In at the Death (24 page)

“Then she fool around with somebody else,” Jorge said. “A gal who cheats on you once, she cheats on you lots of times. You don’t get her back like she never screwed around at all.” Ray’s jaw dropped. Plainly, that had never crossed his mind.
Dumb as rocks
, Jorge thought sadly. He went on, “Or maybe this letter you got, maybe it’s bullshit. Whoever sent it to you, there ain’t no return address, right?”

“I dunno,” Ray said, which covered more ground than he realized. “You might could be right, but I dunno. Kinda sounds like somethin’ Thelma Lou’d go and do.”

So why do you give a damn about her?
Jorge didn’t scream it, however much he wanted to. He could tell it would do no good. “You can’t go nowhere,” he said. “You don’t want to let your buddies down, right?” Ray shook his head. He wasn’t a bad soldier. Jorge pressed on: “You can’t get leave, and there’s lots of military police and Freedom Party men between here and your home town. So stay. All this stuff, if it really is anything, it’ll sort itself out when the war’s done. Why worry till then?”

“I guess.” Ray didn’t sound convinced, but he didn’t sound like someone on the ragged edge of deserting, either.

Sergeant Blackledge swore when Jorge warned him of the trouble. “This ain’t the first time he’s had trouble with that cunt,” he said. “But you were dead right—if he does try and run off, he ain’t gonna get far, and he’ll land in more shit than Congress puts out.”

Half an hour after that, a captain and a second lieutenant and six or eight enlisted men showed up: a new company CO, a platoon commander, and some real live (for the moment, anyhow) reinforcements. Would wonders never cease? The captain, whose name was Richmond Sellars, walked with a limp and wore a Purple Heart ribbon with two tiny oak-leaf clusters pinned to it.

“I told ’em I was ready to get back to duty,” he said, “so they sent my ass here.” He pointed to the lieutenant, who had to be at least forty and looked to have come up through the ranks. “This is Grover Burch. Who’s in charge now?”

“I am, sir. Sergeant Hugo Blackledge.” Blackledge likely wasn’t happy to see company command go glimmering. Jorge wasn’t thrilled about losing his platoon. The good news was that he wouldn’t have to listen to complaints like Ray’s so much. They’d be Burch’s worry, and Sergeant Blackledge’s, too.

“Well, Blackledge, why don’t you fill me in?” Sellars said. He’d seen enough to know he’d be smart to walk soft for a while.

The sergeant did, quickly and competently. He said a couple of nice things about Jorge, which surprised and pleased the new corporal. Then Blackledge pointed northwest. “Not really up to us what happens next, sir,” he said. “The damnyankees’ll do whatever the hell they do, and we’ve got to try and stop ’em. I just hope to God we can.”

F
orward to Richmond! That had been the U.S. battle cry in the War of Secession. It would have been the battle cry during the Great War, except the Confederates struck north before the USA could even try to push south. And in this fight…

In this fight, the CSA had held the USA in northern Virginia. The Confederate States had held, yes, but they weren’t holding any more. Abner Dowling noted each new U.S. advance with growing amazement and growing delight. After U.S. soldiers broke out of the nasty second-growth country called the Wilderness, the enemy just didn’t have the men and machines to stop them. The Confederates could slow them down, but the U.S. troops pushed forward day after day.

A command car took Dowling and his adjutant past burnt-out C.S. barrels. Even in this chilly winter weather, the stink of death filled the air. “I didn’t believe I’d ever say it,” Dowling remarked, “but I think we’ve got ’em on the run here.”

“Yes, sir. Same here.” Major Angelo Toricelli nodded. “They just can’t hold us any more. They’ll have a devil of a time keeping us out of Richmond.”

“I hope we don’t just barge into the place,” Dowling said.

He glanced over at the driver. He didn’t want to say much more than that, not with a man he didn’t know well listening. His lack of faith in Daniel MacArthur was almost limitless. He’d served with MacArthur since the Great War, and admired his courage without admiring his common sense or strategic sense. He doubted whether MacArthur
had
any strategic sense, as a matter of fact.

“I’ve heard we’re trying to work out how to get over the James,” Major Toricelli said.

“I’ve heard the same thing,” Dowling replied. “Hearing is only hearing, though. Seeing is believing.”

