Potter wanted to clutch himself like a maiden surprised. The mere thought was appalling. Reality was worse. He’d seen it. He wanted no closer acquaintance with it than that. But he said, “It just may be, soldier. If anything can nowadays, it’s got a pretty fair chance.”
“Hope so,” the driver said. This time, his suspicious stare was all too familiar. “How come you talk like a Yankee yourself?”
“’Cause I went to college up there a million years ago, and I wanted to fit in,” Potter replied. “And if I had a dime for every time I’ve answered that question, I’d be too rich to worry about an Army post.”
“Reckon we’ll go through security before we get real far into Petersburg.” The driver sounded as if he was looking forward to it, which meant he didn’t completely believe Potter. And if I had a dime for that, too… the Intelligence officer thought.
He figured Petersburg would be something out of Dante, and he was right. Soldiers and bureaucrats and civilian refugees thrombosed the streets. People moved forward by shouting and waving fists and sometimes by shooting guns in the air. Potter saw bodies hanging from lampposts. Some said DESERTER. Others said SPY. He felt the driver’s eye on him, but pretended he didn’t.
Sure as hell, there were security checkpoints almost every block. “Papers!” the soldiers or Freedom Party Guards—more and more Guards as Potter neared the center of town—would shout. The wreathed stars on his collar meant nothing to them. Considering that Nathan Bedford Forrest III and other high-ranking officers had risen against Jake Featherston, that made more sense than Potter wished it did.
Then a Freedom Party Guard checked off his name on a clipboard. “You’re on our list,” said the man in a camouflage smock. “You come with me right now.” By the way he jerked the muzzle of his automatic rifle, Potter would be sorry if he didn’t—although perhaps not for long.
“Where are you taking me?” Potter asked.
“Never mind that. Get out of your auto and come along,” the Party Guard said.
Not seeing any other choice but starting a firefight he couldn’t hope to win, Potter got out of the Birmingham. “Good luck, sir,” the driver said.
“Thanks.” Potter hoped he wouldn’t need it, but it never hurt.
None of his escort—captors?—demanded the pistol on his belt. He wondered whether that was a good omen or simply an oversight. One way or the other, he figured he’d find out before long. “Now that we’ve got him, what the hell do we do with him?” another Party Guard asked.
The one who’d decided Potter was a wanted man checked the clipboard again. “We take him to the Lawn, that’s what,” he answered.
It meant something to the other Freedom Party Guard, if not to Clarence Potter. The security troops hustled him along. Nobody laid a finger on him, but nobody let him slow down, either: not quite a frog-march, but definitely something close.
The Lawn, on Sycamore near the corner of Liberty, turned out to be a tall red-brick house much overgrown by ivy. The grass in front of it had gone yellow-brown from winter cold. More Freedom Party Guards manned a barbed-wire perimeter outside the house. They relieved Potter of the .45 before letting him go forward. Before he could go inside, a stonefaced Army captain gave him the most thorough—and most intimate—patting down he’d ever had the displeasure to get.
“Do you want me to turn my head and cough?” he asked as the captain’s probing fingers found another sensitive spot.
“That won’t be necessary.” The young officer didn’t change expression at all.
“Necessary…sir?” Potter suggested. He didn’t usually stand on military ceremony, but he was sick and tired of being treated like a dangerous piece of meat.
He watched the captain think it over. The process took much longer than he thought it should have. At last, grudgingly, the man nodded. “You are on the list, and it looks like you’re clean. So…it won’t be necessary, sir. Are you happy…sir?”
“Dancing in the goddamn daisies,” Potter replied.
That got the ghost of a grin from the young captain. “Go on in, then, sir.” No audible pause this time. “The boss will take care of you.”
“Who—?” Clarence Potter began, but the captain had already forgotten about him. Somebody else was coming up to the Lawn, and needed frisking. Those educated hands had more work to do. Muttering, Potter went on in. When he saw Lulu typing on a card table set up in the foyer, he figured out what was going on.
