The Grapple

XVI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even more revolting, the United States had not only more barrels but also better barrels. The Confederates desperately needed a new model to match or surpass the latest snorting monsters from Pontiac. They needed one, but where was it? Where were the engineers who could design it? Where were the steelworkers and auto workers who could build it?

Clarence Potter knew where they were. Too damn many of them were in uniform, doing jobs for which they weren’t ideally suited, just like him. The Confederacy was running headlong into the same problem that bedeviled it during the Great War: it couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. One or the other, yes. One and the other? Not so well as the United States.

After Patton’s third ferocious lunge failed to wipe out or even shrink the Yankee bridgehead on the south bank of the Tennessee, he called an officers’ meeting in an elementary-school classroom. Sitting at one of those little desks, smelling chalk dust and oilcloths, took Potter back over half a century.

“What are we supposed to do?” Patton rasped. “We’ve got to stop those bastards any way we can. If they get into Chattanooga…If they get past Chattanooga…We’re screwed if that happens. How do we stop ’em?”

Though for all practical purposes only an amateur here, Potter raised his hand. Again, he thought of himself in short pants. He hadn’t been shy then, and he wasn’t shy now. Patton pointed to him. “Let’s make the enemy come to us for a change,” he said. “Let’s pull back into the city and give him the fun of digging us out. That worked up in Pennsylvania. We can make it work for us, too.”

“It means abandoning the river line,” Patton said.

“Are we going to get it back, sir?” Potter asked.

Patton gave him a dirty look. Chances were the general commanding had intended his remark to close off debate, not keep it going. Potter nodded to himself. Yes, Patton had more than a little Jake Featherston in him. Well, too bad. He shouldn’t have called this council if he didn’t want to hear other people’s ideas.

“We will if we can get some more air support,” Patton said.

“From where?” Potter said. “The damnyankees have had more airplanes than we do ever since the Pennsylvania campaign went sour.”

Patton’s expression turned to outright loathing. He’d been in charge of the Pennsylvania campaign, and didn’t like getting reminded it hadn’t worked. Too bad, Potter thought again. He spoke his mind to Jake Featherston. A mere general didn’t intimidate him a bit.

“If the airplanes come-” Patton tried again.

“Where will we get them from?” Potter repeated. “We can’t count on things we don’t have, or we’ll end up in even hotter water than we’re in now.”

“You talk like a damnyankee,” Patton said in a deadly voice. “I bet you think like a damnyankee, too.”

“By God, I hope so,” Potter said, which made Patton’s jaw drop. “About time somebody around here did, don’t you think? They’ve done a better job of thinking like us than we have of thinking like them, and we’re paying for it.”

“You haven’t got the offensive spirit,” Patton complained.

“Not when we don’t have anything but our mouths to be offensive with, no, sir,” Potter said. “The more we keep charging the U.S. lines, the more they slaughter us, the worse off we are. Let them come to us. Let them pay the butcher’s bill. Let them see how well they like that. Maybe we’ll be able to get out of this war with our freedom intact.” He used the word with malice aforethought.

“I’ll report you to the President,” Patton said.

“Go ahead. It’s nothing I haven’t told him, too,” Potter said cheerfully. “Having people who love you is all very well, but you need a few men who are there to tell you the truth, too.” He mocked Featherston’s wireless slogan as wickedly as he took the Freedom Party’s name in vain.

Several officers moved away from him, as if afraid whatever he had might be contagious. He saw a few men nod, though. Some people still had the brains to see that, if what they were doing now wasn’t working, they ought to try something else. He wondered whether Patton would.

No such luck. Potter hadn’t really expected anything different. He thought about going over Patton’s aggressive head and complaining to Jake Featherston himself-thought about it and dismissed it from his mind. Featherston was as fanatic about the offensive as Patton was, or he would have pulled back sooner in Pennsylvania and lost less.

“We open the new counterattack at 0800 tomorrow,” Patton declared. “General Potter, you will be generous enough to include your brigade in the assault?”

Potter didn’t want to. What was the point of throwing it into the meat grinder now that it was rebuilt to the point of becoming useful again? Wasted materiel, wasted lives the Confederacy couldn’t afford to throw away…But he nodded. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. I don’t disobey orders.”

“You find other ways to be insubordinate,” Patton jeered.

“I hope so, sir, when insubordination is called for.” Potter was damned if he’d let the other general even seem to put him in the wrong.

He got the brigade as ready as he could. If they were going to attack, he wanted them to do it up brown. He didn’t think they could reach the objectives Patton gave him, but he didn’t let on. Maybe he was wrong. He hoped so. If they succeeded, they really would hurt the U.S. forces on this side of the Tennessee.

It all turned out to be moot.

At 0700, Confederate guns in Chattanooga, on Lookout Mountain, and on Missionary Ridge were banging away at the Yankee bridgehead. Potter looked at his watch. One more hour, and then they would see what they would see.

But then a rumble that wasn’t gunfire filled the sky. Potter peered up with trepidation and then with something approaching awe. What looked like every U.S. transport airplane in the world was overhead. Some flew by themselves, while others towed gliders: they were so low, he could see the lines connecting airplane and glider.

One stream made for Missionary Ridge, while the other flew right over Chattanooga toward Lookout Mountain. “Oh, my God!” Potter said, afraid he knew what he would see next.

And he did. String after string of paratroopers leaped from the transports. Their chutes filled the sky like toadstool tops. Confederate soldiers on the high ground started shooting at them while they were still in the air. Some of them fired back as they descended. By the sound of their weapons, they carried captured C.S. automatic rifles and submachine guns. The damnyankees had seized plenty, and the ammo to go with them, in their drive through Kentucky and Tennessee. Now they were using them to best advantage.

As the paratroopers landed atop Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, a captain near Potter said, “They can’t do that. They can’t get away with it.”

“Why not?” Potter answered. “What happens if they seize the guns up there? What happens if they turn ’em on us?”

The captain thought about it, but not for long. “If they do that, we’re fucked.”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself-or worse, depending on your point of view,” Potter said. The racket of gunfire from the high ground got louder. The USA had dropped a lot of men up there. They weren’t likely to carry anything heavier than mortars-though God only knew what all the gliders held-but they had the advantage of surprise, and probably the advantage of numbers.

