Settling Accounts Return Engagement: Book One of the Settling Accounts Trilogy

by Harry Turtledove

  Like most of what CSON played, the song was norteño music, full of thumping drums and accordion. The singer used the same blend of Sonora’s two languages as the announcer. That made Rodriguez frown a little. When he was a young man, norteño music had been in Spanish alone—even though its instruments were borrowed from German settlers along the old border between Texas and Mexico. Because that was what he’d grown up with, he thought it right and natural. As the years went by, though, English advanced and Spanish retreated in his home state.

  When the syrupy love song ended, a blaring march—a Confederate imitation of John Philip Sousa—announced the hour and introduced the news. “Here is the truth,” the newscaster said: the Freedom Party’s claim to it, these days, was far from limited to Jake Featherston alone. Another march, a triumphant one, rang out. That meant the newscaster was going to claim a victory. Sure enough, he spoke in proud tones: “Your brave Confederate soldiers have closed an iron ring around Columbus, Ohio. Several divisions of Yankee troops are trapped inside the city. If they cannot break out, they will be forced to surrender.”

  “That’s amazing,” Rodriguez said to Magdalena. “To have come so far so fast . . . Neither side did anything like this in the last war.”

  “Shh,” she told him. “If we’re going to listen, let’s listen.” He nodded. A wise husband didn’t quarrel even when he was right. Quarreling when you knew you were wrong was a recipe for disaster.

  The newscaster said, “Here is Brigadier General Patton, commander of the Army of Kentucky’s armored striking force.”

  In pure English, a man with a raspy, tough-sounding voice said, “We’ve got the damnyankees by the neck. Now we’re going to shake them till they’re dead.” For those who couldn’t follow that, the announcer translated it into the mixed language commonly used in the Confederacy’s Southwest. The officer—General Patton—went on, “They thought they were going to have things all their own way again this time. I’m here to tell them they’ve missed the bus.”

  Hipolito Rodriguez followed that well enough. He glanced over to Magdalena. She was waiting for the translation. He hadn’t had much English, either, before he went to war. These days, he dealt with it without thinking twice.

  The announcer went on to talk about what he called a terror-bombing raid by U.S. airplanes over Little Rock. “Forty-seven people were killed, including nineteen children sheltering at a school,” he said indignantly. “Confederate bombers, by contrast, strike only military targets except when taking reprisals for U.S. air piracy. And President Featherston vows that, for every ton of bombs that falls on the Confederate States, three tons will fall on the United States. They will pay for their aggression against us.”

  “This is how it ought to be,” Rodriguez said, and his wife nodded.

  “In other news, the reckless policies of los Estados Unidos have earned the reward they deserve,” the newscaster said. “The Empire of Japan has declared war on the United States, citing their provocative policy in the Central Pacific. The United States claim to have inflicted heavy losses on carrier-based aircraft attacking the Sandwich Islands, but the Japanese dismiss this report as just another U.S. lie.”

  “They are supposed to be very pretty—the Sandwich Islands,” Magdalena said wistfully.

  “Nothing is pretty once bombs start falling on it,” Rodriguez replied with great conviction. “That was true in the last war, and it is bound to be even more true in this one, because the bombs are bigger.”

  “Prime Minister Churchill calls the entry of Japan into the war a strong blow against the United States,” the announcer went on. “He says it will restore the proper balance of power in the Pacific. Once the United States are driven from the Sandwich Islands, Japanese-Confederate cooperation against the West Coast of the USA will follow as day follows night, in his opinion.”

  That was a very large thought. Rodriguez remembered that the Japanese had bombed Los Angeles during the Pacific War. But that had been only a raid. This could prove much more important. Of course, the Japanese hadn’t pushed los Estados Unidos out of the Sandwich Islands. If they did, that would be wonderful. If they didn’t, they would still tie up a big U.S. fleet. Too bad they wouldn’t be able to pull off a surprise attack, the way the USA had against Britain at the start of the Great War.

  In portentous tones, the newscaster continued, “Prime Minister Churchill also spoke of the pounding Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, and other German cities have taken from the French and British air fleets. Smoke climbs thousands of feet into the sky. German efforts to retaliate are feeble indeed. The Prime Minister also declares that the collapse of the Ukraine at Russia’s first blows and the clear weakness of Austria-Hungary argue the war in Europe will go differently this time.”

  Hipolito Rodriguez tried to imagine another war across the sea, a war as big as the one here in North America and even more complicated. He had trouble doing it. He would have had trouble imagining the war here if he hadn’t fought in the last one. That was what came of peacefully living most of his life on a farm outside a small town in Sonora.

