Return Engagement

by Harry Turtledove

  "Makes sense," Moss said. Rolvaag usually did. Along with the rest of the pilots from the squadron, they walked toward the biggest camouflaged tent nearby. Either that would hold local headquarters, in which case they could get billeted, or it would be the local officers' club, in which case they could get lit.

  It turned out to be local headquarters. Several fliers looked disappointed. Moss was a little disappointed himself, but only a little. They'd be going into action soon, and he didn't want to fly hung over. Some of the younger guys didn't give a damn. Back in the Great War, he hadn't given a damn, either.

  The captain who let them know where they'd be eating and sleeping (and who told them where the officers' club was, so they could drink, too) only shrugged when Moss asked him when the U.S. push toward Richmond would start. "Sir, when the orders come in, they'll get to you, I promise. We won't leave you on the ground," he said. "Past that, you know as much as I do."

  "I don't know a damn thing," Moss complained. The captain just nodded, as if to say they were still even.

  After supper, Moss did find his way to the officers' club. Blackout curtains inside the tent flap made sure no light leaked out. The fog of cigarette smoke inside would have done a pretty good job of dimming the light even without the curtains. Along with tobacco, the air smelled of beer and whiskey and sweat.

  Moss made his way up to the bar and ordered a beer. He reminded himself that drink wasn't spelled with a u. As he sipped, he listened to the chatter around him. When he discovered that the three men immediately to his left were reconnaissance pilots, he started picking their brains. If anybody could tell him what the Confederates were up to, they were the men.

  But they couldn't tell him much. One said, "Bastards know how to palm their cards as well as we do. If they haven't got more than they're showing, we'll waltz into Richmond. 'Course, I hope to hell they're saying,, ‘Sure don't look like them damnyankees got much up there a-tall." " His impression of a Confederate accent was less than successful.

  "Here's hoping," Moss agreed. A second beer followed the first. He had a few more over the evening. He didn't get drunk–he was sure of that–but he did get happy. He heard about as many opinions of Daniel MacArthur as there were people offering them.

  Not long after he hit the sack, Confederate bombers came overhead. They were doing their best to disrupt what they had to know was coming. Moss ran for a damp trench. He didn't think any of their load hit the airstrip, but it wasn't coming down very far away. He hoped U.S. bombers were paying similar calls on the defenders. Soldiers who went without sleep didn't fight as well as those who got their rest.

  Orders for his squadron came in the next morning. He'd wondered if they'd been sent east to escort bombers. They hadn't had any training or practice in that role. But instead the command was ground attack. Moss nodded to himself. They could handle that just fine. And he had a date–three days hence. He talked with men who'd been in Maryland longer about local landmarks and Confederate antiaircraft.

  The day of the attack dawned cold and gloomy. Moss yawned as he went to his fighter. He didn't like the low clouds overhead. They would make it harder for him to find his targets. He managed a shrug. His squadron wouldn't be the only one hitting the Confederates. He could probably tag along with someone else.

  He ran through his flight checks with impatience, but was no less thorough because he was impatient. Like a modern automobile, the Wright had a self-starter. No groundcrew man needed to spin the prop for him. He poked the button. The engine roared to life; the propeller blurred into a disk.

  He raced down the runway and flung himself into the air. One by one, the airplanes in his squadron followed. They rocketed south toward Virginia and the enemy. Moss got the feeling of being part of something much bigger than himself. He'd known it in the Great War, too, but seldom in this fight.

  As they got farther south, the clouds began to break up. That was a relief. Maybe the people who'd ordered the attack weren't complete idiots after all. Then again, you never could tell. Moss got a quick glimpse of Washington, D.C., before he zoomed over the Potomac. Plumes of smoke rose here and there from the formal capital–for all practical purposes, the former capital. Confederate bombers must have visited there the night before. Not even Y-ranging had helped fighters do much to track bombers by night.

  After the Potomac, the next good-sized river was the Rappahannock. If U.S. soldiers could get over the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, the next stop was Richmond, which lay on the north bank of the James.

