The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  “We kill enough of these fuckers, sooner or later the rest will get the idea,” Wheat said. “Or if they don’t, we’ll kill all of them.” He didn’t sound worried—more as if he looked forward to it.

  After a third shot rang out, Martin got to his feet. “Somebody ought to do something about that damn sniper,” he said.

  He hadn’t gone more than a step or two before a U.S. machine gun stuttered out a short burst, and then another one. A triumphant shout went up: “Got the son of a bitch!”

  “Talk about service,” Lieutenant Wheat said. Chester grinned and nodded and hunkered down again. He pulled out a pack of Raleighs—properly grown, properly cured tobacco—and lit up. After a deep drag, he nodded again. Yeah, this was what smokes were supposed to taste like.

  A soldier trotted back to him and the lieutenant. “There’s a Confederate captain with a flag of truce, wants to talk to us about civilians,” he said.

  “Bring him back here,” Wheat said. “We can talk.”

  “Blindfold him first,” Chester added. “No point letting him see what we’ve got. That may be part of what he’s after.” The platoon commander nodded. The soldier saluted Wheat and hurried away.

  “Would you like to sit in on this?” the lieutenant asked politely.

  “If you don’t mind, sir,” Chester answered, as politely. The platoon leader didn’t want to let the Confederates hornswoggle him. Chester was his ace in the hole, and appreciated being invited without having to invite himself.

  When the C.S. captain took off his blindfold, he proved to be about thirty, with the ribbon for the Purple Heart—a decoration that went back to George Washington, and that both sides used—on his chest. He said his name was Wilbur Pease. He didn’t seem surprised to find a first sergeant sitting in with a second lieutenant, which showed he knew how the world worked.

  Wheat did the talking: “Well, Captain, what’s on your mind?”

  “I’ve had reports of atrocities against civilian citizens, Lieutenant, and I’ve come to investigate and to protest,” Pease answered.

  “Considering what the Confederate States are doing to their Negroes, aren’t you in a poor position to talk about atrocities?” Wheat asked.

  Wilbur Pease didn’t even blink. “Civilian citizens, I said. Negroes are only residents, not citizens. They don’t have the rights of citizens.” We can do whatever we want to them, Martin translated. Captain Pease went on, “I’m talking about white people, people who matter.” His racism was so complete, so perfect, he didn’t know he had it.

  “We have a problem with—what’s the fancy French for it, Sergeant?”

  “Francs-tireurs, sir.” Chester pronounced it franks-teeroors; he knew no more French than Chinese.

  It satisfied both Lieutenant Wheat and Captain Pease. The U.S. officer went on, “If we catch people out of uniform shooting at us, we’re going to kill them. It’s as simple as that, Captain. We nailed one a few minutes ago. If we have to take hostages to make them think twice, we’ll do that, too. And we’ll shoot the hostages if it comes to that. I’m sorry, but these jerks with guns need to understand that we’re serious.”

  “The laws of war—” Pease began.

  “You did the same damn thing on our soil,” Chester Martin said. “Don’t get all high and mighty about it.”

  “And don’t encourage the, uh, francs-tireurs, either,” Wheat added. “That way, everybody will be better off.”

  Captain Pease scowled. His troops wouldn’t be better off. The more U.S. soldiers flabbled about civilians with rifles, the more distracted from fighting the regular Confederate army they were. “I deny that we encourage civilians to take up arms against invaders,” he said.

  “Of course you do, Captain,” Wheat said.

  “And the stork brings babies and sticks ’em under cabbage leaves,” Chester added.

  “All right,” Pease said angrily. “I can see you don’t take this seriously.”

  “Oh, we do,” Wheat said. “We take it so seriously, we’ll do whatever we have to to stamp it out. And if that means you run short on civilians, we won’t lose any sleep about it. Whatever people in these parts try to do to us, we’ll do worse to them. I promise you that, Captain. It worked in Utah. It should work here.”

  “If you want that kind of fight, I’m sure you can have it,” Wilbur Pease said. “You’d better put my hoodwink back on—I’d like to return to my side of the line.”

