Which was not the sort of thing he wanted to be thinking when he got shot.
One second, he was loping along, happy as a clam (how happy were clams, anyway?). The next, his left leg went out from under him, and he fell on his face in the dirt. He stared in stupid wonder at the hole in his trouser leg, and at the spreading red stain around it.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said, more in annoyance than anything else. I stay lucky for two years, and then this shit happens, he thought.
Then the pain reached his brain, and he howled like a wolf and clutched at himself. He knew what had hit him, all right, and wished to God he didn’t. He scrabbled for the pouch that held his wound dressing, the sulfa powder he was supposed to dust on the wound before he used the bandage, and the morphine syrette that might build a wall between him and the fire in his leg.
“Sergeant’s down!” somebody yelled.
“Corpsman!” Two or three soldiers shouted the same thing.
Armstrong detached the bayonet from the muzzle of his Springfield and used it to cut away his trouser leg so he could give himself first aid. He felt sick and woozy. He also bit his lip against the pain. The wound hadn’t hurt for the first few seconds after he got it, but it sure as hell did now.
My old man got hit just about like this, he thought as he sprinkled sulfa powder into the hole in his calf. He’d never had a whole lot in common with his father. This wasn’t the way he wanted to start. Merle Grimes still used a cane to take some of the weight off his bad leg. Armstrong hoped that wouldn’t happen to him.
He slapped on the bandage. Then he yanked the top off the syrette, stuck himself, and pushed down on the plunger. He felt more squeamish about that than he had about the bandage, or even the wound. He was hurting himself on purpose. He knew he would feel better soon, but knowing didn’t make a whole lot of difference.
Once he’d done what he could for himself, he looked around for cover. He didn’t see anything close by. He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging. It wouldn’t be much of a hole, no doubt, but anything was better than nothing. He piled the dirt from the scrape in front of him. Enough of it might stop a bullet, or at least slow one down.
He’d just got up a halfway decent dirt rampart when medics crouched beside him. “Here you go, Sergeant,” one of them said. “Can you slide onto the stretcher?”
“Sure.” Armstrong was amazed at how chipper he sounded. He didn’t care about anything. The morphine had taken hold while he was digging. He didn’t slide so much as roll onto the stretcher.
Another medic looked at his wound. The man with the Red Cross armbands and smock and helmet markings poked at it, too, which hurt in spite of the shot. “He did a pretty good job patching himself up,” he reported. “I don’t think the bones are broken. Looks like a hometowner to me.” He gave Armstrong an injection, too, before the wounded man could tell him not to bother.
“Where you from, Sergeant?” asked one of the corpsmen at Armstrong’s head.
“Uh, Washington. D.C., I mean,” Armstrong answered vaguely. That second shot was kicking like a mule. He felt as if he were floating away from himself.
The medic didn’t seem to see anything out of the ordinary in the way he talked. The man laughed. “If that’s your home town, you’re safer staying away. Damn Confederates have worked it over pretty good, I hear.”
“Folks are all right, as far as I know,” Armstrong said. Then the corpsmen picked up the stretcher and carried it away. Armstrong had felt as if he were floating before. Now he floated and bounced.
Red Cross flags flying around the aid station and Red Crosses painted on the tents themselves told the Canucks not to shoot this way—or gave them targets, depending. One of the medics let out a yell: “Doc! Hey, Doc! We got a casualty!”
That’s what I am, all right. With two shots of morphine in him, the idea didn’t bother Armstrong a bit. “Bring him in!” somebody yelled from the other side of the canvas. In Armstrong went. He smelled ether and other chemicals he couldn’t name—and blood, enough blood for a butcher’s shop. “Where are you hit, soldier?” a bespectacled man asked from behind a surgical mask.
“Leg,” Armstrong answered.
The corpsmen slid him off the stretcher and onto the operating table. The doctor peeled off the bandage he’d put on and studied the wound. “You’re lucky,” he said after perhaps half a minute.
