Drive to the East
Page 18
He said something filthy. However much he’d longed for combat posts, he’d spent much of his career either as Custer’s adjutant or on occupation duty in Utah—his main job there, in fact, had been to keep that from turning into a combat post, and he’d done it. Now he had what he’d always wanted. He had it, and he hadn’t covered himself with glory in it. Maybe he wasn’t cut out to be a hero. Or maybe he should have been more careful about what he wished for, lest he get it.
****
Jake Featherston peered down from Marye’s Heights over the town of Fredericksburg toward the Rappahannock and the damnyankees on the other side. He turned to Nathan Bedford Forrest III, who stood by his side. “I was right about here when the last war ended,” the President of the CSA said.
“Yes, sir,” replied the chief of the Confederate General Staff, who’d been too young to fight in the Great War.
“Well, I was, goddammit,” Featherston said. “When the order to cease fire came, I waited till the very last minute. Then I took the breech block out of my piece and chucked it in that creek over yonder.” He pointed. “I was damned if the United States were gonna get anything they could use from me.”
“Yes, sir,” Forrest repeated, adding, “That sounds like you.”
“Good. It ought to,” Jake said, more than a little smugly. “Maybe what pissed me off most about having to quit, though, was that I could have killed every damnyankee in the world from right here, if the bastards kept coming at me and my ammo held out.”
“It’s a good position,” Forrest allowed. “Not as good as it would have been in the Great War—artillery’s better now than it was then, and barrels and bombers are a hell of a lot better. But it’s still mighty good.”
“I know it is,” Jake said. “That’s how come I was more than half disappointed we didn’t let the enemy get into Fredericksburg and then try to storm these heights. We’d have been shooting ’em till they got sick of trying.”
Nathan Bedford Forrest III frowned. “Conventional wisdom says you don’t want to let them have a bridgehead if you can help it. You can get around conventional wisdom a lot of the time, but not always. That foothold they’ve got south of the Rapidan in the Wilderness still worries me.”
One of the reasons Forrest headed the General Staff was that he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, even to the President of the Confederate States. Jake asked, “Are you telling me they might break through if they cross the river here? We couldn’t hold ’em and drive ’em back?”
Forrest scratched his mustache with his right thumb. “Odds are we could, but it’s not a sure thing. Remember, sir, they kept fighting after we thought they wouldn’t.”
After you thought they wouldn’t, he meant. Featherston couldn’t even swear at him, not when he wasn’t wrong. Because Forrest spoke his mind, Jake handled him more carefully than he would have dealt with some Party yes-man. “What’s your judgment, then, General? If you reckon the risk is too high, we won’t take it. But if you don’t, this looks like a dandy place to bleed the damnyankees white.”
“If everything goes well, sir, we ought to be able to do that,” Forrest said at last. “If things go wrong, though . . . If things go wrong, we’ve given ourselves a lot of trouble that we didn’t have to. And remember, Mr. President—we’ll need more men here to bleed the Yankees than we would if we just kept ’em on the north bank of the Rappahannock. Those are men we wouldn’t be able to use for other operations. The one thing the Yankees always have is more men than we do. So which is more important to you?”
Featherston smiled. He almost laughed out loud. He’d put the burden on Forrest’s shoulders, and the chief of the General Staff had put it right back on his. And Forrest’s question was a serious one. Jake hated nothing worse than being deflected from any purpose of his—indeed, he’d made a hallmark of being impossible to deflect. Here, though, Nathan Bedford Forrest III was speaking plain good sense, much too plain to ignore. “All right, dammit,” Jake said grudgingly. “Hold ’em on the other side of the Rappahannock if you can.”
He didn’t fail to note how relieved Forrest looked. “We’ll do that, sir, or we’ll do our best to do it, anyhow,” the general said. “If they try to force another crossing, they may get over whether we want them to or not. In that case, we’ll do our best to give you the killing ground you have in mind.”
