The Grapple sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “Sure-if they recognize us,” Pound answered. “But if they don’t…” He explained what he had in mind.

  When he finished, Sergeant Blakey whistled. “You’ve got the balls of a burglar, sir. If we try it, though, we just have to hope you don’t get ’em draped over a doorknob.”

  “If you think it won’t work, sing out,” Pound said. “I spent years telling officers they were a bunch of damn fools-and they mostly were, too. My ears won’t fall off if you tell me the same thing.”

  Despite reassurances, none of the noncoms under him spoke up right away. At last, Blakey said, “I think we’ve got a chance, sir. Like you say, they sure as hell won’t be expecting it.” He laughed. “I wouldn’t-you better believe that.”

  “Let’s go, then.” When an idea struck Pound, it struck hard. This one was no exception. He threw open the cupola lid and climbed out of the barrel. “Come on,” he called to his gunner and loader. “Time’s a-wasting.”

  They descended from the machine, too. They both looked faintly dubious, or more than faintly, but they went along. Crewmen also got out of the other four barrels. Like Michael Pound and his men, they started cutting down bushes and leafy branches and tying them to the decking and turrets of their machines, breaking up their silhouettes and hiding a lot of the green-gray paint that covered them.

  An infantry lieutenant came up to Pound. “What the hell are you guys doing?” he asked. “Playing Queen of the May?”

  “I hope not.” Pound pointed to the span between Calhoun and Rumsey. “I aim to take that bridge. I’ll probably need your help to do it.” He told the other officer-who was at least twenty years younger than he was-his plan.

  “You got your nerve, don’t you?” The infantry lieutenant echoed Sergeant Blakey. But he nodded. “Yeah, we can do that. Keep quiet till you make it onto the bridge or you get in trouble, then open up with everything we got.” He had a tough-guy, big-city accent-Pound guessed he was from Chicago. He added, “You know that’s liable to be kinda too late, don’t you?”

  “Chance you take.” Pound’s broad shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “If we go down, we’ll go down swinging.”

  “Hope you don’t. We’ll back your play.” The other lieutenant stuck out his hand. “Luck.” He didn’t say, You’ll need it, but it was written all over his face.

  Pound shook hands with him anyway. “Thanks. If this does work, come on down once we’re where we need to be and help us take charge of things.”

  “Right,” the infantry lieutenant said. Fat chance, his face declared.

  When the barrels were camouflaged to Pound’s satisfaction, he led the parade down into Calhoun. The other four machines stayed buttoned up. He couldn’t stand that. He wanted to see everything that was going on-and he thought he might need to talk his way past some of the men in butternut.

  Along State Highway 81 they rumbled, past Seventh, Sixth, Fifth, Fourth. Calhoun didn’t seem to have any street with a number bigger than Seventh. They got down to Mayberry, four blocks past the county seat and only a block away from the river, before anybody thought to challenge them. A Confederate sergeant stepped out into the narrow road and called, “What do y’all reckon you’re doin’?”

  “Securing the bridge, of course.” As usual, Michael Pound acted as if he had not a doubt in the world.

  Frowning, the sergeant hefted his automatic rifle. The barrel’s bow machine gun could cut him in half before he started shooting…Pound hoped. “You talk funny,” the noncom said. “Where you from?”

  “New Orleans,” Pound answered. The Crescent City’s half-Southern, half-Brooklyn speech pattern was different from anything else in the CSA. His own accent was much closer to Canadian than anything else; he’d grown up not far from the border. It didn’t sound much like that of a native Louisianan, but if this Confederate wasn’t expecting anybody from the USA…

  And he wasn’t. He stepped aside, saying, “Wish to God somebody woulda told us we were getting barrels sent in.”

  Life is full of surprises, Pound thought, but he didn’t say anything out loud-the less he opened his mouth where Confederates could hear, the better. The barrel turned right on First and rumbled west toward the bridge to Rumsey. The bridge was about a quarter of a mile away. Pound’s machine had covered a little more than half the distance when somebody shouted, “Holy Jesus! They’re Yankees!”

