In at the Death (3 page)

The black guerrillas got another surprise the next day. A Confederate captain approached a scout with a flag of truce. The scout blindfolded him and brought him into camp. No one offered to take the blindfold off once he got there, either.

That didn’t seem to faze him. “I have a proposition for you people,” he said.

“Go on. Say your say. Tell your lies,” Gracchus answered.

“No lies. What I ask is very simple: leave us alone while we fight the USA,” the C.S. officer said. “You stay quiet, we won’t come after you. We’ll even give you rations so you don’t have to plunder the countryside.”

“Put rat poison in ’em first, I reckon,” Gracchus said.

“If you agree, I will come back as a hostage and food taster,” the captain said. “Don’t jog our elbow. That’s all we want. You tell us no, you’ll get the stick instead of the carrot. I promise you that.”

“Shoulda started leavin’ us alone a hell of a long time ago,” Cassius said.

Shrugging, the soldier said, “Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. Too late to worry about it now, though. It’s water under the bridge.”

“Easy fo’ you to say, ofay.” Some of Gracchus’ rage and hatred came out. “You ain’t got no dead kinfolks.”

“Hell I don’t,” the captain said, and Cassius realized he hated them at least as much as they hated him. “Damnyankee bombs blew up my mother and father and sister. Another sister’ll limp forever on account of ’em. And you’re helping the USA. Far as I’m concerned, we ought to feed you rat poison, and better than you deserve. But I don’t give those orders. I just follow them.”

“You got nerve.” Gracchus spoke now with a certain reluctant admiration.

“I told you—I’ve got orders,” the Confederate said. “So what’ll it be? Will you back off and let us fight the United States, or do we come in here and clean out all of you raggedy-ass coons?”

Gracchus didn’t answer right away. He wasn’t an officer with a chain of command behind him and the automatic authority to bind and to loose. He couldn’t order his fighters to obey a truce if they didn’t want to. Cassius knew
he
didn’t. He spoke to the captain: “You coulda done that, reckon you would’ve a long time ago.”

“You don’t get it, boy,” the white said, and never knew how close he came to dying on the spot. He continued, “Before, you were just a rear-area nuisance. But if you think we’ll let you fuck with us when the front’s so close, you better think again.”

Maybe he had a point of sorts. But even if he did…“What happens when the Yankees push you outa here?” Cassius ground out. “You reckon we ain’t got us a lot o’ bills to pay? You reckon we ain’t gonna pay ’em soon as we git the chance?”

That got home. The C.S. captain bit his lip. “All the more reason for us to get rid of you now,” he said.

“You kin try.” Gracchus seemed to have made up his mind. “Yeah, you kin try, but I don’t reckon you kin do it. When the war started, you coulda got what you wanted from us easy. All you had to do was leave us alone. Well, you didn’t do nothin’ like that. You know what you done. Like my friend here say”—he named no names—“we owes you too much to set it down. We takes you back to your own folks now. Ain’t got nothin’ left to say to each other no more.”

As the scout led the blindfolded officer away, Cassius found himself nodding. Gracchus had nailed that, probably better than he knew. All across the Confederate States of America, whites and Negroes had nothing left to say to each other.

“Reckon we better get outa here,” Gracchus said after the white man in butternut was gone. “They ain’t gonna wait around. Soon as he tell ’em we say no, they gonna pound the shit outa where they thinks we’s at.”

He proved a good prophet. Artillery started falling not far from their camp inside of half an hour. A couple of Asskickers buzzed around overhead, looking for targets they could hit. The Negroes stayed in the woods till nightfall.

“You reckon they come after us from the same direction as that captain?” Cassius asked Gracchus.

“Mos’ likely,” the guerrilla leader answered.

“Maybe we oughta rig us an ambush, then,” Cassius said. “That’ll learn ’em they can’t run us like we was coons an’ they was hounds.”

“We
is
coons,” Gracchus said with a grim chuckle. He clapped Cassius on the back. “But yeah, you got somethin’ there. We see what we kin do.”

Next morning, right at dawn, close to a company of Confederate soldiers approached the woods where the guerrillas sheltered. Cassius and a couple of other Negroes fired at them, then showed themselves as they scurried away. That was dangerous. A fusillade of bullets chased them. But nobody got hit.

