In at the Death (19 page)

“Damn squareheads have airfields closer to you now,” Jake said. Lord Halifax looked like a man who’d just sat on a tack but was too polite to mention it. Featherston knew why. He hadn’t been…diplomatic.
Well, too bad
, he thought. He’d told the truth, hadn’t he? He’d told the truth all the time while he rose—it looked that way to him, anyhow. He didn’t see any point to stopping now.

And he was telling the truth again. The Kaiser’s forces had bundled the British out of northwestern Germany, out of Holland, and back into Belgium. They were threatening Ypres—universally pronounced
Wipers
by English-speakers—again, as they had in the Great War. When it fell then, it was a sign that the Entente couldn’t hold on against the Central Powers. If it fell this time around, it would be another verse of the same song.

“We are doing everything in our power to deny them the use of those air bases,” Halifax said.

“Sure, sure.” Jake nodded and smiled. He probably should have kept his mouth shut even if he did tell the truth. Didn’t he owe Halifax that much? The ambassador—and his government, of course—had come through for the Confederacy in a big way. “Between us, your Lordship, sir, we’ll lick the bad guys yet.”

“Between us, yes. And the French and the Russians will have something to say about it as well.” Lord Halifax grimaced again. “I worry about the Russians. Failure the last time around cost them the Ukraine and Finland and Poland and the Baltic states and a Red insurrection at least as unpleasant as yours.”
He
was being diplomatic; the Tsar’s fight against the Reds had been bigger and bloodier than anything the CSA went through. After a pause to light a Habana, he continued, “They’re wavering again, I fear. When they couldn’t beat the Germans, or even the Austrians…If they go out, heaven only knows what sort of upheaval will follow.”

“Hell with that,” Featherston said. “If they go out now, you and France get the shaft. The Kaiser can pull everything away from the east and shoot it all at you.”

“Quite.” British reserve had its uses. Lord Halifax got as much mileage from one soft-spoken word as Jake would have from five minutes of cussing. He rose and held out an elegantly manicured hand. “Always a pleasure, Mr. President. I do hope the document proves valuable to you.”

“I’m sure it will be.”
I’ll know just how valuable by this time tomorrow
, Jake thought as he shook it. Aloud, he went on, “England’s always been the best friend the Confederacy has. We know that, and we never forget it.”

One more time, the truth. English recognition in 1862, English forcing of the U.S. blockade, had ensured the Confederacy’s independence. English help during the Second Mexican War made sure the CSA got to keep Chihuahua and Sonora, even if an invasion of the USA from Canada came to grief in Montana.

Well, the Confederate States of America paid their debts to the UK in 1914. This time, no debt was involved: both countries wanted revenge against the enemies who’d beaten them. And remembering alliances past didn’t mean you
had
to do anything but remember. Jake understood that perfectly well. Did Lord Halifax? No doubt; he was twisty as a snake.

As soon as the British ambassador bowed his way out, Featherston summoned a courier. The bright young lieutenant saluted. “Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Jake echoed. He handed the man the British document. “Get these pages photographed. As soon as you’ve done that, haul ass to Washington University in Lexington and deliver them to Professor FitzBelmont.”

“Yes, sir.” The courier hesitated. “If it’s such a tearing hurry, sir, why wait for the photography?”

“Because this
has
to get through,” Jake answered. “Even if something happens to you”—
even if the damnyankees roast you like a barbecued porker
—“FitzBelmont
has
to get it. So we make a copy before we send you off.”

“All right, sir. I understand.”

“Good. Tell the fellow in the photo lab to call me as soon as he does what he needs to do.” With this document, Jake intended to take no chances whatever.

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said again. He saluted and hurried away. He didn’t even need to leave the armored underground compartment to find a photographic technician. Anything that had to do with running a country, you could do here.

Now he would have some idea of what was going on in Lexington. So would the man who photographed the pages. That worried Jake less than it would have a few months before. If one of them reported to the damnyankees…well, so what? The United States already knew the Confederate States were working on a uranium bomb. The United States knew where, too. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have started pounding the crap out of Lexington. If they knew the limeys were helping out, how did that change things? Didn’t it just give them a brand-new worry? It looked that way to Jake Featherston.

