Drive to the East (75 page)

“Why couldn’t that blamed man say one way or the other?” he asked when he took it upstairs.

“You find out then, that’s all,” Elizabeth said. She was calmer than he was—and she wasn’t trying to find out what she’d be doing for the rest of the war.

Cincinnatus took a trolley to the recruiting station bright and early on the appointed day. He got there before it opened, and went across the street to a diner to get out of the cold. The guy behind the counter who served him a cup of coffee gave him a fishy look, but took his five cents without saying anything.

The one-handed sergeant got to the station when Cincinnatus was about halfway through the cup. He left it on the counter and limped over to find out what was what. The sergeant was getting his own pot of coffee going on a hot plate. He looked up without much surprise when the bell above the door jingled.

“Good morning, Mr. Driver,” he said. “You didn’t waste any time, did you?”

“No, suh—uh, no, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus said, and the noncom smiled at the self-correction. Cincinnatus wished he’d got it right the first time. He went on, “You gonna let me drive a truck, or shall I see what I can do in a war plant? Gotta do my bit some kind o’ way.”

Reaching into the top desk drawer, the recruiting sergeant pulled a sheet of Army stationery. “Here’s what Brigadier General Straubing has to say about you, Mr. Driver.” He set a pair of reading glasses on his nose. “ ‘I remember Cincinnatus well. He was a solid driver, clever and brave and resourceful. I have no doubts as to his loyalty or devotion to the United States.’ How’s that?”

“That’s—mighty fine, Sergeant. Mighty fine,” Cincinnatus said. “So you let me drive again?”

“We’ll let you drive,” the sergeant answered. “You said it yourself—if you go behind the wheel, a younger man gets to pick up a Springfield.”

“Ain’t quite what I said.” Cincinnatus knew he ought to leave it there, but he couldn’t. “What I said was, a white man gets to pick up a Springfield. I still don’t reckon that’s fair. Do Jesus, in the last war the Confederates let some o’ their colored men carry guns.”

“Yeah, and they’ve been regretting it ever since,” the sergeant said dryly. He held up his hook. “You can say it wouldn’t be like that here. You can say it, and I wouldn’t give you any grief about it, Mr. Driver, ’cause I think you’re likely right. But I don’t make the rules, and neither do you. The War Department says we’ll play the game like this, so we will. Do you want to do it, or don’t you? If you do, you’ve got about a million forms to fill out. If you don’t, well, thanks for stopping by.”

He had no give in him. He didn’t need to; the government backed him straight down the line. Cincinnatus sighed. “Let me have the damn forms. You ain’t what you oughta be, but you’re a damn sight better’n Jake Featherston.”

The sergeant had to go back to a filing cabinet to get the papers. “You’re a sensible man, Mr. Driver. The difference between bad and worse is a lot bigger than the difference between good and better.”

Cincinnatus started to answer, then stopped before he said anything. That would give him something to think about when he had the time. Now . . . paperwork. The recruiting sergeant had exaggerated, but not by much. Cincinnatus filled out forms till he got writer’s cramp—not an ailment he worried about very often.

Officially, he wasn’t joining the Army. Officially, he was becoming a civilian employee of the U.S. government.
The undersigned agrees, acknowledges, and accepts that his duties may require him to enter areas not definitively known to be safe.
He wasn’t sure what
definitively
meant, but he signed anyway. He knew he wasn’t going to be driving from Idaho to Minnesota.

For purposes of self-protection, employees hired for the aforementioned duty may be permitted to carry firearms,
another form told him. He looked at the recruiting sergeant. “The Confederates catch me with a gun, they gonna shoot my ass,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” the sergeant answered. “If they catch you without a gun, they’ll shoot your ass anyway.” Since Cincinnatus couldn’t very well argue with that, he signed again.

At last, only one sheet of paper was left: a loyalty oath. Cincinnatus signed that, too, then set down the pen and shook his hand back and forth to work out the kinks. “Lot o’ paper to go through,” he said. “What do I do next?”

“Go home,” the sergeant told him, which caught him by surprise. “Bring a suitcase—a
small
suitcase—with you Monday morning. You report to the State Capitol, room . . . 378. After that, you do what they tell you.”

“All right. Thank you kindly, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus said.

