The Grapple sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

He muttered under his breath. Did she mean that, or was it window dressing to lull any censors? He didn’t think the envelope was opened before he saw it, but he could have been wrong. Only one way to find out: he kept reading.

  Things here haven’t changed much since the last time I wrote, she went on. Prices have gone up some, though, and the stores don’t have as much as I wish they did. If you could send me a hundred dollars, it would help a lot.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. He had a hundred dollars in his wallet. He’d had good luck and a good partner at the bridge table two nights before. If that was all…

  But it wasn’t. He might have known it wouldn’t be. Hell, he had known. You ought to tell me about your friends, she wrote. I never hear about how things really are at the front. Where are you exactly? Dover snorted. As if she didn’t know! What are you doing? How are you going to lick the damnyankees?

  Jerry Dover didn’t snort this time. He sighed. He feared he knew what she was asking for. He’d wondered if she would. He hadn’t wanted to believe it, but here it was.

  And he was liable to end up in trouble on account of it. He’d end up in worse trouble if he told her the things she wanted to know, though. He sent a soldier after his second-in-command here, a bright, eager captain named Rodney Chesbro. “Don’t let them steal this place while I’m gone,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to the Intelligence people.”

  “Find out how we’re going to kick the damnyankees in the slats?” Chesbro asked-yes, he was eager. “If they tell you, will you tell me, too?”

  “If they say I can,” Dover answered, which was less of a promise than it sounded like.

  He drove a beat-up Birmingham north toward Chattanooga. The road was in bad shape. He was glad no U.S. fighter-bombers showed up to strafe him or drop explosives on his head. It was only a few miles to Division HQ, but getting there took twice as long as he’d thought it would.

  As always, the tent where the G-2 men worked was inconspicuous. Intelligence didn’t advertise what it was up to. If you didn’t need to talk to those people, they didn’t want you around. Dover wished he didn’t. But he did. A few words to a scholarly-looking noncom got him sent over to a Major Claude Nevers. “What can I do for you, Colonel?” Nevers asked.

  “I have a problem, Major,” Dover answered. “I’ve got a lady friend who’s been quietly squeezing me for money for quite a while. I wouldn’t waste your time if that were all, but now she’s trying to get information out of me, too.” He showed the Intelligence officer the letter.

  Nevers read it and nodded. “I think you’re right. She’s smooth, but that’s the way it looks to me.” He eyed Dover. “You realize we’re going to have to look at you, too?”

  “Yeah,” Dover said without enthusiasm. “But you’d look a lot harder, and you’d have some nastier tools, if I kept mum and you found out about this anyway. So do whatever you need to do, and I’ll worry about that later.”

  “All right, Colonel.” Nevers didn’t call him sir. “Most of the time, I’d remove you from active duty, too. But we’re strapped for men now, and I’ve heard more than a few people who ought to know talk about what a good job you’re doing. So give me the particulars about this, ah, Melanie.”

  “Melanie Leigh.” Dover spelled the last name. “Brunette. Blue eyes. Maybe thirty-five, maybe forty. About five feet four. Nice figure. You’ve got the address there. I’ve been sending her cash now and then for years so my wife wouldn’t hear about her. She can’t live on what I give her, though. I have no idea if she has other guys on the string, or how many. I don’t know how she’d get word out, either-but she likely has a way.”

  “Uh-huh,” Nevers said. “Send her this hundred she wants. Write her a chatty letter about the kind of stuff you do. Tell her funny stories, nothing she can really use. With luck, we’ll drop on her before she can write back saying that isn’t what she wants.”

  “Tunnel requisitions,” Dover murmured. Major Nevers looked blank. “I understand what you’re talking about, Major,” Dover told him. “I’ll do it. Maybe I’m seeing shadows where nothing’s casting them, but…”

  “Yes. But,” Nevers said. “Go tend to it, Colonel. We’ll be in touch.”

  “Right,” Dover said unhappily.

