Return engagement sa-1

by Harry Turtledove

  Considering one of his projects, that was very true indeed. He still waited for results from it. He had no idea how long he would have to go on waiting, or if it would ever come to fruition. Logically, it should, but whether evidence that it had would ever appear to someone who could get word back to him was another open question.

  Before the U.S. onslaught, Jake Featherston had called him about it two or three times. Featherston didn't have the patience to make a good intelligence man. He wanted things to happen right now, regardless of whether they were ripe. That driving, almost demoniac, energy had taken the Confederate States a long way in the direction he wanted them to go, but not all problems yielded to a hearty kick in the behind. The President of the CSA sometimes had trouble seeing that.

  People who came to the office every day spoke of the pounding Richmond was taking. Potter hardly ever got out of the War Department, and so saw less of that destruction than most people.

  The U.S. attack disrupted his news gathering-his spying-on the other side of the border more than he'd thought it would. Some of his sources were too busy doing their nominal jobs to have the chance to send information south. That frustrated him to the point where he reminded himself of Featherston.

  He ate when he got the chance. As often as not, he had someone go to what passed for the War Department canteen and bring him back something allegedly edible. Half the time, he didn't notice what it was. Considering what the canteen turned out, that might have been a blessing.

  Every once in a while, he emerged from his lair. He felt like a bear coming out of its den after a long winter when he did. By the way the inside of his mouth tasted after too much coffee and too many cigarettes, the comparison was more apt than he would have liked.

  Once, he walked into the canteen at the same time as Nathan Bedford Forrest III. The head of the Confederate General Staff looked even more weary, rumpled, and disheveled than he did. Forrest was also in a perfectly foul temper. Fixing Potter with as baleful a stare as the spymaster had ever got, the younger officer growled, "God damn those nigger sons of bitches to hell, so the Devil can fry 'em even blacker than they are already."

  "What now?" Potter asked with a sinking feeling.

  "We had two big trainloads of barrels that were supposed to get up here from Birmingham, so we could gas 'em up, put crews in 'em, and throw 'em into the fight against the damnyankees. Two!" Forrest said. "Fucking niggers planted mines under both sets of train tracks. Blew two locomotives to hell and gone, derailed God only knows how many freight cars, and now those stinking barrels won't get here for another three days at the earliest. At the earliest!" He was extravagantly dismayed and even more extravagantly furious.

  "Ouch!" Potter said. He didn't ask what the delay would do to the defense of northern Virginia. The answer to that was only too obvious: nothing good. Instead, he chose the question that touched him professionally: "How did the coons find out those trains were on the way?"

  Lieutenant General Forrest looked even grimmer than he had before. "I've asked General Cummins the very same thing. So far, he hasn't come up with answers that do me any good." His expression said that the head of Counterintelligence had better come up with such answers in a tearing hurry if he wanted to keep his own head from rolling.

  The canteen line snaked forward. Potter picked up a tray and a paper napkin and some silverware. So did Forrest. Potter got a dispirited salad and a ham sandwich. Forrest chose a bowl of soup and some of the greasiest fried chicken Potter had ever seen. He wondered what the cooks had fried it in. Crankcase oil? He wouldn't have been surprised.

  Forrest followed him to a table. They sat down together. The head of the General Staff went right on cursing and fuming. Potter had the rank and the security clearance to listen to his rant. After a while, when Forrest ran down a little, Potter asked, "Do you think the damnyankees knew about those trains and tipped off the raiders?"

  "That's the way I'd bet right now." Nathan Bedford Forrest III demolished a drumstick, plainly not caring what he ate as long as it filled his belly. "General Cummins says it isn't possible. I wish I thought he was right, but I just can't believe it. The timing was too goddamn good. For them to nail both those trains within an hour of each other… They knew they were coming, all right."

  "I agree," Potter said crisply-which was not a word he could use to describe the lettuce in his salad. "You can only bend the long arm of coincidence so far before you break it."

