The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  And Marietta’s people seemed as ravaged as the town. They were skinny and dirty, many of them with bandages or simply rags wrapped around wounds. They stared at the U.S. troops trudging south through their rubble-strewn streets with eyes that smoldered. Nobody said anything much, though. As Chester had seen in other Confederate towns, his buddies were quick to resent insults. A man with a rifle in enemy country could make his resentment felt.

  A scrawny woman whose hair flew every which way cocked a hip in a pose meant to be alluring. “Sleep with me?” she called.

  “Jesus!” said one of the soldiers in Chester’s squad. “I’ve been hard up before, but not that hard up.”

  “Yeah.” Chester nodded. “I think she’s a little bit cracked. Maybe more than a little bit.”

  An old man whose left sleeve hung empty scowled at him. Chester nodded back, more politely than not. He understood honest hate, and could respect it. He wondered if the respect he showed might change the Confederate’s mind. It didn’t, not by the look on the man’s face. Chester didn’t suppose he should have been surprised.

  A burnt-out C.S. barrel sat inside the ruins of a brick house. The last few feet of the barrel’s gun poked out through a window. The gun tube sagged visibly. Eyeing it, Chester said, “Must’ve been a hell of a fire.”

  “Yeah, well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys,” said the soldier who didn’t want the scrawny woman.

  Chester grunted. He didn’t love Confederate barrelmen. What U.S. soldier did? Those enemies were too good at killing his pals. But he didn’t like to think of them cooking like beef roasts in a fire so hot it warped solid steel. That was a bad way to go, for anybody on either side. He wanted the enemy barrel crew dead, sure. Charred to black hideousness? Maybe not.

  “Come on, step it up!” Lieutenant Lavochkin yelled. “We aren’t camping here. We’re just passing through, heading for Atlanta.”

  Chester looked forward to fighting for Atlanta the way he looked forward to a filling without novocaine. Atlanta was a big city, bigger than Chattanooga. The United States couldn’t take it by surprise, the way they had with the Tennessee town. If U.S. forces tried smashing straight into it, wouldn’t the Confederates do unto them as the USA had done to the Confederacy in Pittsburgh? Fighting one house at a time was the easiest way Chester knew to become a casualty.

  Maybe the brass had a better plan. He hoped like hell they did. But if so, nobody’d bothered passing the word down to an overage retread first sergeant.

  A kid wearing what looked like his big brother’s dungarees said, “Get out of my country, you damnyankee.”

  “Shut up, you lousy brat, or I’ll paddle your ass.” Chester gestured with his rifle. “Scram. First, last, and only warning.”

  To his relief, the kid beat it. You didn’t want to think a nine-year-old could be a people bomb, but he’d heard some ugly stories. Boys and girls didn’t fully understand what flicking that switch meant, which made them more likely to do it. And soldiers sometimes didn’t suspect children till too late.

  “Hell of a war,” Chester muttered.

  Some of his men liberated three chickens to go with their rations. They didn’t have time to do anything but roast poorly plucked chicken pieces over a fire. The smell of singeing feathers took Chester back half a lifetime. He’d done the same thing in the Great War. Then as now, a drumstick went a long way toward making your belly stop growling.

  He was smoking a cigarette afterwards when a grenade burst not far away. Somebody screamed. A burst of fire from a submachine gun was followed by another shriek.

  “Fuck,” said a soldier named Leroy, who was more often called the Duke.

  “Never a dull moment,” Chester agreed. “We’re licking these bastards, but they sure haven’t quit.”

  As if to prove it, the Confederates threw in a counterattack the next day. Armor spearheaded it: not barrels, but what seemed more like self-propelled guns on tracked chassis. They weren’t mounted in turrets, but pointed straight ahead. That meant the enemy driver had to line up his machine on a target instead of just traversing the turret. The attack bogged down south of Marietta. A regiment of U.S. barrels made the C.S. barrelbusters say uncle.

  Chester examined a wrecked machine with a professional’s curiosity. “What’s the point of these, sir?” he asked Captain Rhodes. A U.S. antibarrel round had smashed through the side armor. He didn’t want to think about what the crew looked like. You could probably bury them in a jam tin.

