The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  U.S. bombers left two major dams in northern Tennessee untouched—the one by Carthage and the one farther east near Celina. They didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts: they didn’t want the floods downstream to disrupt their own advance. The Confederates, desperate to slow U.S. ground forces however they could, blew both dams as they fell back over the Cumberland.

  Michael Pound was not pleased. The floodwaters washed over the banks of the river and flowed across what had been fertile farmland. They turned it into something that more closely resembled oatmeal.

  The new U.S. barrels had wide tracks. That meant each part of the track carried less weight than was true in older machines. It also meant they could keep going where older barrels would bog down. It didn’t mean they had an easy time.

  Here and there, Confederate antibarrel guns and holdouts with rocket launchers lingered north of the Cumberland. “I hate those damn stovepipes,” Sergeant Mel Scullard said, using the name the men in green-gray had hung on the launchers. “Doesn’t seem fair, one miserable infantry son of a bitch able to take out a whole barrel all by his lonesome.”

  “Especially when it’s your barrel—and your neck,” Pound observed dryly.

  “You bet,” the gunner said.

  “They always could, with a Featherston Fizz,” Pound said.

  “That’s different,” Scullard insisted. “You could see those assholes coming, and you had a chance to kill ’em before they got to you. These guys, they stay hidden, they fire the lousy thing, and then they run like hell.”

  “I know,” Pound said. “We’ve got to get something just like that so our guys can give the Confederates what-for.” Had he been as mouthy to his superiors when he was a noncom? He smiled reminiscently. He was sure he had.

  That evening, he got summoned to an officers’ conclave. This was the sort of thing he’d always had to find out about from his own superiors till he finally couldn’t evade promotion. It proved less impressive than he’d imagined it would. A dozen or so officers, ranging up from his lowly second lieutenanthood to a light colonel, gathered in a barn that smelled maddeningly delicious: the former owners had used it for curing tobacco.

  The lieutenant colonel lit a U.S. cigarette, whose nasty smoke seemed all the viler by comparison with the aroma of choice burley. “Intelligence says the Confederates have some Freedom Party Guards units in the neighborhood,” he announced. “You want to watch out for those guys.”

  “What’s so special about ’em, sir?” a captain asked. “If you shoot ’em, they go down, right? If you shoot ’em enough times, they stay down, right?” Michael Pound smiled. Meeting someone who thought the way you did was always nice.

  After another drag on his cigarette, the senior officer (who was younger than Pound) looked at it in distaste. “I think they made this thing out of camel shit,” he said. How he knew what camel shit tasted like when he smoked it was probably a question for another day. No matter how little he liked the Niagara, he kept on smoking it. “What’s so special?” he echoed. “They’re supposed to be Featherston’s elite force. They’ve got the best men, and they’ve got the best equipment. Just about all of them carry those goddamn automatic rifles, they’ve got plenty of stovepipes”—he used the new handle, too—“and their armor is the best the Confederates have.”

  “Not good enough.” Pound and two other U.S. officers said the same thing at the same time.

  The lieutenant colonel shook his head. “Even up, out in the open, we’ve got the edge. If they shoot from ambush when we’re out in the open…” He didn’t go on, or need to. Pound nodded reluctantly, but he nodded. A hit from a three-inch gun could kill his barrel. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it could.

  “How do we know ’em when we see ’em?” somebody asked.

  “They wear camouflage uniforms, not ordinary butternut,” the light colonel said. “They’ve caused a lot of trouble in Texas. This is the first report of ’em east of the Mississippi.”

  “Just our luck,” Pound said. A couple of the other men in the barn sent him curious looks. He was the junior officer present. He was also the oldest man there. The combination was odd and awkward—awkward for other people, anyhow. Michael Pound didn’t much care. If they busted him back down to sergeant, he wouldn’t say boo. He’d found he could do more as an officer than as a noncom. That was nice, and the Confederates had reason to regret it on the Green River. But he wouldn’t mind looking through a gunsight again, either. That 3½-incher was a gunner’s delight. High muzzle velocity, a flat trajectory, better sights than earlier barrels had, too…

  “You need to be aware they’re around,” the lieutenant colonel said. “And be aware our engineers are in the neighborhood, too. They’ll do their best to make ways for you to go forward where the flooding’s worse than usual.”

