American Front gw-1

by Harry Turtledove

  A lot of bullets were hitting the armored car. The sound of them rattling off its side put Ramsay in mind of hail hitting a tin roof. But the car kept on coming, like an ironclad smashing its way through a navy of wooden ships. The comparison was apt, for it was doing more damage to the Confederates all by its lonesome than all the troopers who came with it.

  Bobby Brock made a noise somewhere between a groan and a scream. There was a neat hole in the front of his uniform tunic. As he slumped down over his horse's neck, Ramsay got a look at the hole the bullet had made going out through his back. That wasn't neat at all. It looked more as if somebody had set off half a stick of dynamite in his chest.

  The trooper right alongside of Brock went down as his horse took three bullets-neck, barrel, and hock-from that damned machine gun in the space of a second and a half. The cavalryman pulled himself free, but he didn't bounce to his feet. Having a horse fall on your leg wasn't the best thing that could ever happen to it.

  For a couple of dreadful minutes, Ramsay was afraid the armored car would win the little battle all by its lonesome, even though the Confederate troopers were mopping the floor with the damnyankees whenever they could engage them away from the car with its machine gun. But then the vehicle, all of its tires shot out, slowed to walking pace and, when it went into a hole, couldn't pull itself out no matter how the engine growled and roared and sent up clouds of stinking exhaust.

  Ramsay threw back his head and let out the catamount wail of a Rebel yell. "Damn thing is stuck, boys!" he shouted. "Now we can get around behind it and settle the rest of these bastards."

  The Confederates went wide to right and left around the bogged-down armored car, getting away from the deadly arc of fire its machine gun could command. Once that gauntlet was run, chasing the Yankee cavalry back toward Kingman proved the work of only a few minutes.

  "And now we settle with this goddamn thing," Captain Lincoln said, riding toward the armored car from the rear. The machine gunner proved to have a firing port in the back of the steel box that enclosed him. He banged away with a pistol. The range was still long for a handgun, and he missed. Captain Lincoln yelled, "Parley, dammit!" The U.S. soldier held his fire. Lincoln said, "You come out of that damned iron turtle of yours, or we'll chuck a couple of sticks of dynamite under it and blow y'all to kingdom come."

  With a squeal of metal against metal, a hinged roof on top of the armored car and a door in its side came open. The machine gunner stood up with his hands in the air and the driver stepped out. "All right, you've got us," the gunner said with a grin, sounding and looking a lot more jaunty than he should have, considering how much damage he'd done to good Southern men and horses. "Take us and-"

  He never got any farther than that. Somebody's carbine barked at almost point-blank range. The back of his head blew off in a spray of blood and brain and bone. He collapsed, dead before he knew what hit him. With a cry of horror, the armored-car driver tried to dive back into his machine. Several more shots stretched him lifeless beside it.

  "Chew our people up and make like it's a game you can just walk away from, will you?" Ramsay said. He hadn't fired at the men who'd surrendered, but he didn't miss them a bit, either.

  "You want to fight us, get on a horse and fight fair," somebody else added, which made troopers' heads bob up and down in agreement.

  Captain Lincoln set his hands on his hips and snarled in exasperation. "God damn it to hell, now we got to blow up that machine," he said. "Otherwise the Yankees'll find the bodies like that and start shootin' our prisoners, too."

  The armored car went up in a ball of flame as a stick of dynamite set off the gasoline in the fuel tank. Machine-gun bullets, ignited by the fire, added brisk popping sounds as they cooked off one after another.

  "All right, we did what we came to do," Lincoln said, looking from the funeral pyre of the armored car to the wrecked stretch of track. "Let's get back home."

  Ramsay was happy to obey. Yes, they'd done what they'd come to do, but the cost- Of every three men who'd left Sequoyah, only two were going back, and one of them was wounded. And all that, or almost all of it, from one armored car that bogged down pretty fast.

  He spurred his horse up close to Captain Lincoln's. "Sir, what's cavalry supposed to do when we run into four or five of those machine gun-totin' machines, not just the one like we fought today?"

  Lincoln didn't answer for so long, Ramsay started to wonder if he'd heard. The captain looked back over his depleted command. "I don't know, Corporal. I just don't know."

