U.S. soldiers cut the dead hostage down and marched another one, a young one, over to take his place. The youth’s shout of, “Freedom!” cut off abruptly when the men from the firing squad pulled their triggers. More screams rang from the crowd. A girl about his age tried to charge the soldiers. Not too roughly, they kept her from hurting them or herself, then shoved her back to her relatives. The locals held on to her to make sure she didn’t try again.
Most of the hostages died as well as men could. Four or five wept and begged. It did them no good. Chester called, “Ready!…Aim!…Fire!” over and over again. Finally, the men in green-gray cut down the last bloody body.
“Bury your dead,” Captain Rhodes told the townsfolk. “And remember, chances are whoever made us do this is still right here with the rest of you. Some of you may even have a pretty good notion who he is. But he kept quiet, and you kept quiet, and this is what you get. You leave us alone, we won’t harm you. If you break the laws of war, you’ll pay. You have paid.”
The courthouse square stank of cordite and blood and shit. It stank of fear, too; Chester had smelled that smell too many times to have any doubts about what it was. For once, he didn’t smell his own fear.
He made sure he patted each man from the firing squad on the back. “You did good,” he told them. “That wasn’t easy, doing what you guys did. I’m proud of you.”
“Those fuckers had it coming,” said one of the men in green-gray. Several other soldiers nodded.
But another man said, “You’re right, Sarge-it wasn’t easy. They were just…people. They didn’t hurt anybody. I did this once, but I don’t think I ever want to do it again.”
“All right, Lewis. You won’t, then,” Martin promised. “Go off and smoke a cigarette. If you’ve got any booze, take a knock. I’ll look the other way. You earned it.”
“I don’t, Sarge,” Lewis said mournfully.
“Don’t worry about it, Frankie,” another soldier said. “I got a pretty good idea where you can get your hands on some.”
Chester turned his back so they wouldn’t see him smile. They were kids doing a man’s job. What about me? he wondered. I’m no kid any more. He was trying to do a man’s job, too, and it wasn’t any easier for him than it was for them.
Arifle on his shoulder, Jonathan Moss trudged along through the muggy hell that was summertime in Georgia. He turned to Nick Cantarella and remarked, “Up at 25,000 feet, where I’m supposed to be fighting, it’s cold enough for me to need fur and leather. Even up above this, it’s still that cold.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how the ball crumbles,” the infantry officer answered. “That’s the way the cookie bounces.”
Spartacus looked from one escaped U.S. POW to the other. “You damnyankee ofays, you fuckin’ crazy, you know dat?” the guerrilla leader said.
“Thanks,” Moss said, which wasn’t likely to convince Spartacus he was wrong. Cantarella chuckled. A couple of the blacks who were close enough to listen to the byplay tapped index fingers against their temples or spun them by their ears to show whom they agreed with.
The guerrillas held the countryside. It did them less good than Moss wished it would. With so many big farms growing one big crop-cotton or peanuts or tobacco-and with so many Negroes taken off the countryside after agriculture was forcibly mechanized, the rebels had a devil of a time feeding themselves. Some of their raids on towns came from no better reason than the need to steal enough food to keep from starving.
Towns were going hungry, too. Trains had cars that mounted machine guns and cannon. Trucks traveled in convoys with machine-gun-toting command cars. Guerrilla bands shot at them and planted explosives under roads and along railroad tracks anyway. Spartacus’ machine-gun-carrying pickup had done some nasty work driving alongside roads and shooting up trucks that stuck to them.
“What are we going to do next?” Moss asked Spartacus. Back in the USA, he wouldn’t have imagined ever taking orders from a black man. But Spartacus unquestionably led this band. A word from him to his followers and both Moss and Cantarella would die the next instant.
But all he said was, “Don’ know fo’ sho’. Wish to Jesus I did. Best thing I kin think of is to keep on movin’ east. Foraging do seem better over dat way.” He had a Tredegar slung over one shoulder-and a ham slung over the other.
“Not so many Mexicans over that way, neither,” Nick Cantarella said. Moss could follow Cantarella when he spoke. He could follow Spartacus when he spoke, too. Trying to follow one of them on the heels of the other sometimes made him feel he was shifting mental gears too fast for comfort.