  “Shit!” Pound said, without originality but with great sincerity. A burst of submachine-gun fire clanged off the side of the barrel. He dove down into the turret. “Gun it for the bridge!” he yelled to the driver. To the bow gunner, he added, “Shoot anybody who gets in our way or tries to blow the bridge!”

  “Yes, sir,” both men answered. The barrel’s engine went from rumble to roar. The ponderous machine couldn’t leap, but it could scoot pretty fast. It could-and it did.

  “What if they can blow the damn thing from the Rumsey side, sir?” the gunner asked.

  “There’s a technical term for that, Sergeant,” Pound answered. “In that case, we’re screwed.” He startled a laugh out of Mel Scullard. A moment later, he added, “Once we’re on the bridge, I want you to make sure nothing alive has the chance to come up from Rumsey and blow it. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Scullard said, which was the right answer. He gave the loader a one-word order: “Canister!”

  “Canister,” Private Joe Mouradian echoed. The shell went into the breech. Barrels carried only three or four rounds of canister in their racks because they needed it so seldom. When they did need it, though, they were liable to need it bad. It turned the main armament into an enormous shotgun. Anybody who came within a hundred yards or so was asking to get blown to bits.

  The driver turned left onto the bridge so sharply, Pound thanked the God in Whom he only sporadically believed for not letting the barrel throw a track. One of the machines behind him fired a round from its main armament. He couldn’t see what it was shooting at-he had his eyes on the forward-facing periscopes that showed the far end of the bridge and the village of Rumsey beyond.

  “Stop just at the end of the bridge,” he told the driver.

  “At the end of the bridge-yes, sir.” No sooner had the driver stopped than soldiers in butternut started running toward the barrel. The bow machine gun chattered. The Confederate soldiers went down, some dead or wounded, others diving for cover. Civilians appeared in the streets, too, but they were running for cover.

  After the first impromptu charge from Rumsey failed, the Confederates paused to put together a proper attack. Whoever led it was plenty smart. He had plenty of people with automatic rifles and submachine guns going forward in front of the men with Featherston Fizzes and the Confederates’ newfangled antibarrel rockets. If the troops making the racket with the small arms could distract the barrel crew…

  But the Confederate commander reckoned without canister. Pound waited till the closest enemy soldiers were very close indeed before he shouted, “Fire!”

  Even he was awed by the carnage a 3?-inch canister shell could cause. Men and pieces of men lay and writhed, broken, in front of the barrel. Several dropped Featherston Fizzes added flames to the horror. “Shall I give ’em another round, sir?” Scullard asked.

  “By all means,” Pound answered.

  The second round of canister, when added to the steady rattle of death from the bow machine gun, convinced the handful of Confederates still on their feet to get away if they could. “Give me one more round,” the gunner told the loader.

  “Hold up on that.” Pound overrode him. “Use HE instead, and start knocking down the houses closest to us. I don’t want one of those bastards with a rocket to be able to get off an easy shot at us.”

  “I’ll do it, sir,” Scullard said, and he did, with the peculiar gusto a man has when destroying property that belongs to the other side. A secondary explosion from inside one of those houses in Rumsey made Pound think he’d barely beaten the Confederates to the punch: if that wasn’t
a rocket blowing up, what was it?

  Sergeant Blakey’s barrel came up alongside Pound’s. The other three in the platoon held the north end of the bridge against the Confederates in Calhoun. Their cannon and machine guns thundered and barked. Pound hoped the U.S. foot soldiers in the woods north of Calhoun were pressing down into the town. Squeezed between them and the barrels on the bridge, what could Featherston’s men do but get out?

  The Confederates inside Rumsey had an antibarrel cannon: an inch-and-a-halfer from the days when the war first started. It had two virtues-it was easy to haul around, and it fired rapidly. Against one of the new U.S. barrels, though, it was hardly more than a doorknocker. Its shells had no hope of penetrating that thick, well-sloped armor.

  “There it is, sir!” Scullard said. “In the bushes by that big house.”

  “You’re right,” Pound said. “Do the honors, then.”

