The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  “So what?” Spartacus answered. “We be long gone by the time they catch up to us—an’ if we ain’t, they be sorry.” He probably wasn’t wrong about that. Pursuers—even riflemen—coming up against a machine gun would get a lethal surprise.

  He sent Moss and the pickup bouncing along back roads and tracks nobody who hadn’t known these parts for years would have been able to follow. Moss’ teeth clicked together more than once. They weren’t necessarily good tracks. One of them had a hog wallow right in the middle. Spartacus pointed straight ahead. Moss gunned the engine and leaned on the horn. The machine gunners solved the problem a different way. As hogs scrambled out of the muck, the gunners shot them.

  The truck sprayed stinking mud as it went through. “Stop!” Spartacus yelled when it got to the other side. Moss hit the brakes. The machine-gun crew hopped out and threw three carcasses into the back of the pickup. “We don’t just shoot up the ofays,” Spartacus said happily. “We eats good today, too.”

  A white man with a shotgun charged out of a farmhouse a couple of hundred yards away. He didn’t want to yield his porkers without a fight. The machine gunners sprayed a burst in his general direction. He ran away even faster than he’d come out.

  “We don’t take shit from nobody!” Spartacus roared as Moss put the pickup in gear again. Riding around with a machine gun in the back of your truck worked wonders for your confidence.

  Those side roads brought the pickup almost back to where its rampages had begun. The machine gun and the top part of the mount came off neat as you please. One of the gunners carried the weapon. The other shouldered the long pipe. More guerrillas emerged from the undergrowth to take charge of the dead pigs.

  Roast pork and a ten-mile stretch of road shot to hell and gone made for a celebration that evening. So did a couple of jugs of raw corn whiskey. The stuff tasted like paint thinner and burned its way down like a lighted kerosene lamp. After a few swallows, Moss started forgetting things. A few more, he knew, and he’d have trouble remembering his name.

  But he needed to remember something. “You’ve got to tell people,” he said to Spartacus, the homemade hooch adding urgency to his voice.

  “Tell which people?” the guerrilla leader asked. “Tell ’em what?” He was drinking harder than Moss.

  “Got to tell the other colored fighters.” Moss was proud of himself. He did remember! “Got to tell them what these pickup trucks can do.”

  “Don’t you worry none about dat,” Spartacus said. “Be all over Georgia day after tomorrow. Be all the way to Louisiana this time nex’ week. Yes, suh. You best believe it will. We done hit the ofays hard. Folks is gonna hear about it. You best believe folks is gonna hear about it.”

  Moss turned to Nick Cantarella. “You’re a hero.”

  “My ass,” Cantarella said. “I didn’t even get to drive the truck.” But he hadn’t drunk himself fighting mad, for he went on, “What I really like about this is that their own damn propaganda upped and bit ’em. I never woulda thought of mounting a machine gun on a pickup and raising hell. But since those stupid pricks went and told me how—”

  “Here’s to propaganda,” Moss said. They both drank.

  Colonel Terry DeFrancis was one of the youngest officers of his rank Major General Abner Dowling had ever seen. Remembering how long he’d taken to get to bird colonel himself, Dowling eyed the boy wonder with suspicion.

  “My orders from the War Department are to subordinate myself to you and to smash C.S. air power in west Texas,” DeFrancis said. “I think my wing has brought enough fighters and bombers out here to do the job, too.”

  “I wouldn’t begin to argue with you there, Colonel,” Dowling said. In one fell swoop, the air power at his command had tripled. “But why does Philadelphia care now when it didn’t before?”

  “Sir, I can answer that in three little words,” DeFrancis told him.

  “If you’re going to say, I love you, Colonel, I’ll throw you out on your ear,” Dowling warned, straight-faced.

  Terry DeFrancis stared at him, then laughed like a loon. “You’re not what I expected, sir, not even slightly,” he said. “No, what I was going to say is, I don’t know. Have Featherston’s boys been pulling off air raids that hurt?”