“Thank
you,
Mr. Driver. You said it—you’re doing your bit.” The sergeant looked down at his hook for a moment, then up at Cincinnatus again. “And if you have to use a gun, make it count.”

“I do that, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus promised. “Yes, suh. I do that.”

A
clear predawn morning in mid-January. When Irving Morrell looked west, he saw red flares in the sky—Confederate recognition signals. When he looked east, he saw more red flares. The Confederates to the east and west could probably see each other’s flares, too. Only twenty or thirty miles separated them, twenty or thirty miles and the force Morrell commanded.

So far, the C.S. rescue force pushing east hadn’t been able to reach the men trapped in and around Pittsburgh. Morrell didn’t intend that they should, either. He turned to his wireless man. “Send ‘Rosebud’ to Philadelphia, Jenkins,” he said.

“ ‘Rosebud.’ Yes, sir.” The wireless operator didn’t know what the code phrase meant. He sent it anyway. A moment later, he nodded to Morrell. “Received, sir.”

“Good,” Morrell said. “Now we see how they like that.”

“Yes, sir,” Jenkins repeated. “Uh, what’s it all about, sir?”

Morrell didn’t think the wireless man could be a Confederate plant. He didn’t think so, but he didn’t take any chances, either. “It means Featherston’s fuckers are going to have some tough sledding, that’s what,” he said. That seemed safe enough—the younger man still didn’t know where or how.

He could have meant sledding literally. Snow blanketed eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Everywhere he looked, everything was white—except for the soot smears that marked burnt-out barrels, wrecked strongpoints, and other works of man.

Artillery boomed, off to the north. Those were U.S. guns, throwing death at the Confederates pushing in from the west. The men in butternut who hung on around Pittsburgh hadn’t pushed west to try to join them. Maybe they were too short of fuel to move. By now, Featherston’s transport aircraft had taken a devil of a beating. And they were flying in from farther and farther away, too, as U.S. bombers plastered their fields.

Had Morrell been running the Confederates’ show, he would have ordered the C.S. troops in Pittsburgh to break out no matter what. Yes, they would have given up the city. Yes, they would have taken losses. But if they’d done it soon enough, they would have saved most of their men and some—maybe a lot—of their equipment. Now they were in real trouble.

That didn’t break Morrell’s heart. For the first year of the war, everything Jake Featherston tried seemed golden. He’d jumped on the United States with both feet. He’d held the USA down, too, even though he ran a smaller country. That had really alarmed Morrell. Featherston didn’t just intend to lick the United States. He intended to conquer them. Morrell wouldn’t have believed it was possible—till the Confederates cut the USA in half.

After that, it was hang on tight and try to survive. Looking back on things, the U.S. counteroffensive in Virginia was ill-conceived. Sure, charge right into the teeth of the enemy’s defenses. Featherston had known the United States were coming, and he’d baked a cake—a reinforced-concrete cake. Fredericksburg? The Wilderness? Nobody in his right mind would want to attack in places like those.

That didn’t stop Daniel MacArthur, of course. He attacked, and paid for it, and attacked again, and got another bloody nose. He hurt the CSA, too, but not in proportion.

“Sir, there’s enemy pressure near Cambridge,” Jenkins reported.

“Is there?” Morrell said. The men and barrels in butternut would be coming along the east-west highway that went through the manufacturing town. A north-south road also ran through Cambridge. Morrell and the couple of dozen barrels he personally commanded were in bivouac along it, a few miles south of the place. Charging to the attack was a major’s job, not a one-star general’s. All at once, Morrell didn’t care. “Then let’s hit them, shall we?”

Within twenty minutes, his barrels were rolling north. The sun came up as they got moving. Infantrymen accompanied them, some riding barrels, some in trucks, some in half-tracked troop carriers that could cross ground where even a four-wheel-drive truck bogged down. When the fighting started, the foot soldiers would jump out and go to work.

The Confederates had stalled just outside of Cambridge. Morrell could see why: it was a tough nut to crack. It sat on a rise, and dominated the ground on which Featherston’s men had to approach. Several butternut barrels burned. But there was already fighting just outside the town. The chatter of automatic weapons made Morrell grind his teeth. The Confederates had plenty of firepower.

Still, he was hitting them in the flank when all their attention was focused ahead of them. “Front!” he called to his gunner.

