Something on the ground blew up—a roar different from the ones bombs made. Jerry Dover swore. He hoped the secondary explosion didn’t take too much with it. He was as careful with ordnance as he knew how to be. He didn’t store much of it in any one place, and he did build earth revetments around each lot. That minimized damage, but couldn’t stop it.
Another secondary explosion proved as much, as if proof were needed. Dover swore some more. A couple of other soldiers in the bombproof laughed, as much from nerves as for any other reason. A lucky hit and the bombproof might not be; it might turn into a tomb.
“Sometimes the bastards get lucky, that’s all,” Pete said.
“I don’t want them to get lucky, goddammit,” Dover said. “What if they’re starting the big push now? The guys at the front will need everything we can send ’em.”
“And if the damnyankees break through, we’ll be the guys at the front,” Pete said.
That made Dover wish he hadn’t already used up so much good profanity. Then, instead of cussing, he started to laugh himself, which made Pete send him a fishy stare. He still thought it was funny. Here he’d gone and turned down a combat command, but he was liable to get one whether he wanted it or not.
A big explosion sent dirt trickling down between the planks on the shelter’s roof. “I hope to God that was one of their bombers crashing,” Pete said.
“Me, too,” Dover said. “Why don’t they go away and bother somebody else?” He knew why perfectly well. That didn’t keep him from wishing anyway.
The bombers stayed overhead for more than two hours. That had to mean several waves of them were pounding Confederate positions. Now that the United States had airstrips down in southern Tennessee, they were only a short hop away. And they were making the most of it, too.
After no bombs had fallen for fifteen minutes or so, Dover said, “Well, let’s see what’s left upstairs.” He hoped something would be. He also hoped he wouldn’t come out when a new wave of enemy bombers appeared overhead. That’d be just my luck, wouldn’t it? he thought sourly.
The passage out from the bombproof’s outer door had a dogleg to keep blast from getting in. It also had several shovels stashed near that outer door, in case the men inside needed to dig their way out. But Jerry Dover could see daylight when he got the door open.
He could see daylight, yes. He could also see smoke, and smell it: smoke from burning rubber and explosives and wood and paint and several other things. His eyes stung. He coughed again and again.
Behind him, Pete said, “How bad is it?” He was coughing, too. Dover wished he were wearing a gas mask. He hoped the Yankees hadn’t blown up any gas shells, or he might really need one.
“I don’t think it’s good,” he answered. Getting out of the trench was easy. A near miss had built a nice, convenient ramp. If that one had burst a hundred feet to the left…No, you didn’t have to fight at the front to see combat these days.
He and Pete and the other soldiers hurried up to ground level and looked around. “Fuck,” Pete said softly, which summed things up pretty well.
Enemy air strikes had pounded Jerry Dover’s supply dumps before. That was part of the cost of doing business in a war. He didn’t think one of his depots had ever taken a beating like this before, though. Eight or ten fires raged. Yes, one of them was an enemy bomber’s pyre—he could see the airplane’s tail sticking up. But the damnyankees had done a lot more damage here than they’d taken doing it.
Hoses were already playing on some of the worst blazes. Dover felt proud of his men. They knew what they had to do, and they did it. And in doing it, they took chances front-line soldiers never had to worry about.
Of course, the men at the front had worries of their own. Pete cocked his head to one side, listening. “Firing’s picked up—fuck me if it hasn’t.”
Dover listened, too. He said the worst thing he could think of: “Yeah, I think you’re right.”
“They’re trying to break out.” Pete found something bad to say, too.
“Sure sounds that way,” Dover allowed.
“Think they can do it, sir?” Any time Pete used an officer’s title, he needed reassurance.
Right now, Dover longed for reassurance, too. “Hope to hell they can’t.”
A telephone rang. He would have bet the bombardment had blown up the instrument or broken the lines that made it work, but no. He ran over to it and admitted he was there and alive.
“Dover, you’ve got to send me everything, fast as you can!” He recognized the voice of the brigadier general who’d offered him a regiment. “They’re coming at me with everything they’ve got. If you have a division’s worth of dehydrated infantry, pour water on ’em quick and get ’em up here.”
