Return Engagement (53 page)

“I don’t think I much care for the sound of that,” Forrest observed. “Do you think they could pull off an armored attack like the one that took us up to Lake Erie?”

“Give that Colonel Morrell of theirs enough barrels, for instance, and I expect he could,” Potter answered. “One of the things that goes some little way towards easing my mind about what’s building up to the north of us here is that Morrell’s nowhere near it.”

Forrest chewed on the inside of his lower lip as he thought that over. At last, he nodded. “A point. But that’s not what I came here to talk to you about. Do you truly believe we’ve got us some damnyankee gophers digging out what we’re up to here in the War Department?”

“Gophers.” Potter tasted the word. He nodded, too—he liked it. He could all but see spies gnawing underground, chomping away at the tender roots of Confederate plans. “Unfortunately, sir, I do. Why
wouldn’t
the United States want to do something like that? No reason I can see. And they’ll have people who can sound as if they belong here, same as we have people who can put on their accent.”

“You’re one of those,” Forrest said. “Every now and then, I get calls about you from nervous lieutenants. They think you’re a spy.”

“And so I am—but not for the United States.” Potter allowed himself a dry chuckle. “Besides, I only sound like a Yankee to somebody who’s never really heard one. I do sound a little like one, but only a little. Comes of going to college up there. That turned out to be educational in all kinds of ways.”

“I’ll bet it did,” Forrest said.

“Sir, you have no idea how much in earnest those people were,” Potter said. “This was before the Great War, you understand. We’d licked them twice, humiliated them twice. They were bound and determined to get their own back. That holiday of theirs, Remembrance Day . . . They wanted the last war more than we did, and they got it.”

“Well, now that shoe is on the other foot,” Forrest said. He was right. The Confederates had been whipped up into a frenzy of vengeance, while U.S. citizens hadn’t cared to think about a new fight. The chief of the General Staff brought things back to what he wanted to know: “If we’ve got gophers, how do we find ’em? How do we go about getting ’em out of their holes?”

“I can tell you the ideal solution,” Potter said. Forrest raised an eyebrow. His eyes and eyebrows were much like his famous ancestor’s, more so than the lower part of his face. Clarence Potter went on, “The ideal solution would be for our gophers in Washington and Philadelphia to dig up a list of U.S. gophers here. That could solve our problem.”

“Could, hell!” Forrest said. “That
would
do it.”

“Well, sir, not necessarily,” Potter said. “If the Yankees knew we were looking for that kind of list, they could arrange for us to find it—and to shoot ourselves in the foot with it.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest III raised both eyebrows this time. “You have a damn twisty mind, General.”

“Thank you, sir,” Potter answered. “Considering the business I’m in, I take that for a compliment.”

“Good. That’s how I meant it.” Forrest pulled a pack of Raleighs out of his pocket. He stuck one in his mouth and held out the pack. Potter took one, too. Forrest had a cigarette lighter that could have done duty for a flamethrower. He almost singed Potter’s nose giving him a light. After they’d both smoked for a little while, the head of the General Staff said, “Something I want you to do for me.”

“Of course, sir.” Potter gave the only kind of answer you were supposed to give to a superior officer.

“If you get word that that Morrell is moving from Ohio to the East, I want you to let me know the instant you do. The instant, you hear me? I don’t care if I’m on the crapper with my pants down around my ankles. You barge in there yelling,, ‘Holy Jesus, General, the damnyankees have transferred Morrell!’ “

Potter laughed. Nathan Bedford Forrest III wagged a finger at him. He wasn’t kidding. “If I have to do that, I’ll do it,” Potter promised.

“You’d better.” Forrest got to his feet. “And if you have any good ideas about how to make a gopher trap, I wouldn’t mind hearing those.”

“That’s really more Counterintelligence’s cup of tea, sir. I just wanted to alert you to the possibility,” Potter said. “I don’t want to step on General Cummins’ toes any more than I have already.”

“Oh, I’ll put him on it, too. Don’t you worry about that,” Forrest said. “You’ve already done some thinking about this, though. Kindly do some more.” Trailing smoke, he hurried out the door.

