Walk in Hell (15 page)

The buildings were not part of the Mormon defensive line, which only increased Mantarakis’ suspicions: the rebels fought from built-up positions till forced out of them by artillery or, more often, by the bayonet. But, before long, U.S. troops had not only occupied the Ordnance Depot buildings, they were firing from them on the Mormon defenses farther north. When an American aeroplane dropped a couple of bombs nearby—whether because it thought the enemy still held the depot or because it simply couldn’t aim worth a damn, Paul never knew—the soldiers shooting from it began waving a big Stars and Stripes to show under whose ownership it had passed.

Maybe the sight of the American flag in the ruins of the Ordnance Depot was some kind of signal. Paul never knew that, either. But, whether by plan or by coincidence, the ground rocked under his feet a couple of minutes later.

He staggered, stumbled, fell. “What the hell…?” he shouted while clods of earth rained down on him from the wall of the trench in which he’d been standing—and from on high, too, or so it seemed. He was afraid the whole trench would collapse.

Through the shaking, through the hideous din, Captain Schneider shouted, “Earthquake! I was in the Presidio in San Francisco ten years ago, and it was almost like this.” He managed to stay on his feet.

“Make it stop! Jesus, make it stop!” Ben Carlton howled. It would have taken Jesus to make it stop; that was surely beyond the power of an infantry captain, or even of Teddy Roosevelt himself.

Mantarakis succeeded in standing. The rumble had faded, leaving behind an awful silence. The sound that came through it was not one he had expected to hear in the wake of a natural catastrophe: it was cheering, and it was all coming from the Mormon lines.

Gordon McSweeney got up on the firing step, or on what was left of it after the ground had shaken. “The misbelievers are coming out of their trenches and moving forward in an attack,” he reported. His head turned to the left, so that he was looking west. For once, not even his stern rectitude was proof against merely human astonishment. “They’ve blown a hole in our lines you could drive a freight train through,” he burst out, his voice squeaking with surprise.

“What?” Paul got up there beside McSweeney. Sure enough, any resistance from the U.S. lines ended perhaps a quarter of a mile west of where he stood. A great haze of dust and smoke hung in the air west of that, but no U.S. gunfire was coming from the ground under the haze. And that ground, what little he could see of it, looked different: sagging, slumped.

Captain Schneider’s mouth fell open when he saw that. “It
wasn’t
an earthquake,” he said accusingly, as if angry at having been mistaken. “The filthy, stinking Mormons mined the ground under us, and touched off their charge when we got on top of it.”

He went on cursing in a harsh, steady monotone. Mantarakis didn’t blame him. It looked as if a whole great chunk had disappeared from the U.S. line—the U.S. line in an advance that had been, up till then, finally turning into the rout it should have been from the beginning.

Then a bullet cracked past his head. The Mormons weren’t trying to overwhelm only the part of the line they’d blown to kingdom come. They were aiming to take out all of it, to throw the Americans back as far as they could. Of itself, the Springfield jumped to Paul’s shoulder. He aimed and fired. A man in overalls went down, whether hit or diving for cover he couldn’t have said.

“Bad position to try to defend,” Captain Schneider muttered. “We don’t have a whole lot of wire in front of us.” He grabbed Carlton by the arm and pointed him west. “Go on down as far as there are any live men in the trench and tell them to fall back at a right angle to our line—or what used to be our line. We don’t want the Mormons to be able to roll us all up. They’ve got their breakthrough—we have to keep them from exploiting it too much.”

Carlton went. Mantarakis admired the captain’s presence of mind. In these circumstances, he himself was having enough trouble figuring out what he needed to do. Worrying about the bigger picture was altogether beyond him. Schneider was earning his pay today—assuming he lived to collect it. Right now, that didn’t look like the best bet in the world.

More and more Americans were shooting back at the Mormons now, but the enemy kept coming, some of them singing hymns as they advanced. They’d learned how to move forward against heavy fire, some shooting from cover to make their foes duck while others advanced. And they used their machine guns aggressively, manhandling the heavy weapons forward so they too could make the Americans keep their heads down.

