Walk in Hell (45 page)

Even before the damnyankees’ guns stopped pounding the Confederate trenches, though, men in butternut were pouring machine-gun fire into their foes. The barrage was liable to kill them, but, if they didn’t keep the U.S. soldiers out of their trenches, they were surely dead.

The battery poured shrapnel into the Yankees advancing across no-man’s-land, shortening the range as the soldiers in green-gray drew closer to the Confederate line. Shell casings lay by the breech of the gun in the same way that watermelon seeds were liable to lie by a Negro sleeping in the sun: signs of what had been consumed.

Dirt fountained up from every explosion. Men fountained up, too, or pieces of men. Others dove for the shelter of shell holes old and new. For a moment, the attack faltered. Jake had watched a lot of attacks, both Yankee and Confederate, falter: generals had a way of asking men to do more than flesh and blood could bear. “Be ready to lengthen range in a hurry,” he called to his gun crews. “When they run, we want to hurt ’em as bad as we can so they don’t try this shit again in a hurry.”

But then a cry of alarm and despair rose, not from the ranks of the Yankees but from the Confederates’ trenches. Men started running away from the front, straight toward Jake Featherston’s guns.

“Barrels!” Michael Scott shouted. With the gas helmet he had on, Jake couldn’t see his face, but he would have bet it was as pale as whey. “The damnyankees got barrels!”

There were only three of them, belching out gray-black clouds of exhaust as they lumbered forward with a clumsy deliberation that put Featherston in mind of fat men staggering out of a saloon. But, like fat men not so drunk as to fall down, they kept on coming no matter how clumsy they looked.

Machine-gun bullets struck sparks from their armored hides, but did not penetrate them. They had machine guns, too, and poured a hail of bullets of their own on Confederate positions that kept on resisting. Where those machine-gun bullets proved inadequate, they used their cannon to pound the foes into silence.

They were, Jake saw, deadly dangerous weapons of war. They were also even more deadly dangerous weapons of terror. Rumors about them had raced through the Confederate Army weeks before this, their first appearance on the front here. Seeing that they were nearly as invulnerable as rumor made them out to be, most of the men thought flight the best if not the only answer.

“That armor of theirs, it doesn’t keep shells out,” Jake said. “They’re not going any faster than a man can walk, and every damn one of ’em’s as big as a battleship. We don’t fill ’em full of holes, we don’t deserve to be in the First Richmond Howitzers.”

He felt the sting of that himself. As far as the powers that be were concerned, he didn’t deserve to he an officer in the First Richmond Howitzers. When his life lay on the line, though, pride took second place. At his shouted orders, all the guns in the battery took aim at the barrels.

Despite the encouraging words he’d used, he quickly discovered hitting a moving target with an artillery piece was anything but easy. Shell after shell exploded in front of the barrels or far beyond them. “If I was a nigger, I’d swear they were hexed,” Michael Scott growled.

“If you were a nigger—” Featherston began, and then stopped. He didn’t know how to finish the thought. He’d fought that very gun with two Negro laborers, up in Pennsylvania, after a Yankee bombardment had killed or wounded everyone in the crew but him. The fire he and Nero and Perseus delivered had helped drive back a U.S. assault on the trenches in front of the battery.

Yet the two blacks had sympathized with the Red revolt enough to desert the battery when it began, and he hadn’t seen them since. He wondered if they’d managed to get their hands on any guns and turn them against their Confederate superiors. He doubted he’d ever know.

But he was sure that, if not for the Negro uprising, the war against the USA would be going better now. Blacks were mostly back to work yes, but you couldn’t turn your back on them, not the way you had before. That made them only half as useful as they had been before the red flags started flying—and that meant the war against the United States was still feeling the effects of the uprising.

“We’ll pay ’em back one of these days,” Jake said. He had no more time in which to think about it. One of the barrels was clumsily turning so that its cannon bore on his gun. Barrels couldn’t stand hits from artillery. He’d told his gun crew as much, and hoped for the sake of his own neck he was right. He didn’t need anyone to tell him guns out in the open couldn’t do that, either.