“Not yet,” Spartacus said. “Dey hear we’s operatin’ in them parts, though, dey git over there pretty damn quick.”
“Maybe,” Moss said. “But maybe not, too. They aren’t what you’d call eager to mix it up with us.”
“Not their fight,” Cantarella said. “I was them, I wouldn’t want anything to do with a bunch of crazy-ass smokes.”
“Ofays hereabouts make them greasers fight,” Spartacus said. “Make ’em pretend to fight, anyways. How good they aim, how hard they push when they comes after us…Mebbe a different story.”
“Has been so far,” Moss said. Francisco Jose’s soldiers showed no more enthusiasm about being in Georgia than Moss would have shown in the Yucatan. And if peasants in the Yucatan tried to kill him when he came after them, he wouldn’t go after them very hard.
“Big worry is, they’re liable to find an officer with a wild hair up his ass,” Cantarella said. “They get a guy who makes his troops more afraid of him than they are of us, they can give us trouble.”
Before Moss or Spartacus could answer, the guerrillas’ point man waved. Everybody stopped. They were coming out of pine woods into more open, more cultivated country. Or maybe they weren’t coming out. “What’s up?” Spartacus asked in a penetrating whisper.
“Somethin’ don’t look right up ahead,” answered the point man, a small, scrawny, very black fellow named Apuleius.
“Don’t look right how?” Spartacus asked. “What you mean?”
Apuleius shrugged. “Dunno. Too quiet-like, maybe.”
“Reckon somebody’s layin’ for us out there?” Spartacus asked. The point man shrugged again. Spartacus frowned. “Can’t go back or stay here fo’ good,” he said. Nobody argued with him; that was self-evidently true. His frown got deeper. “We gonna have to smoke ’em out, then. I’ll go out, see what they do.”
An Army officer would have sent a private, or several privates, into the open to do the same job. Spartacus led by force of personality, not force of military law. He had to show the men who followed him that he was worth following. That meant exposing himself to danger instead of them.
Out of the woods he sauntered. He left his Tredegar and the ham behind; he might have been a happy-go-lucky Negro without a care in the world. He might have been…if Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party hadn’t made Negroes without a care in the world extinct.
Along with the rest of the band, Moss and Cantarella watched from the woods. Moss knew more than a little relief that Spartacus hadn’t told the two white men to scout what was up ahead. If Mexican soldiers lurked in the fields, their color might have done the trick. But their accents would have betrayed them to Confederates as soon as they opened their mouths.
For a moment, Moss thought Apuleius was flabbling about nothing. Spartacus strolled along, and nobody bothered him. Then a shout rang out, seemingly from nowhere. Like a chipmunk popping out of its hole, a gray-haired Confederate in a gray uniform stood up in what looked like a plain old field of peanuts. He pointed a rifle at Spartacus.
Three other white men appeared and went over to the Negro. One of them held out his hand. Spartacus produced papers. They were more or less genuine; the Negro whose picture was on them even looked something like the guerrilla leader. Spartacus pointed east down the road toward Perry, the closest town.
The whites put their heads together. After a minute or two, the
y waved for him to pass on. He sketched a salute and walked off in the direction toward which he’d pointed.
Back in the woods, the men he led scratched their heads. “What you reckon we should oughta do now?” one of them asked Nick Cantarella. He wasn’t Spartacus’ second-in-command in any formal sense. But the Negroes recognized that he had a professional’s sense of tactics.
“Now we know where they’re at,” Cantarella said, and the black man nodded. The U.S. officer went on, “We could set up the machine gun over there, say”-he pointed-“and attack from a different angle while they’re trying to take it out.”
“Could work,” the Negro agreed.
“Yeah.” Cantarella nodded. “But it’d make a lot of noise, and probably draw everybody and his goddamn dog over this way. That ain’t good news. Other thing that occurs to me is, we could just sit on our asses here till dark and try and get past this position then. Spartacus’ll be waiting up the road for us somewhere-you can count on that.”
