In at the Death (2 page)

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than fragments clattered off the barrel. They sounded like hail on a tin roof, which only proved you couldn’t go by sound.

“Lord help the infantry,” said Sergeant Mel Scullard, the gunner. He managed to put up with having a longtime gunner set over him—at least, he hadn’t tried to brain Pound with a wrench while the platoon commander slept.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Pound replied. “It does even out some, though. Nobody fires antibarrel rockets or armor-piercing rounds at them.”

“Goddamn stovepipe rockets,” Scullard said. “If I caught a Confederate with one of those things, I’d shove the launcher up his ass and then light off a round. And that, by God, would be that.”

“My, my. How the boys in the striped pants who put together the Geneva Convention would love you,” Pound said.

The gunner’s opinion of the Geneva Convention and its framers was blasphemous, scatological, and almost hot enough to ignite the ammunition stowed in the turret. Laughing, Pound wagged a forefinger at him. Scullard used a different finger a different way.

Pound peered through the periscopes set into the cupola. Had he been standing up, he could have used field glasses for a better view. Another rattle of sharp steel against the barrel’s armored skin reminded him there were times to be bold and times to be smart, and this sure as hell looked like a time to be smart.

And he could see enough, if not quite everything he wanted. “They’re coming, all right,” he said. “Infantry first—probably probing to find out where the mines are and whether we’ve got any weak spots. And when they find some, that’s where the barrels will try and get through.”

“Let the goddamn barrels come,” Scullard said. “They’ll regret it.”

In the first year and a half of the war, U.S. forces were sorry more often than not when they came up against C.S. barrels. Confederate machines had bigger guns, stronger engines, and thicker, better-sloped armor. But the newest U.S. models finally got it right. Their 3½-inch guns outclassed anything the enemy used, and their powerplants and protection also outdid the opposition. With problems elsewhere, the Confederates were slow to upgrade their barrels.

Some of the machines advancing now weren’t barrels at all, but squat, ugly assault guns. Pound, a purist, looked down his nose at them. But throw enough of them into the fight and something would probably give. Quantity had a quality of its own.

“What’s the range to those bastards?” he asked.

Scullard checked the rangefinder. “More than a mile and a half, sir. Even a hit at that range isn’t a sure kill—they’ve got thick glacis plates.”

“Take a shot at the lead machine anyway,” Pound said. “If you do kill it way the hell out there, the rest of them will know right away they’ve got a tough row to hoe.”

“I’ll do it, sir,” the gunner answered. Then he spoke to the loader: “Armor-piercing!”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Joe Mouradian said, and handed him a long, heavy cartridge with the nose painted black.

Scullard traversed the turret a little to the left. He peered through the rangefinder again, raised the gun, peered once more, muttered, and brought the cannon up a hair farther. Pound wouldn’t have hesitated so much. He had uncommon confidence in himself. He wasn’t always right, but he was always sure. He was sure he ought to keep quiet now. Scullard’s style was different from his, but the gunner usually hit what he aimed at.

If he didn’t hit here, Pound intended to say not a word. It
was
long range, even for a gun that fired on a fast, flat trajectory like the 3½-incher.

Boom!
Inside the turret, the noise wasn’t too bad. Right outside, it would have seemed like the end of the world. Michael Pound looked through the periscopes, hoping he could see the shot fall if it missed.

But it didn’t. The lead Confederate assault gun suddenly stopped. Greasy black smoke spurted from it. A hatch in the side opened. Somebody bailed out. More smoke belched from the hatch.

“Good shot!
Good
shot!” Pound thumped Scullard on the back. “Now kill the next one. The others will think twice about coming on after that.”

“I’ll try, sir,” the gunner said, and then, “AP again, Mouradian!”

“Right.” The loader slammed another round into the breech.

Scullard traversed the turret to the right. He fired again, then swore. That was a miss. Pound swore, too; he saw no puff of dust to mark where the shot came down. The wet weather complicated lives all kinds of ways.

Scullard tried again. This time, the shot went home. The assault gun slewed sideways and stopped, a track knocked off its wheels. The enemy could probably fix it, but that would take a while. In the meantime, it was out of the fight, a sitting duck. Odds were somebody would blast it before it got fixed.

