester could hope so, anyhow.

He did talk to Captain Rhodes, who, he was sure, knew his ass from his end zone. "If they're laying for us, sir, we'll be all dressed up with no place to go," he said.

"What do you think the odds are?" the company commander asked.

"Well, sir, we sure as hell won't take 'em by surprise twice," Martin answered.

"No, but how much can they do about it?" Rhodes said.

"Don't know, sir," Chester said. "I bet we find out, though. If I wanted to be a goddamn guinea pig, I would've bought myself a cage."

That made Captain Rhodes grin, but he didn't change his mind. "We've got our orders," he said. "We're going to go through with them. If we run into trouble, I expect we'll have backup. But I think we have a decent chance to bang on through, same as we did the last time around."

"Hope you're right, sir." Chester didn't believe it. Nobody above him cared what he believed. To the men in his platoon, he was God the Father to Lavochkin's Son and Rhodes' Holy Ghost. To the officers above him, he was just a retread with a big mouth. And the fellows with shoulder straps were the ones whose opinions mattered.

Two mornings later, the long, muscular armored column rolled down the road from Monroe to Good Hope, the same road the smaller raiding band had traveled not long before. Chester thought that might surprise whoever was in charge of the Confederate defenders. They wouldn't believe anybody could be dumb enough to hit them the same way twice running. Chester had trouble believing it himself.

They didn't run into any traffic on the way to Good Hope. They also didn't run into any ambushes, for which Chester was duly grateful. Maybe the C.S. brass really couldn't believe their foes would try the same ploy twice.

Good Hope looked like holy hell. Only a couple of people were on the street when the U.S. command cars and armored vehicles rolled in. The Confederate civilians didn't think the green-gray machines were on their side this time. They took one horrified look, screamed, and ran for their lives.

Maybe that did them some good; maybe it didn't. Machine guns and cannon cut loose as soon as the U.S. column came into the little town, and didn't let up till it rolled through. Martin looked back over his shoulder after he was outside of Good Hope. Clouds of smoke announced that raiders were on the loose. If the enemy had telephone and telegraph lines back up from the last assault, people were already letting C.S. military authorities know about the new one.

If there were any C.S. military authorities in this part of Georgia…Perhaps there weren't. Perhaps the Confederate States really were falling into ruin. Chester could hope so, anyhow.

Trouble came between Good Hope and Apalachee. The road went through some pine woods. The column stopped because a barricade of logs and rocks and overturned wrecked vehicles blocked it. Getting barrels up to knock the obstruction aside wasn't quick or easy, not with trees of formidable size alongside the narrow, badly paved road.

And as soon as the column bogged down, C.S. troops in the woods opened up with automatic weapons, mortars, and stovepipe rockets. Chester didn't think there were a whole lot of them, which didn't mean they didn't do damage. Several soft-skinned vehicles and a halftrack caught fire. Wounded men howled.

U.S. soldiers hit back with all the firepower they'd brought along: heavy machine guns and cannon on their vehicles, along with the rifles and automatic rifles and submachine guns the men carried. Nobody could come close to the column and live, which didn't help all that much when it wasn't going anywhere.

After half an hour or so, U.S. barrels did shoulder the roadblock out of the way. The column went on, minus the vehicles put out of action. When the soldiers got to Apalachee, they tore into it even more savagely than they had at Good Hope. Not much was left of the hamlet when they came out the other side.

Chester hoped they wouldn't duplicate the whole route from the last raid. That would give the Confederates more chances to bushwhack them, and would also mean they were tearing up more stuff they'd already wrecked once. He nodded in approval when they left the road and started cross-country, heading as close to due east as made no difference.

Whenever they came to a farmhouse, they shot it up. If the people who lived there made it very plain they were giving up-if they came out with hands high-the soldiers let them flee with the clothes on their backs. If they showed fight or even if they just stayed inside, they got no second chances.

A startling number of rural Georgians seemed to think a few rounds from a squirrel rifle or a shotgun would set the U.S. Army running. They paid for their education. None of them would ever make that mistake, or any mistake, again. Often, their families died with them.