  "Yeah." Forrest slurped up soup with the same methodical indifference he'd shown the chicken. "General Cummins thinks otherwise… but he's got his prestige on the line. If the niggers figured it out all by themselves, then his shop doesn't look bad."

  Potter didn't say anything to that. Instead, he took a big bite of his ham sandwich-and regretted it. Virginia made some of the finest ham in the world, none of which had gone between those two slices of bread. But Forrest was liable to see any comment he made about Cummins as self-serving.

  Forrest scowled across the table at him. "What can you tell me about this business? Anything?"

  "Right this minute, sir, no," Potter answered. "If the Yankees are getting messages to our niggers, I don't know how they're doing it. I don't know how they're getting word of our shipments, either. That's probably not too hard for them or the niggers, though. They could do it here, or in any one of half a dozen-likely more-railroad dispatch offices, or at the factories in Birmingham."

  "I'd like to put you in charge of finding out," Forrest said. "You seem to have more ideas about it than General Cummins does."

  Part of Potter craved the extra responsibility. The rest of him had more sense. He said, "Sir, there aren't enough hours in the day for me to give it the attention it ought to have. General Cummins is a good officer. If he can't track down what's going on, odds are nobody can."

  "He hasn't done it yet, and he's had his chances," the chief of the General Staff said. "You're right, Potter: he's sound. I know that. But he hasn't got the imagination he needs to be really top-notch."

  "If that means you think I do, then I thank you for the compliment," Potter said. "But I'm sure General Cummins has some bright young officers in his shop. Give one of them his head, or more than one. They'll have all the imagination you could want-probably more than you can use."

  "With Cummins in charge, they won't get the chance to use it. He'll stifle them," Forrest predicted.

  "Sir, there are ways to finesse that." The word made Potter wonder when he'd last played bridge. He loved the game. Like so much of his life, the chance to sit at a table for a few hands had been swallowed up by duty.

  "I know there are," Forrest said. "I'd still rather the imagination came from the top. That idea you had for finding spies here-"

  "Has come to exactly nothing so far," Potter pointed out.

  "It will, though." Forrest sounded more confident than Potter felt. "I don't know when, but it will. Soon, I hope. What I do know is, Cummins wouldn't have had the idea in a million years."

  "Somebody over there would have," Potter said.

  Nathan Bedford Forrest let out a deeply skeptical grunt. "I don't think so. The President doesn't think so, either."

  "Really?" Potter pricked up his ears. "I would have thought I'd have heard that from the President himself if it were so."

  "Not lately. He's been at the front a lot." Forrest made a face and dropped his voice. "You didn't hear that from me, dammit."

  "Yes, sir." Clarence Potter smiled. Forrest still didn't. He'd let his mouth run freer than it should have, and it worried him. Considering Featherston's temper, it should have worried him, too. Smiling still, Potter went on, "What's he doing up there, playing artilleryman again?"

  Now the chief of the General Staff gaped at him. "How the devil did you know that?"

  "Well, I didn't know for sure, but I thought it was a pretty good bet," Potter answered. "Remember, the two of us go back to 1915. We go back longer than he does with any of his Freedom Party buddies. We haven't always
got along"-now there was an understatement; Potter remembered the weight of the pistol in his pocket when he came up to Richmond for the 1936 Olympics-"but I do have some notion of the way he thinks." And he has a notion of how I think, too, dammit. Otherwise, I wouldn't be in uniform right now.

  "All right, then." Forrest didn't sound sure it was all right, but he nodded. "Yeah, he's done some shooting. But you didn't hear that from me, either."

  "Hear what?" Potter said blandly. Forrest made a face at him. Potter decided to see if he could squeeze some extra information out of the younger man now that he'd caught him embarrassed: "Sir, are we going to hold Richmond?"

  "We'll find out, won't we, General?" Forrest answered. Nodding, Potter dropped it. He could tell he'd got as much as he would get.