“My ass.” Even doped to the gills, Armstrong knew bullshit when he heard it. “If I was lucky, the fucker would’ve missed me.”
“He’s got you there, Doc,” one of the medics said, laughing.
“Oh, shut up, Rocky,” the surgeon replied without rancor. He turned back to Armstrong. “I’m going to give you a shot of novocaine to numb you up. Then I’ll clean that out. It should heal fine. You may not be as lucky as you like, but you’ll do all right.”
He wasn’t especially gentle, and he didn’t wait for the novocaine to take full effect before he started working with a probe and forceps and a scalpel. Armstrong yipped a couple of times. Then he did more than yip. “Christ on a crutch, Doc, take it easy!” he said.
“Sorry about that.” The surgeon didn’t sound very sorry. He didn’t take it easy, but went on, “No offense, but I want to get you taken care of in a hurry so I can deal with a bad wound if one comes in.”
“Thanks a lot,” Armstrong said. “Easy for you to talk like that—it ain’t your goddamn leg.”
“Well, no,” the medico said. “But it’s not an amputation, either, or a sucking chest, or a belly wound, or a bullet in the head. You’ll be back on duty in six weeks or so. In the meantime, you get to take it easy while you heal. Could be worse.” As he spoke, he did some more snipping. Armstrong yelped again.
After what seemed like forever and was probably about ten minutes, the surgeon gave him a shot. “What’s that?” Armstrong asked suspiciously.
“Tetanus—lockjaw,” the man answered. He eyed Armstrong over his mask. “Locking your jaws might be an improvement, all things considered.”
“Funny, Doc. Har-de-har-har. I’m laughing my ass off, you know what I mean?”
“Get him out of here,” the surgeon told the corpsmen. “Some other poor bastard’ll come along pretty damn quick.”
They carried Armstrong over to a tent next to the aid station and put him on a cot. “Ambulance’ll be along in a while,” one of them said.
“Happy day,” he answered. They were shaking their heads when they left the tent. He couldn’t have cared less.
The tent held a dozen cots. Counting his, five of them were occupied. None of the other wounded men was in any shape to talk. One of them had bloody bandages around his head. One had lost an arm. Two had torso wounds. Three, including the man who’d been shot in the head, were deeply unconscious. The other one moaned from time to time, but didn’t come out with any real words.
Looking at them, listening to them, Armstrong reluctantly decided the smartass surgeon had a point. If he had to get wounded, he could have done a lot worse than catching a hometowner. Despite the morphine and novocaine, his leg barked again. He muttered under his breath. Then he brightened—a little, anyhow. His old man had always thought he wasn’t quite good enough, that he never did enough. If his father tried saying that now, Armstrong promised himself he’d knock his goddamn block off.
Lulu looked into Jake Featherston’s office. “General Forrest is here to see you, Mr. President,” she said.
“Send him in, then,” Jake growled. His secretary nodded and ducked out to bring back the chief of the Confederate General Staff.
Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked pale and pasty: the look of a man who spent most of his time underground and didn’t see the sun very often. Featherston looked the same way, but he hardly noticed it—he saw himself all the time. Forrest nodded to him. “Mr. President,” he said.
“Hello, General.” Jake leaned forward across the desk. “Are we ready to hit back at those damnyankee sons of bitch
es?”
“General Patton thinks so, sir, and he’s the man on the spot,” Forrest answered.
“He’s the man on the spot, all right,” Jake Featherston said. His eyes went to the map on the wall of his office. The Confederates had been gathering men and matériel east of the Appalachians for weeks, aiming to strike at the U.S. flank. If everything went the way it was supposed to, they could cut off the Yankees in Tennessee and bundle the ones in Kentucky back to the Ohio. That would put the war on even terms again. But if things didn’t go the way he wanted them to…“We can’t afford to fuck this up.”
“Yes, sir,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said stolidly.
Jake swore under his breath. He’d never thought it would come to this when he ordered his armies into motion against the USA. The Yankees were the ones who were supposed to be fighting for their lives, not his side.
