Return Engagement (14 page)

Dive bombers screamed out of the sky a quarter of an hour later.
Screamed
was the operative word; the Mules (soldiers often called them Asskickers) had wind-powered sirens built into their nonretractable landing gear, to make them as demoralizing as possible. They swooped down on the U.S. artillery so fast and at so steep an angle, Tom thought they would surely keep going and crash, turning themselves into bombs, too.

He’d watched Mules in action before. They always made him worry that way. He’d seen a couple of them shot down—if Yankee fighters got anywhere near them, they were dead meat. But they didn’t fly themselves into the ground, no matter how much it looked as if they would. One after another, they released the bombs they carried under their bellies, pulled out of their dives, and, engines roaring, raced away at not much above treetop height.

Mules aimed their bombs by aiming themselves at their target. They were far more accurate than high-altitude bombers—they were, in effect, long-range heavy artillery. Counterbattery fire hadn’t put the U.S. guns out of action. A dozen 500-pound bombs silenced them.

“Let’s go, boys!” Colleton yelled, emerging from his foxhole and dashing forward. His men came with him. If he’d called for them to go forward and hung back himself, they wouldn’t have moved nearly so fast. He’d discovered that in the Great War. He was one of the lucky ones. He’d had only minor wounds, hardly even enough to rate a Purple Heart. An awful lot of brave Confederate officers—and damnyankees, too—had died leading from the front.

Even without their artillery, the U.S. soldiers in Grove City didn’t intend to leave. Tracer rounds from several machine guns sketched orange lines of flame across the fields. Men went down, some taking cover, others because they’d been hit. The volume of fire here was less than it had been on the Roanoke front; this was a war of movement, and neither side got the chance to set up defenses in depth the way both had a generation earlier. But even a few machine guns could take the starch out of an attacking infantry regiment in a hurry.

“Goddammit, where the hell are the barrels?” somebody shouted.

Whoever that fellow was, noncom or more likely private, he thought like a general. Barrels—a few stubborn Confederates called them tanks, the way the British did—were the answer to machine-gun fire. And here they came, five—no, six—of them, as if the bellyaching soldier really had summoned them. The U.S. machine guns started blazing away at them. You needed a bigger door knocker than a machine-gun round to open them up, though. The bullets sparked off their butternut-painted armor.

The barrels also carried machine guns. They started shooting up the U.S. position at the southern edge of Grove City. And the barrels’ cannon spoke, one by one. One by one, the Yankees’ machine guns stopped shooting back. Rifle fire still crackled, but rifle fire couldn’t wreck advancing foot soldiers the way machine guns could.

“Let’s go!” Tom Colleton yelled again. He panted as he dashed forward. He’d been a kid during the Great War. He wasn’t a kid any more. He flinched when a bullet whined past him. Back then, he’d been sure he would live forever. Now, when he had a wife and kids to live for, he knew all too well that he might not. He didn’t hang back, but part of him sure as hell wanted to.

Young soldiers on both sides still thought they were immortal. A man in U.S. green-gray sprang up onto a Confederate barrel. He yanked a hatch open and dropped in two grenades. The barrel became a fireball. The U.S. soldier managed to leap clear before it blew, but Confederate gunfire cut him down.

Five trained men and a barrel,
Tom thought glumly. The damnyankee had thrown his life away, but he’d made the Confederates pay high.

Another barrel hit a buried mine. Flames spurted up from it, too, but most of the crew got out before the ammunition inside started cooking off. The remaining barrels and the Confederate infantry pushed on into Grove City. Tom waited for barrels painted green-gray to rumble down from the north and stall the Confederate advance. He waited, but it didn’t happen. The USA didn’t seem to have any barrels around to use.

They’re bigger than we are,
Colleton thought as he peered around the corner of a house whose white clapboard sides were newly ventilated with bullet holes.
They’re bigger than we are, but we’re a lot readier than they are. If we’d waited much longer, we’d be in trouble.

But the Confederate States hadn’t waited, and their armies were going forward. In the last war, they’d thrust toward Philadelphia, but they’d fallen short and been beaten back one painful mile at a time. Other than that, they’d fought on the defensive all through the war. Tom had been part of it from first day till last, and he’d never once set foot on U.S. soil.