  When he got back to the dump, he had to explain to Captain Chesbro that he didn’t know how the Confederate States were going to drive the Yankees back to the Ohio by Wednesday next. Writing a cheery, chatty letter to a woman he feared was a spy wasn’t easy, but he managed. He let Major Nevers vet it before he sent it out; he didn’t want the G-2 man thinking he was warning Melanie. He left it and the money and an envelope with the major to mail. Then he tried to worry about logistics.

  He got a call from the major that night-in the middle of the night, in fact. A noncom woke him to go to the telephone. Without preamble, the Intelligence officer said, “She flew the coop, dammit.”

  Dover said the first thing that came into his mind: “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “I know that,” the Intelligence officer answered. “We’ve had you under surveillance since you came to me earlier today.”

  We? You and your pals? You and your tapeworm? You and God? Dover was silly with sleepiness. “How did she know to disappear, then?” he asked.

  “Good question,” Major Nevers said. “I hope we find out-that’s all I’ve got to tell you. You’ve exposed a security leak, that’s for damn sure. I suppose I ought to thank you.” He didn’t sound grateful. Dover, yawning, didn’t suppose he could blame him.

  Every time Major General Abner Dowling saw a pickup truck these days, he winced. The Confederates’ improvised gun platforms had caused him a hell of a lot of grief. Their flanking attacks had stalled his drive on Camp Determination and Snyder. They hadn’t made him fall back on Lubbock, let alone driven him over the border into New Mexico, the way the enemy probably hoped. But his men weren’t going forward any more, either.

  And so he grimaced when a pickup truck approached Eleventh Army headquarters out there in the middle of nowhere, even though the truck was painted U.S. green-gray and he could see it had no machine gun mounted in the bed. No matter what color it was painted, guards made sure it wasn’t carrying a bomb before they let it come up to the tent outside of which Dowling stood.

  He started to laugh when the truck door opened and a brisk woman not far from his own age got out. “What’s so damn funny, Buster?” Ophelia Clemens demanded, cigarette smoke streaming from her mouth as she spoke.

  “The guards were looking for explosives, but they let you through anyhow,” Dowling answered. “You cause more trouble than any auto bomb or people bomb ever made.”

  She batted her eyes at him, which set him laughing all over again. “You say the sweetest things, darling,” she told him. “Do you still keep a pint hidden in your desk?”

  “It was only a half pint,” he said, “and now I’ll have to put a lock on that drawer.” That made her laugh. “Come on in,” he continued. “I’ll see what I can find. It’s good to see you, by God.”

  “People I talk to aren’t supposed to tell me things like that,” the reporter said severely. “They’re supposed to say, ‘Jesus Christ! Here’s that Clemens bitch again!’” She was kidding, and then again she wasn’t.

  “I never do things I’m supposed to. Would I be here if I did?” Dowling held the tent flap wide. “Won’t you walk into my parlor, said the fly to the spider?”

  “That’s more like it.” Ophelia Clemens ducked inside. Dowling followed her. He did produce some whiskey, and even a couple of glasses. As he’d seen her do before, Miss Clemens-she’d never married-knocked hers back like a man. “And that’s more like it, too,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” Dowling said. “I don’t suppose you came way the hell out here just to drink my booze, so suppose you tell me why you did.”

  “I want to do a piece on Camp Determination,” she answered. “I want to show people in the USA what that murd
erous son of a bitch in Richmond is doing to his Negroes.”

  “That would be good,” Dowling said carefully, “but a lot of what we know is classified. I don’t know how much I’m authorized to show the press. Some of what we have shows how we got it, which isn’t so good.”

  “This will have to pass the censors before it goes out,” she said. “As for authorization…” She fumbled in her purse, which held only a little less than a private’s pack. “Here.” She thrust a folded piece of paper at him.

  He unfolded it. It was a letter from Assistant Secretary of War Franklin D. Roosevelt, allowing and indeed requiring him to tell Miss Clemens what he knew “since this information, when widely publicized, will prove valuable to the war effort.” He set it down. “Well, you’ve persuaded me,” he said. “I’m putty in your hands.”

  “Promises, promises,” Ophelia Clemens said. They both grinned. The game of seduction played for farce, with neither of them intending to conquer, was almost as fun in its own way as it would have been for real. “What have you got?”

