The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  Moss didn’t argue with that. His middle-aged bones thought anything was better than sleeping on bare ground. War was a young man’s game. As a fighter pilot, he’d made up in experience what he lacked in exuberance. Even so, he’d needed more rest and more regular rest than his young comrades, and he wasn’t able to fly as many missions.

  Here, on the ground in Georgia, his years shoved themselves in his face in all kinds of ways. He got tired. He got hungry. When the shooting started, he got scared. Spartacus’ black guerrillas were mostly young and entirely fearless. When they attacked whites, they did it with a fierce joy, almost an exaltation, that left him admiring and astonished. He didn’t think he’d ever felt that ferocious in an airplane over Canada in the last war.

  Of course, he hadn’t had such good reasons for ferocity, either.

  He went into one of the cabins. It smelled all musty; it had been deserted for some time, and water and mold had their way inside. But even brand-new, it would have indicted the system that produced it. No running water. No plumbing. No electricity. No gas. Not even a wood-burning stove—all the cooking was done over a fireplace.

  “I’ve seen horses with better stalls than this,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Nick Cantarella nodded. “Tell you something else, too—horses deserve better than this. So do people.”

  Not much was left inside the cabin to show how the people who used it had lived. A cheap pine stool lay tumbled in a corner. A few dishes, just as cheap, some of them broken, sat on a counter. When Moss put the stool back on its legs, he found a rag doll, face leprous with mildew, forgotten behind it. Did some little colored girl cry and cry because that doll was lost? He’d never know now, any more than he’d know whether that little girl was still alive.

  “Can’t even light a fire,” Cantarella grumbled. “Anybody white sees smoke coming out of the chimney, he’ll sic the Mexicans on us.”

  “Yeah, well, it could be worse,” Moss said. “They could have guys after us who really want to fight.”

  Nick Cantarella laughed, though he wasn’t kidding. Francisco José’s soldiers rapidly discovered the black guerrillas were desperately in earnest. Spartacus’ men didn’t need long to figure out that the soldiers from the Empire of Mexico weren’t, at least if not under direct attack. The Mexicans didn’t want to be in Georgia. They resented C.S. whites almost as much for making them come up here as they resented C.S. blacks for having the gall to shoot back. It wasn’t quite a plague on both your houses, but it came close.

  “What do we have for food?” Cantarella asked.

  “I’ve got some ham and cornbread. How about you?”

  “Cornbread, too, and I’ve still got a couple of ration cans from that dead Mexican we found.” Cantarella grimaced. “Damned if I know how the Confederates go on eating that slop. I mean, the stuff we have is lousy, but this is a hell of a lot worse.”

  “It’s pretty bad,” Moss agreed. Pilots ate better than soldiers in the field—most of the time, anyway. He went on, “It’s better than what we got in Andersonville, though, except when the Red Cross packages came through.” Rations for POWs were supposed to be the same as what the captor’s soldiers got. Theory was wonderful—either that or the Confederate States were in more trouble than anybody north of the Mason-Dixon Line suspected.

  They shared what they had. It filled their bellies, although a chef at the Waldorf-Astoria—or even a mess sergeant—would have turned up his nose, or more likely his toes. Despite lacking a fire, Moss appreciated being able to sleep with a wall, no matter how drafty, between him and the outside world. What Georgia called winter had been mild by the standards of Ontario or Chicago, but it still got chilly. Spring days were warmer. Spring nights didn’t seem to be.

  Then again, Moss suspected he could sleep through an artillery duel in the middle of a blizzard. Any chance for sleep he got, he grabbed with both hands. He knew his age was showing, knew and didn’t care.

  Captain Cantarella shook him awake much too early the next morning. Any time before the next afternoon would have been too early, but the sun was barely over the horizon. Moss’ yawn almost made the top of his head fall off. “Already?” he croaked.

  “’Fraid so,” Cantarella answered. “They’ve got coffee going out there, if that makes you feel any better.”

  “Not much,” Moss said, but he sat up. “What they call coffee’ll be nothing but that goddamn chicory, anyhow.”