Shouting and pointing, the Confederates pounded after the fleeing blacks. Down deep, the ofays still thought Negroes were stupid and cowardly. They wouldn’t have pursued U.S. soldiers with so little caution.

The machine gun opened up from the flank and cut them down like wheat before the scythe. The Confederates were brave. Some of them tried to charge the gun and take it out with grenades. They couldn’t work in close enough to throw them. The white soldiers broke off and retreated. They did it as well as anyone could, leaving not a wounded man behind.

“We done it!” Cassius whooped. “We fuckin’ done it!”

Gracchus was less exuberant. “We done it this time,” he said. “Ofays ain’t gonna make the same mistake twice. Next time, they don’t reckon it’s easy.”

That struck Cassius as much too likely. Gracchus moved his band away from the ambush site as fast as he could. Artillery and bombs from above started falling there a few minutes later—probably as soon as the beaten Confederate soldiers could send back word of where they ran into trouble.

Armored cars and halftracks began patrolling the roads around the guerrilla band. The Negroes got one with a mine, but the vehicles trapped them and hemmed them in, making movement deadly dangerous. Before long, they started getting hungry. The rations the Confederate captain had promised in exchange for quiet seemed better to Cassius every time his belly growled.

“Reckon we kin hold ’em off when they come again?” he asked Gracchus.

“Hope so,” the guerrilla leader answered, which was a long way from yes.

Cassius made sure his rifle was clean. He didn’t want it jamming when he needed it most. How much good it would do him against a swarm of Confederates supported by armor…he tried not to think about.

Then one night the northwestern sky filled with flashes. Man-made thunder stunned his ears. The C.S. attack the guerrillas were dreading didn’t come. The Confederates needed everything they had to hold back the U.S. forces hitting them.

And everything they had wasn’t enough. Soldiers and vehicles in butternut poured back past and through the guerrillas’ little territory. They weren’t interested in fighting the blacks; they just wanted to get away. Wounded men and battered trucks and halftracks floundered here and there. The Negroes scrounged whatever they could.

And then Cassius spotted an advancing barrel painted not butternut but green-gray. It had a decal of an eagle in front of crossed swords on each side of the turret. He burst into unashamed tears of joy. The damnyankees were here at last!

A
fter capturing Camp Determination and the vast mass graves where its victims lay, Major General Abner Dowling had trouble figuring out what the U.S. Eleventh Army should do next. He’d handed the United States a huge propaganda victory. No one could deny any more that the Confederates were killing off their Negroes as fast as they could.

Some of the locals were horrified when he rubbed their noses in what their country was up to. The mayor of Snyder, Texas, and a few of its other leading citizens killed themselves after forced tours of the graves.

But others remained chillingly indifferent or, worse, convinced the Negroes had it coming.
Only coons
and
goddamn troublemakers
were phrases Dowling never wanted to hear again.

He scratched at his graying mustache as he studied a map of west Texas tacked on the wall of what had been the mayor’s office. Snyder, under military occupation, was doing without a mayor for now. “What do you think, Major?” he asked his adjutant. “Where do we go from here?”

Major Angelo Toricelli was young and handsome and slim, none of which desirable adjectives fit his superior. “Amarillo’s too far north,” he said judiciously. “We don’t have the men to hold the front from here to there.”

Dowling eyed the map. If that wasn’t the understatement of the year, it came in no worse than second runner-up. “Abilene, then,” he said. It was the next town of any size, and it didn’t lie that far east of Snyder.

“I suppose so.” If Major Toricelli was eager to go after Abilene, he hid it very well. Dowling knew why, too. Even if the Eleventh Army captured Abilene…Well, so what? Taking it wouldn’t bring the USA much closer to victory or do anything more than annoy the Confederates.

With a sigh, Dowling said, “We’ve pretty much shot our bolt, haven’t we?”

“Unless they’re going to reinforce us, yes, sir,” his adjutant answered.

“Ha! Don’t hold your breath,” Dowling said. Hanging on to the men Eleventh Army had was hard enough.

“Maybe you’ll get a new command, sir,” Major Toricelli said hopefully.

“Sure. Maybe they’ll send me to Baja California.” Dowling’s voice overflowed with false heartiness.