  "Come on! Come on! Come on!" Captain Irving Morrell urged his men forward. Dust spurted up under his boots as, with every stride, he penetrated deeper into Confederate Sonora. "The faster we move, the less chance they have of setting up lines against us."

  One of his soldiers, sweat soaking through his uniform as he slogged through the desert under the weight of a heavy pack, pointed up into the sky. "They already got their lines set, sir," he said.

  Morrell hadn't heard the buzz of a spying Confederate aeroplane, but looked up anyhow. He burst out laughing. No aeroplane up there, just half a dozen vultures, all of them circling hopefully. "They won't get us, Altrock," he said. "They're waiting for us to feed 'em some Rebs."

  "That must be how it is, sir," the infantryman agreed. He stepped up his pace to match that of his commander.

  "You bet that's how it is," Morrell said, kicking at the light brown sandy dirt. "Didn't we give 'em a blue-plate special when we crossed from Nogales into New Montgomery?"

  Several men nodded enthusiastically in response to that. The bombardment of the Confederate town had done everything it was supposed to do, silencing the enemy's guns and sending civilians streaming away in panic- white Confederates, their black servants and laborers, and the brown folk who'd lived there since the days before the Rebels bought Sonora from a Mexico strapped for cash to pay England and France what it owed. The garrison had fought, but they'd been outnumbered as well as outgunned. The way into Sonora, toward Guaymas and the Pacific end of the Confederate railway net, lay open.

  Morrell meant to do everything he could to make sure that line got cut. He was a lean man in his mid-twenties, with a long face, light eyes, and sandy hair he wore cropped close to his skull. He gulped a salt tablet and washed it down with a swig of warm water from his canteen. Other than that, he ignored the sweat gushing from every pore. He ignored everything not directly concerned with the mission, and pursued everything that was with a driving energy that brought his men along, too.

  "Come on!" he called again, stepping up the pace. "We've cracked the shell. Now we get to suck the meat out."

  One of his first lieutenants, a big, gangly fellow named Jake Hoyland, moved up alongside him, map in hand. "Next town ahead is Imuris," he said, pointing. "There's some mines around there, too: copper mines. Cocospera." He read the name off the map with the sublime disregard for Spanish pronunciation growing up in Michigan gave him.

  "The division will secure those, and the United States will exploit them," Morrell said. "We have an advantage over our German allies here, Jake."

  "Sir?" Hoyland wasn't much given to strategic thought. He'd make captain one day, but he probably wouldn't rise much further than that.

  Patiently, Morrell explained: " Germany is attacking France on a narrow front, and the French and the damned English can be strong against them all along it. We have about the population of Germany, and the Confederacy and Canada together close to the population of France, but we have thousands and thousands of miles of frontier with our enemies, not a few hundred. Except in a few places, defense in depth becomes impossible."

  "Oh. I see what you mean." Maybe Hoyland even did. He pointed to the map again. "How will we exploit these Cocospera mines?"

  "Probably with the niggers the Rebels brought in to work them," Morrell answered, shrugging. "That's not our worry. Our worry is to take them."

  "Yes, sir." Now Hoyland wiped his face with his sleeve, leaving a smear of dust
on his cheek. "Even hotter here than it was up in the USA, you ask me."

  "We've only come twenty miles, for God's sake," Morrell said in some exasperation. "We've got a long haul before we get to Guaymas."

  He looked back over his shoulder. Dust clogged the horizon to the north, hiding the men and horses and cannon and horse-drawn wagons and motor trucks that had stirred it up. He knew they were there, though, intent on sealing the western part of the Confederacy from the rest of the country: not only was Guaymas a railhead, it was the only real Pacific port the Rebels had. Shut it down and this part of the South withered on the vine.

  The Rebels knew as much, too. Their frontier force had been smashed in the opening U.S. attack, but they were still doing what they could to resist. Off to the northeast of Imuris, the desert rose up into low, rolling hills. They'd mounted some three-inch field guns up on the high ground, and were banging away at the advancing U.S. column.

  More dust rising from the U.S. left showed cavalry-or, more likely, mounted infantry-peeling off to deal with the Confederates. Those nuisance field guns had accomplished their objective: to distract some of the American force from its primary mission.