In spite of everything, Dover smiled. But he had to say, “Sir, I don’t know what the hell we’ve got right this second. They just bombed hell out of the dump, too.”
The general’s opinion of that violated all the Commandments with the possible exception of the one against graven images. “We’re doing all we can, dammit, but how can we hang on if we don’t have enough bullets and shells?” he said.
“I’ll get you what I have, sir.” Dover slammed down the handset and yelled orders. He had to interrupt himself when the telephone rang again. “Dover here,” he said.
“Rockets! Antibarrel rockets!” another harried officer screamed in his ear. “Damnyankee armor’s tearing holes in my lines! They’ve got these goddamn flail barrels to clear mines, and they’re going through us like a dose of salts. If we don’t stop ’em quick, we are dead meat, you hear me? Fucking dead meat!”
Dover didn’t know what a flail barrel was. He didn’t know how many antibarrel rockets had escaped the Yankee bombs. He didn’t even know who was yelling at him. He managed to find that out. He rapidly figured out one other thing, too: the United States were pushing hard here. If they did break through…If they break through, we’ve lost the damn war for sure, Dover thought. He dashed off to do what he could to stop them.
Signs with skulls and crossbones on them warned the world a minefield lay ahead. Lieutenant Michael Pound was pretty sure the signs and the field were genuine. When the Confederates bluffed, they usually slanted the bones and the word MINES. These stood straight.
He was a hard charger, but he didn’t want to tear across that field and blow a track or maybe get the bottom blasted out of his barrel. And he didn’t have to. “Here comes a flail,” he said happily, ducking down into the turret to relay the news to his gunner and loader and to get on the wireless to the other machines in his platoon. He’d had to make himself remember to do that when he first became an officer. Now he did it automatically.
Sergeant Mel Scullard grinned. “Those bastards sure are funny-looking,” he said.
“Well, I won’t argue with you,” Pound told the gunner. “But who gives a damn? They do the job, and that’s what counts.”
Some engineer must have been smoking funny cigarettes when he came up with the flail barrel. He mounted a rotor drum on a couple of horizontal steel bars out in front of the barrel’s chassis. The barrel’s engine powered the contraption. Lengths of heavy chain came off the drum. As it rotated, the chains spanked the ground ahead of the oncoming machine. They hit hard enough to touch off mines before the barrel itself got to them. And other barrels could follow the path the flail cleared.
Naturally, the Confederates did everything they could to blow up flail barrels before they got very far. But, after the pounding U.S. artillery and aircraft had given the defenders here, they couldn’t do as much as they wanted to. The Confederate Army remained brave, resourceful, and resilient. It wasn’t so responsive as it had been earlier in the war, though. You could knock it back on its heels and stun it if you hit it hard enough, and the USA had done that here.
“Follow the flail!” Pound commanded, and his driver did. They all wanted to get past the minefield as fast as they could. The pine woods ahead weren’t cleared yet. That meant they
were bound to have Confederate soldiers—and, all too likely, Confederate barrels—lurking in them.
The other machines in Pound’s platoon followed him, as he followed the flail barrel. Every commander rode with his head and shoulders out of the cupola, the better to see trouble. He was proud of them. He hadn’t ordered them to do it. He wouldn’t have given an order like that. They got out there on their own.
Fires in the woods sent up smudges of smoke. There weren’t enough of them to drive out the lurkers, however much Pound wished there were. If they had an antibarrel cannon waiting…
They did. Sensibly, they fired at the flail barrel first. If they knocked it out, all the machines behind it would expose themselves to danger among the mines. Their AP round scored a direct hit…on the flail. The gadget fell to ruins, but the barrel kept going. Now it was as vulnerable as any of the others.
“Front!” Pound sang out—he’d seen the muzzle flash.
To his relief, Mel Scullard sang out, “Identified,” which meant he’d seen it, too. To the loader, he added, “HE!”
