The Grapple (71 page)

They did. Sensibly, they fired at the flail barrel first. If they knocked it out, all the machines behind it would expose themselves to danger among the mines. Their AP round scored a direct hit…on the flail. The gadget fell to ruins, but the barrel kept going. Now it was as vulnerable as any of the others.

“Front!” Pound sang out—he’d seen the muzzle flash.

To his relief, Mel Scullard sang out, “Identified,” which meant he’d seen it, too. To the loader, he added, “HE!”

With a thrum of hydraulics, the turret traversed to the left. As it steadied, Pound ordered the barrel to stop to give the gunner a better shot. If the gun in the woods was drawing a bead on him at the same time…Well, that was the chance you took.

Several cannon spoke at once: the antibarrel gun and at least four barrels’ main armaments. An AP round dug a furrow in the dirt a few feet to the right of Pound’s machine. He was surprised it didn’t touch off a mine or two. The other shells all burst close to the same place in the woods.

“Gun it!” Pound yelled to the driver. If they hadn’t knocked out the gun or wounded the crew, more murderous projectiles would come flying out of there. “Stay behind the flail barrel,” he added a split second later.

“How come?” the driver asked. “He’s not gonna do any more flailing.”

“Well, no,” Pound said, and let it go at that. Some people weren’t very bright, and you couldn’t do anything about it. The lead barrel’s flail might have taken a knockout, but it could still show where at least one mine lay—the hard way.

Pound wished he hadn’t thought that—it might have been a jinx. A few seconds later, the flail barrel did hit a mine. It slewed sideways and stopped, its right track blown off. It didn’t catch fire, but it was hideously vulnerable out there. The commander traversed his turret till it faced the woods, putting as much armor as he could between himself and the enemy. Past that, he had to wait for a recovery vehicle and hope.

Losing the flail barrel left Pound in the lead. He could have done without the honor, but he had it like it or not. He got on the wireless to the other barrels in his platoon: “Stay behind me. If I make it through, you will, too. And even if I don’t, you won’t have far to go, so you may make it anyhow.”

He could see the signs at the far edge of the minefield. Only a couple of hundred yards to go…Maybe a hundred yards…Maybe fifty…It would be a shame to run over one now, with the end of the field so close….

“Made it!” he said, a great whoop of relief, as if all his troubles were over.

No matter how much he savored the moment, he knew better. The Confederates had a strongpoint up ahead on some high ground called Snodgrass Hill. They’d put a lot of guns up there, most of which could fire AP ammo. Hitting a moving barrel with an artillery piece wasn’t easy, but horrible things happened when gunners did. Not even the latest U.S. barrel had a prayer of surviving a tungsten-tipped 105mm round. Pound drove past a couple of burnt-out hulks that showed as much. One of them had the turret blown off and was lying upside down ten feet away from the chassis. That wasn’t the kind of thing a barrel commander wanted to see.

Much more welcome were the fighter-bombers working over Snodgrass Hill. They hit the Confederates again and again, bombing and strafing. Two or three of them went down, but the fire coming from the hill decreased dramatically.

“Couldn’t have done that in the last war,” Pound said.

“No, sir,” Sergeant Scullard agreed. “But their goddamn foot soldiers wouldn’t have been carrying stovepipes then, either.” He sprayed some bushes up ahead with a long burst from the coaxial machine gun. If any Confederates with antibarrel rockets crouched there, they didn’t get the chance to fire them.

Machine guns at the base of Snodgrass Hill held up U.S. infantry. Barrels painted green-gray knocked out the machine-gun nests one by one. Antibarrel cannon farther up the hill knocked out some U.S. barrels. Michael Pound got on the wireless and screamed for artillery support. Being only a lowly platoon commander, he didn’t have a set that let him talk directly with the gun bunnies. He yelled loud enough to make the soldier he did talk to say, “Keep your hair on, pal. I’ll get the word through, honest to Pete.”

“You’d better,” Pound said. “Otherwise, if they find you mysteriously strangled with telephone wire, they’ll know just who to suspect.” On that encouraging note, he switched off.

He couldn’t have been the only barrelman yelling for HE. The barrage didn’t land on Snodgrass Hill fast enough to suit him, but it would have had to go in yesterday to do that. Land it did. The lower slopes of the hill went up in smoke and shrapnel and poison gas. Watching all that come down on the Confederates, anybody would have thought nothing could stay alive under it.