They caught Patton with his pants down, Potter thought, and then, Hell, they caught me with my pants down, too. They caught all of us.

“We’re not going to go forward at 0800 now, are we, sir?” the captain asked.

“Sweet Jesus Christ, no!” Potter exclaimed. “We-our side-we’ve got to get those Yankees off the high ground. That comes ahead of this counterattack.” If Patton didn’t like it, too bad.

But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than a wireless operator rushed up to him. “Sir, we’re ordered to hold in place with two regiments, and to bring the third back, fast as we can, to use against Lookout Mountain.”

“Hold with two, move the third back,” Potter echoed. “All right. I’ll issue the orders.” He wondered if he could hold with two-thirds of his brigade. If U.S. forces tried to break out of the bridgehead now, at the same time as they were seizing the high ground and guns in the C.S. flank and rear, couldn’t they just barge into Chattanooga and straight on past it? He hoped they wouldn’t try. Maybe their right hand and left didn’t have even a nodding acquaintance with each other. It had happened before.

Not this time. Twenty minutes later, as his rearmost regiment started south toward Lookout Mountain, U.S. artillery north of the Tennessee awakened with a roar. Green-gray barrels surged forward. It was only August, but winter came to live in Clarence Potter’s heart.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull worked like a man possessed. In part, that was because the new senior medic working with him, Sergeant Vince Donofrio, couldn’t do as much as Granville McDougald had. Donofrio wasn’t bad, and he worked like a draft horse himself. But Granny had been a doctor without the M.D., and Donofrio wasn’t. That made O’Doull work harder to pick up the slack.

He would have been madly busy even with McDougald at his side. The United States hadn’t quite brought off what they most wanted to do: close off the Confederates’ line of retreat from Chattanooga with paratroops, surround their army inside the city, and destroy it. Featherston’s men managed to keep a line of retreat open to the south. They got a lot of their soldiers and some of their armor and other vehicles out through it. Down in northern Georgia, Patton’s army remained a force in being. But the Stars and Stripes floated over Chattanooga, over Lookout Mountain, over Missionary Ridge. The aid station was near the center of town.

Up in the USA, newspapers were bound to be singing hosannas. They had the right-this was the biggest victory the United States had won since Pittsburgh. It was much more elegant than that bloody slugging match, too.

Which didn’t mean it came without cost. O’Doull knew too well it didn’t. He paused in the middle of repairing a wound to a soldier’s left buttock to raise his mask and swig from an autoclaved coffee mug. His gloved hands left bloody prints on the china. He set the mug down and went back to work.

“Poor bastard lost enough meat to make a rump roast, didn’t he, Doc?” Donofrio said.

“Damn near. He’ll sit sideways from now on, that’s for sure,” O’Doull replied. “Like the old lady in Candide.”

He knew what he meant. He’d read it in English in college, and in French after he moved up to the Republic of Quebec. But Sergeant Donofrio just said, “Huh?” O’Doull didn’t try to explain. Jokes you explained stopped being funny. But he was willing to bet Granny would have got it.

He finished sewing up the fellow’s left cheek. The stitches looked like railroad lines. It was a nasty wound. You made jokes that didn’t need explaining when somebody got hit there, but it was no joke to the guy it happened to. This fellow would spend a lot of time on his belly and his right side. O’Doull didn’t think he would ever come back to the front line.

After the stretcher-bearers carried the anesthetized soldier away, they brought in a paratrooper who’d got hurt up on Lookout Mountain. He had a splint and a sling on his right arm and a disgusted expression on his face. “What happened to you?” O’Doull asked him.

“I broke the son of a bitch, sure as hell,” the injured man replied. “Looked like I was gonna get swept right into a tree, so I stuck out my arm to fend it off, like. Yeah, I know they teach you not to do that. So I was a dumb asshole, and I got hurt without even getting shot.”

“Believe me, Corporal, you didn’t miss a thing,” O’Doull said.

“But I let my buddies down,” the paratrooper said. “Some of them might’ve bought a plot ’cause I fucked up. I shot myself full of morphine and took a pistol off a dead Confederate, but even so… I wasn’t doing everything I should have, dammit.”

“What did you do when the morphine wore off?” Donofrio asked.

“Gave myself more shots. That’s wonderful stuff. Killed the pain and kept me going just like coffee would. I’ve been running on it two days straight,” the corporal said.

Sergeant Donofrio looked at O’Doull. “There’s one you don’t see every day, Doc.”

“Yeah,” O’Doull said. Morphine made most people sleepy. A few, though, it energized. “You’ve got an unusual metabolism, Corporal.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Neither, I don’t think. It’s just different. Why don’t you get up on the table? We’ll put you under and make sure your arm’s set properly and get it in a cast. That’ll hold things together better than your arrangement there.”

“How long will I take to heal up?” the soldier asked as he obeyed.

“A couple of months, probably, and you’ll need some more time to build up the arm once you can use it again,” O’Doull said. The paratrooper swore resignedly. He wasn’t angry at being away from the fighting so much as for letting his friends down.

O’Doull gave him ether. After the soldier went under, the doctor waved for Vince Donofrio to do the honors. Setting a broken bone and putting a cast on it were things the medic could do. He took care of them as well as O’Doull might have.

They fixed several more fractures: arms, ankles, legs. Paratroopers didn’t have an easy time of it. Coming down somewhere rugged like the top of Lookout Mountain was dangerous in itself. Add in the casualties the desperate Confederates dealt out and the U.S. parachute troops suffered badly.

But they did what they were supposed to do. They silenced the enemy guns on the high ground. They turned some of those guns against the Confederates in and in front of Chattanooga. And they made Featherston’s men fear for their flank and rear as well as their own front. If not for the paratroopers, the Stars and Bars would probably still fly above Chattanooga.

The wounded men seemed sure the price they’d paid was worth it. One of them said, “My captain got hit when we were rushing a battery. ‘Make it count,’ he told us. He didn’t make it, but by God we did like he said.” He’d had two fingers shot off his left hand, and couldn’t have been prouder.