  “I’ll do it, sir,” Chester said to Lieutenant Wheat. As he blindfolded Pease, he went on, “We don’t have anything in particular against the Confederate Army. You play fair when you fight us. Civilians playing soldier—that’s a different story.”

  “Yes, it is. You’ll see.” Pease held out his hand. “Someone take me back, please.”

  A soldier led him through the U.S. positions. Chester’s face was troubled as he watched the Confederate officer go. A different story…He wondered if his own words would come back to haunt him. Auto bombs, people bombs…The Kentuckians hadn’t started making life as miserable for the U.S. Army as they could.

  “How much trouble do you think civilians can make?” By the troubled note in Lieutenant Wheat’s voice, he was worrying about the same thing.

  “It can’t be worse than Utah. That’s all I know for sure.” Martin paused for a moment. “Of course, Utah was pretty bad.”

  A brief burst of gunfire came from the Confederates, formally marking the end of the truce. A U.S. machine gun fired back, and after that it was time for everyone to keep his head down again.

  The Confederates launched a salvo of their rockets. Most of them came down on Earlington. Civilians hadn’t evacuated the town, and bore the brunt of the hellish weapons’ bursts. “So much for taking care of their own,” Martin said into Delbert Wheat’s ear; they both crouched in the same shell hole. If something came down on them, the platoon would need new leaders.

  “They don’t give a damn. They never have,” the young officer answered. “All they care about is scoring points off us.”

  Chester nodded. It looked like that to him, too. Chaos reigned in the town. Wounded U.S. soldiers screamed for medics. So did wounded civilians. The corpsmen dealt with soldiers first. That was likely to hurt their popularity with the locals. They didn’t seem to care. Chester didn’t, either.

  U.S. warplanes streaked low overhead. They were fighters, but each one carried a bomb slung under its belly. They were bound to be slower and less maneuverable till they dropped those bombs. Explosions on the Confederate side of the line said they weren’t wasting any time.

  Barrels rumbled down toward the front, too. One platoon particularly caught Chester’s eye. All five machines were the newest U.S. model, sleek and deadly as so many tigers. All five were unbuttoned, too, their commanders and drivers looking out to see where they were. When they got closer to the firing, the drivers would close their hatches. Some barrel commanders liked to stand up in the cupola as long as they could. They took chances doing that, but their machines fared better.

  One of those commanders drew Chester’s notice as he rolled down Highland Park and into the northern outskirts of Earlington. He spotted Chester, too, and no surprise, for they were about the same age: middle-aged survivors in a world of young men. Over the din of his engine, he called, “You went through it before and you came back for another round?” His accent said he came from somewhere close to the Canadian border.

  “Yeah, I’m a glutton for punishment—just like you,” Chester shouted back. They grinned and waved at each other. “Stay safe,” Chester added.

  “You, too.” The barrel commander laughed. So did Martin. If they wanted to stay safe, what were they doing here?

  Lieutenant Wheat gave Chester a quizzical look. “You know that guy?”

  “No, sir,” Chester answered. “But us old farts, we’ve got to stick together.”

  His platoon went into the line not long after the barrels clattered past. With help from the armored behemoths, they shoved
the Confederates all the way out of Earlington. More rockets came in from the south. Featherston’s soldiers had lots of nasty weapons. Whether they had enough men to use them was a different question. For all their firepower, Confederate troops seemed thin on the ground.

  That barrel commander fought his machine aggressively. His gunner hit a Confederate barrel at what had to be over a mile, and set it afire. Two other Confederate barrels decided they’d be better off somewhere else. They trundled away in a hurry. Chester approved—the less he had to worry about enemy armor, the happier he was. Before too long, he trudged past the burning enemy machine. The push south rolled on.

  Cincinnatus Driver made sure the .45 on the seat of his truck was loaded and sat where he could grab it in a hurry—he never let it slide out of reach. The road between Paris and Winchester wasn’t safe for U.S. convoys. The drive south had pushed the Confederate Army out of this part of Kentucky. But C.S. stragglers and bushwhackers who didn’t wear uniforms still took potshots at U.S. vehicles from the trees that grew too damn close to the side of the road.

