The Grapple (80 page)

“Heads up!” somebody called. Cassius flattened himself into the grass. Why did people say that when they meant
duck down
? He supposed it came from football or some other game.

Then, catching the low rumble of approaching trucks, he stopped worrying about things that didn’t matter. How much protection did they have with them? If four or five armored cars and half-tracks were in the convoy, the plan was to blow up the lead vehicle and then just slip away. Getting into an expensive skirmish was the last thing Gracchus wanted.

Closer…Closer…The machine in front was a truck. It was, in fact, a captured U.S. truck—blockier than C.S. models—with a coat of butternut paint slapped on over the original green-gray.

Gracchus had the plunger whose wires led to the explosives in the roadway. He jerked down on it at just the right moment. The truck went up in a fireball that engulfed the one behind it, which was following too close. The other trucks in the convoy slammed on the brakes. As soon as they did, Cassius and the rest of the black guerrillas started shooting.

He’d never fired a rifle till he joined Gracchus’ band. He sure knew what to do with one now. He fired again and again, working the bolt on the Tredegar and slapping in a fresh clip when the one he was using ran dry. The rifle butt slammed against his shoulder again and again. He’d be sore tomorrow…assuming he was still alive.

The drivers had rifles and submachine guns of their own, and started shooting back. And then Cassius heard an unmistakable machine gun banging away, and ice walked through him. That sure sounded as if it came from a weapon most likely to be mounted on an armored vehicle. He hoped the guerrillas had some Featherston Fizzes, but getting close enough to throw one could prove more dangerous to the man with it than to his intended target.

And then he heard something else: a deep rumble from the northwest, rising swiftly to multiple screams in the air. Yankee fighter-bombers had spotted the convoy with the burning trucks corking its way forward. The airplanes gleefully swooped down for the kill.

Cassius had imagined hell on earth, with the Confederate military playing a star role in the roaster. Now he saw it: truck after truck smashed by bombs or by machine-gun and cannon fire. Gouts of flame erupted from the road. The trucks couldn’t run, couldn’t hide, couldn’t even shoot back. The men inside them died where they sat—or, if they tried to run for cover, the black guerrillas shot them.

Only one thing was wrong with the fire and brimstone visited upon the convoy—some of it slopped over onto Gracchus’ band. Not all the bombs hit right on the road. Neither did all the shells and bullets. Chances were the U.S. pilots didn’t even know the Negroes were there. If they knew, they didn’t give a damn. Their mission was to smash up enemy transport. They did that up brown. Everything else was just a detail.

To them, it was a detail. It was liable to get Cassius killed. He hugged the ground while bullets smashed down much too close and blast tried to pick him up and throw him away. Somebody close by screamed, “No! No! No!” After a little while, he realized he was making those noises.

The U.S. warplanes couldn’t have lingered more than ten minutes. They came, they saw, they destroyed. And the truck convoy was much more thoroughly wrecked than either Gracchus or Jeroboam could have imagined.

“Shitfire!” Gracchus cried in a mix of awe and outrage. “Ain’t even nothin’ left fo’ us to steal!”

“Hell you say,” Pyrrhus answered, and paused to shoot a dazed and bloodied Confederate truck driver who staggered toward him. As the white man fell, the guerrilla went on, “Almost got myself squashed by a big old crate of rations—landed in these bushes here.”

“Well, that’s somethin’.” Gracchus sounded as if he didn’t know how much it was. Cassius didn’t, either. You could eat Confederate rations and you wouldn’t be hungry afterwards. Past that, he had nothing good to say for them. He’d heard even Confederate soldiers traded cigarettes or coffee with the enemy to get food better than their own.

“Mother!” a dreadfully wounded Confederate screamed.
“Motherrr!”
Cassius drew a bead on him and shot him through the head.

“Why you go an’ do dat?” a Negro asked. “Shoulda let the damn ofay suffer.”

“I’d shoot a dog,” Cassius said.

“Yeah, but a dog, he wouldn’t shoot you,” the other rebel said.

After a moment, Cassius decided he had a point. Instead of admitting it, he changed the subject, calling out to Gracchus, “You gonna let that Jeroboam loose?”

“Reckon I better,” the guerrilla leader said. “He wasn’t lyin’, that’s fo’ damn sure. An’ we ought to write a nice thank-you to them Yankees. They done a lot of work fo’ us.” He laughed. “Reckon they done mo’ work than we coulda did our ownselves.”

