In at the Death (32 page)

“My name is Jerry Dover. I’m a lieutenant colonel.” Dover rattled off his pay number. “I ran the supply dump back there by Albertville.” According to the Geneva Convention, he didn’t have to say that. Self-preservation argued it would be a good idea.

“Quartermaster, huh? No wonder you got good smokes,” the one with the deep voice said. He turned to the guy with the automatic rifle. “Take him back to battalion HQ, Rudy. Don’t plug him unless he tries to bug out.”

“Gotcha,” Rudy said. He gestured with the captured weapon. “Get movin’, Pops. You run, it’s the last dumbass stunt you pull.”

“I’m not going anywhere, except wherever you take me,” Dover said. He was so relieved not to get shot out of hand, he didn’t even resent the
Pops
. He
was
old enough to be the damnyankee’s father. “Will you please bury my sergeant there?” he asked his captors, pointing to the Birmingham. “He was a good man.”

“We round up some more of you butternut bastards, they can take care of it,” the corporal said. The Yankees weren’t going to dig for an enemy themselves.

“Move it,” Rudy said. Hands still high, Jerry Dover trudged off into captivity.

D
uring the last war, Chester Martin remembered, the Confederates had seen the writing on the wall in northern Virginia. As the summer of 1917 went on, the spirit gradually leaked out of the men in butternut. They wouldn’t stand and fight till they couldn’t fight any more, the way they had earlier. They would throw away their rifles and put up their hands and hope their U.S. opposite numbers didn’t murder them.

The same thing was happening in Georgia now. Even some of the Freedom Party Guards had the message: the Confederate States weren’t going to win this time around, either. Some of the men in brown-splotched camouflage smocks had a hard time surrendering. But then, anybody who tried to surrender to Lieutenant Lavochkin had a hard time.

Chester admired the platoon leader’s courage. Past that…If everybody on the U.S. side were like Boris Lavochkin, the war probably wouldn’t have been anywhere near so tough. But Chester didn’t think he wanted to live in a country that produced a lot of men like that. Living with one of them was tough enough.

Getting to Savannah seemed to have amounted to the be-all and end-all of General Morrell’s strategy. Once the port fell, once the sickle slice cut the Confederacy in half, things were confused for a while. The powers that be needed some time to figure out what to do next. After you went to bed with the girl of your dreams, what did you say when you woke up beside her in the morning?

Martin’s platoon, along with the rest of the regiment and a couple of more besides, crossed the Savannah River and went up into South Carolina. The swamps on that side of the river seemed no different from the ones in Georgia. The people over there spoke with the same mushy drawl. They hated damnyankees just as much as the Georgians did, even if they hadn’t been able to muster more than a few soldiers to try to keep the invaders in green-gray out of their state.

“South Carolina seceded first, boys,” Captain Rhodes told the company. “This goddamn state got the CSA rolling. Been a hell of a long time since then, but we finally get to pay the bastards back.”

As far as Martin was concerned, too much water had gone under the bridge to care about which drop went first. What difference did it make now? He despised all the Confederate states equally. Why not? Men from each and every one of them were equally eager to do him in.

What did give him chills were the empty villages through which his outfit passed. He’d seen the like in Georgia. Once upon a time—say, up until a couple of years earlier—Negro sharecroppers had lived in them. Those people were almost all gone. He would have bet dollars to doughnuts they were almost all dead. Before long, their flimsy shacks would crumble and fall down, and then who would remember that they’d ever lived here?

Local whites didn’t want to. Lieutenant Lavochkin brought the mayor of a little town called Hardeeville to a nameless village a couple of miles away. The mayor didn’t want to come; a rifle to the back of his head proved amazingly persuasive.

“What happened to these people?” Lavochkin demanded.

“Well, I don’t rightly know.” The mayor was a white-mustached fellow named Darius Douglas. He walked with a limp that probably meant he had a Purple Heart stashed in a drawer somewhere.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Lavochkin rapped out. “You suppose they all decided to go on vacation at the same time?”

Douglas had fine, fair skin. When he turned red, the flush was easy to see. “Well, I reckon not,” he admitted. “But a lot of ’em was gone a while back, off to towns and such. The fancier the farm machinery got, the fewer the niggers we needed.”

