The Grapple sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Army engineers with bulldozers were busy repairing the damage. Soldiers in green-gray went through the bushes to clear out snipers so the engineers could work without harassing fire. That made Cincinnatus jealous, but the engineers weren’t even moving targets. They were sitting ducks.

  More engineers were stretching lengths of steel matting-the kind used to make emergency airstrips-across the field to serve as a makeshift road while the real one was getting fixed. After about half an hour, the job was done well enough to suit them. They waved the lead truck forward.

  Cincinnatus was glad he wasn’t driving lead. But where the deuce-and-a-half ahead of him went, he followed. The matting was a little higher than an ordinary curb would have been. His truck didn’t like climbing up onto the stuff, but it could. He bumped along, then jounced down, then climbed up onto another strip of matting. Skirting the bomb craters went slowly, but it went. And those soldiers out there beating the bushes were keeping him safe along with the engineers. He tipped his cap to them, though they couldn’t see him do it.

  Everybody stepped on the gas once he got back onto the paved highway. Cincinnatus was happy to mash the pedal down to the floorboard. He knew he might be rushing toward danger, not away from it. All the same, he’d felt like a sitting duck himself back there. He was glad to get away.

  Nobody got hurt on the run north from Delphi, which made it a good one. Only three or four shots were fired at the column. They sounded like.22 rounds to Cincinnatus. Those wouldn’t come from Confederate soldiers, who had better weapons, but from some civilian with a squirrel gun and a grudge. U.S. authorities had confiscated all the firearms they could. The penalties for holding on to rifles and pistols were bloodthirsty. The Confederate citizenry didn’t seem to care. Cincinnatus wished he were more surprised.

  Halfway to Camp Determination. That was how Abner Dowling looked at it. He wished he’d come farther. He wished his men could have moved faster. But he’d been stalled in front of Lubbock too damn long. The Eleventh Army-such as it was-was moving again. How much anybody back East cared…might be a different story.

  He hadn’t got the reinforcements he hoped for. Everything the U.S. Army could lay its hands on was going into the drive toward Chattanooga. Dowling didn’t much like that, but he understood it.

  One reason he wasn’t going as fast or as far as he wished he could was that the Confederates were bringing in reinforcements: Freedom Party Guard outfits that fought as if there were no tomorrow. They made Dowling scratch his head for all kinds of reasons.

  “They’ve got fewer men in Tennessee and Kentucky than we do, right?” he asked his adjutant one hot, sticky summer morning.

  “Certainly seems so,” Major Angelo Toricelli agreed.

  “They’re in trouble over there and we’re not, right?” Dowling persisted.

  “Unless our newspapers and wireless people are lying even harder than Featherston’s, yes, sir,” Toricelli said. “Possible, I suppose, but not likely.”

  “Bet your ass it’s not,” Dowling said, which made the younger officer blink. “All right, then. We keep saying we can’t afford to send anything out here to the ass end of nowhere. But Featherston’s sending people, sending equipment, out here like it’s going out of style. I know he’s a son of a bitch, but up till now I never thought he was a dumb son of a bitch, you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, sir,” Toricelli said. “I can only think of one thing.”

  “Well, you’re one up on me if you can. Spit it out.” Dowling had always enjoyed feeling smarter than George Custer. Now he watched his own adjutant feeling smarter than he was.

  “To the Confederates, sir, this isn’t the ass end of nowhere,” Toricelli said.

  “Well, yes, but why not?” Dowling asked. “You can’t really mean they think killing off Negroes as fast as they can is more important than keeping us out of Chattanooga?”

  The words hung in the air after he said them. The oppressive humidity might have borne them up. Major Toricelli nodded. “That’s it, sir. That is what I think. Nothing else makes sense to me.”

  “Then Featherston really is off the deep end,” Dowling exclaimed.

  “Could be, sir. I don’t know anything about that. I’m no head-candler. But whether he’s nuts or not, he’s still running the CSA, and nobody’s trying to stop him that I know of. When he yells, ‘Jump, frog!’ they all ask, ‘How high?’ on the way up.”

