The Grapple (59 page)

“Haven’t yet, sir,” the gunner answered. “Shall I give him a round or two of HE if I do?”

“Damn straight,” Pound said. “They’re starting to shoot their own people now. They might as well be Russians or Japs.”

They rolled past wherever the machine gun was concealed without spotting it. Pound wasn’t too worried about that. Another barrel or the infantry would take care of it. He just hoped it wouldn’t cause many casualties before that happened. Any which way, the machine gunners were in more trouble than they knew what to do with. Somehow or other, soldiers who served machine guns—especially soldiers who served them right up to the last minute—had a lot of trouble surrendering.

Pound peered through the periscopes set into the cupola. It wasn’t as good as riding with his head out, but it would have to do. He wondered where the Confederate barrels were. They couldn’t stay very far behind the line, not unless they didn’t intend to fight this side of the Chattanooga city limits. So…where?

“Front!” The gunner spotted the first enemy machine before Pound did. It squatted hull-down behind the rubble of what had been a roadside diner. And its crew had seen this barrel before anyone spotted it. Even as the gunner yelled for an armor-piercing round, the enemy cannon swung toward the barrel and spat fire.

Clang!
Less than a second later, the enemy AP round hit the turret. It was like having your head stuck in God’s cymbals when He clashed them together. But the thick, well-sloped armor kept the round from penetrating.

“Thank you, Jesus!” Scullard said.

“Amen!” Michael Pound laughed from sheer relief at being alive. By the shape of its turret, the enemy barrel was an old model, one that carried only a two-inch gun. That cannon was better than good enough when the war started, but not any more. “Give him some of his own medicine, if you please.”

“Yes, sir!” The gunner’s enthusiasm surely also sprang from relief. He fiddled with the gun-laying controls—but not for long, because they’d be reloading with frantic haste in that other barrel, and they might get lucky the second time around.

The U.S. barrel’s gun spoke before the enemy got off his second shot. It wasn’t an easy target, not with only the Confederate machine’s turret showing. Pound wished he were making it himself. Not that Scullard wasn’t a damn good gunner—he was. But Pound knew he was better than a damn good gunner himself. He commanded the barrel, though. He couldn’t hop into the seat on the other side of the turret. Sometimes you had to trust the men under you, no matter how hard that was. Times like this, he wished he had his stripes back. Being an officer was no fun at all.

And then, suddenly, it was. The 3½-inch AP round punched through that old-fashioned turret as if its steel armor were so much cardboard. It knocked the turret half off the ring, knocked the enemy gun all askew. Then the ammunition stored inside the turret started cooking off. Better not to think about what happened to the Confederate barrelmen when a tungsten-pointed projectile started ricocheting around inside that crowded space.
Much
better not to think about it, because it had almost happened here instead.

“Good shot, Scullard!” Pound said. “Hell of a shot!” You could talk about the shot as if it were part of a game. You could talk about the enemy barrel as if it fought by itself, as if it had no crew inside. That way, you didn’t have to think about what happened to the men in there, what you’d just done to them.

“Thank you, sir.” The gunner laid an affectionate hand on the cannon’s breech. “If our turtle didn’t have a thick shell, those fuckers would’ve done unto us before we could do unto them.”

“First shot is better, but we made—you made—the second one count.” Pound gave credit where it was due.

Scullard sent him a sly grin. “Bet you wished you were doing the shooting yourself.” He knew Pound had been shifting in his seat.

“Well, maybe a little,” the barrel commander admitted—he couldn’t very well deny it. But he went on, “Probably just as well I wasn’t. You know the controls for this weapon better than I do.” That was not only polite but true. He’d fired a few rounds to familiarize himself with the cannon in case something happened to the gunner, but it was Scullard’s baby. Pound always thought he could do anything. Maybe getting reminded every once in a while that that might not be true was good for him.

“You’re a gent, sir,” Scullard said.

Pound laughed. “Only shows you don’t know me as well as you think you do, Sergeant.” He called the driver on the intercom: “Let’s get moving again. We keep sitting around, we give those bastards too good a shot at us.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said. The barrel lurched forward.