He swore again, on a different note, a moment later. He’d already survived two assassination tries. If the war kept going down the toilet, he knew damn well he’d have to worry about another one. Even a Vice President as pliable as Don Partridge might start getting ideas. So might Clarence Potter—as if he didn’t have them already. But he might decide to do something about them, the cold-blooded son of a bitch. Nathan Bedford Forrest III might get some of his own, too.
“Is security tight?” Jake asked.
“Tight as we know how to make it,” Forest answered.
“It better be. It better be tight as a fifty-dollar whore’s twat,” Jake said, and the chief of the General Staff let out a startled laugh. Featherston went on, “If the damnyankees figure out what we’re up to before we get rolling, they can give us all kinds of grief, right?”
“You’d better believe it, sir. If they’ve got a gopher planted somewhere between here and General Patton’s headquarters, that’s a problem,” Forrest replied. “And if he can pass on whatever he knows, I mean.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jake said impatiently. “What are the odds?”
“Mr. President, I just don’t know.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III spread his hands. “We still have gophers in the USA and with U.S. forces. The Yankees are bound to be doing the same thing to us. Too goddamn hard for one side to root out all the spies from the other. We just sound too much alike. Whether they’ve got somebody in the right place, whether the son of a bitch can pass on what he picks up, if he picks up anything…We’ll have to find out. I hope to God we don’t find out the hard way, but I can’t be sure.”
Most men in Forrest’s place would have told Jake Featherston what they thought he wanted to hear: that everything was fine, that of course the United States had no chance of finding out what was going on. Reluctantly, Featherston respected the younger man’s honesty. If you promised the moon and couldn’t deliver, wasn’t that worse than not promising in the first place?
“All right. We’ll see what happens.” Jake tried telling himself what he wanted to hear: “Maybe the Yankees won’t believe we’d try coming through the mountains even if some stinking spy tells them we will.”
“Maybe.” But General Forrest sounded dubious. “Remember, sir, that’s General Morrell in charge of their spearhead. He won’t be easy to fool. He’s the kind who’d take armor through the mountains himself, so he’s too likely to think we’d try it, too.”
“I suppose.” Featherston forced himself to nod. “No, you’re bound to be right, dammit. I sure wish we’d punched his ticket for good. Some lousy busybody of a sergeant threw him on his back and toted him out of the line of fire, I hear.”
Nathan Bedford Forrest III didn’t say anything. The expression on his face was hard for Jake to fathom—and then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. Sure as hell, Forrest was thinking, Takes one to know one. And sure as hell, he was right. Jake damn well had been a lousy busybody of a sergeant. Clarence Potter remembered that, even if Forrest couldn’t.
“Anything else?” Jake asked.
“No, Mr. President. That’s what’s going on now.”
“We’ll go from there, then. Tell Patton to give ’em hell. Tell him I said so.”
“I will, sir—when I’m sure the damnyankees can’t hear me do it.” Forrest got to his feet, saluted, and left the office.
Once Jake was sure the general was on his way back to the War Department, he stuck his head out and asked, “Who’s next, Lulu?”
“The Attorney General is waiting to see you, Mr. President.”
“Well, you know you can send him in,” Featherston said.
Ferdinand Koenig lumbered into the office a moment later. Unlike Forrest, he was older than Jake, and also much heavier than the President, who retained a whipcord leanness. “Good morning,” Koenig rumbled.
“I hope so,” Jake said. “You couldn’t prove it by me, though.” He pointed at the map. The U.S. thrust aimed straight at Chattanooga. It was getting too close, too.
“I expect you’ll do something about that before too long.” Ferd Koenig didn’t know the details. He didn’t need or want to know them, either.
“I expect I will, too.” Jake said no more than he had to. The less you told people, the less they could blab. Ferd wasn’t the kind of guy who ran his mouth; Featherston wouldn’t have put up with him for a second if he were. But even an inadvertent slip might hurt badly here, so why take chances? The President said, “What’s on your mind today?”
“About what you’d expect: the mess in Texas.”