She paused when she recognized him. He almost laughed at the sniff she let out. She never had liked him—she never thought he was loyal enough to the President. But it wasn’t funny any more. The way things were these days, suspicion of disloyalty was liable to be a capital offense.
“General Potter,” the President’s secretary said.
“Hello, Lulu,” Potter answered gravely. “Is he all right?”
“He’s just fine.” She got to her feet. “You stay right there”—as if he were likely to go anywhere. “I’ll tell him you’re here.” The Confederate States of America might be going down the drain, but you couldn’t tell from the way Lulu acted. She came back a moment later. “He wants to see you. This way, please.”
This way took him through the living room, down a hall, past four more guards—any one of whom looked able to tear him in half without breaking a sweat—and into a bedroom. Jake Featherston was shouting into a telephone: “Don’t just sit there with your thumb up your ass, goddammit! Hurry!” He slammed the handset down.
Lulu’s cough said she disapproved of the bad language even more than of the man she escorted. “General Potter is here to see you, sir,” she said. She still didn’t care for Potter, though, not even a little bit.
“Thank you, darling,” Jake said. Watching him sweet-talk his secretary never failed to bemuse Potter. He wouldn’t have bet Featherston could do it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes again and again. “Come in, Potter. Sit down.” He pointed to a chair. “Lulu, hon, please close the door on your way out.” Please! Who would have thought it was in the President’s vocabulary?
Lulu gave Potter a fishy stare, but she did as Jake Featherston asked. “Reporting as ordered, Mr. President,” Potter said, sinking into the overstuffed chair. It was all red velvet and brass nails, and looked like something from a Victorian brothel.
“How close are they to a uranium bomb?” Featherston didn’t waste time or politeness on Potter. The President looked like hell: pale and haggard and skinny, with big dark circles under his eyes. How much did he sleep? Did he sleep at all? Potter wouldn’t have bet on it.
“They’re getting closer, sir,” he answered. “They’re talking about months now, not years—if the damnyankees’ bombs don’t set them back again.”
“Months! Jesus Christ! We can’t wait months!” Jake howled. “Haven’t they noticed? This goddamn country’s falling apart around their ears! Atlanta! Richmond! Savannah’s going, and God only knows how long Birmingham will last. We need that fucker, and we need it yesterday. Not tomorrow, not today—yesterday! Months!” He rolled his eyes up to the heavens.
“Sir, I’m just telling you what Professor FitzBelmont told me,” Potter said. “He also said that if you think you can find someone who’ll do it better and faster, you should put him in charge.”
Featherston swore. “There isn’t anybody like that, is there?”
“If there is, Mr. President, I sure don’t know about him,” Potter answered. “Shall we try disrupting the U.S. program again?”
“What the fuck difference does it make?” Featherston said bitterly. That alarmed Potter, who’d never before heard him back away from anything. Even more bitterly, the President went on, “Shit, they’re licking us without uranium bombs. I never would’ve reckoned they could, but they damn well are. Makes you wonder if we deserve to live, doesn’t it?”
“No, sir. I have to believe that,” Potter said. “This is my country. I’ll do everything I can for it.”
Featherston cocked his head t
o one side. “Ask you something?”
“You’re the President, sir. How can I say no?”
“You sure never had any trouble before. But how come you didn’t throw in with Bedford Forrest III and the rest of those bastards?”
“Sir, we’re in a war. We need you. We need you bad. Whoever they brought in instead would have been worse. Chances are the Yankees wouldn’t have made peace with him, either, not this side of—what do they call it?—unconditional surrender. That kills us. Way it looks to me is, we’ve got to keep fighting, because all our other choices are worse. Maybe the slide-rule brigade can save us. It’s the best hope we’ve got, anyhow.”
He realized he’d just admitted he knew about Forrest’s plot, even if he hadn’t gone along with it. If Jake wanted his head, he could have it. But that had always been true, ever since the Richmond Olympics. “Well, I get straight answers from you, anyway,” the Confederate President said. “Listen, you go back and tell FitzBelmont I don’t care what he does or who he kills—we’ve got to have that bomb, and faster than months. Get his head out of the clouds. Make sure he understands. It’s his country, too, what’s left of it.”