“Gopher traps,” Potter muttered. He did some more muttering, too, while he finished the cigarette and stubbed it out. It wasn’t as if he weren’t already riding herd on 127 other things, all of which
were
in his bailiwick. And it wasn’t as if General Cummins weren’t a perfectly competent officer. Potter wanted to put the whole business on the back burner.

He wanted to, but he found he couldn’t. He kept worrying at it in odd moments. It might have been a bit of gristle stuck between his teeth. It kept drawing his attention no matter how much he wished it wouldn’t.

“Gopher traps.” He kept saying it, too. If only Forrest hadn’t come up with such a good phrase. It commanded attention whether Potter felt like giving it or not.

For the next few days, as he watched the growing U.S. storm in the north, he tried hard not to think about catching any possible spies in the War Department. He was, in fact, clacking away at a report summarizing news from spies in Kansas and Nebraska when he suddenly stopped and stared out the window, his eyes far away behind his spectacles.

His gaze returned to the report. It was as dull as it deserved to be. Not a hell of a lot was going on in Kansas and Nebraska. Not a hell of a lot had ever gone on in that part of the USA. In spite of that, he started to smile. In fact, he started to laugh, and the report had not a single funny word in it.

He walked over to Lieutenant General Forrest’s office. The chief of the General Staff wasn’t in the men’s room. That being so, Potter had no trouble getting in to see him.
The power of these wreathed stars,
he thought. He’d never expected to become a general officer. He’d ten times never expected to become a general officer with Jake Featherston as President of the CSA. But here he was.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked up from whatever paperwork jungle he’d been hacking his way through. “Morrell?” he asked. “If he’s up there, the other shoe’ll drop on us any day now.”

“No, sir. Haven’t heard a thing about him.” Potter shook his head. “I may have found a gopher trap, though.”

“Well, that’s interesting, too.” Forrest waved him to a chair. “Why don’t you sit down and tell me all about it?”

“Let me show you this first.” Potter set the report on Kansas and Nebraska on Forrest’s desk. “Glance over it, sir, if you’d be so kind.” After Forrest did, he nodded. Potter explained. He finished, “You see how I could do that, don’t you, sir?”

“I believe I do.” Forrest looked the report over one more time. “It would mean a good deal of extra typing for you—because if you take this on, you’re not going to trust it to a secretary.”

“Oh, good heavens, no, sir. Of course not.” Potter was shocked. “The thought never once crossed my mind.”

“Good. I believe you—you sound like a schoolteacher talking about the bawdyhouse next door to her apartment building.” The chief of the General Staff chuckled. Potter was less amused, but let it pass. Chuckling still, Forrest went on, “I should have remembered you run spies. You think about these things more than an ordinary officer is liable to.”

“Well, I should hope so!” Clarence Potter exclaimed. “Ordinary officers . . .” He shook his head. “I read a memoir once, by one of Robert E. Lee’s couriers. In the Pennsylvania campaign, he almost lost a set of Lee’s special orders—the damned fool had wrapped them around three cigars. If McClellan had found out how badly Lee had divided the Army of Northern Virginia, who knows how much mischief he could have done? An enlisted man saw the orders fall and gave them back. If he hadn’t, that courier’s name would be mud all over the CSA.”

“You do have to pay attention to little things,” Forrest agreed. He tapped the report with his fingernail. “Go ahead with what you’ve got in mind. I’ll be interested to see what you turn up.”

“Yes, sir.” Potter’s smile was all sharp teeth. “What—and who.”

XIV

C
olonel Irving Morrell hadn’t read the
Iliad
since he got out of the Military Academy, almost thirty years ago now. Chunks of it still stuck in his mind, though. He didn’t remember the anger of Achilles so much as the Greek hero sulking in his tent after he’d quarreled with Agamemnon.

All things considered, Morrell would rather have sulked in Achilles’ tent than in Caldwell, Ohio, where he found himself ensconced for the moment. Caldwell was a town of fifteen hundred or two thousand people, a few miles west of Woodsfield. It was the county seat for Noble County, as a sign in front of the county courthouse declared. That made him feel sorry for the rest of the county.