After talking it over in low voices, the guerrillas decided to wait it out. Moss thought that was a good idea. “We can’t send for reinforcements if things go sour,” he said. “There’s a saying-there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.”
“Makes sense,” Apuleius said. As point man, he recognized the need for caution more than most of the others. If he got bold when he shouldn’t, he’d end up killing himself, and probably a lot of his comrades, too.
They waited under the trees. Midges and the nasty little biting flies the Negroes called no-see-’ems buzzed around. Eventually, the sun sank. As darkness deepened, Cantarella peered east with a pair of field glasses some Mexican officer didn’t need any more. “Fuck me,” he said softly.
“Now what’s wrong?” Jonathan Moss asked.
“They’ve got somebody cute in charge of them,” Cantarella answered. “They aren’t leaving. They’re moving to new positions closer to the road so they can make sure nobody sneaks by. What I wouldn’t give for a mortar right now.”
“Fight our way through?” Moss didn’t like the idea, and he was sure his dislike showed in his voice.
“I don’t want to,” Cantarella said. “Even if we win, it’ll cost us. And it’ll draw more of these militia assholes and Mexican soldiers down on us just like shit draws flies.”
“You say the ofays is by the road?” Apuleius asked. Nick Cantarella nodded. “Is all of ’em there?” the Negro persisted.
“I don’t know for sure, ’cause I don’t know how many of ’em were out there to begin with,” Cantarella said. “But a good many of ’em moved. How come?”
“On account of mebbe I kin git us around ’em in the dark,” Apuleius replied. “Wouldn’t want to try in the daytime. They see us sure. But at night, without no moon…Got a fair chance, anyways.”
“Let’s do it.” Cantarella wasn’t a man to whom hesitation came naturally. “We’ll go in full combat array, ready to fight if we have to, but we’ll sneak if we can.” Then he seemed to remember he wasn’t a U.S. Army captain any more, and couldn’t just give orders. He had much less authority here than Spartacus did. “Is that all right with youse guys?” he asked the guerrillas.
Nobody said no. They got to their feet and shook themselves out into a line from which they could go into action if they needed to. Everyone checked to make sure he had a round chambered and his safety off. Then, as quietly as they could, they left the corner of the pine woods and sneaked left, following Apuleius one man at a time.
The point man found or knew about a track through the fields. A lot of the Negroes were barefoot. They moved as silently as ghosts. Their dark skins also made them harder to spot. Moss, shod and with what didn’t feel like enough dirt on his face and arms, felt conspicuous every time one of his feet came down.
He waited for a shout from near the road, which didn’t seem far away at all. Worse, he waited for a volley from the white men’s rifles, thunder and the lightning of muzzle flashes splitting the night. Those old-timers in gray couldn’t be so blind and deaf…could they?
Maybe they could. Moss spotted a couple of glowing coals in the militiamen’s positions. They were smoking, and they weren’t being careful about it. “Jesus, if I was a fuckin’ sniper…” Cantarella whispered.
Moss didn’t want to say a word, for fear his voice would carry. But he nodded. The same thing had occurred to him. The whites over there should know better. Careless smoking in the trenches got plenty of soldiers killed in the Great War.
No challenge rang out. Nobody fired. None of the guerrillas tripped over his own feet or dropped his weapon or did any of the other simple, deadly things that were all too easy to do. Apuleius led the line back toward the road. If the militiamen had had a deep position…But there weren’t enough of them for that.
Just when Moss thought he was safe, when he could breathe more than tiny sips of air, a human shape loomed out of the darkness ahead. He almost fired from the hip. Then he realized it was Spartacus. “I was hopin’ y’all didn’t run off an’ leave me,” the Negro said dryly.
“Not us. That other gal, she nothin’ but a pretty face,” Apuleius answered. Laughing softly, the guerrillas tramped on through the night.
XII
Sergeant Armstrong Grimes looked at Winnipeg from the prairie due south of the city. As usual, smoke shrouded the view. Bombers the Confederates would have hacked out of the sky with ease were more than good enough to lower the boom on enemies who didn’t have fighters or antiaircraft guns. That was as true in Canada as it had been in Utah.