  “If they have, nobody told me about it,” Dowling answered. “They haven’t had enough airplanes out here to hurt us very badly. We haven’t had enough to do much to them, either. Sounds like things are going to change, though.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Colonel DeFrancis agreed. “That’s what my boys are here for. We’re going to make them sorry if we can.”

  “Good,” Dowling said. It was good in all kinds of ways. If the War Department had aircraft to spare for an out-of-the-way outfit like his Eleventh Army, it was bound to have even more farther east, where the real decision would lie. And…“Tell me something, Colonel: when they sent you out here, did they say anything about Camp Determination?”

  “No, sir,” the younger man answered. “Is that ours or theirs? Sounds like something the Freedom Party would name.”

  “There’s a reason for that—it is something the Freedom Party named. Here. Take a look at these.” Dowling’s desk had a locked drawer. He unlocked it and took out the aerial reconnaissance photos of the camp near Snyder…and of the mass graves not far away.

  DeFrancis studied them with meticulous care. He was frowning as he looked up at Dowling. “Interpreting stuff like this isn’t always easy, especially when you’re seeing it for the first time. What exactly am I looking at here?” Dowling told him exactly what he was looking at there. DeFrancis’ jaw dropped. “You’re making that up…uh, sir.”

  “Colonel, I wish to Christ I were,” Dowling answered, and the disgust and horror in his voice had to carry conviction. “It’s the truth, though. If anything, it’s an understatement. They really are killing off their Negroes, and they really are doing it by carload lots. Literally by carload lots—that’s a railroad spur between the two halves of the camp.”

  “Yes, sir. I saw that it was.” Colonel DeFrancis stared down at the pictures again. When he looked up this time, he wasn’t just frowning. He was slightly green, or more than slightly. “You know, I thought all those stories were bullshit. Propaganda. Stuff we pumped out to keep the civilians all hot and bothered about the war effort. Back in the last war, the British said the Germans boiled babies’ bodies to make soap. That kind of thing.”

  “I felt the same way till I got out here,” Dowling said grimly. “Who wouldn’t? If you’re halfway decent yourself, you figure the guy on the other side is, too. Well, the guy on the other side here is Jake Featherston, and Jake Featherston really is just as big a son of a bitch as everybody always thought he was.”

  DeFrancis eyed the photographs once more. Dowling understood that. They had an evil fascination to them. In their own way, they were just as much filthy pictures as the ones you could buy in any town where soldiers or sailors got leave. “What can we do about this, sir?” DeFrancis asked. “We can’t just let it go on. I mean, I haven’t got any great use for niggers, but….”

  “Yeah. But.” Dowling reached into another desk drawer. He pulled out a half-pint of whiskey and slid it across the desk to the younger man. “Here. Wash the taste out of your mouth.”

  “Thank you, sir.” DeFrancis took a healthy swig, then set the flat bottle down. “What can we do? We’ve got to do something.”

  “I think so, too, though you’d be amazed at how many people on our side of the border don’t give a rat’s ass,” Dowling said. “I’ve had the time to think about it now. Way it looks to me is, we can’t just bomb hell out of the camp. If we do that, we go into the nigger-killing business ourselves. Like you said, I don’t have much use for them, but I don’t want to do that.”

  “I agree,” DeFrancis said. “Like I told you, sir, my first priority is blasting enemy airstrips and aircraft, but now I see what I do next.”

  Dowling scratched his head. The War Depa
rtment suddenly seemed to have a wild hair about C.S. airstrips here in the West. Had the latest raids on Los Angeles and Las Vegas and Denver rattled people back East so much? If they had, why? Dowling shrugged. That wasn’t his worry—and, as often as not, the ways of the gods back in Philadelphia were unfathomable to mere mortals in the field.

  “I haven’t operated out here before,” Colonel DeFrancis said. “What’s the fuel situation like?”

  “We don’t have a problem there,” Dowling said. “The refineries in Southern California are working with local crude, so they’re at full capacity. We get what we need. A lot of the airplane plants are out there, too, so you should be able to get your hands on spare parts.”

  “Assuming they don’t decide to send all of them—and all the avgas—to Ohio and Virginia,” DeFrancis said.