“Only thing worse than getting hurt when you win is getting hurt when you lose,” Donofrio remarked after they anesthetized the paratrooper. “Then you know your country got screwed along with you.” Maybe sergeants thought alike; Granny’d said the same thing.

They treated wounded Confederates who went a long way toward proving the point. “You bastards win, you’re gonna screw us to the wall,” said a glum PFC with a bullet through his foot. “I gave it my best shot, but what the hell can you do when you stop one?” He seemed sunk in gloom.

“You came through alive,” O’Doull said. “Whatever happens, you’re here to see it.”

“Hot damn,” the Confederate answered. Donofrio put him under. O’Doull did what he could to patch up the damage from the bullet. He didn’t know if the wounded man would ever walk without a limp, but he was pretty sure he saved the foot.

Away went the wounded PFC. Next up on the table was a much more badly hurt Confederate, with an entry wound in the right side of his chest and a far bigger exit wound in the right side of his back. Bloody foam came from his mouth and nostrils. He wasn’t complaining about how the war was going. He was gray and barely breathing.

Sergeant Donofrio got a plasma line into him before O’Doull could even ask for it. O’Doull wished he could transfuse whole blood. They were supposed to be working the bugs out of that, but whatever they were doing hadn’t got to the field yet. This guy needed red cells to carry oxygen, but he would have to use his own.

That means I’ve got to keep him from bleeding to death in there, O’Doull thought unhappily. He opened the Confederate’s chest even as Donofrio stuck the ether cone over the man’s face. The wounded soldier was too far gone to care.

The bullet had torn hell out of his right lung. O’Doull hadn’t expected anything different. He cut away the bottom half of the organ, tying off bleeders as fast as he could.

“Make it snappy, Doc,” Donofrio said. “His BP’s dropping.”

“I’m doing everything I can,” O’Doull answered. “Keep that plasma coming.”

“I gave him the biggest-gauge needle we have,” the medic answered. “Only way to get it in there faster is with a fuckin’ funnel.”

“All right,” O’Doull said, but it wasn’t-not even close. Too much blood loss, too long trying to breathe with that ruined lung…He knew exactly when the wounded man died, because he felt his heart stop. He swore and tried open-chest massage. He won a couple of feeble contractions, but then the heart quivered toward eternal silence. O’Doull looked up and shook his head. “Shit. Close the line, Vince. He’s gone.”

“Oh, well. You tried, Doc. Don’t feel bad about it.” Every time they lost somebody, O’Doull heard the same thing. There wasn’t much else to say. Donofrio went on, “Not like he was one of ours, anyway.”

“I work just as hard on them,” O’Doull said. “That way, I can stay honest when I hope they work just as hard on our guys.”

“Well, yeah,” Donofrio said. “But even so…You know what I mean.”

O’Doull nodded. He knew exactly what the younger man meant. He worked as hard as he did on enemy wounded not least because he knew. As long as he was honest about that, losing Confederate casualties bothered him as little as possible. If he only went through the motions, if he lost men he might have saved by working harder…Well, how could he shave in the morning without wanting to slice the razor blade across his throat?

Corpsmen lifted the dead Confederate off the operating table and carried him away. O’Doull peeled off his gloves. He threw them into a trash can. He had blood on his arms up past the gloves; he’d been deep inside the soldier’s chest. He scrubbed with strong soap that smelled of carbolic acid, then went to get a towel with his wrists bent up so the water would run away from his fingers. Hands dried, he took a deep breath. “Whew!” he said. “Feels like I’m coming up for air.”

“Enjoy it while you can,” Vince Donofrio said. “Chances are it won’t last long.” He stretched and twisted his back. Something in there crackled. He was grinning as he took off his mask. “That’s better. Wonder what Chattanooga’s like. Haven’t hardly had a chance to look around.”

“Chattanooga’s a mess,” O’Doull said, which was true in the same sense that Jake Featherston was not a nice person. Chattanooga was bombed and shelled and shot up. But that wasn’t all of what Donofrio meant. O’Doull went on, “Probably not all the women refugeed out.”

“Sure as hell hope not.” Chasing skirt was Donofrio’s hobby, the way fishing was for some men and carpentry for others.

“Be careful what you catch. After you’ve got it for a little while, you’ll decide you don’t want it any more.” O’Doull knew a lot of skirt-chasers, and didn’t understand any of them. He was happy enough with one woman. Oh, he looked at others, but he didn’t touch. Plenty of men did.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m a big boy, Doc,” Donofrio told him impatiently. The medic was ready-eager-to comb through the ruins of Chattanooga for anything that didn’t take a leak standing up.

“Just remember your initials,” O’Doull warned.

“Funny. Fun-ny,” Vince Donofrio said. “Har-de-har-har. See? I’m busting up.”

“Yeah, well, use a pro station when you’re done laughing,” O’Doull said. “Sulfa’s pretty good for the clap, but it doesn’t do anything about syphilis.”

“I know, I know. I’ll be careful,” Donofrio said. “Is that other new stuff coming out of the labs-that peni-whatever-the-hell-is that as good as everybody says it is?”

“Haven’t got my hands on any, so I don’t know for sure,” O’Doull answered. “The literature sure makes it sound like the Second Coming, though, doesn’t it?” He’d seen plenty of literature like that for one patent medicine or another, and that always turned out to be less than met the eye. But people raved about penicillin in professional journals. That was different. He hoped it was, anyway. Drugs that killed germs without poisoning patients gave doctors an edge they’d sorely missed in the Great War.

“I’m gonna slide outa here if I get a chance,” Donofrio said. He didn’t; not even a minute later, corpsmen brought in a Confederate groaning with a shattered shoulder. The medic went to work without complaint. If he was thinking about women while he did, well, wasn’t that better than brooding about blood and bullets and broken bones?

Armstrong Grimes was new to the rituals of the repple-depple. He’d stayed with the same unit from Ohio to Utah to Canada. Now he didn’t belong to anybody or anything. He’d been dissolved away from everything that went before, and was floating free. He was a-what the hell did they call them in chemistry? He muttered to himself, flogging his memory. An ion, that was it. He was an ion.