“Jesus, you’d think we’d have killed all the damned Mormons in Utah by now,” Captain Schneider said. He was blazing away with the pistol he wore on his belt, and the enemy was close enough to the trench line for it to be about as effective a weapon as a Springfield.

“I wish we had,” Paul said with great sincerity. He was getting low on ammunition, and heaven only knew when more would come forward.

Three Mormons popped up out of a shell hole not fifty feet away. The winter sun pierced the haze rising from the exploded mine to glitter off the bayonets of the rifles they carried. Shouting the rebel battle cry—“Come, ye saints!”—they rushed for the trench.

Gordon McSweeney laughed the triumphant laugh of a man seeing the enemy delivered into his hands. He fired a single jet of flame that caught all three Mormons in it. Only one of them had even the chance to cry out. All three jerked and writhed and shrank, all in the blink of an eye, blackening into roasted husks like those of insects that littered the street below gas lamps of a summer’s evening.

“Come on!” McSweeney shouted. “Who wants the next dose? You might as well come ahead—you’re all going to hell, anyhow.”

The Mormons kept coming, up and down the line. Machine-gun fire hammered many of them into the ground, and McSweeney got to use his infernal weapon several more times. After that, the rebels avoided the stretch of trench where he was stationed; even their spirit proved to have limits. Here and there, they did break into the trench line, but they did not force the Americans out—not, at least, in the stretch where the line hadn’t been blown sky-high.

Farther west, Paul could trace the progress of the fighting only by where the gunfire was coming from. By the sound of it, the Mormons were pushing on south toward Clearfield through a gap that was bigger than he’d thought.

“How much dynamite did they pack underground, anyway?” he asked, as if anyone nearby had the slightest chance of knowing.

“Tons,” Captain Schneider said—not an exact answer, but one with plenty of flavor to it. “Has to be tons.” He shook his head in disbelief. “And if we’d been over there instead of over here—” That thought had already gone through Paul’s mind. If he’d been over there instead of over here, he’d have been blown up or buried or one of any number of other unpleasant possibilities. As things stood, all he had to worry about was getting shot. He hadn’t imagined that that could seem an improvement, but suddenly it did.

“What do we do now, sir?” he asked.

“Form a perimeter, try to hold on, hope there are enough government soldiers in Utah to patch something together again here,” the company commander answered.

Mantarakis nodded. Schneider gave straight answers, even if they weren’t the sort you were delighted to hear. If he was still alive tomorrow, and if he still remembered (he wondered which of those competing unlikelihoods was less likely), he’d have to tell the captain that.

Roger Kimball looked out from the conning tower of the
Bonefish
toward the northern bank of the Pee Dee. He hadn’t brought the submersible so far up the river this time as he had on his earlier run against the black rebels of the Congaree Socialist Republic, not yet, but he figured he’d end up going farther now than he’d managed then.

Tom Brearley stood up there with him. “What do you think of the new, improved model, Tom?” he asked his executive officer.

Brearley answered with the same serious consideration he usually showed: “You ask me, sir, the boat looked better before.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that,” Kimball admitted. “But who the hell ever thought they’d have to modify a sub to do gunboat duty?”

The plain truth was, nobody had ever thought of that. Nobody had imagined the need. But need and the
Bonefish
had been in the same place at the same time, and so…In the Charleston shipyard, they’d put steel armor all around the three-inch deck gun’s mount, so its crew could shelter against bullets from the riverbank. And they’d mounted the machine guns on circular slabs of iron with cutouts in them, so the gunners could revolve them with their feet to bear on any target. More steel armor coming up from the outer edges of the slabs gave the machine guns protection against rifle fire, too.

Kimball pointed toward the bank. “You ask me, that’s where our real improvement is.”

“Oh, the Marines? Yes, sir,” Brearley said. “This whole operation really makes you understand what the Army is talking about when it comes to how important seizing and holding ground is, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Kimball said, and then, under his breath, “To hell with the Army.” As far as he was concerned—as far as almost any Confederate States Navy officer was concerned—the Army was a dismal swamp that sucked up enormous sums of money, most of which promptly vanished without trace: money that could have gone for more battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines…

Marines, of course, were the Navy’s admission that some action on dry land did have to be contemplated every now and again, no matter how distasteful the notion might be. Somehow or other, somebody with pull had arranged to land a couple of companies of them at the mouth of the Pee Dee and have them work their way northwest along the river toward the black heart of the Congaree Socialist Republic.

