Drive to the East (52 page)

“Yes, sir,” Pound said, as gently as he could. “I’ve seen it before.” He’d got glimpses through the gunsight here, too, and was glad he’d had no more than glimpses. Shrapnel clattered off the sides and front of the barrel. There were times when sitting in a thick armored box wasn’t so bad, even if it was too damn hot and nobody in there with you had bathed anytime lately.

Griffiths spoke to the driver over the intercom: “If you can go forward without smashing people, do it.” The barrel moved ahead in low gear. Pound didn’t like to think about what it was running over, so he resolutely didn’t. The lieutenant peered through the periscope: a far cry from sticking your head out and looking around, but nobody would have done that under this kind of shellfire. Well, maybe Irving Morrell would have, but officers like him didn’t come along every day.

Suddenly, Griffiths let out an indignant squawk. “What is it, sir?” Pound asked.

“Our men,” Griffiths answered. “Our soldiers—retreating!”

Pound got a brief look at them, too, and liked none of what he saw. “We’d better find an ambush position pretty quick, then, sir,” he said. “We’re going to have company.”

Griffiths didn’t get it right away. When he did, he nodded. A stone wall that hid the bottom half of the barrel wasn’t perfect cover, but it was a lot better than nothing.

“Have an AP round ready,” Pound told Bergman. The loader tapped him on the leg to show he’d heard.

“There’s one!” Griffiths squeaked with excitement. “Uh, front, I mean!”

“Identified,” Pound confirmed. “Range six hundred yards.” He added, “Armor-piercing.” Bergman slammed the round into the breech. With quick, fussy precision, Pound lined up the sights on the target: one of the new-model C.S. barrels. Now to see what this new gun could do. He nudged Lieutenant Griffiths. “Ready, sir.”

“Fire!” Griffiths said, and the cannon spoke.

Here in the turret, the report wasn’t too loud. The empty casing leaped from the breech and clattered down onto the deck. Cordite fumes made Pound cough. But he whooped at the same time, for fire spurted from the enemy barrel. “Hit!” he shouted, and Griffiths with him. The old gun wouldn’t have pierced that armor at that range.

“Front!” Griffiths said again, more businesslike this time. “About ten o’clock.”

“Identified,” Pound replied. He scored another hit. Whatever the Confederates wanted today, they weren’t going to buy it cheap.

O
ut of the line. Armstrong Grimes knew only one thing besides relief: resentment that he’d have to go back when his regiment’s turn in reserve was up. For the time being, though, nobody would be shooting at him. He wouldn’t be ducking screaming meemies. He wouldn’t wonder if the stranger in a green-gray uniform was really a U.S. soldier, and worry that that unfamiliar face might belong to a Mormon intent on cutting his throat or stabbing him in the back and then sneaking away.

He turned to Sergeant Rex Stowe, who tramped along beside him down what had been a highway and was now mostly shell holes. “Ain’t this fun?”

“Oh, yeah. Now tell me another one.” Stowe needed a shave. His helmet was on crooked. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He looked like most of the other U.S. soldiers trudging through the wreckage that had been Provo.

“Anybody figure this fight would take so long when it started?” Armstrong persisted. “We’ve been here forever, and we’re still not in Salt Lake City.” He was no lovelier than his sergeant, and had no doubt he smelled as bad, too.

“We’re doing it on the cheap,” Yossel Reisen complained. “We could end this mess in a hurry if we’d put enough men and barrels and bombers into it.”

“Write your Congresswoman,” Stowe said—a joke that had grown old in the company.

But Reisen answered, “I’ve done it. Aunt Flora says the Confederates and now Canada are taking away what we need.”

Sergeant Stowe didn’t seem to know what to say to that. Neither did Armstrong. They both outranked Yossel, but when it came to clout. . . . Armstrong had none, and as far as he knew Stowe didn’t either. Yossel Reisen, on the other hand, had all the clout in the world—and didn’t want to use any of it.

If he had wanted to use it, he would have been anywhere but here. Provo looked as if God had dropped a cigarette here and then ground it out with a hobnailed boot. The city had fallen weeks ago, but smoke still rose here and there. The smell of death lingered, too. By the urgent insistence it took on every now and then, some of the dead were a lot more recent than the fall of the town.