  A bloated body hung from a telegraph pole. The placard tied around the man’s neck said, FRANC-TIREUR. That was officer talk for bushwhacker. No doubt U.S. authorities hanged him there to warn his buddies. His wasn’t the first corpse Cincinnatus had seen. They didn’t seem to do much to intimidate the Confederates.

  He sighed. Things hadn’t been that much different in the Great War. You did what they told you to do, and you hoped you came out the other side in one piece. You volunteered for this, Cincinnatus reminded himself. Were you born stupid, or did you have to study? He concluded he was born stupid; he’d never been much for studying. But he’d had too recent a close-up look at the Confederacy. Any black man who did, naturally wanted to kill the country with an axe.

  Since he didn’t have an axe, truckload after truckload of supplies would have to do. In the Great War, the USA was content to make the CSA say uncle. This time, the United States seemed to want to kill the Confederate States with an axe. Cincinnatus understood why, too. The United States almost had the axe fall on them.

  The lead truck in the convoy didn’t run into an axe. It ran over a land mine, and started to burn. The lead truck never carried munitions, just because it was most likely to go boom. The driver probably didn’t have a chance. A different truck, chosen by lot, led every convoy. That could have been me, Cincinnatus thought, gulping.

  No matter what happened to the lead truck, the convoy had to get through. The second truck drove off the road onto the soft shoulder on the right—and ran over another mine and blew up. “Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus yelped. He hit the brakes. There was going to be a holdup here—he could see that. If the third truck went off the road to the left, would it go sky-high, too? The driver didn’t want to find out. Cincinnatus wouldn’t have, either. The Confederates who planned this one had outthought their U.S. opposite numbers.

  Just how badly they’d outthought them became obvious a moment later. When the U.S. trucks in the convoy were all stopped and all bunched up behind the two that were in flames, a machine gun and assorted automatic rifles and submachine guns opened up on them from the woods to the left. As soon as Cincinnatus heard the gunfire and saw muzzle flashes winking over there, he bailed out. He paused only to grab the .45 as he slid across the seat. He was damned if he’d get out of the truck on the driver’s side and make himself a perfect target for the C.S. holdouts or guerrillas or whoever the hell they were.

  His bad leg and bad shoulder both howled protests at what he was making them do. He paid them no attention. Getting hit by an auto had been bad, very bad. Getting chewed up by machine-gun fire was one of the few things he could think of likely to be worse. He didn’t want to find out the hard way.

  No more than a second or two after he threw himself to the ground and crawled behind a tire, a burst of bullets chewed up the cab of the truck. Glass from the windshield and the driver’s-side window blew out and then fell like rain.

  Had the engine caught fire, he would have had to abandon the truck and make for the woods to the right. He would also have had to pray Confederates didn’t infest them, too. For the moment, though, the truck wasn’t burning.

  A couple of wounded drivers cried out in pain. Other men, like Cincinnatus, crouched and sprawled in whatever cover they could find. One of them called, “Be ready! Those fuckers are liable to rush us.”

  Can they be that smart and that dumb at the same time? Cincinnatus wondered. If he were in the woods, he would have kept shooting at the trucks till they all caught fire or started exploding. The Confederates had put themselves in a position where they could do that. Why wouldn’t they, then?

  Confederate soldiers probably would have reasoned the same way he did. The men in the woods turned out not to be soldiers. They were amateurs, bushwhackers, guerrillas. They cared about the trucks, yes, but they wanted to kill people, too. Once they’d peppered the trucks with bullets, set some on fire, and flattened a lot of tires, they loped forward to deal with the drivers.

  They must have thought they’d killed and wounded more men than they had. That was the only thing Cincinnatus could think of. With just a pistol, he had to let them come near before he opened up. He eyed the bushwhackers. They wore dirty dungarees and dirtier flannel shirts. They were poorly shaved. When they got a little closer, they would probably stink.