  XVI

  Tom Colleton had a rain slicker on over his uniform. The hood was made to cover his head even when he wore a helmet. In spite of slicker and hood, cold water dripped down the back of his neck. And he had it better than the damnyankees looking his way from a small forest between Sandusky and Cleveland: the rain was at his back, while it blew into their faces. He'd never liked rain in the face. Some of the Yankee soldiers, like some of his own, wore glasses. For them, rain in the face wasn't just an annoyance. It could be deadly if it blurred an approaching enemy.

  A barrel rumbled up the road toward him. He wouldn't have wanted to try sending barrels anywhere except along roads right now. The rain had turned an awful lot of dirt into mud. He'd seen a couple of bogged-down barrels. They needed specialized recovery vehicles to get them out of their wallows.

  The man commanding the barrel rode with his head and shoulders out of the cupola. Tom approved of that, especially in this weather. A lot of people would have stayed buttoned up and dry and comfortable inside the turret-and if they couldn't see quite as much that way, well, so what? If you took care of your job first and yourself second, you were more likely to live to keep on doing your job.

  As the barrel drew near, the commander ducked down into the turret. He must have given an order, for the machine stopped, engine still noisy even while idling. The commander popped up out of the cupola again like a jack-in-the-box. He waved to Tom. "What's going on up here?" he called, pitching his voice to carry over the engine and through the rain.

  Probably a lieutenant or a sergeant himself, he had no idea he was talking to a lieutenant-colonel. Tom gave the same answer any foot soldier who'd seen some action would have: "Not a hell of a lot, thank God."

  "Sounds good to me," the barrel commander said. By his accent, he came from Texas, or possibly Arkansas-somewhere west of the Mississippi, anyhow. He wiped the back of his hand across his face. "I don't mind the rain one goddamn bit, let me tell you."

  "Because of the lull, you mean?" Tom asked. As if to belie the word, an automatic rifle not too far away stuttered out a short burst. Several shots from Springfields answered. Tom waited to see if anything big would flare up.

  So did the barrel commander. When the firing died away instead, his smile showed nothing but relief. "Partly the lull, yeah," he said. "But there's one thing more: weather like this here, all the poison gas in the world ain't worth shit."

  "You've got a point," Tom said. He didn't want to think about wearing a gas mask in a driving rain like this. All his thoughts about eyeglasses came back, doubled and redoubled. With a gas mask's portholes, you couldn't even peer over the tops if the lenses got spattered. You were stuck trying to see through drip-filled glass.

  "Damnyankees throw that stuff around like it's going out of style." The barrel commander patted the cast steel of the cupola. "Sometimes inside here, we don't know they've done it till too late."

  "Hadn't thought of that," Tom admitted. He imagined rattling along inside the noisy barrel, maybe firing its cannon and machine guns to add to the din. If gas shells started bursting near you, how would you know? Likely by getting a lungful of the stuff, which wasn't the best way. Colleton asked, "Haven't you got any filters to keep it out?"

  "Yeah, but we have to seal everything up for 'em to work at all, and you don't want to do that most of the time, on account of you can't see out so good," the man standing in the cupola replied, illustrating his own point. "Besides, it's cooled down now, but in the summertime you purely can't stand getting all cooped up in here. They throw some potatoes in with us, they could serve us up for roast pork."

  Tom's stomach did a slow lurch. In the last war and this one, he'd smelled burnt human flesh. It did bear a horrid resemblance to pork left too long on the fire. Would it taste the same way? He didn't want to know.

  The barrel commander disappeared down into the turret again. As he emerged, the engine noise picked up. The barrel started forward. "Don't go too far into the woods, or you'll run into the Yankees," Tom shouted. The commander cupped a hand behind his ear. Tom said it again, louder this time. The barrel commander waved. Tom hoped that meant he understood, not that he was just being friendly.

  A few minutes later, two more Confederate barrels rattled down the road after the first one. Tom Colleton frowned. Had some kind of push been ordered, one nobody'd bothered to tell him about? He wouldn't have been surprised; that kind of thing happened too often. On the other hand, maybe the barrels' crews thought something was going on when it really wasn't. In that case, they were likely to get a nasty surprise.

