The Grapple (6 page)

Off to the north, artillery boomed. U.S. airplanes buzzed overhead, some spotting for the guns, others dropping bombs on Mormon positions. The Confederates would have hacked the lumbering, obsolescent bombers out of the sky with ease. Against enemies who didn’t have fighters and didn’t have much in the way of antiaircraft guns, they were good enough.

“Blow all the bastards to hell and gone.” Armstrong picked up a chip of granite that might have come from the Temple. “Then we can get on with the real war.” He flung the stone chip away. It bounced off a bigger rock and disappeared in the rubble.

Yossel’s expression changed. He bent and picked up a bit of stone, too. Tossing it up and down, he murmured, “I wonder what Jerusalem is like these days.”

“Huh?” Armstrong knew what Jerusalem was like: a sleepy Ottoman town full of Arabs and Jews where nothing much had happened for centuries.

But his buddy said, “We had our Temple destroyed twice, too.”

He didn’t usually make a big deal out of being a Jew, any more than he made a big deal out of being a Congresswoman’s nephew—and not just any Congresswoman, but one who’d also been First Lady. “You guys are real Americans,” Armstrong said. “Hell, you’re a gentile here—just ask a Mormon.”

“I know. I think it’s a scream,” Yossel Reisen said. “Yeah, we’re real Americans—or we try to be, anyhow. But we sure didn’t make real Romans a couple of thousand years ago. That’s why the Second Temple got it.”

“I guess.” Except for what little Armstrong remembered from a high-school history class and from
Julius Caesar
in English Lit, ancient Rome was a closed book to him.

“We think the Mormons are nuts, and we treat ’em that way, and what happens?” Yossel said. “Bang! They rise up. We treat Jews all right, and they’re happy and quiet. The Romans thought my ancestors were nuts, and they treated ’em that way, and what happened? Bang! The Jews rose up.”

“Bunch of bullshit, if you want to know what I think,” Armstrong said. “We were nice to the Mormons right before the war, and what did we get for it? They kicked us anyway, soon as we got busy with Featherston’s fuckers.” He might not know ancient history, but he remembered the end of the occupation of Utah. Fat lot of good ending it did anybody.

“Yeah, there is that,” Yossel allowed. “Maybe you just can’t make some people happy.”

“Better believe you can’t,” Armstrong said. “These bastards have spent the last God knows how long proving it, too.” He was some small part of what the U.S. government had done to Utah, but that never entered his mind. Neither side, by then, worried much about who’d started what and why. They both knew they had a long history of hating, mistrusting, and striking at each other. Past that, they didn’t much care.

Yossel Reisen pointed to another corporal trudging through the wreckage of Temple Square. He nudged Armstrong. “You recognize that guy?”

Armstrong eyed the two-striper. He looked like anybody else: not too young, not too old, not too big, not too small. But he didn’t look like anybody Armstrong knew, or even knew of. Maybe that didn’t mean anything. Now that Temple Square had finally fallen, it drew its share of gawkers.

But maybe it did mean something. The USA had trouble fighting the Mormons just because they looked so ordinary. They had no trouble getting U.S. uniforms, either. Down in the CSA, the Freedom Party knew who was a Negro and who wasn’t. Here…Armstrong unslung his Springfield. “Let’s go check him out.”

The corporal wasn’t doing anything to draw notice; he ambled around with his hands in his pockets. Once he bent down and picked up a bit of rock and stowed it away. To Mormons, pieces of the Temple were sacred relics. But to U.S. soldiers who’d gone through hell to get here, they made good souvenirs. Carrying one didn’t say a thing about what you were.

“Hey!” Armstrong said, quietly slipping off the Springfield’s safety.

“You want something, Sarge?” The corporal sounded like anybody else, too. Mormons did.

“Yeah. Let’s see your papers.”

“Sure.” The noncom started to take something out of his pocket.

“Hold it right there!” Yossel Reisen snapped. Armstrong didn’t like the way the stranger’s hand bunched, either. He sure looked as if he was grabbing something bigger than a set of identity documents. “Take both hands out, nice and slow,” Yossel told him. “If they aren’t empty when you do, you’re dead. Got it?”

