The Grapple sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “That does it! That fuckin’ does it!” the sergeant shouted. “Youse guys have had it.” He stormed off and returned a few minutes later with a captain in tow. “Listen to these wiseguys, sir!”

  Cincinnatus and the other truckers were happy to let the captain listen. “We almost got killed today,” Cincinnatus said. “I don’t see him with no Purple Heart or Silver Star or nothin’.” Again, the rest of the drivers chimed in on his side.

  After listening to them, the captain turned to his sergeant and said, “Take an even strain, Cannizzaro. It’s not like they were holding you up on purpose.”

  “But, sir-” Sergeant Cannizzaro began.

  “Take an even strain, I said,” the captain told him, more sharply this time. “The stuff is here now. Let’s get it out to the troops who need it.” He walked away, leaving the quartermaster sergeant staring after him. An officer with sense, Cincinnatus thought. He’d run into some before, but it didn’t happen every day.

  Jerry Dover had a promotion. He wanted a second star on either side of his collar about as much as he wanted a third leg, but he was now officially a lieutenant-colonel. He was doing everything Colonel Travis W.W. Oliphant did before he went missing and more besides, so the powers that be seemed to have decided he deserved at least some of the vanished Colonel Oliphant’s rank.

  Lieutenant-colonel wasn’t enough. To get the boneheads down in Tennessee to pay attention to him, he would have needed to be at least a lieutenant general-not a rank the Confederate States dished out every day.

  “Listen, dammit,” Dover snarled over a bad telephone connection, “if you don’t get more ammo and gasoline up here pretty damn quick, you won’t need to worry about me pissing and moaning any more, that’s for sure.”

  “You don’t know how bad things are down here,” said the colonel on the other end of the line. “The Yankees are bombing the shit out of the dams President Featherston built. We’ve got floods like you wouldn’t believe. Half the time we don’t have power, on account of they made so much of it. Roads are out, railroads are out-”

  “If you don’t send us what we need to fight with, we’re out,” Dover interrupted. “You’ll be arguing with some damnyankee quartermaster, not me.” Some damnyankee quartermaster was enjoying the depot he’d put together outside of Covington. Nobody but nobody had dreamt the USA could move so fast.

  “We’re trying,” the colonel said.

  “You sure are,” Jerry Dover told him, but it went over his head. Dover would have bet on that. He went on, “This is a war, in case you didn’t notice…sir. If we don’t do it, we’re going to fucking lose.” He didn’t care what he said when he talked to a supplier. That was just as true when he talked to C.S. Army quartermasters as it had been when he talked to rascally butchers in Augusta.

  “I am certain you are doing everything you can, Colonel,” said the officer down in Tennessee. “Why don’t you give me and my men credit for doing the same?”

  Because from up here it looks like you’ve got your head up your ass. But Dover didn’t say that, though it was a damned near-run thing. What he did say was, “Get as much forward as you can. They’ve promised me they’ll hold on to Bowling Green no matter what.”

  They’d also promised they would hold on to Covington no matter what. He’d believed them, which only proved anybody could be a fool now and then. He was more ready to evacuate and wreck this depot than he had been when the line lay farther north. Some Yankee writer once said, Trust everybody-but cut the cards. That struck Jerry Dover as good advice.

  Even the colonel down in Tennessee, who had to worry about nothing worse than bombers and floods-mere details in Dover’s harried existence-could see they might have promised more than they could deliver. “Keep your options open,” he said, and hung up.

  “Options. Right,” Dover said tightly. At the moment, he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, and that about summed up his options. The western U.S. column was already down about even with Bowling Green. The eastern one was still northeast of his current center. In a way, that was good news. It meant that, for the time being, he could resupply both crumbling Confederate fronts. But it also meant both fronts were liable to converge on him here, or even behind him. If that happened…

  If that happens, I have to move like a son of a bitch to save anything, Dover thought glumly. Take what I can, blow up what I can’t. He already knew what was what, what would go and what would go up in smoke.