Caldwell was a coal town. People had been mining coal there for more than sixty years, and it showed. The air was hazy with coal dust. When Morrell needed to hawk and spit, he spat black. There were no red brick buildings in Caldwell. There were no white frame houses, either. The brick buildings were murky brown, the frame houses gray. The people seemed as subdued as their landscape. A lot of them seemed covered in a thin film of coal dust, too.

All things considered, Caldwell would have made Irving Morrell gloomy even if he’d gone into the place cheery as a lark. Since he’d gone in sullen, he would have been satisfied to come away without hanging himself. Even that much sometimes seemed optimistic. Caldwell was where what would have been his grand attack against the base of the Confederate salient in Ohio had ingloriously petered out. Sabotage and Confederate Asskickers had brought his armor to a standstill.

That wasn’t the worst of it, either. He’d thought it would be, but he’d been wrong. As he watched some of his precious barrels chained onto flatcars bound for the East Coast, his fury and frustration grew too large to hold in. He turned to Sergeant Michael Pound, who was always good for sympathy over imbecilities emanating from the War Department. “I’m being robbed, Sergeant,” he said. “Robbed, I tell you, as sure as if they’d held a gun to my head and lifted my wallet.”

“Yes, sir,” Pound said. “If they’re going to take your barrels, the least they could do would be to take you, too. Seems only fair.”

“They don’t want me anywhere near Philadelphia,” Morrell said. “They want me to keep fighting here in Ohio. They’ve said so.”

“They just don’t want to give you anything to fight with,” Sergeant Pound said. “They’ll probably set you to making bricks without straw next.”

“You mean they haven’t?” Morrell said. “By God, I was doing that for years at Fort Leavenworth. We had the prototype for a modern barrel twenty years ago—had it and stuck it in a back room and forgot about it. Christ, Sergeant, you went back to the artillery when they closed down the Barrel Works.”

“I’m glad you don’t hold it against me, sir,” Pound said.

“A man has to eat. There’s nothing in the Bible or the Constitution against that,” Morrell said. “If there were no barrels to work on—and there damn well weren’t—you needed to be doing something.”

“That was how I looked at it, too.” Pound suddenly snapped his fingers. “I’ll bet I know one of the reasons why they’re taking your barrels away from you.”

“More than I do,” Morrell said sourly. “Tell me.”

“They’re the biggest bunch we can get our hands on this side of the Confederate salient,” Pound said. “Everything west of here has to go the long way around, up through Canada—either that or on Great Lakes freighters that the enemy can bomb.”

Morrell eyed him. “Normally, Sergeant, when I say somebody thinks like a General Staff officer, I don’t mean it as a compliment. This time, I do. That makes much more sense than anything I’ve been able to think of.” He paused. “How would you like me to recommend you for a commission? You have the brains to do well by it. You have more in the way of brains than four out of five officers I know, maybe more.”

“Thank you very much, sir.” Michael Pound smiled a crooked smile. “If it’s all the same to you, though, I’ll pass. I’ve seen what officers do. There’s a lot more nonsense in it than there is when you’ve just got stripes on your sleeve. Gunner suits me fine. It’s simple. It’s clean. I know exactly what I have to do and how to do it—and I’m pretty damn good at it, too. My notion is, the Army needs a good gunner more than it needs an ordinary lieutenant, which is what I’d be.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Morrell’s smile lifted only one corner of his mouth. “Whatever else you were, you’d be an
extraordinary
lieutenant. You talk back to me as a sergeant. If you got a gold bar on your shoulder, you’d probably talk back to the chief of the General Staff.”

“Seeing how the war is going, wouldn’t you say somebody ought to?” Pound sketched a salute and ambled off. He was blocky as a barrel himself—and solid as a barrel, too. And, when he went up against something he didn’t like, he could also be as deadly as a barrel.

