Casings leaped from the breeches. George fed shells as fast as he could. Thanks to Gustafson’s steady hands, the twin 40mms devoured them just as fast. Black puffs of smoke appeared all around the oncoming C.S. bombers and fighters. All the other guns on the Townsend were blasting away, too: not just the 40mm mounts but the dual-purpose five-inch main armament and the .50-caliber machine guns that were stationed wherever the deck offered a few feet of space. The noise was terrific, impossible, overwhelming.
“Got one!” Everybody at George’s mount yelled the same thing at the same time. George couldn’t be sure a shell from one of his guns hit the Hound Dog, but he thought so. The fighter pilot tried to crash his airplane into the destroyer, but fell short—he went into the drink about a quarter of a mile off the port bow.
George never saw the Asskicker that hit the Townsend till too late.
One second, he was passing shells as fast as he could. The next, altogether without knowing what had happened, he was flying through the air with the greatest of ease, like the daring young man on the flying trapeze. Unlike the daring young man, he didn’t have a trapeze. He didn’t have a net, either. The Gulf of California reached up and smacked him in the face and in the gut. If his wasn’t the worst bellyflop of all time, he surely got no lower than the bronze medal.
At least the water was warm. He didn’t swallow too much of it. His life vest kept him from sinking. He looked up just in time to watch a C.S. Mule zoom off not far above the waves. Dalby was right—with those uptilted wings, the damn thing was as ugly as a turkey vulture.
It made a much better killing machine, though.
He didn’t realize what had happened to the Townsend till he looked back at his ship. Before that, he thought whatever happened to him was some sort of private accident—though how a private accident could have hurled him close to a hundred yards was anything but obvious. He slowly decided he wasn’t thinking very well at all.
But he didn’t need to be a genius to see the destroyer was history. Her back was broken. Smoke billowed from her. The Gulf of California all around her was full of sailors, some with their heads out of the water and paddling, others facedown and still and dead.
“Holy Jesus!” George blurted. “We got nailed.” That was, if anything, an understatement. Even as he watched, the Townsend settled lower in the water. She wouldn’t stay afloat much longer.
But George only thought he was afraid till he saw gray dorsal fins knifing through the water. He’d watched sharks from the destroyer’s deck. That was fine. Watching them from the sea with a free-lunch course spread out all around…George crossed himself. The Ave Maria he blurted out might not help, but it sure couldn’t hurt.
He looked around not just for sharks but also for his buddies. He didn’t see Fremont Dalby anywhere. A big blond body floated not far away. Was that Fritz? George didn’t paddle over to see. He didn’t want to know that bad.
Fuel oil spread from the stricken destroyer. George swam away from it. That stuff would kill you if you swallowed it. He’d seen as much in the Sandwich Islands. His voice rose with others, calling for nearby ships to pick them up.
The minesweeper that had led the flotilla swung back toward the Townsend, whose deck was almost awash now. When the destroyer went down, her undertow dragged luckless sailors too close by under with her. George had got too far away for that to happen to him. But someone not nearly far enough from him screamed. Dorsal fins converged as red spread through the deep blue. George rattled off more Hail Marys, and an Our Father for good measure.
A life ring attached to a line splashed into the sea maybe fifty yards off. He swam over and put it on. Sailors aboard the minesweeper hauled him in like a big tuna. The ship had nets down. They helped him scramble up the side.
“Well, well—look what the cat drug in,” Fremont Dalby said. He was soaked, of course, but he already had a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Drop Dalby in horseshit and he’d come out with a pony. But his sardonic grin slipped as he asked, “Spot any of the other guys?”
“Maybe Gustafson.” George pointed his thumb down at the deck.
“Fuck.” The gun chief looked at the oil slick and the bobbing men and debris that were the sole remains of the Townsend. “That Asskicker sure kicked our ass, didn’t he? Hit us right where it did him the most good, the son of a bitch.”
Airplanes were still mixing it up overhead. George Enos hardly noticed. He was luxuriating—rejoicing—in being alive. “We just got ourselves some leave,” he said. ”And you know what? I wish to God we didn’t.” Dalby nodded.
