Drive to the East (68 page)

But the freighter—Sam didn’t suppose she was really the
Karlskrona
—had no more fight in her. Her men were taking to the boats—which, in the North Atlantic, was no joke. Sam ordered nets lowered to let the British sailors come up the
Josephus Daniels
’ side. His own crew, armed with a couple of submachine guns, rifles, pistols, axes, and even some big wrenches, looked like a nineteenth-century boarding party as they took charge of the prisoners. The pharmacist’s mate had groaning wounded men to deal with.

Sam went down to the deck for a closer look at the vanquished enemy. The British skipper, a weary and bedraggled man with a horsy face and bad teeth, recognized him for the destroyer escort’s captain at once. “Well fought, sir,” the limey said, saluting. “Thought we might surprise you, but you maneuvered well—and those bloody guns! Damn me if I think you missed even once.”

“You gave us a nasty start,” Sam said. “You were loaded for bear, all right.” That probably made him sound like Daniel Boone to the Englishman, but he didn’t care. If the freighter’s gunners were better . . . But the best gun crews were bound to be in the Royal Navy. Little jaunts like this would have to take whoever was left, and whoever was left hadn’t been good enough.

“Kind of you to take us aboard, all things considered,” his opposite number said.

“If you’d fired after the white flag went up, I’d’ve sunk you,” Sam said matter-of-factly. “Short of that, though, I wouldn’t leave a ship’s cat in an open boat on the North Atlantic. I’ve been in the Navy better than thirty years. I’ve seen a few things I’d rather not see again, or think about, either.”

“I believe you, sir. I’m grateful all the same,” the Englishman said.

“Gratitude is worth its weight in gold,” Sam said, and the limey flinched. Sam went on, “You and your men are POWs now. We’ll take you back to the USA. When the war’s over, you can go home. For now . . .”
For now,
he thought,
you didn’t blow me to hell and gone. I’ll take that.

I
rving Morrell looked up into the western sky. A snowflake hit him right between the eyes. “By God, the bastards weren’t lying,” he breathed, and his breath smoked as if he had a cigarette in his mouth. Just this minute, he didn’t, though a pack sat in his pocket.

For once, the weathermen had hit things right on the button. They’d said this early snowstorm would get here now, and they were right. He’d gambled and held up his attack three days to wait for it, and his gamble looked as if it would pay off.

Meadville, Pennsylvania, lay in the foothills of the Alleghenies. Morrell stood on the grounds of Allegheny College. The Georgian and Greek Revival architecture told of timeless elegance and dedication to scholarship. But Confederate bombs and artillery had turned some of the buildings to ruins—not that the Greeks hadn’t wrecked masterpieces in their own wars. And the barrels snorting on the yellowing lawn were not in perfect keeping with an academic atmosphere.

Only a few blocks away stood the world’s biggest zipper factory. Morrell wondered if button manufacturers cursed Meadville whenever they thought of it. That wasn’t his worry, though. He aimed his curses at Jake Featherston, and before long he’d aim them through the barrel of a gun.

He scrambled up into the closest barrel, which was his to command. When the fighting started, he intended to lead from the front. Generals who stayed in back of the line soon lost track of what was really going on. Generals who didn’t stay back of the line often got killed, but Morrell refused to worry about that.

“We just about ready, sir?” asked his gunner, a dark, and darkly clever, corporal named Al Bergeron. He was a good soldier and a good gunner; Morrell missed Michael Pound all the same, and hoped the veteran underofficer was safe. Wherever Pound was, he’d be acting as if he wore three stars, not three stripes.

But Morrell would have to worry about him later, too. “Just about, Frenchy,” he answered. During the Great War, more than a few people with French names changed them to German-sounding ones so their neighbors wouldn’t suspect them. That kind of hysteria hadn’t come again. The Confederate States were the only enemies people flabbled hard about now.

Morrell put on his earphones. This barrel had a fancier wireless setup than any of the rest. He could link up not only to other barrels but also to artillery, infantry, and aviation circuits. He wondered whether being able to talk to so many people at once was part of the privilege of his rank or part of the price of it.

He connected to the artillery web. “Ready at 0730?” he asked. If he got a no, somebody’s head would roll—H-hour was only fifteen minutes away.