“How come we didn’t see ’em in Savannah, then?” The lieutenant’s voice was silky with danger. “How come we don’t see ’em anywhere? How many niggers you got in Hardeeville, damn you?”

“Don’t have any, I don’t reckon, but we never did,” Darius Douglas answered. “Hardeeville, it’s a white folks’ town. Niggers came in to work, but they didn’t live there. They lived in places like this here.”

“Do you know what you are? You’re a lying sack of shit, that’s what,” Lieutenant Lavochkin snarled. “If you came out and said, ‘Yeah, we killed ’em, and I don’t miss ’em a fucking bit,’ at least you’d be honest. This way…Christ, you know what you assholes did, but it makes you jumpy enough so you don’t want to own up to it, not when you’re talking to people like me.”

“I always knew damnyankees was nigger-lovers,” the mayor of Hardeeville said. “Nobody else’d make such a fuss over a bunch o’ damn coons.”

“Yeah? So who’s gonna make a fuss over you?” Lavochkin asked. Before Mayor Douglas could answer, the U.S. officer shot him in the face. Douglas dropped like a sack of beans in the middle of a muddy, overgrown street.

“Jesus!” Chester Martin exclaimed. “What the hell’d you go and do that for…sir?”

The platoon commander looked at him—looked through him, really. “You going to tell me he didn’t have it coming?”

“Jesus,” Martin said again. “I dunno. He didn’t kill any of those coons himself, I don’t think.” The late Mr. Douglas was still twitching a little, and still bleeding, too. The iron stink of blood mingled with the foulness of bowels that had just let go.

“No, he didn’t kill ’em. He just waved bye-bye when they went off to the camps,” Lavochkin said. “All these Confederate cocksuckers did the same goddamn thing. Far as I’m concerned, they all deserve a bullet in the head.”

As far as Martin was concerned, that had nothing to do with anything. “We deal with that after the war’s over, sir. You start shooting civilians for the hell of it, we’re going to have reprisals come down on our heads, and we need that kind of crap like we need a root canal.”

Lavochkin grunted. “I’m not afraid of these assholes. They’re whipped.”

“How many replacements do we need right now?” Chester asked. The lieutenant grunted again. “They haven’t all quit yet, so let’s not fire ’em up. What do you say to that?”

He could tell what Lieutenant Lavochkin wanted to say. Lavochkin wanted to call him yellow, but damn well couldn’t. Scowling, the lieutenant did say, “If I’m not a good boy, I don’t get promoted, right? You think I give a flying fuck about that?”

Chester shrugged. He hoped Lavochkin did. It was the only hold he had on the cold-blooded young officer. Lieutenant Lavochkin liked killing too much, and Chester didn’t know what he could do about it. Yeah, you killed in a war—that was what it was all about. But the guys who enjoyed it caused more trouble than they solved. Martin wondered whether the platoon commander needed to have an unfortunate accident.

He didn’t let that show on his face. If he had, he was sure Lieutenant Lavochkin would have plugged him with as little remorse as he’d shot Darius Douglas.
If I have to take him out, I can’t fuck up, ’cause I’ll only get one chance
, Martin thought unhappily.

“Let’s go back to Hardeeville,” Lavochkin said, which was anything but a retreat.

“What will you say when the people ask what happened to the mayor?” Chester wondered.

“Shot resisting U.S. authority.” The lieutenant’s voice remained hard and firm. He didn’t sound the least bit guilty. Chester wondered whether he knew how to feel guilty. The first sergeant wouldn’t have bet on it. As far as Lavochkin was concerned, anything he did was right because he did it. How did that make him any different from Jake Featherston, except that Featherston had more scope for running wild than an infantry lieutenant did?

“Come on, you guys,” Chester called to the men in the platoon. “You heard the lieutenant—we’re heading back to Hardeeville. Keep your eyes open when we get there, in case of trouble.”
In case the locals go nuts because we scragged the mayor
. He didn’t say that, but he hoped the men could work it out for themselves.

Most of them seemed able to. They tramped back toward the little town as if advancing into battle. They moved in small groups, warily, keeping an eye out ahead and to all sides.

Hardeeville was a block of shops, a filling station, a saloon, and a few houses. Before the war, it might have held two or three hundred people. With the men anywhere close to military age gone, it was smaller than that now. When the mayor’s wife saw the U.S. soldiers coming back without him, she screeched, “Where’s Darius?”