  “Maybe a little bit of the real bean,” Cantarella said. “And chicory’ll open your eyes, too.”

  “Yeah, but it tastes like you’re drinking burnt roots,” Moss said.

  “That’s ’cause you are,” Cantarella said cheerfully. “If you don’t get your ass in gear, though, you won’t get to drink any burnt roots, on account of everybody else will have drunk ’em all up.” There was a threat to conjure with. Moss got to his feet. He creaked and crunched, but he made himself move.

  After a tin cup full of essence of burnt roots—and maybe a little bit of the real bean—life looked better, or at least less blurry. Moss munched on a chunk of cornbread. Spartacus squatted beside him. “Nigger come out from Americus in the night,” the guerrilla leader remarked. “He say there’s a train comin’ we gots to blow. Gots to sabotage.” He spoke the last word with sardonic relish.

  And Jonathan Moss liked the idea of striking a train better than he liked going into these half-assed Georgia towns and shooting them up. Shooting up a town annoyed the Confederates and made them flabble. Wrecking a train, though, meant the men and munitions aboard either wouldn’t get into the fight against the USA or would get there late. “Sounds good,” he said. “What’s on this one? Do you know?”

  “Oh, I know, all right.” Spartacus sounded thoroughly grim. “Niggers is on it.”

  “Huh?” Even after the mostly ersatz coffee, Moss wasn’t at his best.

  “Niggers,” Spartacus repeated. “From No’th Carolina, I reckon. They’s headin’ for them camps. They git there, they don’t come out no mo’. So we gots to make sure they ain’t gonna git there.”

  Rescuing a trainload of blacks wouldn’t do the USA much good, but Moss didn’t even dream of trying to talk the guerrilla chieftain out of it. Spartacus had his own worries, his own agenda. When those took him on a track that also helped the United States, he didn’t mind. When they didn’t, he didn’t care.

  One of his men knew more about dynamiting train tracks than Nick Cantarella did, and Cantarella was no blushing innocent. The U.S. officer did suggest a diversionary raid a few miles away to give the explosives man—his name, also likely a nom de guerre, was Samson—a chance to work undisturbed. Spartacus liked that. “Sneaky fucker, you,” he said, nothing but admiration in his voice.

  He sent off a few of his men to shoot at trucks on the highway. That would be plenty to draw the Confederates’ attention—and that of their Mexican stooges, too. The rest of the band lurked close by where Samson did his job.

  The train pushed a heavily laden flat car ahead of the locomotive. That kept Samson’s bomb from wrecking the engine itself. Against some kinds of sabotage, it might have mattered. But the bomb still made the train stop. Then the guerrillas sprayed the engine and the men inside with gunfire. Steam plumed from the punctured boiler.

  Some of Spartacus’ men ran forward to open the passenger cars and freight cars in the train. Others stayed back to cover them. Jonathan Moss was one of those who hung back—he doubted the Negroes in there would welcome any white face just then.

  Blacks began spilling out, more and more and more of them. “Sweet Jesus!” Cantarella said. “How many smokes did those Freedom Party bastards cram in there?”

  “Too many,” Moss said, and then, “Now I believe every atrocity story I ever heard. You don’t pack people in like that if you don’t mean to dispose of them.”

  He watched in horrified fascination as the Negroes scattered over the countryside. They didn’t know where they were going, where they would sleep, or what—if a
nything—they would eat. But they were sure of one thing, and so was he: whatever happened to them here, they would be better off than if this train got to where it was going.

  Most of the time, Irving Morrell didn’t like getting called back to Philadelphia for consultation. Some things, though, were too big to plan on the back on an envelope. What to do once the USA drove the CSA out of Ohio seemed to fall into that category.

  Brigadier General John Abell met him at the Broad Street Station. The tall, thin, pale General Staff officer was as much a product of the War Department as Morrell was of the field. Morrell was sure Abell distrusted him as much as he distrusted the other man, and for reasons probably mirroring his own.

  “Good to see you under these circumstances,” Abell said, shaking his hand.

  “Good to be here under these circumstances,” Morrell answered. Better by far to come to Philadelphia to plan the next attack than to figure out how to defend the city. More than eighty years had passed since a Confederate army reached Philadelphia. Morrell devoutly hoped the city never saw another one.