  Crossing the Rappahannock wouldn't be a whole lot of fun, though. Confederate artillery was zeroed in on the river, and pounded the pontoon bridges U.S. military engineers were running up under the not quite adequate cover of their own artillery. Asskickers were out dive-bombing those bridges, too. Moss watched one crash into the Rappahannock in flames. Somebody had thought to bring plenty of antiaircraft guns forward, then. Good.

  And there were plenty of Confederate antiaircraft guns right up at the front, too. Shells began bursting around Moss and his squadron even while they were on the U.S. side of the Rappahannock. He hoped those came from Confederate guns. He didn't like the idea of getting shot down by his own side. Come to that, he didn't like the idea of getting shot down by the enemy, either.

  He dove on a battery of Confederate artillery pieces. He could damn well shoot back at the bastards on the other side. He thumbed the firing button. His Wright seemed to stagger a little in the air from the recoil of the guns. Soldiers in butternut scattered as he roared past overhead. Muzzle flashes showed that some of them were taking potshots at him with whatever small arms they carried. He wasn't going to lose any sleep over that–he was gone before they could hope to aim.

  He had more targets than he could shake a stick at. The Confederates had known this attack was coming, and they'd spent a lot of time getting ready for it. That worried Moss. When the Confederates struck for Lake Erie, they'd caught the USA by surprise. Maybe they shouldn't have, but so what? Surprise had helped them go as far and as fast as they had.

  Surprise wouldn't do the USA a nickel's worth of good here. Could a major armored thrust succeed without it? Moss didn't know. One way or the other, he'd find out. And so would everybody else.

  He shot up another artillery position, and a battalion's worth of infantrymen he caught in the open. He'd pitied the poor foot soldiers in the last war. Their lot was, if anything, worse now. The fighters he and the Confederates were flying now were ever so much more deadly as ground-attack machines than their Great War ancestors had been. Barrels were correspondingly more dangerous, too. Even the poison gas was more poisonous than it had been a generation earlier.

  When Moss tried to strafe some more infantrymen, his guns emptied in the middle of the burst. Time to head for home, he thought, and hoped no Hound Dog would jump him on the way back to Maryland. All he could do was run away.

  From the squadron's wireless traffic, a lot of the other pilots were in the same boat. "Let's go back," Moss said. "They can reload us, and then we'll hit 'em again." Savage sounds of approval dinned in his earphones.

  Finding Texas, Maryland, wasn't easy, even though the clouds had thinned out up there, too. He knew how things had looked going from north to south. They didn't look the same coming back from south to north. They never did. Anyone who drove a motorcar knew that. The problem was ten times worse in an airplane.

  He finally spotted the town by the nearby ponds that had once been mine shafts. If they were there, then the airstrip was . . . there. He bumped to a landing. It wasn't pretty, but he'd take it.

  Groundcrew men swarmed over the fighters. He got refueled. Armorers took out the empty ammunition belts and loaded in full ones. An officer came out of the headquarters tent with a map. He pointed a few miles west of where Moss and his squadron had been strafing. Moss called his pilots to gather around so they got a look at the map, too. After a little while, everybody nodded. Moss thought he knew how to get there.

  As
it happened, the squadron never did. They'd come into U.S.-held West Virginia and were heading for Confederate Virginia when they ran into a squadron of Hound Dogs flying north to shoot up the men in green-gray who wanted to invade their country. Fliers from each side spotted the other at about the same time. Both sides started shooting at about the same time, too.

  Nobody'd planned the fight. Nobody'd expected it. Nobody backed away from it, either. It was a wild mêlée. Both Wrights and Hound Dogs were already on the deck; they had no altitude to give up. They just darted and swooped and fired. Gunners down below–Moss was damned if he knew whose gunners–seemed to blaze away impartially at both sides.

  Moss thought he hit a Hound Dog, but the Confederate fighter kept flying. A Wright smashed into the ground. A fireball blossomed where it went down. He swore. That was one of his men surely dead; nobody could hope to bail out this low. A Hound Dog limped off toward the south trailing smoke. Moss hoped it crashed, too.

  After several more airplanes went down or had to pull out of the fight, both sides broke off, as if licking their wounds. Moss and his squadron didn't shoot up the Confederates in northern Virginia. The Hound Dogs didn't shoot up U.S. soldiers in eastern West Virginia (they would have called it occupied northern Virginia). They'd battled one another to a standstill. At the moment, as far as he was concerned, that would have to do.

