Return Engagement (71 page)

“Well, what the hell else am I going to do?” Moss asked irritably. “There!” He shed the harness. He knew of a man who’d had to cut his way free, and had cut off the tip of his thumb without even noticing till later.

One of the Confederates had a single bar on either side of his collar: a second lieutenant. “Can you walk, Yankee?” he asked.

“Let’s see.” Gingerly, Moss got to his feet and put weight on that ankle. “Kind of.”

“Pull his teeth, somebody,” the lieutenant said. A corporal plucked the .45 automatic from Moss’ belt. The downed fighter pilot looked at it as if it belonged to somebody else—which it did, now. He’d been about as likely to yank it out and start shooting as to sprout wings and fly away without his airplane. Of course, the Confederates didn’t know that. To them, if not to himself, he was still a dangerous character.

They also relieved him of his wristwatch. That was a different story. He let out a squawk: “My wife gave me that watch.” It was one of the last things he had by which to remember Laura.

The lieutenant stuck it in his pocket. “And so?” he asked coolly. Moss wondered whether a sob story would do him any good. He didn’t wonder for more than about three seconds, though. They didn’t
have
to take prisoners, no matter what the Geneva Convention said. Not every fighting man who fell into enemy hands ended up in a POW camp. If they shot him now, who’d know? Who’d care? Nobody and nobody, respectively. When Moss kept his mouth shut, the lieutenant nodded and said, “I reckoned you were a smart fellow. Now get moving.”

He got moving. He couldn’t go very fast, but they didn’t push him. As long as they were herding him along, they were doing something clearly line-of-duty and just as clearly not very hard. That came close to a soldier’s ideal. One of them even cut a branch off a pine and trimmed it with his bayonet to make Moss a walking stick. He took it gratefully. It helped.

They’d spread camouflage netting and branches over their tents. That must have worked; they didn’t seem to have been shot up. The lieutenant took Moss into a tent where a man in his thirties with three bars on each side of his collar—a captain—sat behind a folding table doing paperwork. “Captured the damnyankee flier we heard going down,” the lieutenant said proudly.

“Good work.” By the casual way the captain said it, this sort of thing happened every day, which was bullshit of the purest ray serene. The captain looked at Moss and said, “For you, the war is over.”

How many bad films about the Great War had he seen, to come out with a line like that? Moss almost laughed in his face. But it wasn’t really a laughing matter, not when he could still suffer an unfortunate accident—and when the captain was right. “Looks that way to me, too,” Moss said.

The captain got down to business. “Give me your particulars.”

“Jonathan Moss. Major, U.S. Army.” He rattled off his pay number. He knew it as well as he knew his name.

“What was your mission?” the Confederate officer asked.

“I’ve told you everything the laws of war say I have to,” Moss answered, and waited to see what happened next. If the captain felt like giving him the third degree . . . he couldn’t do a whole hell of a lot about it.

But the man just said, “Well, we can’t keep you here. We don’t have the setup to hold prisoners. Jenkins!”

“Yes, sir!” the lieutenant said.

“Take him into Spotsylvania. They’ll have a jail there. He won’t get out till they can take him down to the Carolinas or Georgia or one of those places where they’ve got themselves POW camps.”

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant repeated. Into Spotsylvania Moss went.
Hell of a name for a town,
he thought, but that was one more thing he kept quiet about. The auto was of Confederate make, but looked and performed like one built in the USA. Two soldiers with submachine guns sitting behind Moss discouraged any thoughts of adventure.

The jail was a squat red-brick building. The sheriff considerately gave Moss a cell as far away from the drunk tank as he could. It had a cot and a chamber pot and a pitcher and cup and basin. The water was cool, not cold. Moss drank it anyway. The bars all looked very solid. He rattled them. They were. He sighed and lay down on the cot.
For you, the war is over.
And so it was.

B
rigadier General Abner Dowling was not a happy man. For Dowling, that made anything but a man-bites-dog headline. What with long service under George Armstrong Custer, even longer service in hate-filled Utah, and brief service trying to hold back the Confederate thrust into Ohio, he hadn’t had a lot to be happy about. When some of your fonder memories were of a Salt Lake City sporting house, you hadn’t lived life for the fun of it.