He’s trying to let me down easy. Again, Jake almost laughed. He said, “All right, that’s how we’ll do it, then. Make your orders out that way. And make sure the other thing, Coal-scuttle, is going forward the way it’s supposed to. I want to make the United States feel the pinch, goddammit.”
“Things are moving into place on that one, Mr. President,” Forrest said. “Keeping a smaller presence here will help that, too. I don’t think you’d find anyone who’d disagree there.”
“All right. All right. You made your point.” No, Jake didn’t like being balked. It didn’t happen very often, not when he was both President of the Confederate States and head of the Freedom Party. He’d thought he knew just how Al Smith’s mind worked, but then the son of a bitch decided to go on with the war. And now this . . .
“Mr. President, we simply aren’t big enough to do two big things at once,” Forrest said. “That’s a nuisance, but it’s the truth. If we try to pretend we are, we’ll end up in trouble.”
“If you try to teach your grandma how to suck eggs, you’ll end up in trouble,” Jake said. Nathan Bedford Forrest III chuckled, though Jake hadn’t been joking. The President went on, “Let’s get back to Richmond, then.” He all but spat out the words. He’d wanted to take off his shirt and serve a gun, the way he had in the Great War. Things were simple then. With the enemy right in front of you, you went ahead and blew him up. You didn’t need to worry about anything else.
These days, enemies were everywhere: not just the damnyankees, not just the niggers who tormented the CSA, but fools and bunglers who wouldn’t go along and traitors who wanted to see him fail just because that would mean they were right and he was wrong. I’ll settle them all—every last one of them, Jake thought. By the time I’m through, this country will look the way it’s supposed to, the way I want it to.
As usual, he went back to Richmond in an ambulance. If U.S. airplanes appeared overhead, the Red Crosses on the vehicle ought to keep the Yankees from shooting it up. Also as usual, he had an ordinary—although armored—motorcar take him the last leg of the journey so no Yankee reconnaissance aircraft or spies on the ground would spot an ambulance going into the Gray House.
Bomb craters turned the grounds around the Presidential residence into a lunar landscape. And repairmen swarmed over the building itself. “Jesus!” Jake exclaimed. “How come nobody told me it got hit again?”
“Probably didn’t want to get you all upset, sir,” his driver answered.
Probably didn’t want to make you blow a gasket, that meant. The driver was probably right, too. Jake had succeeded in making people afraid of him. Men who would tell him what they thought, men like Nathan Bedford Forrest III and Clarence Potter, were rare. The rest said what they thought he wanted to hear—either that or they hunkered down and didn’t tell him anything. That last looked to be what had happened here.
“Is Lulu all right?” he demanded when he got inside. If his secretary wasn’t and they’d kept that from him, they’d be sorry, and pretty damn quick, too.
But the flunky he’d asked nodded. “She sure is, Mr. President. Just about everybody got down to the shelter before the bombs started falling.”
“Well, that’s good, anyway,” Featherston said. The bomb shelter below the Gray House was as elaborate as the one under the Confederate War Department. No doubt the shelter under Powel House in Philadelphia was just as fancy, but it hadn’t done Al Smith one damn bit of good. Jake preferred not to dwell on that.
When he got to his office, Lulu greeted him with a nod. “Hello, Mr. President,” she said, as calmly as if nothing had happened while he was away.
Her sallow cheeks turned pink. “You worry about running the country, sir,” she said. “You don’t need to worry about me.” In such things, she could give him orders, or thought she could.
“I’ll worry about whatever I . . . darn well want to,” he said. He swore like the old soldier he was around everyone else, but tried not to around her. Her disapproving sniffs were too much for him to take. He went on, “Can I still work at my desk, or did it get blown to, uh, smithereens?”
“I’m afraid it did, sir,” Lulu answered. “But everything down below came through just fine.”
