The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  But she shook her head. “Milton, I think.”

  “If you say so. It’s true here, though. Except I’m not standing. I’m staying busy with what I’ve got. I think I can go another forty miles.”

  “If you go thirty, you can shell the camp,” she said.

  “We haven’t bombed it because we don’t want to go into the Negro-killing business ourselves,” Dowling said. “Same problem with shelling. The people in the camp would be on our side if they got guns. They are on our side. They just can’t do anything about it.”

  “Any way to change that?” Ophelia Clemens asked.

  “I don’t see one,” Dowling said regretfully. “I wish I did.”

  XVI

  Artillery was coming down not far from the supply dump where soldiers unloaded Cincinnatus Driver’s truck. The Army had put everything as close to the front as it could. With U.S. soldiers on the north bank of the Tennessee River, with the big brass trying to work out how to get across, nobody wanted to run short of anything.

  “You need me to, I take this shit right up to the fellas doin’ the fighting,” Cincinnatus called to the quartermaster sergeant checking things off on a clipboard.

  “That’s awright, buddy,” the noncom said in a big-city accent. “We’ll move it forward—that ain’t no skin off your nose. What you gotta do is, you gotta go back, get some more shit, and bring it down to us here.”

  “I’ll do that, then,” Cincinnatus said. This fellow didn’t mock him. He argued from efficiency, which was reasonable enough.

  As soon as the big trucks were empty, the convoy did start north to fill up again. Armored cars and half-tracks escorted it. By now, U.S. forces had a pretty good grip on the roads leading down to Chattanooga. But pretty good wasn’t perfect. Holdouts or civilians fired at the convoy. They knocked out two windows and gave a truck a flat. Cincinnatus didn’t think they hit anybody, though, which made the northbound journey a success.

  When the convoy got to the supply dump, soldiers in green-gray surrounded it. Something’s up, Cincinnatus thought, and wondered what. A full colonel came forward to lead the trucks to tents that hadn’t been pitched when they set out a few hours earlier. The troops the colonel commanded spread out; they set up cloth barriers to make sure no one outside the depot could watch what was going on inside.

  “What the hell?” Hal Williamson shouted from the cab of his deuce-and-a-half. Cincinnatus was glad to find he wasn’t the only driver wondering if somebody’d slipped a cog—or more than one.

  “This is a special transport mission,” the colonel shouted. “You are not to talk to anybody about what you’re going to see. Do you understand that? Anyone who doesn’t care to go along can withdraw now without prejudice.”

  Nobody withdrew. After that buildup, Cincinnatus was too curious to back out. He and the other truckers hauled vital munitions all the time. What could be more special than the stuff soldiers needed to blow Featherston’s fuckers to hell and gone?

  “All right!” the colonel said. “The other thing I need to warn you about is, don’t panic and don’t reach for your weapons when you see what’s going on. These men are on our side, the side of the United States of America.”

  If he hadn’t said so, Cincinnatus wouldn’t have believed it. As things were, Cincinnatus had trouble believing it anyway. The soldiers who came out of the tents wore Confederate uniforms. They had on Confederate helmets. They all carried submachine guns or automatic Tredegars.

  “The fuck?” Cincinnatus was far from the only driver to say that or something very much like it.

  “They’re on our side,” the colonel repeated. “This is the 133rd Special Reconnaissance Company. They’re all U.S. citizens who grew up in the CSA or lived there for years. They look like Confederates, they act like Confederates, they talk like Confederates—and they’re going to screw the Confederate States to the wall. The enemy did this to us in Pennsylvania last year. Turnabout, by God, is fair play.”

  Cincinnatus stared at the pseudo-Confederates. “Do Jesus,” he said softly. Little by little, a wide, predatory grin spread across his face. If these fellows sounded as good as they looked, they could cause the Confederates a world of grief.

  Were they going to cross the Tennessee? If anyone could do it on the sly, this was the outfit. If they got caught, they’d get killed—probably an inch at a time. You had to have balls to try something like this.

  Even so, Cincinnatus’ hackles rose when some of them got into the back of his truck. Those uniforms, those weapons, that accent…They all screamed Murderers! to him.