With a thrum of hydraulics, the turret traversed to the left. As it steadied, Pound ordered the barrel to stop to give the gunner a better shot. If the gun in the woods was drawing a bead on him at the same time…Well, that was the chance you took.
Several cannon spoke at once: the antibarrel gun and at least four barrels’ main armaments. An AP round dug a furrow in the dirt a few feet to the right of Pound’s machine. He was surprised it didn’t touch off a mine or two. The other shells all burst close to the same place in the woods.
“Gun it!” Pound yelled to the driver. If they hadn’t knocked out the gun or wounded the crew, more murderous projectiles would come flying out of there. “Stay behind the flail barrel,” he added a split second later.
“How come?” the driver asked. “He’s not gonna do any more flailing.”
“Well, no,” Pound said, and let it go at that. Some people weren’t very bright, and you couldn’t do anything about it. The lead barrel’s flail might have taken a knockout, but it could still show where at least one mine lay—the hard way.
Pound wished he hadn’t thought that—it might have been a jinx. A few seconds later, the flail barrel did hit a mine. It slewed sideways and stopped, its right track blown off. It didn’t catch fire, but it was hideously vulnerable out there. The commander traversed his turret till it faced the woods, putting as much armor as he could between himself and the enemy. Past that, he had to wait for a recovery vehicle and hope.
Losing the flail barrel left Pound in the lead. He could have done without the honor, but he had it like it or not. He got on the wireless to the other barrels in his platoon: “Stay behind me. If I make it through, you will, too. And even if I don’t, you won’t have far to go, so you may make it anyhow.”
He could see the signs at the far edge of the minefield. Only a couple of hundred yards to go…Maybe a hundred yards…Maybe fifty…It would be a shame to run over one now, with the end of the field so close….
“Made it!” he said, a great whoop of relief, as if all his troubles were over.
No matter how much he savored the moment, he knew better. The Confederates had a strongpoint up ahead on some high ground called Snodgrass Hill. They’d put a lot of guns up there, most of which could fire AP ammo. Hitting a moving barrel with an artillery piece wasn’t easy, but horrible things happened when gunners did. Not even the latest U.S. barrel had a prayer of surviving a tungsten-tipped 105mm round. Pound drove past a couple of burnt-out hulks that showed as much. One of them had the turret blown off and was lying upside down ten feet away from the chassis. That wasn’t the kind of thing a barrel commander wanted to see.
Much more welcome were the fighter-bombers working over Snodgrass Hill. They hit the Confederates again and again, bombing and strafing. Two or three of them went down, but the fire coming from the hill decreased dramatically.
“Couldn’t have done that in the last war,” Pound said.
“No, sir,” Sergeant Scullard agreed. “But their goddamn foot soldiers wouldn’t have been carrying stovepipes then, either.” He sprayed some bushes up ahead with a long burst from the coaxial machine gun. If any Confederates with antibarrel rockets crouched there, they didn’t get the chance to fire them.
Machine guns at the base of Snodgrass Hill held up U.S. infantry. Barrels painted green-gray knocked out the machine-gun nests one by one. Antibarrel cannon farther up the hill knocked out some U.S. barrels. Michael Pound got on the wireless and screamed for artillery support. Being only a lowly platoon commander, he didn’t have a set that let him talk directly with the gun bunnies. He yelled loud enough to make the soldier he did talk to say, “Keep your hair on, pal. I’ll get the word through, honest to Pete.”
“You’d better,” Pound said. “Otherwise, if they find you mysteriously strangled with telephone wire, they’ll know just who to suspect.” On that encouraging note, he switched off.
He couldn’t have been the only barrelman yelling for HE. The barrage didn’t land on Snodgrass Hill fast enough to suit him, but it would have had to go in yesterday to do that. Land it did. The lower slopes of the hill went up in smoke and shrapnel and poison gas. Watching all that come down on the Confederates, anybody would have thought nothing could stay alive under it.
Pound knew better. Featherston’s fuckers had trenches, and they had gas masks, and they had balls. As soon as things eased off even a little bit, they’d pop up and start serving all the guns that weren’t knocked off their wheels. He didn’t want that to happen—it was the last thing he did want.
