The Grapple (32 page)

“Read you five by five, Robin.” The answer resounded in his earphones. He was back in touch, back in command. After fifteen or twenty minutes of glory—and responsibility—Harlan Parsons could go back to being number two.

“What is the situation?” Morrell asked. “Any changes?”

“Negative, sir,” the wireless man replied. “Everything’s on schedule, or maybe a little ahead of schedule.”

“Sounds good to me,” Morrell said. Before the Nest could answer, a noise like a giant frying bacon filled his earphones. Swearing, he yanked them off his head. The Confederates were starting to jam signals. That was a sign they were getting their wits about them and seriously starting to fight back. Morrell swore some more. He would have liked the enemy to stay stunned a while longer. You didn’t always get everything you wanted. As long as the USA had enough…

The barrel jounced past the burning ruin of a C.S. machine. Four soldiers in blood-soaked butternut coveralls—the barrel crew—sprawled close by in death. Maybe the fifth man got away. Or maybe he never got out, and was nothing but charred meat inside the barrel.

Morrell rode toward the front standing up in the turret, head and shoulders out of the cupola. He wanted to see what was going on. Enemy fire was light. Machine guns and other small arms farther forward chattered. Every Confederate foot soldier carried either an automatic rifle or a submachine gun. The bastards in butternut had plenty of firepower. Did they have enough big guns, enough barrels, enough airplanes, enough
men
? Morrell and the United States were betting they didn’t.

A salvo of those newfangled rockets screamed in from the south. Morrell just had time to duck down into the turret and slam the cupola hatch shut before the rockets burst. Blast rocked the barrel. It could flip even one of these heavy machines right over. It could, but it didn’t this time. Fragments clanged off armor.

“Son of a bitch!” Frenchy Bergeron said. “Those fuckers are no fun at all.”

“Right the first time,” Morrell told the gunner. Yes, the Confederates were fighting back. No reason to expect they wouldn’t, no matter how much Morrell would have liked it if they rolled over onto their backs like whipped dogs.

Another salvo of rockets came down, this one a little farther away. “God help the poor infantry,” Bergeron remarked. Morrell nodded. For plastering a wide area with firepower, those rockets were world-beaters. Bergeron went on, “How many of them have they got, anyway?”

“Good question,” Morrell said. “Best answer I’ve got is, not enough to stop us.” He hoped he was telling the truth. Somewhere in Alabama or Texas or Georgia, the CSA had factories working overtime to turn out the rockets and their launchers, though the latter were simplicity itself: just iron tubing and sheet metal. But the more rockets the Confederates made, the less of something else they turned out. Bullets? Automatic rifles? Barrel tracks? Canned corn? Something—that was for sure. Keep the pressure on them and they couldn’t make enough of everything they needed and keep an army in the field at the same time, not when they were fighting a country more than twice their size.

Things had worked that way in the Great War, anyhow. The United States ought to have a bigger edge this time, because the Confederates were persecuting their Negroes instead of using them. But industrialized agriculture and factory efficiency were both a lot further along than they were a generation earlier. Farms and factories kept fewer men away from the field than they had.

The bow machine gun on Morrell’s barrel fired a quick burst. “Scratch one!” the gunner said. A Confederate who did make it to the battlefield wouldn’t go home again. Morrell nodded to himself. Now—how many more would it take before Jake Featherston said uncle?

C
incinnatus Driver sat in a tent north of Cincinnati, hoping the other shoe would drop here. U.S. forces were already over the river farther west, driving from Indiana into western Kentucky. Meanwhile, Cincinnatus shoved money into the pot. “See you an’ raise you a dollar,” he said. He was holding three jacks, so he thought his chances were pretty good.

One of the other truck drivers still in the hand dropped out. The last driver raised a dollar himself. Cincinnatus eyed him. He’d drawn two. If he’d filled a straight or a flush, he’d done it by accident. Odds against that were pretty steep. Cincinnatus bumped it up another dollar.

Now the other man—a white—eyed him. He tossed in one more dollar of his own. “Call,” he said.