  Morrell refused to be distracted. He scrambled between strands of barbed wire that marked the outer bounds of some ranch's property. He could see the ranch house and its outbuildings a couple of miles ahead, shimmering in the heat haze. As on the U.S. side of the border, ranches were big here; because water was scarce and precious and the ground scrubby as a result, you needed a lot of acreage for your stock.

  He didn't see any of that stock. The owner, whoever he was {an old-time Mexican or a Southern Johnny-come-lately? Morrell wondered), had run it off to keep the U.S. forces from getting their hands on it. They'd probably run off themselves, too-with luck, so fast they hadn't had a chance to take everything out of the ranch house. Whatever they hadn't taken, the U.S. Army would.

  A rifle barked, up ahead. A bullet kicked up dirt, maybe fifty yards from Morrell's feet. As if that first one had been a test, a fusillade of rifle shots rang out. Morrell threw himself flat on his belly. Somewhere behind him, a wounded man let out a breathless, angry curse.

  From the volume of fire, the Confederates were there in about platoon strength. Morrell didn't hear the deadly chatter of a machine gun, for which he thanked God. Even after the bombardment of New Montgomery, machine guns in the ruins had chewed holes in the U.S. forces.

  "We'll flank 'em out!" he shouted. "Hoyland, your platoon to the left; Koenig, yours to the right. Foulkes, I'll stay with your boys here in the center. We'll advance by squads. Let's go."

  The Confederates had had time to dig themselves holes, and their dun-colored uniforms weren't easy to spot against the gray-brown dirt: here, at least, they matched the terrain better than the U.S. troops did. They could not let themselves be taken from the sides, though, and began falling back toward the ranch house and other buildings as their foes moved forward. Here and there, a brave man or two would stay in a hole and die in place, buying his comrades time to retreat.

  One of those diehards popped up not ten feet from Morrell. The U.S. captain shot first. With a cry of pain, the Confederate fell back. He wasn't through, though; he tried to bring his rifle to bear once more. Morrell sprang down into the hole and finished him with the bayonet.

  He got out and resumed the advance. "We can't let 'em get set," he said. "Press 'em hard, every one of you."

  A U.S. soldier was already sprawled behind a woodpile near the house, firing at the Rebels inside. A body sprawled out through a window and poured blood down onto the flowers below.

  With better cover, though, the Confederates were taking a heavy toll on the U.S. troopers. Firing came not only from the ranch house but also from the barn, the chicken coop, and what looked like a little separate smithy. Then three of Morrell's men rushed into the smithy. After a sharp, short volley, it became a U.S. strongpoint rather than a Confederate one.

  But heavy firing still came from both the ranch house and the barn. Several men in butternut burst out of the barn and ran toward the house, which was closer to the advancing U.S. soldiers.

  "Come on!" Morrell shouted to his own men. He burst from the cover of a scraggly bush and sprinted toward the Confederates, firing as he ran. They fired, too; a couple of bullets cracked past him.

  He didn't have time to be afraid. He fired again, saw one man fall, worked the bolt on his Springfield, and pulled the trigger. His only reward was a dry click; he'd just spent the last round in the magazine. No chance to fumble for a fresh one. The Rebels couldn't have been more than twenty or thirty feet away. He'd always been pretty good with the bayonet. If he stuck one Confederate, maybe the rest would run. Shouting once more for his men to follow him, he rushed at the enemy.

  The bullet caught him in the right thigh. The rifle flew out of his hands and crashed to the ground. So did he. Looking down at himself, he saw in mild surprise that a chunk of meat about the size of a clenched fist was missing from the side of his leg. Blood spilled out onto the hot, dry, thirsty ground.

  He didn't hurt-and then he did. His groans were lost in the racket of gunfire. Nobody could come to retrieve him, not when he lay right between the two battling forces. Nobody fired at him to finish him off, either. He was not altogether sure that was a mercy. The fierce sun beat down on him.

  Next thing he remembered, the sun was in a different part of the sky. Somebody was rolling him over onto his back. Did they think him dead? The very idea made him indignant. But no-Private Altrock was wrapping something around his leg.

  "Get that belt good and tight," Lieutenant Hoyland said. "He's already lost a hell of a lot of blood."