A couple of minutes later, machine-gun fire started clattering off the machine’s armored side and the turret. It sounded like hail on a corrugated-iron roof. Pound traversed the turret to the left. There was the machine gun, sure as hell, muzzle flash winking like a lightning bug. It had a damn fool running it—he couldn’t hurt a barrel with all the ammo in the world. “Front!” Pound sang out.

“Identified, sir,” Scullard replied. He spoke to the loader: “HE!”

“You got it.” The high-explosive shell went into the breech.

“Fire!” Pound yelled, and the gunner did. The shell casing leaped from the gun and clattered off the turret floor. Dirt and smoke fountained up a few yards in front of the machine-gun nest. “Short!” Pound said. “Give ’em another round or two. We’ll shut the bugger down, by God.”

“Yes, sir,” Scullard said, and then, “HE again.” His sensitive fingers raised the cannon a hair. He fired the gun. This time, the sandbags that warded the Confederate machine gun went flying. One of the men from the crew started to run. Scullard cut him down with a burst from the coaxial machine gun. “That takes care of that.”

Pound didn’t answer. He was turning his head this way and that, trying to look through all the periscopes set into the cupola. Somewhere not far away, a U.S. barrel was burning. It wasn’t one from his platoon, but that didn’t matter. He watched a rocket with a tail of fire brew up another U.S. barrel.

That made him angry. “Goddammit, where
is
our infantry?” he said. “They’re supposed to keep those bastards with the stovepipes too far off for them to shoot up our barrels that way.”

Then he forgot about enemy soldiers with rocket launchers. The Confederates weren’t saving all their armor inside Chattanooga—no, indeed. Butternut barrels rumbled forward. So did barrelbusters: self-propelled artillery pieces without turrets, so they had only a limited traverse, but with larger-caliber cannon than barrels carried. The United States were starting to use them, too. They could be dangerous, both because of the punch they packed and because their low silhouette made them easy to hide and hard to spot.

They were well armored, too, but not well enough—as Pound rapidly proved—to hold out a 3½-inch AP round. The armored melee was as wild as anything Pound had ever seen…till U.S. fighter-bombers appeared overhead and tore into the Confederate machines with rockets of their own. The enemy had no answer to those flaming lances slicing down from the sky. Several barrels and barrelbusters went up in flames. Others pulled back toward better cover.

“Forward!” Pound called to his platoon. One of the barrels couldn’t go forward; it had a track shot off, and needed repairs. The other four, including his, pressed on. “They can’t stop us!” he exulted.

Maybe the Confederates couldn’t, but nightfall did. He wouldn’t have minded storming forward after dark, but he got explicit orders to hold in place. He tried to tell himself it might be just as well. If green-gray infantry did come forward in the night, the enemy wouldn’t be able to use their rocket launchers against U.S. armor come morning. And if the infantry didn’t come up, Pound wanted to know why not.

He didn’t mind the chance to get out of the barrel and stretch his legs—and to empty the bottle into which he and the rest of the turret crew had been pissing all day long. He whistled softly when he got a good look at the groove the enemy AP round scored in the hard steel of the turret before bouncing off. “That was closer than I really like to think about,” he said to Scullard.

“Bet your ass—uh, yes, sir,” the gunner answered. He greedily sucked in cigarette smoke. Lighting up inside the turret wasn’t a good idea.

U.S. artillery came down on the Confederates not far ahead. Pound approved of that. Things seemed to be going…well enough, anyhow.

J
orge Rodriguez wasn’t just glad to be alive after everything he’d been through the past few days. He was amazed. The damnyankees were throwing everything they had into their drive on Chattanooga. His own side was throwing in everything it had to stop them. If anyone came out of the collision point still breathing, it meant one side or the other was falling down on the job.

If he saw the U.S. soldier who’d traded him ration cans for cigarettes, he knew he would shoot the son of a bitch in a minute—unless the Yankee shot him first. This wasn’t trading time, not any more.

He’d hoped the coming of night would slow the U.S. armored advance. It did, but U.S. artillery lashed the Confederates in their trenches and holes. Nobody talked about artillery much, but it was a worse killer than gunfire. It reached farther back from the line, and it could kill you even if you stayed in your hole. Staying down kept you out of the way of bullets. If a 105 shell came down where you were…If that happened, then you weren’t, not any more.