“I’ll do my best, sir. I don’t know how much I can hurry the physicists, though,” Potter said.
“You’d better, that’s all I’ve got to tell you,” Featherston said. Clarence Potter nodded. He’d seen the President of the CSA angry before—Jake Featherston ran on anger the way trucks ran on gasoline. He’d seen him gleeful. He’d seen him stubborn and defiant. But never—never till now, anyway—had he seen him desperate.
Next stop, Birmingham!” Michael Pound said exultantly. It wasn’t spring yet, not even here in Alabama, where spring came early. It wasn’t spring, no, but something even sweeter than birdsong and flowers filled the air. When Pound sniffed, he didn’t just smell exhaust fumes and cordite and unbathed soldiers. He smelled victory.
The Confederates hadn’t quit. He didn’t think they knew the meaning of the word. Some of their terrifying new barrels came into the front line without so much as a coat of paint—straight from the factories U.S. bombers and now artillery were still trying to knock out. The crews who fought those shiny metal monsters were brave, no doubt about it. But all the courage in the world couldn’t make up for missing skill.
And, while the Confederate machines trickled from their battered factories in dribs and drabs, U.S. production went up and up. Maybe a new C.S. barrel was worth two of the best U.S. model. If the USA had four or five times as many barrels where it mattered, how much did that individual superiority matter?
Not enough.
Pound guided his barrel past the guttering corpse of a machine that had tried conclusions with several U.S. barrels at once. That might have been a brave mistake, but a mistake it undoubtedly was. The Confederates had made so many big mistakes, they couldn’t afford even small ones any more.
Somebody not far away fired an automatic rifle. Maybe that was a U.S. soldier with a captured weapon. On the other hand, maybe it was a Freedom Party Guard aiming at a barrel commander riding along with head and shoulders out of the cupola. Regretfully, Michael Pound decided not to take the chance. He ducked down into the machine.
“Where the hell are we, sir?” Sergeant Scullard asked. The gunner didn’t get nearly so many chances to look around as the barrel commander did.
Despite having those chances, Pound needed to check a map before he answered, “Far as I can tell, we’re just outside of Columbiana.”
“And where the fuck’s Columbiana?”
Unless you were born and raised in central Alabama, that was another reasonable question. “Twenty, maybe thirty miles from Birmingham, south and a little bit east,” Pound said. “Town’s got a munitions plant in it, run by the C. B. Churchill Company—that’s what the map notes say, anyhow.”
“Fuck,” the gunner repeated, this time as a term of general disapproval. “That means those butternut assholes’ll fight like mad bastards to keep us out.”
“They’ve been fighting like mad bastards for almost three years,” Pound said. “How much good has it done ’em? We’re in the middle of Alabama. We’ve got ’em cut in half, or near enough so it makes no difference. If they had any brains, they’d quit now, because they can’t win.”
“Yeah, and then they’d spend the next hundred years bushwhacking us.” Scullard was not in a cheerful mood.
Pound grunted. The gunner might have meant that for a sour joke. Even if he did, it made an unfortunate amount of sense. In a standup fight, the Confederacy was losing. But how much fun would it be to occupy a country where everybody hated your guts and wanted you dead? After the Great War, the United States hadn’t enjoyed trying to hold on to Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah. If the USA tried to hang on to the whole CSA…
“Well, nobody ever said the Army would go out of style any time soon,” Pound said.
“A good thing, too,” Scullard replied. “If we’re in deep shit now, we’d be in a lot deeper without this baby.” He rapped his knuckles on the breech of the barrel’s main armament, adding, “I just wish we had more like it.”
“They’re coming,” Pound said. “Maybe not as fast as if we’d started sooner, but they are. We can make more stuff than the Confederates can. Sooner or later, we’ll knock ’em flat, and it’s getting on toward sooner.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth before a Confederate antibarrel rocket slammed into a U.S. machine a quarter of a mile away. The green-gray barrel brewed up, sending an enormous and monstrously perfect smoke ring up and out through the open cupola. Fire and greasy black smoke followed an instant later as the barrel slewed to a stop. Pound didn’t think anybody got out.