His adjutant winced. The USA had tried to take Baja California away from the Empire of Mexico during the last war, tried and failed. This time around, the United States seemed to have succeeded. And, having taken Baja California away from Mexico, what did the USA have? Baja California, and that was all: miles and miles and miles of the driest, most godforsaken terrain in the world.

Holding Baja California mattered for only one reason. It let the United States sit over the Confederates in Sonora. U.S. ships could block the outlet to the Gulf of California. U.S. airplanes in Baja California could easily strike the C.S. port at Guaymas. Of course, Confederate aircraft in Sonora could hit back at the warships and the air bases. They could, and they did. The luckless brigadier general in charge of that operation was welcome to it, as far as Abner Dowling was concerned.

“With what you’ve done here, you ought to get a command closer to the
Schwerpunkt
,” Major Toricelli said.

“How about Sequoyah?” Dowling asked innocently.

That
was
closer to the center of things than west Texas, which didn’t mean Toricelli didn’t wince again anyhow. Sequoyah was a bloody mess, and probably would go on being one for years. Thanks to a large influx of settlers from the USA, it had voted not to rejoin the Confederacy in Al Smith’s ill-advised plebiscite. But the Indian tribes in the east, who’d prospered under Confederate rule, hated the U.S. occupation. And most of the oil there lay under Indian-held land.

The oil fields had gone back and forth several times in this war. Whoever was retreating blew up what he could to deny the oil to the enemy. When the United States held the oil fields, Confederate raiders and their Indian stooges sabotaged whatever wasn’t blown up. That led to U.S. reprisals, which led to bushwhacking, which led to hell in a handbasket.

“About the only thing we could do to make Sequoyah work would be to kill all the redskins in it.” Dowling sighed. “And if we do that, how are we any better than the goddamn Confederates?”

“Those Indians really are fighting us,” Toricelli said.

“Sure.” Dowling’s chins wobbled as he nodded. “But if you listen to Confederate wireless, you hear all the stories about the terrible wicked black guerrillas. Some of that’s got to be bullshit, sure. But not all of it, because we both know the War Department helps the guerrillas when it can.”

Major Toricelli looked unhappy, but he nodded. One of the reasons Dowling liked him was that he would look facts in the face, even when they were unpleasant.

As if on cue, a soldier from the signals unit stuck his head into the office and said, “Sir, we just got a message that needs decoding.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Toricelli said, and hurried away. Dowling wondered what was going on. Eleventh Army wasn’t important enough to receive a lot of encrypted transmissions. The Confederates were welcome to read most of the usual messages it did get.

“Well?” Dowling asked when his adjutant came back forty-five minutes later.

“Well, sir, we’re ordered to step up air attacks against Abilene.” Toricelli had the look of a man who’d gone hunting in the mountains and brought home a ridiculous mouse.

“We can do that,” Dowling allowed. He even understood why the order was coded—no point to letting the Confederates haul in more antiaircraft guns to shoot down U.S. bombers. But, after what he and Toricelli were talking about, the order felt anticlimactic, to say the least.

Colonel Terry DeFrancis was one of the youngest officers of his rank in the Army. He was also one of the better ones; his fighters had established U.S. dominance in the air over west Texas. “Pound the crap out of Abilene?” he said when Dowling told him about the new order. “Sure. We can do that, sir. I’ll step up the recon right away, so we know what we’re up against.”

“Step up the recon over other targets, too,” Dowling said. “No use advertising what we’re up to.”

“Will do, sir,” DeFrancis promised. “You’re sneaky, you know that?”

“Well, I try.” Dowling paused to light a cigarette. No two ways about it—Raleighs and Dukes beat the hell out of anything the USA made. And Confederate cigars…Reluctantly, Dowling brought his mind back to the business at hand. “That’s one thing I had to pick up on my own. General Custer never much went in for being sneaky.”

“What was it like serving under him?” Colonel DeFrancis asked.

“It wasn’t dull, I’ll tell you that. He always knew what he wanted to do, and he went ahead and did it.” Dowling nodded. That was true, every word of it. It was also the sanitized, denatured version of his long association with the man who was, by his own modest admission, the greatest general in the history of the world. Dowling suspected he’d kept Custer from getting sacked several times. He also suspected he’d kept himself from getting court-martialed at least as often. But Terry didn’t need to hear about that.