  “Yes, assuming,” Dowling agreed. “We can’t do much about that, so there isn’t much point to worrying about it, is there?”

  “No, sir.” The young officer eyed him. “I think we’re going to get on pretty well, sir.” He might have been announcing a miracle.

  “Well, here’s hoping,” Dowling said. “I put up with General Custer for a lot of years. My thought is, if I managed that, most people ought to be able to stand me for a while.”

  “Er—yes, sir.” Colonel DeFrancis gave him an odd look now. To DeFrancis, as to most people, George Armstrong Custer was a hero up on a marble column. He wasn’t a whiskey-drinking, cigar-smoking, skirt-chasing (whenever his wife wasn’t too close), evil-tempered, mule-stubborn old man. Reminding people that a hero had feet of clay (and sometimes a head of iron) seldom won you friends.

  No matter what DeFrancis thought about General Custer, he knew what to do with airplanes. He built his strips close to the front, relying on the Eleventh Army not to lose ground and leave them vulnerable to artillery fire. Dowling thought he could oblige the flier there. But he was gloomily certain the Confederates would find out where the new fields were as soon as the bulldozers and steamrollers started leveling ground. No matter whether you called this part of the world west Texas or part of a revived U.S. state of Houston, the people here remained passionately pro-Confederate. And the land was so wide and troops scattered so thinly, those people had no trouble slipping across the front to tell the enemy what they knew.

  Or rather, what they thought they knew. Terry DeFrancis proved devious to a downright byzantine degree. Earth-moving equipment laid out and flattened several dummy fields along with the ones his airplanes would actually use. Confederate bombers called on more of the dummies than the real airstrips, wasting their high-explosive sweetness on the desert ground.

  And then DeFrancis’ medium and heavy bombers roared off to respond. Dowling drove back to one of the strips—irreverently named Fry Featherston Field—to watch them go. They and their escort fighters kicked up ungodly clouds of dust. Coughing, Dowling said, “We’ve got our own smoke screen.”

  “Yes, sir,” DeFrancis shouted over the engines’ thunder. “We could use one, too. I’m not used to operating in broad daylight. It’s a different war out here. New rules.”

  “No, Colonel.” Dowling shook his head. “Only one rule, the same one you find anywhere. We’ve got to beat those bastards.”

  DeFrancis pondered that, but not for long. “We’ll do it, sir. We’ll beat ’em like a drum.”

  He kept fighters in the air when the bombers came back for fuel and ordnance. A few bombers—and a few fighters—didn’t come back. The Confederates had fighters of their own, and antiaircraft around their airfields. You couldn’t fight a war without taking losses. Colonel DeFrancis looked grim. The men who went down weren’t just fliers to him. They were friends, almost family.

  Wireless technicians monitored signals from the U.S. airplanes, and also from the Confederates. They marked maps and brought them to DeFrancis and Dowling. “Looks like we’re doing pretty good, sir,” one of them said.

  “We’re plastering the fields we know about, all right,” DeFrancis said.

  “How many fields have they got that we don’t know about?” Dowling asked.

  “That’s always the question,” DeFrancis said. “We’ll find out how hard they hit back, and from where. Then we’ll go blast hell out of those places, too. Sooner or later, they won’t be able to stand the gaff any more.”

  He sounded confident. Dowling looked inside himself—and found he was confident, too. Enemy bombers returned, but at night: the Confederates had paid too high a price to go on with day bombing. That was a sign they were hurting, or Dowling hoped it was. Night bombing spared their airplanes, but wasn’t very accurate.

  The Confederates managed to sneak auto bombs onto a couple of fields. They blew up one bomber in its revetment and cratered another runway. The runway was easy enough to repair; the bomber was a write-off. Terry DeFrancis cashiered the officers in charge of security at those strips.

  When Dowling heard about the auto bombs, he telephoned and asked what the wing commander had done about them. When he found out, he grunted in sour satisfaction. “If you didn’t give ’em the boot, I would have,” he said.