The courier hadn’t been gone more than a couple of minutes before the telephone on his desk jangled again. He eyed it the way a man in the woods might eye a rattler with a buzzing tail. Unlike a man in the woods, he couldn’t walk away from it no matter how much he wished he could.

He picked it up. “Featherston here…What the hell do you mean, they’re over the North Anna?” He’d expected bad news—that was the kind that got to the President in a hurry. He hadn’t expected news this bad, though. “How the devil did they do that? Which dumb-shit general had his thumb up his ass to let ’em?…Jesus Christ, they can’t have
that
much armor—can they?” He sounded worried even to himself. That was no good. You needed to sound calm, even—no, especially—when you weren’t.

He gave orders to try to stem the green-gray tide. The damnyankees couldn’t shell Richmond yet, no, but it wouldn’t be long if they kept going like this.

“Over the North Anna.
Son
of a bitch,” Jake muttered after he hung up. He started looking at the maps on his office walls in a new way. Richmond really might fall. And if it did, he needed somewhere else to go, a place from which he could keep fighting till FitzBelmont and the rest of the high foreheads came through.

He’d never thought it would come to this. He’d figured the United States would roll over and show their yellow belly when he cut them in half. When that didn’t happen, he’d been sure losing Pittsburgh would make them quit. When they didn’t lose Pittsburgh…About then, he realized he had a tiger by the tail.

Can’t let go
, he thought. And the Yankees had a tiger by the tail, too. If they didn’t know that yet, they would. He nodded to himself. They sure as hell would. No matter where he had to do it from, he’d make them pay for every single thing they’d done to his country. He’d make them pay plenty.

A
rmstrong Grimes was happy as a clam in a country where they’d never heard of chowder. Along with the rest of his platoon, he tramped east toward the Savannah River and the sea. They’d told Lieutenant Bassler the Confederates didn’t have a whole hell of a lot in front of them. So far, they looked to be right.

“Keep your eyes peeled, though,” he warned the men in his squad. “Don’t want to get your nuts shot off doing something dumb.”

“Shit, Sarge, I don’t want to get my nuts shot off doing something smart,” Squidface said.

“You’ve got a point,” Armstrong said. “Now put a hat on it.”

The PFC flipped him off. He gave back the bird. When he took over the squad, the men had been wary about him. They’d come through a lot together, and they weren’t about to trust somebody from the repple-depple till they saw he deserved it. By now, Armstrong had paid his dues and then some. He was part of the life of the platoon, somebody to razz and somebody to put them through their paces. They followed his orders not just because he had three stripes but because they’d seen he had a halfway decent notion of what he was doing.

Up ahead, a Confederate machine gun chattered. That tearing-sailcloth noise sobered people in a hurry. Men kind of hunched down to make themselves into smaller targets. They moved away from one another to make a burst less likely to take out several of them at once. Armstrong did all that himself, too, before he even thought about it. He knew his trade, the same as the other guys did.

Most of them did, anyhow. A couple were new men fresh out of the replacement depot. A tall, gangly kid called Herk had taken Whitey’s place. He stared around in mild surprise when the soldiers around him spread out. Then a bullet cracked past his head. He knew what that meant, all right, and awkwardly dropped to the ground.

“You gotta move faster’n that, man,” Armstrong told him. “Otherwise, you’ll damn well stop one, and I ain’t got time to nursemaid you.”

“I’ll try, Sarge.” Herk was willing. He was just unskilled.

“Sure.” Armstrong swallowed a sigh. He’d hit it, all right—he couldn’t nursemaid the replacements. In a perfect world, they would have joined the unit when it got taken out of the line so the veterans got to know them a little bit. Here, it was baptism by total immersion. Experienced soldiers shied away from the new guys. Raw men didn’t just get themselves maimed and killed; they also brought trouble down on their comrades, because the Confederates who aimed at them also hit guys near them.

If they made it through a couple of weeks of action, they learned the ropes and turned into decent soldiers. A lot of them didn’t, though. Not too many Confederates stood in front of Armstrong’s platoon right now. The ones who did knew their business. The only new Confederate soldiers were the ones who’d been too young for conscription when the war started.

From the ground, Herk asked, “We gonna go after that machine gun, Sarge?”