  “Good God,” Dowling murmured. “If you’ll let your country go down the drain so you can do this instead…I’m not sure a head-candler can help you.”

  “I hope nobody can help him,” Toricelli said. “But he’s been at war with Negroes about as long as he’s been at war with the USA. Don’t they say he had a chance to stop the uprisings in the last war, only his superior wouldn’t let him take a servant in for questioning? Something like that, anyway.”

  “I think you’re right, or close enough,” Dowling said. “But if he beats us, he can do what he wants with the Negroes later. If he goes on killing them and we lick him…”

  “They’re gone, and he dies happy,” Toricelli said.

  “He sure as hell dies,” Dowling said. “Send the War Department a report showing the reinforcements we’ve run up against. Send them a summary of what we’ve been talking about, too. They should know we think he thinks that way. Don’t be shy about giving yourself credit, either. You were there ahead of me.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Major Toricelli sounded as if he meant that. Dowling understood why. When he served under Custer, nothing was ever the great man’s fault. Anything good accrued to the great man’s credit. Here, Dowling consciously tried not to imitate his old boss.

  He sent an armored probe forward-and got it bloodied. Yes, the Confederates finally were reinforced. They had new armor of their own, and that meant trouble. They’d go nipping in after his supply line next. He had the feeling he’d come about as far as he could, or maybe a little farther.

  One thing the enemy didn’t have was much air power. Dowling summoned Colonel DeFrancis. “I want you to go after those barrels and self-propelled guns, Terry,” he said. “Go after their fuel dumps, too. Let’s see how much we can slow ’em down.”

  “I’ll do my goddamnedest, sir,” DeFrancis said. “We’ve got some new inch-and-a-half guns mounted under dive bombers. Turns ’em into barrel busters. They dive, fire from close range, pull up and climb, then do it again. Engine decking hasn’t got a prayer of standing up to an armor-piercing round like that.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Dowling told him. “Turn ’em loose. Let ’em hunt. Let’s see what they can do. Let’s see if they can keep those bastards off our necks.”

  “Yes, sir!” Terry DeFrancis sounded enthusiastic. He often did, especially when Dowling was turning him loose on a new and exciting hunt. For most officers, as for most other people in executive positions, what they did was a job. Some of them were better at it than others, but for the able and not so able alike it was work. DeFrancis was different. He enjoyed what he did. He had a good time doing it. Maybe he got a hard-on watching things blow up. Dowling didn’t know-he didn’t ask. But the colonel’s enjoyment made him a better combat officer. He constantly looked for new ways to put the enemy in trouble. Chances were he grinned when he found them, too.

  West Texas made good barrel country. It was nice and flat-you could see for miles. There weren’t a lot of forests for barrels to hide in, either. That made for a wide-open fight, and also for a fair fight. But if barrels had trouble hiding from one another, they also had trouble hiding from airplanes. The USA controlled the skies hereabouts. Abner Dowling aimed to make the most of it.

  His headquarters wasn’t close enough to the airstrip to let him hear DeFrancis’ dive bombers and fighter-bombers take off. Why put all your eggs anywhere near the same basket when the prairie was so wide? He stayed where he was, strengthened his flanks in case the aircraft didn’t do as much as he hoped they would, and waited to see what happened next.


  Custer wouldn’t wait, he thought. Custer would charge ahead regardless. And no doubt he was right, because Custer always aimed to get the bit between his teeth and charge ahead regardless. About four times out of five, he ended up wishing he hadn’t. The fifth time…The fifth time left him with his reputation as a great general, because the fifth time he charged the other side shattered instead of his own.

  Dowling knew he wouldn’t go down in the history books as a great general. The two likeliest candidates this time around were Irving Morrell and George Patton. Patton got off to a fast start in Ohio, but Morrell was making up ground-literally as well as metaphorically-in Kentucky and Tennessee. Who held higher honors in the books would probably depend on who won the war.

  Some men who realized they weren’t going to be great generals turned into failures instead. They drank too much, or they became sour martinets, or they forgot about discipline for themselves and everybody under them. Dowling tried not to commit those particular sins. If he couldn’t be a great general, he could be a pretty good one, and that was what he aimed at.