As Armstrong and his buddies slogged south, other soldiers came north. They were cleaner and better barbered, but their faded uniforms and hard, watchful faces said this wasn’t the first time they were heading up to the front. “What’s new?” one of them called in Armstrong’s general direction.

“You know about the fucking spigot mortar?” he replied.

“Sure do.” The soldier going the other way nodded. “Ka-
boom!
They had that the last time I went up.”

“Yeah, but now they’ve started loading the screaming meemies with mustard gas. They can carry a lot of it, too.”

“Well, shit,” the other soldier said bitterly. “If it’s not one goddamn thing, it’s another. If I have to put on that rubber gear, the heat’ll kill me.”

It was probably somewhere in the upper nineties. That wasn’t so dreadful as it would have been back in Washington or Philadelphia. As people from out West never got tired of saying, it was a dry heat. That didn’t mean it wasn’t hot, though. And when you wore full antigas gear, you cooked in your own juices. Who needed humidity then?

A little blond girl came out of the ruins to stare at Armstrong. She was about eight years old, and would have been pretty if she weren’t scrawny and filthy and wearing what looked like a torn burlap bag for a dress. The stony hatred on her face didn’t help, either.

“Jesus!” He wanted to make the sign of the cross to ward off that look, and he wasn’t even Catholic. “She’ll shoot at us in the next go-round, and her kid’ll pick up a gun in the one after that.”

“We oughta just shoot all of these bastards and start over here,” Stowe said. “Treat ’em like the Confederates treat their niggers. Then we could do this place right.”

“You think Featherston’s fuckers really are doing that shit?” Armstrong said. “Seems hard to believe.”

“You’d better believe it—it’s true,” Yossel Reisen said. “My aunt knows more about that stuff than she ever wanted to find out. They’re filthy down there, really filthy.”

His aunt was likely to know if anybody did. Armstrong said, “Still seems crazy to me. Why would anybody want to do that to somebody else just on account of what he looks like? I mean, I’ve got no use for niggers, God knows, but I don’t want to kill ’em all.” He had no idea how many oversimplifications and unexamined ideas he’d packed into that, and was probably lucky he didn’t.

“People do it all the time,” Yossel said. “You’re not Jewish, that’s for sure.”

“Nope, not me.” Armstrong might have had more to say on the subject of Jews, too, but not where his buddy could hear it. You didn’t do things like that. Life at the front was tough enough as is. If you pissed off somebody who might save your ass one day soon, you only made it worse.

A sign led to the trucks that would take them back to the R and R center at Thistle. Before long, they’d have to leave again, but Armstrong looked forward to getting clean, getting deloused, and eating real food and sleeping on a real mattress.

As happened too often in the Army, somebody’d screwed up. There were far more soldiers than trucks to take them to Thistle or anywhere else. The men milled around, waiting for something to happen. A lot of Army life was like that. A captain climbed up on what was left of a brick wall and shouted that more trucks would be along in an hour or so. The cheers he drew were distinctly sarcastic. The catcalls, on the other hand, came from the heart. The captain turned red and got down in a hurry.

Armstrong didn’t know what drew his eye to the woman who walked toward the crowd of soldiers. Maybe it was just that she
was
a woman. Most of the ones he’d seen lately wore dungarees and carried rifles and wanted to kill him. He returned the favor the best way he knew how.

This one had on a dress, a baggy dress that reached almost to her ankles. Her face was pinched and pale. Maybe that was what kept Armstrong’s eye on her—not her good looks, though she wasn’t half bad, but her absolute determination. An alarm bell went off in his mind. He nudged Rex Stowe. “Sergeant, something’s wrong with that broad.” He pointed.

“Yeah?” Stowe didn’t see it for a second. Then he did. “Yeah.” He took a step toward her, and started to take another one—

And the world exploded.

Next thing Armstrong knew, he was on his back. Something that stung ran into his eyes. He put up a hand and discovered it was blood. He was bleeding from the leg, too, and from one arm. He looked around. Yossel Reisen, somehow, was still on his feet and didn’t seem to be scratched. Sergeant Stowe was down and moaning, both hands pressed to a swelling scarlet stain on his belly.

“She blew herself up!” The words seemed to come from a million miles away. Armstrong realized the bomb must have stunned his ears. He hoped they weren’t ruined for good.