  “Yes, sir,” the gunner said, and then, to the loader, “HE!” Two shells sufficed to upend the gun and send a couple of the men who served it flying. Pound nodded to himself in somber satisfaction. If the other side wanted to play the game but didn’t have good cards…well, too bad for them.

  He looked through the periscopes facing back toward Calhoun. Alarm tingled through him. Soldiers were on the bridge. Could he traverse the turret fast enough to fire at them before they reached the barrel? But then he relaxed-they wore green-gray, not butternut.

  “We have Calhoun,” he said happily. “And we have the bridge-intact, by God. We can keep rolling right on through Kentucky. Let’s see Featherston stop us. Let’s see anybody stop us.”

  IX

  In the reinforced-concrete shelter under the ruins of the Gray House, Jake Featherston fumed. He had the feeling of being a bug pinned down on a collector’s board. Wiggle as he would, the pin held him helplessly in place.

  He’d had that feeling in the last war, when U.S. artillery and barrels inexorably pushed the Army of Northern Virginia back from Pennsylvania through Maryland and into the state for which it was named. He’d sworn he would never feel that way again. He’d sworn the Confederate States would never let anybody on earth do that to them again. For two years, near enough, his barrels and dive bombers made good on the boast. Now…

  Now the damnyankees had barrels and dive bombers, too. Their machines were just as good as the CSA’s. From the dismayed reports from the field, their latest barrels were better than anything the Confederates had. And the United States had swarms of barrels and cannon and airplanes and men, while the Confederates had…what was left from the adventures of the past two years.

  Lulu stuck her head into the office. “Mr. President, General Forrest is here to see you.”

  “Thanks,” Featherston said. “Please send him in.” He could order Negroes sent to camps by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, without batting an eye, but he was always polite to his secretary.

  Nathan Bedford Forrest III came in and gave him a perfunctory salute. “Mr. President,” he said, and then, plainly with an effort, “Freedom!”

  “Freedom!” Jake echoed; the Party slogan never felt stale to him. He waved the head of the General Staff to a chair. Seeing how haggard Forrest looked, he took out the bottle of whiskey that lived in his desk drawer. “Need a snort?”

  “Don’t mind if I do, sir.” Forrest poured himself a healthy shot. “Mud in your eye.” He knocked it back. Jake Featherston also drank. Forrest eyed him. “That was good, but I don’t reckon I can drink enough to make me forget how much trouble we’re in.”

  “You’re the fellow who’s supposed to get us out of trouble like that,” Jake said.

  “With what…sir?” Forrest asked. “Talk about making bricks without straw-I feel like I’m trying to make bricks without mud out there. How can I stop the damnyankees when they’re throwing everything but the kitchen sink at me and I don’t even have the goddamn sink?”

  “It can’t be that bad,” Featherston said.

  “No, sir. It’s worse,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “We…lost a lot of men and we lost a lot of materiel in Pittsburgh and falling back afterwards.”

  “The Yankees must have lost a lot, too.” Featherston eyed the whiskey bottle. He still drank, but he couldn’t remember the last time he really drank. Getting plowed, forgetting all this crap, was an enormous temptation. But the crap wouldn’t go away, and it would get worse while he wasn’t looking at it. And so, regretfully, he looked but he didn’t grab the bottle again.

  “They did, sir. No doubt about it,” the chief of the General Staff said earnestly. He’s getting ready to call me a damn fool, Featherston thought. He’ll be polite about it, but he’ll do it just the same. And sure as hell, Forrest went on, “But they’ve got more men and more factories than we do. They can build up faster than we can, and they can go on building up to a level…we have trouble matching.”

  A level we can’t match-that’s what he almost said. “They’ve got more men. We can’t do much about that,” Jake said. “But we’ve got better men, by God, and we’ve got better weapons. The automatic rifles, and now the rockets…”

  “All that’s true, sir, and it’s why things aren’t worse,” Forrest said. “But our artillery’s no better than theirs, and they’ve got more. Our airplanes aren’t better, and they’ve got more. That’s really starting to hurt. And when it comes to barrels-sir, when it comes to barrels, they’ve got a step up on us. That’s starting to hurt bad, too.”