"That's kind of a shame, sir," Chester said as a woman trapped in a burning farmhouse and likely wounded shrieked her life away.

"Think of it as survival of the fittest," Captain Rhodes replied. "If they're dumb enough to fire on us, they're too dumb to deserve to live."

"She probably didn't have a gun," Martin said.

The company commander shrugged. "She was dumb enough to marry somebody who did. We aren't here to talk to these people, Sergeant. We're here to teach 'em that fucking with the United States is as dumb as it gets."

Inside the farmhouse, cartridges started cooking off. The woman's shrieks mercifully faded. "I'd say she's got the point, sir," Chester said. "Fat lot of good it'll do her from here on out."

Before Rhodes could answer, Chester and he both heard airplane motors overhead. They expected U.S. fighter-bombers to pound whatever lay ahead of them. Then a fearsome scream rose with the rumble. Chester had heard that noise too many times, though not so often lately.

"Asskickers!" he yelled, and threw himself flat.

Anybody who could get to an automatic weapon opened up on the vulture-winged C.S. dive bombers. The Mules ignored the ground fire and planted their bombs in the middle of the thickest concentrations of vehicles they could find. One landed right on a halftrack. The fireball caught a couple of nearby soldiers and turned them into torches. The Asskickers came back again to strafe the U.S. soldiers. Machine-gun bullets stitched the ground much too close to Chester. He scraped away with his entrenching tool, not that it would do a hell of a lot of good.

And then the dive bombers were gone. Captain Rhodes looked around at the damage they'd done. "Fuck," he said softly. "You all right, Chester?"

"Yeah." Martin scrabbled in his pockets for a cigarette. "Boy, I forgot how much fun that was."

"Me, too," Rhodes said. "We've got used to dishing it out. That's a lot more fun than taking it."

"Bet your ass-uh, sir." Chester needed three tries before he could strike a match; his hands were shaking. Then he held out the pack to Rhodes. The company commander didn't waste time trying to light one on his own. He just leaned close to Chester and started his the easy way.

Lieutenant Lavochkin came up. "We ought to push on, sir," he said. "We can do a lot more damage before nightfall."

He didn't care about the air attack. All he wanted to do was keep hitting the Confederates. That was either admirable or slightly insane, depending. Captain Rhodes sighed and blew out a ragged plume of smoke. "We'll see to the dead and wounded, and then we'll go on," he said.

Some of the dead didn't leave enough remains to bury. Maybe the Confederates would tear up the graves the men in green-gray quickly dug, but Chester could hope they wouldn't. Plenty of C.S. soldiers lay in U.S. soil, for the most part quietly.

When the war was over, they would probably sort all of that out. They'd done the same thing after the Great War. By all the signs, this war was bigger and nastier than the one that had lasted from 1914 to 1917. What would they call it when it was done? The Greater War? The Worse War? Right now, it was just the War, commonly with an obscene adjective stuck on in front.

They did roll on after an hour or so, and took a would-be Confederate ambush from behind. The enemy soldiers seemed highly offended at that-those who lived through the encounter, anyhow. U.S. soldiers took prisoners, as much to keep their intelligence officers happy as because they really wanted to. One of the men in butternut complained, "Y'all weren't suppose to come where you did."

"That's what she said," Chester answered, which left his buddies laughing and the POW shaking his head.

Home guards and Mexicans tried to make a fight in Stephens and Hutchings, two little towns in front of Lexington. They got blasted out of the way in short order in both places. They were brave, but bravery and small arms and a few mines didn't go very far against halftracks and barrels. The two villages went up in flames.

Lexington was a tougher nut to crack. The defenders had a couple of quick-firing three-inch guns, leftovers from a generation earlier. For all Chester knew, they'd been sitting on the courthouse lawn ever since. If they had, somebody'd kept them well greased. And some old-timer-probably a guy a lot like me, Chester thought-knew what to do with them. Shells rained down on the advancing U.S. soldiers.