  If this turned into the front, he was liable to have to turn into a combat soldier to get free of it. He muttered to himself; like every other white man his age in the CSA, he’d done a spell in the trenches in the last war. He wasn’t eager to repeat it. But if the damnyankees got in his way, he would try his best to run them over.

  The telephone jangled. If it was that officious idiot in Tennessee, telling him something wouldn’t show up because somebody’d lost the paperwork…“Dover here,” he growled, a note of warning in his voice.

  “This here is Major Kirby Bramlette over by Elkton,” the caller said. Dover had to look at a map to find Elkton southeast of Hopkinsville, which had fallen to the USA only the day before. It was also definitely south of Bowling Green, which wasn’t good news. Bramlette sounded right on the edge of being frantic as he went on, “You got any more o’ them antibarrel rockets, the ones infantrymen can shoot off? Looks like every Yankee barrel in the world is heading right at me.”

  “You’ll have some in a couple of hours, if U.S. fighters don’t shoot up my trucks on the way,” Dover answered.

  “Sooner’d be better,” Bramlette said. “Two hours from now, I’m liable to be dead.” He didn’t say anything about pulling back. The Confederates did that only when they couldn’t help it.

  “Fast as we can get there.” Dover hung up and ran outside, yelling for drivers. When he’d assembled half a dozen, he said, “Load up on antibarrel rockets and get ’em to Elkton on the double.”

  “Where the fuck is Elkton?” one of them asked.

  “Follow me. I’ll get you there.” By his accent, the man who spoke was from around these parts. You’d have to be, to know where Elkton was.

  “Take your trucks to gate number nine,” Dover said. “Go in through there and make the first left you can.” He’d laid out the depot himself. He knew where everything was. If Major Bramlette needed cold-weather socks or prophylactics, he would have known where they were off the top of his head, too.

  Confederate soldiers loaded the rockets and their stovepipe launchers onto the trucks. In the last war, Negroes would have done it. Not here, not now. The soldiers didn’t even grumble about nigger work. They just fetched and carried without a second thought. If blacks were working now, most of the soldiers working the depot could have been at the front with automatic rifles in their hands. That seemed obvious to Jerry Dover. The trouble he would land in if he said so out loud seemed even more obvious, so he kept his mouth shut.

  Inside of half an hour, the trucks were on the way. Dover went back to his office and telephoned Major Bramlette. “Barring air strikes, they should get there in an hour or so. It’s what, about forty miles from here to where you’re at?” he said.

  “Something like that, anyways,” Bramlette answered. “Thank you kindly, Colonel. You’ve done what you could. Now we just have to see if we can hold on that long.” As if to punctuate the comment, explosions came over the telephone line. All of a sudden, he didn’t have a connection. He swore, hoping the trouble was in the line and not because of a direct hit on Bramlette’s headquarters.

  He didn’t find out till the trucks got back a little before sunset. “We delivered the rockets, sir,” said the head driver, a master sergeant named Stonewall Sloane. (Dover had seen his papers-that was his real name. Why his parents couldn’t have picked a different Confederate hero to name him after…Jerry Dover shrugged. How many babies born between 1934 and now were called Featherston? Too many-he was sure of that.)

  “All right-you deliver
ed them,” Dover said. Sloane nodded. He neither looked nor sounded happy. Dover asked the question he had to ask: “What went wrong?”

  “Damnyankees had already shoved our guys out of Elkton by the time we got there, sir.” Stonewall Sloane paused to light a cigar. Dover had a cigarette going-but then, he usually did. The sergeant went on, “I hope the rockets can help us blow some of the Yankees to hell and gone. If they can’t…” He sent up gloomy smoke signals.

  “Shit,” Dover said. “Whereabouts exactly did you make your delivery? Was it south of Elkton or east of it?”

  “East, sir,” Sloane answered: a world of bad news in two words.

  “Shit,” Dover said again. “They’re heading this way, then.”

  “Don’t know if they want to take Bowling Green or get in behind it and cut it off,” Sergeant Sloane said. “They’ve been doing a lot of that crap lately. We did it in Ohio, so I reckon the United States learned their lessons from us.”