A rifle shot rang out, not nearly far enough away. The driver sped up. Toricelli swung the command car’s heavy machine gun toward the sound of the gunshot. He didn’t know what was going on. He couldn’t know who’d fired, either. The shot sounded to Dowling as if it had come from a C.S. automatic rifle, but about every fourth soldier in green-gray carried one of those nowadays—and the other three wanted one.

Toricelli relaxed—a little—as no target presented itself. “Back in the War of Secession, they would have had a devil of a time taking the straight route we’re using,” he remarked. “The lay of the land doesn’t make it easy.”

“Around here, the lay of the land’s got the clap,” Dowling said. His adjutant snorted. So did the driver. An adjutant was almost obligated to find a general’s jokes funny. A lowly driver wasn’t, so Dowling felt doubly pleased with himself.

He’d been exaggerating, but only a little. The rivers in central Virginia all seemed to run from northwest to southeast. Major Toricelli was right. Those rivers and their bottomlands would have forced men marching on foot to veer toward the southeast, too: toward the southeast and away from the Confederate capital.

But barrels and halftracks could go where marching men couldn’t. And U.S. forces were pushing straight toward Richmond whether Jake Featherston’s men liked it or not.

So Dowling thought, at any rate, till C.S. fighter-bombers appeared. The driver jammed on the brakes. Everybody bailed out of the command car. The roadside ditch Dowling dove into was muddy, but what could you do? Bullets spanged off asphalt and thudded into dirt. Dowling didn’t hear any of the wet slaps that meant bullets striking flesh, for which he was duly grateful.

A moment later, he did hear several metallic
clang!
s and then a soft
whump!
That was the command car catching fire. He swore under his breath. He wouldn’t be going forward to Richmond as fast as he wanted to.

He stuck his head up out of the ditch, then ducked again as machine-gun ammo in the command car started cooking off. Embarrassing as hell to get killed by your own ordnance. Embarrassing as hell to get killed by anybody’s ordnance, when you came right down to it.

After the .50-caliber rounds stopped going off, Dowling cautiously got to his feet. So did the driver. Dowling looked across the road. Major Toricelli emerged from a ditch there. He wasn’t just muddy—he was dripping. His grin looked distinctly forced. “Some fun, huh, sir?”

“Now that you mention it,” Dowling said, “no.”

“We’d better flag down another auto, or a truck, or whatever we can find,” Toricelli said. “We need to be in place.”

He was young and serious, even earnest. Dowling had been through much more. With a crooked grin, he replied, “You’re right, of course. The whole war will grind to a halt if I’m not there to give orders at just the right instant.”

Who was the Russian novelist who’d tried to show that generals and what they said and did was utterly irrelevant to the way battles turned out? Dowling couldn’t remember his name; he cared for Russian novels no more than he cared for Brussels sprouts. With the bias that sprang from his professional rank, he thought the Russian’s conclusions absurd. He remembered the claim, though, and enjoyed hauling it out to bedevil his adjutant.

“They do need you, sir,” Major Toricelli said. “If they didn’t, they would have left you in Texas.”

“And if that’s not a fate worse, or at least more boring, than death, I don’t know what would be,” Dowling said.

While he and Toricelli sparred, the driver, a practical man, looked down the road in the direction from which they’d come. “Here’s a truck,” he said, and waved for it to stop.

Maybe he was persuasive. Maybe the burning command car was. Either way, the deuce-and-a-half shuddered to a halt, brakes squealing. Over the rumble of the engine, the driver said, “You guys look like you could use a lift.”

“You mean you’re not selling sandwiches?” Dowling said. “Damn!”

The driver eyed his rotund form. “You look like you’ve had plenty already…” As his eyes found the stars on Dowling’s shoulder straps, his voice trailed off. Too late, of course, and the glum look on his face said he knew it. “Uh, sir,” he added with the air of a man certain it wouldn’t help.

“Just get me to Army HQ in a hurry, and I won’t ask who the hell you are,” Dowling said.

“Pile in. You got yourself a deal.” Now the driver sounded like somebody’d who’d just won a reprieve from the governor.

Before long, Dowling repented of the bargain. The trucker drove as if he smelled victory at the Omaha 400. He took corners on two wheels and speedshifted so that Dowling marveled when his transmission didn’t start spitting teeth from the gears. Other traffic on the road seemed nothing but obstructions to be dodged.