Jake made a discontented noise, down deep in his throat. He didn’t want to run the war from down in the bomb shelter, even if its air conditioning made it a comfortable place in the hot weather that lay ahead. It felt like being cooped up inside a submarine. Actually, Jake had never been inside a sub, so he couldn’t prove that, but it felt like what he thought being cooped up in one would feel like. And what he wanted to do wasn’t always the same as what he needed to do. The shelter bristled with telephone and wireless links. He could run the war from it. If he didn’t like it—well, too bad. This was war, and people all over the continent were putting up with things they didn’t like.
A young man in a State Department uniform came up to him, waited to be noticed, and then said, “Sir, may I speak to you for a moment?”
“You’re doing it,” Jake told him.
“Er—yes.” For some reason, that flustered the State Department fellow. He needed a moment to gather himself. Then he said, “Sir, we’ve heard from the Emperor of Mexico. His Majesty will provide the three divisions you requested.”
“Good. That’s good.” Featherston tried to make his smile benign instead of tigerish. Maximilian hadn’t wanted to cough up the men. Jake had been blunt about what would happen to his miserable gimcrack country—and to him—if he didn’t. Evidently the message had got through. The President went on, “We’ve saved the greasers’ bacon a few times. Only fitting and proper they pay us back.”
“Yes, sir,” the State Department man said. He looked as if he would have been more comfortable in striped trousers and cutaway coat. Too damn bad for him.
“Anything else, sonny?” Jake asked. The puppy shook his head. Featherston jerked a thumb toward the front door, which hadn’t been damaged. “All right, then. Get lost.”
The kid from the State Department disappeared. Jake stared after him. Either they really were making them younger than they had once upon a time or he himself was starting to get some serious mileage on him. He suspected the problem did not lie with the State Department.
Whether he was getting old or not, he still had a war to run. He could do that better than anybody else in the CSA. Better than anybody else in the USA, too, by God, he thought. And those three Mexican divisions would help, especially since, now that Maximilian had agreed once, he’d have a harder time saying no if Jake asked again. And Jake intended to do just that.
****
Dr. Leonard O’Doull wondered what was going on when he and his aid station got pulled out of their position across the Rapidan from the Wilderness and shifted east. Now he knew: they’d left the frying pan and gone straight into the fire.
Most of the frying was getting done on the other side of the Rappahannock, in and just beyond Fredericksburg. The U.S. Army had battered out a foothold there, as it had in the Wilderness. It was trying to feed in enough men and machines to make the foothold mean something. Whether it could was very much up in the air.
Whether the kid on the table in front of O’Doull would make it was also up in the air. A piece of shrapnel had torn the hell out of his chest. He was bleeding faster than O’Doull could patch him. “Keep pouring in the plasma!” O’Doull barked to Granville McDougald. “Gotta keep his blood pressure up.”
“Pretty soon there won’t be any blood in the pressure,” McDougald said. That exaggerated, but not by much. An awful lot of blood had come out, and an awful lot of plasma had gone in. “Shit!” McDougald exclaimed. “We haven’t got any pressure now!”
“Yeah.” O’Doull had no trouble figuring out why, either—the kid’s heart had stopped. He grabbed it and started cardiac massage. Once in a blue moon, that worked. Most of the time, a heart that stopped would never start again. This was one of those times. After a few minutes, he let it go and shook his head. “We’ve lost him.”
McDougald nodded. “Afraid you’re right. That was a nasty wound. We did everything we could.” He beckoned to a corpsman. “Get him off the table, Eddie. He’s Graves Registrations’ business now.”
“Right, Granny,” Eddie said. “One more Deeply Regrets telegram. One more time when everybody hopes the Western Union delivery boy stops next door.”
The corpse was hardly out of the tent before a groaning sergeant with a shattered knee came in on a stretcher. “Granny, you do this one and I’ll pass gas,” O’Doull said. “You’re neater at orthopedic stuff than I am.”
“I’ve had more practice, Doc, that’s all.” But McDougald sounded pleased. He wasn’t an M.D. despite his vast experience; to have a real doctor defer to him had to make him feel good.
“Gas!” the sergeant said when O’Doull pressed the ether cone down over his nose and mouth. O’Doull had seen that before. He and Eddie kept the wounded man from yanking off the cone till the anesthetic took hold.