But the answer came back at once: “Ready, sir.” The officer who replied sounded young and excited. Morrell wondered if he’d seen action before. Whether he had or not, he would now.

Those fifteen minutes, like the last fifteen minutes before every attack, seemed to crawl by on their bellies. Corporal Bergeron said, “Almost seems a shame to do this to those damn greasers.”

“Almost—but not quite,” Morrell said dryly. The gunner chuckled. Morrell’s mouth stretched in a grin of savage anticipation. No, he didn’t think it was a shame, not even slightly. If Jake Featherston was stretched so thin that he needed to use second-grade troops from the Empire of Mexico to hold part of his line, he had only himself to blame if the USA tried to stomp the stuffing out of them.

No sooner had that thought crossed Morrell’s mind than the artillery opened up. Even here inside the turret, the thunder was cataclysmic. He’d been hoarding guns as hard as he’d been hoarding barrels. The Mexicans would like things even less.

The barrage went on for a precise hour and a half. As soon as the guns let up, Morrell spoke into the intercom to the driver and then over the webs connecting him to the rest of the barrels and to the infantry. He said the same thing every time: “Let’s go!”

Engine roaring, his barrel rumbled forward. Morrell stuck his head out of the cupola so he could see better. That was a splendid way to get shot. He knew as much. It was the chance he took. If he got another oak-leaf cluster for his Purple Heart, then he did, that was all. He needed to see what was going on, as much as he could. And if he stopped one with his face . . . Well, a general officer’s pension would leave Agnes and Mildred without many worries about money.

Along with the rest of the barrels, his pushed southwest out of Meadville. Some foot soldiers loped along among the big, noisy machines. Others rode in trucks or in lightly armored carriers to keep up more easily. A few infantrymen clambered up onto barrels and let them do the work. That was highly unofficial. Doctrine handed down from on high—which is to say, from Philadelphia—frowned on it. Riding barrels left soldiers vulnerable to the fire they inevitably drew. But it also got them where they were going faster and fresher than marching would have done. No matter what doctrine the War Department laid down, Morrell liked that.

He knew just when they broke into the Mexicans’ lines. The U.S. barrage had come down right on the button. Only a few soldiers in that yellowish khaki were in any shape to fight. Scattered rifle fire and a handful of machine guns greeted the advancing U.S. forces, but that was all. Francisco José’s soldiers didn’t carry the automatic rifles that made C.S. infantrymen so formidable. They had bolt-action Tredegars, pieces much like U.S. Springfields.

They didn’t have barrels. They didn’t have much artillery. They didn’t have armored personnel carriers. And they didn’t have a chance. Morrell had loaded up with a rock in his fist. Now he swung it with all his might.

Here and there, the Mexicans fought bravely. Knots of them held up Morrell’s forces wherever they could. Stubborn men who would die before they yielded a position were an asset to any army, and the Empire of Mexico’s had its share. But the Mexicans didn’t have enough men like that, and the ones they did have couldn’t do what they might have done with better equipment. More often than not, the U.S. advance flowed past those stubborn knots to either side. They could be cleaned up at leisure. Meanwhile, the push went on.

“Keep moving!” Whenever Morrell ducked down into the turret, he spread his gospel over the wireless. “Always keep moving. Once we get in among ’em, once we get behind ’em, they’ll go to pieces. And then we’ll be able to move even faster.”

And he had the pleasure of watching his prophecy come true. Till the early afternoon, the enemy soldiers in front of his barrels and infantry did everything they could to stop them and even to throw them back. After that . . . After that, it was like watching ice melt when spring came to a northern river. Once the rot started, it spread fast. By that first nightfall, he was seeing the enemy’s backs.

He didn’t want to stop for the darkness. He kept going till his driver couldn’t see any farther. He sent infantry ahead even after that. And he had the barrels moving again as soon as the first gray showed in the east.

The Mexicans kept trying to fight back early in the second day. But when they saw barrels coming at them out of the swirling snow, a lot of them lost their nerve. Morrell would have lost his nerve, too, trying to stand up against barrels with no more than rifles. Some of the men in the yellowish khaki ran away. Others dropped their rifles and raised their hands. A lot of them looked miserably cold. They didn’t have greatcoats, and probably didn’t have long johns, either. Down in the Empire of Mexico, they wouldn’t have needed them. They were a long way from home.