“What are you carrying?” the general shouted. The engine wasn’t rumbling any more—it was roaring.

“Shells—105s, mostly,” the driver yelled back, leaning into another maniacal turn. “How come?”

Major Toricelli crossed himself. Dowling wondered who was more dangerous, the Confederate fighter-bomber pilot or this nut. Well, if the shells went off, it would all be over in a hurry. Then, brakes screeching now, the driver almost put him through the windshield.

“We’re here,” the man announced.

“Oh, joy,” Dowling said, and got out of the truck as fast as he could. Toricelli and the soldier who’d driven the command car also escaped with alacrity. The truck drove off at a reasonably sedate clip. The madman behind the wheel probably felt he’d done his duty.

A sentry with a captured C.S. submachine gun came up. “I know
you
, sir,” he said to Dowling. “Do you vouch for these two?” The muzzle swung toward Toricelli and the driver.

Never saw ’em before
. The words passed through Dowling’s mind, but didn’t pass his lips. The sentry was too grim, too serious, to let him get away with them, and too likely to open fire before asking questions. “Yes,” was all Dowling said.

“All right. Come ahead, then.” The sentry gestured with his weapon, a little more invitingly than he had before.

Familiar chaos enveloped Dowling as he stepped into the big tent. The air was gray with tobacco smoke and blue with curses. People in uniform shouted into telephone handsets and wireless sets’ mikes. But they just sounded annoyed or angry, the way they were supposed to sound when things were going well.

He remembered headquarters in Columbus, back in the first summer of the war. He remembered the panic in officers’ voices then, no matter how they tried to hold it at bay. They couldn’t believe what the Confederates were doing to them. They couldn’t believe anyone could slice through an army like a housewife slicing cheddar. They didn’t know how to do it themselves, and so they’d figured nobody else knew, either.

They almost lost the war before they realized how wrong they were.

Now they knew what was what. Now they had the barrels and the bombs and the artillery and the men to turn knowledge into action. Better still, they had the doctrine to turn knowledge into
effective
action. Yes, they’d learned plenty of lessons from the enemy, but so what? Where you learned your lessons didn’t matter. That you learned them did.

One of the men at a field telephone lifted his head and looked around. When he spotted Dowling, he called, “Message for you from General MacArthur, sir.”

“Yes?” Dowling tried not to show how his stomach tightened at that handful of words. Daniel MacArthur often seemed incapable of learning anything, and the lessons he drew from what happened to him verged on the bizarre. His scheme to land men at the mouth of the James and march northwest up the river to Richmond…

I managed to scotch that one, anyhow
, Dowling thought.
I earned my pay the day I did it, too
.

“Well done for your progress, and keep it up,” the man reported. “And the general says he’s over the Rapidan River east of Fredericksburg and rapidly pushing south. ‘Rapidly’ is his word, sir.”

“Is it?” Dowling said. “Good for him!” The Confederates had given MacArthur a bloody nose at Fredericksburg in 1942. There wasn’t much room to slide troops east of the town. Abner Dowling wouldn’t have cared to try it himself. But if MacArthur had got away with it, and if he was driving rapidly from the Rapidan and punning as he went…“Sounds like Featherston’s boys really are starting to go to pieces.”

“Here’s hoping!” three men in Army HQ said in one chorus, while another two or three added, “It’s about time!” in another.

Dowling liked prizefights. People said of some boxers that they had a puncher’s chance in the ring. If they hit somebody squarely, he’d fall over, no matter how big and tough he was. That was the kind of chance the CSA had against the USA. But when the United States didn’t—quite—fall over, the Confederate States had to fight a more ordinary war, and they weren’t so well equipped for that.

Did Featherston have one more punch left? Dowling didn’t see how he could, but Dowling hadn’t seen all kinds of things before June 22, 1941. He shrugged. If the United States seized Richmond and cut the Confederacy in half farther south, what could Featherston punch with?

“Tell General MacArthur I thank him very much, and I look forward to meeting him in front of the Gray House,” Dowling said. Forward to Richmond! Things really were going that way.

A
s far as Dr. Leonard O’Doull was concerned, eastern Alabama seemed about the same as western Georgia. The hilly terrain hadn’t changed when he crossed the state line. Neither had the accents the local civilians used. Shamefaced U.S. soldiers caught social diseases from some of the local women, too.