He scrambled to his feet. Closer to the woman—who wasn’t there anymore, of course—the landscape was a surreal mess of bodies and body parts. How many had she killed? How many had she hurt? Armstrong watched a soldier pull a nail out of his arm. He realized the woman hadn’t just carried explosives. She’d had shrapnel, too. She’d done what she’d done on purpose, and she’d made sure she did as much damage as she could when she did it.

“You all right?” Yossel’s voice came from far, far away, too.

“If I’m not, I’ll worry about it later,” Armstrong said. “We’ve got to do what we can for these poor mothers.”

He bent beside Rex Stowe and gave him a shot of morphine. He might have wasted it; Stowe was going gray. He put a dressing on the noncom’s wound, but blood soaked through right away. “Corpsman!” Yossel Reisen shouted. But a dozen other soldiers were yelling the same thing, and no medics seemed close by. Who would have thought trouble might strike
here
?

Nobody would have. Nobody had. And that was probably
why
it had happened here. The men waiting for transport hadn’t paid any attention to the Mormon woman . . . till too late.

Yossel Reisen slapped a bandage on Armstrong’s forehead. “Thanks,” he said.

“It’s all right,” Yossel said absently—he had other things on his mind. In disbelieving tones, he went on, “She blew herself up. She fucking blew herself up. She fucking blew herself up on purpose.”

“She sure as shit did.” Armstrong liked that no better than his buddy did. “How do you stop somebody who wants to make like a bomb?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea, and I don’t think anybody else does, either,” Yossel said. “Who would have thought anybody could be that crazy?”

“Mormons,” Armstrong said. The Mormons had caused so much trouble for the USA, and had notions so different from those of most Americans, that blaming things on them just because they
were
Mormons came easy. But even Armstrong, who was anything but reflective, realized more than that went into it. Despite the heat, he shivered. “A woman. She waited till she could hurt the most soldiers, and then—she did.”

“They could pull shit like this anywhere,” Yossel Reisen said, a new horror in his voice. “Anywhere at all. On a bus, in a subway, in a theater, at a football game—anywhere there’s a crowd. If you hate enough and you want to hit back enough . . . you just do.”

“Fuck.” Armstrong meant the word more as prayer than as curse. He said the worst thing he could think of to follow it: “You’re right.”

Men with Red Cross armbands did rush up then. They got Rex Stowe on a stretcher and carried him away. He was still breathing, but Armstrong didn’t think he’d live. Even if he did, he’d be out of the war for months, probably for good.

Bodies and pieces of bodies remained after all the wounded were taken away. So did the butcher-shop stink of blood. Armstrong walked over to where the woman had been standing. He found a torn and charred shoe that wasn’t Army issue. But for that, there was no sign she’d ever existed—except the carnage all around. “Fuck,” he said again, no less reverently than before.

A dozen U.S. trucks painted Army green-gray rumbled up then. The drivers stared in disbelief at the blood-soaked scene. “What the hell happened here?” one of them said.

Somebody threw a piece of broken brick at his truck. It clanged off the hood. “You son of a bitch!” the soldier shouted. “If you’d got here on time, we wouldn’t have been here when she did that!”

Another rock or brick banged off a different truck. For a moment, Armstrong wondered if the soldiers who’d survived the bomb would lynch the truck drivers. They might have if a burly first sergeant hadn’t said, “She was gonna do it anyways. If it wasn’t us, it woulda been the next poor bunch of bastards. What the fuck you gonna do?”

He was so obviously right—and so large—that he threw cold water on the lynching bee. An officer thought to set up a perimeter in case more Mormons decided to blow themselves to kingdom come for their cause. And then the unwounded and the walking wounded got on the trucks and headed down to Thistle after all.
What the fuck are you gonna do?
Armstrong thought. Like Yossel, he had no idea. He hoped somebody did.

F
lora Blackford had never warmed to the Philadelphia cheese steak. The only way they could have made it more
treyf
was to add ham and oysters. She stuck with pastrami on rye. Robert Taft probably wouldn’t have minded if they’d added ham and oysters to his cheese steak. Those weren’t forbidden foods for him.

The Old Munich was near the damaged Congressional building. It had pretty good prices and air conditioning. Looking around, Flora didn’t think she could assemble a quorum from the Representatives and Senators in the place, but she didn’t think she would miss by much, either.

Taft raised a schooner of beer. “Here’s to you—most of the time,” he said, and sipped from it.