XV
Jorge Rodriguez and Gabriel Medwick made unlikely friends. Jorge was skinny and swarthy and spoke with a Spanish accent. Medwick was big and blond and handsome in a jut-jawed way. If not for the war, they never would have met. But they’d shared in the grinding Confederate retreat through Tennessee. Now, just outside of Chattanooga, the powers that be were saying C.S. troops wouldn’t fall back another yard. Jorge didn’t know if they were right, but they were saying it.
A lot of men who’d come over from Virginia with Jorge and Gabriel were dead or wounded now. Jorge didn’t think much of their replacements. Old-timers in the company doubtless hadn’t thought much of him when he first joined it, either. Two company commanders had gone down since Captain Hirsch. They were both supposed to recover, but that didn’t help much now. A first lieutenant named Jubal Frisch had the company at the moment, and didn’t seem to know what to do with it.
Sergeant Hugo Blackledge hadn’t got a scratch. He was another reason Jorge and Gabriel were friends—they both hated him. He had a platoon now, not just a squad. That let him spread his bad temper around more, but did nothing to make it good.
“Why don’t they bring in a lieutenant to take over for him?” Medwick mourned.
“Even if they did, he’d still be running the platoon,” Jorge said. “That’s what sergeants do. The officer would just be—how do you say?—the guy in front.”
“The front man,” Medwick said.
“That’s it. Thanks. The front man, yeah,” Jorge said. “Blackledge, he can handle a platoon—no doubt about that.”
“Oh, I know. I know.” Gabriel Medwick looked around carefully and lowered his voice to a near-whisper. “He can run it, sure. That ain’t the problem. The problem is, he’s a fuckin’ asshole.”
“You got that right,” Jorge whispered. They both nodded, satisfied they’d figured out at least one small part of how the universe worked.
Blackledge couldn’t have heard them. He would have come down on them harder than a six-inch shell. Somehow or other, though, they both ended up on sentry-go that night. The front wasn’t quiet. Snipers and raiding parties slipped back and forth. That was the small change of war, and nobody worried much about it one way or the other except the people who got wounded or killed. But sentries were a trip wire, too. If a big push came, they were supposed to get word back to the main force.
Jorge peered out into the darkness, all eyeballs and nerves and apprehension. Every time an owl hooted, he thought it was a damnyankee signal. Every time a firefly blinked, he feared it was a muzzle flash. He clutched his automatic rifle and hoped nothing would happen till his relief took over.
Out of the darkness came a low-voiced call: “Hey! You there! Yeah, you, Confederate!”
Jorge crouched in good cover. Even if a machine gun opened up, he was safe enough. So he cautiously called back: “Yeah? What you want?”
“Got some smokes?” The other man had a funny accent—a Yankee accent. “Wanna swap ’em for rations? I can use coffee, too, if you got it.”
“I got cigarettes,” Jorge answered. “Not much coffee. You got deviled ham?”
“Buddy, I got a dozen cans,” the U.S. soldier said proudly. “I came prepared—bet your butt I did.”
“I got three-four packs I can trade you,” Jorge said. “You see a stump by a rock up in front of you?”
A pause, presumably while the wou
ld-be merchant scanned the area. “Yeah, I see it.”
“Bueno,” Jorge said. “Put four cans on it, then go away. I put four packs on it, then I go away. You come back and get ’em.”
“And you shoot my sorry ass off,” the U.S. soldier said. “I’ll put two, you put two, then we do it again. Got to be some kind of way to keep both of us interested in the deal all the way through.”
“All right,” Jorge said, though he didn’t much care whether it went through or not. The only thing that kept him going was the reasonable certainty that killing him would cause more trouble than it was worth. “Go ahead. I don’t shoot.”
“Fuckin’ better not,” the U.S. soldier said, which was true enough under the circumstances.
He moved quietly. When he came, Jorge didn’t know he was there till he got to within a few feet of the stump and boulder. He set down the cans, waved in Jorge’s general direction, and disappeared again. But he had style; he made more noise retreating than he had advancing, so Jorge could be sure he really was leaving.