Flame spurted from the muzzle of the cannon inside the traveling fortress. The shell was short. Fragments clattered off the splinter shield that was all the protection his gun crew had. Nothing got through. Nobody got hurt. He knew perfectly well that that was luck.

“Left half a degree!” he shouted, and the muzzle of the howitzer swung ever so slightly. He yanked the lanyard. The gun roared. So did he: “Hit! We hit the son of a bitch!”

Smoke poured out of the barrel. Hatches popped open all over the ungainly machine. Men, some carrying machine guns and belts of ammunition, dove out of the hatches and into whatever cover they could find. The gun crew raked the area where they were cowering. “I hope we kill ’em all, and I hope they take a long time dying,” Michael Scott said savagely.

At Featherston’s orders, his gunners also sent several more rounds into the burning barrel, to make sure the damnyankees couldn’t salvage it. Another barrel had stopped on the open ground between two trenches. Jake didn’t know why it had stopped. He didn’t care, either. What difference whether it had broken down or its commander was an idiot? It made an easy target. Nothing else mattered. Soon it was burning, too.

Seeing the seemingly invincible barrels going up in flames put fresh heart into the Confederate infantry that had been on the point of breaking. The men in butternut stopped running and started shooting back at the U.S. soldiers in their trenches. The last surviving barrel made a slow, awkward turn—the only kind it could make—and lumbered away from the battery of field guns that had treated its comrades so roughly.

Its tail carried a two-machine-gun sting, but Jake had never been so glad to see the back of anything. All the guns in the battery sent shells after the barrel. No one was lucky enough to score a hit on it.

“It’s going,” Featherston said. “That’s good enough for now, far as I’m concerned. If it comes back tomorrow, we’ll worry about it tomorrow. Meantime, let’s see if we can make the damnyankees sorry they ever made it into our trenches.”

Before long, the U.S. soldiers in the Confederate positions were very unhappy; the battery showered them with both gas and shrapnel. The troops they’d driven back counterattacked aided by reinforcements hurrying across the Monocacy on bridges the Yankees hadn’t been able to knock down.

The U.S. soldiers did hold on to the first couple of lines of trenches, but that wasn’t enough of an advance to make the battery change site. Glum-looking Yankee prisoners filed back toward the Monocacy bridges, their hands high in the air.

Once the fighting had eased, officers came out to examine the burned-out hulks of the barrels. One of them was Major Clarence Potter. On his way back to Army of Northern Virginia headquarters, he stopped for a couple of minutes at Jake Featherston’s battery. “I’m given to understand we have your guns to thank for those two ruined behemoths,” he said.

“Yes, sir, that’s right.” Featherston dropped his voice. “They won’t promote me for it, but I did it.”

“Any way you could have gotten us a barrel in working order, not one that’s been through the fire?” Potter asked. He held up a hand. “That won’t get you promoted, either, Sergeant, but it will help our cause.”

“Sir, if those barrels had kept running, they’d be visiting you about now, not the other way round,” Jake answered. “We got any more men back of the line, sir? One more attack and we can push the Yankees all the way back where they started from.”

But the intelligence officer shook his head. “Lucky we were able to throw in as much as we did.” Now he was the one who spoke quietly: “If we don’t get more men in arms, be they white or black, we’ll be reduced to standing on the defensive all along the line, and that’s no way to win a war.”

“Black soldiers.” Featherston’s lip curled.

“You know they can fight,” Potter said. “You of all people should know that.” He’d heard about the use to which Jake had put Perseus and Nero.

“Yes, sir, I do know that,” Jake said. “But I’ll be damned if I think they ought to get any kind of reward for trying to overthrow the government in the middle of the war. That’s what giving ’em guns and giving ’em the vote would be. They stabbed us in the back. Somebody—anybody—does that to me, I’ll make him pay.” Some of the faces in his mind when he said that were black. Some were white and plump and prosperous, the faces of soldiers and bureaucrats in the War Department in Richmond.

