“I’m not afraid,” Edith said. “God will watch over all of us. I know He’s on our side.” Everybody in every war since the world began was convinced God was on his side. Half the people in every war since the world began ended up being wrong. Jeff didn’t know how to say that, either. He did know Edith wouldn’t listen if he tried, and so he let it go.
Major Jerry Dover didn’t know what the hell had happened to Colonel Travis W.W. Oliphant. Dead? Captured? Deserted? He couldn’t say, and he didn’t much care. With Oliphant out of the picture, keeping central Kentucky supplied landed on his shoulders. He could do it. Without false modesty, he knew he could do it better than his thickheaded superior did.
Oliphant, of course, was a Regular. He went to VMI or one of the other Confederate finishing schools for officers. No doubt he was a good enough subaltern during the Great War. But it wasn’t the Great War any more, and Oliphant had had trouble figuring that out.
“Trucks!” Dover shouted into the telephone. “We need more trucks up here, dammit!” He might have been back at the Huntsman’s Lodge, screaming at a butcher who’d shorted him on prime rib.
“We’re sending up as many as we’ve got,” said the officer on the other end of the line, an officer much more safely ensconced down in Tennessee. “Damnyankees are giving us a lot of trouble, you know.”
That did it. Dover blew up, the same way he would have at a cheating butcher. “Give me your name, damn you! Give me your superior’s name, too, on account of I’m going to tell him just what kind of a clueless git he’s got working for him. You want to know what trouble is, come up where you can hear the guns. Don’t sit in a cushy office miles and miles away from anywhere and tell me how rough you’ve got it. Now give me your name.”
Instead of doing that, the other officer hung up on him. Jerry Dover said several things that made the other logistics officers in the tent outside of Covington, Kentucky, look up in amazement. Then he called back. Someone else down in Tennessee picked up the telephone.
“Who was the last son of a bitch on the line?” Dover demanded.
“Brigadier General Tyler just stepped out,” the other man replied. “Who are you, and who do you think you are?”
“Somebody who’s looking for Tyler’s superior,” said Dover, who didn’t back away from anybody. He had a short-timer’s courage: he was a man with no military career to wreck. They wouldn’t shoot him-the damnyankees were much more likely to do that. They wouldn’t jail him for long. The worst they were likely to do was cashier him, in which case he’d go home and be better off than he was now. “I’m going to get what I need up here in Kentucky, or I’ll know the reason why.”
“I’m Major General Barton Kinder,” the officer said. “Now, one more time-who the dickens are you?”
“I’m Major Jerry Dover, and I want Brigadier General Tyler to pull his trucks out of his asshole and get ’em on the road up here,” Dover said.
A considerable silence followed. Then Kinder said, “A major does not speak that way to a general officer.”
“So sue me,” Dover said. “All I know is, the damnyankees are building up like you wouldn’t believe on the other side of the Ohio. We’re lagging, on account of we can’t get what we need where we need it. And one of the reasons we can’t is that you guys won’t turn loose of your trucks. If we get swamped, you reckon anybody in Richmond’s going to give a rat’s ass that you’ve got all your fucking trucks?”
The silence lasted even longer this time. “I could have your head, Major,” General Kinder said at last. “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t?”
“I can give you two, sir,” Dover said. “You give me the boot, you’ll get somebody up here who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, and that’ll screw up the war effort. There’s one. And two is, ten minutes after that new sucker gets here, he’s gonna be on the horn screaming his head off to you, wondering how come you’re not shipping him the shit he needs.”
“You can’t possibly be a Regular,” Major General Kinder said after yet another pause.
“Not me,” Jerry Dover agreed cheerfully. “I come out of the restaurant business. But I’m mighty goddamn good at what I do. Which counts for more…sir?”
“The restaurant business, eh? No wonder you’re such a foulmouthed son of a bitch,” Kinder said, proving he’d had at least one other restaurant manager serve under him. “All right, Major. We’ll see what we can do.”
“Thank you very much, sir.” Dover’s respect for military courtesy rose in direct proportion to how much his superiors were inclined to do what he wanted.
