The Grapple (81 page)

Somewhere between five and ten minutes went by. Then the United States opened up with everything they’d shown the Confederate officers and more besides. Jorge didn’t think he’d ever gone through a bombardment like this. Fighter-bombers stooped on the C.S. line and added their weight of hellfire to the mix. He heard shrieks through the thunder of exploding ordnance. Jorge carried a rosary in his pocket, and fingered the beads to thank God and the Virgin that his own shrieks weren’t among them.

Wise in the Yankees’ ways, he popped up from his hole the instant the barrage lifted. Sure as the devil, soldiers in green-gray scrambled forward. He shot one of them. Another alert Confederate nailed a different one. The rest hit the dirt or ducked behind trees. But they weren’t giving up. That would have been too much to ask for. They kept on coming. They just didn’t think it would be a walkover any more.

More shells and some mortar bombs started dropping on the Confederates. Shouts and curses off to the left warned that enemy troops had reached and were probably piercing the line there. A moment later, enfilading fire made the probability a sure thing.

“Back!” Sergeant Blackledge yelled. Jorge might have known nothing the USA fired at the Confederates could hurt him. “They’ll cut us off if we stay!”

“The sergeant’s right!” Captain Boyd added, perhaps relieved Blackledge spoke up before he had to. “We need to save ourselves!”

Jorge didn’t want to get out of his hole, any more than a mouse wanted to come out into the middle of the floor. Bullets and flying fragments did dreadful things to soft, tender flesh. But he’d get captured or killed if he stayed here. Out he came, and ran up the north slope of Kennesaw Mountain toward one of the two crests.

A bullet slammed into a tree trunk just to his left. A big shell burst behind him—at least a six-incher. None of the fragments tore into him, but blast—a St. Bernard puppy the size of a building—picked him up and shook him and dropped him on his face. He scrambled up again, knowing he was lucky to be able to. Blast could kill all by itself. Had that shell come down a little closer…

Best not to think of such things. He ducked behind another tree to see how close the damnyankees were. Two or three were too damn close for comfort. He fired at them. They went down, though he didn’t think he’d hit them. But he would have done the same thing in their boots. Why take chances when you were winning?

“Way to go, Rodriguez,” Sergeant Blackledge said from behind another tree. He seemed to be everywhere at once. “Make ’em earn it, by God. They won’t come on like their pants are on fire now, the bastards.”

“Sure, Sarge.” Jorge hadn’t thought of anything more than saving his own skin. He still wasn’t sure he could do that. The U.S. major hadn’t been kidding. The United States put a rock in their fist before they hit Kennesaw Mountain. More shells came down. He huddled in what wasn’t enough shelter.
“¡Madre de Dios!”
When he got scared into Spanish, things were pretty bad. “What can we do?”

“Try and stay alive.” As usual, Blackledge was relentlessly pragmatic. “Try and find some place where we can make a stand, slow the shitheels down. Try and hit back when they give us the chance. Sooner or later, they will—I hope.” He swore, plainly wishing he hadn’t tacked on the last two words.

“Marietta’s gonna fall, isn’t it?” Jorge asked. The sergeant didn’t answer. For a second, Jorge thought he didn’t hear. Then he realized the noncom didn’t want to say yes. If Marietta fell, Atlanta was in deep trouble. If Atlanta fell, the Confederate States were in deep trouble. And Marietta
would
fall, which meant….

P
urple martins perched in the shattered trees in the park square at the center of Marietta. The birds were flying south for the winter; they didn’t care that the trees had taken a beating. There were still plenty of bugs in the air. All the artillery in the world couldn’t kill bugs.

Chester Martin, in green-gray, didn’t care that the trees were burned and scarred, either. As far as he was concerned, the Confederate States were getting what was coming to them. And he hoped he was going south for the winter. Atlanta wasn’t that far away. How much did the enemy have between here and there? Enough? He didn’t think so.

A man with a white mustache hung from a lamppost. A sign around his neck said,
I SHOT AT U.S. SOLDIERS
. He’d been there a couple of days, and was starting to swell and stink. Chester hardly looked at him. Maybe he’d do a little good; maybe he wouldn’t. Confederate bushwhackers and diehards and holdouts and red-ass civilians kept on harrying the occupiers all the way back to the Ohio River. Hostages kept dying because of it. Which side would run out of will first remained unclear.