The replacement depot had been a high school somewhere in the middle of Tennessee. He didn’t know exactly where, or care very much. All he knew was that it was a hell of a lot hotter and muggier than Manitoba. And he knew the locals here, like the ones up there and the ones in Utah, didn’t like U.S. soldiers worth a damn. A barbed-wire perimeter with sandbagged machine-gun nests around the depot rubbed that in.

He lit a cigarette. Confederate tobacco was easy to come by around here, anyway. He sucked in smoke, held it, and blew it out. The kid in the seat next to his said, “Bum a butt off you, Sergeant?”

“Sure.” Armstrong held out the pack.

“Thanks.” The kid took one, pulled a lighter out of his pocket, and got the Duke going. He smoked it halfway down, then said, “You rather go to the front, or do you want occupation duty?”

“Christ! The front!” Armstrong said. “I’ve done occupation duty. You can have it. I want to get some licks in at the real enemy for a change. What about you?”

“I got wounded when we were outflanking Nashville,” the kid answered. “If I could find a nice, quiet spot where nothing much happens…”

“You’re an honest goldbrick, anyway,” Armstrong said, laughing.

“I’d have to smoke funny cigarettes to really believe it, not nice ones like these,” the young private said. “The only guys who draw duty like that are Congressmen’s kids.”

“Not even them. There was one in my outfit-well, a nephew, but close enough,” Armstrong said. “He was a regular joe, Yossel was. Did the same shit everybody else did, took the same chances when the shooting started. He had balls, too-sheenies must be tougher’n I figured.”

Up at the front of the repple-depple, where the principal would have given the students what-for, a personnel sergeant sat reading a paperback with a nearly naked girl on the cover. A young officer came up and spoke to him. He nodded, put down the book, and picked up a clipboard. He read off several names and pay numbers. Men grabbed their gear and went out with the shavetail.

A few more soldiers came in and found seats. The personnel sergeant called other names and numbers. Men slung duffel bags or shouldered packs and found themselves part of the war again. A poker game started. Armstrong stayed away. He’d played a lot of poker in the hospital, and had less money than he wished he did because of it.

Another lieutenant talked with the personnel sergeant. The sergeant looked at his clipboard. Among the names he read was, “Henderson, Calvin.” The kid next to Armstrong got up and walked to the front of the room. Then the noncom said, “Grimes, Armstrong,” and rattled off his pay number.

He got up, too. His leg hurt a little, but he got around all right. He went up and said, “I’m Armstrong Grimes.”

“Hello, Sergeant. I’m Lieutenant Bassler,” the officer said. “I’ve got a squad for you. You’ve led a squad before?”

“I’ve led a platoon, sir,” Armstrong answered.

Lieutenant Bassler took it in stride. “Good. You’ll know what you’re doing, then. Where was that?”

“In Utah, sir, and up in Canada.”

“All right. And you’re in the repple-depple because…?”

Did you foul up? Did they take your platoon away from you? Armstrong could read between the lines. “I got wounded, sir.” He touched his leg. “I can use it pretty well now.”

“Ah. I caught one about there myself last year,” Bassler said. “Gives us something in common, even if we don’t much want it.”

“Hell of a lot better to shoot the other guy,” Armstrong agreed.

“Well, you’ll get your chance. Come on,” Bassler said.

“Hold it.” The personnel sergeant held up a hand. “I gotta sign these guys out.” Armstrong and Cal Henderson and the other men signed on their lines on the clipboard. Now the military bureaucrat nodded approval. He reminded Armstrong of his own father. He wanted all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, and he didn’t think anything was official till they were.

When the soldiers got outside, Armstrong said, “Sir, you mind if I load my weapon? Never can tell what’s waiting out here.”

The question wasn’t just practical, though it was that. It would also show him something about how Lieutenant Bassler thought. The officer nodded right away. “You’d all better do that,” he said, and pulled his own.45 from its holster.

Armstrong put a clip in his Springfield and chambered a round. All but one of the other men also had Springfields. The odd man out-his name, Armstrong remembered, was Kurowski-carried a submachine gun: not a Confederate model, but a big, brutal Thompson, made in the USA.

The lieutenant had a couple of command cars waiting to take his new men down to the front. He said, “I’ll handle the machine gun on one of these. Who wants to take the other one?”

“I’ll do it, sir,” Cal Henderson said. “I’ve used a.30-caliber gun before. Haven’t fired one of these big mothers, but they work the same way, right?”

“Near enough,” Lieutenant Bassler said. “A.50-caliber gun shoots farther and flatter and harder, that’s all.”

“Sounds good to me,” Henderson said. It sounded good to Armstrong, too.

But Lieutenant Bassler didn’t put him in with the kid. The officer stuck Armstrong in his own command car, and grilled him as they thumped down the battered road. He got more out of Armstrong about where he’d fought and what he’d done. He probably also learned a bit about how Armstrong thought, but that didn’t occur to Armstrong till later.

When they came into Chattanooga-luckily, without needing to use the machine guns on the way-Bassler said, “Ever see anything this torn up?”

“Sir, this isn’t a patch on Ogden and Salt Lake City,” Armstrong answered. “The Mormons hung on till they couldn’t hang on any more. Then they pulled back a block and did it again.”

An old man picking through ruins with a stick glared at the command cars as they went by. If he had a rifle…But he didn’t-not here, anyway-so he could only hate.

“What do we do with them-what do we do to them-once we lick them?” Bassler said. “How do we keep from fighting another round twenty, twenty-five, thirty years from now? How do we keep them from putting bombs under their shirts and blowing themselves up when they walk into a crowd of our soldiers?”

Armstrong remembered that woman in Utah, when he was heading for R and R. He shivered despite the humid heat. “Sir, I wish to hell I knew,” he said. “I’m just a dumbass sergeant. What do you think? How do we do it?”

“Either we make them like us-”

“Good luck!” Armstrong broke in. “Uh, sir.”

“Yeah. I know.” Bassler wasn’t more than a few years older than Armstrong. When he grinned, the difference hardly showed. “Fat chance. But if we could do that, it would sure save us a lot of trouble down the road. If we can’t, maybe we can make them too scared of us to turn terrorist very often.”

