In at the Death (43 page)

Part of Jeff said Vern Green was flabbling over nothing. There wouldn’t be U.S. soldiers
all over
Texas no matter what—the state was too damn big for that. But there might be U.S. soldiers here at Camp Humble in the next day or two. The Yankees wanted this place closed down, and they wanted that bad.

He’d never dreamt he would have to worry about something like this. “Anybody who wants to disappear, I won’t say boo,” he said slowly. “Do what you think you gotta, that’s all. Hell, you may be right.”

“Much obliged, sir,” Green said, and hung up. Jeff knew what that meant: he planned on bailing out.

How much did what he planned matter? A guard knocked on Jeff ’s door. When the camp commandant let him in, the man said, “Sir, there’s a Texas Ranger captain named Hezekiah Carroll out there, and he wants to see you.”

Pinkard didn’t want to see the biblically named Texas Ranger. What choice did he have, though? “All right,” he growled. “Bring him on in.”

Carroll was tall and weathered and tough-looking. But if he was as tough as he looked, why wasn’t he in the Army? Before Jeff could ask him, he said, “You will have heard of the reestablishment of the Republic of Texas?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it. Getting out while the getting’s good, are you?” Jeff said.

“Yes,” Carroll answered baldly. “You will also have heard that Confederate troops may evacuate?”

“I heard that, too, all right,” Jeff allowed. “What about it?”

“It doesn’t mean you. That’s part of the deal Governor—uh, President—Patman cut with the Yankees,” Carroll said. “They say Confederate combat soldiers are welcome to leave. But you people—they want y’all. Crimes against humanity, they call it.”

“Oh, my ass!” Pinkard exploded. “You gonna tell me you’re sorry we’re taking care of our nigger troubles? Yeah, sure—go ahead. Make me believe it.”

Captain Carroll turned red. All the same, he said, “What I think hasn’t got diddly-squat to do with it. I know damn well this is the best deal Texas can get. If you and your people try to evacuate this camp, we will stop you, and that’s the God’s truth.”

“Christ! I never thought my own side would fuck me!” Jeff tried to figure out what to do. With all the machine guns in the guard towers, he could hold off the Rangers, or anybody else who didn’t have artillery, for a long time. But what good did that do him when he needed to get the hell out of here?

None. Zero. Zip.

Maybe he could mount machine guns in some of the camp trucks and shoot his way past the Rangers. Yeah, it might work once, but it was more than a hundred miles from Humble to the Louisiana border. Could he win a running fight? Not a chance in church, and he knew it.

“I am a citizen of the Republic of Texas, and my country has an armistice with the USA,” Carroll said. “I have to abide by the terms of the armistice, and I will. I’m only following orders, same as you were doing here. But the country that gave you orders is going down the crapper, and mine’s just getting started.”

Only following orders
. That was the main defense Pinkard had if he ever did get in trouble for what the camps did. It sounded pretty goddamn hollow when somebody else threw it in his face.

“Listen—let’s do it like this.” He wasn’t used to pleading; he hadn’t had to do it for a lot of years. He gave it his best shot, though: “We can keep it unofficial. Let us slide on out of here a few at a time—how’s that? Then nobody’ll be any wiser when we’re gone, nobody’ll get in any trouble, and we can get back to doing what needs doing once we’re somewhere that’s still fighting.” He didn’t even cuss out Wright Patman, no matter how much he wanted to.

But Hezekiah Carroll shook his head. “Sorry about that—I
am
sorry about that. I would if I could, but I can’t, so I won’t. I don’t reckon you understand how bad the damnyankees want you. They told the—the President they would bomb the living shit out of Austin if you got away.”

“They’re a bunch of nigger-lovers, that’s why! And you’re throwing in with ’em!” Jeff couldn’t keep his temper down forever.

“What we are is out of the war. You think we want the damnyankees dropping one of those superbombs on Dallas? You think we want ’em to drop one on Houston or Austin or San Antone? You better think again, buddy.”

“But—But—Christ on His cross, you’re cutting the CSA off from Sonora and Chihuahua. You can’t do that!”

“No, huh? Just watch us,” Captain Carroll said. “White folks don’t need all those greasers around anyway. If Francisco José wants ’em back, he’s welcome to ’em, far as I’m concerned.”

Realization smote Pinkard. “If we were smokin’
their
sorry asses, I bet you’d let us go!” he said.

