The Grapple (79 page)

No, he didn’t get much sleep himself. Having nerves was silly—he couldn’t do anything about whatever would happen soon—but he did all the same. Because he was awake at least as much as he was asleep through the night, he heard barrels rattling up to the start line under cover of darkness. Lieutenant Bassler had got that right, anyhow.

The bombardment started at five on the dot. Star shells lit up the hill bright as day. High-altitude bombers droned overhead, dropped loads of death, and kept on going. They’d blast Atlanta or some other C.S. town, then fly north and land, after dawn let them see what they were doing.

Confederate artillery woke up in a hurry. Quite a few shells fell on the U.S. front line, but none dangerously close to Armstrong’s squad. The men huddled in their foxholes and waited for the brass whistles and the shouts that would send them forward.

It was getting light when U.S. fighter-bombers zoomed in to put the finishing touches on the preliminaries. Armstrong was glad to see them. They could hit targets the high-altitude airplanes were too likely to miss.

“Boy!” Whitey yelled. “They’re beating the holy bejesus out of that place, aren’t they?”

“Here’s hoping,” Armstrong said.

Several soldiers nodded at that. They were like the guys he’d fought beside in Utah: they’d been through the mill, they knew it was no damn good and wouldn’t get any better, and they kept going anyway. He didn’t have anybody just out of the repple-depple in his squad, though the company carried several replacements. He took another look at that hill. By the time they got to the top of it, he feared the squad would need some new men. He hoped to hell it wouldn’t need a new sergeant.

Engines roaring, U.S. barrels clattered forward. Lieutenant Bassler’s whistle shrilled. “Let’s go!” the company commander shouted. “Keep your heads down, don’t bunch up, and I’ll see you when we get there!”

He made a good leader for a front-line outfit. He always sounded confident, and he didn’t send his men anywhere he wouldn’t go himself. Armstrong feared they were going into a meat grinder now. Sometimes that came with the job. He didn’t like it, but he couldn’t help it.

Mortar bombs started falling as soon as the U.S. barrels and soldiers began to advance. Screams followed some of the bursts. Medics scooped up the wounded and carried them back to the rear. Other bursts sounded curiously subdued. They didn’t throw many fragments. Armstrong knew what that meant. Swearing, he shouted, “They’re heaving gas at us!” and put on his mask. One more annoyance, one more inconvenience, in a war that seemed full of nothing else but.

A bullet cracked past him, about belly-button high. He was flat on his belly in the muddy grass before he knew how he’d got there—reflexes really did take over in time of danger. A moment later, he got up and started running again, dodging like a star halfback in a professional league.

Another bullet missed him by not nearly enough. He hit the dirt again. This time, he spotted the muzzle flash. “There!” he yelled, pointing toward a foxhole just in front of the edge of the trees.

With several U.S. soldiers shooting in his direction, the Confederate took his life in his hands whenever he popped up to fire. The men in green-gray worked their way closer to the foxhole. One of them shouted for him to give up. He answered with a burst from his automatic rifle. A shriek said he wounded someone. But two grenades flew into the hole. After that, he didn’t fire any more.

Other Confederates farther back did. Armstrong was glad when he got in among the trees himself. He had plenty of cover then, from upright trunks and from those the U.S. bombardment had knocked over. Not least because of all the havoc the shells and bombs had wreaked, the woods smelled powerfully of pine. The fresh, clean, spicy scent made an odd backdrop for the brutal firefight that went on under the trees.

Armstrong ran past a young Confederate he thought was surely dead—the man had stopped a couple of fragments with his belly and another with his chest. But the soldier in butternut groaned and moved, and almost scared Armstrong out of a year’s growth.

Crouching beside him, Armstrong asked, “How bad is it?”

“I’m done, Yankee,” the enemy soldier answered, gasping against the pain. Blood ran from his mouth and nose.

“You want morphine?” Armstrong said. “I’ll give you some.”

“Already got it.” The kid had to be younger than Armstrong himself, and Armstrong was only twenty. After another gasp, the Confederate said, “Don’t help much.” Armstrong believed him; nothing would help much, not with those wounds.

That led to another question: “Shall I finish you or yell for the medics?”

“I’m done. Told you that.” The soldier took as deep a breath as he could. “Get it over with. No blame on you. I’ll thank you for it.”