Jake Featherston grunted. It was a mess, no two ways about it. “When we built Camp Determination way the hell out there at the ass end of nowhere, we never reckoned the damnyankees would give us so much trouble about it.”
“That’s the truth,” Koenig said unhappily.
“Only goes to show the bastards really are a bunch of nigger-lovers,” Jake said. “How far from the camp are they?” He already knew, but didn’t feel like admitting it.
“About forty miles now. They’re throwing everything they’ve got out there into the attack,” the Attorney General said. “They’ve got more out there than we do, too. We need reinforcements, Mr. President. We need ’em bad.”
“I can’t give you more Army men, dammit.” Jake pointed again to the map showing the ominous Yankee bulge. “Everything we can grab, we’re using against that.” He sighed. Talking about Texas meant talking about Kentucky and Tennessee after all. He might have known it would. Things fit together; however much you wished you could, you couldn’t look at any one part of the war in isolation.
“Can I have more Freedom Party Guards, then?” Koenig asked. “I’ve got to do something, Jake, or the damnyankees’ll take the camp away from us. We can’t afford to let that happen—you know we can’t. It screws up the whole population-reduction program, and it hands the USA a propaganda victory like you wouldn’t believe.”
He wasn’t wrong. Sometimes, though, propaganda defeats had to take a back seat when you were nose-to-nose with real military defeat. Jake didn’t want anything to get in the way of cleansing the Confederacy of Negroes, but he didn’t want to lose the war, either. He felt more harried than he’d ever dreamt he could. Never a man who compromised easily, he knew he had to now.
“Yeah, you can raise some more Guards units,” he said. “We aren’t short of weapons and we aren’t short of uniforms, by God. But I’ll tell you something else, too—we better set up a new camp some place where the damnyankees sure as hell can’t get at it. When it’s ready to roll, just move the guard staff and start shipping in niggers.”
“What about the ones who’re already in Camp Determination?” Koenig asked.
“Well, what about ’em?” Jake said. Ferd was a sharp guy, but sometimes even sharp guys missed seeing the obvious.
“Oh.” The Attorney General turned a dull red. To hide his embarrassment, he made a small production of lighting up a Habana. After a couple of puffs, he went on, “Yeah, that’ll take care of itself, won’t it? Jeff Pinkard won’t be happy about moving, though. Camp Determination’s his baby.”
&nb
sp; “Tough titty,” Featherston said. “Where it’s at, his baby’s getting to be more trouble than it’s worth. If there’s no camp in west Texas, the United States don’t have any reason for pushing farther in. Except for Determination, what’s there?”
“Lubbock,” Koenig said. “Amarillo.”
“Big fucking deal.” Jake was massively unimpressed. “The United States are welcome to both of ’em. They want to set up their phony state of Houston again, they’re welcome to do that, too. Far as I can see, they got more grief from it last time around than anything else.”
“You’ve got a good way of looking at things,” Koenig said.
“Well, I hope so. Right now, what we’ve got to do is take care of the shit that won’t wait.” Featherston aimed a forefinger at the map one more time. “After we’ve dealt with that, then we go on with the rest of it.” He made everything sound simple and obvious and easy. He’d always had that knack.
Usually, making things sound easy was good enough. In a fight for your life, though…Ferd Koenig could see that, too. “We need to hit the Yankees hard,” he said.
“Bet your sweet ass, Ferd.” Jake was thinking of Henderson V. FitzBelmont, about whom, he devoutly hoped, the Attorney General knew nothing or next to it. “We will, too. You better believe it.”
“I’ve believed you for twenty-five years now,” Koenig said. “I’m not about to quit.”
“Good.” Jake meant it from the bottom of his heart. “You’ve believed in me longer than anybody these days.” That was true. Of people he still knew, Clarence Potter had met him before Ferd did. But Potter hadn’t always followed him. He wasn’t sure if Potter ever really followed him. Potter was loyal to the country, not to the Freedom Party or to Jake Featherston himself.
The Grapple Page 42