  Frowning, Tom shouted for a wireless man. The soldier with the heavy pack on his back seemed to materialize out of thin air. One second, he was nowhere around. The next, he stood in front of Colleton, asking, "What do you need, sir?"

  "Put me through to division HQ in Sandusky," Tom answered. "I want to find out what the hell's going on up here."

  When the wireless man wanted to, he had a wicked laugh. "What makes you think they'll know?"

  That held more truth than Tom wished it did. "Somebody has to," he said. "They're as good a bet as any, and better than most. Come on, get on the horn with them."

  "Right." The wireless man got busy. Before he could raise Sandusky, though, an antibarrel cannon went off in the direction the Confederate barrels had taken. It fired several rounds. Those weren't big guns; a crew could serve them lickety-split. A machine gun started to answer, undoubtedly trying to shoot down the gunners, but fell silent all at once. A moment later, Tom heard ammunition start to cook off. At least one of those barrels was history.

  He muttered a curse and set a hand on the wireless man's shoulder. "Never mind. I just got my answer." Pulling his pistol from its holster, he ran forward to see what he could do for the luckless barrel men.

  Some of them came running or staggering back toward him. Most were wounded. A couple of the soldiers in butternut coveralls turned around and went with him. The others kept going. Tom didn't suppose he could blame them, not after what had just happened.

  And it turned out not to matter any which way. All three barrels were burning. Tom couldn't get close to any of them. Several men, including the commander of that first barrel, lay dead near the dead machines. Tom swore again. They'd walked into a buzzsaw. He hoped the end had come quickly for them. Sometimes, in war, that was as much as you could hope for.

  A burst of machine-gun fire chewed up the fallen leaves not far from his feet. He dove for cover and swore one more time, now at himself. He hadn't come up here to be a target. Of course, the poor bastards in the barrels hadn't, either, and what had happened to them?

  The damnyankee behind the machine gun squeezed off another burst. Hunting me, the son of a bitch, Tom thought as he rolled and scrambled toward and then behind the thickest tree he could find. The U.S gunner's fire went a little wide. Tom lay there panting for a couple of minutes. In the last war, he might have laughed at himself for getting into and out of a scrape like that. He didn't feel like laughing any more.

  Careful not to draw the machine gunner's notice again, he crawled off to the west, putting as many trees between himself and the enemy as he could. Only when he was sure he could do it without getting shot
did he climb to his feet. By then, he was so wet, he might as well not have bothered with the rain slicker. He felt like a cat that had fallen into a pond.

  To add insult to injury-or, here, almost to add injury to insult-some Confederate soldiers hurrying into the woods came close to shooting him for a Yankee. No good deed goes unpunished, he thought as he finally made it back out into open country.

  His wireless man looked him over. "Sir, you're a mess."

  "Thanks. Thanks a hell of a lot, Rick," Tom said. "I never would have figured that out without you."

  Rick took his canteen off his belt. "Here you go, sir. Have a knock of this." This turned out to be a good deal more potent than water. Tom swigged gratefully.

  "Ahhh," he said when the fire in his gullet had faded a little. "That hit the spot. Now get on the horn to divisional headquarters. They need to know the damnyankees have got antibarrel guns and all sorts of other little delights lurking in those woods."

  "I'll do it, sir," the wireless man said, and he did. Tom spoke with heat perhaps partly inspired by the liquid flames he'd just drunk.

  "Well, we'll see what we can do about it." The staff officer back in Sandusky didn't sound very worried. Why should he be? He was far enough behind the lines that nobody was shooting at him. He went on, "Can't really send out the Mules in weather like this, you know."

  He was bound to be dry and under a roof, too. More cold water trickled down the back of Tom Colleton's neck. He was amazed his anger didn't turn it to steam. "Have you ever heard of artillery?" he growled.

  "Oh, yes, sir," the staff officer said brightly. "I told you, sir-we'll see what we can do. Things are spread a little thin right now."