“All right, then.” One quick round did the trick. Armstrong hoped somebody on either side would do the job for him if he ever needed it as bad as this kid did. He hurried on, leaving the corpse where it lay.

The Confederates had several machine-gun nests with interlocking fields of fire on the forward slope. You couldn’t approach one without exposing yourself to fire from another. The shelling and bombing hadn’t hurt them; they were made of cement, not sandbags. A soldier with a flamethrower tried to deal with one of them, but a bullet to the fuel tank drenched him in the fire he hoped to shoot. That was a bad way to go; the stench of burnt meat made Armstrong’s stomach heave.

Then two barrels ground close enough to shell a Confederate bunker. After three or four hits, the guns inside stopped shooting back. “Careful!” Armstrong yelled when U.S. soldiers started moving forward again. “They might be playing possum.” They weren’t, but Lieutenant Bassler thumped him on the back for worrying about it.

The barrels methodically smashed three more machine-gun nests. Then one of them hit a mine and threw a track, while a Confederate with a stovepipe rocket set the other one on fire. One last concrete emplacement went on hurling death at the men in green-gray. Two U.S. soldiers with captured Confederate automatic rifles sprayed bullets back. The machine guns focused on them, which was what the men with the automatic rifles had in mind. While they kept the Confederates inside the emplacement busy, another soldier with a flamethrower crept toward it.

A jet of golden fire spat from the nozzle of his infernal device. It shot through the narrow concrete slit that let the machine guns traverse. Armstrong heard screams from inside. They didn’t last long. He got another whiff of that charred-pork smell as he loped past the machine-gun nest. It was dead now, and so were the men inside it.

Up till then, the Confederates resisted fiercely. After the last bunker fell, the spirit seemed to go out of the soldiers in butternut. Instead of dying in place or falling back to fight again from another position, more and more of them tried to surrender. Some succeeded, and went to the rear with hands high and with broad grins of relief on their faces. Others ran into U.S. soldiers in a vengeful mood or just without the time or manpower to bother with prisoners.

Armstrong trotted past a Confederate soldier out in the open who looked to have got shot while trying to give up. That was too bad. If he ever found himself in a mess like this, he hoped the men on the other side would let him yield. But not a damn thing in war came with a money-back guarantee.

He made it to the top of the hill before he quite realized he was there. A couple of mortar teams were launching bombs at Hollysprings to announce that the hill had changed hands. A lieutenant from another company in the regiment was yelling for men to go on and take the town. After the fight on the hill, nobody looked thrilled about rushing into another big one right away.

“You made it, Sarge.” There was Squidface, smoking a Duke some Confederate wouldn’t need any more. He held out the pack to Armstrong without being asked.

“Thanks.” Armstrong took one and leaned close to get it started. He sucked in smoke, then blew it out. It eased the worst of his nerves, anyhow. “Yeah, I’m still here. Looked like they started to lose it a little bit once we took out their machine guns.”

“Uh-huh. I thought so, too,” Squidface said. “Don’t hardly see that with these butternut bastards. Say what you want about ’em, they fight hard.”

“Maybe they see the writing on the wall,” Armstrong said. “Wouldn’t that be something?” He tried to imagine Jake Featherston giving up. The picture didn’t want to form. Neither did one of the United States’ accepting anything less than unconditional surrender and full occupation of the Confederacy.

Artillery shells screamed in from the south. Armstrong hit the dirt and started digging. Sure as hell, the Confederates hadn’t quit yet.

C
assius relaxed in a hut that had once belonged to a sharecropper. The roof leaked. The mattress was ancient and musty. He didn’t much care. Right this minute, nobody seemed to be hunting Gracchus’ guerrilla band. With the damnyankees pounding toward Atlanta, central Georgia had more urgent things to worry about than a few blacks with stolen guns.

Not being dogged wherever he went felt wonderful to Cassius. Gracchus, by contrast, was insulted. “They reckons we don’t count fo’ nothin’,” the guerrilla leader grumbled. “Gots to show ’em we does.”

“Ought to lay up for a while first.” That wasn’t Cassius; it was a scarred veteran named Pyrrhus. “Rest and relax while we can.”

Gracchus shook his head. “They shippin’ all kinds o’ shit up toward the no’th. We hit some o’ dat, make it harder fo’ Featherston to fight the Yankees.”

“We get hit, make it harder for us to fight anybody,” Pyrrhus said.

