Return Engagement (16 page)

P
lain City, Ohio, was a neat little town north and west of Columbus. Big Darby Creek chuckled through it. Shade trees sheltered the houses, and also the stores in the two-block shopping district. A fair number of Amish lived nearby; in peaceful times, wagons had mingled with motorcars on the roads. Had Irving Morrell been a man who cared to settle down anywhere, he could have picked plenty of worse places. Agnes and Mildred would have liked Plain City just fine.

At the moment, though, Morrell wasn’t worried about what his wife and daughter might think of the place. He wanted to keep the Confederates from getting over Big Darby Creek as easily as they’d crossed Little Darby Creek a few miles to the south. Every thrust of their barrels put them closer to outflanking Columbus and threatening to encircle it.

Morrell knew the kind of defensive campaign he would have run if he’d had the barrels. If he’d had enough machines, he could have made his Confederate opposite number’s life very unhappy. He’d already slowed the C.S. forces down several times. He counterattacked whenever he saw the chance. Trouble was, he didn’t see it often enough.

“Ten years,” he growled to Sergeant Michael Pound. “Ten mortal years! We figured the Confederates would never get back on their feet again, and so we sat there with our thumb up our ass.”

“And now we’re paying for it,” the gunner agreed. “You and I both thought this would happen. If we could see it, why couldn’t the War Department?”

What the War Department had seen was that barrels cost money, airplanes cost money, submersibles and airplane carriers cost money. It had also seen that, under twelve years of Socialist administrations, money was damned hard to come by. And it had seen that the United States had won the war and the Confederate States were weak, and if they got a little less weak, well, who cared, really? The United States were still stronger. They always would be, wouldn’t they?

Well, no. Not necessarily.

Morrell stuck his head out of the cupola for a look around. Unless the Confederates planned on throwing a pontoon bridge across Big Darby Creek somewhere west of Plain City, they would have to come through here. This was where the ford was, where their barrels could easily get over the stream and keep pushing north. And he knew without being told that that was what they wanted to do. It was what he would have wanted to do if he’d worn butternut instead of green-gray. Whoever was in charge on the other side thought very much the way he did. It was like fighting himself in a mirror.

But the fellow on the other side had more barrels. He had more airplanes. And he had one other thing going for him. It was the edge the United States had had in 1914. The Confederates here were convinced they owed the USA one, and they intended to pay the United States back. It made them come on where more sensible soldiers would have hung back. Sometimes it got them killed in carload lots. More often, though, it let them squeeze through holes in the U.S. line that less aggressive troops never would have found.

Morrell had about two dozen barrels. More were supposed to be coming down from the north, but he didn’t know when they’d get here. As far as he was concerned, that meant they were out of the fight. During a war, nobody ever showed up on time, except possibly the enemy. He’d found few exceptions to that rule during the Great War. So far in this one, he hadn’t found any.

He couldn’t see more than a couple of his barrels. They waited behind garages and in hedgerows and hull-down behind little swells of ground. All of them had secondary and tertiary positions to which they could fall back in a hurry. Morrell didn’t like standing on the defensive. He would much rather have attacked. He didn’t have the muscle to do it. If he was going to defend, he’d do the best job he could.
Nothing comes cheap
—that was his motto.

A soldier in green-gray came pelting up a driveway toward him. “They’re heading this way, sir!” he called.

“Give me today’s recognition signal,” Morrell said coldly.

“Uh, hamster-underground,” this man said.

“All right. Tell me more.” The Confederates had no trouble getting hold of U.S. uniforms. They didn’t have much trouble finding men whose drawls weren’t too thick. Add those two together and they’d made a couple of holes for themselves where none had been before, simply by telling the right lie at the right time. That made U.S. officers leery about trusting men they didn’t know by sight.

With luck, U.S. soldiers in butternut were also confusing the enemy. Both sides had used such dirty tricks in the last war. They both seemed much more earnest about them this time around.

The man in green-gray pointed southwest. “Barrels kicking up dust, sir. You’ll see ’em yourself pretty soon. And infantrymen moving up with ’em, some on foot, some in trucks.”