“You almost pushed it too far, Major,” Barton Kinder said. “I wouldn’t try that again if I were you.” He hung up before Dover could answer, which might have been lucky for all concerned.
One of the other logistics officers, who couldn’t possibly have heard what Major General Kinder said, told Dover, “Boy, you like to walk close to the edge, don’t you?”
“The damnyankees can blow me up. The damnyankees will blow me up if we give ’em half a chance-maybe even if we don’t,” Dover answered. “If a brass hat on my own side wants to throw me in the stockade or take the uniform off my back, what the hell do I care? The worst thing my own people can do to me is leave me right where I’m at.”
“I wish I could look at it that way.” The other man had a VMI class ring on the third finger of his right hand, so he was a career officer. That meant he was missing…
“Freedom!” Dover said. He was no Party stalwart, but the slogan rang true here. “Isn’t that what this damn war’s all about? If we aren’t free to do what we want and tell everybody else to piss up a rope, what’s the point?”
Before the VMI graduate could answer, the world blew up. Alarms started howling and screeching. Bombs started dropping. Shells started bursting. Men started screaming, “Gas! Gas!”
“Fuck!” Jerry Dover said, with much more passion than he’d used to say, Freedom! He had to rummage in his desk for a gas mask. As he fumbled it on, he knew what this was. He knew what it had to be. The Yankees had been building up for a long time. They weren’t building any more. They were coming.
Invasion! No word could rouse greater dread in the CSA. For the first two summers of the war, the Confederates had had everything their own way. The United States had a lot of debts to pay. Now it looked as if they were laying their money on the table.
“Out!” somebody shouted. “Out and into the trenches!”
That struck Jerry Dover as some of the best advice he’d ever heard. He flew out through the tent flap-not that he was the first man gone, or even the second. The trenches weren’t far away, but one of the men who got out ahead of him stopped a shell and exploded into red mist. Dover tasted blood on his lips as he ran by. He spat and spat, feeling like a cannibal.
He jumped into the trench feetfirst, as if going into a swimming hole when he was a kid. Then he looked around for something to dig with. Being merely a logistics officer, he had no entrenching tool on his belt. A board was better than nothing. He started scraping his own dugout from the side of the trench.
Shell fragments screeched past above his head. A wounded man shrieked. Not everybody made it to the trench on time. Some Confederate guns started firing back. The noise of shells going out was different from the one they made coming in.
Bombs whistled down out of the sky. They were what really scared Dover. If one of them burst in this stretch of trench, that was it. He was safe enough from artillery here, but not from bombs.
Somebody punctuated a momentary lull by screaming, “This is it!”
“Make it stop!” someone else added a moment later, his voice high and desperate and shrill.
Jerry Dover wished it would stop, too, but it didn’t. It went on and on, till it reminded him of one of the unending bombardments from the Great War. He was convinced whoever’d let out that first cry was dead right-or, with better luck, still alive and right. This had to be it. If the damnyankees wer
en’t coming over the Ohio right here, this was the biggest bluff in the history of the world.
More Confederate guns boomed, but the noise they made seemed almost lost in the thunder of the Yankee barrage. Officers and sergeants shouted for men to move now here, now there. Dover wouldn’t have left his hole for all the money in the world, or for all the love in it. Moving about up there was asking to be obliterated.
Overhead, U.S. airplanes droned south. Dover swore as he listened to them. The Yankees weren’t just going after front-line C.S. troops. They were trying to tear up roads and railroads, too. The better the job they did, the more trouble the Confederacy would have bringing up men and materiel to beat them back.
And the better the job they did, the more trouble Jerry Dover would be in, not only from the U.S. soldiers but also from his own superiors. They wouldn’t believe any disaster that befell the CSA was their fault. God forbid! Easier to blame the major who used to manage a restaurant.
A four-engine bomber fell out of the sky, its right wing a sheet of flame. It smashed down less than a quarter of a mile from where Dover huddled. Its whole bomb load went off at once. The ground shook under him. Blast slammed him into the side of the trench. He tasted blood again. It was his own this time.