  “In a display of barbarism yesterday, the United States executed four Canadians accused of railroad sabotage,” the newsman said. “Confederate security forces in Mississippi, meanwhile, smashed a squadron of colored bandits intent on murdering white men and women and destroying valuable property. The mallates and their mischief will be suppressed.”

  He sounded full of stern enthusiasm. Rodriguez found himself nodding. He’d suppressed mallates himself—niggers, they called them in English. That had been his first taste of war, even before he faced the Yankees. As far as he was concerned, black men caused nothing but trouble. He had another reason for despising them, too. They were below folk of Mexican descent in the Confederate social scale. If not for blacks, the white majority would have turned all its scorn on greasers. Rodriguez was as sure of that as he was of his own name.

  A string of commercials followed. The messages were fascinating. They made Rodriguez want to run right out and buy beer or shampoo or razor blades. If he hadn’t lived three miles from the nearest general store, he might have done it. Next time he was in Baroyeca, he might do it yet.

  More music followed the commercials. The news was done. Rodriguez said, “The war seems to be going well.”

  “No war that has our son in it is going well.” Now Magdalena was the one whose voice held conviction.

  “Well, yes,” Rodriguez admitted. “Tienes razón. But even if you are right, wouldn’t you rather see him in a winning fight than a losing one? Winning is the only point to fighting a war.”

  His wife shook her head. “There is no point to fighting a war,” she said, still with that terrible certainty. “Win or lose, you only fight another one ten years later, or twenty, or thirty. Can you tell me I am wrong?”

  Rodriguez wished he could. The evidence, though, seemed to lie on his wife’s side. He shrugged. “If we win a great victory, maybe los Estados Unidos won’t be able to fight us any more.”

  “They must have thought the same thing about los Estados Confederados,” Magdalena said pointedly.

  “They did not count on Jake Featherston.” Rodriguez missed that point.

  His wife let out an exasperated sniff. “Maybe they will have that kind of President themselves. Or maybe they will not need a man like that. They are bigger than we are, and stronger, too. Can we really beat them?”

  “If Señor Featherston says we can, then we can,” Rodriguez answered. “And he does, so I think we can.”

  “He is not God Almighty,” Magdalena warned. “He can make mistakes.”

  “I know he can. But he hasn’t made very many,” Rodriguez said. “Until he shows me he is making mistakes, I will go on trusting him. He is doing very well so far, and you cannot tell me anything different.”

  “So far,” his wife echoed.

  Sometimes Rodriguez let her have the last word—most of the time, in fact. He was indeed a sensible, well-trained husband.
But not this time, not when it was political rather than something really important. They argued far into the night.

  Brigadier General Abner Dowling had never expected to command the defense of Ohio from the great metropolis of Bucyrus. The town—it couldn’t have held ten thousand people—was pleasant enough. The Sandusky River, which was barely wide enough there to deserve the name, meandered through it. The small central business district was full of two- and three-story buildings of dull red and buff bricks. A factory that had made seamless copper kettles now turned out copper tubing; one that had built steamrollers was making parts for barrels.

  How long any of that would last, Dowling couldn’t say. With Columbus lost, he had no idea whether or how long Bucyrus could hold out. He counted himself lucky to have got out of Columbus before the Confederate ring closed around it. A lot of good U.S. soldiers hadn’t. The Columbus pocket was putting up a heroic resistance, but he knew too well it was a losing fight. The Confederates weren’t trying very hard to break into the city. Cut off from resupply and escape, sooner or later the U.S. soldiers would wither on the vine. The Confederates, meanwhile, kept storming forward as if they had the hosts of hell behind them.

  Dowling’s makeshift headquarters were in what had been a grain and feed store. The proprietor, an upright Buckeye named Milton Kellner, had moved in with his brother and sister-in-law. Sentries kept out farmers who wanted to buy chicken feed and hay. Dowling wished they would have kept out all the soldiers who wanted to see him, too. No such luck.

  Confederate artillery could already reach Bucyrus. Dowling wondered if he should have retreated farther north. He didn’t like making his fight from a distance, though. He wanted to get right up there and slug it out with the enemy toe to toe.

  The only problem was, the enemy didn’t care to fight that kind of war against him. Confederate barrels kept finding weak spots in his positions, pounding through, and forcing his men to fall back or be surrounded. Fighters shot up his soldiers from the sky. Dive bombers wrecked strongpoints that defied C.S. artillery. He didn’t have enough barrels or airplanes to do unto the enemy as the enemy was doing unto him.

