In at the Death (31 page)

George shrugged; that wasn’t his worry. He went up the gangplank and paused at the end. Catching the officer of the deck’s eye, he said, “Permission to come aboard, sir?”

The OOD was a lieutenant. George had had a two-striper for a skipper before. “Granted,” the name said. He poised pen and clipboard. “And you are…?”

“George Enos, sir.”

The officer checked him off the list. “You’re new, then,” he said, and George nodded. The OOD went on, “What was your previous duty? And your battle station?”

“I was on a destroyer escort, sir—the
Josephus Daniels
. My battle station was loader on a 40mm mount. When they ordered me to duty here, they said that was where you’d put me.” He knew the powers that be would do whatever they damn well pleased, but he’d got his druthers in. “I can do just about anything if I have to. I was a fisherman before the war, and I came back to the USA in the prize crew of a freighter we took in the South Atlantic.”

“Uh-
huh
. You realize we can check all this?”

“Yes, sir. It’s all in my jacket, anyway.” George wasn’t talking about clothes, but about the paperwork any sailor carried with him.

“Uh-
huh
,” the OOD said again. Then he turned and called, “Caswell!”

“Yes, sir?” A petty officer materialized behind him.

“Here’s Enos. Put him on the number-three 40mm mount—he’s a loader. Show him where he’s supposed to go for general quarters and where he can sling his hammock.”

“Aye aye, sir. Come on, Enos.” Caswell had a thin, clever face and cold gray eyes. George didn’t think getting him mad was a good idea. You’d pay for it, and you’d keep on paying, maybe for years.

He didn’t want to get the senior rating mad at him any which way. “Show me where to go and what to do, and I’ll go there and do it,” he said. He’d hoped for a bunk, given the size of the battlewagon, but he could live with a hammock. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t had one before…and the
Oregon
would carry a much bigger crew than the
Josephus Daniels
did, too.

Caswell took him to his battle station first. That he still had his duffel slung over his shoulder seemed to mean nothing to the petty officer. Caswell wasn’t carrying anything himself, after all. George could see right away that the 40mm mounts on the
Oregon
’s deck were added long after the ship was built. That was no surprise; every warship these days piled on as much AA as she could without capsizing. The number-three mount was on the port side, well forward.

George eyed the awesome bulk of the two triple fourteen-inch turrets not far away. “What’s it like when they go off?” he asked.

“Loud,” Caswell said, and said no more.
No shit
, George thought. That boom would probably blow the fillings out of your teeth, and maybe the hair off your head. He didn’t want to think about the big guns going off when he had a hangover. If that didn’t kill you, you’d wish it would.

He looked up and down the deck. Yeah, there was a lot of antiaircraft: 40mms, and .50-caliber and .30-caliber machine guns as well. And the five-inch guns of the secondary armament could fire AA rounds, too. “Anybody bores in on us, we can make him mighty unhappy,” he remarked.

“We better,” the petty officer replied. “We fuck up once, we’re toast.” That was nothing but the truth. A well-placed bomb could sink even this floating, fighting fortress. Caswell lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer George one, but he did say, “Come on. I’ll take you below.”

There were bunks on the
Oregon
. But there were also lots of hammocks. Since George was a new fish here, his getting one was no man-bites-dog story. The sailors on either side of him seemed good enough guys—a hell of a lot friendlier than Caswell, that was for sure.

“Give me the straight skinny,” George said to one of them, a broad-shouldered man who went by Country. “Is she a madhouse or is she a home?”

“She’s a home…mostly.” Country’s harsh Midwestern accent said he hadn’t grown up near the sea.

“Mostly? When do things go wrong?”

The other sailor tipped him a wink. “You’ll find out,” he said, and that was all George could get out of him.

L
ieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover looked around at the latest place his supply dump had come to rest. He looked at Pete, who’d done a hell of a lot of retreating with him. “From Edwardsville to Albertville,” Dover said. “Reckon that’d make a good title for my memoirs when I write ’em up?”

“For your what?” The quartermaster sergeant gave him a blank look. “This Albertville place don’t look like it’s good for squat.”

“It’s bigger than Edwardsville,” Dover said. Pete couldn’t very well argue. Edwardsville had had only a couple of hundred people in it. Albertville, northwest of the other town—on the road to Huntsville, in other words—had three, maybe even four, thousand. It boasted a cotton gin and a cotton mill and a cottonseed-oil plant and a cornmeal mill. The local high school bragged about how it trained future farmers.