  He awaited developments, then. A great general probably would have forced them. A pretty good general could decide he was in no position to force them, which seemed plain as a punch in the nose to Dowling. He consoled himself by deciding it would take a great general to beat him, and so far his Confederate counterpart had shown no signs of greatness. If anything, the fellow on the other side seemed to have more trouble making up his mind than Dowling did.

  The awaited developments…didn’t develop. No column full of Freedom Party Guards and enemy armor crashed into Dowling’s flank from the wide open spaces to the north or south. Dowling briefly wondered whether his opposite number had had his imagination surgically removed when he was only a lad.

  Then the aerial reconnaissance photos came in. Terry DeFrancis came in with them-and with a spring in his step and a cigar in his mouth. “Will you look at these, sir?” he said. “Will you just look at them?”

  “If you quit waving them around, I will,” Dowling said.

  “Sorry, sir.” DeFrancis set them on his desk.

  Dowling spread them out so he could look at several at once. They all seemed to feature vehicles on fire and pillars of smoke mounting up to the sky. Some of the burning vehicles were trucks, but quite a few were barrels. “You hit them hard,” Dowling said.

  “Sir, we fucking pulverized them, pardon my French,” DeFrancis said. “They were driving along without a care in the world, right out in the open, and we caught ’em naked with their legs spread. We screwed ’em, too. We screwed ’em to the wall.”

  “With news like that, you can speak French to me any old day,” Dowling said.

  “Thank you, sir.” Colonel DeFrancis grinned around the cigar. He grew a little more serious as he went on, “Air power matters here. It really matters. We’ve got it, and the other guys don’t. That gives them just as much trouble approaching us as a fleet of battleships has approaching an airplane carrier.”

  “Don’t get carried away,” Dowling warned. “They can do things battleships can’t. They can camouflage themselves. They can spread out, so you don’t catch so many of them together. I suppose they can even use dummies and hit with their real force while you attack those.”

  DeFrancis eyed him. “Sir, I’m glad we’re on the same side. You’ve got an evil, nasty, sneaky mind.”

  “You say the sweetest things, Colonel.” Dowling batted his eyelashes at the younger man. Watching a portly, sixtyish general simper and flirt was almost enough to make DeFrancis swallow his stogie. As his air commander had before, Dowling quickly sobered. “You’re doing a terrific job, Terry. I just don’t want you to get too confident.”

  “Fair enough, sir,” DeFrancis said. Dowling hoped he meant it. When you were winning, when things were going your way, it was easy to think victory was meant to be. Custer always did. Hell, Custer thought victory was meant to be even when he’d just taken a shellacking. His confidence made his troops pay a fearful butcher’s bill.

  In the end, Custer made his vision of victory real. Dowling wanted DeFrancis to do that without causing his own side the misery Custer had. “What’s the next thing you can do that would hurt the enemy most?” Dowling asked.

  “Catch another column flatfooted,” DeFrancis replied at once.

  Dowling tried again: “What’s the next thing you can do that would hurt the enemy most, assuming he’s not an idiot?”

  Colonel DeFrancis took longer to answer this time. At last, he said, “Well, the more we pound his supply lines, the more trouble he’ll have hitting us.”

  “Fine,” Dowling said. “Do it. Even if the War Department won’t send us more men, they don’t seem constipated about shipping us ordnance. As long as we’ve got it, we might as well drop it on the Confederates’ heads.”

  “I like the way you think, sir,” DeFrancis said.

  “I just hope the bastards in butternut don’t,” Dowling answered. “Keep hammering them. If we can soften ’em up enough, we will drive on Camp Determination.” He spoke with no small determination of his own.

  “Hey, Sarge!” one of the soldiers in Chester Martin’s platoon called to him.

  “What’s up, Frankie?” Martin asked.

  “Found this out on patrol. Figured I better bring it in so you could see.” Frankie held out a piece of paper.