  They never got that close. One of the drivers had a Springfield, not a .45. He fired from behind a tire, worked the bolt, and fired again. Two guerrillas fell. The others started spraying lead as if it were going out of style.

  The drivers fired back. They didn’t want the bushwhackers to concentrate on the man with the best weapon. Cincinnatus used the two-handed grip to steady the .45, but it still bucked like an unbroken stallion when he pulled the trigger. The man he aimed at ducked, the way almost everyone did when a bullet came too close.

  Several bullets came too close to Cincinnatus. He was already down on his belly. He tried to flatten out like a squirrel after a deuce-and-a-half ran over it. Another guerrilla fell. The drivers’ cheers were punctuated by a shriek as one of them got hit.

  In the films about fighting Indians on the Great Plains, the cavalry always charged over the hill in the last reel. It wasn’t the cavalry this time. It was an armored car and two command cars that carried .50-caliber machine guns. As soon as the U.S. soldiers in them got a look at what was going on, they hosed the irregulars down with gunfire. The men who fought for the Confederacy broke and flew toward the woods. Not many of them got there.

  Even then, the bushwhackers didn’t give up. The machine gun hidden among the trees started shooting at the oncoming vehicles. The armored car didn’t need to worry about that, but the thin-skinned command cars did. The armored car had a small cannon, not just machine guns of its own. After it sent half a dozen rounds crashing into the woods, the enemy machine gun shut up in the middle of a burst.

  Somebody in one of the command cars or the armored car must have used the wireless, because four or five fighter-bombers roared in and dropped their presents on the stand of trees. Cincinnatus hoped they blew the bushwhackers to hell and gone. No matter what he hoped, he knew some of them would get away. Maybe they would think twice about messing with the U.S. Army from now on. More likely, he feared, they wouldn’t.

  He didn’t want to get out from behind his tire even after the armored car took up a position between the woods and the shattered convoy. Nobody could call him a cowardly coon, either, not when the white drivers also stayed right where they were.

  A soldier got out of one of the command cars for a closer look at a dead irregular. A bullet from the woods made him throw himself flat. The armored car and the command car lashed the trees with machine-gun rounds. Another defiant bullet clanged off the armored car’s turret.

  Nobody went anywhere till more trucks brought soldiers forward, some to clear the woods and others, engineers, to get rid of the rest of the mines the bushwhackers had planted.
After that, still more trucks had to come up to salvage what the Kentuckians hadn’t destroyed—and to pick up the drivers.

  “I’m getting too old for this shit,” one of them said wearily as he climbed into the back of a deuce-and-a-half.

  “I was too old for this shit a long time ago,” Cincinnatus said. “Remind me how come I signed up to do it again.”

  “On account of you’re a damn fool,” the other driver said. Before Cincinnatus could even start to get mad, the white man added, “Just like me.” That took care of that.

  The front lay just north of Winchester. Cincinnatus wished it were farther south still. He knew that was unfair. The U.S. Army had done in a couple of weeks what took months of slogging in the last war. And this wasn’t even the main U.S. thrust. That was farther west, and was moving faster.

  He got a new truck that afternoon, and a new assignment. The kid lieutenant in the motor pool gave him a dubious look. “You sure you’re up for this, Gramps?” he said.

  “It’s gonna help whip Jake Featherston, ain’t it?” Cincinnatus said.

  “That’s the idea, yeah,” the lieutenant answered.

  “Then I’m up for it,” Cincinnatus declared.

  After another pause, the lieutenant—he was younger than Cincinnatus’ son Achilles, which made him seem very young indeed—nodded. “Well, when you put it that way—”

  “I do,” Cincinnatus said.

  “Fair enough. I can see why,” the lieutenant said. “Good luck.”

  Cincinnatus drove within artillery range of the front. Nothing came down too close, for which he thanked God. “What the hell took youse guys so long?” said the quartermaster sergeant who took charge of the supplies the truck convoy delivered. “We been waitin’ for youse.” He was a hairy little Italian guy from New York City. His accent and Cincinnatus’ were a long way from each other.