He had no idea if he was the highest-ranking barrel officer down near the bottom of Snodgrass Hill. He didn’t care, either. He sent his platoon an order barrels didn’t hear every day: “Charge!” A moment later, he added, “And bring everybody else with you if you can. Let’s get them before they get us!”
He stood up in the cupola to wave all the U.S. barrels forward. The commanders in his other machines were doing the same thing. A short round from his own side burst much too close to his barrel. Shell fragments whined past his head. He turned the wave into an obscene gesture aimed at the artillery he’d wanted so badly only a few minutes before. You were just as dead if your buddies got you as you were if the bad guys put one between your eyes.
With a few more barrels of their own, the Confederates probably could have broken up the charge before it got rolling. But they didn’t have enough, and one of the U.S. barrels killed the first C.S. machine that showed itself. The infantrymen in butternut with stovepipes mostly stayed down in their holes; they wanted to live just like anybody else. And the charge pounded on.
Before long, Pound ducked down and closed the cupola hatch. By then, rounds didn’t have to fall short to be dangerous. He was brave enough, but not suicidal. He thought of himself as a coldly practical man. Whether that kind of man would have led a charge up the heavily defended hill was a question he never worried about.
Both his barrel’s bow machine gun and the one beside the main armament chattered. Brass casings clanked down onto the floor of the fighting compartment. “This is kind of fun, you know?—like a pinball arcade,” Sergeant Scullard said. “They pop up here, you shoot ’em, then they come up somewhere else, so you gotta knock those guys down, too.”
“I can tell you one difference,” Pound said dryly.
“Yeah? What’s that, sir?” Scullard didn’t even need to look at what he was doing to feed a new belt of cartridges into the coaxial machine gun.
“In the arcade, they don’t shoot back,” Pound answered. Machine-gun bullets and shell fragments clattered off the barrel’s thick steel skin.
“God knows we’ve been through worse.”
“You aren’t wrong,” Pound agreed. They were almost to the top of Snodgrass Hill now, and resistance was thinning out. Too much had landed on the Confederates too fast. They were groggy, like a boxer who’d taken too many rights. In the ring, the ref would have stopp
ed the fight before the loser got badly hurt. Hurting the other side was the point of the exercise here.
Pound’s barrel rolled over the tube of an overturned 105. Even if the Confederates drove the USA off this hill, they’d never use that gun again—or if they tried, the first round would blow up inside it. Wouldn’t that be a shame? Pound thought.
He looked around for more enemy soldiers to shoot or guns to wreck, and he didn’t see any. He wasn’t quite at the crest of the hill—why give somebody on the far side a clean shot?
More airplanes appeared. He needed a moment to realize they were Confederates: Asskickers with rockets slung under their wings. When the dive bombers salvoed them, they looked like lances of fire slashing across the sky. They tore into the U.S. forces on Snodgrass Hill like lances of fire, too. And Pound couldn’t do a thing about it. He’d seen a few barrels with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted in front of the commander’s cupola to serve as an antiaircraft weapon. He didn’t have one, but he was thinking he’d get one as soon as he could.
The Asskickers sped off to the south. They couldn’t linger, or U.S. fighters would hack them down. They’d done damage, no doubt about it. But they hadn’t driven U.S. forces off of Snodgrass Hill. They didn’t have a chance of doing that, not by themselves, and no Confederate ground counterattack materialized. The strongpoint seemed to be the center of the C.S. position here, and it had just fallen.
Clarence Potter knew the wintry pleasure of being right. The Confederates had hit the United States as hard as they could, and the USA didn’t quite fall over. Now the United Sates were hitting back, and they had the CSA on the ropes. The Confederates’ problem was that they’d kept trying to land haymakers when they should have been doing their damnedest not to get hit. He thought of everything his country had squandered on aggressive counterattacks that it should have kept under cover or in reserve. If that wasn’t enough to drive a man to drink, he didn’t know what would be.
The Grapple Page 65