“Three jacks.” Cincinnatus showed them. The other driver swore—he had three eights. Cincinnatus scooped up the pot. The other driver, still muttering darkly, grabbed the cards and shuffled them for the next hand.

He’d just started to deal when artillery, a lot of artillery, roared not far away. All the men in the card game cocked their heads to one side, listening. “Ours,” one of them said. The rest nodded, Cincinnatus included.

“Don’t sound like they’re dicking around,” said the fellow who’d held three eights. He was a wiry little guy named Izzy Saperstein. He had a beard so thick he shaved twice a day and the most hair in his nose and ears Cincinnatus had ever seen.

“Put on a bigger barrage earlier,” another driver said. “Made the bastards in butternut keep their heads down and made sure they wouldn’t move soldiers west. Chances are this is more of the same.”

“Maybe.” Saperstein scratched his ear. With that tuft sprouting from it, he likely itched all the time. Cincinnatus wondered if he couldn’t cut the hair or pluck it or something. It was just this side of disgusting.

They played for another couple of hours, while the guns boomed and bellowed. None of them got excited about that. They’d all heard plenty of gunfire before. As long as nothing was coming down on their heads, they didn’t flabble. Cincinnatus won a little, lost a little, won a little more.

He was up about fifteen bucks when a U.S. captain stuck his head into the tent. “Go to your trucks now, men,” he said. “Head for the depot and load up. We’ve crossed the Ohio, and our boys’ll need everything we can bring ’em.”

“Crossed the Ohio? Here?” Izzy Saperstein sounded amazed.

Cincinnatus was surprised, too. He hadn’t really believed the USA would try to force a crossing here. He didn’t know many people who had, either. If folks on this side were caught by surprise, maybe the Confederates would be, too. “We fighting in Covington, sir?” he asked. “I was born there. I know my way around good. I can lead and show folks the way.”

“Thanks, Driver, but no,” the captain answered. “We’re going to skirt the town, pen up the enemy garrison inside, and clean it out at our leisure. Now get moving.”

Only one possible answer to that. Cincinnatus gave it: “Yes, sir.” Along with the other men, he headed for his truck as fast as he could go.

A self-starter was so handy. A touch of a button and the motor came to life. He remembered cranking trucks in the Great War. That was even more fun in the rain—and if your hand slipped, the crank would spin backwards and maybe break your arm. He didn’t have to worry about that now. No—all he needed to worry about was getting shot or incinerated or blown sky-high.
Happy day,
he thought.

Soldiers with dollies filled the back of the truck with crates of God knew what. Ammunition, he guessed by the way the truck settled on its springs. “Go get ’em, Pop!” one of the young white men yelled to him. Cincinnatus grinned and waved. He was plenty old enough to be that kid’s father. And
Pop
didn’t burn his ears the way
Uncle
would have. The soldier would have said the same thing to a white man Cincinnatus’ age. In the CSA,
Uncle
was what whites called a Negro too old to get stuck with
boy.

The truck convoy rumbled south, toward the river. With so much weight in the rear, Cincinnatus’ deuce-and-a-half rode a lot smoother than it did empty. He drove past gun pits where gun bunnies stripped to the waist worked like men possessed to throw more shells at the Confederates. Some of the U.S. soldiers were already lobster-red from too much sun. Cincinnatus glanced at his own brown arm. There weren’t many things white men had to worry about that he didn’t, but sunburn was one of them.

Every so often, incoming shells burst. Think what you would about the men who followed Jake Featherston, but they had no quit in them. Wherever they could hit back, they did.

“This way! This way!” A sergeant with wigwag flags directed the trucks toward slab-sided boats plainly made to cross rivers no matter what the unpleasant people on the other bank had to say about it. Cincinnatus rolled into one.