“That’s what they tried in Utah,” Armstrong said. “It sort of worked, but only sort of. You start shooting hostages and stuff, you just make people hate you worse.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Bassler said sourly. “And the Confederate States are a lot bigger than Utah. We occupy them all, there are bound to be lots of places where we’re too thin on the ground to do it right. And those are the places where trouble starts.”

“I know one thing we could do,” Armstrong said. Bassler raised a questioning eyebrow. Armstrong went on, “We could give what’s left of the nigger’s guns. If half the shit they say about what Featherston’s fuckers are doing to them is true, they’ll want payback like you wouldn’t believe. They may not love us, but they sure as hell have to hate the bastards who’ve been screwing ’em over for so long.”

Lieutenant Bassler stayed quiet for so long, Armstrong wondered if he’d said something dumb. Well, too bad if he had. Bassler shouldn’t have asked him if he didn’t want to know what he thought. Then the young officer said, “You know, Grimes, I’m going to pass that up the line. We don’t think about the Negroes in the CSA as much as we should. I’m sure we’re doing some things to help them, same as the Confederates did what they could to help the Mormons in Utah.”

“Mostly the Mormons used our weapons, sir,” Armstrong said. “That way, they could get ammo from us. Sometimes they took our guns, too. But they already had a lot when we got there, yeah.”

“Uh-huh,” Bassler said. “But that’s not my point. My point is that we ought to be using the Negroes systematically, and we aren’t. Somebody with stars on his shoulder straps needs to think about that. Maybe the President does, too.”

Armstrong was convinced they wouldn’t think about it on the suggestion of a no-account noncom. Then they drove through the gap between Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, the gap U.S. forces now held. Bare-chested gun bunnies fed 105s that sent death down into Georgia. Eyeing the high ground to either side, Armstrong said, “My hat’s off to those paratroopers. They saved us a world of grief.”

“You can sing that in church, Sergeant,” Bassler said. “We got over the Tennessee with a ruse, and we took the mountains with a trick. Makes you wonder what we’ll have to do to go forward from here.”

“Well, the country looks easier, anyway,” Armstrong said. “If we start banging barrels through the gap, can those butternut bastards stop us?”

“Good question. I think we’ll find out before too long, once the logistics buildup gets done,” Bassler said. They were close enough to the front to watch incoming artillery burst less than a quarter of a mile away. Bassler tapped the driver on the shoulder. “This’ll do. We’ll hoof it from here. They’ll start aiming at the command cars if we come much closer.” Looking grateful, the driver hit the brakes.

Armstrong ended up with Cal Henderson in his new squad. He was introduced to Whitey and Woody and Alf and Rocco and Hy and Squidface and Zeb the Hat. When he said, “Let’s try not to get each other killed, all right?” they all nodded.

“You’ve been through some shit,” Squidface opined. “That’s good.”

“A little bit,” Armstrong allowed. “You guys look like you have, too.”

“Hell, we’re here,” Squidface said. He was a PFC, skinny and dark and needing a shave. He didn’t have tentacles or even particularly buggy eyes. One of these days, Armstrong figured he’d find out how the nickname happened. Till then, he didn’t need to flabble about it.

The Confederates threw a little more artillery at the U.S. positions. Nobody in Armstrong’s new squad even moved. These guys were veterans, all right; they could tell by listening when falling shells were liable to be dangerous. They watched Armstrong as the shells burst, too. They wanted to see if he got all hot and bothered. When he lit up a Duke and went on talking as if nothing were happening, they relaxed a little.

“You guys think we can break out?” he asked. He’d heard what Lieutenant Bassler had to say. These men would have to do the bleeding. So will I, Armstrong thought. (So would Bassler-second lieutenants were expendable, too. But Armstrong didn’t worry about him.)

They all loudly and profanely insisted they could. Armstrong figured that meant they’d get the chance to try before real long.

Jonathan Moss counted himself lucky to be alive. He didn’t think what was left of Spartacus’ band would attack another airstrip any time soon. Doing it once had cost the black guerrillas too much.

“They was layin’ for us,” Spartacus said. He, Moss, Nick Cantarella, and a dozen or so Negro fighters sat around a couple of small campfires. “Was they layin’ for anybody who come by, or did somebody rat on us?”

That was an ugly thought. A Negro would have to be crazy or desperate to betray his comrades to whites in the CSA, but it could happen. If a man knew his loved ones were in a camp, could he make a bargain with the Devil? Of course he could. Moss could find other reasons that might make a black turn traitor-simple jealousy of Spartacus came to mind-but saving kin stood highest on the list of likely ones.

“Some lyin’ nigger might be sittin’ right here next to me,” Spartacus said. “Damn cottonmouth might be gittin’ ready to bite again.”

The guerrillas stirred. One of them, a heavyset fellow called Arminius, said, “We went to the damn airstrip on account o’ these ofays. Anybody sell us out, reckon they’s the ones. Like calls to like, folks say.”

“It couldn’t very well have been us,” Moss said. “You people have kept an eye on us ever since we joined the band. You think we don’t know that? I don’t blame you for doing it, but it’s no secret.”

He talked like a lawyer: he reasoned from evidence. No surprise-he was a lawyer. Sometimes, though, legal tactics weren’t what the situation called for. Moving quickly but without any fuss, Nick Cantarella got to his feet. “Anybody says I kiss Jake Featherston’s ass can kiss mine.” He eyed Arminius. “Shall I drop my drawers for you?”

The black man jumped up with a roar of rage. He charged Cantarella. He was a couple of inches taller than the escaped POW, and much wider through the shoulders. He wasn’t afraid of anything-Moss had seen that plenty of times.

He swung an enormous haymaker, intending to knock Cantarella into the middle of next week. No doubt the white officer tried to infuriate him so he would fight foolishly. Cantarella got what he wanted. He grabbed Arminius’ arm, jerked, and twisted. The Negro let out a startled squawk as he flew through the air. He landed hard. Cantarella kicked him in the side.

Arminius groaned, but tried to yank Cantarella’s foot out from under him. “Naughty,” the U.S. officer said, and kicked him above his left ear. Arminius groaned and went limp. The brawl couldn’t have lasted half a minute. Cantarella looked around. “Anybody else?”

