Drive to the East sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  C.S. barrels waddled forward and shelled the machine-gun nests. “Let’s try it again!” Tom shouted. This time, he scrambled into one of the black rubber boats himself. He’d get over the Cuyahoga or he’d probably die in it. He grabbed a paddle and thrust it into the muddy water.

  The machine guns stayed quiet. The barrels had done their job, then. Rifle fire from the far bank was galling, but no worse than galling. Confederate machine guns, some on the barrels and others served by infantrymen, made the damnyankee riflemen keep their heads down.

  A bullet cracked past Tom. When you heard that crack, the round came too damn close. He automatically ducked, not that it would have done him any good. Nobody thought anything less of him for ducking. Only a handful of nerveless people lacked that reflex.

  Here came the far bank. “Let’s go!” Tom yelled, and paddled harder than ever. As soon as the rubber boat grounded on the mud, he leaped out and ran for the closest wreckage. He threw a grenade into what looked like the mouth of a cave in case any U.S. soldiers lurked there, then dove behind a burned-out truck carcass. “Stay down!” he called to his men. “If they want you, make ’em pay for you!”

  More Confederates got over the Cuyahoga. U.S. soldiers rushed up to try to wipe out the bridgehead before it got established. A mortar bomb whispered down much closer to Tom than he would have liked. Fragments of hot, jagged steel snarled through the air. Not far away, somebody shrieked-some of those fragments had snarled through flesh instead.

  Asskickers that stooped on the attacking men in green-gray might have been angels in camouflage paint. Tom Colleton yelled exultantly at the chance to get killed farther east in Ohio than other Confederates had before him.

  Sergeant Michael Pound approved of the way Lieutenant Bryce Poffenberger’s combat education was coming. Lieutenant Poffenberger hadn’t gone and killed himself yet. Even more to the point, the barrel commander hadn’t yet gone and killed Sergeant Pound. Pound strongly approved of that.

  What he didn’t approve of were the new Confederate barrels. No, that wasn’t quite true. He highly approved of them-as machines. What he didn’t approve of was that the long-snouted monsters had Confederates inside them and not U.S. barrelmen.

  “We could have had barrels like that,” he told Lieutenant Poffenberger as they camped somewhere between Akron and Canton. “We could have had them more than ten years ago, but we didn’t want to spend the money.”

  Incautiously, Poffenberger said, “And I suppose you were there at the creation.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pound said-if the puppy forgot, he had to have his nose rubbed in it. “I was at the Barrel Works at Fort Leavenworth when General Morrell-of course, he wasn’t a general then, just a colonel-designed the prototype for the model we’re using now. If we’d had that then, we would have upgraded long since. I’m sure of it.”

  Poffenberger stared at him. Firelight shone from the junior officer’s wide eyes. Not for the first time, he asked the question a lot of people had asked before him: “Why the devil aren’t you an officer, Sergeant?” What he meant by it was, Why the devil aren’t you out of my hair?

  “I like what I’m doing, sir,” Pound replied in his best innocent tones. “Things are-looser this way.”

  “Hrmp,” Poffenberger said, a noise that might have meant anything at all.

  “If you’ll excuse me, sir…” Pound waited to be sure the lieutenant wouldn’t hold him, then walked over to the barrel. The driver, a blond from Dakota named Tor Svenson, was fiddling with the engine, wrench in one hand, flashlight in the other. Any good barrel crew did a lot of its own maintenance; the big, heavy machines operated at-or often past-the limits of engine, transmission, and suspension, and they broke down a lot even when coddled and cosseted. “What’s up, Svenson?”

  The driver had been so engaged in what he was doing, he needed a moment to realize somebody was talking to him. When he looked up, a smear of grease darkened one Viking cheekbone. “Oh, it’s you, Sarge,” he said, relief in his voice. Relief that it wasn’t Second Lieutenant Bryce Poffenberger? Pound wouldn’t have been surprised. Svenson went on, “You notice how the beast doesn’t quite pick up fast enough when I goose it?”

  “Uh-huh.” Pound nodded. “Figure it’s the carb?”

  “Yah, but I can’t find anything wrong with the son of a bitch.”