“All the way forward!” a sailor told him. “We hold two trucks, by God.” Cincinnatus rolled up till his front bumper kissed the landing craft’s rear wall. The sailor rewarded him with a circle from his thumb and forefinger. Cincinnatus waved and nodded, as he had with the young soldier who loaded the truck. He knew how the man in blue meant the gesture. Whether the sailor did or not, though, Cincinnatus also happened to know that to Germans (many of whom had crossed from Cincinnati to Covington in the easygoing days before the Great War) a very similar hand sign meant you were an asshole.

Another truck followed his into the ungainly boat. It didn’t quite have to bump his machine to let the boat’s crew raise the ramp and dog it shut. “Do I leave my motor on?” Cincinnatus called to the closest sailor.

“Bet your butt, buddy,” the man answered. “You’re gonna wanna hit the ground running, right?”

Cincinnatus didn’t say no. He wished he were someplace where the Confederates couldn’t shoot at him or shell him or drop bombs on his head.
Why didn’t you stay in Des Moines, then?
he asked himself. A little—no, much—too late to worry about that now. And he knew why he didn’t stay there: he owed the CSA too much. But understanding that and liking it when he headed into danger were two different things.

On land, the landing craft ran well enough to get down into the river. On the Ohio, it ran well enough to cross. On the other side, it got up onto the bank. It didn’t do any of those things very well. That it could do all of them, even if badly, made it a valuable machine. The wall against which Cincinnatus’ truck nestled also proved to be a ramp. It thudded down. He put the truck in gear and rolled off. The other truck in the landing craft followed him.

A corporal pointed at him, and then at some other trucks. “Follow them!” the man yelled. Cincinnatus nodded to show he understood. He wasn’t sure those other trucks came from his unit. That wasn’t his worry, not right now. Somebody’d told him what to do. He just had to do it.

He began to wonder if they’d caught the Confederates flatfooted. There wasn’t a lot of incoming enemy fire. He didn’t miss it, and he hoped that what there was kept missing him. Whenever he could, he glanced east, toward Covington. He could see…exactly nothing. He hoped the police and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards hadn’t shipped all the Negroes in town off to camps farther south. He hoped Lucullus Wood and the other black Reds were finding ways to give the Confederates a hard time, even from behind barbed wire. All he could do was hope. He couldn’t know.

The convoy stopped by a battery of 105s. Soldiers swarmed aboard his truck and unloaded it with locustlike intensity. He waited to see if they would start swearing, the way they might if, say, he carried crates full of machine-gun belts. When they didn’t, he decided the corporal had sent him to the right place after all.

“Where do I go now?” he asked when the truck was empty. “Back across the river to load up again?”

“No, by God.” A U.S. soldier pointed south and west. “We just took a Confederate supply depot. I mean to tell you, the guy who was running it must’ve been a fucking genius. Everything from pencils to pecans to power tools. Ammunition out the ass, too.”

“That don’t do us much good,” Cincinnatus said. “They don’t use the same calibers as we do.”

“Yeah, but we got a lotta guys carrying their automatic rifles. Damn things are great, long as you can keep ’em in bullets,” the soldier said. “We got enough of their ammo at this here dump to keep a lot of our guys going for a long time.”

Cincinnatus liked the way that sounded. When he got to the depot, he decided the soldier who’d sent him there was right: the quartermaster who’d set it up was a genius. If he was still alive, he was bound to be gnashing his teeth that everything he’d labored to gather now lay in U.S. hands. The Confederates hadn’t even got the chance to blow up the ammunition.

This time, Cincinnatus could see what went into the back of his truck.
RATIONS, CANNED
, the crates said. No doubt U.S. authorities would use them to feed soldiers in green-gray. And no doubt the soldiers in green-gray would grumble when they got them. U.S. canned goods were better than their C.S. equivalents. But Confederate rations were ever so much better than no rations at all.

Confederate prisoners marched glumly up the road toward the Ohio. The U.S. troops in green-gray who herded them along got them off the highway and onto the shoulder to keep them from slowing down the southbound trucks. Some of the men in butternut stared at Cincinnatus’ dark face in the cab of his truck. He sent them a cheery wave and went on driving. So they didn’t think Negroes were good for anything, did they? Well, he hoped he gave them a surprise.