Drive to the East

by Harry Turtledove

  Still, he was hitting them in the flank when all their attention was focused ahead of them. “Front!” he called to his gunner.

  “Identified!” Frenchy Bergeron answered, a quarter of a heartbeat slower than he should have. Maybe Morrell was overcritical; maybe Michael Pound had spoiled him for other gunners. Morrell yelled to the driver. The barrel stopped. The gun slewed a few degrees to the left. It roared.

  “That’s a hit!” Morrell whooped with glee as the C.S. barrel caught fire. A pair of crewmen got out and ran for the closest trees. They didn’t make it. Morrell picked another target. “Front!—the one next to the upside-down auto.”

  “Identified!” Bergeron sang out. The turret traversed again. The cannon shouted. The Confederate barrel went up in flames. Morrell whooped again.

  For two or three minutes, the U.S. machines had it all their own way. Their enemies didn’t seem to realize where the devastating fire was coming from. Then the Confederates rallied. Most of their barrels were new models, with the well-sloped armor and the big gun. When they turned toward the U.S. barrels on their flank, they suddenly became much harder to knock out. And those three-inch guns began taking a toll on the barrels Morrell led.

  But in confronting Morrell’s barrels, the Confederates left themselves vulnerable to the U.S. defenders holed up in Cambridge. The force in the town didn’t seem to have many barrels, but did have plenty of antibarrel cannons. Those began picking off the C.S. barrels that turned to expose their thinner side armor to them.

  A clear day had disadvantages as well as advantages. Confederate Asskickers screamed down out of the sky to bomb the antibarrel cannons. The dive bombers put several guns out of action in the space of a few minutes. Asskickers were hideously vulnerable to U.S. fighters, but no U.S. fighters seemed to be in the neighborhood. They were probably out chasing Pittsburgh-bound transports.

  Morrell swore under this breath, and then over it. No matter how you tried, the pieces didn’t all fit together the way you wanted them to. If everything worked the way you hoped it would, you’d win the war in a couple of weeks, and you’d hardly take any casualties. If . . .

  Fortunately, the Fuckup Fairy visited both sides. Considering all the Confederates trapped in the Pittsburgh pocket, she’d sprinkled more of her magic dust on Jake Featherston lately than she had on the U.S. General Staff. And if that wasn’t a miracle of rare device, Morrell had never seen one.

  He ducked down into the turret to use his fancy wireless set. “Close with them!” he called to his crews. “Front to front, they can hurt us from farther away than we can hurt them. If we get in close, it evens out.”

  What had Horatio Nelson said? No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy, that was it. Nelson had a better turn of phrase than Irving Morrell. They both thought the same way, though.

  Engine growling, Morrell’s barrel raced forward. His driver had got the order along with the others. A couple of bullets clanked off the machine’s steel hull. Bullets didn’t matter. Confederate foot soldiers could shoot at the barrel till the cows came home. A three-inch armor-piercing round, unfortunately, was another story.

  It was a wild melee, there on the snow-covered fields. The two barrel forces got within point-blank range of each other. Whoever shot first won. U.S. barrel turrets had hydraulic traverse. The Confederates had to crank theirs around by hand. It gave the green-gray barrels a small edge on the ones painted butternut.

  And the antibarrel fire from Cambridge didn’t stop. After as wild a half hour as Morrell had known, the Confederates sullenly drew back. They’d lost fifteen or twenty barrels, and taken out about half as many U.S. machines. “We smashed ’em, sir!” Bergeron exclaimed.

  “Maybe,” Morrell said. “I hope so. But maybe they’re just waiting till reinforcements come forward. If they are, we’ve got some problems.” He smiled. That was putting it mildly. He didn’t know where he would find reinforcements. The Confederates had stretched him about as thin as they’d stretched themselves. If what he had here and what was in Cambridge couldn’t stop Featherston’s men, they might link up with their trapped comrades after all.

  That wouldn’t be good. Not even slightly.