  “Goddammit, why can’t we keep up?” Jake Featherston snarled. “We were ahead when the war started.”

  “We don’t have enough engineers, sir. We don’t have enough factory hands,” Forrest said. “Damn near every healthy white man in the country from eighteen to fifty’s in uniform.”

  “Women are taking up some of the slack in the factories-more every day, in fact.” Forrest was angry he’d taken too long to see how important that was. He didn’t like giving women such jobs. In the long run, it would twist the CSA out of the shape he wanted the country to have. But if you got smashed in the short run, the long run didn’t matter. So women went to work in war plants, and he’d worry about what it all meant later-if there was a later.

  “We still need more bodies in there, sir.” Forrest took a deep breath. “If there was any way we could get more use out of our niggers-”

  “No,” Featherston said in a low, deadly voice. “The niggers are Party business. They’re my business. Don’t you go sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. We are gonna come out of this war nigger-free. Nigger-free, you hear me?”

  “Mr. President, how much do we have to pay to make that happen?” Forrest asked. “We needed most of a division to clean Richmond out-a division we couldn’t use against the damnyankees. If that happens too many more times, it’ll put us in a world of trouble. I’m sorry I have to tell you such things, sir, but somebody needs to.”

  He had nerve. Not many people who came before Jake Featherston told him anything but what they thought he wanted to hear. Clarence Potter did, but Potter had almost official gadfly status. Even Ferd Koenig hesitated. Forrest might be hesitant, but he was saying what he thought.

  “The worst is over,” Jake said. “Most towns are cleaned out.” That still left the black belt from rural South Carolina through Louisiana largely unaffected, but he wasn’t about to split hairs with Nathan Bedford Forrest III. Besides, he had Mexican soldiers dealing with the coons there. He didn’t need to pull so many of his own men away from more urgent-not more important, but more urgent-things.

  “I hope you’re right, sir,” the chief of the General Staff said. “I hope so, but…”

  I haven’t convinced that man, Jake thought. He changed the subject from his own shortcomings to those of the Army: “We’ve got to stop the Yankees. They’re carving their way through Kentucky like we did through Ohio.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Mr. President,” Forrest said. “We’re using every man and every piece of ma
chinery we can get our hands on. We can’t get our hands on enough men or machines.”

  “If you stop retreating, if you start hitting back-”

  “Sir, that’s not fair to the men fighting and dying in Kentucky. You can hang me out to dry if you want-I’ll be your scapegoat. But they’re doing everything flesh and blood can do. They’re making stands every chance they get, and they’re counterattacking every chance they get, too. We’d be in worse shape if they weren’t, and you can take that to the bank.”

  His passion startled Featherston. The President of the CSA would have thrown him to the wolves without a qualm-if he’d had someone in mind to replace him. But the only officer who came to mind for the job was George Patton, and Patton was too valuable in the field to bring him back to Richmond.

  So instead of canning Nathan Bedford Forrest III, Featherston said, “Let’s take a look at the map.”

  “Of course, sir.” Did Forrest sound relieved? If he didn’t, he damn well should have.

  But the map mattered. Jake Featherston slashed a line across it with his forefinger-almost exactly the line Irving Morrell had slashed across a map of the CSA in Philadelphia some months earlier. Whatever Featherston’s flaws, he had a gift for seeing the big picture. “This is what the sons of bitches aim to do to us.”

  Nathan Bedford Forrest III blinked. He worried about trees; he hadn’t looked at the forest as a whole for a while. “You don’t think small, sir,” he said after a moment’s pause for thought.

  “Neither do the damnyankees,” Jake answered without the least hesitation. The truth burned hot and clear in his mind. (Lies burned just as hot and clear, which helped make him as effective as he was. But this was no lie; he wasn’t trying to fool either himself or the chief of the General Staff.) “The damnyankees hurt us bad the last go-round, but that was all they did-they hurt us. With barrels that really haul ass, with airplanes that really bomb, they’ll fucking kill us this time. And that’s how they’ll do it-Chattanooga, Atlanta, the ocean.”