Carroll neither affirmed nor denied. He just said, “Things are the way they are. And so you know, the Yankees are flying in a team to take charge of this place. They ought to be landing in Houston pretty soon. Won’t be more than a couple of hours before they’re here. Whatever you’ve got to say from now on, you can say to them.” He left the office without a salute, without a nod, without a backwards glance.

Vern Green burst in a moment later. “What are we gonna do?” he cried.

Jeff told him what the Texas Ranger had said. “If you and the guards still want to try and skip, I still won’t say boo,” he finished. “Maybe you’ll get away, maybe you’ll get your ass shot off. I don’t know one way or the other. With Edith and the kids here, I’m fuckin’ stuck.”

“Damnyankees’ll hang you,” Green warned.

“How can they? I was doing what Ferd Koenig told me to do,” Jeff said. “Could I say, ‘No, we got to treat the niggers better’? He’d shoot me if I did. ’Sides, the job needed doing. You know it as well as I do.”

“Sure. But the Yankees won’t.” Green sketched a salute. “I am gonna try and get away. Wish me luck.”

“Luck,” Jeff said. Not much later, he heard spatters of gunfire in the near distance. He had a couple of drinks at his desk.

Two and a half hours after that, a man in a green-gray uniform with gold oak leaves on his shoulder straps walked in. “You’re Brigade Leader Pinkard?” he asked in U.S. accents.

“That’s right,” Jeff said, a little surprised the Yankee officer got the Party title right.

“Major Don Little, U.S. Army,” the other officer said, and then, “You’re under arrest.”

A
rtillery fire came down near Armstrong Grimes’ platoon—not
real
close, but close enough to make them pucker some. Through the man-made thunder, Squidface said, “How come we ain’t in Texas?”

“How come you ain’t a beautiful woman?” Armstrong answered. “How come you ain’t even an ugly woman, for cryin’ out loud? If you didn’t know how to handle a gun, you’d be fuckin’ useless.”

“Ah, you’ve been talkin’ to my old man again,” Squidface said in mock disgust.

He remained stubbornly male. And central Alabama, where the war was very much alive, remained nothing like the state—or even the Republic—of Texas, where it had died. Instead, soldiers on both sides were doing the dying here. The Confederates didn’t have enough to keep the United States away from Selma and Montgomery, but they didn’t seem to know it yet.

Armstrong didn’t mind showing them. He did mind getting killed or maimed on a bright spring day when the air smelled green and the birds sang and the bastards in butternut couldn’t possibly win even if they wiped out every U.S. soldier south of Birmingham. Why couldn’t they see the shit had hit the fan and just give up? That would have suited him fine.

But the Confederates down here were a stubborn bunch. They didn’t just fight back—they kept throwing in local counterattacks. A little farther east, one of those had driven U.S. forces back ten or fifteen miles before it finally ran out of steam. By now, the enemy had lost all that ground again, and more besides. He’d thrown away men and barrels he couldn’t possibly hope to replace. What the hell was the point? Armstrong couldn’t see it.

Some of the shells from his latest barrage sounded funny. So did the bursts they made when they hit the ground. “Oh, for Chrissake!” Armstrong said, almost as disgusted with the men he was facing as he had been when he fought the Mormons. He raised his voice: “Gas!” he yelled. “They’re throwing gas at us!” Why were they bothering? What was it supposed to prove?

He put on his mask. It was annoying. It was inconvenient. If they wanted to attack here, they’d have to wear masks, too, and be annoyed and inconvenienced. And his own side’s gunners would probably give them a big, lethal dose as soon as they found out this crap was going on.
Serve ’em right
, Armstrong thought, sucking in air that smelled like rubber instead of spring.

Off to the left, somebody—he thought it was Herk, but how could you be sure when a guy was talking through a mask?—shouted, “Here they come!”

Armstrong peered in that direction through porthole lenses that needed cleaning. Sure as hell, the Confederates
were
pushing forward, their foot soldiers backed up by a couple of assault guns and one of their fearsome new barrels. Somebody must have fed their CO raw meat.

A U.S. machine gun started chattering. The masked soldiers in butternut dove for cover. The barrel’s massive turret swung toward the machine-gun nest. The main armament fired once. Sandbags and somebody’s leg flew through the air. The machine gun fell silent.

That did the Confederates less good than it would have earlier in the war. Armstrong had a captured automatic rifle. Squidface had his own gun. Herk was banging away with a C.S. submachine gun. Plenty of other captured weapons and U.S.-issue Tommy guns gave the guys on Armstrong’s side a lot more firepower than they would have had even a year earlier.

