Breakthroughs gw-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “Then get the hell out of here,” the clerk said, and Cincinnatus-Cincinnatus Driver-took his leave. Behind him, the clerk called “Next!” and the black man in back of Cincinnatus stepped forward to take his place.

  He got out of the Covington city hall as fast as he could; he kept expecting Luther Bliss to pop out of nowhere and start grilling him. Had the Kentucky State Police chief known what all Cincinnatus had done instead of merely suspecting him because of the company he kept, he would have been in a different line, a line where his ankles were shackled to those of the prisoners in front of and behind him.

  When he got outside, he let out a sigh of relief. He also felt a surge of pride that surprised him. Somebody might actually call him Mr. Driver now, a form of address impossible before. In the form of his name-if in very little else-he had become a white man’s equal.

  He spotted Apicius in the line snaking its way toward the building. The barbecue cook saw him, too, and waved. As he waved back, he wondered what the local Red leader would think of this small measure of equality. Nothing much, he suspected; mystification was one of Apicius’ favorite words.

  Apicius waved again, more urgently this time. With a certain amount of reluctance, Cincinnatus approached. “What are you callin’ yourself?” the fat black man asked him.

  “Driver,” Cincinnatus answered. “How ’bout you? You gonna be Cook?”

  “Hell, no.” Apicius’ jowls wobbled as he scornfully shook his head. “I’m gonna call me an’ my boys Wood. You ain’t got the right wood in the fire, you ain’t got no barbecue.”

  “Apicius Wood.” As the clerk had before, Cincinnatus tested the flavor of the new surname. As the clerk had, he decided he approved. “Sounds pretty good, you want to know what I think.”

  “Don’t care much,” the Red answered, “on account of it don’t matter a hill of beans any which way. Just one more tool of the oppressors to do a better job of exploitin’ us. Hell of a lot easier to keep track of Apicius Wood than it is to keep track of Apicius the barbecue king.”

  He made no particular effort to keep his voice down. Most Kentucky Negroes, like most down in what was still the CSA, had at least some sympathy for the Marxist line. Cincinnatus felt that way himself. Grinning at Apicius, though, he said, “They ain’t gonna have much trouble keepin’ track o’ you.”

  Apicius set his hands on his hips, which only made him look wider than ever. “I ain’t sayin’ you’re wrong, mind you, but I ain’t sayin’ you’ re right, neither,” he said. “Other thing is, ain’t a whole lot o’ niggers stand out in a crowd like I do.” He snapped his fingers. “In a crowd-that reminds me, goddamn if it don’t.”

  “Reminds you of what?” Cincinnatus asked.

  “Reminds me of why Tom Kennedy got his head blown off,” Apicius replied.

  Cincinnatus stiffened. “I think maybe you better tell me whatever it is you reckon you know.”

  “Wonder if I ought to,” Apicius said thoughtfully. “I still don’t know whose game you’re playin’.”

  “I’m playing my own game, goddammit,” Cincinnatus replied in a low, furious voice. “And I’ll tell you somethin’ else, too-I know how to play rough. You don’t reckon I’m tellin’ you the truth, you remember what happened to Conroy’s store and you reckon it up again.”

  “You come prowlin’ round my place, you ain’t goin’ home again,” Apicius told him. “Catfish on the river bottom git hungry this time o’ year.” Cincinnatus looked back at him and said not a word. The barbecue cook was the first to shift from foot to foot. “Dammit, I do recollect about Conroy’s.”

  “Tell me what you know, then.”

  “Think about it like this,” Apicius said. “Think about how come Kennedy came round your place. Think about how come he didn’t go to Conroy or any o’ them Confederate diehards.”

  Cincinnatus duly thought about it. His first thought was the one Apicius no doubt wanted him to have: that Kennedy had fallen foul of the diehards and was trying to escape them. But Cincinnatus’ ex-boss could as easily have been fleeing Luther Bliss or the U.S. Army. Or, for that matter, the Reds might have been after him while trying to make him-and Cincinnatus-think someone else was.

  Letting Apicius see any of those thoughts but the first one was dangerous. “Uh-huh,” Cincinnatus said, as if to tell the Red leader he was with him and had not gone one step beyond him.