By the end of that second day, Morrell’s barrels had smashed through the crust of enemy resistance. Behind it lay . . . not much. Morrell had a gruesomely good time shooting up a Confederate truck convoy. The big butternut trucks rolled right up to his barrel, sure it had to be on their side even if it was the wrong color.

They found out how wrong they were in a hurry. At Morrell’s orders, Frenchy Bergeron wrecked the first truck in the convoy with a well-aimed cannon shell. The second truck tried to go around it. Bergron blasted that one, too, effectively blocking the road. Then he and the bow gunner used their machine guns to shoot up the rest of the trucks. More U.S. barrels came up and joined the fun.

It wasn’t much fun for the poor bastards on the receiving end. Soldiers spilled out of some of the trucks and tried to find shelter from the storm of bullets wherever they could. Other trucks carried munitions, not men. When they burned, they sent tracers flying every which way. Standing up in the cupola again, Morrell whooped. Corporal Bergeron got the view through his gunsight. He pounded Morrell gently on the leg, which also amounted to a whoop.

Desperate to escape the trap, some of the trucks went off the road and into the fields on either side. Like their U.S. counterparts, they had four-wheel drive. That gave them some traction on the wet ground, but only some. Great gouts of mud flew from their tires as they struggled forward. While they did, the green-gray barrels went right on shooting at them, and they couldn’t shoot back. Without antibarrel cannon, the only weapons foot soldiers had against armor were grenades through the hatches and Featherston Fizzes. They couldn’t get close enough to use anything like that here.

Once he’d smashed the column of trucks, Morrell got on the wireless circuit to the barrels closest to his: “Let’s get rolling again. We’ve got to keep moving.” He popped up again and cast a wary eye at the sky. So far, the promised storm was still rolling through. When the weather got better, the Confederates were going to throw anything that could fly at his armored forces. From what he could see, air strikes had the best chance of slowing him down—if anything could. Now that he’d broken through the C.S. line, he saw nothing in the rear that had much chance of doing the job.

As his armored column pushed south and west from Meadville, another, slightly smaller, U.S. force was driving north from Parkersburg, West Virginia. If everything went according to plan, Morrell’s men and the troops advancing from West Virginia would clasp hands somewhere in eastern Ohio. And if they did, the Confederate Army infesting Pittsburgh would find itself in a very embarrassing position indeed.

Surrounded. Cut off from reinforcements, except perhaps by air. Cut off from resupply, with the same possible exception. Could Featherston’s men fly in enough fuel and ammo to keep a modern army functioning? Morrell didn’t know, but this whole two-pronged attack was based on the assumption that it was damned unlikely. And even if the Confederates could at first, would they be able to build transports as fast as U.S. fighters shot them down? He didn’t think so.

What
would
he do if he were Jake Featherston? Try to pull out of Pittsburgh and save what he could? Try to break the ring around the city from the outside? Try to do both at once? Did the CSA have the men and machines to do both at once? With every mile his barrels advanced, Irving Morrell doubted that more and more. At the front, Confederate armies remained formidable, even fearsome. But they were like an alligator that went, “I’ve been sick,” in an animated cartoon: all mouth, with no strength anywhere else. If you concentrated on the puny little legs and tail instead of the big end that chomped . . . “Well, let’s see how Jake likes this,” Morrell murmured, and he rolled on.

D
uring the Great War, Chester Martin would never have imagined hitching a ride on a barrel. For one thing, there hadn’t been so many of the lumbering monstrosities in the last fight. For another, a Great War barrel going flat out was faster than a man, but not by a whole hell of a lot.

Here at the end of 1942, though, things had changed. Most of Chester’s new platoon had attached itself to a platoon of barrels. They rumbled through Pennsylvania—or maybe they were in Ohio by now. One state didn’t look a whole lot different from another, especially when you were crashing along at fifteen or twenty miles an hour.

Every once in a while, the platoon had to fight. Sometimes the men would drop down from the barrels and shoot at startled Confederates. Sometimes they wouldn’t bother descending. A PFC from Chicago carried a captured Confederate submachine gun and sprayed bullets around from the back of a barrel. Chester kept thinking he should have been called Vito or something like that, but he was a big blond Pole named Joe Jakimiuk.