No one said anything. “Sit down,” Spartacus told him. “I don’t reckon you done nothin’. I reckon you did, you be dead no matter how fancy you fight. You gots to sleep some o’ the time.”

“Throw water on Arminius,” Cantarella said. “He’ll be fine once his headache goes away. I don’t think I broke anything-didn’t do it on purpose, anyhow.”

A bucket-no, they call it a pail here, Moss thought-from a nearby creek revived Arminius. He didn’t remember the fight or what led up to it. He did say, “My head bangin’ like a big ol’ drum.”

“I bet it is,” Spartacus said. He eyed Cantarella. “Where you learn dat?”

“Here and there,” Cantarella answered.

“You learn me how to do it?”

“Probably,” the U.S. officer said. “Most of the time, it’s no damn good. Somebody got a gun, he’ll punch your ticket for you before you get close enough to throw him through a wall.”

“Learn me anyways,” Spartacus said. “Mebbe I got to impress some niggers, git ’em to jine up with me. I do dat fancy shit, dey reckon I’s tough enough to suit.” He paused. His mouth twisted. “Hope I find me some niggers to impress. Ain’t so many left no more, ’cept for the ones already totin’ guns.”

He was right about that. Ten years earlier, the countryside hereabouts would have been full of sharecropper villages, full of blacks. Mechanization and deportation had taken care of that. Not many Negroes remained out here, and fewer all the time. Mexican soldiers and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards from the towns took ever more to train stations. Off they went to one camp or another. And it grew clearer and clearer that the camps didn’t house them, or not for long. The camps just killed them, as fast as they could.

“Assembly line for murder,” Jonathan Moss murmured.

“What you say?” Spartacus asked.

“Nothing. Woolgathering, that’s all.” Moss was glad the guerrilla chief hadn’t understood him.

Nick Cantarella had. “Army’s coming,” he said. “Won’t be too fucking long, either. Chattanooga’s fallen. Even the Confederate propaganda mill can’t spew lies about that any more. If our guys aren’t in Georgia already, they will be pretty damn quick. Territory north of Atlanta’s rough, but it’s not that rough. I don’t think Featherston’s fuckers can stop ’em once they get rolling again.”

“We still be breathin’ when they gits here?” Spartacus asked. “Can’t hardly think about hittin’ towns no mo’. Got to stay alive first.”

“What happen to me?” Arminius asked, holding his head as if afraid it might fall off any minute now. Considering what Cantarella did to it, it might, too. Moss wouldn’t have wanted a well-aimed shoe clomping into the side of his noggin.

“You done did somethin’ dumb, dat’s what,” Spartacus answered, and then came back to the problem at hand: “Wanna hit the damn ofays. Don’t wanna jus’ lurk out here like swamp niggers in slavery days.”

“You can get dynamite, right?” Cantarella asked. Spartacus nodded. Cantarella went on, “And you can get alarm clocks, too, yeah?”

“Reckon so,” Spartacus said. “What you thinkin’ ’bout? People bombs is too risky, even if we finds folks willin’ to do it. These days, ofays see a nigger they don’t know, they jus’ start shootin’. Can’t get close enough to blow up a lot of ’em.”

“Auto bombs,” Cantarella said. “Set the timer for sunup, but drive in during the middle of the night, park the son of a bitch, and then get out if you can. All the shrapnel flying, auto bombs make a mess of things even if they don’t have a big crowd around ’em.”

Spartacus sighed. “Yeah, we do dat. Dey don’t patrol as good as dey oughta. But it ain’t the same, you hear what I say?”

“We hear,” Moss said. He didn’t want to make himself too prominent right now. The guerrillas had attacked the airstrip on his account. He would have enjoyed strafing Confederates in Georgia if he’d stolen an airplane. He would have enjoyed flying off to U.S.-held territory even more. Instead…Instead, the band wrecked itself. That was all there was to it. Spartacus and the surviving Negroes-fewer than half those who’d gone to the airport-didn’t want to admit that, even to themselves, for which he couldn’t blame them. But it was true.

They’d fought the Mexicans on even terms before the debacle. Now they ran from them. They had to. They would get chewed to bits if they didn’t.

A buzz in the air overhead made everybody look up nervously. “Reckon the woods hides our fires good enough?” Spartacus said.

“We’ll find out,” Nick Cantarella answered.

That wasn’t what Moss wanted to hear. And, a minute or so later, he wanted even less to hear the screech of falling bombs. They wouldn’t be big ones-ten-pounders, say, thrown out of the airplane by hand the way bombardiers did it back in the early days of the Great War. But when he had no trench or foxhole to jump into, all he could do was flatten out on the ground and hope for the best.

The Confederate pilot wouldn’t be aiming any fancy bombsight, not in an obsolete airplane like the one he was flying. He’d just fling the bombs out and hope for the best. Not much chance of doing damage that way, not unless he got lucky. But when the first bomb knocked down a tree less than a hundred yards from the fires, Moss wasn’t the only one who cried out in fear.

More bombs rained down, some bursting farther away, others closer. Fragments snarled past. One man’s cries went from fear to pain. Moss got up and bandaged the gash in the Negro’s leg. He didn’t have needle and thread, but used a couple of safety pins to help close the wound.

“Thank you kindly, suh,” the guerrilla said, and then, “Hurts like a motherfucker.”

“I’m sorry-I don’t have any morphine,” Moss said.

“Didn’t reckon you did,” the black man answered. “Somebody ’round here will, mebbe. When the bombs let up, he get up off his ass an’ stick me. You got balls, ofay, movin’ while they’s comin’ down.”

“Thanks.” Moss didn’t think the risk was especially large, which was why he’d done it. He didn’t say that, though. Being old and white isolated him from Spartacus’ band. No one till Arminius had blamed him for the fiasco at the airstrip, but it stuck in his mind-and, no doubt, in the guerrillas’ minds, too. Any way he could find to win back respect, he gladly accepted.

After a few minutes, the little puddle-jumper of an airplane buzzed and farted away. The Negro Moss had bandaged was the only man hurt. Spartacus said, “We gots to git outa here. That pilot, he gonna tell the ofays an’ the greasers where we at. They come after us in the mornin’.”