But the Confederates didn't seem to have any armor-piercing ammunition. Those three-inchers weren't made for barrel busting, anyway. They did hurt some men on foot and in soft-skinned vehicles, but that was enough to make the soldiers in green-gray angry without being enough to stop them. As the December sun went down, Lexington got the same treatment as the two smaller towns in front of it.

The U.S. soldiers camped in the ruins. "See?" Lieutenant Lavochkin said. "Piece of cake."

"Expensive piece of cake…sir," Chester said woodenly.

Lavochkin shrugged. "They paid more than we did. And we can afford it better than they can."

Both those things were probably true. In the cold calculus of war, they were also probably the only things that mattered. A guy who'd just stopped shrapnel with his belly cared about none of that. Chester lit a Raleigh and thanked God he hadn't.

O ne of the first things Dr. Leonard O'Doull found out about Sergeant Goodson Lord was that he hated his name. "My mother's maiden name, and I've got it for my first one," the new medic said. "If I had a dime for every time I got called Good Lord, I'd be a goddamn millionaire."

"I believe it," O'Doull said. "Didn't your folks realize what they were doing?"

"I doubt it," Lord replied. "Neither one of 'em's got much of a sense of humor, I'm afraid."

"How about you?" O'Doull asked.

"Me, sir?" Sergeant Lord gave him a wry grin. "I earned mine the hard way. It was either laugh or murder some yokking asshole before I was twelve years old."

"Well, I spent a couple of years working with a guy who answered to Granny," O'Doull said. "If I say Good Lord every once in a while, I may not be talking to you."

"Can't ask for more," Lord said.

"And I'll tell you one more time-careful about the women around here."

"Hey, I like screwing-who doesn't?" the noncom said. "I hope I'm not too dumb about going after it."

He didn't seem to swish now, even if O'Doull had wondered before. He was on the young side of thirty. Most guys his age would have said the same thing-unless they came out and admitted that they thought with their dick. "Try not to get murdered," O'Doull said earnestly. "I hate breaking in a new guy every couple of months, you know what I mean?"

"Sir, I will do my best," Sergeant Lord said.

He did his best with the wounded, too. He was at least as good as Vince Donofrio had been, and he was plainly a better anesthetist. O'Doull still missed Granville McDougald, but Lord would definitely do.

And the wounded kept coming in as U.S. forces cut off one road into and out of Atlanta after another. O'Doull worked like a maniac to keep the hurt men from dying or getting worse right away, then sent them off to field hospitals farther back of the line.

He spent quite a bit of time patching up a sergeant's left hand, which had taken a bullet through the palm. "I think he'll have pretty good function there," he said when the surgery was done. "Hope so, anyway."

"I bet he will, Doc," Goodson Lord said. "You really do pay attention to the little stuff, and it matters. I've seen some guys just stitch up a wound like that and let it go. They figure the doctor in the rear'll take care of it, and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong. Myself, I always thought it was a lazy, shitty thing to do."

"I'm with you. The more you do right the first time, as soon as you can, the less you have to be sorry for later," O'Doull said.

Sometimes you couldn't do much. The corpsmen brought in a soldier in the mottled camouflage uniform of a Freedom Party Guard; he'd been shot through the head. "Why did you bother?" Lord said after one look at the wound.

"Well, you never can tell," Eddie answered.

That was true. Every once in a while, O'Doull got a surprise. But he didn't think he would this time. The wounded man was barely breathing. His pupils were of different sizes and unresponsive to light, his pulse reedy and fading. Brains and blood and bits of bone dribbled out of a hole the size of O'Doull's fist.

"I can clean things up a little, but that's it," O'Doull said. "He's in God's hands, not mine." He didn't think God would hang on tight, either.

The Confederate died halfway through the cleanup. He gave a couple of hitching last breaths and then just-stopped. "That's a mercy," Sergeant Lord said. "Other mercy is, he never knew what hit him. How many bad burns have you seen, Doc?"

"One is a million too many," O'Doull answered, and the senior medic nodded. When O'Doull thought of those, he didn't think of seeing them, though. The smell, like pork left too long in the oven, rose up in his mind as vividly as if a burned barrelman lay on the table in front of him.