  A broad, friendly grin spread over Apicius’ face. Cincinnatus trusted it no further than he would have trusted a smile from Luther Bliss. Apicius said, “That’s the way the money goes.”

  Pop goes the weasel, Cincinnatus thought. Popped right between the eyes, most likely. And I’m the weasel. He took up his new surname and carried it off toward his home.

  “We’ve grabbed ’em by the nose!” Lieutenant General George Custer said in the map room of what had been the Tennessee state capitol. “Now we have to kick ’em in the pants.”

  “Yes, sir,” Major Abner Dowling said resignedly. Custer was a great one for mouthing slogans. He was a great one for inspiring his men, too. He’d had a lot of practice at that, having fed so many of them into the meat grinder. But, now that he’d come up with what was admittedly the great military idea of his career, he seemed disinclined to think about any other military ideas.

  He had reasons, too, or thought he did. “The War Department is run by morons,” he growled, “and expects everyone else to be a moron, too.”

  “Sir, as I’ve said before, in my opinion it’s just as well that First Army doesn’t advance on Memphis,” Dowling answered. “We’re too distant for the thrust to do much good. Murfreesboro is a better choice all the way around.”

  Custer muttered something into his gilded mustache. It sounded like, If the War Department orders it, it must be wrong. But, since he hadn’t said it quite loud enough to compel Dowling to notice it, his adjutant didn’t. He made such a point of not noticing, in fact, that Custer had to say something intelligible: “So long as we kick ’em in the pants hard enough, maybe it won’t matter which direction we go in.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dowling said, more enthusiastically than before. “We truly may have them on the ropes. All we need to do is finish them off.”

  Was he really talking like that? He was. Did he really believe what he was saying? He did. That he believed it still astonished him. The Rebs were fighting hard-nobody had ever accused Confederate soldiers of having any quit in them-but there weren’t enough of them, white or black, and they didn’t have enough guns or barrels to hold back the United States, not any more.

  Custer said, “The Barrel Brigade will put a crimp in the CSA-you wait and see if it doesn’t.”

  “Yes, sir.” Abner Dowling didn’t know whether to be pleased he was thinking along with the general commanding First Army or appalled Custer was thinking along with him. After momentary hesitation, the latter emotion prevailed.

  With a chuckle that struck Dowling’s ear as evil, Custer went on, “I’m going to make sure the Barrel Brigade doesn’t smash the Rebel line anywhere near General MacArthur’s division, too. And do you know what else, Major? I’ll have MacArthur thank me for doing things that way, too, because I’ll extend his men the great privilege of feinting against the Rebels to draw their attention away from the main axis of my attack.”

  “That’s very-clever, sir,” Dowling said. No wonder Custer had sounded evil. He might not be a great soldier (on the other hand, despite everything, he might be, a realization that never failed to unsettle Dowling), but more than half a century in the Army had made him a nasty schemer. Daniel MacArthur could no more help putting his heart into any attack he made than a trout could help rising to a fly. But an attack meant as a feint would be foredoomed to failure, and not all his brilliance could change that. Poor bastard, Dowling thought-not that he was fond of the arrogant MacArthur, either.

  “Colonel Morrell, now, Colonel Morrell is a proper officer,” Custer said. “That young fellow will go far.”

  Since Morrell
had made himself so prominent in Custer’s eyes, Dowling had done some checking on the officer who led the barrels. Morrell’s record was impressive; the only thing that could possibly be construed as a blemish was trouble getting along with the General Staff back in Philadelphia. Dowling didn’t hold that against a man, and Custer, no doubt, would look on it as virtue rather than vice.

  Off in the distance, antiaircraft guns began to pound. First Army had driven the CSA out of artillery range of Nashville, but the Confederates never stopped trying to hit back as best they could. Their aeroplanes were finishing the job of pounding the town to bits that U.S. artillery north of the Cumberland had begun so well.

  Larger explosions started mingling with the barking thunder of the guns. Dowling frowned. “Archie can’t hit the broad side of a barn,” he complained. “It’s a good thing the Rebs aren’t any better at it than we are, that’s all I have to say.”