“How many barrels?” Morrell asked. He worried about the Confederate soldiers in trucks, too. This war was being fought at a pace faster than men could march. The CSA seemed to understand that better than his own side did.

“Don’t know for sure, sir,” the man answered.
Was
he really a U.S. soldier? The Confederates could have wrung the signal out of a prisoner. He went on, “Looked like a good many, though.”

Artillery started coming in out of the south. That argued the fellow was telling the truth. Morrell hoped all the civilians were out of Plain City. Artillery killed.

Up ahead, machine guns started rattling. They sealed the messenger’s truth for Morrell. Up there, grizzled noncoms would be teaching their younger disciples the mysteries of the two-inch tap, mysteries into which they themselves had been initiated during the last war. Tap the side of the weapon so that it swung two inches to right or left, keep tapping back and forth through its whole arc of fire, and it would spit out a stream of bullets thick enough that advancing against it was death for foot soldiers.

Small-arms fire answered the machine guns. But it was not small-arms fire of the sort Morrell had heard in the Great War, not the steady
pop-pop-pop!
that came from bolt-action rifles. These stuttering bursts were like snippets of machine-gun fire themselves. Some of the Confederates had submachine guns, whose racket was relatively weak and thin. But others carried those damned automatic rifles that were young machine guns in their own right.

And here came the Confederate barrels. The lead machines did what they were supposed to do: they stopped and began taking out the U.S. machine-gun nests. Once those were silenced, the infantry could go forward without being bled white. But the Confederates didn’t seem to suspect U.S. barrels were in the neighborhood. Stopping to fire gave irresistibly tempting targets.

“Pick your pleasure, Sergeant Pound,” Morrell said with an odd, joyous formality.

“Yes, sir.” Pound traversed the turret, peered through the rangefinder, and turned a crank to elevate the gun ever so slightly. He barked a hyphenated word at the loader: “Armor-piercing!”

“Armor-piercing!” Sweeney set a black-tipped shell in the breech; high-explosive rounds had white tips.

Pound fired. The gun recoiled. The roar, Morrell knew, was softer inside the turret than it would have been if he had his head out the cupola. He coughed at the cordite fumes.

“Hit!” Pound shouted, and everyone in the crowded turret cheered and slapped everyone else on the back. Morrell popped up like a jack-in-the-box to get a better look at what was going on. Three Confederate barrels were burning. Men were bailing out of one, and U.S. machine-gun and rifle fire was cutting them down. The poor bastards in the other two barrels never had even that much chance to get away.

Now the C.S. barrel crews knew they weren’t facing infantry alone. They did what Morrell would have done had he commanded them: they spread out and charged forward at top speed. A moving target was a tough target. And they had, however painfully, developed the U.S. position: now they knew where some of their assailants hid. A glancing blow from a shell made one of them throw a track. It slewed sideways and stopped, out of the fight. The rest came on.

Sergeant Pound fired twice in quick succession. The first round set a barrel on fire. The second missed. The Confederates started shooting back. A U.S. barrel brewed up. Ammunition exploded inside the turret. An enormous and horribly perfect smoke ring rose from what must have been the open cupola. Morrell hoped the men inside the barrel hadn’t known what hit them.

He got on the wireless to his machines: “Fall back to your second prepared positions now!” He didn’t want the Confederates outflanking his barrels, and he didn’t want them concentrating their fire on the same places for very long, either.

His own barrel retreated with the rest. The second prepared position was under a willow tree that made the great steel behemoth next to invisible from any distance. He wished he could have offered more support to the foot soldiers, but his main task was to keep the Confederate barrels on this side of Big Darby Creek.

Sergeant Pound fired again. He swore instead of whooping: a miss. And then, as much out of the blue as a sucker punch in a bar fight, a shell slammed into Morrell’s barrel.

The front glacis plate almost kept the round out—almost, but not quite. The driver and the bow machine gunner took the brunt of the hardened steel projectile. They screamed, but not for long. The loader likewise howled as the round smashed his leg before crashing through the ammunition rack—luckily, through a slot without a shell in it—and into the engine.