“We ought to pull out, yeah,” Nick Cantarella said. “But we should set up an ambush, blast the crap out of those bastards when they poke their noses where they don’t belong.”

Spartacus thought about it. At last, reluctantly, he shook his head. “Can’t afford to lose nobody now. Can’t afford to lose no machine gun, neither.”

Cantarella looked as if he wanted to argue. After a moment, he shrugged instead. “You’re the boss. Me, I’m just a staff officer.”

“Nah. Them fuckers never come up where they kin hear the guns,” Spartacus said. Moss and Cantarella both guffawed. Most of the guerrillas looked blank. Sure as hell, Spartacus had seen staff officers in action-or in inaction-when he wore butternut during the last war. The men he led weren’t old enough to have fought for the CSA the last time around.

If they’d had the chance, if they’d been treated decently, they might have done it this time. How many divisions could the Confederates have squeezed from their colored population? Enough to give the USA fits; Moss was sure of that. But the Freedom Party didn’t want Negroes on its side. It wanted them gone, and it didn’t care what that did to the country.

Moss shook his head. He didn’t have it quite right. The Freedom Party thought getting rid of Negroes was more important than using them. That struck Moss as insane, but it made whites in the CSA happy. Jake Featherston wouldn’t have got elected if it didn’t; it wasn’t as if he ever made any secret about what he had in mind.

The guerrillas had to rig a litter of branches and a blanket to take the wounded man along-he couldn’t walk. He offered to stay behind and shoot as many soldiers and stalwarts as he could, but Spartacus wouldn’t let him. “Can’t do enough with no rifle, and we ain’t leavin’ no machine gun here,” he said. They got the Negro-his name was Theophrastus-onto the litter and hauled him away.

Moss let out a mournful sigh. If things had worked out the way he wanted, he would be back on the U.S. side of the line now. He might be flying a fighter again. How much had they improved while he sat on the shelf here? He didn’t-couldn’t-know. But he was still fighting the enemy, which he hadn’t been while stuck in Andersonville. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.

“Way to go, Pat!” Sam Carsten held out his hand. “I knew you’d do it. Now get out there and give ’em hell.”

“Thank you, sir.” The exec shook the proffered hand.

“You don’t call me sir any more. I call you sir now…sir,” Sam said. Cooley was getting his own ship, and getting promoted away from the Josephus Daniels. He hadn’t yet put on his oak leaves or sewn the thin gold stripe that transformed him from lieutenant to lieutenant commander onto each sleeve, but he had the rank even without its trappings.

Rank or no rank, he shook his head. “Doesn’t seem right. It isn’t right, dammit. You’ve taught me so much…”

“My ass,” Carsten said like the old CPO he was. “You knew more than I did when I got here. Now you know a lot more than I do, and the Navy Department’s finally figured it out. We both knew this day was coming. You’re headed for the top, and I’m doing the best job I know how, and that’s the way it ought to be.”

“You ought to have a carrier, not a destroyer escort,” Cooley blurted.

“What the hell would I do with a carrier? Run it on the rocks, that’s what.” Sam had to belittle that; he didn’t want to-he didn’t dare-admit how much he wanted it. He thought he knew what to do. He’d spent enough time aboard the Remembrance, first as a rating and then as an officer. But even the baby flattops they were cranking out now had three-stripers in command, and he knew he’d be lucky if he ever made two and a half. He was damn lucky to have made a lieutenant’s two.

“You could swing it,” Pat Cooley said. “You can handle men. You know guns. You know damage control. For everything else”-he winked-“you could lean on your exec till you got the hang of it.”

Sam laughed. “You remember to lean on yours,” he said. “You’re the Old Man now. You’re the good guy, the mild guy. Let him be the professional son of a bitch. That’s his job. It’s not yours any more.”

“I won’t forget.” Cooley slung his duffel over his shoulder.

As he walked off the deck and onto the gangplank that led to the Boston Navy Yard, the crew called out good luck and good wishes to him. Cooley waved and grinned. He hadn’t been an out-and-out Tartar, the way a lot of execs were. The sailors might not love him, but they did respect him.

“Wonder who we’ll get now,” one grizzled petty officer said to another.

“Some hotshot who shaves once a week,” the other CPO predicted. “Well, we’ll break him in, by God.”

“Yeah, we’ll-” The first chief noticed Sam listening and shut up with a snap.

“I know what you guys will do,” Sam said, holding in a smile. “Remember, I’ve done it myself. If you don’t ride the guy too hard, everything’ll be jake.”

“Sometimes we forget you’re a mustang, sir,” the first chief said sheepishly. “You just act like an officer, you know?”

Was that a compliment or an insult? Sam didn’t try to parse it. With a snort, he said, “Yeah, like the oldest goddamn lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. If I’m not a mustang, I’m a screwup. Better for the ship if I came up the hawser.”

Those were the magic words. If something was good for the ship, nobody would say a word about it. The two chiefs didn’t hang around, though. They went off someplace where they could slander the outgoing and incoming execs-and probably the skipper, too-without getting overheard.

As for Sam, he walked back to his cramped cabin and wrestled with the ship’s accounts. After a spell in combat, you could always write some things off as lost in action, which simplified your life. He thought about keeping accounts for an airplane carrier. That almost made him decide not to touch the job with an eleven-foot bohunk, which was what you used when a ten-foot Pole wouldn’t reach. But if he ever got the chance, he knew he would leap at it.

He laughed, but he was angry, too. Pat Cooley had given him a new itch, even if it was one he didn’t think he’d ever be able to scratch.

More shells and small-arms ammunition came aboard. So did all kinds of galley supplies. The ship got refueled, too, and he had to sign off on everything. One of these days, if the Josephus Daniels didn’t get sunk under him, he’d have to turn her over to somebody else, and he wanted the books to balance, or at least get within shouting distance of balancing, when he did.

The new exec came aboard the next day. Lieutenant Myron Zwilling couldn’t have been more different from Pat Cooley had he tried for a week. He was short and squat and dark. He was also fussily precise; if he had a sense of humor, he kept it so well hidden, even he didn’t know where it was. He stared at Sam’s right hand.