  “Let me have a look.” With a grunt, Pound heaved himself up onto the machine so he could look down on the engine. As a matter of fact, he did look down on it; it wasn’t powerful enough to let the barrel do everything he wished it could. He had a variety of wrenches and other tools in his coverall pockets. Some of them helped him adjust his beloved gun. The others clanked there because any barrelman who’d been at his trade for a while turned into a pretty fair mechanic.

  Svenson had already partly disassembled the carburetor. Pound continued the attack with his own wrenches and, soon, a needle-nosed pliers and a jeweler’s screwdriver. Svenson watched with interest, occasionally offering a suggestion. He wasn’t a bad mechanic himself, but recognized Pound was a better one.

  “What do you think?” the driver asked in due course.

  “Looks to me like the metering rod’s not quite in synch with the throttle valve, so you get that delay when you want high power,” Pound answered. “I like a power jet better-less to go wrong. But we’ve got what we’ve got. Clean everything out there real well and it should be all right.” He crossed his fingers.

  “Yah, I’ll do it, Sarge.” Some of the flat vowels of Scandinavia lingered in Svenson’s speech. “Thanks. I’m not sure I would’ve picked that up myself.”

  “I expect you would have.” Pound didn’t know whether the driver would have or not, but Svenson worked hard. He was also a man whom a pat on the back helped more than a boot in the backside. He grinned a dirty-faced grin at Pound as he started setting the delicate mechanism to rights.

  When they moved out the next morning, the engine was noticeably smoother. Pound reminded himself to say something nice to Svenson when they stopped somewhere. There wasn’t a lot of really open ground as they moved northwest towards Akron. Ohio was densely settled; suburbs spread from towns like tentacles. That meant a barrel commander had to have eyes in the back of his head to keep from walking into trouble.

  Lieutenant Poffenberger did his best. He rode head and shoulders out of the cupola so he could look around in all directions. Staying buttoned up and using the periscopes was safer for the commander but much more dangerous for the barrel as a whole.

  The open cupola also let a little fresh air into the machine. That was good; it felt hot enough in there to cook meat. At least the engine had a compartment of its own, which it hadn’t in Great War barrels. Pound wiped sweat off his forehead with a coverall sleeve and thought longingly of blizzards.

  Foot soldiers trotted alongside the barrels. If they started yelling about gas-or if they started putting on masks, for they might not be heard no matter how they yelled-the machine would have to button up. That would be… even less pleasant than it was already.

  For all of Lieutenant Poffenberger’s good intentions, he never saw the C.S. barrel that wrecked the one he commanded. The shot came from the side. Wham! Clang! It was like getting kicked by a mule the size of a Brontosaurus. The barrel stopped at once. The steel bulkhead between the engine compartment and the crew would hold fire at bay-for a little while.

  “Holy Jesus!” Poffenberger yipped, his voice high and shrill.

  “Sir, we’ve got to get out of here right now,” Michael Pound said urgently.

  “Yes,” Poffenberger said. Had he said no, Pound would have clipped him and then got out anyway. Poffenberger started up through the cupola. A burst of machine-gun fire from that same Confederate barrel-or so Pound thought-made his body jerk and twitch. The lieutenant let out a thin, startled bleat and slumped back down into the turret.

  He blocked Pound’s escape and the loader’s. Swearing, Pound heaved his body up again so he himself could get at the e
scape hatch on the far side of the turret. His hands left blood on the steel as he undogged the hatch. “Come on!” he shouted to the man who sat below him and to his left.

  “What about the lieutenant?” asked the loader-his name was Jerry Fields.

  “He’s gone. Get moving, goddammit! Next one hits right here.” Pound hauled himself out of the turret with his muscular arms. He crouched on the stricken barrel’s chassis, then dropped to the ground. The loader was right behind him. They used the barrel as cover against enemy fire from the flank. Flame and black smoke boiled up from the engine compartment. That would help hide them from Confederates trying to do them in.

  A hatch opened at the front of the barrel. Tor Svenson and the bow gunner tumbled out one after the other. Pound shouted and waved to them. That enemy machine gun blew off the top of the bow gunner’s head. Svenson’s dash turned into a limp, and then a crawl.