Pound knew better. Featherston’s fuckers had trenches, and they had gas masks, and they had balls. As soon as things eased off even a little bit, they’d pop up and start serving all the guns that weren’t knocked off their wheels. He didn’t want that to happen—it was the last thing he did want.

He had no idea if he was the highest-ranking barrel officer down near the bottom of Snodgrass Hill. He didn’t care, either. He sent his platoon an order barrels didn’t hear every day: “Charge!” A moment later, he added, “And bring everybody else with you if you can. Let’s get them before they get us!”

He stood up in the cupola to wave all the U.S. barrels forward. The commanders in his other machines were doing the same thing. A short round from his own side burst much too close to his barrel. Shell fragments whined past his head. He turned the wave into an obscene gesture aimed at the artillery he’d wanted so badly only a few minutes before. You were just as dead if your buddies got you as you were if the bad guys put one between your eyes.

With a few more barrels of their own, the Confederates probably could have broken up the charge before it got rolling. But they didn’t have enough, and one of the U.S. barrels killed the first C.S. machine that showed itself. The infantrymen in butternut with stovepipes mostly stayed down in their holes; they wanted to live just like anybody else. And the charge pounded on.

Before long, Pound ducked down and closed the cupola hatch. By then, rounds didn’t have to fall short to be dangerous. He was brave enough, but not suicidal. He thought of himself as a coldly practical man. Whether that kind of man would have led a charge up the heavily defended hill was a question he never worried about.

Both his barrel’s bow machine gun and the one beside the main armament chattered. Brass casings clanked down onto the floor of the fighting compartment. “This is kind of fun, you know?—like a pinball arcade,” Sergeant Scullard said. “They pop up here, you shoot ’em, then they come up somewhere else, so you gotta knock those guys down, too.”

“I can tell you one difference,” Pound said dryly.

“Yeah? What’s that, sir?” Scullard didn’t even need to look at what he was doing to feed a new belt of cartridges into the coaxial machine gun.

“In the arcade, they don’t shoot back,” Pound answered. Machine-gun bullets and shell fragments clattered off the barrel’s thick steel skin.

“God knows we’ve been through worse.”

“You aren’t wrong,” Pound agreed. They were almost to the top of Snodgrass Hill now, and resistance was thinning out. Too much had landed on the Confederates too fast. They were groggy, like a boxer who’d taken too many rights. In the ring, the ref would have stopped the fight before the loser got badly hurt. Hurting the other side was the point of the exercise here.

Pound’s barrel rolled over the tube of an overturned 105. Even if the Confederates drove the USA off this hill, they’d never use that gun again—or if they tried, the first round would blow up inside it.
Wouldn’t that be a shame?
Pound thought.

He looked around for more enemy soldiers to shoot or guns to wreck, and he didn’t see any. He wasn’t quite at the crest of the hill—why give somebody on the far side a clean shot?

More airplanes appeared. He needed a moment to realize they were Confederates: Asskickers with rockets slung under their wings. When the dive bombers salvoed them, they looked like lances of fire slashing across the sky. They tore into the U.S. forces on Snodgrass Hill like lances of fire, too. And Pound couldn’t do a thing about it. He’d seen a few barrels with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted in front of the commander’s cupola to serve as an antiaircraft weapon. He didn’t have one, but he was thinking he’d get one as soon as he could.

The Asskickers sped off to the south. They couldn’t linger, or U.S. fighters would hack them down. They’d done damage, no doubt about it. But they hadn’t driven U.S. forces off of Snodgrass Hill. They didn’t have a chance of doing that, not by themselves, and no Confederate ground counterattack materialized. The strongpoint seemed to be the center of the C.S. position here, and it had just fallen.

C
larence Potter knew the wintry pleasure of being right. The Confederates had hit the United States as hard as they could, and the USA didn’t quite fall over. Now the United Sates were hitting back, and they had the CSA on the ropes. The Confederates’ problem was that they’d kept trying to land haymakers when they should have been doing their damnedest not to get hit. He thought of everything his country had squandered on aggressive counterattacks that it should have kept under cover or in reserve. If that wasn’t enough to drive a man to drink, he didn’t know what would be.

If Chattanooga had held, they still might have had a chance. Chattanooga was the cork in the bottle. U.S. paratroopers had yanked the cork. Now the damnyankees could spill out into the heart of the Confederacy, into country that hadn’t seen Yankee invaders even in the War of Secession.