  “Don’t worry, pal,” one of them said through the little window between the rear and the cab. “We don’t bite, honest.” He sounded like an Alabaman, which didn’t help.

  After the 133rd Special Reconnaissance Company boarded the trucks, the guards at the depot took down the screens. No one from outside could hope to see into the deuce-and-a-halfs. But then everybody just sat there. The trucks didn’t roll south. Cincinnatus wanted to go. He wanted to get these men out of his truck. They looked so much like the enemy, they gave him the cold horrors, and he couldn’t do anything about it.

  He must have been wiggling on his seat, because that counterfeit Confederate spoke up again: “Don’t flabble, man. It’s better if we get there after dark. If those fuckers don’t see us coming, we can surprise ’em better.”

  “I guess,” Cincinnatus said. “Makes sense.” And it did. No matter how sensible it was, nothing could make him like it.

  Sundown seemed to take forever. He knew it didn’t, but it sure seemed to. At last, as twilight deepened, the lead truck rumbled to life. Cincinnatus thumbed the starter button with vast relief. The engine caught at once. He wouldn’t have been heartbroken had it died. The false Confederates could have found another truck, and he would have stayed here. No such luck.

  He turned on his headlights. He might as well not have bothered. The thin strip that masking tape didn’t cover gave a little more light than a smoldering cigarette, but not much. The truck convoy wouldn’t hurry down toward Chattanooga, not at night it wouldn’t.

  It did keep its escort. That was good. In case anything went wrong, soldiers in real U.S. uniforms in the half-tracks might protect the impostors from men who didn’t know who and what they were. Those soldiers might protect the drivers, too. If ordinary U.S. troops spotted these fellows in butternut, everybody anywhere near them would need a hell of a lot of protecting. Cincinnatus was sure of that.

  He rattled along at about fifteen miles an hour. Every once in a while, on a straight stretch of road, he got up to twenty or so. No shots came from the woods. Maybe all the bushwhackers went to bed early. He could hope, anyway. He followed the narrow stripe of tail light the truck ahead of him showed, and hoped that driver didn’t get lost. If he did, all the trucks behind him would follow him straight into trouble.

  After a while, Cincinnatus went past the depot he’d visited earlier in the day. He thought it was the same one, anyhow. The artillery duel seemed to have flagged with the coming of night. A mosquito bit him on the arm. He swore and slapped and didn’t squash it. Next to the bite of a shell fragment, though, it seemed almost friendly.

  Those stripes of red got a little brighter: the truck ahead was hitting the brakes. Cincinnatus did the same. The driver in back of him was paying attention, too, because that truck didn’t smack his rear bumper.

  Somebody by the side of the road gestured with a dimmed flashlight. “You guys with the special cargo—over this way!” he called.

  Like the rest of the convoy, Cincinnatus went over that way. The trucks were crawling along now. That made them quieter, but not what anybody would call quiet. With luck, though, gunfire masked most of their noise. This was about as close to the front as Cincinnatus had ever come. Peering through the windshield, he could see muzzle flashes across the river.

  Another soldier with a feeble flashlight said, “Lights out!” Cincinnatus hit the switch and went from dimness to dar
kness. His eyes adapted fast, though. He soon spotted strips of white tape somebody—engineers?—had put down to guide the convoy to where it was supposed to go. He nodded to himself. They’d done things like that during the Great War, too.

  “Here we are!” A loud, authoritative voice, that one. If it didn’t belong to a veteran noncom, Cincinnatus would have been amazed. He hit the brakes.

  “Let’s go!” That voice came from the back of the truck. The U.S. soldiers in butternut piled out. They gathered with their pals from other trucks.

  “Good luck.” Cincinnatus almost couldn’t force the words out.

  Had the ordinary U.S. soldiers here been briefed? If they hadn’t, there’d be hell to pay in nothing flat. The thought had hardly crossed his mind before gunfire broke out. Some of the weapons were U.S., others Confederate. Shouts and screams filled the air.

  “Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus burst out. He’d feared things might go wrong, but he hadn’t imagined they could go as wrong as this. Only shows what I know, he thought bitterly. The Army could screw anything up.