While Pete didn’t argue, he didn’t seem much impressed, either. “Horseshit’s bigger’n dogshit, too, but shit’s still shit, you ask me.” He pulled out a pack of Raleighs. With Kentucky and Tennessee lost, with North Carolina cut off from Alabama, even good tobacco was getting scarce. Seeing Dover’s longing expression, he gave his superior a smoke and a light. After his drag, he added, “And the Confederate States are in deep shit right now, and that’s the God’s truth.”

“You think I’m gonna pat you on the ass and go, ‘No, no, everything’s fine,’ you’re out of your tree,” Dover answered. “They’re already knocking Birmingham flat. If we lose Huntsville, too…”

“We’re fucked,” Pete finished for him. “Without the rockets, we can’t do
anything
against the damnyankees.”

“Yeah.” Jerry Dover smoked in quick, worried puffs. “If Birmingham and Huntsville go, what’s left? New Orleans and Little Rock and Texas. God Himself couldn’t lick the USA with New Orleans and Little Rock and Texas, and I bet He wouldn’t be fool enough to try. Which is more than I can say for Jake Featherston.”

Pete looked around nervously. “Jeez, sir, careful how you talk. You seen how many soldiers they’ve hanged from trees with
DEFEATIST
around their necks?”

“They won’t hang me—or you, either,” Dover said. “We’re still doing our jobs—and we’re doing ’em pretty goddamn well, too. That’s a hell of a lot more than most people can say—including the President. Wasn’t either one of us who lost Richmond.”

“He says we’ll get it back,” Pete said.

“Freedom!” Dover replied—without a doubt, the most sardonic Party salutation in the history of the CSA. In one politically safe word, he called everybody who’d ever believed anything Jake Featherston said an idiot. He’d believed some of those things himself—not all of them, but some—so he knew he was an idiot, too.

Pete cocked his head to one side, like a bird dog taking a scent. “Firing’s picking up at the front.”

Jerry Dover listened, too. “Shit. You’re right. Yankees are laying down more artillery than they’ve used for a while. If that doesn’t mean another push is on its way…”

“Can’t afford many more,” Pete said.

“
Any
more,” Dover corrected. “If they start shelling Huntsville
and
bombing it, how’s it going to keep doing what it’s got to do?”

Before Pete could answer, Dover’s field telephone jangled. The noncom sketched a salute and ducked out of Dover’s tent. “Albertville supply depot here,” Dover said as he picked up the telephone. He listened, then answered, “I’m light on 105 shells, but I’ll send you what I’ve got.” He yelled for Pete to come back. Would Cicero Sawyer be able to get him more artillery rounds after he sent off what he had here? He had to hope so.

“I’ll get ’em moving,” Pete promised when Dover told him what he needed. “We don’t have as many as I wish we did, though.”

“Yeah, I know. I said the same thing,” Dover answered. “Anything is better than nothing, though.”

Was anything
enough
better than nothing? Dover didn’t know. Once more, he had to hope. The telephone rang again, and then again. The soldiers farther forward sounded more and more desperate. “Things are falling apart up here!” one of them yelled.

“We can’t hold!” another cried.

“I’ll send what I can,” Dover said, and rang up Huntsville. “Whatever you’ve got,” he told Sawyer. “They’re taking it on the chin here.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Cicero Sawyer answered, sounding much like Dover himself. “We aren’t getting stuff as fast as I wish we would, either.”

“Great.” Dover meant anything but what he said. “How are we supposed to fight a war if we don’t have anything to fight with?”

“Good question,” Sawyer said. “If you don’t have any other good questions, class is dismissed.” He hung up.

Swearing, so did Jerry Dover. After he finished cussing, he checked to see how many clips he had for his automatic rifle. He had the bad feeling he might need it before long.

The next time he saw Pete, he noticed the noncom was carrying a submachine gun. Pete’s eyes went to his weapon, too. Neither of them said anything. If you didn’t talk about what worried you, maybe it would go away and leave you alone.

Or maybe it wouldn’t.

As he’d learned to do in the last war, Dover tracked the battle with his ears. He didn’t like what he was hearing. The Yankees seemed to be pushing forward, straight toward his dump. And they seemed to be outflanking it on both sides.