He wasn’t wrong. “Wonder how many of us those U.S. pilots hit,” Cassius said, and laughed at himself. He was sure he was the only rebel in the band—maybe in the state—who would have said
those pilots.
To the other Negroes, it would have been
them pilots.
Like it or not, Cassius was his father’s son.

The guerrillas had lost one man dead and two more wounded, neither seriously. “Watch what happen to them trucks, an’ do Jesus! I don’t hardly mind gettin’ shot,” one of the injured men said. The dead guerrilla had stopped a 20mm cannon shell with his chest. Chances were he wouldn’t have agreed.

Carrying the rations and other small bits of loot, the black rebels made their getaway. Behind them, the shattered convoy sent up great dark plumes of smoke. Before long, whites would come out from Madison to see what had happened—not that they could be in much doubt—and do what they could for anyone left alive.

Cassius smiled as he trotted away. God hadn’t come down from the heavens to give the guerrillas a hand, but the next best thing had.

J
orge Rodriguez wondered how long he could go on. He wondered how long the Confederate States could go on, too. If the damnyankees kept pounding on them the way they had been, it wouldn’t be much longer. Autumn or no autumn, rain or no rain, the United States were driving on Atlanta, and Jorge didn’t see how the Confederacy could stop them.

He didn’t worry about it all that much, either. He worried about staying alive. With everything the damnyankees were throwing at his regiment, that was plenty all by itself.

Kennesaw Mountain was heavily wooded country. U.S. artillery was firing shells fused for air bursts. If you didn’t have a good foxhole, the fragments knifing down from above would cut you to ribbons. Jorge did. He was proud of the hole, which he’d dug himself. He could fire from it when enemy soldiers drew near. But it also had a small shelter strengthened with boards—what they would have called a bombproof in the Great War—scraped out under the forward lip. When the shelling got bad, he’d duck under there and stay fairly safe.

Right this minute, there was a lull. He could get out of his hole, ease himself behind a tree, smoke a cigarette. He could, yes, as long as he stayed wary as a cat at a coon-hound convention. Things had a way of picking up with no warning. If you didn’t dive back into your hole in a hurry, you’d be a casualty.

“Stay alert, men!” Captain Malcolm Boyd called. “They’re liable to throw paratroops at us like they did in Tennessee.”

If the United States tried an air drop here, they had to be crazy. It looked that way to Jorge, anyhow. Too many paratroops would get stuck in trees and die before they could start fighting.

“We’ve got to hang on to Marietta no matter what, too,” the company commander added. “We don’t hang on to Marietta, how the hell can we hold Atlanta?”

There he made more sense to Jorge. Marietta was the cork in the bottle—probably the last cork in the bottle in front of Atlanta. If it fell, Atlanta almost had to. And if Atlanta fell, the Confederate States were in a hell of a lot of trouble. So everybody said, anyhow. Jorge knew things everybody said weren’t always right, but this one felt too likely to laugh off.

He wished he wouldn’t have heard so many things like,
We’ve got to hang on to Chattanooga no matter what.
The Confederates couldn’t hang on to Chattanooga. Now they were paying for losing it.

An automatic rifle rattled up ahead. When Jorge first went into the Army, that would have meant the man with the rifle wore butternut. No more, not necessarily. The Yankees had captured a lot of C.S. automatic weapons on their long drive south. They’d captured the ammo the rifles used, too—or maybe they were making their own. Jorge didn’t know about that. He did know he had to wait and hear more before he could be sure who was out there.

Sure as hell, the bangs that followed came from U.S. Springfields. In the CSA, nobody but home guards and Mexican soldiers used bolt-action rifles these days. The damnyankees were still a long step behind when it came to small arms. Some Confederate soldiers wondered what the enemy was doing in Georgia if that was so.

To Jorge, the answer looked clear enough. Yes, Yankee soldiers carried Springfields. But whole great swarms of Yankee soldiers carried them. U.S. artillery matched anything the Confederacy turned out. So did U.S. airplanes, and the United States had more of them than the Confederate States did. As for barrels…Jorge didn’t want to think about barrels. The USA’s new monsters outclassed everything the CSA made.

He peered down the forward slope of Kennesaw Mountain. He couldn’t see the enemy troops, but he had a pretty good idea where the gunfire was coming from. The damnyankees were probing in front of his regiment, trying to find a way through. He could have done without the compliment, if that was what it was.