He wasn’t enjoying himself much here in Virginia, either. His corps had borne the brunt of the Confederate flank attack. They’d contained it, but they’d been badly battered in the process. The counterattack against the right and the coming of winter had slowed the U.S. advance—intended to be as quick and ferocious as the Confederate drive that had opened the fighting—to a crawl right out of 1915.

And now Daniel MacArthur had a new brainstorm. As Dowling’s driver took him over the icy roads to MacArthur’s headquarters in Warrenton, he wondered what the army commander had come up with this time. MacArthur’s last inspiration had led to this bloody stalemate. Dowling was more than a little surprised to see the flamboyant officer get a second chance. He wondered what MacArthur would do with it.

When fighters roared by overhead, he wondered if he would live to find out. The Confederates still came over and harried road traffic in U.S.-held territory, just as U.S. airplanes shot up motorcars farther south. But either these were U.S. fighters or the Confederates didn’t think the middle-aged Buick worth wasting ammunition on, for he came through unscathed.

Warrenton was nothing special. It had gone from Virginia to West Virginia, from the CSA to the USA, after the Great War, and had never got over it.
YANKEES GO HOME!
graffiti, others saying
FREEDOM!
, and whitewashed patches covering up more such love notes scarred the walls. Dowling saw no U.S. soldiers by themselves. Everybody always had at least one buddy along, which spoke volumes about how much the locals thought of themselves as U.S. citizens.

Daniel MacArthur had appropriated the fanciest house in town for his headquarters. That struck Dowling as utterly in character. If MacArthur had made one more Warrentonian turn scarlet about the United States and everything they stood for . . . Dowling, frankly, wasn’t going to give a damn.

The neoclassical columned portico made him feel as if he were walking into a government building in Philadelphia or Washington. The only difference was, the architect here had shown better taste and more restraint than builders in the USA’s capitals were in the habit of doing.

“Good afternoon, General.” MacArthur greeted him in the foyer.

It was getting on toward evening, but Dowling didn’t argue. “Good afternoon, sir.” He saluted. Grandly, MacArthur returned the courtesy. His long, lean toothpick of a body was made for the grand, arrogant gesture. Built more along the lines of a refrigerator, Dowling had to make do with competence. He asked, “What have you got in mind, sir? Some way to punch through the Wilderness?” He didn’t think any such way existed. His superior was all too likely to own a different opinion. Which of them turned out to be right might prove a different question, but MacArthur had more stars on his shoulder straps than Dowling.

The cigarette in MacArthur’s long, fancy holder quivered. Excitement? Disdain? Who could tell? “Come with me to the map room,” the U.S. general commanding said. You couldn’t fight a war without maps. Only MacArthur would make it sound as if he never looked at them outside of this one room.

He led Dowling to a chamber that was indeed full of maps. To Dowling’s surprise, he pointed to a large-scale one that showed all over Virginia and the surrounding states, both U.S. and C.S. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t make it out from this alone,” Dowling said.

“No?” By MacArthur’s tone, he’d just proved himself a moron. “What I aim to do, General, is force the Confederates to divide their forces by making a surprise landing at the mouth of the James and advancing on Richmond along the river.” He struck a pose, plainly waiting for Dowling to acclaim his genius.

Whatever else you could say about him, he didn’t think small. But there
were
other things to say. Dowling didn’t scream,
Are you out of your goddamn mind, sir?
He was proud of himself because he didn’t. It showed commendable restraint on his part—that was how he saw it, anyway.

“Didn’t General McClellan try that same move during the War of Secession?” he inquired, hoping to lead MacArthur back to reality by easy stages.

“He did indeed,” MacArthur said. “But he didn’t move fast enough. The only thing about McClellan that might have moved fast enough was his bowels.”

Dowling fought back a startled giggle. From everything he’d read about McClellan, that was gospel truth. Even so, he said, “But you have to worry about things he didn’t—the Confederates’ Navy and their bombers, for instance. If you do land a force, can you supply it?”

“By God, I can. By God, I will.” MacArthur stuck out his granite chin, as if to say he needed nothing but determination.

It wasn’t that simple, as Dowling knew too well. “Sir, they’ll have artillery that can reach our rear, too,” he said. “General McClellan didn’t have to worry about that kind of thing, either.”