  As they walked from the station to the auto Abell had waiting, the General Staff officer said, “When we beat the Confederates this time, we’re going to beat them so flat, they’ll never give us trouble again. We’ll beat them so flat, they won’t even think about raising a hand against us from now on.”

  “I like that,” Morrell said. The enlisted man driving the government-issue Chevrolet sprang out to open the back door for his exalted passengers. After Morrell slid into the green-gray auto, he went on, “Can we bring it off?”

  “Militarily? I think we can. It won’t be easy or cheap, but we can do it.” Abell sounded coldly confident. “We can, and we need to, and so we will.” As if to underscore his determination, the Chevy rolled by a downed Confederate bomber. Behind a barricade of boards on sawhorses, technicians swarmed over the airplane, partly to see if the enemy had come up with anything new and partly to salvage whatever they could.

  “Oh, yeah—I think we can whip ’em, too,” Morrell said. “But we have to occupy them once we do. Otherwise, they’ll just start rearming on the sly the way they did after the Great War.”

  John Abell nodded. “You and I are on the same page, all right.” He let out a small chuckle; they’d known each other for close to thirty years, and that wasn’t the kind of thing either one of them said every day. Then he went on, “Plans for doing that are already being prepared.”

  “Good. Are the planners working out how much it’ll cost us?” Morrell asked. Abell made a questioning noise. Morrell explained: “They hate us down there. They hate us bad. Maybe they hate their own Negroes worse, but maybe they don’t, too. And it’s awful easy to make a guerrilla war hurt occupiers these days. Auto bombs. People bombs. Land mines. Time bombs. These goddamn newfangled rockets. It was bad when we tried to hold down Houston and Kentucky. It’ll be worse now. ‘Freedom!’” He added the last word with sour emphasis.

  General Abell looked pained—not so much for the wit, Morrell judged, as for what lay behind it. “Maybe it’s a good thing you’re here for more than one reason,” Abell said. “You ought to write an appreciation with all that in mind.”

  “No one will appreciate it if I do,” Morrell said.

  That made Abell look more pained still. But he said, “You might also be surprised. We’re looking at this. We’re looking at it very seriously, because we think we need to. If you point out some pitfalls, that will be to everyone’s advantage—except the Confederates’, of course.”

  He was serious. The War Department was serious, then: whatever else you could say about John Abell, he made a good weather vane. “If we occupy the CSA, we won’t even pretend to be nice people any more,” Morrell warned. “It’ll be like Utah, only more so. We’ll have to kill anybody who gives us a hard time, and maybe kill the guy’s brother-in-law to make sure he doesn’t give us a hard time afterwards.”

  “That is the working assumption, yes,” Abell agreed matter-offactly.

  Morrell let out a soft whistle. “Lord!” he said. “If the Confederates are killing off their own Negroes the way we say they are—”

  “They are.” Abell’s voice went hard and flat. “That’s not just propaganda, General. They really are doing it.”

  However many times Morrell had heard about that, he didn’t want to believe it. Because the Confederates fought clean on the battlefield, he wished they played fair with their own people, too. But Abell’s certainty was hard not to credit. Sighing, Morrell went on, “Well, if they’re doing that, and if we kill off any whites who get out of line, people are liable to get thin on the ground down there.”

  “Yes, that’s true.” Spring was here, but Abell remained blizzard-cold. “And so?”

  He envisioned massacre as calmly as Jake Featherston did. The only difference was, he might let whites in the CSA live if they stayed quiet. Featherston killed off Negroes whether they caused trouble or not—his assumption was that Negroes were trouble, period. The distinction didn’t seem enormous. Morrell clung to it nonetheless.

  “Either this town was already as beat-up as it could be or it hasn’t taken a whole lot of new damage since the last time I was here,” he remarked.

  “The Confederates still come over,” Abell said. “Maybe not so much—and we can hurt them more when they do.”

  “That sounds good,” Morrell said.