  He drew back to the outskirts of the town. He had more cover for his remaining barrels there. The Confederates had got themselves mired in a big house-to-house fight in Pittsburgh. If they tried coming this way again, he aimed to give them a smaller one in Cambridge.

  Time crawled by. The Confederates didn’t return to the attack. Maybe they couldn’t scrape together any more reinforcements after all. Morrell hoped not. They’d already put in a stronger attack from the west than he’d expected. They were bastards—no doubt about that. But they were formidable bastards—no doubt about that, either.

  After the Confederates left him alone for a couple of hours, he sent foot soldiers down the west-facing slope to reoccupy the open ground where his force and theirs had clashed. When another hour went by with everything still quiet, he sent three or four barrels down there, too. They took up positions behind the burnt-out hulks of dead machines.

  “Not like those assholes to stay quiet so long,” Bergeron remarked.

  “No, not usually,” Morrell said. “I hope I know why they’re doing it, but I’m not sure yet.” The longer the Confederates held off, the higher his hopes rose.

  The officer in charge of the infantry down below showed initiative. He ordered scouts west to see what the enemy was up to. When he got on the wireless to Morrell, he sounded as if he could hardly believe what the men told him. “Sir, they’re pulling back,” he said. “Looks like almost all of ’em are heading west as fast as they can go.”

  “Are they?” Morrell breathed. That was as far as his hopes had gone, and maybe a couple of furlongs further.

  “Yes, sir,” the infantry officer said. “I’ve got four independent reports, and they all tell me the same thing. They’re leaving a screen behind to slow us down if we come after them, but most of their force is going like nobody’s business.”

  “Thank you, Major. Thank you very much,” Morrell said. “Out.” After he broke the connection, he murmured, “Son of a bitch—it worked.”

  “Sir?” Bergeron asked.

  “Rosebud.” Morrell could talk about the code name now. “We took what we could piece together in northern Indiana and the northwestern corner of Ohio and threw it east against the Confederates from there. And they don’t have anything around those parts that can stop it. They stripped themselves naked to mount this push toward Pittsburgh. The only prayer they’ve got of holding the corridor up to Lake Erie is breaking off the attack and using their men from this force to defend instead.”

  “But if they do that, their guys inside Pittsburgh are screwed.” The gunner saw the key point in a hurry.

  “They sure are,” Morrell said. This still wasn’t the two big simultaneous attacks planners on both sides dreamt of. It was about one and a half. It might be enough. Maybe the Confederates’ position in Ohio would unravel even if they did go over to the defensive. Morrell aimed to make it unravel if he could. He got on the all-hands wireless circuit. “The enemy is retreating. We’re going after him.”

  J efferson Pinkard stood outside the house in Snyder, Texas, where his wife and two stepsons lived. He kept staring northwest, toward Lubbock and toward the damnyankees not far outside the town. He couldn’t hear the artillery—it was too far away. But it was close enough to let him imagine he could when he was feeling gloomy. He felt plenty gloomy this morning.

  Edith came out with him in spite of the raw wind blowing down from the north. He’d never seen such a place for wind as the West Texas prairie. No matter what direction it came from, it had plenty of room to get a good running start. “What’s the matter?” she asked him.

  “Wondering what the devil we’re gonna do if Lubbock falls,” he answered. “If Lubbock falls, there’s not a . . . heck of a lot between the Yankees and here. Just miles.” He didn’t wo
rry that much about Snyder itself. The locals could always evacuate to the east. But Camp Determination . . . Camp Determination was a different story.

  “They can’t expect you to take all the niggers out of that place.” Edith knew he worried about the camp, not the town.

  “No, don’t reckon they can.” Jeff let it go at that. But the bathhouses that weren’t bathhouses, the trucks with the sealed passenger compartments, the mass graves—all those would be worth millions to damnyankee propaganda. Richmond wouldn’t want such secrets getting out. How could he do anything to stop that, though?

  You could drive the trucks away. You could, he supposed, blow up the bathhouses. That would make Camp Determination look like an ordinary concentration camp . . . till the damnyankees found the mass graves. How many tens, how many hundreds, of thousands of corpses lay in them? Pinkard didn’t know, though he could have figured it out from camp records.