Had Anne Colleton managed that? It was the sort of thing Kimball would have expected from her, but he didn’t know for a fact that she was alive. Whoever had thought of it, it was a good idea. The insurgent Negroes couldn’t ignore the Marines, and Kimball didn’t think any irregular troops in the world could stand against them.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a brisk
pop-pop
of small-arms fire broke out along the riverbank. He couldn’t see where the Negroes were; they’d concealed themselves in amongst the heaviest undergrowth they could find. But he knew where the Marines were; they’d made a point of keeping in touch with the
Bonefish
and apprising him of their position. He didn’t have to be a Jesuit to own enough logic to realize that the fellows who were shooting and weren’t Marines had to be the enemy.

“All right, boys,” he called to the gun crews. “Let’s show the people why they brought us to the dance.”

The machine gun on top of the conning tower opened up a split second before the one mounted on the rear deck. The racket was appalling. Kimball’s head started to ache. He tried to imagine standing next to a machine gun after a good, friendly night in port. The mere thought was plenty to make his headache worse.

He got the response for which he’d been hoping: the Negroes turned a machine gun of their own, either captured from Confederate forces or donated by the damnyankees, on the
Bonefish
. As soon as it started firing, he and Brearley ducked down the hatch into the conning tower. Being in there under machine-gun fire was like standing in a tin-roofed shed during one hell of a hailstorm.

But, in firing, the Negroes’ machine gun revealed its position. The
Bonefish
’s machine guns were not the only weapons that opened up on it: so did the deck gun, at what was point-blank range for a cannon. After six or eight shells went into the woods, bullets stopped clanging off the side of the conning tower.

Kimball, who was closer to the top than Brearley, grinned down at his exec. “With luck, we just wrecked their gun. Even without luck, we just put a crew who knew how to serve it out of action.”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley said. “The Negroes can’t have a whole lot of trained fighting men. The more of those we eliminate, the faster the rebellion as a whole will fall apart.”

“That’s right,” Kimball said. “Hell, these niggers haven’t been through conscription. Where are they going to come by the discipline they need to stand up against some of the best fighting men in the Confederate States?”

“Don’t know, sir,” Brearley answered. Then he went on, perhaps unwisely, “I never thought they had the discipline to stand up against whites any kind of way. If I’d known they could fight the way they’ve already shown, I’d have been for conscripting them along with us and letting ’em kill some Yankees.”

Kimball shook his head, so sharply that he almost smacked it against the inside of the conning tower. “Mr. Brearley, I have to tell you that’s a mistake.” He hadn’t called his executive officer by his surname since the first couple of days they were working together. “Suppose niggers do make soldiers. I don’t believe it for a minute, but suppose. Suppose we send ’em up into the trenches and they do help us lick the damnyankees and win the war. Then they come back home. Right? You with me so far?”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley answered. He sounded like a puppy that doesn’t understand why it’s just been paddled.

Normally, Roger Kimball would have felt some sympathy for him. Not now. He continued, “All right, the war is over, we whipped the Yankees, and we got, say, five divisions of nigger soldiers coming on home. What the hell do we do with ’em, Mr. Brearley? They’ve been up at the front. They’ve been killing white men. Hell, we’ve been payin’ ’em to kill white men. What are they gonna do when we tell ’em, ‘Good boys. Now go on back to the cotton field and the pushbroom and forget all about that business of shooting people’? You reckon they’re gonna pay much attention to us?”

The junior lieutenant didn’t answer right away. When at last he did, he said, “Seems to me, sir, if they fight for us, it’d be mighty hard to make ’em go back to being what they were before the war started. Thing of it is, though, it’s already gotten to be hard to put ’em back where they were. So many of ’em have gone to factories and such, making ’em into field hands again is going to be like putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.”