  “These things have to be cheaper to build than barrels, and quicker to build, too,” the company commander answered. “If you’ve got to have as much firepower as you can get, and if you need it yesterday, they’re a lot better than nothing.”

  “I guess,” Chester said. “Ugly damn thing, isn’t it?”

  “Now that you mention it, yes—especially if you’re on the wrong end of it,” Rhodes said. “Get used to it, Sergeant. You can bet your ass you’ll see more of them.”

  He was bound to be right. And if they were cheap and easy to make…“What do you want to bet we start cranking ’em out, too?”

  Captain Rhodes looked startled, but then he nodded. “Wouldn’t be surprised. Anything they can do, we can do, too. We’re lucky we’ve kept our lead in barrels as long as we have. Maybe the Confederates were too busy with these things to pay as much attention to those as they should have.”

  “Breaks my heart,” Martin said dryly.

  The company commander laughed—but not for long. “Be ready for a push of our own, soon as we can move more shit forward. When the Confederates hit us, they use stuff up faster than they can resupply. Might as well kick ’em while they’re down.”

  “Mm?” Chester weighed that, then nodded. “Yeah, I bet you’re right, sir. I’ll get the men ready. You think we’re going into Atlanta?”

  “Christ, I hope not!” Rhodes blurted, which was about what Chester was thinking himself. Rhodes went on, “We do try to go straight in there, a lot of us’ll come out in a box.”

  “Looks like that to me, too. So what do we do instead?” Chester asked. “Just bomb it flat? Or maybe try and flank ’em out?”

  “My guess is, we go that way.” Captain Rhodes pointed east. “We do that, we cut the direct train and truck routes between Richmond and Atlanta. Yeah, the Confederates can get around it, but we put ourselves in a good position for hitting the lines and the roads coming up from the south. I’d sure rather do that than charge in with my head down.”

  “Me, too,” Chester said fervently. “Amen, in fact. You think the brass has the smarts to see it like you do?”

  “Well, we’ll find out,” Rhodes replied with a dry chuckle. But he didn’t seem too downcast. “Start of this campaigning season, we were chucking the Confederates out of Ohio. Now they’re trying to get us out of Georgia. I think maybe General Morrell knows what he’s doing.”

  “Here’s hoping,” Chester said, which made the company commander laugh out loud.

  The U.S. push went in three days later. The Confederates had done what they could to build a line south of Marietta, and it held for most of a day, but once U.S. armor cracked it the enemy didn’t have much behind it. Then Confederates fired what had to be half the rockets in the world at the advancing men in green-gray. They were scary—hell, they were terrifying. They caused casualties, not a few of them. But, without enough men in butternut on the ground to hold it, the rockets couldn’t stop the U.S. forces.

  And the main axis of the U.S. attack aimed not at Atlanta but at Lawrenceville, almost due east of Marietta. Captain Rhodes looked uncommonly smug. Chester Martin didn’t say boo. How could he? The captain had earned the right.

  Heavy bombers and fighter-bombers stayed overhead all the time, tearing up the countryside south of the U.S. advance and keeping the Confederates in and around Atlanta from striking at the U.S. flank. Lots and lots of artillery fire came down on the enemy, too. Chester approved of every single shell and wished there were more.

>   Every time U.S. forces crossed a railroad line, demolition teams tore hell out of it. Every time U.S. forces crossed a paved road that ran north and south, engineers dynamited bridges and blew craters in the roadway. Even if the Confederates rallied and drove back the men in green-gray, they wouldn’t move much into or out of Atlanta any time soon.

  For the first time, Confederate prisoners seemed to lose heart. “Thanks for not shootin’ me,” one of them said as he went to the rear with his hands high. “Reckon we’re whipped any which way.”

  “See what Featherston’s freedom got you?” Chester said.

  “Well, we’re rid of most of our niggers, anyways, so that’s good,” the POW said. “But hell, Yank, you’re right—we coulda done that without gettin’ in another war with y’all.”