And they got themselves a different kind of casualty, one brought in not by the medics but by an irate platoon commander. "Sir, this sorry son of a bitch has the clap," the lieutenant said in a voice that seemed barely done changing. "Isn't that right, Donnelly?"

"'Fraid so," Donnelly said. "Hurts like hell when I piss."

"Well, we can do something about that," O'Doull said; guys with VD were just as much out of the fight as if Jake Featherston's men had plugged them. "Drop your pants, Donnelly, and turn the other cheek."

"You gonna give me a shot?" the soldier asked apprehensively.

"Yup." O'Doull readied the needle-a big one.

"I thought you got pills for the clap." Donnelly might well be fearless in the field, but he sure wasn't here.

"You used to. This penicillin clears it up faster and better, though," O'Doull said. "Now bend over."

"You fuck around, Donnelly, I'll have you bend over and I'll kick your sorry ass-I won't stick it," the kid lieutenant said.

By the expression on Donnelly's face, he would rather have got a kicking than a shot. But he saw he had no choice. He yelped when the needle went home. O'Doull pushed in the plunger with a certain malicious glee. "For Chrissake, wear a rubber next time," he said.

"It's like screwing in socks," Donnelly whined.

"Well, your sweetheart sure gave you something to remember her by," O'Doull said. "What did you give her?"

"Four cans of deviled ham. She was skinny as all get-out. How was I supposed to know she'd give me a drippy faucet?"

"You're supposed to think about shit like that," his platoon commander snapped before O'Doull could say anything. "How many times did you hear about it in basic?"

"Yes, sir," Donnelly said. O'Doull had a good notion of what he wasn't saying: that the only thing he'd cared about was getting his jollies.

That was natural enough. Of course, so was running away if somebody started shooting at you. Soldiers could learn not to. They could also learn not to screw without being careful. They could, but this one hadn't.

"Clap isn't the only thing to worry about down here," O'Doull said. "Medic who worked with me got murdered for laying a Confederate woman."

"I wasn't worried about that, sir. I wasn't worried about anything," Donnelly said.

He wouldn't listen. O'Doull could see that. "Well, pull your pants up and get the hell out of here," he said. "If you come down with another dose, so help me God I'll find a bigger needle." The threat might work if anything did.

It made Donnelly look worried as he covered himself again, anyhow. The lieutenant kept barking at him as he led him away from the aid station. "How often does that happen?" Lord asked.

"Every now and again," O'Doull answered. "At least this guy didn't have a chancre."

"Penicillin'll do for syphilis, too," Sergeant Lord said.

"Sure a lot better than the chemicals full of arsenic we used before," O'Doull agreed. "And before that it was mercury and all kinds of other poison."

The senior medic made a face. "I think I'd rather have the pox. A lot of the time, something else would kill you before it got bad."

"Maybe," O'Doull said. "But maybe not, too. A lot of the time, you'd get sick over and over, one thing after another. They'd all be different. They'd all look different, anyhow. But they'd all have syphilis at the bottom. Damn thing's the great pretender."

"You know more about it than I do, sir," Sergeant Lord said. "I played the trombone before I got conscripted. I knew some guys who had it, and it didn't seem to bother them all that much."

"Seem to is right," O'Doull said, and then, "The trombone, eh? Have one with you?"

"Afraid not, sir. It's not like a flute or even the trumpet-not so easy to carry around."

"Too bad. Well, maybe you can liberate one."

"Maybe." Goodson Lord looked dubious. "I've seen fiddles and pianos and guitars in these pissant Confederate towns, but that's about it."

"Well, let the corpsmen know. Let the guys in front of us know," O'Doull said. "You'd be amazed at what they can come up with-besides the clap, I mean."

"If I want that, I'll get it myself," Lord said. O'Doull snorted.

Since the medic didn't seem to want to spread the word, O'Doull did it for him. Inside of three days, Eddie produced a horn. "Here you go," he said. "Merry Christmas."