Jonathan Moss peered down at the battlefield in dismay. The advance through Ontario toward Toronto had been slow and brutally expensive, but it had been a continuous advance. One enemy defensive line after another had been stormed and overwhelmed. Now, for the first time, American troops were in headlong, desperate retreat. From the air, they looked like ants fleeing a small boy’s shoe.

That was, in effect, what they were. A handful of bigger shapes moved on the ground, grinding through American barbed wire and into the U.S. trenches. “Son of a bitch,” Moss said, and the wind blew his words away. “The limeys and Canucks have barrels of their own.”

They looked different from American barrels, of which he’d seen one or two. He flew lower for a better look, figuring that the more he could put in his report, the better it would be. That battalions of American infantrymen were getting much more intimately acquainted with the barrels advancing on them than he could in an aeroplane never once crossed his mind.

The lower he flew, the stranger the enemy barrels looked. They were forward-leaning rhomboids, with tracks going all the way around the outside of their hulls. He wondered why the Canucks—or was it the limeys?—had settled on such a stupid design till he saw a barrel climb almost vertically out of a trench into which it had fallen. However odd the setup seemed, it had its merits.

Instead of mounting a cannon in the nose like U.S. barrels, the ones currently pushing back the American infantry carried two, one on each side, mounted in sponsons whose design—if not the actual pieces of forged iron themselves—had been taken from the secondary armament of warships. Some of the barrels mounted machine guns in one or both sponsons instead of cannon.

“I wonder whose are better, theirs or ours,” Moss said. He had no way to tell at the moment. American barrels still being thin on the ground, and used mostly to spearhead long-planned attacks, none was anywhere nearby to challenge the machines the enemy was hurling at the poor bastards down in the trenches.

Moss dove on the barrels, machine gun blazing. He walked his tracers across one, another, a third. As far as he could tell, they did the massive machines no harm. He cursed himself for a fool. American barrels were armored to hold out enemy machine-gun fire. Whatever you could say about the Canadians and the British, they weren’t stupid. They’d do unto the USA as they’d been done by themselves.

He cursed his stupidity for another reason as well. The advancing foe loosed a storm of lead at his Martin one-decker. Ground fire had shot him down once already. Now again he heard the thrumming pop of bullets tearing through canvas.

Clang!
That bullet hadn’t torn through canvas—it had hit something metal. His eyes flicked over the instrument panel. Everything looked all right. If he was lucky, the bullet had ricocheted off the side of the engine block without breaking anything. If he wasn’t lucky, he’d find out soon enough—most likely at the moment he could least afford to.

That
clang
, though, was an urgent reminder that he couldn’t afford to linger indefinitely down here. He pulled back on the stick. The nose of his fighting scout rose.

As Moss gained altitude, Tom Innis made his own firing run on the advancing enemy. Perhaps profiting from his flightmate’s experience, he didn’t try to shoot up the barrels. Men were always more vulnerable. Banking toward the American lines—or what had been the American lines before the attack—Moss watched men in khaki dive for cover. He whooped with glee and shook his fist in the slipstream.

But not all the British and Canadians tried to shelter themselves from Innis’ gun. They shot back at him as ferociously as they had at Moss. And a streak of smoke began streaming back from Tom’s engine cowling.

“Get out of there!” Moss shouted—uselessly, of course. “Get out of there while you can!” He looked around for Dud Dudley and Phil Eaker—they’d have to shepherd Innis back toward the aerodrome. He’d be a sitting bird if the Canadians or British pounced on his crippled bus.

He swung the one-decker back toward the west. The smoke wasn’t getting better. It was getting worse. “Climb, damn you!” Moss yelled to him, as if he could hear. The more altitude he gained, the farther he’d be able to glide when his engine quit. Moss knew all about that, the hard way.

Innis had to know it, too. But the Martin didn’t get any higher off the deck. The only reason for that, Moss figured, was that it couldn’t get any higher off the deck. And that meant his flightmate was in trouble.