  “You started it,” Chester said. “We’ll finish it.”

  Freedom Party Guards, by contrast, still believed they’d win. “Wait till the secret weapons get you,” said a man in camouflage overalls. “You’ll be sorry then.”

  “Yeah, the bogeyman’ll get you if you don’t watch out,” Chester jeered. The captured Confederate glared at him. Under the guns of half a dozen soldiers in green-gray, he couldn’t do more, not if he wanted to keep breathing. “Take him away,” Chester said. “Let him try his line of bullshit on the Intelligence boys.”

  “It ain’t bullshit!” the Freedom Party Guardsman said. “You’ll find out! And you’ll be sorry when you do, too.”

  “Yeah, sure, buddy,” Chester said. Two men took the POW off to the rear.

  “The crap they come up with,” another U.S. soldier said, lighting up a Habana he’d taken from a prisoner. “He sounded like he believed it, too.”

  “People used to believe the world was flat,” Chester said. The soldier laughed and nodded. But the Guardsman had sounded mighty sure of himself. And Chester remembered all the rockets the Confederates seemed to have pulled from nowhere. He was a little more worried than he let on—not a lot, but a little.

  Flora Blackford hurried into the House chamber. She’d got the summons to the joint session of Congress only a little while before. Other Representatives and Senators were grumbling at having to change plans to get here on time. She understood why. The President wouldn’t ask for a joint session much in advance. That would give the Confederates—and maybe other enemies—more time to come up with something unpleasant.

  The Speaker of the House rapped loudly for order. When he got something close to quiet, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have the distinct honor and high privilege of introducing the President of the United States, Charles W. La Follette!”

  Applause rang through the hall. Charlie La Follette took his place behind the lectern. He was tall and ruddy and handsome, with a splendid shock of white hair the cartoonists loved. He’d been President for almost a year and a half now, but still didn’t seem to have stepped out from under Al Smith’s shadow. Maybe today was the day.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the Congress, my fellow Americans, 1943 has blessed our arms with victory,” he said. “When the year began, we were driving invaders from western Pennsylvania. Now Pennsylvania and Ohio have been liberated, and our armies stand not far from Atlanta, the hub of the Confederate States of America.”

  More applause washed over him, loud and fierce. He grinned and held up a hand. “We have also driven deep into Texas, and seen with our own eyes the horror the Confederates have visited on their Negro population. The murder factory called Camp Determination, at least, will perpetrate those horrors no more.”

  This time, the applause was more tentative, though Flora clapped till her palms hurt. Pictures of those enormous mass graves—the words hardly did them justice—had been in all the weeklies for a while. Even so, the furor was less than she’d hoped for. People either didn’t care or didn’t want to believe what they were seeing was true.

  “Everywhere, Confederate forces are in retreat,” the President said. “Even Jake Featherston must see that he cannot hope to win the war he started two and a half years ago. This being so, I call on him to surrender unconditionally and spare his country the bloodshed further resistance would cause.

  “Though they do not deserve them, I promise him and his leading henchmen their lives. We will take them into exile on a small island, and will guard them there so they can no longer trouble North America and blight its hopes. Confederate soldiers will be disarmed and sent home. All Confederates, white and colored, will be guaranteed life, liberty, and property.

  “Think well, President Featherston. If you reject this call, both you and your country will regret it. We will leave wireless frequency 640 kilocycles unjammed for your reply for the next forty-eight hours. You will be sorry if you say no.” He stepped away from the microphones on the lectern, putting notes back into an inside pocket of his jacket as he did.

  Flora applauded again. So did most of the other members of Congress. If the war ended now…If it ends now, Joshua won’t get hurt, she thought. That alone gave her plenty of reason to hope. Hope or not, though, she feared Featherston would ignore the call.

  The hall emptied as fast as it had filled. Now no one had a great big target to aim at. Flora hurried to her office. She tuned the wireless set there to 640. She didn’t know how long the President of the CSA would take to answer, but she wanted to hear him when he did.