  “Did they have to learn them so goddamn well?” Dover stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. Stonewall Sloane managed a thin smile. After a deep, savage drag, Dover asked, “You think we’ll have to get out of town? The more time we have, the more stuff we’ll be able to save.”

  “Sir, I honest to God don’t know,” Sloane replied. “If you told me a month ago the Yankees could come this far this fast, I would’ve told you you were out of your goddamn tree. Uh-meaning no disrespect.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Dover said dryly.

  Stonewall Sloane sent him an appraising glance. The cigar twitched. “You’re all right, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I try.”

  “Yeah.” Sloane scratched his head. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. They’ve already done more than I reckoned they could, so who knows what the fuck they’re liable to do next? Do you want to take chances?”

  Before Dover could answer, air-raid sirens wailed. “We’re going to take chances whether we want to or not,” he said, and grabbed his helmet and ran for the closest trench. Sergeant Sloane was right behind him.

  Antiaircraft guns around the depot thundered. Dover was glad he had steel between his skull and the chunks of shrapnel that would start falling out of the sky any second now. You were just as dead if your own side killed you as you were any other way.

  Fighter-bombers streaked by low overhead, the U.S. eagle in front of crossed swords plainly visible. One trailed fire and smoke. It slammed into the ground and blew up. “That’ll learn ’em!” Sloane yelled.

  But other explosions came from the depot not far away. Some were single, others multiple: bombs touching off more explosions on the ground. What Jerry Dover had to say scuttled several commandments. He’d arranged ordnance in small lots with thick earthen dikes between them. That minimized the damage, but didn’t, couldn’t, stop it.

  The surviving U.S. airplanes came back for another pass at the depot and the trucks, this time with their cannons and machine guns. Dover said something even worse. He yanked his.45 out of its holster and fired several shots at the U.S. warplanes. That did no good, of course. He’d known it wouldn’t. “Goddamn useless thing,” he growled in disgust.

  “Antiaircraft guns aren’t doing a hell of a lot better,” Stonewall Sloane said.

  “Fuck them, too,” Dover said. The veteran noncom blinked, then laughed. Dover wasn’t laughing. He was furious. “We ought to have something that really will shoot airplanes down, dammit. All these things do is make noise.” The guns, at the moment, were making a godawful racket.

  “Rockets, maybe?” Sergeant Sloane didn’t sound as if he took that seriously, even if he was the one proposing it.

  But Dover said, “Why the hell not? They’ve got ’em for barrels. Why not airplanes? They’re a lot easier to wreck.”

  “Harder to hit, though,” Sloane said.

  “That’s for the guys with the high foreheads and the thick glasses,” Dover said. “I bet we’ve got people working on it. I bet the damnyankees do, too. If they figure it out first, that’s bad news.” He scrambled out of the trench and trotted toward the depot to do what he could to control the damage-and to see how much damage there was to control. Right now, he couldn’t find much good news for the CSA.

  Cassius skirted Milledgeville, Georgia, the way he skirted every town he approached. Milledgeville was a fair-sized place, with maybe 5,000 people in it. It was laid out with the idea that it would become the state capital-and it did, till brawling, bumptious Atlanta displaced it after the War of Secession. A sign on the outskirts bragged that Milledgeville was where Georgia legislators voted to leave the Union. Cassius didn’t think that was anything to be proud of.

  What would life be like in the United States? It probably wouldn’t be good; he didn’t suppose life for Negroes was good anywhere. But it couldn’t be like this. He was skinny and dirty. He smelled bad-the only chances he got to wash were in streams he walked past. He was hungry most of the time.

  And, at that, he didn’t have it so bad. He wasn’t in a camp. He didn’t know what his family was going through, not exactly. Nobody knew exactly except the people who got carted away. The only thing people on the outside knew was that the ones who got carted away didn’t come back.

  Most Negroes in the cities had been rounded up and taken away. It was harder out in the countryside. They were more scattered, harder to get into one place with barbed wire all around it. Guerrillas scared some whites out in the country to death. Others, though, weren’t so bad. Quite a few let you do odd jobs in exchange for food and a place to sleep and maybe a dollar or two.