  But when he got to the War Department, he went underground—far underground. Brigadier General Abell had to vouch for him before he even got into the battered building. The stars on his shoulders meant nothing to the guards at the entrance. That was how it should be, as far as Morrell was concerned. “No one has been able to blow himself up inside yet,” Abell said with what sounded like pride.

  They went down endless flights of stairs. Morrell revised his notions about whether people around here ever got exercise. Climbing those stairs on the way back up would be no joke. “How close have they come?” he asked.

  “Somebody dressed like a major took out a guard crew at the eastern entrance a couple of weeks ago,” Abell answered. “One of the men there must have seen something he didn’t like, and so….”

  “Yeah. And so,” Morrell said. “I wonder how long it’ll be before they start using two-man suicide crews. The first fellow blows himself up, then the next one waits till the place is crowded before he uses his bomb—either that or he uses the confusion to sneak into wherever he really wants to go. It works with auto bombs; I know the Negroes in the CSA have done it. It might work with people bombs, too.”

  “You’re just full of happy thoughts this morning, aren’t you?” John Abell said. “Well, put that in your appreciation, too. If you can think of it, we have to believe those Mormon bastards can, too.” He made a sour face. “Probably not going to be many people left alive in Utah by the time that’s all done, either.”

  “No,” Morrell agreed. His own name for planning had suffered when a Great War attack against the rebels there didn’t go as well as it might have. He was banished from the General Staff back to the field then—a fate that dismayed him much less than his banishers thought it would. He said, “One thing—if we need to sow the place with salt, we won’t have to go very far to get it.”

  “Er—no.” Abell didn’t know what to make of foolishness. He never had. To Morrell’s relief, he left the stairwell before they got all the way to China. “The map room is this way,” he said, reviving a little. Separate a General Staff officer from his maps and he was only half a man.

  Officers ranging in rank from captain to major general pored over maps on tables and walls. Those maps covered the U.S.-C.S. frontier from Sonora all the way to the Atlantic. Some of the men in green-gray used their pointers decorously, like schoolteachers. Others plied them with brio, like orchestra conductors. Still others might have been knights swinging swords: they slashed and hacked at the territory they wanted to conquer.

  Morrell was a slasher himself. He grabbed a pointer
from a bin that looked like an archer’s quiver and advanced on a map showing the border between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. “This is what I want to do,” he said, and executed a stroke that would have disemboweled the Confederacy if it went across the real landscape instead of a map.

  John Abell’s pale eyebrows rose. “You don’t think small, do you?”

  “I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but rarely that,” Morrell said. “We can do it, you know. We should have started building up a little sooner, but I really think we can do it.”

  Abell studied the map. He borrowed the pointer from Morrell and walked over to another map. His slash was as surgical as Morrell’s, if less melodramatic. “This would be your follow-up?” he inquired.

  “Absolutely.” Morrell set a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “If we’re thinking along the same lines, chances are this will really work, because we never do that. Or we never did—now it’s twice in just a little while.”

  “More likely we’re both deluded,” the General Staff officer replied. Morrell laughed, hoping Abell was joking. Abell studied the map himself. “This may be a two-year campaign, you know, not just one.”

  “That’s…possible,” Morrell said reluctantly. “But I don’t think the Confederates will have a whole lot more than wind and air once we breach their front. They shot their bolt, and they hurt us, but they didn’t quite kill us. Now it’s our turn, and let’s see how they like playing defense.”

  “Defense is cheaper than offense,” Abell warned. “And they have some new toys of their own. These multiple rocket launchers are very unpleasant.” He hadn’t come within a hundred miles of those rocket launchers—he was that kind of soldier—but he spoke with authority even so.

  “Where are our new toys?” Morrell asked.

  “I thought you might be wondering about that.” With the air of a stage magician plucking a rabbit from a hat, John Abell took a folded sheet of paper out of his breast pocket. “Tell me what you think about this.”

  Morrell paused to put on reading glasses, a concession to age he hated but couldn’t do without. He unfolded the paper and skimmed through it. The more he read, the wider his smile got. “Well, well,” he said. “This is more like it! But there isn’t anything about when they’ll be ready. Are we talking about soon, or is this in the great by-and-by?”