“Identified!” Frenchy Bergeron answered, a quarter of a heartbeat slower than he should have. Maybe Morrell was overcritical; maybe Michael Pound had spoiled him for other gunners. Morrell yelled to the driver. The barrel stopped. The gun slewed a few degrees to the left. It roared.

“That’s a hit!” Morrell whooped with glee as the C.S. barrel caught fire. A pair of crewmen got out and ran for the closest trees. They didn’t make it. Morrell picked another target. “Front!—the one next to the upside-down auto.”

“Identified!” Bergeron sang out. The turret traversed again. The cannon shouted. The Confederate barrel went up in flames. Morrell whooped again.

For two or three minutes, the U.S. machines had it all their own way. Their enemies didn’t seem to realize where the devastating fire was coming from. Then the Confederates rallied. Most of their barrels were new models, with the well-sloped armor and the big gun. When they turned toward the U.S. barrels on their flank, they suddenly became much harder to knock out. And those three-inch guns began taking a toll on the barrels Morrell led.

But in confronting Morrell’s barrels, the Confederates left themselves vulnerable to the U.S. defenders holed up in Cambridge. The force in the town didn’t seem to have many barrels, but did have plenty of antibarrel cannons. Those began picking off the C.S. barrels that turned to expose their thinner side armor to them.

A clear day had disadvantages as well as advantages. Confederate Asskickers screamed down out of the sky to bomb the antibarrel cannons. The dive bombers put several guns out of action in the space of a few minutes. Asskickers were hideously vulnerable to U.S. fighters, but no U.S. fighters seemed to be in the neighborhood. They were probably out chasing Pittsburgh-bound transports.

Morrell swore under this breath, and then over it. No matter how you tried, the pieces didn’t all fit together the way you wanted them to. If everything worked the way you hoped it would, you’d win the war in a couple of weeks, and you’d hardly take any casualties. If . . .

Fortunately, the Fuckup Fairy visited both sides. Considering all the Confederates trapped in the Pittsburgh pocket, she’d sprinkled more of her magic dust on Jake Featherston lately than she had on the U.S. General Staff. And if that wasn’t a miracle of rare device, Morrell had never seen one.

He ducked down into the turret to use his fancy wireless set. “Close with them!” he called to his crews. “Front to front, they can hurt us from farther away than we can hurt them. If we get in close, it evens out.”

What had Horatio Nelson said?
No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy,
that was it. Nelson had a better turn of phrase than Irving Morrell. They both thought the same way, though.

Engine growling, Morrell’s barrel raced forward. His driver had got the order along with the others. A couple of bullets clanked off the machine’s steel hull. Bullets didn’t matter. Confederate foot soldiers could shoot at the barrel till the cows came home. A three-inch armor-piercing round, unfortunately, was another story.

It was a wild melee, there on the snow-covered fields. The two barrel forces got within point-blank range of each other. Whoever shot first won. U.S. barrel turrets had hydraulic traverse. The Confederates had to crank theirs around by hand. It gave the green-gray barrels a small edge on the ones painted butternut.

And the antibarrel fire from Cambridge didn’t stop. After as wild a half hour as Morrell had known, the Confederates sullenly drew back. They’d lost fifteen or twenty barrels, and taken out about half as many U.S. machines. “We smashed ’em, sir!” Bergeron exclaimed.

“Maybe,” Morrell said. “I hope so. But maybe they’re just waiting till reinforcements come forward. If they are, we’ve got some problems.” He smiled. That was putting it mildly. He didn’t know where he would find reinforcements. The Confederates had stretched him about as thin as they’d stretched themselves. If what he had here and what was in Cambridge couldn’t stop Featherston’s men, they might link up with their trapped comrades after all.

That wouldn’t be good. Not even slightly.

He drew back to the outskirts of the town. He had more cover for his remaining barrels there. The Confederates had got themselves mired in a big house-to-house fight in Pittsburgh. If they tried coming this way again, he aimed to give them a smaller one in Cambridge.

Time crawled by. The Confederates didn’t return to the attack. Maybe they couldn’t scrape together any more reinforcements after all. Morrell hoped not. They’d already put in a stronger attack from the west than he’d expected. They were bastards—no doubt about that. But they were formidable bastards—no doubt about that, either.