Moss bared his teeth in an anguished grimace—it wasn’t just smoke streaming back from the engine now, it was flame, too. The slipstream blowing in Moss’ face made it hard for him to close his mouth again. The slipstream also blew the flames back toward Tom Innis.

He beat at them with his fist and arm. They spread faster than he could knock them down. “Land it!” Moss screamed. “Land it, God damn you!” He wasn’t cursing his friend. He was cursing fate, without a doubt the most dreadful fate any airman could face. Better to yank out your pistol and put one through your head than go down in a burning crate, as far as he was concerned.

That was especially true if you were going down in a burning crate from, say, fifteen thousand feet. If you were only a couple of hundred feet off the ground when your aeroplane caught fire, you had a chance to put it down and get the hell out before you roasted, too.

You had a chance…. The trouble was, every yard of territory here abouts was as cratered as the surface of the moon: the USA had had to blast the Canucks off the land before advancing through it, and then, even after having had it taken from them, the Canadians and the limeys had shelled it to a faretheewell to make sure the Americans didn’t enjoy owning it.

With a healthy aeroplane, Tom Innis would have had more choices. Of course, with a healthy aeroplane, he wouldn’t have needed to land in the first place. He did the best he could, steering for a meadow that still had some green grass mingled with the brown of earth thrown up from shell blasts.

“Come on. Come on,” Moss whispered, his hand trying to move on the joystick as if he were landing his own aeroplane. Despite smoke and flames and what had to be mortal fear, Innis got the Martin down. You didn’t need much in the way of ground to kill all the speed and hop out. “Come on,” Moss said again as he buzzed overhead. “Taxi, taxi…”

The Martin nosed down into a shell hole and flipped over. It kept right on burning. Nobody came out of it. Nobody was going to come out. Moss knew that. If the fire hadn’t killed Tom, getting the engine and machine gun slammed back into his chest would have done the job.

Infantrymen in green-gray ran toward the crash. Moss and his flightmates kept circling above it. Some of the infantrymen, their faces small pale ovals, looked up at them and shook their heads. No luck. It was over.

Moss felt empty inside as he flew back toward the aerodrome.
It could have been me
echoed in his mind again and again. It nearly had been him, not so long before. What was the difference between the way he’d put his damaged aeroplane down and how Tom Innis had done it? Luck, nothing more. You didn’t like to think you were alive for no better reason than dumb luck. Was he an ace by dumb luck, too?

When only three returned where four had set out, the mechanics on the ground didn’t need a handbook to figure out what had happened. “What went wrong?” one of them asked quietly. Dud Dudley was the flight leader. That meant he had the delightful job of telling them.

The surviving fliers went into Shelby Pruitt’s tent. The squadron commander looked up from his paperwork. His mouth twisted. “Dammit,” he said, and then, mastering himself, “All right, give me the details.”

Dudley did that, too. When he was through, Moss spoke of the enemy barrels spreading havoc through the U.S. lines. That had seemed the most important news in the world when he’d spotted them. Now he had to flog his memory to come up with details.

Hardshell Pruitt took notes. He had to be a professional about the business of slaughter, too. He asked his questions, both about Innis’ demise and about the barrels. Then he said, “All right, boys. I don’t expect the three of you will be doing any flying tomorrow. Don’t worry about morning roll call, either, come to that. You’ll be recorded as present. Dismissed.”

If that wasn’t an order to head for the officers’ club and get smashed, it might as well have been. Moss would have headed there anyway. Dudley and Eaker matched him stride for stride.

News traveled fast through the aerodrome. When the Negro behind the bar saw them come in, he set a bottle of whiskey, a corkscrew, and three tumblers on the bar, nodded, and said not a word. It was almost as if he stood at the bedside of a patient whose chances weren’t good.

As suited his station as flight leader, Dud Dudley carried the bottle. Moss picked up the glasses. That left the corkscrew for Eaker, who brought it over to the table as if glad to have something to do.