  ****

  ARMSTRONG GRIMES sat cross-legged in front of a campfire on the outskirts of Provo, Utah. He leaned close to the flames. The night was chilly, and he had his tunic off. He was sewing a second stripe onto his left sleeve, and not having an easy time of it. "My aunt ought to be doing this, goddammit," he grumbled.

  Across the fire from him, Rex Stowe was sewing a third stripe onto his sleeve. He raised an eyebrow. "Your aunt?"

  "Yeah." Armstrong nodded. "She's only two years older than me. My granny got married again right when the Great War ended, and she had a kid just a little before my ma did. Clara would be good at this– and it would piss her off, too. We fight like cats and dogs."

  "All right." Stowe laughed and shrugged. "Whatever makes you happy."

  "What'd make me happy is getting the hell out of here," Armstrong said. "You fix that up for me, Corp– uh, Sarge?"

  Stowe laughed again. "In your dreams. And now all the fresh young dumb ones can call you Corporal. Looks to me like we've got two ways to leave Utah any time soon. We can get wounded– or we can get killed."

  It looked like that to Armstrong, too. He'd hoped Stowe would tell him something different. Not too far away, a machine gun started hammering. Armstrong and Stowe both paused in their sewing. Tunics or no tunics, they were ready to grab their rifles and do whatever they had to do to keep breathing. Then the gunfire stopped. The two noncoms looked at each other. "Is that good or bad?" Armstrong asked.

  "Dunno," Stowe answered. "If they just overran one of our machine-gun nests, it's pretty bad, though." He pointed to a couple of privates. "Ustinov! Trotter! Go see what the hell's going on with that gun. Try not to get killed while you're doing it, in case the Mormons have got the position."

  "Right, Sarge." The two men slipped away. Grimes didn't think a machine gun could fall with so little fuss, but the Mormons had already come up with too many surprises to leave him sure of anything.

  He waited. If Ustinov and Trotter didn't come back pretty soon, the Army was going to need a lot more than two guys to set things right. Stowe must have thought the same thing. He put his tunic back on even though his new stripes were only half attached. So did Armstrong.

  No gun suddenly turned the wrong way started spitting bullets. A sentry not far from the fire called a challenge. Armstrong heard a low-voiced answer. He couldn't make out what it was. That was good, because one of the Mormons' little games was to steal countersigns and use them to sneak infiltrators in among the U.S. soldiers. If Armstrong couldn't hear the countersign, odds were the enemy couldn't, either.

  He shook his head at that. Up till a few weeks before, the Mormons hadn't been the enemy. They'd been his fellow citizens. But they didn't want to stay in the USA, any more than the Confederates had. The Confederates had made secession stick. They were genuine, sure-as-hell foreigners these days. The Mormons wanted to be, but the United States weren't about to let them go.

  Ustinov and Trotter came back in. Trotter said, "Gun's still ours, Sergeant. He squeezed off a burst on account of he thought he saw something moving out in front of him."

  "Thanks," Stowe said. "You guys did good. Sit your butts down and take it easy for a couple minutes."

  Ustinov laughed. He was a big bear of a man; the noise reminded Armstrong of a rockslide rumbling down the side of a valley. "You take it easy around here, you start talking out of a new mouth," he said, and ran a finger across his throat in case anybody had trouble figuring out what he meant.

  He wasn't wrong, either. The Mormons were playing for keeps. They'd tried rising up once before. The USA had pushed their faces into the dirt and sat on them for twenty years afterwards. They had to know that whatever happened to them if they lost again would be even worse. And they had to know the odds were all against their winning. They'd risen again anyhow. That spoke of either amazing stupidity or undying hatred–maybe both.

  Hardly any Mormons surrendered. Not many U.S. soldiers were in much of a mood to take prisoners even when they got the chance. Every now and again, the Mormons took some. Oddly, Armstrong had never heard that they mistreated them. On the contrary–they stuck to the Geneva Convention straight down the line.

  When he mentioned that, Sergeant Stowe spat into the campfire. "So what? Bunch of holier-than-thou sons of bitches," he said. Heads bobbed up and down. Armstrong didn't argue. How could he? If the Mormons hadn't been a pack of fanatics, would they have rebelled against all the might the United States could throw at them?