  “Figured as much, sir,” DeFrancis said. “But I can shoot my own dog, by God. And I shot both those sons of bitches. They had no business falling asleep at the switch. This isn’t Nebraska, for God’s sake. Enemy action shouldn’t catch them playing with themselves.”

  “In two words, Colonel, you’re right.” Dowling hung up feeling better about the world than he had in quite a while. DeFrancis was an officer after his own heart.

  On the ground, the Eleventh Army wasn’t making much progress. Dowling used what he had as aggressively as he could. He’d already made the Confederates send that elite unit to stall his advance. The Party Guards did it, too. He was disappointed about that, but not crushed. Whatever the Freedom Party Guards did here, they weren’t doing in Ohio or Kentucky or Virginia, places that really mattered.

  He wondered if the Confederates would send more bombers west to contest the skies with Terry DeFrancis’ airplanes. They didn’t. Their counterattacks dwindled. Before long, they were reduced to harassment raids from biplanes that sounded like flying sewing machines—Boll Weevils, the Confederates called them. They came straight out of the Great War: their pilots heaved five- and ten-pound bombs from the cockpit by hand.

  That sounded laughable, till the first time one of those little bombs blew up an officers’ club. The Boll Weevils flew at what would have been treetop height if there were any trees close by. Y-ranging had a devil of a time spotting them, and nothing else could, not till they got right on top of whatever they intended to hit.

  They would never win the war for the CSA. Even so, they kept Dowling and DeFrancis back on their heels. U.S. air power had won part of the fight here in west Texas, but not all of it. Abner Dowling fumed in Lubbock. Nothing ever went quite the way you wished it would.

  VIII

  George Enos had never crossed the country on a train before. That he could now said the war had come a long way in the past few months. The Townsend sat in drydock in San Diego, getting a refit and repairs. They’d given him enough liberty to go to Boston, stay a few days, and then hop another train heading back to the West Coast.

  The one he was on now would have gone faster if it could have made anything better than a crawl at night. But blackouts were strictly enforced. The cars had black curtains. Along with conductors, they had hard-faced blackout monitors who carried .45s and made sure nobody showed a light at night.

  Those monitors had good reason to look tough. The farther east the train traveled, the more often George saw wrecks shoved off to one side of the railroad. The government no doubt figured they were part of the cost of making war. The government had a point. George doubted the people in those ravaged trains would have appreciated it.

  He came through Ohio during the day, so he could see what the war had done. He stared in astonishment. It looked more like the mountains of the moon than any human landscape. How many
years would this part of the country take to recover from the devastation? Would it ever? How could it?

  He didn’t go through Pittsburgh. From everything he’d heard, that was even worse. That he could get through at all was plenty. This time last year, things were even worse, he thought. He shook his head. It seemed impossible.

  Even Boston had taken bomb damage. He’d heard that, too. Seeing it as the train slowed and then stopped was something else again. Those bastards hit my home town. The fury that stirred up amazed him.

  He wasn’t overjoyed about coming into town three and a half hours behind schedule, either. He wasn’t surprised, but he wasn’t overjoyed. He hoped Connie and his sons weren’t waiting for him on the platform. The boys would be bouncing off the walls if they’d had to sit around all that time.

  When the train stopped, he jumped up, grabbed his duffel, and slung it over his shoulder. He almost clobbered another sailor. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. Then a sergeant almost clobbered him. He laughed. What went around came around, but not usually so soon.

  There was a traffic jam at the door to the car. Everybody wanted to get out first. Eventually, the door opened and people squeezed out. Most of the passengers were soldiers and sailors coming home on leave. Screaming, weeping women rushed toward them.

  “George!” That was redheaded Connie—she was there after all. She almost knocked him off his feet when she threw her arms around him.

  “Hi, babe,” he said. Then he kissed her, and that took a lot of careful attention. He felt as if he stayed submerged longer than any submersible in the U.S. Navy. At last he came up for air, his heart pounding. He noticed his wife was there by herself. “Where are the kids?” he asked.

  “My mother’s got ’em,” Connie answered. “I figured the train would be late, and I was right…. What’s so funny?”