Dudley used the corkscrew, tilted the bottle, and poured all the glasses full. “Well, here’s to Tom,” he said, and drained his without taking it from his lips. When it was empty, he let out a long sigh. “I always thought the ornery son of a bitch would be doing this for me, not the other way round.”

“Yeah.” The whiskey burned in Moss’ throat, and in his stomach. He could feel it climbing to his head. “He went out the way you’d figure, if he was ever going to go. He wanted to hit the Canucks and limeys one more lick.”

“That’s a fact.” Dudley filled the tumblers again. “He was a wolf when he drove a bus, nothing else but. Never saw a man who just aimed himself at the enemy and fired himself off like that.”

“Best straight-out aggressive pilot I ever saw,” Moss agreed. “And Luther was the best technical flier I ever saw. And they’re both dead and we’re alive, and what the hell does that say about the way the world works?”

“It’s a damn shame,” Eaker said. The whiskey was already slurring his speech, but he attacked the second glass as single-mindedly as Tom had ever shot up a target. “Not fair. Not fair.”

He’d joined the flight as Luther Carlsen’s replacement. Now another set of personal goods would have to be cleared from the tent. Somebody else new would be sleeping on Innis’cot. They’d have to point Tom out in the pictures on the wall and explain what kind of a man he’d been. It wouldn’t be easy, any of it.

“God damn the Canucks, anyhow,” Moss said. “If they’d just rolled over when the war started, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”

“That’s right,” Eaker said. “Then we could have thrown everything we’ve got at the goddamn Rebs, and that would be the war over and done with, right there.”

“Yeah, and if the Russians hadn’t invaded Germany when things got started, France would have gone down the drain and Kaiser Bill would have won his war, too,” Moss said. “But instead, we’ve got—this.”

He waved a hand to encompass
this
. It was the hand holding the glass of whiskey. Fortunately, he’d already drunk most of it. A little spilled on the table and on his trouser leg, but not much. He started to pick up the bottle to fill the tumbler once more. “It’s empty,” Dud Dudley said.

“You’re right. It is.” Moss stared at it. “How did it get empty so fast?” Before he could get up and do anything about that, the bartender brought over a fresh bottle. Moss nodded. His neck felt loose. “That’s better.”

“How did it get empty so fast?” Eaker echoed. He sounded even more surprised than Moss had, as if there weren’t the slightest connection between his stumbling speech and that poor dead bottle.

“It got empty the same way we did,” Moss said. “It got empty the same way the whole stupid world did.” Rapidly getting drunk as he was, he couldn’t tell whether that was foolish maundering or profound philosophy. The next day, hung over and wishing he was dead, he couldn’t tell, either, and the day after that, climbing into his one-decker for another flight above the trenches, he still didn’t know.

Night lay like a cloak over the
Bonefish
. “Ahead one quarter,” Roger Kimball called from his perch atop the conning tower.

“Ahead one quarter—aye aye, sir,” answered Ben Coulter, the helmsman, his voice floating up the hatchway to the skipper.

“If we bring this off, sir—” Tom Brearley breathed.

Kimball made a sharp chopping motion with his right hand, cutting off his exec. “We
are
going to bring this off,” he said. “No ifs, ands, or buts. I don’t care how many mines the damnyankees have laid in Chesapeake Bay, I don’t care how many shore guns they’ve got watching from Maryland. We are going to pay them a visit. If they aren’t glad to see us, too damn bad.”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley said, the only thing he could say under the circumstances. After a few seconds, he went on, “It’s a shame the USA pushed down so far toward Hampton Roads.”

“You’re right about that,” Kimball said. “If we were holding onto both sides of the mouth of the Bay as tight as we ought to…Things’d look a lot better if that was so, I tell you.”

There were, at the moment, any number of ways in which the war could have looked better from the Confederate point of view. Kimball wasted little time worrying about them. They’d given him the job of penetrating as far up the Chesapeake Bay as he could and doing as much damage as he could once he got there, and he aimed to follow his orders to the letter.