Other U.S. barrels opened up. More C.S. assault guns and barrels got hit. Others stopped to return fire. Having expended three rounds from this spot, Pound figured it was time to move. They would have a good idea where he was, the same as if he’d lit three cigarettes on a match. He ordered the barrel back and to the left to a secondary firing position he’d marked out ahead of time.

Nobody ever said the Confederates lacked guts. They pressed the attack hard. Pound could see only his little part of it, like any soldier at the front. Thanks to the mines and the machine guns and the barrels and the fighter-bombers that swooped down on the enemy, the men in butternut never made it across the open ground and into the pine woods. They tried three different times, which only meant they paid a higher price for failure than if they’d left well enough alone after the first time.

When they sullenly pulled back late that afternoon, Pound said, “We ought to go after them. We might be able to walk right into Atlanta.”

“Easy to walk
into
Atlanta, sir,” Scullard said. “If we do, though, how many of us’ll walk out again?”

Pound grunted. Having seen what the fighting in Pittsburgh was like, he didn’t want to wind up on the other end of that. But watching the enemy get away went against all his instincts.

Then rockets started screaming down on the open ground in front of the woods and on the trees as well. Blast made even the heavy barrel shudder on its tracks. The Confederates were doing everything they could to discourage pursuit. He feared the foot soldiers were catching it hard.

Even so…“They won’t take Lawrenceville away from us like that,” he said.

“No, sir,” Scullard agreed. “We’ll likely try a flanking move from there, I bet. If we can make them leave Atlanta without us going in and taking it away from them, that sounds goddamn good to me.”

“To me, too,” Pound said. “The cheaper, the better.”

The order to move forward came early the next morning. The axis of the advance was southeast: not straight towards Atlanta, but deeper into central Georgia. That warmed the cockles of Michael Pound’s heart. It also told him that General Morrell, whom he’d known for many years, still had what it took. Morrell was all but inviting the Confederates in Atlanta to strike at his flank again. If they did, he would give them lumps.

They didn’t. Watching their first counterattack fail must have taught them something. Pound didn’t—wouldn’t—believe they’d lost too many men and too much equipment for another try. They’d counterattacked again and again, all the way down from the Ohio River—usually before they should have. And it had cost them a lot more than standing on the defensive and making U.S. forces come to them would have done. Maybe they were finally wising up.

But if they were, it was liable to be too late. If they didn’t come out of Atlanta, men and barrels in green-gray would curl around and cut them off from the east and south as well as from the north. And what would stop Irving Morrell’s armor from slashing across the rest of Georgia to Savannah and the Atlantic and cutting the Confederacy in half?

Nothing Second Lieutenant Pound could see.

Here and there, the Confederates still fought hard. The Freedom Party Guard units, in their mottled uniforms, had the best gear the CSA could give them and a vicious determination to use it. They took few prisoners, and mostly didn’t let themselves get captured. And their fanatical resistance got them…

Not very much. Jake Featherston didn’t have enough Guard outfits to go around. He didn’t come close. In between the towns they defended and the strongpoints they manned lay…again, not very much. Most Confederate soldiers, like most soldiers most places, weren’t so enthusiastic about dying for their country. Militias of beardless boys and old men mixed bolt-action Tredegars from the last war with hunting rifles and shotguns. Some of them were brave. It hardly mattered. They didn’t have what they needed to fight a real army.

Mel Scullard machine-gunned a kid who was running up to the barrel with a Featherston Fizz. The youngster fell. The burning gasoline from the bottle made his last minutes on earth even worse than they would have been otherwise.

With cold eyes, the gunner watched him die. “You want to play against the first team, sonny, you better bring your best game,” he said.

“That’s about the size of it,” Pound agreed. “And most of
their
first team is in Atlanta, and it’s doing them less and less good the longer it sits there. In the meantime, by God, we’ll just clean up their scrubs.”

C
assius began to think he might live through the war. Black guerrillas who took up arms against the CSA and the Freedom Party always hoped to live, of course. But hoping and believing were two different things. Sooner or later, he’d figured, Gracchus’ band would run out of luck. Then he’d either die on the spot or go to a camp the way his mother and father and sister had. Quick or slow, it would be over.