"I'll be a son of a bitch," Goodson Lord said. He took the trombone and started to play. Notes smooth and mellow as butter filled the tent. They made the Army bugles O'Doull was used to seem like screeching blue jays by comparison.

"Wow!" Eddie said. "You really can play that so-and-so."

"You think I was lying?" Lord asked, lowering the trombone.

"No, not like that," Eddie answered. "But there's playing, and then there's playing, you know? You're really good!"

"Oh. Thanks." The corpsman's enthusiasm made the sergeant blink. He started to play some more.

He got about thirty seconds into a number from Oh, Sequoyah! before a corpsman brought in a man with a piece of shrapnel in his thigh. "You can blow that thing, man," the soldier said. "Can you keep playing while the doc works on me?"

"Sorry," Lord said after a quick look at the wound. "I think we're gonna have to knock you out."

"Aw, hell," the wounded man said. As far as Leonard O'Doull could remember, that was the first time he'd ever heard a man ask not to be anesthetized.

Sergeant Lord got the patient etherized on the table. O'Doull cut away the man's trouser leg and started cleaning out the wound and tying off bleeders. He could see the femoral artery pulsing in there, but it wasn't cut. If it had been, the man likely would have bled out before he got back to the aid station.

O'Doull sewed him up and injected him with penicillin and tetanus antitoxin. "These aren't so bad," he said. "He should heal up fine."

"You do like to work on 'em when they turn out that way," Lord agreed. "How many amputations have you done?"

"I couldn't even begin to count 'em. They're like burns: more than I ever wanted to, that's for damn sure," O'Doull said.

"Yeah, same here," Lord said. "They're easy to perform, they're fast, and the patient usually comes through 'em pretty well. But you know he'll never be the same afterwards, the poor bastard."

"Ain't it the truth?" O'Doull said sadly. "Most of the time when I do an amputation, I feel more like a butcher than a surgeon."

"That's about the size of it," Lord said.

O'Doull wished they hadn't been talking about it, because the very next man the corpsman carried in had a foot and lower leg smashed beyond the hope of saving. The doctor pulled out the bone saw and did what he had to do. As Sergeant Lord had said, the soldier would probably pull through. Whether he would be happy about it was a different question. O'Doull wasn't likely ever to learn his answer to it.

Fayetteville lay south and even a little west of Atlanta. A rail line ran through it. Once the U.S. Army got astride that line, it would pinch off one more Confederate artery into the beleaguered capital of Georgia. Lieutenant Michael Pound didn't think the enemy would be able to hold Atlanta much longer after that happened.

Being a platoon commander, Pound wore earphones more often than he wanted to. Instead of doing as he pleased, he had to keep track of what the other units in the regiment and the other barrels in his platoon were up to. He thought it cramped his style.

"Marquard's platoon has lost three barrels at square G-5," a voice from somewhere in back of the line intoned. "Need armor there to cover the infantry advance."

Pound checked the map. If his platoon was where he thought, they were right on the edge of G-5 themselves. "Pound here," he answered on the same frequency. "We can cover. Do you know why they lost them? Over."

He waited. He didn't have to wait long. "Roger your covering," the voice said. "Report is that the losses are due to enemy barrels. Over."

"What the hell's wrong with Marquard?" Pound asked, but not with the TRANSMIT key pressed. He happened to know that the other lieutenant had new-model machines. To his way of thinking, you had to be worse than careless to lose three in a hurry to C.S. barrels. You damn near had to be criminally negligent.

He wirelessed the news to the other four barrels in his platoon. By what their commanders said, they felt the same way. "We'll take care of it," one of the sergeants promised. "Those butternut bastards can kiss their butts good-bye."

"Damn straight!" Pound said. He led a bunch of hard-charging pirates, men who thought the same way he did. "Let's go get 'em. Follow me."

He led the platoon west and a little south, to come in where the luckless Marquard had got in trouble. He hadn't got far before realizing the trouble might not be what he thought. There sat a dead U.S. barrel in a field-not just dead but decapitated, for the turret lay upside down, about ten feet from the chassis.