  Dowling produced aerial photos. “Here’s the camp. The side north of the train tracks-that’s this way-holds women and children. The other side, which is older, is for men.”

  “Uh-huh.” Like him, the reporter wore bifocals. “How big is this thing?”

  “You see these little tiny rectangles here by the men’s side?” Dowling waited for her to nod, then went on, “Those are trucks. They’re about the size of our deuce-and-a-halfs.”

  Ophelia Clemens blinked. “The place is that big?” Now Dowling nodded. She whistled. “It’s not a camp. It’s a goddamn city!”

  “No, ma’am,” Dowling said. “There’s one big difference. A city has a permanent population. People go into Camp Determination, they go through it, but they don’t come out again-not alive, anyway.”

  “And your evidence for that is…?”

  He passed her more photos. “This is-was-a stretch of Texas prairie not far from the camp. Barbed wire keeps people out, not that anybody who doesn’t have to is likely to want to go out to the back of beyond. The bulldozers give you some idea of scale here. They also dig trenches. You can see that most of those are covered over. The couple that aren’t…Those are bodies inside.” He gave her another picture. “A low-level run by a fighter-bomber got us this one. You can really make out the corpses here.”

  “Jesus!” She studied it. “How many bodies are in here? Have you got any idea?”

  “Only a rough one,” Dowling answered. “Hundreds of thousands of people, that’s for sure. The experts who are supposed to be good at figuring this stuff out say it’s unlikely there are more than a million…so far, anyway.”

  “Jesus!” Ophelia Clemens said again, more violently than before. “Give me that bottle again, will you? I need another drink. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million-what did they do to deserve it?”

  “They were born colored,” Dowling said. “To the Freedom Party, that’s a capital offense.”

  “If that’s a joke, it’s not funny,” she said as he passed her the bottle. Her throat worked when she drank.

  “I wasn’t kidding,” he told her. “The other thing you have to remember is, this isn’t the only camp the Confederates have. We think it’s the biggest, but we’ve also been able to disrupt operations here better than anywhere else. The ones farther east, in Louisiana and Mississippi, they go right on working all the time, because we can’t reach them.”

  Ophelia Clemens looked from one photograph to another with the kind of horrified fascination a bad traffic accident might cause. But motorcars hadn’t banged together here-whole races had. And one was running over the other. “If they keep this up, there won’t be many Negroes left in the CSA by the time they’re done.”

  “No, ma’am. That’s not quite right.” Dowling shook his head. Ophelia Clemens made a wordless questioning noise. He explained: “They don’t aim to leave any colored people alive. Not one. That’s what they’re aiming for. They don’t even bother hiding it. Hell, some of the Freedom Party Guards we’ve captured brag about what they’re doing. Far as they’re concerned, it’s God’s work.”

  “God’s work.” She spat out the words as if they tasted bad. “If I believed in God, General, these photos would turn me into an atheist. These photos would turn the Pope into an atheist.”

  “I doubt it,” Dowling said. “The Vatican kept quiet when the Turks slaughtered Armenians. It hasn’t said boo about the Russian pogroms against the Jews. So why should Pope Pius give a damn about what happens to a bunch of coons who mostly aren’t Catholic on the other side of the ocean?”

  “Who mostly aren’t Catholic,” Ophelia Clemens repeated. “Yes, that’s about the size of it, I’m afraid. He’d bellow like a bull if they were. But since he doesn’t care, what are you doing about it?”

  “I’m trying to take Camp Determination, that’s what,” Dowling answered. “It’s not easy, but I’m trying.”

  “Why isn’t it easy? This ought to be one of the most important things we’re doing,” she said. “Hundreds of thousands of bodies…Attila the Hun didn’t kill that many people, I bet.”

  “There weren’t so many people to kill back then,” Dowling said. “And why isn’t it easy? Because this is a secondary front, that’s why. I’m short of men, I’m short of barrels, and I’m short of artillery. I used to be short of airplanes, too, but I’m not any more. Of course, the Confederates are even shorter on everything than I am. That’s why I’ve managed to come as far as I have.”