Eddie shook his head as the sergeant’s hands finally went limp. “That’s always so much fun,” he said.
“Yeah,” O’Doull agreed. “How’s he look, Granny?”
“It’s a mess in there. Kneecap’s smashed, medial collateral’s cut,” McDougald answered. “Can you get him down a little deeper? I want those leg muscles as relaxed as I can get ’em.”
“Will do.” O’Doull opened the valve on the ether cylinder a little more.
After a minute or so, McDougald gave him a thumbs-up. The medic worked quickly and skillfully, repairing what he could and removing what he couldn’t repair. When he was through, he said, “He’ll never run the mile, but I think he’ll walk . . . pretty well.”
“Looked that way to me, too,” O’Doull said. “That medial collateral was nicely done. I don’t think I could have got it together anywhere near as neat as you did.”
“Thanks, Doc.” McDougald’s gauze mask hid most of his smile, but his eyes glowed. “Had to try it. A knee’s not a knee without a working medial collateral. It’s not a repair that would do for a halfback, but for just getting around it ought to be strong enough.”
“They play football in Quebec, too. Well, sort of football: they’ve got twelve men on a side, and the end zones are big as all outdoors. But it’s pretty much the same game. Guys get hurt the same way, that’s for sure,” O’Doull said. “I’ve had to patch up a couple of wrecked knees. I told the men I’d come after ’em with a sledgehammer if I ever caught ’em playing again.”
“Did they listen to you?” McDougald asked, amused interest in his voice.
“Are you serious? Quebecois are the stubbornest people on the face of the earth.” Leonard O’Doull knew he sounded disgusted. “Repairing a knee once isn’t easy. Repairing it twice is damn near impossible.” He flexed his none too impressive biceps. “I’m getting pretty good with a sledgehammer, though.”
“I believe that.” McDougald and Eddie eased the wounded sergeant off the table. He would finish recovering farther back of the line. McDougald caught O’Doull’s eye. “Want to duck out for a butt before the next poor sorry bastard comes in, Doc?”
“I’d love to. Let’s—” But O’Doull stopped in midsentence, because the next poor sorry bastard came in right then.
One look made O’Doull wonder why the hell the corpsmen had bothered hauling him all the way back here. He ha
d a bullet wound—pretty plainly an entry wound—in his forehead, just below the hairline, and what was as obviously an exit wound, horrible with scalp and blood, in back.
Seeing O’Doull’s expression, one of the stretcher-bearers said, “His pulse and breathing are still strong, Doc. Maybe you can do something for him, anyways.”
“Fat chance,” O’Doull muttered. Military hospitals still held men who’d got turned into vegetables by head wounds in the Great War. Some of them had a strong pulse and breathed on their own, too. Some of them would die of old age, but none would ever be a functioning human being again.
Then the wounded man sat up on the stretcher and said, “Have any aspirins, buddy? I’ve got a hell of a headache.”
“Jesus Christ!” Everybody in the aid tent except the fellow with the head wound said the same thing at the same time. One of the bearers and Eddie and O’Doull crossed themselves. O’Doull had seen a lot of things in his time, but never a man with a through-and-through head wound who sat up and made conversation.
Granville McDougald strode forward. He bent low and looked not at the soldier’s injuries but at the scalp between them. Then he shook his head in slow wonder. “I will be damned,” he said. “I’ve heard of wounds like this, but I didn’t think I’d ever run into one myself.”
“What is it, Granny?” O’Doull asked. He wanted to latch on to something, anything, but the idea of a dead man talking.
“Look, Doc. You can see for yourself.” McDougald’s finger traced the injury. “The slug must have gone in, then slid around the top of this guy’s skull under the scalp till it exited back here. It didn’t do a damn thing more. It couldn’t have, or he’d be dead as shoe leather.”
“I’m fine,” the soldier said. “Except for that headache, anyhow. I asked you guys for aspirins once already.”