  Now Pound beamed. That was good news. Army engineers were on the ball. Fighting wasn’t their job, but they did it when they had to. And they worked under fire without a peep. Solid men, sure as hell. He stuck up his hand. The lieutenant colonel nodded. “Sir, will they have bridging equipment to get us over the Cumberland?” Pound asked. “The sooner we can grab a bridgehead on the other side, the more the Confederates’ll have to flabble about.”

  “You don’t think small, do you?” the light colonel said.

  “No, sir.” Pound took the question literally and answered with a straight face.

  He nonplused the colonel. The younger man rubbed his chin. “If we get that far, Lieutenant, I figure we’ll find some way to get over, too. Does that satisfy you?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” Pound said. “But as long as those bastards are down, I want to keep kicking them. I want to kick their teeth in.”

  Again, he sounded perfectly earnest. Again, he made the lieutenant colonel pause. At last, the man made the best of it, saying, “Your spirit does you credit. You can serve as an example for all of us. Any more questions?” He waited. Nobody said anything. He clapped his hands together once, softly. “All right, then. Let’s go get ’em.”

  “What’s the word, sir?” Sergeant Scullard asked when Pound came back from the meeting.

  Pound hid a grin. How many times had he asked officers the same question when he was a sergeant himself? More than he could count, that was for sure. “We drive for the Cumberland—and cross it if we can,” he answered, which overstated the case a bit. “The engineers will give us a hand. We may have Freedom Party Guards units in front of us. They’re supposed to be tough, and they’ve got A-number-one equipment, but we’ll make ’em say uncle.”

  “Sounds good to me.” The gunner was a man after his own heart.

  The attack went in the next morning. Infantrymen in trucks and half-tracked armored personnel carriers kept up with the barrels, though the trucks had trouble with the mud and mostly stayed on the roads. Engineers rode in combat cars and in bulldozers with steel plating welded around the driver’s position. Some of the dozers sported machine guns, too. Those were informal, nonregulation additions, but the engineers were in a position to do that if anybody was.

  Resistance was light at first. Pound had just begun to doubt whether that lieutenant colonel knew what he was talking about when all hell broke loose. An enemy barrel nicely hidden behind an overturned truck blew up two personnel carriers in quick succession. The crew, no fools, started to fall back to another position. “Front!” Pound sang out.

  “Identified!” Scullard answered. What he identified, he could hit. He could—and he did. The C.S. barrel started to burn. Pound thought some of the men inside got away—it was long range for a machine gun. That was a shame; those soldiers plainly knew what they were doing. As soon as they got a new machine, they’d cause the USA more trouble.

  But not now. When an antibarrel rocket took out a green-gray barrel, foot soldiers descended from their conveyances and started hunting the Confederates nearby. The enemy troops were plainly outnumbered, but nobody seemed to have told them anything about retreating. Holding their ground
till they were overrun, they died in place, and took a lot of U.S. soldiers with them.

  “Those the Freedom Party Guards, sir?” Scullard asked.

  “I think so,” Pound said. “Either they’ve all got a lot of mud on their butternut or they’re wearing camouflage. And they fight hard—no two ways about that.”

  “We smashed ’em for now, looks like,” the gunner said.

  “Yup,” Pound agreed. “And that means we ought to gun for the river fast as we can, before the Confederates bring more troops back to this side.”

  He stood up in the cupola and looked around to see if he could spot any engineers. His wireless set couldn’t communicate directly with theirs, which he considered an oversight not far from criminal. But he spotted an armored bulldozer only a couple of hundred yards away. He had his driver go closer so he could shout back and forth with the man inside. The dozer driver waved and nodded.

  Then it was on toward the Cumberland for his platoon and the foot soldiers with them, and blast anything that got in the way. The Confederates really didn’t have much left on this side of the river. Michael Pound cheerfully went about reducing what they did have. He wondered how they planned on fighting the war next year and the year after if they were wrecking some of their most productive land and the United States were wrecking some more.