Here he was in Ohio now. Jake Featherston had always said he would do better than the Whigs had when it came to running a war against the United States. Tom had had his doubts. He’d never sold his soul to the Freedom Party, the way he often thought his sister had. You couldn’t argue with results, though. A couple of weeks of fighting had taken the Confederacy halfway from the banks of the Ohio River to the shores of Lake Erie. If another two or three weeks could take the CSA the rest of the way . . .

If that happens, the United States get to find out what it’s like when an axe comes down on a snake. Both halves wiggle for a while afterwards, but the damn thing dies just the same.
Tom grinned fiercely, liking the comparison.

Freight-train roars in the sky reminded him that the damnyankees weren’t cut in half yet. Half a dozen soldiers yelled, “Incoming!” at the same time. The Mules might have knocked out the battery that had flayed the regiment as it advanced, but the USA had more guns where those came from.

And, along with the usual roaring and screaming noises shells made as they flew toward their targets, Tom also heard sinister gurgles. He knew what those gurgles meant. He’d known for more than a quarter of a century, though he’d hoped he might forget what he knew.

“Gas!” he shouted. “They’re shooting gas at us!” He pulled his mask off his belt and thrust it over his face. He had to make sure the straps that held it on were good and tight and that it sealed well against his cheeks. No soldier who wanted to make sure he was safe against gas could afford to grow a beard.

Shells thudded home, one after another. Most were the robust black bursts with red fire at their heart that Tom had long known and loathed. A few of them, though, sounded more like sneezes. Those were the gas shells going off. Tom wondered what kind of gas the Yankees were using. A mask alone wasn’t really enough protection against mustard gas. It would blister your hide as well as your lungs. A few gas specialists wore rubberized suits along with their masks. A rubberized suit in Ohio in July was torture of its own.

The gas would also torment the defenders in Grove City, who were falling back toward the racetrack at the north end of town. The Yankee high command didn’t seem to care. The more they slowed down the Confederates, the longer they would have to fortify Columbus.

Tom wondered if his own side could be that ruthless. Part of him hoped so, if the need ever arose. But he prayed with every fiber of his being that such a day of need would never come.

B
rigadier General Abner Dowling stood by the side of Highway 62, watching U.S. soldiers fall back from the south and into Columbus. Dowling didn’t think he had ever seen beaten troops before. In the Great War, he’d watched George Custer throw divisions into the meat grinder, sending them forward to take positions that couldn’t possibly be taken. Where divisions went forward, regiments would come back. Before barrels changed the way the war was fought, machine guns and artillery made headlong attacks impossibly, insanely, expensive—which hadn’t stopped Custer from making them, or even slowed him down.

Those who lived through his folly had been defeated, yes. By the nature of things, what else could have happened to them? But they hadn’t been
beaten,
not the way these soldiers were. They’d been ready to go back into the fight as soon as the trains disgorged some more newly minted, shiny troops to go in with them.

Looking at the men trudging up the asphalt towards and then past him, Dowling knew they weren’t going to be ready for battle again any time soon. They weren’t running. Most of them hadn’t thrown away their Springfields. Their eyes, though . . . Their eyes were the eyes of men who’d seen hell come down on earth, who’d seen it, been part of it, and had no intention of being part of it again for a long time, if ever.

Beside Dowling stood Captain Max Litvinoff, a short, skinny young man with a hairline mustache. The style was popular these days, but Dowling didn’t think much of it. He was used to the bushier facial adornments men had worn in years gone by. He didn’t think much of Captain Litvinoff, either. Not that the man wasn’t competent—he was. He was, if anything, the USA’s leading expert on gas warfare. That by itself was plenty to give Dowling the cold chills.

“If we are to hold this city, sir, we need a wider application of the special weapons.” Litvinoff’s voice was high and thin, as if it hadn’t quite finished changing. He wouldn’t call poison gas poison gas, from which Dowling concluded his conscience bothered him. If he used an innocuous-sounding name, he wouldn’t have to think about what his toys actually did.