“Dead,” Lavochkin said flatly. “He resisted our authority, and—” Whatever he said after that, Mrs. Douglas’ shriek smothered it.
She
made a fuss over the late mayor.

A shot rang out from one of the houses. A U.S. soldier went down, grabbing his leg. “Shit!” he yelled. Chester didn’t think the cartridge was anything more than a .22, but that didn’t mean it felt like a kiss.

Three soldiers with automatic rifles emptied their magazines into the front of the house. Glass and chunks of wood flew. A woman and a twelve-year-old boy staggered out. Both of them were bleeding. The boy still clutched the .22. He tried to raise it and shoot at the U.S. soldiers again, but he fell over instead, blood puddling under him.

“Fuck,” said one of the men in green-gray. He was no happier about shooting a kid than anyone else would have been. Yeah, the kid had fired first. Yeah, he was an enemy. That didn’t make it much better.

Had things ended there, they would have been bad. But they didn’t. They got worse. Somebody fired from another house. A Featherston Fizz came flying out of nowhere and burst at the feet of a U.S. soldier. He screamed like a damned soul as flames engulfed him. And one of the old men in Hardeeville laughed.

“Take ’em out!” Lieutenant Lavochkin yelled. “Take ’em all out!”

Chester’s first shot knocked over the old man who thought watching a Yankee burn was funny. His second shot hit the old woman next to the old man right in the middle of the chest. She crumpled before she had a chance to screech. Of course, Chester’s wasn’t the only bullet that hit her—not even close. All the soldiers in the platoon were letting go with everything they had.

They started throwing grenades into the houses closest to them. A couple of men had grenade launchers on their rifles. They lobbed grenades all over Hardeeville, almost at random. “It’ll come down on somebody’s head!” one of them whooped as he pulled the trigger and sent one off…somewhere.

The men and women and kids on the street went down as if scythed. Their dying cries—and the gunfire, and the grenades bursting randomly all over the little town—brought more people out to see what was going on. The U.S. soldiers shot them down, too.

It was madness, red-hot madness. Chester Martin felt it as he fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded, and slapped in clip after clip. He didn’t know how many Confederates he killed. He didn’t much care, either. Along with his buddies, he went through the town. By the time they got done, there wasn’t much town left—it burned behind them. And just about everybody who’d lived in Hardeeville was dead.

Chester stood there shaking his head, like a man whose fever had suddenly broken. “Wow,” he said, looking back on the devastation. “What did we just do?”

“Settled their hash,” Lieutenant Lavochkin answered. “I don’t think too much of this needs to go into the after-action report, do you?”

“Christ, no!” Chester thought about some of the things he’d just done. He wished he hadn’t. He wished he hadn’t done them, too. So, no doubt, did Hardeeville. Well, it was too late for him, and much too late for the little town. He had the rest of his life to try to forget. Hardeeville…didn’t, not any more.

C
onfederate Connie was on the air again. To most people in the USA, the music the propaganda broadcaster played was hot stuff, at or past the cutting edge. Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Moss—he was still getting used to the silver oak leaves on his shoulder straps—had heard stranger, wilder rhythms when Spartacus’ guerrillas got their hands on a guitar and a fiddle.

Here he was, at a big air base just outside of Dayton, Ohio, not far from where the Confederates swarmed over the border not quite three years before. The base didn’t exist then. Now, unless the Kaiser’s airmen had something fancier, it was the biggest training center in the world.

The song ended. Like most of the other guys at the base, Moss thought listening to Confederate Connie was more fun anyway. She had a contralto like a wet dream.

“Well, you Yankee boys, aren’t you proud of yourselves?” she said, as if she were waiting for you to get back into bed with her and didn’t want to wait very long. She was probably fifty-five and frumpy, but she sure didn’t sound that way. “Your
brave
soldiers went and wiped Hardeeville right off the map.”

“Where the hell’s Hardeeville?” somebody asked.

“Shut up,” said Moss and two other men. Listening to Confederate Connie didn’t just remind you why you fought. It reminded you why you were alive.

“That’s right,” she went on. “They marched into a defenseless town and they murdered everybody in it—men, women, children, everybody. Then they burned it down on top of the bodies. No more Hardeeville, South Carolina. Gone. Right off the map. Some fun, hey? Aren’t you proud to live in a country that does stuff like that?”