  He did know the graves were too big to hide. Even if he bulldozed the ground flat, the bodies and bones remained below. And somebody was bound to blab. Somebody always blabbed. Some secrets you couldn’t keep, and that was one of them.

  “Records,” he said to himself.

  “Records?” Edith said. “The kind you listen to? The kind you dance to?”

  Jeff didn’t answer. Those weren’t the records he had in mind. Just like any other big operation, the camp generated lots of paperwork. If the U.S. Army got close, that paperwork would have to disappear, too. Right this minute, he didn’t know where all of it was. He did know it wasn’t all in the same place, and he couldn’t get rid of all of it in a hurry. And he realized he would have to fix that as soon as he could.

  The things you never reckon you’ll have to worry about, he thought. But that was foolish. He’d fought not too far from here a generation before. The Yankees had pushed east from New Mexico then. Why shouldn’t they be able to do it again?

  Because we were going to lick ’em this time. Because Jake Featherston promised we’d lick ’em this time. Jeff believed what Jake Featherston said. He’d believed him ever since first hearing him in Birmingham not long after the end of the last war. He didn’t want to think—he hardly dared think—the President of the CSA might be wrong.

  He muttered again, this time without words. Whether he wanted to or not, he had to be ready to do what he could in case the Confederates didn’t come out so well in this particular part of the war. (Putting it like that meant he didn’t have to dwell on how things were going across the length and breadth of the North American continent.)

  When Edith looked northwest, she had other things on her mind. “Jeff . . .” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Will . . . Will the boys be all right? The war’s not as far away as I wish it was.”

  “Things aren’t bad now. I don’t reckon they’ll turn bad real quick. If the damnyankees get into Lubbock, or if they get past Lubbock, maybe you and the boys ought to go east for a bit.”

  His wife nodded. “I’ve got some stuff packed up in case we have to leave in a hurry.”

  “Good. That’s good, babe,” Jeff said. “Should be easy enough to get away. Nothing around here is what you’d call a great big target.”

  “What about the camp?” Edith asked.

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “Don’t you worry none about that. What’s in the camp? Niggers. Who gives a . . . darn about niggers?” To anyone else, he would have said, Who gives a rat’s ass? or something like that. But he tried to watch his language around Edith. He answered his own question: “Nobody does, not on either side of the border.”

  She nodded again, reassured. “Well, you’re right about that, Lord knows. They’re nothing but our misfortune.”

  Jeff kissed her. “That’s just what they are, all right.” Not even Saul Goldman and the other fancy-pants slogan-makers for the Freedom Party had ever put it any better. He went on, “They’re not going to be such a big misfortune after a while, though; that’s for sure.”

  He didn’t talk in any detail about what Camp Determination did, not even to Edith, not even if she’d been married to a guard at Camp Dependable in Louisiana before she said her I do’s with him. Nobody who didn’t wear the uniform needed to know the details. He felt a certain lonely pride in the knowledge of what he did to serve the Confederate States. He was part of the war, just as much as if he commanded a division of troops.

  Edith didn’t ask for details, either. She just said, “All right,” and let it go at that.

  When Jeff got back to Camp Determination, he summoned the camp’s chief engineer, a dour assault band leader—the Party equivalent of a major—named Lyle Schoonover, and told him what he needed. One of the reasons Schoonover was dour, and that he held a Party rank and not one in the regular Army, was that he’d lost his right leg below the knee. He heard Pinkard out, nodded, and said, “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Not just the bathhouses, mind,” Jeff said. “Set something up where we can get rid of the records in a hurry, too.”

  “I said I’d take care of it.” Schoonover sounded impatient. “I meant all of it.”

  “You meant all of it . . .” Jefferson Pinkard tapped the three wreathed stars on the left side of his collar.

  The engineer had only one star on each side of his collar, and no wreath. He gave Jeff a dirty look, but said what he had to say: “Sir.”