Mortar rounds started landing among the unhappy C.S. soldiers, too. Armstrong whooped. “See how you like it, you bastards!” he shouted. “It’s better to give than to receive!” Then a U.S. barrel put an AP round through an assault gun’s glacis plate. The assault gun slewed sideways, sending greasy black smoke high into the sky. He whooped again. That pillar of smoke marked four men’s funeral pyres. They weren’t his buddies, so he didn’t care.

A moment later, the other assault gun hit a mine and stopped with a track blown off. That was the signal for every U.S. barrel in the neighborhood to open up on it. It didn’t last long—what could have? Recognizing the minefield, the enemy barrel’s crew also stopped. A couple of rounds hit it, but bounced off. Armstrong stopped whooping and swore. AP rounds
could
penetrate those monsters—he’d seen it happen. But it didn’t happen all the time.

And the metal monster started picking off U.S. barrels, one after another. Its big gun could penetrate any U.S. machine’s frontal armor with no trouble at all. Still swearing, Armstrong wished for a stovepipe rocket like the ones Jake Featherston’s men carried. If any of those had been captured, they didn’t seem to be in the neighborhood. Too bad.

How come the Confederates get all the good stuff first?
he wondered. They did, damn them. They’d carried automatic weapons against Springfields. They had the screaming meemies and the stovepipe antibarrel rockets and the long-range jobs. They even used the superbomb first.

And a whole fat lot of good it did them, because there weren’t quite enough of them anyway, not if they wanted to conquer a country that could put three times as many soldiers in the field. He supposed Featherston’s fuckers got the fancy weapons because they really needed them. The USA muddled along with ordinary stuff, and eventually got the job done.

The local Confederate attack bogged down when the big, nasty barrel stopped going forward. The C.S. infantry knew they couldn’t push their foes out of the way without armor support. They went to ground and dug in. Artillery and mortar rounds rained down on them. Dig as they would, their holes weren’t so good as the ones they would have had in prepared defensive positions.

Two fighter-bombers zoomed in and ripple-fired rockets from underwing racks. One of those, or maybe more than one, hit the C.S. barrel. The rocket got through the armor where the AP rounds hadn’t. The barrel started to burn. Somebody bailed out of the turret. Every U.S. soldier around fired at the barrelman, but Armstrong thought he made it to cover.
Too bad
, he thought.

Whistles blew. Somebody who sounded like an officer yelled, “Let’s push ’em back, boys! With their armor gone, they won’t even slow us down.” Then he said the magic words: “Follow me!”

If he was willing to put his ass on the line, he could get soldiers to go with him. “Come on!” Armstrong called, scrambling out of his own scrape in the ground. “Let’s go get ’em! We can do it!”

And damned if they couldn’t. Oh, some of the Confederates fought. There were always diehards who wouldn’t quit till the last dog was hung. But there weren’t very many, not this time around. Some of the men in butternut drew back toward their own start line. Others raised their hands as U.S. soldiers drew near.

“Don’t shoot me! Sweet Jesus, buddy, I don’t want to die!” an unshaven corporal called to Armstrong. Another Confederate soldier near him also held his hands high.

“Waddaya think?” Armstrong asked Squidface.

“We can take ’em down the road,” Squidface answered.

“’Bout what I figured,” Armstrong agreed. He raised his voice: “Herk! Take these guys down the road.”

“You sure, Sarge?” Herk asked.

“Yeah—go on. Go deal with ’em,” Armstrong said.

“Right.” Herk gestured with his captured weapon. “Come on, you two.” The Confederate soldiers eagerly went with him. After he led them around behind some trees, the submachine gun stuttered out two short bursts. He came back. “It’s taken care of,” he said.

“Attaboy. C’mon. Let’s go,” Armstrong told him. If you told one of your men to take somebody back, you really meant to make a prisoner of him. If you told your guy to take him down the road…Well, it was a hard old war. Sometimes you didn’t have the manpower or the time to deal with POWs. And so—you didn’t, that was all.

Somebody up in the middle of the fighting was on the horn to U.S. artillery. The USA didn’t have screaming meemies, but battery after battery of 105s did a hell of a job. The barrage moved in front of the advancing soldiers, and fell with terrible power on the line from which the Confederates had jumped off. They couldn’t hold that line, not with the men they had left after the counterattack failed. They would have done better not to try to hit back at the U.S. forces.