“Corpsman!” “Medic!” the shouts rose again and again, from all directions. God help these poor bastards, Dover thought. Riflemen and machine gunners-mostly-turned their weapons away from the soldiers who wore Red Crosses. Shells and bombs didn’t give a damn.
After four and a half hours that seemed like four and a half years (Dover kept checking his watch every three months and being amazed only fifteen minutes had gone by), the gunfire let up. He waited for shouts of, Here they come! He was surprised he hadn’t already heard those shouts. The damnyankees could have carved out a formidable bridgehead under cover of that barrage.
Then, just when he started to wonder if it was a bluff after all, more shells came in, these close by the river. “Smoke!” Again, the shout came from everywhere at once. U.S. light airplanes buzzed along the southern bank of the Ohio, spraying more smoke behind them. They got away with it, too. They made perfect targets, but the Confederates near Covington were simply too battered and rattled to shoot back.
Slowly, slowly, the smoke screen cleared. Jerry Dover started to look up, but the rattle of machine-gun fire made him duck back into the trench again. Those small airplanes came back and sprayed more smoke. The sound of machine guns and rifles roared from it.
“Reinforcements!” someone bawled. “We got to get us reinforcements, before they break out and go hog wild!”
“Fuck me!” That shout of despair came from close by Dover. “They’ve got barrels over the river!”
Dover looked up. Sure as hell, through the smoke that now thinned again he spied several squat, monstrous shapes. The growl of their engines added more noise to the racketing gunfire.
A Confederate shell burst in front of a barrel-and it ceased to be. It didn’t brew up; it didn’t catch fire. It…vanished. “It’s a goddamn balloon!” Dover exclaimed.
There were no real barrels close by-only more balloons. The noise of engines and gunfire came from phonograph records and loudspeakers. Whoever’d planted them had disappeared. The biggest bluff in the history of the world, Jerry Dover thought again. And it had worked. It froze the Confederates by Covington. Now…Where was the real blow landing?
Irving Morrell was wary of repeating himself. Irving Morrell was wary of repeating himself. The armor commander shook his head, wondering if he was going out of his tree. He wanted to drive Jake Featherston out of his instead. Crossing a river the size of the Ohio wasn’t easy. When George Custer did it in the Great War, he paid a heavy price-and he went on paying a heavy price while his troops ground their way southward a few hundred yards at a time.
Back in 1917, Morrell got men over the Cumberland east of Nashville much more quickly, much more neatly. But he had to figure the Confederates now knew all about what he did then and how he did it. They were bastards, but they weren’t dopes. If he tried the same thing twice, they would hand him his head. And he would deserve it.
And so, in football terms, he was doing his best to fake them out of their jocks. He laid on ferocious barrages in front of Covington and Louisville, and one on an open stretch of river between the two Kentucky towns. He used all the sneaky ingenuity the Army could come up with-and some straight out of Hollywood, too. Inflatable rubber barrels and sound-effects records kept the Confederates guessing a crucial extra little while. So did shells that gurgled as they flew through the air but didn’t hold any gas. A sensible man would figure no one wasted gas shells on a bluff. And a sensible man would be right. Morrell saved the real ones for the genuine assault.
The state of the art of crossing rivers in the face of enemy fire had improved since 1917. You didn’t have to throw pontoon bridges across or send men over in wallowing barges. Armored landing craft delivered soldiers, barrels, and artillery in a hurry. Only a direct hit from a 105 or a bigger cannon yet could make them say uncle. Once the soldiers carved out a lodgement, then bridges could span the river.
No, the tricky part wasn’t the crossing itself. The tricky part was moving men and materiel into southern Indiana without letting the bastards in butternut know what was going on. Lots of trucks made lots of trips carrying nothing to fool Featherston’s fuckers into thinking the real blow would fall farther east. Lots of others carried men who promptly reboarded them under cover of darkness. More inflatable barrels and wooden artillery pieces left the impression of buildups where there were none. So did acres of tents just out of range of C.S. artillery.