Even so, Jorge’s heart pounded as he went up to the stump. If more Yankees waited nearby, they could jump out and capture him. He’d picked this spot himself, but….
He grabbed the cans and almost forgot to set down the cigarettes. After he did, he headed back to his foxhole. Up came the U.S. soldier. “Yeah, you play fair,” he said as he snatched up the packs. “Here’s the rest.” He set down two more cans and withdrew again.
After Jorge took them and left the last two packs of Dukes, he was tempted to shoot the U.S. soldier when he came forward. But what was the point? It wouldn’t win the war. It wouldn’t move the war toward being won by even a hair’s breadth. It would only start a firefight in which he was liable to get hurt himself. He would fight when he had to. When he didn’t have to, he didn’t want to.
Like a ghost, the U.S. soldier materialized. “Thanks, buddy,” he said, collecting the last two packs of Dukes. “Stay safe. I won’t plug you unless I’ve got to. Try and do the same for me.” He vanished into the darkness again.
The deviled ham would be good. Jorge could always get more smokes. He wondered how long that would last, though. The United States had overrun a lot of tobacco country. How long could the Confederacy go on turning out cigarettes? There was a scary thought.
When his relief came up, he almost shot the other Confederate soldier. It wasn’t even that his countryman messed up the password; he was just jumpy. He went back to the company’s forward position, rolled himself in his blanket, and slept till sunup.
He got coffee and fried eggs from the company cook. When he spooned deviled ham into his mess kit to go with the eggs, his buddies gave him jealous looks. “Where’d you get that?” Gabe Medwick asked.
“Found it on a tree stump,” Jorge answered, which was technically true but not what anybody would call responsive. Medwick rolled his eyes.
Sergeant Blackledge was blunter: “You trading with the enemy?”
“Uh, yes, Sergeant.” Jorge didn’t have the nerve to lie.
“Didn’t pay more than one pack of smokes for a can, did you?” Blackledge demanded.
“Uh, no, Sergeant.”
“Goddamn well better not. You jack up the price for everybody else if you do.” The sergeant tramped off. Jorge let out a sigh of relief louder and more heartfelt than the one that had escaped him after he finished the deal with the damnyankee.
He was just finishing his coffee when somebody yelled, “Mail call!” He hurried over to see if there was anything from his brothers (POWs were allowed occasional letters, so Pedro sometimes wrote) or from his family back in Sonora. The field-post corporal had a devil of a time pronouncing his last name, but a lot of ordinary Confederates did, so he took that in stride.
“Who’s it from?” Gabe Medwick asked. He had a large family in Alabama, and got letters all the time.
“My mother,” Jorge answered. “Got to remember how to read Spanish.” He said that only for effect. He wouldn’t have any trouble, and he knew it.
When he opened the letter, what he got wasn’t what he expected. They say your father killed himself, his mother wrote. I don’t believe them. I will never believe them, not just because killing yourself is a mortal sin but because your father would not do it. He would only do such a thing if he found out he had committed some great wrong and he had no other way to make up for it. And that is not so. He was doing something great, something wonderful, something important. He always said so when he wrote me. And so it must be a lie. Maybe they tell me these things because he died fighting and he promised me he would not go into any danger when he left to put on the uniform again. I cannot think of anything else that would make them say such things. And they are paying me a pension for him. Would they do that if he really killed himself? I don’t believe it.
Jorge stared at the scrawled words. He read them two or three times, and they made no more sense than they had at the beginning. He couldn’t believe his father would kill himself, either. Some great wrong, his mother said. What could his father have done that was wrong? It wasn’t in his father to do such a thing…was it? He didn’t see how.
“You all right, buddy?” Gabriel Medwick asked. By the look on his face, Jorge got the idea he’d asked the same question before, maybe more than once, and hadn’t got an answer for it. Gabe went on, “You look like somebody just reduced your population, man. You got bad news from home?”