Now…Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t. He’d already watched U.S. fighter-bombers stoop on a truck convoy the Negroes stalled with a land mine planted in a pothole. What followed wasn’t pretty, which didn’t mean he didn’t like it. Oh, no—it meant nothing of the sort.

And the rumble and growl of artillery in the northwest wasn’t distant or on the edge of hearing any more. Now it grew into an unending roar, louder by the day and as impossible to ignore as a toothache. Whenever the guerrillas camped for the night, the same phrase was on their lips: “Damnyankees comin’ soon.”

They wanted the U.S. soldiers to get there soon. They would likely die if the U.S. soldiers didn’t. They called them damnyankees anyhow. There as in so many other things, they imitated Confederate whites. They found yellow women prettier than brown ones and much prettier than black ones. They liked straight hair better than kinky, sharp noses better than flat. In all of that, they were typical of the Confederacy’s Negroes.

The main way they weren’t typical was that they were still alive.

Not far away, trucks rattled through the darkness, bringing C.S. troops forward to try to stem the U.S. tide. The guerrillas let most convoys go. They couldn’t afford to get into many real fights with real soldiers. Gracchus had enough trouble scraping up new recruits as things were. Except for the scattered, harried rebel bands, not many Negroes were left in the Georgia countryside.

“Suppose the damnyankees come,” Cassius said, spooning up beans from a ration a Mexican soldier would never open now. “Suppose they come, an’ suppose they kill the Confederate sojers an’ the ofays who put on white shirts and yell, ‘Freedom!’ all the goddamn time.”

Gracchus was gnawing on a drumstick from a chicken liberated from a white man’s coop. “Then we wins,” he said, swallowing. “Then we starts puttin’ our lives back the way they was ’fo’ all this shit happen.”

In a way, that sounded wonderful. In another way…“How? How we do dat, boss?” Cassius asked. “All the Yankee sojers in the world ain’t gonna give me my ma an’ pa an’ sister back again. They ain’t gonna bring back all the niggers the ofays done killed. We is like ghosts of the folks what used to be here but ain’t no more.”

Gracchus scowled as he threw the leg bone aside. “
We
ain’t ghosts,” he said. “The ones who got killed, they’s ghosts. I bet this whole country have more hants’n you kin shake a stick at, this war finally done.”

Cassius didn’t exactly believe in hants. He didn’t exactly not believe in them, either. He’d never seen one, but so many people were sure they had, he had trouble thinking they were all crazy or lying. He did say, “Hants ain’t slowed down the ofays none.”

“Might be even worse without ’em,” another Negro said.

“How?” Cassius asked, and nobody seemed to want to answer that.

He didn’t want to take the argument with Gracchus any further. He didn’t want the guerrilla chieftain to think he was after that spot himself. As far as Cassius was concerned, Gracchus was welcome to it.

But, even if he kept quiet, he still thought he was right. Blacks in the CSA had had a vibrant life of their own, much of it lived right under the white majority’s noses. With so many Negroes dead, how would the survivors ever start that again? How could they even live alongside the whites who hadn’t tried to stop Freedom Party goons from stuffing them into trains for one-way journeys to camps, who’d often cheered to see them disappear? What could they be but a sad reminder of something that had once been alive but was no more? And if that wasn’t a ghost, what was it?

The next morning, a scout came back in high excitement. “The Mexicans, they’s pullin’ out!” he said.

“They ain’t goin’ up to the front to fight?” Gracchus asked. “You sure?”

“Sure as I’s standin’ here,” the scout replied. “They’s marchin’ south.”

“They ain’t here to fight the damnyankees,” Cassius said. “They is here to keep us in line.”

Francisco José’s men were less enthusiastic about going after Negroes than white Confederates were. But their being here let the Confederacy put more men in the field against the United States. They did inhibit the rebel bands…some.

“If they’s buggin’ out fo’ true, they must reckon the Confederate Army can’t hold the Yankees back no mo’.” Gracchus’ voice rose with excitement. “Do Jesus, I hope they’s right!”