And the enemy knew it, too. It didn’t do any more to expect U.S. generals to stay half a step behind their opposite numbers in butternut. The United States banged through the improvised C.S. lines in northwestern Georgia…oh, not with the greatest of ease, but not with the kind of effort that ruined them, either. They could bang some more whenever and wherever they chose to.

Meanwhile, General Patton was trying to piece together another line. This one, of necessity, was longer than the one centered on Snodgrass Hill. It was also weaker. Fewer men and barrels were doing their damnedest to cover more ground. Their damnedest, Potter feared, wouldn’t be good enough.

His own brigade was stationed near Calhoun, Georgia, defending the line of the Oostanaula and Coosawattee Rivers. He wished the rivers were as wide as their names were long. But even if they were, how much difference would it make? The Yankees had crossed the Ohio and the Cumberland. They would be able to deal with obstacles like these.

Right now, they weren’t trying very hard. Their artillery and his fired at each other across the rivers. Not a half hour went by when his brigade didn’t take at least one casualty. Replacements trickled in more slowly. He would have bet the commander of the U.S. outfit to the north didn’t have that worry.

His stomach started to knot up when General Patton paid him a call. He feared he knew what Patton would want, and he was right. “How soon do you think your brigade can be ready to strike a blow for—”

“Freedom?” Potter interrupted, turning the Party slogan into a jeer.

Patton turned red. “You still don’t have the proper attitude, Potter.”

“That’s a matter of opinion, sir,” Potter replied. “I don’t think we can win the war any more, not on the battlefield.” He thought about U-235 and Professor FitzBelmont. If the Confederacy still had hope, it lay there. Did Patton know about uranium bombs? Potter hoped not. He went on, “Seems to me what we ought to do now is try not to lose it on the battlefield.”

“You’re a defeatist. I’ll report you to the President,” Patton snarled.

Such a threat would have chilled the blood of ninety-nine percent of the officers in the Confederate Army. Potter yawned in Patton’s face. “Go ahead. He knows how I feel.”

Patton stared at him. “Then why doesn’t he throw you in irons, the way you deserve?”

“Because he knows I think with my head, not with my heart or my balls,” Potter answered. “It’s really a useful technique. You ought to try it one of these days…sir.”

“You can go too far, General,” Patton warned. “Watch yourself.”

“Sir, you can do whatever you please to me, and I really don’t care. I’m Clarence Potter, and I’m here to tell you the truth.” Potter appropriated President Featherston’s phrase with malicious glee. Patton gaped at him. Smiling a chilly smile, Potter went on, “We can’t afford the head-knocking style you’ve been using. What will it take to make you see that? The damnyankees in Atlanta? In Savannah, on the ocean? In Mobile, on the Gulf of Mexico? From where I sit, you’re greasing the skids to get them there.”

“How dare you say such a thing to me?” Patton thundered. “How
dare
you? I’ll have you court-martialed and drummed out of the Army, so help me God I will!”

“Good luck,” Potter said. “I’ve got a Stonewall in my pocket that says you can’t do it.” He took out the goldpiece and tossed it up and down. “Worse thing that’ll happen is that the President’ll overrule the court and order me back to Richmond. My bet is, he’ll overrule the court and keep me right here.”

His calm voice must have held conviction. Patton stood there breathing hard, his cheeks a mottled and furious red. Then, suddenly, he lashed out and slapped Potter in the face. While Potter was grabbing—successfully—for his glasses, Patton ground out, “All right, you son of a bitch! Will you meet me on the field of honor tomorrow morning?
Have
you honor? One of us will go down in history as a casualty of war, and the other will be able to continue the campaign as he thinks best.”

He was dead serious. He was also deadly serious, his hands hovering near the fancy pistols he wore on each hip. He looked ready—more than ready—to plug Potter on the spot. Replacing his spectacles on his nose, Potter said, “As challenged party, I believe I have the choice of weapons, sir?”

Patton actually bowed. Did he imagine himself a knight in shining armor? Hadn’t he got that idiocy knocked out of him during the Great War? Evidently not, for he was courtesy itself as he replied, “That is correct, sir. Pistols, swords, rifles at long range if you prefer a contest of skill…I am entirely at your disposal in that regard.”