  "Yes, sir," Altrock said, and grunted as he pulled the makeshift tourniquet tighter.

  "Did we-take the position?" Morrell asked, each word a separate effort.

  "Yes, sir," Hoyland told him. "You take it easy now. We'll get you out of here." Off to one side, a couple of men were improvising a stretcher from two poles and a shelter half. When they were done, Altrock and Hoyland got Morrell onto it, lifting him like a sack of grain. He remembered the stretcher coming off the ground, but blacked out again after that.

  He woke up out of the direct sun, looking up at green-gray cloth. A hospital tent, he thought dimly. A man in a gauze mask bent over him with an ether-soaked rag. "Wait," Morrell croaked. "If you go into close combat, make sure you've got the last bullet." The rag came down, and with it blackness.

  III

  The Dakota slowed to a crawl to let the fuel ship Vulcan come alongside. Sailors cursed and grunted as they wrestled with the hose from the Vulcan and started pumping heavy fuel oil into the battleship.

  Seaman First Class Sam Carsten looked on the refueling process with something less than approval: he was swabbing the deck nearby, and saw more work piling up for him every moment. "Can't you lugs be careful?" he demanded. "Bunch of filthy slobs, is what you are."

  "Sorry, mother dearest," one of the men on the refueling party said in a high, scratchy falsetto. His comrades laughed. So did Carsten, who leaned on his mop to watch the work go on. He laughed easily, even at himself. He was a big, slow-moving blue-eyed blond, his skin ever more sunburned these days.

  "Wish we were back in San Francisco," he said wistfully. "It was right nice there-good weather for a paleface like me. Another couple days of this and you can spread me with butter and marmalade, because I'll be a piece of toast."

  "It's hot, sure as hell," the other sailor agreed. Black oil stains spotted his dungarees. "It ain't near as hot as we're gonna make it for the goddamn limeys, though."

  "That's right," another hose-handler agreed. He eyed Carsten. "You're gonna be toast, are you? Maybe we'll use you for the Sandwich Islands, then." He snickered at his own wit.

  "Pretty funny," Carsten said amiably. He swabbed a few strokes to satisfy any watching petty officer, then took it easy again. He'd been in the Navy five years, and was used to its rhythms and routines. Things had
sped up on account of the war, sure, but not that much: on a ship you had to do things by the numbers even in peacetime, which wasn't so true in the Army. He paused to roll himself a cigarette, lighted it with a match he scraped to life on the sole of his shoe, and sucked in a breath of smoke before going on, "Any luck at all, we'll cornhole the limeys but good."

  "Cornhole 'em, hey?" one of the hose jockeys said. "I like that, damned if I don't. We're sure comin' up at 'em the wrong way."

  "Yeah." Carsten plied the mop again. If you looked busy, people would figure you were. If you didn't, they'd find something for you to do, probably something you'd like less than what you were doing now.

  As he worked, he thought again about cornholing the Royal Navy. The more he thought about it, the better he liked it. The U.S. Pacific Fleet had put to sea days before war was declared, sailing out of San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles and San Diego. The Seattle squadron was still up there, to face the British and Canadian ships based in Vancouver and Victoria. But the main fleet had swung west and south in a long loop around the western end of the Sandwich Island chain, and now "Wish we'd have beaten the British to annexing those damned islands," said the sailor with the oil-spotted dungarees. "Then we could have sailed from there 'stead of the West Coast, and we'd be steaming for Singapore."

  "Or maybe for the Philippines," Carsten said. "The Japs, they're England 's good pals. One of these days, we kick them in the slats, too."

  He tried to think like Admiral Dewey. If they could boot the British out of the Sandwich Islands, they booted them all the way across the Pacific, to Singapore and Australia. They'd have only the one chance, though; if things went wrong here, British battleships would be steaming up and down the west coast of the United States for the rest of the war, and there'd be damn all anybody would be able to do about it.

  "So-we roll the dice," he muttered. If the Pacific Fleet took the Sandwich Islands away from England, the USA would have an easier time resupplying them than the British did now. They'd run around the chain so the limeys wouldn't spot them on the way in, and now they were picking up fuel for the last run on Pearl Harbor. One good surprise and the islands would be theirs.