As smoke and flame began filling the turret, Morrell threw open the cupola. “Out!” he shouted to Pound. “I’ll give you a hand with Sweeney.”

“Right you are, sir,” the gunner said, and then, to the loader, “Don’t worry. It will be all right.”

“My ass,” Sweeney ground out.

They got him and themselves out of the barrel before ammunition started cooking off. One look at his leg told Morrell he’d lose it—below the knee, which was better than above, but a long way from good. A tourniquet, a dusting of sulfa powder, and a shot of morphine were all Morrell could do for him. He shouted for medical corpsmen. They took the wounded man away.

“Now we have to get out of this ourselves. That could be interesting.” Michael Pound sounded more intrigued than alarmed.

U.S. barrels were falling back towards and then across the ford over Big Darby Creek. The Confederates pressed them hard. Morrell would have done the same thing. It might cost a few more casualties now, but the rewards were likely to be worth it.

The two barrel men splashed through the creek. A Confederate barrel whose machine gun was swinging their way took a round in the flank and caught fire. The crew lost interest in them and started bailing out. Morrell and Pound made it across and into the bushes on the far side. For the time being, the Confederates couldn’t force a crossing here. But Morrell wondered how long that would last and whether they could get over the creek somewhere else.

M
ajor Jonathan Moss was not the man he had been half a lifetime ago, not the bright young flying officer who’d gone into the Great War all bold and brave and chivalrous. The desperate campaign in the skies above Ohio and Indiana rubbed his nose in that.

Last time around, he’d been able to live practically without sleep for weeks at a time, and to make up for it when the weather was too bad to let him get his rickety machine off the ground. Now, more than a quarter of a century further on, he needed a rest every so often. Despite coffee and pep pills, he couldn’t bounce from mission to mission as fast as the younger men in his squadron.

He went to a doctor at the airstrip just outside Winchester, Indiana, and asked what the fellow could do to help him. The doctor was a tall, skinny, middle-aged man with bags under his eyes and yellow hair heavily streaked with gray. His name was Clement Boardman; he went by Doc or Clem. After a brief pause to light a cigarette and take a deep drag, he said, “Goddammit, Major, if I had the fountain of youth, don’t you think I’d use it on myself?”

“I don’t want miracles,” Moss said.

“Like hell you don’t. I want ’em, too,” Boardman said. “Difference between us is, I know I won’t get ’em.”

“What can I do?” Moss demanded.

“Shack up with an eighteen-year-old blonde,” the doctor answered. “That’ll have you walking on air for a few weeks, anyhow—if it doesn’t remind you you’re not a kid any more some other ways, either.”

He didn’t know how Moss’ wife had died. The flier had to remind himself of that to keep from getting angry. He said, “I already know I can’t screw like I did when I was in college. But that’s just me. This is my country.”

“All you can do is all you can do,” Clem Boardman said. “If you fly into a tree or you get shot down because you’re too goddamn sleepy to check six, what good does that do your country—or you?”

It was an eminently sensible question. Moss didn’t want good sense, though. He wanted to be told what he wanted to hear. That he was thinking like a three-year-old was a telling measure of how tired he was, but he was too tired to realize it.

“Here. Take these.” The doctor handed him two pills.

“What are they?” Moss asked suspiciously.

“They’ll make a new man out of you.” Boardman filled a glass from a metal pitcher of water. “Come on. Down the hatch. In my medical opinion, they’re what you need.”

“All right. All right.” Moss swallowed both pills at once. He could take almost any number of pills at the same time. That had amazed, amused, and horrified his wife, who couldn’t . . . and try as he would, he couldn’t get Laura out of his mind. He wondered if she’d ever fade, even a little. He also still wondered about the pills. “I don’t feel any different than I did before.”

“Wait twenty minutes,” Boardman said.

“Then what happens?”

“Your hair turns blue, your nose catches fire, you start spouting Shakespeare, you grow fins, and your balls swell up to the size of cantaloupes,” Boardman answered, deadpan. “I told you, they’ll make a new man out of you.”

“I think maybe I like the old man better.” Moss yawned. “Dammit, who knows what the Confederates are liable to do if I’m not up there to shoot ’em down?”