  And then, little by little, he realized the chaos and the gunfire weren’t screwups after all. They were part of a plan. The fake Confederates got into rubber rafts and paddled across the Tennessee toward the southern bank, which real Confederates held. Tracers came close to those rafts, but Cincinnatus didn’t think they hit any of them.

  He started to laugh. If the shooting fooled him, wouldn’t it fool Jake Featherston’s troops on the far bank? Wouldn’t they think some of their buddies were getting away from the damnyankees? And wouldn’t the phonies be likely to have all the passwords and countersigns real Confederates should have?

  So what would happen to the genuine Confederates who greeted the troops they thought were their countrymen? They would get a brief, painful, and probably fatal surprise.

  And what would happen then? Cincinnatus didn’t know, not in detail, but he could make some pretty good guesses. When he did, he laughed some more. The only thing he wished was that he were a white man in one of those rafts, carrying a Confederate automatic rifle. He wanted to see the look on the face of the first real Confederate he shot.

  The counterfeits in butternut would be getting close. He couldn’t hear the shouts across the water, not for real, but he could imagine them in his mind’s ear. He sat in the cab of his truck and swatted at more mosquitoes. He wished for a smoke, but didn’t light up. He waited and waited and…

  Sudden gunfire on the south bank of the Tennessee. As if that was a signal—and no doubt it was—U.S. artillery opened up. Cincinnatus could see where the shells came down by the flashes of bursting shells across the river. It made a tight box around the place where Featherston’s phony fuckers had come ashore. The artillerymen would have range tables and maps marked with squares so they could put their bombardment right where they needed it.

  And more boats started across the river. These weren’t paddle-powered rubber rafts; Cincinnatus could hear their motors growling. They would land real U.S. soldiers in real U.S. uniforms and, no doubt, everything the troops needed to fight on the far side of the Tennessee: mortars and antibarrel guns and ammo and command cars and maybe even barrels. The invaders would secure the bridgehead, punch a hole in the enemy defenses, and then try to break out. And the whole enormous force on the north bank would slam in right behind them.

  Cincinnatus waved, there in the deuce-and-a-half. “So long, Chattanooga!” he said. “Next stop, fuckin’ Atlanta!”

  If things worked. Why wouldn’t they, though? Somebody’d planned this one to a fare-thee-well. Once the U.S. forces punched through the lines the Confederates had fortified, what could stop them? They’d be fighting in the open, and the enemy would have to fall back or get rolled up.

  Small-arms fire on the other side of the river suddenly picked up. Cincinnatus whooped. He knew what that meant, knew what it had to mean. U.S. soldiers in green-gray were across the Tennessee. “Go, you bastards!” he yelled, as if they were his favorite football team. “Go!”

  Jake Featherston didn’t order Clarence Potter court-martialed and shot for his failure in the flanking attack on the damnyankees in Tennessee. There was plenty of failure to go around. Featherston extracted a nastier revenge on the Intelligence officer: he kept him in a combat slot.

  Potter protested, saying—accurately—that he was more valuable back in Richmond. No one felt like listening to him. The Confederate States needed combat officers. He wasn’t the only retread—far from it. Officers from the Quartermaster Corps, even from the Veterinary Corps, commanded regiments, sometimes brigades. When you ran short of what you needed, you used what you had.

  They were using Potter. He hoped they didn’t use him up.

  He wanted to do in Chattanooga what the United States had done in Pittsburgh. He wanted to tie the enemy down, make him fight house by house, and bleed him white. He thought Jake Featherston wanted the same thing. He hoped that, even if Chattanooga fell, the Confederates could take so much out of the U.S. forces attacking them that the Yankees would be able to go no farther. That would give the CSA a chance to rebuild and regroup.

  With C.S. forces holding Lookout Mountain to the south and Missionary Ridge to the east, the defensive position should have been ideal. But Potter couldn’t get anybody to listen to him.