A white Confederate from Alabama could no more read Spanish than he could fly, Jorge reminded himself. He didn’t want to lie, but he didn’t want to tell the truth, either. “It’s not as good as it could be, anyhow,” he said.
“Not more trouble on top of your dad, I hope?” Medwick knew Hipolito Rodriguez was dead. He didn’t know how—up till this moment, Jorge hadn’t known how himself. I still don’t, dammit, he thought fiercely.
“No, not on top of my father, gracias a Dios,” Jorge said, which was even true. “Just…trouble winding up his affairs, I guess you would say.”
“That’s no good,” Gabe said seriously. “Stuff like that can get a whole family riled up, with lawyers or maybe guns, depending. Some neighbors of ours started feuding over a will, and now everybody hates everybody else. You don’t want something like that to happen.”
“No, no,” Jorge said again. “I don’t think it will. But everything is more…more complicated than anyone thought it would be.”
“Not easy when somebody dies. I’m sorry,” Medwick said.
“No, not easy,” Jorge agreed.
Before he could say anything more, his head went up like a hound’s when it took a scent. He didn’t smell anything, but he heard trouble in the air. Gabe Medwick shouted it louder than he did: “Incoming!” They both dove for the closest hole in the ground.
It wasn’t really big enough for both of them, but they made do. And when the U.S. shells started bursting around them, they both tried to make themselves as small as they could, which made the hole seem bigger. That had to be crazy, but Jorge thought it was true.
The damnyankees had shelled Confederate positions in front of Chattanooga before, but this was different. That had just been harassing fire. This time, they meant it. They wanted to blow a big hole in the Confederate line right here, smash on through it, and head straight for the city the soldiers in butternut had defended so long and so hard.
They were liable to get what they wanted, too. Jorge had never been in a bombardment like this, not here and not back in Virginia, either. Beside him, Gabe Medwick was screaming for his mother. He wasn’t hurt—he was just scared to death. Jorge couldn’t blame him, not when he was scared to death, too.
As suddenly as it had begun, the barrage stopped. “Up!” Jorge said. “We’ve got to get out and fight, or they’ll murder all of us.”
He looked around…and found he might have been in the mountains of the moon. After a pounding like that, could the Confederates fight back?
If you wanted something and the fellow who h
ad it didn’t feel like handing it over, one way to get it was to put a big rock in your fist and then slug him. The USA wanted Chattanooga. The Confederates didn’t feel like giving it up. Lieutenant Michael Pound knew a certain amount of pride at being on the pointy end of the rock.
As soon as the U.S. bombardment let up, he got on the wireless circuit to the other barrels in his platoon: “Let’s go get ’em! They think they can stop us. I say they’re wrong, and I say we’ll prove it.”
In war, proving the other guy was wrong often meant proving he had no business breathing. Pound was ready to use that kind of logic against Jake Featherston’s men. Why not? Featherston had tried using it against the United States.
As his barrel rumbled forward, Pound wondered if he would spot General Morrell. This was Morrell’s operation, and Pound knew how Morrell thought, how he fought, better than anyone else except possibly George Patton. One thing Morrell did was lead from the front. He’d be here somewhere.
“Old home week,” Pound muttered.
“What was that, sir?” Sergeant Scullard asked.
“Nothing. Woolgathering,” Pound said, embarrassed the gunner had overheard him. He still wasn’t used to getting called sir, either.
The bow machine gun chattered, knocking over a couple of soldiers in butternut unlucky enough to get caught away from cover. Another Confederate dropped his submachine gun and raised his hands over his head. “What do I do, sir?” The question came back to Pound over the intercom.
“Let him live,” Pound answered. “We’ve got infantry along to scoop up prisoners, and he doesn’t look like he’ll do any more fighting. We’ll play fair when we can.” And when they couldn’t—and there would be times like that—he would do whatever needed doing, and he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
He stood up in the turret, riding with head and shoulders out so he could see more. Only a little small-arms fire was coming back at the barrels; the barrage had left the Confederates more discombobulated than usual. Maybe they were finally starting to crack. He could hope so, anyhow.
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