Now Morrell had to hope all his deceptions were deceptive enough, his security tight enough. That the Confederates had spies on the northern bank of the Ohio went without saying. That U.S. Intelligence hadn’t rooted out all of them was also a given. How much they reported, how much they were believed…Those were the questions only battle would answer.
So far, everything looked good. The U.S. concentration lay between two tiny Indiana riverside towns with odd names: Magnet and Derby. Magnet hadn’t attracted any particular Confederate attention. That made Morrell want to tip his derby to the men under him who’d made the crossing work.
He wanted to, but he didn’t-he wasn’t wearing a derby. He was wearing a helmet with two stars painted on the front. On a parade helmet, the stars would have been gold so they stood out. Morrell didn’t want them to stand out. One sniper had already hit him. He wasn’t anxious to make himself a target for another one. His rank emblems were dull brown, and invisible from more than a few feet away.
His own headquarters were in Derby, the more southerly of the two towns. People there talked with a twang that reminded him of the wrong side of the border. Intelligence assured him they were no more disloyal than anybody else. He hoped Intelligence knew what it was talking about. But his hackles rose whenever he listened to any of the locals.
Through field glasses, he watched artillery and dive bombers pound northern Kentucky. The Confederates were trying to hit back, but they seemed a little punch-drunk, a little slow. The corners of Morrell’s mouth turned down. Two years earlier, he and Abner Dowling were a beat late when they tried to meet the C.S. thrust into Ohio. About time the other side found out what that felt like.
A soldier from the wireless shack came up to him and saluted. “We’ve reached Objective A, sir,” he reported.
Morrell looked at his watch. Two in the afternoon, a few minutes past. “Almost an hour ahead of schedule,” he said. They’d driven the Confederates out of rifle and machine-gun range of the Ohio: pushed them back more than a mile. Jake Featherston’s men wouldn’t have an easy time driving the invaders into the river now. And Morrell had another reason to beam. “With Objective A taken, I can cross myself.”
“Yes, sir,” the noncom said. Morrell had strict orders from Philadelphia to stay north of the Ohio till the Confederates were cleared from the riverside. He
obeyed orders like that only when he felt like it. Here, reluctantly, he saw they made good sense.
“General Parsons!” he shouted now.
His second-in-command came running. “Yes, sir?” Brigadier General Harlan Parsons was short and square and tough. He didn’t have much imagination, but he didn’t have much give, either.
“As of now, you’re in command,” Morrell said. “Keep ’em crossing the river, keep ’em moving forward. When I get south of the Ohio, I’ll take over again. My barrel’s got enough wireless circuits to do the broadcasting for New York City.” He exaggerated, but not by much.
Parsons saluted again. “I’ll handle it, sir,” he said, and Morrell had no doubt he would. “I’ll see you when we get to Objective B.”
“Right,” Morrell said. They would have to drive the Confederates out of artillery range of the Ohio-say, ten or twelve miles back-to meet their second objective. If everything went according to plan, that would take another two days. But who could say what the plan had to do with reality? You went out there and you saw what happened.
Morrell hurried toward his fancy barrel with the eagerness of a lover going to his beloved. The rest of the crew stood around the machine, waiting. As soon as the four enlisted men saw him, they scrambled into the machine. The engine roared to life even as he was slipping down through the hatch atop the cupola and into the turret.
“Take us onto the landing craft,” he called to the driver as soon as his mouth reached the intercom mike.
“Yes, sir!” The barrel rumbled forward, first on the soft riverside earth and then on the steel ramp that led up into the ungainly, slab-sided, river-crossing contraption.
Sailors-they wore Navy blue, not Army green-gray-raised the ramp. It clanged into place, hard enough to make the barrel shake for a moment. A series of clangs meant the ramp was stowed and now had become the boat’s stern or rear end or whatever the hell you called it. The boat’s engine started up. The vibration made Morrell’s back teeth ache. Well, a dentist could wait.
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