  As Pound crouched to bandage the driver’s leg, another armor-piercing round slammed into the barrel, just as he’d known it would. Ammunition started cooking off inside, the cheerful pop-pop-pop of machine-gun cartridges-like a string of firecrackers on the Fourth of July-mingling with the deeper roars of the shells for the main armament. The explosions blew what was left of Lieutenant Poffenberger’s body off the turret. More flames and smoke burst from the cupola-including a perfect smoke ring, as if Satan were puffing on a stogie.

  “How is it, Svenson?” Pound asked.

  “Hurts like a bastard,” the driver answered with the eerie matter-of-factness of a just-wounded man.

  Pound nodded. The bullet had taken a nasty bite out of Svenson’s calf. Pound gave him a shot of morphine, then yelled for a corpsman.

  “Feel naked outside the machine,” the loader said.

  “No kidding,” Pound replied with feeling. He felt worse than naked-he felt like a snail yanked out of its shell. The infantrymen around him knew how to be soft-skinned slugs, but he had no idea. The.45 on his belt, a reasonable self-defense weapon for a barrel crewman, suddenly seemed a kid’s water pistol.

  The war went on without him. Nobody cared that his barrel had been smashed, or that Lieutenant Poffenberger was nothing but torn, burnt, bleeding meat and the bow gunner’d had his brains blown out. Other U.S. barrels kept grinding towards Akron. For all he knew, some of them were hunting the C.S. machine that had put him out of action. Foot soldiers loped past. None of them stopped for the deshelled snails; as proper slugs, they had worries of their own.

  A couple of corpsmen did come up. “All right-we’ll take charge of him,” one of them said. “Looks like you done pretty good.”

  “Thanks,” Pound said. He turned to Jerry Fields. “Come on. Let’s get moving.”

  “Where to?” the loader asked reasonably.

  “Wherever we can find somebody who’ll put us back in another barrel, or at least give us something to do,” Pound answered. “We can’t stay here, that’s for damn sure.”

  He couldn’t have been righter about that. The Confederates on the U.S. flank ripped into the advancing men in green-gray. A shell from a C.S. barrel slammed into the turret of a U.S. machine, letting him see what he’d been afraid of a couple of minutes earlier. The high-velocity round almost tore the turret right off the barrel. The men inside never had a chance. They had to be hamburger even before their ammo started cooking off.

  “Jesus,” Fields said beside him. “That could’ve been us.”

  “Really? That never occurred to me,” Pound said. The loader, for whom sarcasm was a foreign language, gave him a peculiar look.

  In the face of concentrated automatic-weapons fire, U.S. foot soldiers went down as if to a reaper. A reaper is right-a grim one, Pound thought. All he knew about infantry combat was to stay low. That didn’t seem to be enough. He pulled out the.45, in case any Confederate soldiers got close enough to make it dangerous. It didn’t seem to be enough, either.

  The attack unraveled. It quickly grew obvious the U.S. soldiers weren’t going to make it to Portage Lake, let alone into Akron. Instead of going northwest, they started going southeast as fast as they could. The question became whether they would be able to hang on to Canton, and the answer looked more and more like no.

  Pound hated retreats. He wanted to do things to the enemy, not have those nasty bastards on the other side do things to him. But one of the things he didn’t want them to do was kill him. He fired several rounds from the.45. He had no idea whether he hit anybody. With luck, he made some Confederates keep their heads down. Without luck… No, luck was with him, for he got back to Canton-still in U.S. hands-alive and unhurt. And as for what the powers that be came up with next-he’d worry about that later.

  Although the newspapers the Confederates let into the Andersonville prison camp boasted of C.S. victories and U.S. disasters, Major Jonathan Moss didn’t throw them away. That was not to say he believed them. Confederates in Cleveland? Ridiculous. Confederates in Canton? Preposterous. Confederates in Youngstown? Absurd.

  And the news from more distant lands struck him as even less likely. The Japs threatening to take away the Sandwich Islands? The Russians driving toward Warsaw? He shook his head. Whoever came up with those headlines had a warped sense of humor. Only on the Western Front in Europe, where the papers admitted that Germany still had soldiers fighting, did even the tiniest hint of reality emerge.

  Like the rest of the U.S. officers in the camp, though, Moss did hold on to the newspapers he got. Since the Confederates didn’t issue toilet paper and Red Cross packages held only a little, the product of Jake Featherston’s propaganda mills made the best available substitute.