  George Patton had gone up to talk to the President. Even so, he kept fighting the campaign his own way: hurling troops and—worse—armor into fierce counterattacks, trying to throw the men in green-gray back over the Tennessee. (Potter hated to learn that U.S. soldiers in butternut had confused Confederate defenders long enough to help the main U.S. push get over the river in the first place. That was one more trick the enemy had stolen from his side. As he’d feared from the beginning, any knife that cut the USA would also cut the CSA.)

  “Dammit, we can hit them in the flank and smash them!” Patton shouted, again and again. “It worked in Ohio! It worked in Pennsylvania till they got lucky! It’ll work here, too!”

  He didn’t mention that it hadn’t worked in Kentucky and here in Tennessee not long before. And he didn’t seem to realize that the Confederates enjoyed the edge in firepower and doctrine in Ohio and also, for a while, in Pennsylvania. Now the U.S. forces understood what was what as well as their C.S. counterparts.

  And the Yankees had the firepower edge, damn them. Whenever the Confederates surged to the attack, they got hit by artillery fire the likes of which they’d never seen in the fondly remembered days of 1941. Fighter-bombers roared across the battlefield, adding muscle to the bombardment. They had a much better chance of getting away to do it again than the slow, ungainly Confederate Asskickers did.

  Even more revolting, the United States had not only more barrels but also better barrels. The Confederates desperately needed a new model to match or surpass the latest snorting monsters from Pontiac. They needed one, but where was it? Where were the engineers who could design it? Where were the steelworkers and auto workers who could build it?

  Clarence Potter knew where they were. Too damn many of them were in uniform, doing jobs for which they weren’t ideally suited, just like him. The Confederacy was running headlong into the same problem that bedeviled it during the Great War: it couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. One or the other, yes. One and the other? Not so well as the United States.

  After Patton’s third ferocious lunge failed to wipe out or even shrink the Yankee bridgehead on the south bank of the Tennessee, he called an officers’ meeting in an elementary-school classroom. Sitting at one of those little desks, smelling chalk dust and oilcloths, took Potter back over half a century.

  “What are we supposed to do?” Patton rasped. “We’ve got to stop those bastards any way we can. If they get into Chattanooga…If they get past Chattanooga…We’re screwed if that happens. How do we stop ’em?”

  Though for all practical purposes only an amateur here, Potter raised his hand. Again, he thought of himself in short pants. He hadn’t been shy t
hen, and he wasn’t shy now. Patton pointed to him. “Let’s make the enemy come to us for a change,” he said. “Let’s pull back into the city and give him the fun of digging us out. That worked up in Pennsylvania. We can make it work for us, too.”

  “It means abandoning the river line,” Patton said.

  “Are we going to get it back, sir?” Potter asked.

  Patton gave him a dirty look. Chances were the general commanding had intended his remark to close off debate, not keep it going. Potter nodded to himself. Yes, Patton had more than a little Jake Featherston in him. Well, too bad. He shouldn’t have called this council if he didn’t want to hear other people’s ideas.

  “We will if we can get some more air support,” Patton said.

  “From where?” Potter said. “The damnyankees have had more airplanes than we do ever since the Pennsylvania campaign went sour.”

  Patton’s expression turned to outright loathing. He’d been in charge of the Pennsylvania campaign, and didn’t like getting reminded it hadn’t worked. Too bad, Potter thought again. He spoke his mind to Jake Featherston. A mere general didn’t intimidate him a bit.

  “If the airplanes come—” Patton tried again.

  “Where will we get them from?” Potter repeated. “We can’t count on things we don’t have, or we’ll end up in even hotter water than we’re in now.”

  “You talk like a damnyankee,” Patton said in a deadly voice. “I bet you think like a damnyankee, too.”

  “By God, I hope so,” Potter said, which made Patton’s jaw drop. “About time somebody around here did, don’t you think? They’ve done a better job of thinking like us than we have of thinking like them, and we’re paying for it.”

  “You haven’t got the offensive spirit,” Patton complained.

  “Not when we don’t have anything but our mouths to be offensive with, no, sir,” Potter said. “The more we keep charging the U.S. lines, the more they slaughter us, the worse off we are. Let them come to us. Let them pay the butcher’s bill. Let them see how well they like that. Maybe we’ll be able to get out of this war with our freedom intact.” He used the word with malice aforethought.