Outside the map room, light drained from the sky. MacArthur looked at him as if he’d just crawled out, all pallid and moist, from under a flat rock. “I had hoped you would show confidence in the fighting ability of the American soldier, General,” he said stiffly.

“Sir, I do. I’m more confident of that than of just about anything else in the world,” Dowling answered. “But I also think we shouldn’t have to depend on his fighting ability by itself. I think he ought to go into battle with a plan that gives him the best chance to win without getting slaughtered.”

Now Daniel MacArthur looked as if he wanted to step on what had crawled out from under the flat rock. “Are you saying my plan does not meet that criterion? I must tell you, I beg to differ.” He didn’t beg to differ; he demanded.

Instead of answering directly, Dowling asked, “What does the General Staff think of your scheme?”

MacArthur snapped his fingers with contempt a Shakespearean actor might have envied. “That for the General Staff!” he said. “If they fart, they’ll blow their brains out.”

Custer would have agreed with that, and would have laughed himself into a coughing fit when he heard it. Dowling persisted: “Have you submitted this plan to them?”

“I don’t need to,” MacArthur said. “I command in the Virginia theater.”

“Well, yes, sir. Of course, sir.” Dowling might have been trying to soothe a dangerous lunatic. As far as he was concerned, that was exactly what he was doing. He went on, “But if you’re going to land troops at the mouth of the James, you’ll need some help from the Navy, you know.”

“Oh, I have that.” MacArthur waved away such trivial concerns. “Rear Admiral Halsey, the commander of the Southern Shore Naval District, is confident he can give me everything I need along those lines.”

“Is he?” Dowling said tonelessly. He hadn’t known the Navy also had a wild man running around loose. He supposed it was fate—probably a malign fate—that let this other officer link up with MacArthur. “Does the Navy Department have any idea what he’s up to?”

“General Dowling, your continual carping questions grow tiresome in the extreme,” MacArthur said. “I thought you would be eager to come to grips with the enemy in some new place. I see I was unduly optimistic.”

“I would have been more eager to come to grips with him here in northern Virginia if the attack hadn’t been delayed so long,” Dowling said.

Daniel MacArthur’s face went a dusky, blotchy red. “Good evening,” he choked out.

“Good evening, sir.” Dowling saluted again and left MacArthur’s sanctum sanctorum. If the other man wanted to relieve him, Dowling wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Even going back to Philadelphia might be a relief after serving under such a prima donna.
I’ve done this before. I don’t need to do it again,
Dowling thought.

His driver was smoking a cigarette when he got out to the motorcar. When the man said, “Where to now, sir?” he had whiskey as well as smoke on his breath. Either he carried a flask or he’d made a friend while waiting for Dowling to emerge.

“Back to my headquarters,” Dowling said, and then, “Do you want me to do the driving?”

“Oh, no, sir. I’m fine,” the driver assured him, unabashed. “I just had a nip. I didn’t get smashed or anything.”

“All right.” Dowling waited to see if it was. It seemed to be. The driver shifted gears smoothly, didn’t speed, and didn’t wander all over the road. Considering that the taped-over headlamps didn’t reach much farther than a man could spit, not speeding was an especially good idea.

Dowling kept a hand on his sidearm all the way back. Confederate bushwhackers sometimes took potshots at passing autos. He didn’t intend to go down without shooting back. What he intended to do and what he got a chance to do might prove two different things. He understood that, even if he didn’t want to think about it.

He wondered whether Daniel MacArthur had ever grasped the difference between intention and reality. All the signs said he hadn’t, any more than George Custer had before him. Once, Custer had proved spectacularly right. By substituting his own view of what barrels could do for War Department doctrine, he’d gone a long way toward winning the Great War for the USA. Before that, though, how many soldiers in green-gray had he slaughtered in his headlong attacks on entrenched Confederate positions? Tens of thousands, surely.

Maybe MacArthur’s plan for a landing at the mouth of the James and a drive on Richmond from the southeast was a brilliant move that would win the war. Then again, maybe it wasn’t. It hadn’t been for McClellan, eighty years ago now. MacArthur was without a doubt a better general than McClellan had been. Of course, saying that was like saying something smelled better than a skunk. It might be true, but how much did it tell you?