"Fuck," Sergeant Scullard said. "Where'd they get a gun that could do that?"

"Good question," Pound said, which didn't answer the gunner. He got on the platoon circuit again: "Be careful, guys. Use all the cover you can. I think Featherston's fuckers just came up with something new."

For most of a year, the latest U.S. barrels had dominated the battlefield. If they couldn't do that any more…then everything got harder. Michael Pound approved of easy, not that the enemy cared.

He flipped up the lid to the cupola and stood up in the turret. He needed to be able to see; the periscopes built into the cupola just didn't do the job. There wasn't a lot of small-arms fire. If the C.S. gunners who nailed that U.S. barrel opened up on him with an automatic rifle or a machine gun…that was better than having them shoot at his barrel with whatever monster gun they had.

One of the other barrels in his platoon was about a hundred yards to his left. He saw a blast of flame burst from a thick stand of bushes, heard a thunderous roar, and a moment later watched the other U.S. barrel brew up. The men inside couldn't have had a chance-and that gun, whatever it was, would be aiming at him next.

"Front!" he bawled as he tumbled back into the turret.

"Identified," Scullard answered. "I'm going to give it AP. I think a hull's hiding in there."

"I don't know. I didn't see one." But Pound added, "If you got a better look, go with what you think."

Mouradian had already slammed the round into the breech. The gunner fired the piece. The cannon's bellow was slightly muffled inside the turret. Smoke and fire spurted from the heart of the bushes. Michael Pound whooped and thumped Sergeant Scullard on the back. "Gimme another round!" Scullard told the loader. He fired again. More flames burst from the bushes. Shame Moses isn't here, Pound thought.

"Sir, I think that son of a bitch is history," Scullard said.

"I think you're right," Pound said. "And if you weren't so quick-and if you weren't so sure about what was hiding there-we would be instead." He spoke into the intercom: "Move forward-carefully. I want to see what the hell we killed."

"Yes, sir," the driver answered.

By the time Pound's barrel drew near, the bushes were burning briskly. Through them, he got a pretty good look at a low hull, a turret as smoothly curved as a turtle's carapace, and a gun that looked as if it came off a destroyer.

"Fuck," Scullard said again. "Gonna be a ton of work killing these babies."

"We can do it. You did it," Pound said.

"I know," the gunner said. "But they can kill us, too, easy as you please. I hope the Confederates don't have a lot of 'em."

"Me, too," Pound admitted. "We can't go marching around like no gun can touch us any more-that's for sure." Sometimes U.S. new-model barrels, confident in their armor, would almost dare C.S. machines to shoot at them. If you did that against one of these barrels, they'd bury your ashes in a tobacco pouch.

He got on the wireless to pass what he'd found to division HQ. "Roger that," came the reply. "We've had a couple of other reports about them."

The soldier on the other end of the connection sounded calm and relaxed. Why not? He was well behind the line. "Why the devil didn't you pass the word along?" Pound yelled. "You damn near got me killed!"

"We said the losses were due to enemy barrels," the wireless man answered, as if that were enough. He probably thought it was.

Pound took off the earphones. "We can beat the enemy," he said to nobody in particular, "but God help us against our own side."

"Headquarters being stupid again?" Scullard asked sympathetically.

"They'd have to wise up to get to stupid." Warming to his theme, Pound added, "They've got their headquarters in their hindquarters."

"And we're the ones who'll end up paying for it," the gunner predicted.

"Guy in one of our uniforms coming up," Mouradian said.

That sent Pound out of the cupola again, a captured Confederate submachine gun at the ready. Just because somebody wore a U.S. uniform, he wasn't necessarily a U.S. soldier. But he stopped by himself before Pound could tell him not to come any closer. "You nailed that fucker," he said. His harsh accent claimed he was from Kansas or Nebraska, but that didn't prove anything, either.

"Yeah," Pound answered. "And so?"

"More of 'em around-bound to be," said the U.S. soldier-Pound supposed he was a U.S. soldier, anyhow. "Can you clear 'em out?"