The automatic rifle chattered again.
Right about…there,
Jorge judged. If the fellow who carried it kept coming forward, he’d probably show himself somewhere near those two pines.

And, a couple of minutes later, he did—not for very long, but long enough. Jorge fired a short burst from his own automatic rifle. The U.S. soldier threw up his hands and toppled. Jorge didn’t think he’d get up again. He looked around for a new target.

Easier to think of what he’d just done as hitting a target. If he thought of that figure in green-gray as a soldier, as a man, then he had to think about everything shooting his fellow soldier, his fellow man, might mean. But a target was only a target. You could shoot at a target for fun, if you felt like it.

Almost as much to the point, targets didn’t shoot back.

Jorge wondered if another U.S. soldier would try to retrieve the automatic rifle. If a man in green-gray did, it would be his last mistake. But the rifle lay where it fell. The damnyankees seemed confident they could drive the Confederates back and then retrieve it. Jorge had to hope they were wrong.

He waited for the next artillery barrage or armored assault or gas attack or air raid or whatever the enemy had in mind. Instead, a U.S. officer waved a white flag from behind a tree and shouted, “Can I come forward?”

Firing on both sides died away. Sergeant Blackledge shouted back: “Yeah, come ahead. What do you want?”

The Yankee emerged, still holding the flag of truce. As he approached the Confederate lines, he answered, “Want to try to talk you people into surrendering, that’s what. You keep fighting, we’ll squash you flat.”

“Yeah, now tell me another one,” Blackledge jeered. “You want to win one on the cheap, that’s all.”

“Not this time,” said the man in green-gray. “We’ll take some of your guys behind our lines, show you what we’ve got. I don’t believe you can stop us, or even slow us down very much.”

“You’ll do what?” The sergeant sounded as if he couldn’t believe his ears. Jorge didn’t blame him. The damnyankees had never said anything like
that,
not where he could hear it. He’d never heard of anything like it, either.

Calmly, the U.S. officer repeated himself. He went on, “Will you take me back? This is what they’d call a limited-time offer on the wireless. If you don’t take me up on it pretty damn quick, you’ll find out whether I’m lying or not. Oh, yeah—better believe you will.”

If he was acting, he could go out on the road. The confidence that filled his voice seemed frighteningly convincing. Maybe Sergeant Blackledge thought the same thing, because he said, “Come on up, damn you. I’m gonna put a blindfold on you before you go back of the line, though. You won’t do any spying under flag of truce.”

“Have it your way,” the Yankee said. “Like I told you, you can look at what we’ve got.” He walked forward. The sergeant put a rag over his eyes and led him back toward C.S. officers. Nobody on either side fired. A few U.S. soldiers came out and swapped rations for smokes and coffee. Jorge just sat tight and waited.

After about twenty minutes, the blindfolded U.S. officer returned, three worried-looking Confederates in his wake. He took off the rag and nodded to Sergeant Blackledge. “Cease-fire will last till these gentlemen come back,” he said. “After that, it’s up to them.”

“We won’t open up unless your guys do,” the noncom replied.

Away they went, the one man in green-gray and the three in butternut. Jorge was sure the Confederates would see only what their enemies wanted to show them. That was liable to be plenty. He waited. He smoked. He climbed out of his hole to take a leak. He didn’t want to be a POW; one of his brothers already languished in a camp. He didn’t want to get killed, either.

An hour and a half later, the C.S. officers returned. Their U.S. guide stopped between the lines. “You can still change your minds,” he said. “This is your last chance, but you can. You’ll spare your men a lot of grief.”

“We’re obliged to defend this position, Major,” a Confederate colonel said. “We will do so to the best of our ability.”

“You’ll be sorry,” the Yankee said. “Your men will be sorrier. I can’t answer for what will happen to them when we cut loose.”

“We have to take the chance, sir,” the Confederate replied. “We have our duty, as you have yours. With our country in danger, our personal safety is of small concern.”

“That sounds very pretty. You’ll find out what it means. You’re sure?” The U.S. officer waited. No one said anything more. The major shrugged and returned to his own lines. One of the Confederates used a field telephone to tell their headquarters what they’d done. All three of them stayed on the front line. Jorge admired that. They could have retreated to safety. Instead, they were sticking it out.