He swore under his breath. The United States were making more stuff than the Confederate States could, yes. Sometimes, though—too damn often, in fact—the Confederates made better stuff. The automatic rifles their infantry carried, these antibarrel rockets, the screaming meemies that could flatten acres at a volley, the long-range jobs that reached into the USA…The enemy had talented engineers. Their cause stank like a dead fish, but they were good at what they did.
Scullard must have seen the U.S. barrel go up, too. “I hope we knock ’em flat sooner,” he said. “That way, the mothers don’t have the chance to come up with anything really nasty.”
“Yeah,” Michael Pound said. That marched with his own thoughts much too well.
Fields and forest surrounded Columbiana. Two routes led up to the town from the south: a county road whose thin blacktop coat the barrels’ tracks quickly wrecked, and a railroad line maybe a hundred yards to the west. They were both nice and straight, and Pound couldn’t have said which he distrusted more. They both let the Confederates see what was coming long before it got there.
And what they could see, they were too likely to be able to hit. That blazing barrel said as much. Of course, banging your way through the woods was asking to get nailed by some kid in butternut crouching behind a pine tree. You’d never spot him till he fired off his stovepipe, and that was too damn late.
Pound stood up in the cupola. He wanted to find out just how much U.S. armor was close enough to follow his platoon’s lead. He hoped the other barrels would follow, anyway. If they didn’t, he was liable to end up slightly dead.
Or more than slightly.
Sometimes, though, a barrel’s engine was as important a weapon as its cannon. This felt like one of those times. Accidentally on purpose, he sent his orders over the all-company circuit instead of the one that linked him to his platoon alone: “Men, we are going to charge up this miserable little road as fast as we can go. We are going to blast anything that gets in our way, and we’ll be inside Columbiana before Featherston’s fuckers figure out what hit ’em.” I hope. “Follow me. If this goes wrong, they’ll get my barrel first.” He switched to the intercom so he could talk to his driver: “You hear that, Beans?”
“Yes, sir.” The driver’s name was Neyer, but he rarely had to answer to
it. His fondness for one particular ration can had given him a handle he’d keep till he took off his uniform…or till he got blown to smithereens, which might happen in the next couple of minutes.
Don’t think about it, Pound told himself. If you think about it, you’ll get cold feet. “Then gun it,” he said. He was sure his own platoon would come with him. The rest…Don’t think about that, either.
The engine roared. The barrel zipped forward. Flat out, it could do better than thirty. On rough ground, going like that would have torn out the kidneys of the men inside. On the road, it was tolerable…barely.
“Shoot first if you see anything,” Pound advised, shouting over the noise.
“Going this fast, the stabilizer ain’t worth shit,” the gunner answered.
“Shoot first anyway. Even if you miss, you make the other guy duck. Then you can make your second shot count.”
Scullard grunted. Pound knew damn well he was right, but he could see that it wasn’t the sort of thing where you’d want to bet your life if you didn’t have to.
As they neared Columbiana, they found there were Confederate soldiers on the road. The men in butternut hadn’t figured the Yankees would be dumb enough or crazy enough to thunder down on them like that. The bow machine gun and the coaxial machine gun in the turret both started jackhammering. The C.S. troops scattered.
“Give ’em a couple of rounds of HE, too,” Pound said. “Something to remember us by, you know?”
“Yes, sir!” Scullard said enthusiastically, and then, to the loader, “HE!”
The main armament thundered twice. A 3½-inch shell carried enough cordite to make a pretty good boom when it burst. One round went off in the middle of a knot of fleeing Confederates. Men and pieces of men described arcs through the air.
“Nice shot!” Pound yelled. Only later did he remember he was cheering death and mayhem. They were what he did for a living, his stock in trade. Most of the time, he took them for granted. He wondered why he couldn’t quite do it now.
In at the Death Page 26