  He needed less than two hours. “Here is a statement by President Featherston of the Confederate States of America,” an announcer said.

  “I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth.” That familiar, rasping, hate-filled voice snarled out of the wireless set. “And the truth is, people of the USA and President La Follette, we aren’t about to surrender. We’ve got no reason to. We’re going to win this war, and you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your mouth pretty damn quick.

  “Philadelphia will get the message in just a few minutes. Philadelphia will get it twice, matter of fact. You wait, you watch, and you listen. Then you figure out who ought to be doing the surrendering. So long for now. You’ll hear more from me soon.”

  Flora said something that would have shocked her secretary. It amounted to, The nerve of the man! He couldn’t have bombers that close to Philadelphia. U.S. Y-ranging gear would have picked them up. And there was bound to be a heavy combat air patrol above the de facto capital of the USA. Bombers—even captured U.S. bombers or C.S. warplanes painted in U.S. colors—might not get through. But Jake Featherston had sounded devilishly sure of himself.

  Terrorists inside the city? People bombers waiting to press their buttons? Flora’s mouth tightened. She knew those were both possibilities. Could Featherston be so sure they’d do their job on short notice? Maybe that was why he hadn’t answered right after President La Follette’s speech. Or…

  A loud explosion rattled Flora’s teeth and put ripples in the coffee in her half-full cup. Long experience told her that was a one-ton bomb going off not nearly far enough away. No air-raid sirens howled. It hadn’t fallen from an enemy bomber. Flora was sure of that.

  Maybe three minutes later, another blast echoed through Philadelphia, this one a little farther from her office. “Vey iz mir!” she exclaimed. She didn’t know what Featherston and his minions had done, but no denying he’d kept his promise.

  After about a quarter of an hour, he came back on the wireless. “I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to say I told you the truth,” he crowed. He must have waited till he got word his plan, whatever it was, had worked. “See how you like it, Philadelphia. Plenty more where those came from, and we’ll spread ’em around, too. Surrender? Nuts! We just started fighting.”

  If anyone in Philadelphia knew what the Confederates had done, Franklin Roosevelt was likely to be the man. What point to having connections if you didn’t use them? Flora dialed his number, hoping she’d get through.

  She did. “Hello, Flora!” Roosevelt still sounded chipper. As far as she could tell, he always did. But he went on, “Can’t talk l
ong. Busy as the Devil after a fire at an atheists’ convention right now.”

  “Heh,” Flora said uneasily. “You must know why I’m calling, though. What did the Confederates just do to us?”

  “Well, it looks like a rocket,” the Assistant Secretary of War answered. “Two rockets, I should say.”

  “Rockets? You mean they had them set up somewhere outside of town and fired them off when Featherston told them to?”

  “No, I don’t think that’s what happened, not from the first look we’ve had at what’s left of them.” Franklin Roosevelt kept that jaunty air, but he sounded serious, too. And he wasted no time explaining why: “Our best guess is, they shot them up here from Virginia.”

  “From Virginia? Gevalt!” Flora said. “That’s got to be—what? A couple of hundred miles? I didn’t know you could make rockets fly that far.”

  “Unfortunately, I can’t. But Jake Featherston can, damn his black heart,” Roosevelt said.

  “What can we do to stop them?” Flora asked.

  “At this end, nothing. They get here too fast,” he said. “If they’ve got bases or launchers or whatever you call them, maybe we can bomb those. I hope so, anyway. But I don’t know that for a fact, you understand.”

  “How much damage did they do?” Flora found one bad question after another.

  “One blew a big hole in a vacant lot. The other one hit in front of an apartment building.” Now Roosevelt was thoroughly grim. “Quite a few casualties. But it would have been worse at night, with more people at home and fewer out working.”

  “Do they aim them at Philadelphia? Or do they aim them, say, at the corner of Chestnut and Broad?” Yes, all kinds of nasty questions to ask.

  “Right now, your guess is as good as mine. If I had to bet, I’d say they just aim them at Philadelphia. A rocket can’t be that accurate…can it? But that’s only a wild-ass guess—excuse the technical term.”