“Who are you clowns?” the corporal demanded. “You Mormons trying to hijack me? You won’t get away with it!”

If he was trying to put the shoe on the other foot, he had balls. Armstrong gestured with his Springfield. “Do like my buddy says.” His own balls tried to crawl up into his belly. If this guy was a Mormon and what he had in there was a detonator…But his hands came out empty.

Yossel reached into that pocket and pulled out a pistol: not an Army .45, but a smaller revolver, a civilian piece. Armstrong’s suspicions flared. Then Yossel found the other corporal’s papers. He looked from the photo to the man and back again. He shook his head.

“Let’s see,” Armstrong said. His pal showed him the picture. It was of a guy noticeably darker and noticeably skinnier than the fellow in the uniform. Armstrong gestured with the rifle again. “Come on. Get moving. You got a bunch of questions to answer.”

“I haven’t done anything!” the corporal said. One thing he hadn’t done was swear, not even once. Most U.S. soldiers would have. Mormons watched their mouths better.

“Well, you’ll get the chance to prove it,” Armstrong said. “Yossel, grab his rifle.”

Carefully, Yossel Reisen unslung the other corporal’s Springfield. “Move,” he told the man.

Still squawking—but still not cursing—the soldier who might not be a soldier moved. They led him back over the ground for which the Mormons had fought so long and so hard, the ground that was cratered and crumpled and crushed, the ground over which the stench of death still hung. That would only get worse when the weather warmed up. Armstrong wondered if it would ever leave the land, or if the foul, clinging odor would linger forever, an unseen but unmistakable monument to what Salt Lake City had gone through.

Sentries outside of regimental headquarters popped up out of the foxholes where they spent most of their time—not every sniper had been hunted down and killed. “What the fuck’s going on here?” one of them demanded. He talked the way most U.S. soldiers did.

“We caught this guy up by the Temple,” Armstrong answered. “Yossel here spotted him.” It didn’t occur to him till later that he might have taken the credit himself. He didn’t want to screw his buddy. “We figure maybe he’s a Mormon. His papers don’t match his face, and he was carrying this little chickenshit pistol—show ’em, Yossel.” Reisen displayed the revolver.

The sentry eyed the corporal who didn’t seem to be a corporal. “Waddayou got to say for yourself, Mac?” he asked, his voice colder than the weather.

“They’re full of baloney,” the—maybe—two-striper said. Not
shit
—
baloney.
He added, “I don’t like a .45—kicks too hard.”

“Huh,” the sentry said, no doubt noticing, as Armstrong did, that that—maybe—Mormon didn’t say anything about his papers. The sentry nodded to Armstrong and Yossel. “Bring him on in. They’ll find out what’s going on with him. And if it is what you think it is…” He didn’t go on, or need to. If it was what they thought it was, the fellow they’d captured was a dead man. He wouldn’t die quickly or cleanly, either.
Oh, what a shame,
Armstrong thought, and led him on.

C
incinnatus Driver hadn’t been under fire for more than twenty-five years. He’d forgotten how much fun it wasn’t. If he hadn’t forgotten, he never would have volunteered to drive a truck in a combat zone again. He would have stayed back in Des Moines and found work in a war plant or tried to bring his dead moving and hauling business back to life.

But he’d been flat on his back in Covington, Kentucky, when the state passed from the USA back to the CSA. He supposed he was lucky: the car that hit him didn’t kill him. It didn’t seem like luck while he was recovering from a broken leg and a fractured skull and a smashed shoulder. Even now, almost two and a half years later, he walked with a limp and a cane and sometimes got headaches that laughed at aspirin.

He was finally exchanged for a Confederate the USA was holding—U.S. citizenship meant something, even for a Negro. It didn’t mean everything; Negroes in the United States couldn’t join the Army, couldn’t pick up rifles and go after the enemies who were tormenting their brethren south of the Mason-Dixon Line. With his age and his injuries, Cincinnatus wouldn’t have been able to join the Army if he were white.