  After a bit, he decided the Confederates didn’t care about next year and the year after. If they couldn’t stop the United States now, they were much too likely to lose the war this year. He nodded. Yeah, that might be so. The more he thought about it, the better he liked it. The better he liked it, the harder he pushed his platoon. Other green-gray barrels stormed toward the Cumberland with them. And dozers and other engineering vehicles did their damnedest to keep up.

  Even before he got to the river, he realized his chances of seizing a bridge intact, the way he had between Calhoun and Rumsey, were slim and none. The Confederates had blown the bridges over the Cumberland themselves, and were using it for a barrier. And if they hadn’t, the flood they turned loose by blowing the dam upstream would have swept away any surviving spans.

  He had hoped the engineers would be able to bridge the river in a hurry. But the Cumberland was too wide for anything engineering vehicles could carry on their backs. It would have to be pontoons, which took longer to rig and let the enemy concentrate his fire.

  But Lieutenant Pound wasn’t the only officer with a driving urge for speed. General Morrell had it, too, and had the authority to do something with it. The pontoon bridges started reaching across the river as soon as it got too dark for the Confederates on the southern bank to see what U.S. forces were up to. Morrell or someone else with a good head on his shoulders ordered an artillery barrage laid on several miles to the west. The Confederates naturally replied in kind, and fired star shells to light up the Cumberland there to discover what the men in green-gray were doing. The soldiers and engineers there weren’t doing anything much but shelling. Lulled, Featherston’s men fired back.

  At a quarter to four, a captain of engineers asked Pound, “You ready to go like hell, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, sir!” Pound answered around a yawn. He’d been up all night.

  The captain nodded. “Good. That’s the right answer. Won’t be long. Haul ass when you get the word.”

  “I can do that, sir,” Pound said. And, ten minutes later, he and his platoon did. They weren’t quite the first U.S. barrels over the Cumberland, but not many were in front of them. Infantry in half-tracks crossed right behind them. By the time the sun came up, they’d carved out a solid bridgehead on the south bank.

  “Gas!” somebody shouted as U.S.shells rained down on the Confederate positions south of the Cumberland. Jorge Rodriguez already had his mask on—he’d heard the gurgle gas rounds made flying through the air. He huddled in a hastily dug foxhole and prayed nothing would come down on his head.

  Too much had landed on him in the past few weeks, not literally but metaphorically. Virginia had been fairly quiet. Getting transferred to the Tennessee front was like getting a bucket of ice water in the face. But getting word that his father had died in Texas was like getting thrown into ice water with no way out. The telegram gave no details, which only made things worse. Jorge had written to his mother down in Sonora, but he was still waiting for an answer.

  He had little time to brood on it. That was the one good thing about getting thrown into combat fierce enough to give him a brush with death almost every day. He’d asked his company commander for compassionate leave. Captain Nelson Cash had looked at the telegram and shaken his head. “I’m mighty sorry, George,” he said, that being what most English-speakers called Jorge. “I’m mighty sorry, but maybe you noticed there was a war on?”

  “Yes, sir.” Jorge hadn’t really expected anything different, but he had to try. He thought about going AWOL, thought about it and then thought again. He was a long way from Texas, an even longer way from Sonora. Someone at a train station was bound to check his papers. They were making examples of deserters these days.

  Of course, what the Army and the Freedom Party were doing to deserters wasn’t a patch on what U.S. bombs and bullets might do to him. He was in his late twenties, older than a lot of the conscripts who filled out his company, old enough to know God didn’t have a carved stone somewhere that said he would live forever.

  Even getting to the front hadn’t been easy. He’d had to go all the way down to Atlanta and then north again, traveling mostly by night. The Yankees had torn up and bombed the railroad lines going west from Virginia into Kentucky, and also the ones going west from Asheville, North Carolina, to Knoxville, Tennessee. They wanted to keep the Confederates from hitting them in the flank while they pushed south. By all the signs, they knew how to get what they wanted, too.