Morrell looked east. Then he looked west. Then he muttered something uncomplimentary about Jake Featherston’s personal habits, something about which he was in no position to have firsthand knowledge. Sergeant Pound was altogether too likely to be right. The thrust up to Lake Erie was starting to hurt the USA. Morrell wondered what the exact problem was. Could they ship enough fuel or enough barrels on the rail lines north of the Great Lakes, but not both at once? Something like that, he supposed. Logistics had never been his favorite subject. No good officer could afford to ignore it, but he preferred fighting to brooding about rolling stock.

Of course, if not for rolling stock he’d still have had his barrels with him. They would have broken down one after another if they’d had to get to eastern West Virginia under their own power. Breakdowns kept almost as many of them out of action as enemy fire did. Morrell wished it were otherwise, but it wasn’t. The weight of armor they carried stressed engines and suspensions to the point of no return, or sometimes past it.

Half a dozen barrels still in Caldwell had their engine decking off. Soldiers were attacking them with wrenches and pliers. Some, maybe even most, of them hadn’t broken down. A barrel whose crew kept it in good running trim didn’t fail as often as one whose crew neglected it.

Far off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Morrell cursed under his breath. He should have been up there punching, not stalled in this jerkwater town. And how could he ever hope to land any punches if they kept siphoning away his strength? He couldn’t, but they’d blame him because he didn’t.

The Constitution said U.S. soldiers weren’t supposed to quarter themselves on civilians. Like most rules, that one sometimes got ignored when bullets started flying. Morrell didn’t ignore it, though. He was perfectly happy in a tent or a sleeping bag or just rolled in a blanket—he
liked
the outdoors. That was a concept General Staff officers back in Philadelphia had trouble grasping.

He was glad he had a tent when it started to pour about eight that night. Rain bucketed down out of the sky. It wasn’t a warm summer rain, either: not the kind you could go out in and enjoy. The nasty weather said the seasons were changing. It would turn everything but paved roads into soup, too. Morrell muttered to himself. Enough mud could bog down barrels. That would slow things here.

He did some more muttering a moment later. If it also rained like this in Virginia, it wouldn’t do the building U.S. offensive any good. That wasn’t his campaign, but he worried about it. He worried about it all the more
because
it wasn’t his campaign. But all he could do was worry. The weather did as it pleased, not as he pleased.

He’d just stretched out on his cot when Confederate bombers came over Caldwell. The drumming rain drowned out the drone of their motors. The first he knew that they were around was a series of rending crashes off in the woods east of the little town. Frightened shouts came from nearby houses. Morrell almost laughed. Civilians got a lot more excited about bombing than soldiers did.

With those clouds overhead, the Confederates were bombing blind. Morrell didn’t worry that they would actually hit Caldwell . . . until the bomb impacts started walking west from those first blasts. The lead bombers had missed their targets by a lot. But the ones behind them, trying to bomb from the same point as they had, released their bombs too soon, an error that grew as it went through the formation.

That sort of thing happened all the time. Here, though, it was bringing the bombs back toward where they should have fallen in the first place. Morrell had taken off his boots to get comfortable. He put them on again in a tearing hurry, not bothering to tie them. Then he bolted from his tent and ran for the closest shelter trench.

He splashed and squelched getting down into it. It filled rapidly with cursing crewmen from his remaining barrels. However much they cursed, they kept their heads down. A chunk of bomb could do as neat a job as a headsman’s axe—but a messy one would leave you just as dead.

“Here they come,” somebody said as bombs started falling inside Caldwell. The ground shook. Fragments hissed and screeched not nearly far enough overhead. As Morrell bent to tie those boots, he hoped the civilians had had the brains to go down into their basements.

One crash was especially loud, and followed by a flash of light. “Fuckin’ lucky bastards,” a soldier said. “If they didn’t just blow a barrel to hell and gone, I’m a monkey’s uncle.” Ammunition cooking off inside the stricken machine proved him right.

Another, different-sounding, crash probably meant a bomb had come down on a house. Going to the basement wasn’t likely to save the poor bastards who’d lived there. Morrell sighed a wet sigh. Nothing to be done about it—and it wasn’t as if U.S. bombers weren’t visiting the same kind of hell on Confederate civilians.