“You don’t got the nerve, you kin stay where you’s at,” Gracchus told him.

The older Negro refused to rise to the bait. “Got me plenty o’ nerve, an’ everybody knows it. Got me some sense, too, an’ you sure ain’t showin’ none.”

“Only way we live through this is if the Yankees come,” Cassius said. “Yankees stay away, sooner or later the militia an’ the Mexicans hunt us down an’ kill us. If we can help the USA, we oughta do it.”

“Hear dat?” Gracchus said. “This is one smart nigger. You don’t want to listen to me, listen to him.”

“You reckon he smart on account of he say the same thing you do. That ain’t reason enough,” Pyrrhus answered. “United States’re comin’ whether we do anything or not. You reckon they get down into Georgia on account o’ what niggers done? Wish it was so, but it ain’t likely.”

Gracchus scowled at him. So did Cassius. It wasn’t likely at all. Another Negro said, “Sure enough wouldn’t mind a little rest-up, anyways.”

At that, Gracchus looked almost ready to explode. Cassius caught the guerrilla leader’s eye and shook his head, ever so slightly. If Gracchus blew up now, he could split the band. Where would they come by new recruits to make either half big enough to be dangerous if that happened? Negroes were thin on the ground in rural Georgia these days.

To Cassius’ relief, Gracchus got the message, or enough of it to keep from losing his temper. He went on glowering at the men who’d thwarted him, but at least he had the sense to see he
was
thwarted for the time being. “We lay up,” he said reluctantly. “We lay up fo’ now, anyways. But if we sees a chance, we takes it.”

“Fair enough,” Pyrrhus said. Some of the other black guerrillas nodded, all seeming relieved the quarrel wouldn’t explode in their faces.

They didn’t live off the fat of the land. The land had little fat to live off. White farmers had armed guards. Some had squads of Mexican soldiers garrisoned on their land. The henhouses and barns might have been bank vaults. Before too long, the guerrillas would have to raid to eat.

Birdlime and nets brought in songbirds. Cassius had never imagined eating robins and doves, but they weren’t bad at all. “My granddaddy, he used to talk about all the passenger pigeons when he was a pickaninny,” Gracchus said. “Way he told it, you could eat them birds fo’ weeks at a time.”

“Where they at now?” Pyrrhus asked. “Sure don’t see ’em around none.”

“Po’ birds got their fuckin’ population reduced,” Gracchus answered. “Might as well be niggers.”

Two nights later, a Negro sneaked out of Madison, Georgia, the town closest to the tumbledown sharecropping village, with word that a truck convoy had stopped there for the night and would go on to the northwest in the morning. “You ain’t goin’ back,” Gracchus said. “You comin’ wid us. You lyin’, you dyin’.”

“Give me a gun. I want a shot at the ofays my ownself,” the Negro replied.

“I gives you a gun,” Gracchus said. “I gives you one after we gits away. You kin shoot the ofays then.”

“You don’t trust me none,” said the town Negro, whose name was Jeroboam.

“Bet your ass I don’t,” Gracchus said. “I don’t know you from a cowflop. Ain’t got no reason to trust you—yet. But you give me one, we git on fine.”

Jeroboam knew the road that led to the front. Like a lot of rural roads, it was badly potholed; money’d gone into guns and barrels and murder camps and main highways, not the roads that meandered between them. One of those potholes let the guerrillas plant explosives without digging under the roadbed from the side, which would have taken longer and been much too conspicuous once done.

Gracchus placed his men in the high grass and bushes to either side of the road southeast of the bomb. The CSA had too much to do to bother clearing weeds, either. With any luck at all, the white Confederates would pay for their neglect.

Jeroboam lay in the bushes only a couple of strides from Gracchus. He was bound and gagged; nothing he did or said would warn the men in the approaching truck convoy—if there was an approaching truck convoy. He hadn’t squawked when Gracchus told him what they were going to do. Cassius hoped that argued he was truthful. If it didn’t, it argued that he was a good actor.

With autumn here, fewer bugs bothered Cassius than would have a few months earlier. He scratched anyway. He knew he was lousy. The only thing he had to kill lice was kerosene, a cure almost worse than the problem. He’d always been clean; his mother was neat, his father downright fastidious. Now they were almost surely dead, and he had nasty little bugs crawling over his scalp.