  He wasn’t the only one dubious about what sort of leaves Confederate headline writers loaded into their pipes. An indignant-looking captain named Ralph Lahrheim came up to him one breathlessly hot and muggy afternoon and waved a copy of a rag called the Augusta Constitutionalist in his face. “What do you think of this, Major?” Lahrheim demanded in irate tones. “What do you think?”

  “That one? I don’t much like it,” Moss answered gravely. “It’s scratchier than most of the Atlanta papers.”

  “No, no, no-that isn’t what I meant,” Lahrheim said. “I was talking about the story.”

  “Oh, the story. Haven’t seen this one yet,” Moss said. The younger man-there weren’t a lot of older men in the camp-handed him the newspaper. He read the story Lahrheim pointed out, then made a reluctant clucking noise. “Well, Captain, a lot of Canucks don’t much like the USA.”

  “Yeah, I know what. But could they throw us out of Winnipeg? Could they cut the east-west railroads?”

  “I’m sure they could cut some of them,” Moss answered. “All? I don’t know about that. I don’t know how strong the rebels are in Winnipeg. I suppose they could drive us out for a while.”

  “We’re busy a lot of other places,” Captain Lahrheim said, as if to declare that the Canadians couldn’t hope to cause the USA trouble if that weren’t so. That was true. It was also rather aggressively irrelevant.

  It was, in fact, irrelevant enough that Moss couldn’t resist mocking it: “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

  Lahrheim turned red. “You’re making fun of me.” He had a rubbery face that conveyed indignation even better than his voice.

  “Not of you, Captain, not personally,” Moss said. The Andersonville camp was crowded; you had to be able to get along with people if you possibly could. Again, though, lawyer’s instinct or perhaps plain cussedness made him add, “You did say something silly.”

  After a moment, Captain Lahrheim managed a laugh of sorts. “Well, maybe I did,” he allowed. But he remained indignant, even if he aimed his ire in a different direction. “Did you see how the damn Frenchies performed? Did you? They just cut and run, sounds like.”

  “I did notice that, yes.” Moss was disappointed, if less surprised than the other officer. Men from the Republic of Quebec were tolerable occupation troops. Their mere presence had made English-speaking Canadians think twice about r
ising against the forces that had beaten them in the Great War. Once the Canucks had thought twice and rose anyway, the men from Quebec proved less then enthusiastic about putting them down. There weren’t enough Frenchies to go around, and they weren’t really trained for serious combat anyway.

  “We have to do everything ourselves,” Lahrheim grumbled, a constant complaint in the USA. Maybe there weren’t enough Americans to go around, either. Jonathan Moss hoped there were, but how could you tell ahead of time?

  Moss looked north. He didn’t know how much Lahrheim knew about the tunnel ever so quietly working its way out past the stockade. Since he didn’t know, he pretended the tunnel didn’t exist. But escape still filled his thoughts. If a good many men could break out, if they could cross Georgia and South Carolina and North Carolina and Virginia or maybe go up through Tennessee and Kentucky… If all that could happen, the United States would gain a few reinforcements.

  All of which would matter-how much? On the big scale of things, probably not much. If the fate of the United States depended on a handful of escaping POWs, the country was in worse shape than anyone could imagine. But by escaping the prisoners would help the USA and hurt the CSA, which seemed worth doing. They would also embarrass the Confederates. The longer Moss stayed in Andersonville, the more appealing that looked.

  Ralph Lahrheim also looked north, or rather northwest. “Storm coming,” he remarked.

  Since Moss couldn’t argue with him, he nodded. Big thunderheads were building and rolling toward the prison camp. “Wouldn’t want to fly through those,” he said, which was the Lord’s truth. The clouds towered higher than a fighter’s ceiling, and were full of turbulence that could damn near tear the wings off an airplane.

  “I don’t much fancy being under them when they get here, either.” Captain Lahrheim retreated toward the prisoner barracks.

  He wasn’t a particularly clever man, which didn’t mean he was wrong here. Moss didn’t fancy staying out in the open once the storm broke, either. The rain would be bad enough. If you were unlucky, lightning would be worse.