  Some of the farms had women running them, all the menfolk gone to war. Cassius learned it was harder to get a handout or even a hearing at those places than at the ones with white men on them. Women on their own commonly carried shotguns or rifles, and didn’t want to listen to a hard-luck story. “Get lost before I call the sheriff,” they would say-either that or, “Get lost before I shoot.”

  But they didn’t call the sheriff. In spite of an Augusta passbook, Cassius hadn’t had any trouble going where he pleased. If he stole, that might have been a different story. Except for trifles-a few eggs here, some matches there-he didn’t. His parents had raised him the right way. He wouldn’t have put it like that, not after the way he knocked heads with his father, but that was what it amounted to.

  He stayed in the pine woods after getting run off a farm west of Milledgeville. With summer coming soon, nights were mild. Mosquitoes tormented him, but they would have done that anywhere except behind screens. He didn’t worry about animals; bears and cougars were hunted into rarity. People, on the other hand…

  He’d already seen Mexican soldiers on the march. He made sure they didn’t see him, ducking into a stand of trees once and hiding behind a haystack another time. Those yellowish khaki uniforms made him angry-what were they doing in his country? He wouldn’t have got nearly so upset about butternut or gray.

  That was his gut reaction, anyhow. When he thought about it, he laughed at himself. As if the Confederate States were his country, or any Negro’s country! The idea was ridiculous. And native whites would have been rougher on him or anyone else his color than these foreigners were.

  He chopped wood for a farmer later that day. The blisters he’d got the first time he did it were starting to turn to calluses. The farmer gave him ham and grits and a big mug of homebrew. Making your own beer was against the law in Georgia, but plenty of people both white and black turned criminal on that score.

  “You work good,” the farmer said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice.

  “Thank you, suh,” Cassius answered.

  As others had before him, the white man asked, “Want to stick around?” He gave Cassius a shrewd look. “Sooner or later, you’re gonna run into trouble wandering around the countryside-or else trouble’s gonna run into you.”

  Cassius only shrugged. Whatever happened to him out here couldn’t be worse than what had happened to his father and mother and sister in August
a. “Sorry, suh, but I got to be movin’ on,” he said.

  “Whatever you want.” The farmer shrugged, too, but Cassius didn’t like the glint in his eye. He left a little earlier than he would have otherwise, and headed south where he had been going west. As soon as he got out of sight of the farmhouse, he took the first westward track he found. Luck was with him, because he came up to another farm just as the sun was going down. He scouted the place from the edge of the woods, and didn’t see or hear any dogs. When it got really dark, he sneaked into the haystack, which gave him a much better bed than bare ground would have.

  He hadn’t fallen asleep yet when gunfire split the night: several bursts from submachine guns, with single shots from a pistol in between them. He wondered what that was all about. No, actually he didn’t wonder-he feared he knew. Had that farmer called the local sheriff or militia commander or whoever was in charge of the people with guns and said, “There’s an uppity nigger southbound from my place. Reckon you ought to take care of him”?

  Deputies or Mexicans must have picked on the first Negro they saw heading south on that road. That black wasn’t Cassius, but they didn’t know or care-especially after he started shooting back at them. Cassius felt bad about snaring the other colored man in his troubles, and hoped the fellow got away.

  If they were after me, they would’ve snagged me, he thought, shivering as he burrowed deeper into the sweet-smelling hay. If I didn’t notice that damn ofay looking all sly…

  He woke up before sunrise, and got out of there before the farmer could come outside and discover him. Once he was back in the woods, he took off his clothes and made sure he brushed all the hay off of them. He didn’t want to look like somebody who had to sleep in a haystack, even if that was what he was-especially if that was what he was.

  He heard gunfire again that afternoon: not just a little, the way he had the night before, but lots. Both sides had plenty of firepower and weren’t shy about using it. Now I know what war sounds like, Cassius thought, which only proved he’d never come anywhere near a real battlefield.