  All that meant the C.S. reinforcements from Virginia reached the front a couple of days later than they would have with everything going smoothly. It meant the front was farther south than it would have been had they got there in good time. And it meant that the mission they’d been given when they left Virginia—throwing the U.S. bridgehead south of the Cumberland back over the river—was nothing but a pipe dream by the time they got there.

  Jorge knew about all that only because of occasional grumbles from his superiors. He’d never been in Tennessee before. He wasn’t sure where the Cumberland was, let alone any of the towns south of it. The only thing he knew was that his outfit had to fight like hell whenever it got where it was going. In a way, such a state of almost blissful ignorance wasn’t bad for an ordinary soldier.

  He got off the train somewhere not far south of Murfreesboro, and climbed into a truck for the journey up to the front. Jorge was sorry to change vehicles; he’d won more than two hundred dollars in the poker game that started back in Virginia. He was a good-tempered, easygoing fellow. A measure of how popular he was with his buddies was that nobody called him a goddamn greaser no matter how much he won.

  Murfreesboro had taken a pounding. A lot of the places where Jorge was stationed in Virginia had taken a pounding, too, but they’d been at or near the front since 1941. Some of them had taken a pounding in the Great War, too, and even in the War of Secession.

  Murfreesboro…Hell had opened up on Murfreesboro in the past few days. The ruins still had sharp edges. Smoke still curled up from them. The women and kids and old men who grubbed through them still looked stunned, astonished that such things could happen to them. The smell of death was very sweet, very strong. Jorge’s stomach turned over. He gulped, trying to keep his rations down.

  The move east from Murfreesboro also came by night. The butternut trucks had most of their headlights covered over with masking tape. The slits that remained shed more light than cigarette coals, but not a whole lot more. The truck convoy had to go slow. Even so, Jorge rattled past one machine that had driven off the side of the road and into a shell hole.

  “That driver, he’s gonna catch hell,” he said. His English had an accent different f
rom those of the white men in the truck with him. Every so often, he used a word that wasn’t English anywhere except Sonora and Chihuahua. But the other soldiers understood him. His father spoke mostly Spanish when he went off to fight in 1916. His mother was still more at home in it than in English. But he and his brothers, like most of the younger generation, embraced the tongue the rest of the CSA used.

  “Maybe he will,” someone else said, “but the guys he was drivin’, I bet they give him a medal for makin’ ’em late.”

  “Wish our driver’d go off the road,” another soldier said. He didn’t sound like a man making a joke. On the contrary—he seemed painfully serious. His name was Gabriel Medwick. He was about six feet three, at least 200 pounds, blond, jut-jawed, and handsome. He could have posed for a Freedom Party recruiting poster, as a matter of fact. And he sounded like a man just this side of shitting himself with fear.

  Jorge was afraid, too. Anybody who’d seen combat and wasn’t afraid had some screws loose somewhere. He hadn’t seen a whole lot, and what he had seen wasn’t too intense. The company was probably heading into something worse. But knowing that the all-Confederate boy sitting in the truck with him was more afraid than he was—or less able to hide his fear, which amounted to the same thing—helped steady him.

  “Aw, fuck,” Medwick muttered when the truck stopped. It was getting near dawn; gray light had started leaking in through the rear-facing opening in the canvas canopy over the cargo area. That’s what we are—cargo, Rodriguez thought. They use us up, like rations or bullets or barrels. He wished that hadn’t occurred to him.

  “Come on. Get out. We got to head on up to the front.” Sergeant Hugo Blackledge would never show up on a recruiting poster. He had hairy ears and more hair sticking out of his nose and a black five o’clock shadow that came out at noon. His eyebrows grew together above that beaky nose. His chin was barely there at all. He was little and skinny and mean. If he was afraid, he never showed it. He ran his squad with no pretense of fairness or justice. But he never sent anyone anywhere he wouldn’t go himself. And he could whip all of them, Gabriel Medwick included. He wouldn’t fight fair to do it, which only made the men more willing to follow his lead. They’d seen enough to know that fighting fair was for civilians and other fools.