  “That’s more like it,” Jeff said. “I’m in charge here, dammit, for better and for worse. Now that things don’t look so good, we’ve got to ride it out the best way we know how.”

  Schoonover’s expression changed. There was respect on his narrow features now—reluctant respect, maybe, but respect all the same. Jeff smiled, down inside where it didn’t show. Educated people often started out looking down their noses at him. He hadn’t finished high school. Before he wound up running prison camps, he was a steelworker and a soldier of fortune. But he had a good eye for what needed doing. He’d always had it, and it let him get and stay ahead of a lot of people who thought they were more clever than he was.

  “You’re not running from trouble, anyway—sir,” Schoonover said.

  “Trouble’s like a dog. You run from it, it’ll chase you and bite you in the ass,” Pinkard said. A startled grunt of laughter escaped Schoonover. Jeff went on, “You go at it, though, sometimes you can make it run instead.”

  “Wish we could make the damnyankees run,” the assault band leader said.

  “That ain’t the point.” Educated or not, Jeff knew enough to say isn’t. He used ain’t with malice aforethought. “The damnyankees are the Army’s trouble. Them finding out about what all we’re doin’ here—that’s our trouble. That’s what we can take care of on our own.”

  “Some of it, anyhow,” Schoonover said. “Those graves won’t disappear all by themselves.”

  “Well, you’re right. I already figured that out myself, too,” Jeff said. “But since we can’t do anything about ’em, no point to flabbling about ’em, either. We got to take care of what we can take care of, that’s all.”

  Lyle Schoonover got to his feet. He moved well, as long as he didn’t have to get anywhere in a tearing hurry. “Fair enough, sir. That’s a sensible attitude.” His salute didn’t seem too grudging. He left Pinkard’s office. If you didn’t know he’d been maimed in the Great War, his gait wouldn’t give it away.

  He hadn’t been gone more than ten minutes before the telephone on Jeff’s desk jangled. Jeff picked it up. “Pinkard here.” He wondered what had gone wrong now. Telephone calls while he was at work were rarely good news.

  “Hello, Pinkard. This is Ferd Koenig.”

  “What can I do for you, sir?” Jeff tried to stay cool. Calls from the Attorney General were never good news.

  “You’ve got the damnyankees a little closer to you than we thought you might,” Koenig said.

  “Yes, sir. That’s a fact.” Jeff began to suspect he knew why Koenig was calling. “We’re doing what we can to get ready, just
in case.”

  “Are you?” the Attorney General said. “Like what?”

  With the conversation with the camp engineer fresh in his mind, Pinkard went into detail—maybe more detail than Ferdinand Koenig wanted to hear. He finished, “Nothin’ we can do about the graves, sir. Except for them, though, we can have this place looking like an ordinary concentration camp mighty quick.”

  “All right,” Koenig said when he got done. The Attorney General sounded more that a little stunned. Yes, Jeff had told him more than he wanted to know. Serves you right, Jeff thought. After a moment to gather himself, Koenig continued, “Sounds like you’ve done everything you could.”

  “You come up with anything else, sir, you just tell me, and I’ll take care of it,” Pinkard promised. He didn’t believe Koenig could. If he’d thought the man back in Richmond would have orders for him, he would have kept his mouth shut.

  “I’ll do that.” By the Attorney General’s tone, he didn’t want to talk to anybody from Camp Determination for quite a while. That suited Jeff fine; he didn’t want to talk to Ferd Koenig, either. Koenig added, “I’ll tell the President how thorough you’ve been out there. He’ll be glad to have the good news.”

  “Thank you kindly, sir.” Jeff might not be an educated man, but he could read between the lines. He heard what Koenig didn’t say: that Jake Featherston hadn’t had much good news lately. “Things aren’t going so good up in Yankeeland, are they?”

  “They could be better.” By the Attorney General’s heavy sigh, they could be a lot better. Koenig went on, “But with any luck at all, the Army will do its job up there by Lubbock, and everything you’re doing will be like putting a storm cellar into a house—it’ll be nice to have, but you won’t really need it.”