"Who knows?" Pound didn't just look at the monstrous machine his barrel had just wrecked. He looked back at the U.S. barrel the Confederates had killed. Those were five men of his, five friends of his, gone in the wink of an eye. He hadn't had even a moment to grieve. He still didn't, not really.

"Those other guys, they walked into a buzz saw," the infantryman in green-gray said. "Bam! Bam! Bam! They went out one after another. I don't think they ever knew what got 'em."

Pound hoped the men in the barrel from his platoon didn't know what got 'em. Was that a 4Ѕ-inch gun on the C.S. machine? A fiveincher? Whatever it was, it was devastating.

A Confederate machine gun started snarling. The foot soldier threw himself flat. Pound ducked down into the turret. He got on the platoon circuit with the survivors: "We're moving up. For God's sake, watch it. We aren't the biggest cats in the jungle any more."

How many of those big barrels did Featherston's men have? How fast were they? How maneuverable? How well did they do on bad ground? A barrel's engine could be as important a weapon as its gun. But the gun in that bastard…

"Kinda revs up the pucker factor, doesn't it, sir?" Scullard said, which came unpleasantly close to echoing Pound's thoughts.

"Maybe a little," he answered, his voice as dry as he could make it. He didn't want to admit he was scared, but he couldn't very well deny it, either. He got on the wireless: "Any chance of sending up some more armor to G-5? We don't know what's ahead of us, and it feels pretty naked around here."

"Well, we'll see what we can do," said the wireless operator on the other end of the line. He was sitting in a chair under canvas somewhere. For all Michael Pound knew, he was eating bonbons and patting a cute nurse on the ass to hear her giggle. He wasn't up here at the sharp end of the wedge, wondering if he'd cook like a pot roast in the next few seconds.

Two rounds of HE silenced that chattering machine gun. The country was pine woods and little clearings. Pound stayed away from the clearings when he could and dashed across when he couldn't. Somewhere ahead lay the Georgia Southern line, somewhere ahead and to the right the unreduced town of Fayetteville. If everything worked, the enemy would have to abandon it along with Atlanta. Pound had been confident. He wished he still were.

He also wished the enemy were still counterattacking. That would have made things easier. Then those big honking barrels would have had to show themselves. As things were, they lurked in ambush. The only way to find one was…the hard way.

Having foot soldiers along came in handy. Pound waited in the woods while the men in green-gray trotted across a field. A big round of HE slammed into the poor bloody infantry. Some U.S. soldiers went flying, while others flattened out and dug in.

"See where that came from, sir?" Scullard asked.

"Bearing was almost straight ahead of us-behind that twisted tree with the chunk of bark missing," Pound answered, peering through the periscopes. "If he's smart, he'll back away-he ought to figure our guys have armor with 'em."

"Maybe he'll get greedy instead," the gunner said.

Pound wouldn't have, but the enemy crew did. They fired twice more at the infantrymen in the field. They had good targets in front of them, and they were going to take advantage of it. To give them their due, they didn't have any room to retreat, not if the CSA wanted to hang on to the railroad line.

"Identify 'em now, Mel?" Pound asked.

"Oh, hell, yes," Scullard said, and then, to the loader, "AP!" He added, "Be ready for another round as fast as you can. If the first one doesn't do the trick, we've got to try again."

"Right," Mouradian said.

If the second one doesn't do the trick, we've got to get away-if we can, Pound thought. The C.S. barrel would know where the shots were coming from, and would answer. Pound didn't want to be on the receiving end of that reply.

The gun spoke twice in quick succession. Scullard didn't wait to see if the first round hit before sending the second on its way. As soon as he'd fired both of them, Pound shouted, "Reverse!" The barrel jerked backward.

No enemy antibarrel rounds came after it. Pound popped out of the turret to see what they'd done to the C.S. barrel. Smoke rose from behind the tree, an ever-growing cloud. He spotted motion back there-somebody'd got out and was running away. That impressed him in spite of himself. His own barrel wouldn't have let anybody inside survive, not after it got hit twice. The Confederates had themselves some deadly dangerous new toys here. He hoped like anything they didn't have too many of them.