This was the next best thing. He’d driven trucks for more than thirty years. He’d driven for the USA during the Great War. Here he was, doing it again, part of a long column of green-gray machines hauling ammunition and rations to the U.S. troops trying to drive the Confederates out of western Ohio.

The state of the art had improved over the past quarter-century. The Chevy truck he drove now had a much more powerful, much more reliable engine than the White he’d used then. It had a fully enclosed cabin, too, and a heater. It boasted a self-starter; he didn’t have to crank it to life. Its headlights were electric, not acetylene lamps. With all-wheel drive, it could get through terrain that would have shaken the White to pieces.

But the driving wasn’t much different. Neither was the fear when shells started bursting in the field to either side of the road. Cincinnatus’ mouth went dry. His sphincters tightened. He wanted to stop and turn around and get the hell out of there.

A .45 lay on the seat beside him. He couldn’t afford to let the Confederates capture him. It wasn’t just that he was colored, though no black man in the USA wanted to think about falling into Confederate hands. But he was also on the CSA’s list of dangerous characters. When they removed him from Covington, they made it very plain they didn’t want to have anything to do with him ever again. They might regret it if they did, but he would never get over it.

Next to those bursting shells, the .45 seemed like small potatoes. Next to the dreadful immensity of the war, Cincinnatus himself seemed like small potatoes: just one man, and an ordinary man at that. But all you could do was all you could do. Everybody was just one person, doing what he or she could do. Added together, all those people made up the USA and the CSA—made up the war. If, added together, all the people of the USA could do more…

“They better,” Cincinnatus said, there alone in the cab of the Chevrolet truck. Imagining a North America dominated by the Confederacy and the Freedom Party…He didn’t want to do it. He’d seen what Covington was like after the Stars and Bars replaced the Stars and Stripes. Thinking of that happening everywhere made him a little sick, or more than a little.

One of the incoming shells hit a truck a couple of hundred yards ahead of him. The truck, loaded with the same sort of cargo as his, went up in a fireball. Luckily, it careened off the road instead of blocking it. All the same, Cincinnatus hit the brakes. He didn’t want to get any closer than he had to till that ammo finished cooking off.

Could have been me,
he thought, and shuddered. It would have been him if one of the Confederate artillery men had paused to scratch an itch or stick a fresh chaw in his mouth before pulling the lanyard. About fifteen seconds later, his truck would have been where that shell landed.

He sped up when he went past the shattered deuce-and-a-half. Not a chance in hell the driver got out. He hoped the man died fast, anyhow. Given the size of that explosion, the odds seemed good.

Another shell left a crater in the road, forcing Cincinnatus over onto the soft shoulder to get around it. With power to all six wheels, he managed to get by without bogging down. He hoped the trucks that came after his would be able to do the same. Each one chewed up the ground more and more.

The truck column rolled into Findlay about five minutes later. Here and there around the town, tall columns of black, greasy smoke rose into the air: oil wells torched by the retreating Confederates. A team of U.S. engineers was trying to put one out as Cincinnatus came into town. He wondered if retreating U.S. soldiers had fired the wells a year and a half earlier, leaving the Confederates to get them working again. He wouldn’t have been surprised.

He didn’t get long to worry about it. “Come on! Come on! Over here!” a sergeant bellowed, waving like a man possessed. Cincinnatus did his best to follow the noncom’s instructions. At last, the sergeant threw up both hands, as if he’d just scored a touchdown. He stopped.

A swarm of soldiers descended on the truck, transferring the munitions and rations to several smaller trucks for the trip to the front. It wasn’t far away; Findlay itself had fallen only a few days before. Shells still came down on the town, as they’d landed on the road to the northwest. The faster the explosives left Cincinnatus’ truck, the happier he would be.

Of course, as soon as the deuce-and-a-half was empty, he had to drive back to the big depot in Defiance to load up again for another trip to Findlay. The CSA had heavily bombed Defiance earlier in the war. Not many enemy airplanes came over these days. U.S. fighters and bombers took off from airstrips on the outskirts of town. Antiaircraft guns by the score poked their long snouts up toward the sky. Camouflage netting masked some of them. Others stood out in the open, as if warning the Confederates they were there.