  “It’s criminal that you’re short.” Ophelia Clemens’ pencil raced across the notebook page. “That smells as bad as all those bodies put together, and I’m going to let the world hear about it.”

  “No!” Dowling exclaimed. She stared at him in surprise, anger, and something not far from hatred. “No,” he repeated. “Don’t raise a fuss about it. Please. Don’t.”

  His earnestness must have got through to her. Her voice was hard and flat when she said, “You’re going to have to explain that,” but she didn’t sound as if she would poison a rattlesnake when she bit it.

  Glad she didn’t, Dowling said, “I will. I used to think different, but it’s simple, when you get down to it. The best way to put Camp Determination out of business is to lick the CSA. That’s what General Morrell is doing over in Tennessee, and more power to him. More power to him, literally. If I had two or three times the men and materiel I do, I’d be taking them away from him, and I don’t want to do that. I can annoy the Confederates. I can embarrass them. He can win the war. Do you see the difference?”

  She didn’t answer for a long time. At last, she said, “I never thought I’d want to punch a man in the nose for being right.”

  “It happens,” Dowling said. “Look at George Custer, for instance.”

  “A point,” she admitted. “I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to punch him, but he won the Great War, didn’t he?”

  “Oh, not all by himself, but more than anybody else, I think,” Dowling answered. “He saw what barrels could do, and he made sure they did it no matter what the War Department said. General Morrell was in on that, too, remember, though he wasn’t a general then, of course.”

  She pointed at him. “So were you.”

  “Maybe a little.” Dowling’s main role had been to lie through his teeth to the big wigs in Philadelphia. Had Custer’s brutal simplicity failed-as it was known to do-Dowling would have lied away his own career along with his superior’s. But for once Custer was right, and success, as usual, excused everything else.

  “Modest at your age?” Ophelia Clemens jeered. “How quaint. How positively Victorian.”

  “You say the sweetest things,” Dowling told her. “Just don’t say I want more men, because honest to God I don’t. I’m keeping the Confederates busy. They can’t send reinforcements east from this front. They’ve had to reinforce it, in fact, to keep me away from Camp Determination. And every man they send out here to the far end of
Texas is a man they don’t have in Tennessee.”

  “‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’” she quoted.

  “Is that Shakespeare?” To Dowling, anything that sounded old had to be Shakespeare.

  But she shook her head. “Milton, I think.”

  “If you say so. It’s true here, though. Except I’m not standing. I’m staying busy with what I’ve got. I think I can go another forty miles.”

  “If you go thirty, you can shell the camp,” she said.

  “We haven’t bombed it because we don’t want to go into the Negro-killing business ourselves,” Dowling said. “Same problem with shelling. The people in the camp would be on our side if they got guns. They are on our side. They just can’t do anything about it.”

  “Any way to change that?” Ophelia Clemens asked.

  “I don’t see one,” Dowling said regretfully. “I wish I did.”

  XVI

  Artillery was coming down not far from the supply dump where soldiers unloaded Cincinnatus Driver’s truck. The Army had put everything as close to the front as it could. With U.S. soldiers on the north bank of the Tennessee River, with the big brass trying to work out how to get across, nobody wanted to run short of anything.

  “You need me to, I take this shit right up to the fellas doin’ the fighting,” Cincinnatus called to the quartermaster sergeant checking things off on a clipboard.

  “That’s awright, buddy,” the noncom said in a big-city accent. “We’ll move it forward-that ain’t no skin off your nose. What you gotta do is, you gotta go back, get some more shit, and bring it down to us here.”

  “I’ll do that, then,” Cincinnatus said. This fellow didn’t mock him. He argued from efficiency, which was reasonable enough.

  As soon as the big trucks were empty, the convoy did start north to fill up again. Armored cars and half-tracks escorted it. By now, U.S. forces had a pretty good grip on the roads leading down to Chattanooga. But pretty good wasn’t perfect. Holdouts or civilians fired at the convoy. They knocked out two windows and gave a truck a flat. Cincinnatus didn’t think they hit anybody, though, which made the northbound journey a success.