  The explosions came closer to the state capitol as the Confederates’ bombing aeroplanes penetrated one ring of U.S. antiaircraft guns after another. Dowling wondered how much damage the bombers were liable to do. In the early days of the war, bombing raids had been pinpricks, annoyances. Now more and bigger aeroplanes carried more and bigger bombs. They could hurt.

  “Sounds like they’re heading right toward us,” Custer remarked. He didn’t sound afraid, or even particularly concerned, only interested. No one had ever challenged his courage. His good sense, perhaps, but never his courage.

  As the antiaircraft fire grew more frantic, the drone of the bombers’ motors provided a swelling background to it. The ground quivered under Dowling’s feet from bombs slamming into Nashville one after another, marching ever closer to the already-battered building in which he stood.

  His urge was to dive under a table. The only thing he personally could do about the bombers was try to keep them from killing him. Being under fire, so to speak, without being able to do anything about it galled him.

  It galled Custer, too, far more. He went to a south-facing window, yanked his pistol from its holster, and blazed away at the Confederate aeroplanes overhead. Abner Dowling knew how utterly futile that was, but sympathized with it nonetheless. And then Custer shouted, “One of them’s coming down, by God!”

  Dowling stared. Custer couldn’t possibly have-

  Custer, no doubt, hadn’t. The Confederate bomber had to have been in trouble long before the general commanding First Army opened fire on it. Otherwise, it would have crashed beyond the state capitol instead of coming down not far in front of the building Custer was using as his headquarters.

  It must have had most of its bomb load still on board, too. The blast sounded like the end of the world. Custer reeled away from the window, both hands clapped to his ears. One of his elbows caught Dowling in the belly. “Uff!” his adjutant said. They both sat down, hard.

  Custer yelled something. Dowling had no idea what it was. He hoped his ears would start working again one of these days. They weren’t working for the time being.

  Bombs kept falling, too. Dowling heard them, and felt them as well. One of them blew the glass out of the window Custer had thrown open. Dowling yipped as a little fragment bit the back of his neck. He clapped a hand to the wound. His palm came away red, but not too much worse than if he’d cut himself shaving.

  “Get up!” Custer screamed in his ear. “We’ve got to make sure this headquarters is still a going concern.”

  Grunting, Dowling struggled to his feet. Custer was up ahead of him, even though the general commanding First Army carried twice his years. That shamed Dowling, although every part of his corpulent body-his right ham in particular-seemed one great bruise.

  Custer’s right trouser leg was out at the knee. He had a cut on his face and another on the back of his hand, each about the same as the small wound Dowling had taken. He seemed to notice none of that. Spry as a new recruit, he ran back to the window and fired some more at the Confederate aeroplanes. Only when his pistol clicked instead of roaring did he bellow what had to be a curse and shove the weapon back into the tooled leather sheath in which it had sat idle for so many years.

  Dowling wondered if he would reload. Instead, he ran for the door. Limping, his adjutant followed. Dowling had never actually seen Custer under attack till now. Lieutenant generals seldom approached the front: the last time Custer had been there was during the first chlorine gas attack against the CSA, two years before.

  Now, all at once, Dowling understood how Custer’s shortcomings had failed to keep him from advancing to his present eminence. In combat, the general commanding First Army was a man transformed. Nothing fazed him. He threw open the door and charged down the hall, Dowling in his wake.

  “General Custer! General Custer!” Officers and enlisted men yelled Custer’s name loud enough to penetrate the cotton wool some unknown malefactor seemed to have stuffed into Dowling’s ears. “What do we do, General Custer?”

  “Come with me!” Custer shouted, and they came. They obeyed without question. Dowling was very impressed. He was even more impressed at the stream of orders Custer threw out. Wherever the general saw a fire or a pile of rubble, he set men to attacking it. They went in with a will, too, just as they’d gone in with a will against the Confederates in so many expensive attacks.