“Not if we can find a barrel or a mortar team to do it for us,” Armstrong answered. “We want to lick these fuckers, yeah, but we don’t want to pay too much while we’re doing it.”

“Now you hope the lieutenant feels the same way,” Squidface said, his grin half sly, half resigned.

“Bet your ass I do.” Armstrong could hope, anyhow. Lieutenant Bassler had pretty good sense…as far as lieutenants went. He didn’t think he had an infinite supply of soldiers to do whatever he thought needed doing, and he didn’t send his men anywhere he wouldn’t go himself. Things could have been worse.

And they rapidly got that way. That rising howl in the air wasn’t artillery. It was even worse. “Screaming meemies!” Squidface yelled while Armstrong was still sucking in wind to shout the same thing. Everybody who wasn’t already on the ground threw himself flat. Armstrong got out his entrenching tool and started digging like a madman.

The salvo of rockets shrieked home before he’d thrown up more than a shovelful of red dirt. A couple of dozen of them slammed down within a few seconds. Armstrong got picked up and thrown around while chunks of jagged iron whined through the air. Whether he lived or died wasn’t up to him; it was just luck one way or the other. He hated that more than anything else about combat. Sometimes whether you were a good soldier didn’t matter worth a dime.

When he came down and stopped rolling, he looked around. There was Herk, blood running from his nose but otherwise seeming all right. There was Squidface, who hadn’t even lost his cigarette. And…there was Zeb the Hat’s head, attached to one shoulder and not much else. The rest of what was probably his body lay thirty yards away.

Herk got a good look at that and lost his breakfast. Armstrong had already seen a lot of bad things, but his stomach wanted to empty out, too. Squidface’s lips silently shaped the word
Fuck
. Or maybe he said it out loud; Armstrong slowly realized he wasn’t hearing very much.

Squidface said something else. Armstrong shrugged and pointed to his ears. The PFC nodded. He came over and bellowed, “He was a hell of a good guy.”

“Yeah,” Armstrong shouted back. “He was.”

That was about as much of a memorial as Zeb the Hat got. Armstrong dragged his two pieces together so Graves Registration would know they went with each other. The surviving soldiers helped themselves to Zeb’s ammunition and ration cans—he didn’t need them any more. Armstrong took out his wallet and found his real name was Zebulon Fischer, and that he was from Beloit, Wisconsin. The billfold held only a couple of bucks. Had he had a real roll, Armstrong would have sent that to his next of kin.

More shrieks in the air announced another salvo of rockets. Armstrong went flat again. These screaming meemies came down off to the left, not all around him. He had more of a chance to dig in, and used it. The Confederates in this part of Georgia didn’t seem inclined to let U.S. soldiers come any farther.

After the rockets slammed down, Armstrong breathed a sigh of relief: nothing bad had happened to him or his men. Then shouts came from the left. He needed a little while to make out what people were saying. The first salvo really had pounded the crap out of his hearing. After a while, though, he got the message: Lieutenant Bassler was wounded.

He swore. God only knew what kind of half-assed new man the repple-depple would cough up. Then somebody said, “Looks like you’re in charge of the platoon, Sergeant.”

“What the hell?” Armstrong said. Two of the other three sergeants were senior to him.

“Yeah, you are,” the soldier insisted. “Same goddamn rocket got Borkowski and Wise. One of ’em’s dead—looks like the other one’ll lose a foot.”

“Shit.” Armstrong had got a platoon before, and the same way—everybody above him got wounded or killed. That was the only way a three-striper could command a platoon…or, if enough things went wrong, a company. He didn’t really want the honor. As usual, nobody cared what he wanted.

“What are we gonna do?” the news bringer asked, something not far from panic in his voice. “We stay here, Featherston’s fuckers’ll just keep pounding the shit out of us.”

“Tell me about it,” Armstrong said unhappily. The Confederates would be loading up more screaming meemies right this minute. If he ordered a retreat, his own superiors would tear the stripes off his sleeve. They’d call him a coward, and he wouldn’t be able to prove them wrong. Which left…“We gotta move up.”

They would have to take out that machine gun now, like it or not. He didn’t, but he was stuck. Squidface came to the same unwelcome conclusion: “That goddamn gun’s gonna have to go.”