  “Thanks-I think.” Chester took it. It was cheap pulp, not much better than newspaper grade. The printing was cheap, too: letters blurred, ink smeary. The message, though, was something else again. YANKEE MURDERERS! it began, and went downhill from there.

  The gist was that U.S. soldiers who’d shot hostages couldn’t expect to be treated as prisoners of war. We shoot mad dogs, it read, and anyone who slaughters innocent Confederate civilians puts himself forever beyond the pale of civilized warfare.

  “What do you think, Sarge?” Frankie asked.

  “Me? I think there’s no such thing as an innocent Confederate civilian, except maybe in his left ear,” Chester answered. “You tell anybody else about this little love letter?”

  Frankie shook his head. “No, Sarge. Not me.”

  “Don’t flabble about it if you did-bound to be lots more copies out there,” Martin said. “But don’t go yelling it from the housetops, either. You did good, bringing it to me. I’m going to let Captain Rhodes have a look at it.”

  Rhodes studied the flyer, then looked up at Chester. “Thanks for showing this to me, Sergeant. I’ll kick it up to Intelligence, let the boys there check it out. I’d say we hit a nerve.”

  “Sir?” Chester said. “How do you mean?”

  “Looks to me like the Confederates are saying they can’t protect their own, and they’re trying to scare us into being nice little boys and girls,” Rhodes answered. “Or do you think I’m wrong? You’ve been around the block a few times-you know what’s what.”

  “I don’t know my ass from a hole in the ground half the time.” Chester thought about it. “You may be right. I don’t know that you are, but you may be.”

  “Fair enough,” Captain Rhodes said. “We’ll see what the Intelligence johnnies think. Hell, they won’t pay any attention to me-I’m just a dumb line officer, so what the fuck can I know?”

  “You’re a damn good company commander, sir,” Martin said. “I’ve been around that block-I ought to know.”

  “Thanks. When you say something like that, I know you’re not blowing smoke up my ass, ’cause you don’t need to,” Rhodes said. “I know damn well we’ve got more good company-level officers than first sergeants.”

  He wasn’t wrong. The worst thing he could do to Chester was take away his platoon. And if he did, if some baby-faced shavetail started commanding it instead, who would really be running things any which way? Chester and Hubert Rhodes both knew the answer to that one.

  “Do we have any notion when we’re going after Chattanooga, sir?” Chester asked.

  “I’m sure we do, if we counts the
big brains back in Philly,” Rhodes answered. “If you mean, do I have any notion, well, no.”

  “Can’t be too much longer…can it?” Martin said.

  “I wouldn’t think so. Both sides are building up as fast as they can,” the company commander said. “As long as we keep building faster than the Confederates, everything’s fine. And I think we are. We’ve got air superiority here-we’ve got it just about everywhere except between Richmond and Philadelphia. We can smash them when they try to move men and supplies forward, and they can’t do that to us.”

  “We’ve got more men to start with, too,” Chester said. “Their small arms make up for some of that, but not for all of it.”

  “Now our barrels are better than theirs, too-till they run out their next model, anyway,” Rhodes said. “We can lick ’em, Sergeant. We can, and I think we will.”

  “Sounds good to me, sir,” Chester said.

  If the Confederates thought their U.S. opponents could beat them, they did a hell of a job of hiding it. Chester had seen that in the last war. You could beat the bastards in butternut, but most of them kept their peckers up right till the end. They kept fighting with everything they had.

  Maybe they didn’t have as much as they would have if U.S. airplanes weren’t bombing the crap out of their supply lines. Chester didn’t know about that. They still seemed to have plenty of artillery ammunition. Their automatic rifles and submachine guns didn’t run short of cartridges, either. They had enough fuel to send barrels and armored cars forward when they counterattacked-and they counterattacked whenever they thought they saw a chance to take back some ground.

  The terrain south of Delphi didn’t need long to turn into the sort of lunar landscape Chester had known and loathed during the Great War. The stench of death hung over it: something even uglier than the view, which wasn’t easy. Soldiers sheltered in craters and foxholes. Trench lines and barbed wire were thinner on the ground than they had been a generation earlier, mostly because barrels could breach them.