“Pay those stinking sons of bitches back for getting me all wet and muddy,” a barrel man said. Civilian casualties worried him even less than Morrell. His own discomfort was another story.

The bombs stopped falling. Morrell stood up straight and looked out of the trench. The barrel that had taken a direct hit was still burning in spite of the rain. By that yellow, flickering light, Morrell saw that two or three houses had fallen in on themselves. They were trying to burn, too, but weren’t having an easy time of it in the downpour.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s see what we can do for the locals.”

A civilian lay in the middle of one of the streets, suddenly and gruesomely dead. What had he been doing out there? Watching the bombs come down? Did he think it was sport? No one would ever know now.

Other people came staggering out of houses. Some of them were wounded. Some were simply in shock, and crying out their terror to whoever would listen, or maybe to the world at large. “My baby! My baby!” a woman shrieked. She was holding the baby, which was also shrieking.

A corpsman took the baby from her. After looking it over—carefully, because fragments could produce tiny but deadly wounds—he spoke in tones of purest New York City: “Lady, ain’t nuttin’ wrong wid dis kid but a wet diaper.”

“But the poor thing is frightened half to death!” the woman said.

What the corpsman said after that was memorable, but had very little to do with medicine. The woman squawked indignantly. Irving Morrell filed away some of the choicer—the corpsman would have said
chercer
—phrases. When he found a moment, he’d aim them at Philadelphia.

W
hen Scipio looked in his pay envelope, he thought the bookkeeper at the Huntsman’s Lodge had made a mistake. That had happened before, two or three times. As far as he could tell, the bookkeeper always erred in the restaurant’s favor. He took the envelope to Jerry Dover. “I hates to bother you, suh, but I’s ten dollars light.”

Dover shook his head. “Sorry, Xerxes, but you’re not.”

“What you mean?” For a second, Scipio thought the restaurant manager thought he’d pocketed the missing banknote before complaining. Then he realized something else was going on. “You mean it’s one o’ them—?”

“Contributions. That’s right. Thought you might have seen the story in the
Constitutionalist
yesterday, or maybe heard about it on the wireless. It’s on account of the bombing in the Terry.”

“Lawd!” Scipio burst out. “One o’ dem bombs almost kill me, an’ now I gots to
pay fo’ it
? Don’t hardly seem fair.” It seemed a lot worse than unfair, but saying even that much to a white man carried a certain risk.

Jerry Dover didn’t get angry. He just shrugged. “If I don’t short you and the rest of the colored help, my ass is in a sling,” he said. If it came to a choice between saving his ass and the black men’s, he’d choose his own. That wasn’t a headline that would make the
Augusta Constitutionalist.

Scipio sighed. Only too plainly, he wasn’t going to get his ten dollars. He said, “Wish I seen de newspaper. Wish I heard de wireless. Wouldn’t be such a surprise in dat case.”

“How come you missed ’em?” Dover asked. “You’re usually pretty well up on stuff.” He didn’t even add,
for a nigger.
Scipio had worked for him a long time now. He knew the colored man had a working brain.

“One o’ them things,” Scipio said with a shrug of his own. He’d missed buying a paper the day before. He hadn’t listened to the wireless very much. He did wonder how he’d managed not to hear the newsboys shouting the headline and the waiters and cooks and dishwashers grousing about it. “Been livin’ in my own little world, I reckon.”

“Yeah, well, shit like that happens.” Dover was willing to sound sympathetic as long as he didn’t have to do anything about it.

Before Scipio could answer, a dishwasher came up to their boss. “Hey, Mr. Dover!” he said. “I got ten clams missin’ outa my envelope here!”

“No, you don’t, Ozymandias,” the manager said, and went through the explanation again. Scipio knew a certain amount of relief that he hadn’t been the only one not to get the word.

Ozymandias, a young man, didn’t take it as well as Scipio had. He cussed and fumed till Scipio wondered whether Jerry Dover would fire him on the spot. Dover didn’t. He just let the Negro run down and sent him out the door. Quite a few white men boasted about being good with niggers. Most of them were full of crap. Jerry Dover really was good with the help at the Huntsman’s Lodge, though he didn’t go around bragging about it.