A corporal came up to him. “Sir, shouldn’t we be getting ready to pull out of here?”

“Yeah, I guess maybe we should.” He’d had to move or abandon a lot of dumps in the Confederacy’s grinding retreat. He wondered why he was dicking around with this one.

A staff car—a butternut Birmingham packed to the gills with officers and men—rattled up to the supply dump. “Get the hell out while you still can!” somebody yelled from inside. “The damnyankees’re right on our ass!” The auto jounced away. The load it carried was too much for its springs.

Maybe the load Dover carried was too much for his. But he started shouting the orders he’d used so often before: “Set the time charges in the ammo! Start blowing up the supplies! Come on, dammit! We’ve got to get out of here, see where else we can make a stand.”

Shells started landing close by. Then machine-gun bullets snapped and whined past his head—not aimed fire, not yet, but they meant U.S. soldiers sure as hell were too damn close. Before long, the Yankees
would
see what they were aiming at, and that wouldn’t be good. And the rounds were coming in from three sides, not just from the front.

“Fuck,” Dover muttered. He really had waited too long this time. He raised his voice to a shout: “Get out, men! Save yourselves!”

He’d just gotten in a truckload of new-model field telephones, lighter and better all around than the ones that had soldiered through the war. They still sat in their crates; he hadn’t had a chance to send any of them forward yet. He shot them up, one short burst at a time. If his own side couldn’t use them, he was damned if he’d let the bastards in green-gray get them.

“Come on, sir! Let’s get out of here!” Pete sat behind the wheel of another military Birmingham. The irony of the auto’s name struck home for the first time, here much too close to the city where it was made. Dover hopped in. Pete headed northwest, toward Huntsville.

They got maybe a quarter of a mile up one of the most godawful roads Dover’s kidneys had ever met when a burst of machine-gun fire off to one side made the quartermaster sergeant grunt. Pete slumped over, half his head blown off. The Birmingham started limping as if it had a flat—later, Dover found out it had two. With no one controlling it, it slewed off the bumpy asphalt and hit a pine tree. Luckily, it wasn’t going very fast. Dover was bruised and shaken, but not hurt. He bailed out.

“Hold it right there, motherfucker!” somebody with a U.S. accent yelled. “Drop that piece, or you’re dead meat!”

Dover froze. He looked around wildly for somewhere to run, somewhere to hide. If he moved, the hidden Yankee could plug him before he took more than a couple of steps. Slowly and carefully, he set the automatic Tredegar on the ground. “I’ve got a pistol on my belt,” he called. “I’m going to take it out and put it with the rifle.”

“Don’t get cute with it, asshole.” That was another U.S. soldier, one with a deep bass rasp. Jerry Dover couldn’t see him. “We got enough firepower to saw you in half like a fuckin’ board.”

“The last person who thought I was cute was my mother,” Dover said, which won him raucous laughter from the unseen enemy troopers. Holding his .45 between thumb and forefinger, he laid it down next to the rifle. Then, without being asked, he raised his hands above his head. “You got me.”

Not two but four U.S. soldiers cautiously came out of the bushes. Two of them had leaves and branches on their helmets, held in place with strips of inner tube. Two carried ordinary Springfields; one a heavy, clunky U.S. submachine gun; and one a captured C.S. automatic rifle. They all needed shaves. They smelled of old sweat and leather and tobacco and mud: like soldiers, in other words.

“Son of a bitch,” one of them said as they drew near. “We got us a light colonel.” The two stars on either side of Dover’s collar weren’t made to be visible from very far off. Why let snipers pick out officers the easy way?

“Cough up your ammo,” said the guy with the Confederate weapon. Without a word, Dover gave him the clips he had left after shooting up the field telephones. His captors also relieved him of watch and wallet and cigarettes. He went right on keeping quiet. They weren’t supposed to do that, but it happened all the time. And they didn’t have to take him prisoner. He could end up dead if any one of them decided to pull the trigger.

“I guess we oughta send him back,” said the one with the deep voice. He was a corporal, and one of the pair with leaves nodding above his head. “Officer like that, the guys in Intelligence can squeeze some good shit out of him.”

“Maybe.” The Yankee with the submachine gun aimed it at Dover’s face. “Who are you, buddy? What do you do? C’mon. Sing.”