The trees in the park weren’t all that had been shattered in Marietta. The Confederates fought hard to hold it. Not many houses were whole. Glassless windows might have been the eye sockets of skulls. Scorch marks scored clapboard. Chunks of walls and chunks of roofs bitten by shellfire gave the skyline jagged edges.

And Marietta’s people seemed as ravaged as the town. They were skinny and dirty, many of them with bandages or simply rags wrapped around wounds. They stared at the U.S. troops trudging south through their rubble-strewn streets with eyes that smoldered. Nobody said anything much, though. As Chester had seen in other Confederate towns, his buddies were quick to resent insults. A man with a rifle in enemy country could make his resentment felt.

A scrawny woman whose hair flew every which way cocked a hip in a pose meant to be alluring. “Sleep with me?” she called.

“Jesus!” said one of the soldiers in Chester’s squad. “I’ve been hard up before, but not
that
hard up.”

“Yeah.” Chester nodded. “I think she’s a little bit cracked. Maybe more than a little bit.”

An old man whose left sleeve hung empty scowled at him. Chester nodded back, more politely than not. He understood honest hate, and could respect it. He wondered if the respect he showed might change the Confederate’s mind. It didn’t, not by the look on the man’s face. Chester didn’t suppose he should have been surprised.

A burnt-out C.S. barrel sat inside the ruins of a brick house. The last few feet of the barrel’s gun poked out through a window. The gun tube sagged visibly. Eyeing it, Chester said, “Must’ve been a hell of a fire.”

“Yeah, well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys,” said the soldier who didn’t want the scrawny woman.

Chester grunted. He didn’t love Confederate barrelmen. What U.S. soldier did? Those enemies were too good at killing his pals. But he didn’t like to think of them cooking like beef roasts in a fire so hot it warped solid steel. That was a bad way to go, for anybody on either side. He wanted the enemy barrel crew dead, sure. Charred to black hideousness? Maybe not.

“Come on, step it up!” Lieutenant Lavochkin yelled. “We aren’t camping here. We’re just passing through, heading for Atlanta.”

Chester looked forward to fighting for Atlanta the way he looked forward to a filling without novocaine. Atlanta was a big city, bigger than Chattanooga. The United States couldn’t take it by surprise, the way they had with the Tennessee town. If U.S. forces tried smashing straight into it, wouldn’t the Confederates do unto them as the USA had done to the Confederacy in Pittsburgh? Fighting one house at a time was the easiest way Chester knew to become a casualty.

Maybe the brass had a better plan. He hoped like hell they did. But if so, nobody’d bothered passing the word down to an overage retread first sergeant.

A kid wearing what looked like his big brother’s dungarees said, “Get out of my country, you damnyankee.”

“Shut up, you lousy brat, or I’ll paddle your ass.” Chester gestured with his rifle. “Scram. First, last, and only warning.”

To his relief, the kid beat it. You didn’t want to think a nine-year-old could be a people bomb, but he’d heard some ugly stories. Boys and girls didn’t fully understand what flicking that switch meant, which made them more likely to do it. And soldiers sometimes didn’t suspect children till too late.

“Hell of a war,” Chester muttered.

Some of his men liberated three chickens to go with their rations. They didn’t have time to do anything but roast poorly plucked chicken pieces over a fire. The smell of singeing feathers took Chester back half a lifetime. He’d done the same thing in the Great War. Then as now, a drumstick went a long way toward making your belly stop growling.

He was smoking a cigarette afterwards when a grenade burst not far away. Somebody screamed. A burst of fire from a submachine gun was followed by another shriek.

“Fuck,” said a soldier named Leroy, who was more often called the Duke.

“Never a dull moment,” Chester agreed. “We’re licking these bastards, but they sure haven’t quit.”

As if to prove it, the Confederates threw in a counterattack the next day. Armor spearheaded it: not barrels, but what seemed more like self-propelled guns on tracked chassis. They weren’t mounted in turrets, but pointed straight ahead. That meant the enemy driver had to line up his machine on a target instead of just traversing the turret. The attack bogged down south of Marietta. A regiment of U.S. barrels made the C.S. barrelbusters say uncle.

Chester examined a wrecked machine with a professional’s curiosity. “What’s the point of these, sir?” he asked Captain Rhodes. A U.S. antibarrel round had smashed through the side armor. He didn’t want to think about what the crew looked like. You could probably bury them in a jam tin.