During a lull a little before midnight, Gabe Medwick called, “Hey, Jorge! You still alive?”

“I think so.” That was about the most Jorge could say. “How about you?”

“Last time I looked.” His friend’s laugh was shaky. “Way that last barrage came in, I wouldn’t bet on anything.”

“You guys want to shut the fuck up?” Yes, Sergeant Blackledge was still breathing, too.
He would be,
Jorge thought darkly. Blackledge went on, “You goddamn well better believe there’s damnyankees close enough to hear you runnin’ your mouths. Sniper with a scope on his rifle spots you moving around in your hole, you’re a Deeply Regrets wire waiting to happen.”

He wasn’t wrong. Somehow, that made listening to him more annoying, not less. Voice sly, Gabe Medwick said, “What about you, Sarge? You just now talked more’n both of us put together.”

“Yeah, but I ain’t dumb enough to let those shitheads draw a bead on me, and you dingleberries are,” Blackledge said. Jorge didn’t know what a dingleberry was, but he didn’t think it was anything good. He wouldn’t have sassed the sergeant. He’d been brought up to respect authority, not to harass it. His father’s hard hand made sure of that.

His father…He still didn’t know what to make of his mother’s letter. Why would his father kill himself? He’d jumped at the chance to put on the uniform of the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades. From his letters, he’d been proud to guard the camp in Texas. What could have made him change his mind? Nothing but
mallates
in the camp, not from what his father had said. It wasn’t as if they were real people or anything. So why would his old man have flabbled about them?

The artillery barrage picked up again. Crouching in his hole with clods of earth thudding down on him from near misses, wondering if the next one in wouldn’t be a near miss, Jorge felt more comfortable than he did wondering what was going through his father’s mind in the last few seconds of his life. He’d learned to master simple terror. Incomprehension was a different story.

In spite of the shelling, he snatched ten minutes of sleep here, twenty there, so that when the sun came up over Missionary Ridge he felt weary but not quite ready to keel over. If the Yankees felt weary, they didn’t show it. Their barrels growled forward even before sunrise. Jorge looked in vain for Confederate armor to throw them back.

An antibarrel gun set one enemy machine afire. A mine blew a track off another. The stovepipe rockets some soldiers were getting stopped a couple of more. But most of the green-gray barrels kept coming, with foot soldiers loping along between them. If you didn’t have a stovepipe, what could you do? You could fall back, or you could die.

Jorge fell back. He fired at enemy infantrymen. He had no idea if he hit anybody, but he made the damnyankees hit the dirt. Even slowing them down felt like a victory. Once, sprawled behind what was left of a stone fence, he saw Sergeant Blackledge on his belly not far away. Blackledge nodded to him. They were both still fighting, even if they were retreating. Jorge looked around for Gabe and didn’t see him. He hoped his buddy hadn’t stopped something for his country.

On that battlefield, an upright man was a prodigy. An upright man in dress uniform seemed like a hallucination. But the officer who came forward wore a chromed parade helmet with a general’s three stars in a wreath on the front in gold plate—or, for all Jorge knew, in solid gold. This spotless apparition also had a pearl-handled revolver in a holster on his left hip, and another one in his right hand.

However magnificent he looked, he sounded like Hugo Blackledge. “Come on, you stinking, cowardly scuts!” he roared. “Drive these Yankee bastards back! They’re not getting into Chattanooga, and that’s flat. It’s ours, and we’re damned well going to keep it. Come on! Do you want to live forever?”

Yes,
Jorge thought.
Oh, yes.
But the general fired that revolver and ran forward.

“Get moving, you sorry bastards!” Sergeant Blackledge yelled. “Anything happens to General Patton, you fuckers’ll wish the Yankees blew your asses off! Move, God damn you!”

General Patton, fighting at the front line? General Patton, fighting like a private soldier? Like a crazy-brave private soldier? Jorge supposed it was possible. He’d heard weird things about Patton. A general who actually liked fighting for its own sake was a rare breed. Patton filled the bill.

Jorge did go forward to protect the crazy general. He believed Sergeant Blackledge. If anything happened to Patton, the unit that let it happen would catch hell. With the damnyankees throwing hell around in carload lots, that wouldn’t be hard to arrange.