“We’ve already used enough gas to kill everything between the Ohio and here, haven’t we, Captain?” Dowling growled.

Behind the lenses of his spectacles, Litvinoff’s eyes registered hurt. “Obviously not, sir, or the opposing forces would not have succeeded in advancing this far,” he replied.

“Right,” Dowling said tightly. “Have we really accomplished anything by using gas? Except to make sure that Featherston’s bastards are using it, too, I mean?”

“Sir, don’t you think it likely that we would be in an even worse situation if we were not using gas?” Litvinoff replied. “The Confederates would be under any circumstances, would you not agree?”

Dowling muttered under his breath. However much he didn’t want to, he did agree with that. Jake Featherston’s main goal in life was to kill as many U.S. soldiers as he could, and he wasn’t fussy about how he did it. As for Litvinoff’s other comment, though . . . Dowling asked, “Captain, how in damnation
could
we be in a worse situation than we are now? If you can tell me that one, you take the prize.”

You Take the Prize
was the name of a popular quiz show on the wireless. Dowling listened to it every once in a while. Part of the attraction, for him, was finding out just how ignorant the American people really were. By the way Max Litvinoff blinked, he’d not only never listened to the show, he’d never heard of it.

“What do you recommend, sir?” he asked.

“How about going back in time about five years and building three times as many barrels as we really did?” Dowling said. Captain Litvinoff only shrugged. However good that sounded, they couldn’t do it. What
could
they do? Dowling wished he knew.

Soldiers weren’t the only people retreating into Columbus. Civilian refugees kept right on clogging the roads. Naturally, nobody in his right mind wanted to hang around where bullets and shells were flying. And a good many people didn’t want to live where the Stars and Bars flew. Three generations of enmity between USA and CSA had drilled that into citizens of the United States. What nobody had told them before the war was that running for their lives wasn’t the smartest thing they could have done.

Had they sat tight, the fighting would have passed them by. On the road, they kept blundering into it again and again. And Confederate pilots had quickly discovered that the only thing that blocked a highway better than a swarm of refugees was a shot-up, bombed-out swarm of refugees. U.S. propaganda claimed they attacked refugee columns for the fun of it. Maybe they had fun doing it, but it was definitely business, too.

Dowling wished he hadn’t thought of air attacks just then. Sirens began yowling, which meant the Y-range gear had picked up Confederate airplanes heading for Columbus. Those rising and falling electrified wails were enough to galvanize soldiers where nothing else had been able to. They scrambled off the road, looking for any cover they could find.

Civilians, by contrast, stood around staring stupidly. To them, the air-raid sirens were just one more part of the catastrophe that had overwhelmed their lives. Maybe this bunch had never been attacked from the air before. If not, they were about to lose their collective cherry.

Captain Litvinoff nudged Dowling. “Excuse me, sir,” he said politely, “but shouldn’t we think about finding shelter for ourselves?”

Dowling could already hear airplane engines. Overeager antiaircraft gunners began shooting too soon. Black puffs of smoke started dotting the sky. “I think it’s too late,” Dowling said. “By the time we can run to a house, they’ll be on top of us.” He threw himself down on the ground, wishing he had an entrenching tool.

Litvinoff flattened out beside him. “What will the United States do if we are killed on account of this incaution?” he asked.

By the way he said it, the USA would have a tough time going on if the two of them got hit. Also by the way he said it,
he
was the one the country would particularly miss. Dowling didn’t blame him for that. Any officer who didn’t think he was indispensable was too modest for his own good.

On the other hand, reality needed to puncture egotism every once in a while. “What will the United States do?” Dowling echoed. “Promote a colonel and a first lieutenant and get on with the goddamn war.”

Captain Litvinoff sent him a wounded look. That was the least of his worries. As he answered, his voice had risen to a shout to make itself heard above the rapidly rising roar of the Confederate bombers.
Mules,
Dowling thought as the airplanes screamed down. No other machines made that horrible screech or had those graceful gull wings.

They seemed to be diving straight down. Dowling knew they weren’t, knew they couldn’t be, but that was how it seemed just the same. “Crash, you bastards!” he shouted. “Fly it right into the ground!”