“These things have to be cheaper to build than barrels, and quicker to build, too,” the company commander answered. “If you’ve got to have as much firepower as you can get, and if you need it yesterday, they’re a lot better than nothing.”

“I guess,” Chester said. “Ugly damn thing, isn’t it?”

“Now that you mention it, yes—especially if you’re on the wrong end of it,” Rhodes said. “Get used to it, Sergeant. You can bet your ass you’ll see more of them.”

He was bound to be right. And if they were cheap and easy to make…“What do you want to bet we start cranking ’em out, too?”

Captain Rhodes looked startled, but then he nodded. “Wouldn’t be surprised. Anything they can do, we can do, too. We’re lucky we’ve kept our lead in barrels as long as we have. Maybe the Confederates were too busy with these things to pay as much attention to those as they should have.”

“Breaks my heart,” Martin said dryly.

The company commander laughed—but not for long. “Be ready for a push of our own, soon as we can move more shit forward. When the Confederates hit us, they use stuff up faster than they can resupply. Might as well kick ’em while they’re down.”

“Mm?” Chester weighed that, then nodded. “Yeah, I bet you’re right, sir. I’ll get the men ready. You think we’re going into Atlanta?”

“Christ, I hope not!” Rhodes blurted, which was about what Chester was thinking himself. Rhodes went on, “We do try to go straight in there, a lot of us’ll come out in a box.”

“Looks like that to me, too. So what do we do instead?” Chester asked. “Just bomb it flat? Or maybe try and flank ’em out?”

“My guess is, we go that way.” Captain Rhodes pointed east. “We do that, we cut the direct train and truck routes between Richmond and Atlanta. Yeah, the Confederates can get around it, but we put ourselves in a good position for hitting the lines and the roads coming up from the south. I’d sure rather do that than charge in with my head down.”

“Me, too,” Chester said fervently. “Amen, in fact. You think the brass has the smarts to see it like you do?”

“Well, we’ll find out,” Rhodes replied with a dry chuckle. But he didn’t seem too downcast. “Start of this campaigning season, we were chucking the Confederates out of Ohio. Now they’re trying to get us out of Georgia. I think maybe General Morrell knows what he’s doing.”

“Here’s hoping,” Chester said, which made the company commander laugh out loud.

The U.S. push went in three days later. The Confederates had done what they could to build a line south of Marietta, and it held for most of a day, but once U.S. armor cracked it the enemy didn’t have much behind it. Then Confederates fired what had to be half the rockets in the world at the advancing men in green-gray. They were scary—hell, they were terrifying. They caused casualties, not a few of them. But, without enough men in butternut on the ground to hold it, the rockets couldn’t stop the U.S. forces.

And the main axis of the U.S. attack aimed not at Atlanta but at Lawrenceville, almost due east of Marietta. Captain Rhodes looked uncommonly smug. Chester Martin didn’t say boo. How could he? The captain had earned the right.

Heavy bombers and fighter-bombers stayed overhead all the time, tearing up the countryside south of the U.S. advance and keeping the Confederates in and around Atlanta from striking at the U.S. flank. Lots and lots of artillery fire came down on the enemy, too. Chester approved of every single shell and wished there were more.

Every time U.S. forces crossed a railroad line, demolition teams tore hell out of it. Every time U.S. forces crossed a paved road that ran north and south, engineers dynamited bridges and blew craters in the roadway. Even if the Confederates rallied and drove back the men in green-gray, they wouldn’t move much into or out of Atlanta any time soon.

For the first time, Confederate prisoners seemed to lose heart. “Thanks for not shootin’ me,” one of them said as he went to the rear with his hands high. “Reckon we’re whipped any which way.”

“See what Featherston’s freedom got you?” Chester said.

“Well, we’re rid of most of our niggers, anyways, so
that’s
good,” the POW said. “But hell, Yank, you’re right—we coulda done that without gettin’ in another war with y’all.”

“You started it,” Chester said. “We’ll finish it.”

Freedom Party Guards, by contrast, still believed they’d win. “Wait till the secret weapons get you,” said a man in camouflage overalls. “You’ll be sorry then.”

“Yeah, the bogeyman’ll get you if you don’t watch out,” Chester jeered. The captured Confederate glared at him. Under the guns of half a dozen soldiers in green-gray, he couldn’t do more, not if he wanted to keep breathing. “Take him away,” Chester said. “Let him try his line of bullshit on the Intelligence boys.”