  Later that night, U.S. bombers paid a call on Provo. They weren't the most modern models. Those went up against the Confederates–Armstrong hoped the attack in Virginia was going well. But the Mormons didn't have any night fighters, and they didn't have much in the way of antiaircraft guns. Second-line airplanes were plenty good enough for knocking their towns flat.

  After the explosions to the north and west had stopped, a couple of Mormon two-deckers buzzed over the U.S. lines and dropped small–probably homemade–bombs on them. "Goddamn flying sewing machines," Armstrong grumbled, jolted out of a sound sleep by the racket.

  Antiaircraft guns and machine guns turned the sky into a fireworks display with tracers. As far as Armstrong could tell, they didn't hit anything. If they fired off a lot of ammo, people would think they were doing their job. The racket killed whatever chance he'd had of going back to sleep.

  When morning came, the Mormons started firing the mortars they used in place of conventional artillery. Like what passed for their air force, the mortars weren't as good as the real thing. Also like the makeshift bombers, the ersatz artillery was a lot better than nothing. And cries of, "Gas!" made Armstrong snarl curses as he put on his mask.

  He wasn't the only one. "How are we supposed to fight in these goddamn things?" Trotter demanded.

  Sergeant Stowe took care of that: "Can't very well fight if you suck in a gulp of mustard gas, either." He already had his mask on. From behind it, his voice sounded as if it came from the other side of the grave, but he wore the mask to make sure it didn't.

  U.S. artillery wasted little time in answering. Some of the shells the U.S. guns flung gurgled as they flew: they were gas rounds, too. In a way, that pleased Armstrong; he wanted the Mormons to catch hell. In another way, though, it mattered very little, because the U.S. bombardment didn't do much to stop the hell he was catching.

  Somebody not nearly far enough away started screaming like a damned soul. That was a man badly wounded, not somebody who'd been gassed. The ordinary Mormon mortar rounds produced a hail of nasty fragments and splinters when they burst. Some poor bastard had stopped at least one.

  Mortar
bombs were still falling, too. Some of them made the ground shake when they hit. Armstrong didn't know much about earthquakes, not when he'd grown up in Washington, D.C. He did know he wanted terra to stay firma under him.

  The wounded man kept screaming. Armstrong swore under his breath. Someone had to go get the sorry son of a bitch and bring him in. Someone, at the moment, looked remarkably like him. He was no hero. All he wanted to do was get out of this war with a whole skin. But if that were him screaming, he would also have wanted his buddies to bring him in if they could.

  Scrambling out of his hole was one of the hardest things he'd ever made himself do, and he'd been in combat since the Confederates bombed Camp Custer. Once in the open, he flattened out like a toad after a steamroller ran over it. His belly never left the ground as he crawled ahead and sideways. Sharp rocks poked him in the stomach. With bullets and sharper fragments snarling by much too close overhead, the pebbles were the least of his worries.

  He found the wounded man. It was Ustinov. His left arm ended just above the wrist. He was holding on to the stump with his right hand, slowing the bleeding. "Oh, shit," Armstrong said softly. He bent and pulled the lace out of one of Ustinov's shoes. "Hang on, pal. I'll fix you a tourniquet." Ustinov nodded. He didn't stop screaming.

  Armstrong tied the tourniquet as tight as he could. Maybe that cost Ustinov some extra agony. Maybe he was already feeling as much as one man could. The noise he made never changed. Armstrong fumbled at his belt till he found the morphine syringe every soldier carried. Awkwardly, he stuck the wounded man and pushed the plunger home.

  He hoped for some immediate change, but didn't see one. Shrugging, he said, "We've got to get you out of here. I'll help you out of the hole. Then you climb on my back, and I'll do the best I can." He was a good-sized man himself, but Ustinov was bigger.

  Getting Ustinov out of the foxhole was a bitch. Again, Armstrong wasn't sure whether he hurt the other man worse by shoving him up. He was afraid he did. But it had to be done. When Ustinov got on top of him, he felt as if he'd been tackled. He crawled on anyhow. He was about halfway back to his own foxhole when Ustinov sighed and stopped screaming. The morphine must have taken hold at last.