  Steam pumps played water on the fires closer to the Cumberland, from which they could easily draw a good supply. Other fire engines struggled against those here close by and in the state capitol, but pressure in the mains wasn’t all it should have been; Dowling wondered if some of the bombs had damaged the water works. He sighed. The USA had finally got them running again, and now…

  But Custer, far more than in an office or conferring with his subordinates around a map, took charge. “Don’t worry, pal,” he called to a soldier whom other men in green-gray were digging out from under bricks and stones. “If you think this is bad, just wait till you see what we do to those Rebel sons of bitches.”

  “That’s bully, sir,” the wounded man answered. By the blood soaking his leg and by the way he held it, he wouldn’t be doing any more fighting any time soon, but he was smiling as his comrades carried him away. Dowling shook his head in amazement. He wouldn’t have been smiling with a broken leg. He would have been screaming his head off. Would listening to Custer have made him shut up? He didn’t think so, but it had sure as hell done the job for the wounded soldier.

  Custer turned and said, “Major, get on the telegraph to Philadelphia. Let the War Department know I am well and tell them First Army has just begun to fight.”

  Dowling, whose ears were still stunned, had to get him to repeat that several times before he had it straight. Custer gladly repeated himself: the only thing he liked better than hearing his own voice was seeing his name in the newspapers. But the men he’d been directing listened avidly, no matter how pompous he sounded.

  “Sorry, sir,” said the telegrapher to whom Dowling brought the message, “but the lines north are all down right now.”

  “They had better be fixed soon, for the future of the nation may ride on them,” Dowling boomed. He was appalled at how much he sounded like Custer. A moment later, he was appalled again, this time by the telegraph operator’s fervent apology. It made him blink and scratch his head. Damned if the old boy didn’t have something after all.

  Barrels crawled north up the road past Arthur McGregor’s farm. They chewed the dirt to hell and gone, kicking great clouds of dust into the air. McGregor wouldn’t have wanted to be one of the Yankee soldiers marching behind the noisy, smelly barrels. But then, he wouldn’t have wanted to be a Yankee soldier under any circumstances.

  He looked out across his fields. They were beginning to go from green to gold. He would have a fine crop this year if the weather held-and the only way he would be able to dispose of it was to the U.S. authorities. He grimaced. Almost better to touch a match to the wheat than sell it to the USA.

  The barrels passed-like a kidney stone, he thought, remembering a tormen
t of his father’s. More men in green-gray slogged north on foot. Watching them, McGregor thought of ants swarming round spilled molasses. You could smash some, but more kept coming. How many columns of U.S. soldiers had he watched trudging up that road? How many men did the United States hold, anyway? One answer fit both questions: too many.

  Southbound traffic was sparser. The farm near Rosenfeld was a long way from the front these days; few Americans needed to withdraw this far. Gloomily, McGregor headed for the barn to muck out and to get in a little work on his latest bomb. He thought he had a way to get it into town, but he wasn’t sure yet.

  Here came a U.S. Ford, painted green-gray as Army motorcars often were. McGregor paused, wondering if it was Major Hannebrink trying to catch him in the act. If so, the Yank would be disappointed. McGregor had nothing out now, and would have nothing out ninety seconds after he stopped work. He did not believe in taking foolish chances with his revenge.

  When the Ford stopped just outside the lane that led to his farmhouse and barn, he laughed quietly, sure he’d pegged things aright. “Not today, Major,” he murmured. “Not today.”

  But then the automobile sped up again, rolling south toward the border. McGregor scratched his head, wondering why it had stopped in the first place. He got his answer a moment later, when a great exultant shout ripped from the throats of the marching American soldiers: “Winnipeg!”

  McGregor took two quick steps to the barn and leaned against the timbers by the door. He didn’t think he could have stood up without that support; he felt as punctured, as deflated, as the inner tubes on the motorcars that had come with Hannebrink after Mary got through with them.

  “Winnipeg!” the U.S. soldiers cried, again and again. “Winnipeg!” Every repetition felt like a fresh kick in the belly to Arthur McGregor. Since the war began, the city through which passed the railroads linking Canada’s east and west had held out against everything the United States threw at it. McGregor knew fresh train lines had been built north of Winnipeg, but if the Yanks had broken into it, could they, would they, not move past it as well?