A glance at Zwilling’s hand told the skipper what he was looking for: an Annapolis ring. Zwilling’s was lovingly displayed, and couldn’t have been polished any brighter. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, trying to hold in his disappointment at not finding Sam a Naval Academy graduate. When he saluted, the ring flashed in the sun.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Zwilling,” Sam said, reflecting that the new exec was either an optimist or a jerk, one. How could a two-striper in his mid-fifties possibly be anything but a mustang? “We’ll give ’em hell, won’t we?”

“I hope to aid in making this ship an efficient fighting unit, sir,” Zwilling said, and Sam’s heart sank. He had nothing against efficiency. But he didn’t want to sing hymns to it, and Zwilling plainly did.

“Have you ever served on a D.E. before?” Sam asked.

“No, sir,” Zwilling replied. “My last tour of duty was aboard a fleet oiler, and before that I was a junior officer on the Idaho. I have my personnel records with me for your review.”

Of course you do, Sam thought. That wasn’t fair, but he couldn’t help it. Trying not to show what he was feeling, he said, “Well, let’s give you the quick tour, then. There’ll be places where you want to watch your head-not a lot of room in one of these babies.”

“I’ll be careful, sir,” Zwilling said, and Sam believed him. He was unimpressed with the pair of 4.5-inch guns that made up the Josephus Daniels’ main armarment. “The secondary weapons on a battleship are bigger than these,” he sniffed.

“Tell me about it. I fought a five-incher on the Dakota,” Carsten said.

“As battery chief?” Zwilling asked with his first show of interest in his new skipper as a human being.

“Nope.” Sam shook his head. “I was a loader when the Great War started, and ended up running a gun.”

“A loader. I see.” Zwilling looked as uncomfortable as if Sam had admitted to eating with his fingers when he was a kid. There wouldn’t be any talk about professors or courses, not on this ship there wouldn’t.

Sam took him through the destroyer escort: galley, bunkrooms, engines, and all. Finally, he said, “What do you think?”

“Everything seems orderly enough,” the new exec allowed. “Still, I’m sure there’s room for improvement.”

“There always is,” Sam said, not liking the way the commonplace sounded in Zwilling’s mouth. “Do you think you can find your way back to your cabin from here?”

“I do.” Zwilling didn’t lack for confidence, anyhow.

“Well, ask a sailor if you get lost.” Sam inserted the needle with a smile. “I’ll let you get settled, and we’ll talk some more in the wardroom tonight.”

“Yes, sir.” Zwilling saluted again and strode off.

After Sam went up on deck, he watched a sailor standing on the pier kissing a redheaded woman good-bye. A couple of sniffling little boys in dungarees stood by her, so she was probably the sailor’s wife. After a last embrace, he slung his duffel bag and asked the officer of the deck for permission to come aboard.

“Welcome to the Josephus Daniels,” Sam said. “Who are you, and what do you do?”

“I’m George Enos, Junior, sir,” the sailor answered. “I jerked shells on a 40mm on the Townsend. Goddamn Confederate Asskicker sank her in the Gulf of California.”

“Well, we can use you.” Carsten paused. Enos? The name rang a bell. He snapped his fingers. “Wasn’t your mother the one who…?”

“She sure was,” Enos said proudly. “My father was a fisherman before he went into the Navy, and so was I.”

“Good to have you aboard,” Sam said. “Good to meet you, too, by God.”

“Thank you, sir.” The sailor cocked his head to one side. “Have we ever met before? You look kind of familiar.”

With his very blond hair and pink skin, Sam sometimes got mistaken for other fair men. He shook his head. “Not that I know of, anyway. You live around here?” After Enos nodded, Sam went on, “I’ve been through more times than I can count, so you may have seen me somewhere, but I’ve got to tell you I don’t remember.”

“Maybe it’ll come to me.” Enos grinned like a kid. “Or maybe I’m talking through my hat. Who knows? Will I go on a 40mm here, sir?”

“Have to see how everything shakes down, but I’d say your chances are pretty darn good,” Sam answered. “Go below for now and sling your duffel somewhere. The chiefs will take charge of you.”

“Aye aye, sir.” With a crisp salute, George Enos headed for a hatch.

He could have been a kid when we bumped into each other, Sam realized. But if he was, why would he remember me? He shrugged. He had no way of knowing. Maybe it would come back to Enos. And maybe it wouldn’t. The world wouldn’t end either way.

Orders came the next day: join up with a task force heading east across the Atlantic to raid Ireland. This is where I came in, Carsten thought. He’d run guns to the micks during the Great War, and shelled-and been shelled by-British positions in Ireland afterwards. The difference this time around was an abundance of British land-based air. He wondered how much the Navy Department brass down in Philly had thought about that.

When he showed Myron Zwilling the orders, the new exec just nodded and said, “That’s what we’ll do, then.”

“Well, yeah,” Sam said. “I’d like to have some kind of hope of coming back afterwards, though.”

“If they need to expend us, sir-” Zwilling began.

“Hold your horses.” Sam held up a hand. “If they need to expend us on something important, then sure. We needed to take Bermuda back if we could-I guess we did, anyhow. I’ve pulled some raids on the Confederates that I think really hurt those bastards. But this? This looks chickenshit to me.”

“You don’t know the big picture, sir,” Zwilling said.

He was right. Sam didn’t. “What I do know, I don’t like.”

“You can’t refuse the mission,” the exec said.

He was right again. That would mean a court-martial, probably, or else just an ignominious retirement. “I’m not refusing it,” Carsten said hastily. “I’m worrying about it. That’s a different kettle of fish.”

“Yes, sir.” The way Zwilling said it, it meant, No, sir.

You’re not helping, Sam thought. An exec was supposed to be a sounding board, someone with whom he could speak his mind. He wasn’t going to get that from Myron Zwilling. He didn’t need to be an Annapolis grad to see as much.

“We’ll give it our best shot, that’s all.” Sam thought about George Enos, Jr. “And we’ll make damn sure all the antiaircraft guns and ashcan launchers are fully manned.”

“Of course, sir,” Myron Zwilling said.