How much good the endless bombing would do…“It’s gonna be craters like on the moon,” Armstrong said, pausing to light a cigarette.
Not far from him, Yossel Reisen was doing the same thing. He said something even worse: “It’s gonna be craters like Salt Lake City.”
“Fuck,” Armstrong muttered, not because Yossel was wrong but because he was right. Every pile of bricks in Salt Lake hid a rifleman or a machine gun. If it worked the same way here…If it worked the same way here, the regiment would take a hell of a lot of casualties.
A harsh chatter rang out in the distance. Armstrong and Yossel looked at each other in dismay. “It’s one of those goddamn machine-gun cunts,” Yossel said, and Armstrong nodded. They hadn’t been in Canada long, but soldiers’ language didn’t need long to hit bottom. Machine-gun pickup went through machine-gun whore on the way down.
An antibarrel cannon boomed. The Canucks on the pickup truck went right on shooting back. Pickups were a lot faster than barrels. On flat ground, they were a lot more mobile, too. And they made much smaller targets. The antibarrel cannon fired again-and missed again.
“Put your spectacles on the next time, dears,” Armstrong said in a disgusted falsetto. Yossel snickered.
The antibarrel cannon boomed one more time. A couple of seconds later, there was a different boom, and a fireball to go with it. “They listened to you!” Yossel exclaimed.
“Yeah, well, that makes once,” Armstrong said.
An officer blew a whistle. Soldiers trotted forward. Armstrong and Yossel veered apart from each other. They both dodged like broken-field runners, and bent as low as they could. They didn’t want to make themselves easy to shoot.
Every time Armstrong saw a motorcar, he shied away from it. The Canadians used auto bombs, as the Mormons had. They’d added a new wrinkle, too: wireless-controlled auto bombs. They loaded a motorcar with explosives, put it where they pleased, and blew it up from a mile away-from farther than that, for all Armstrong knew-at the touch of a button when they saw enough U.S. soldiers near it to make the detonation worthwhile.
Sooner or later, explosives men-most of them borrowed from bomber squadrons-would go over the motorcars one by one to defang the machines that did carry explosives. That was dangerous, thankless work. The Canadians had booby-trapped some of their auto bombs to go off when somebody tried to pull their teeth.
“One thing,” Armstrong said
when he and Yossel happened to dodge together again. The fire from up ahead wasn’t bad-he’d known plenty worse. The Canucks didn’t have many defenders in the outermost suburbs of Winnipeg, anyhow.
“What’s that?” Yossel asked.
“If an auto bomb blows up while you’re trying to defuse it, you’ll never know what hit you,” Armstrong said.
A bullet kicked up dirt between the two men. They both flinched. “Yeah, you got something there,” Yossel said. Each of them had seen-and listened to-men die knowing exactly what had hit them, and in torment till death released them. Armstrong had never killed a man to put him out of his misery, but he knew people who had. He knew he would, if he ever found himself in a spot like that. He hoped somebody would do it for him, if he ever found himself in a spot like that.
Which was not the sort of thing he wanted to be thinking when he got shot.
One second, he was loping along, happy as a clam (how happy were clams, anyway?). The next, his left leg went out from under him, and he fell on his face in the dirt. He stared in stupid wonder at the hole in his trouser leg, and at the spreading red stain around it.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said, more in annoyance than anything else. I stay lucky for two years, and then this shit happens, he thought.
Then the pain reached his brain, and he howled like a wolf and clutched at himself. He knew what had hit him, all right, and wished to God he didn’t. He scrabbled for the pouch that held his wound dressing, the sulfa powder he was supposed to dust on the wound before he used the bandage, and the morphine syrette that might build a wall between him and the fire in his leg.
“Sergeant’s down!” somebody yelled.
“Corpsman!” Two or three soldiers shouted the same thing.
Armstrong detached the bayonet from the muzzle of his Springfield and used it to cut away his trouser leg so he could give himself first aid. He felt sick and woozy. He also bit his lip against the pain. The wound hadn’t hurt for the first few seconds after he got it, but it sure as hell did now.
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