  Boards covered the front window to Kellner’s store. That wasn’t so much to protect the window as to protect the people inside the building from what would happen if the glass shattered. Bucyrus still had electricity; it drew its power from the north, not from Columbus. The environment inside the store wasn’t gloomy. The atmosphere, on the other hand . . .

  A young lieutenant stuck pins with red heads ever farther up a big map of Ohio tacked to the wall over a chart that luridly illustrated the diseases of hens. Dowling was just as glad not to have to look at that. Hens’ insides laid open for autopsy reminded him too much of men’s insides laid open by artillery.

  “By God, it’s a wonder every soldier in the world isn’t a vegetarian,” he said.

  “Because we do butchers’ work, sir?” the young officer asked.

  “It isn’t because we parade so prettily,” Dowling growled. The lieutenant, whose name was Jack Tompkins, blushed like a schoolgirl.

  “What are we going to do, sir?” Tompkins asked.

  Dowling eyed him sourly. He couldn’t possibly have been born when the Great War ended. Everything he knew about fighting, he’d picked up in the past few weeks. And, by all appearances, Dowling knew just as little about this new, fast-moving style of warfare. The idea was humiliating, which made it no less true. “What are we going to do?” he repeated. “We’re going to go straight at those butternut sons of bitches, and we’re going to knock the snot out of them.”

  Custer would be proud of you, a small mocking voice said in the back of his mind. Custer had always believed in going straight at the enemy, regardless of whether that was the right thing to do. Dowling wouldn’t have thought his longtime superior’s style had rubbed off on him so much, but it seemed to have.

  And no sooner were the words out of his mouth than a messenger came into the feed store with what, by his glum expression, had to be bad news. “Well?” Dowling demanded. Since the war started, he’d already heard about as much bad news as he could stand.

  No matter what he’d heard, he was going to get more. “Sir,” the messenger said, “the Confederates have bombed a troop train just the other side of Canton. Those reinforcements we hoped for are going to be late, and a lot of them won’t come in at all. There were heavy casualties.”

  Custer would have screamed and cursed—probably something on the order of, Why do these things happen to me? He would have blamed the messenger, or the War Department, or anyone else who happened to be handy. That way, no blame was likely to light on him.

  With a grimace, Dowling accepted the burden. “Damnation,” he said. “So the antiaircraft guns on the flatcars didn’t work?”

  “Not this time, sir,” the messenger answered.

  “Damnation,” Dowling said again. “I was counting on those troops to go into the counterattack against the Confederates’ eastern prong. If I hold it up till they do come in . . . well, what the devil will the enemy do to me in the meantime?”

  The messenger only shrugged. Dowling dismissed him with an unhappy wave of the hand. Lieutenant Tompkins said, “Sir, we haven’t got the men to make that counterattack work without reinforcements.”

  “Now tell me something I didn’t know,” Dowling said savagely. Tompkins turned red again. Dowling felt ashamed of himself. He had to lash out at someone, but poor Tompkins was hardly a fair target. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “It’s all right, sir,” the young lieutenant answered. “I know we’ve got to do something.” His eyes drifted to the ominous map. He spread his hands in an apology of his own. “I just don’t know what.”

  The U.S. Army wasn’t paying him to know what to do. It was, unfortunately, paying Abner Dowling for exactly that. And Dowling had no more inkling than Tompkins did. He sighed heavily. “I think the counterattack will have to go in anyway.”

  “Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Tompkins looked at the map again. “Uh, sir . . . What do you think the chances are?”

  “Slim,” Dowling said with brutal honesty. “We won’t drive the enemy very far. But we may rock him back on his heels just the same. And if he’s responding to us, he won’t be able to make us dance to his tune. I hope he won’t.” He wished, too late, that he hadn’t tacked on those last four words.

  With no great hope in his heart, he started drafting the orders. In the last war, Custer had fed men into the meat grinder with a fine indifference to their fate. Dowling couldn’t be so dispassionate—or was it simply callous? He knew this attack had no real hope past spoiling whatever the Confederates might be up to. That that was reason enough to make it was a measure of his own growing desperation.

  Artillery shells began falling on Bucyrus again not long after he got to work on the orders. He didn’t think the Confederates knew he was here. They would have hit harder if they did.

  And then, off in the distance, an automobile horn started honking, and another, and another. Dowling swore under his breath. Soldiers by the thousands—by the tens of thousands—were trapped in and around Columbus, but the Confederates were letting out women, children, and old men: anyone who didn’t seem to be of military age. Why not? It made them seem humane, and it made the USA take care of the refugees—whose columns Confederate pilots still gleefully shot up when they got out beyond the C.S. lines.

  “What do we do with them, sir?” Lieutenant Tompkins asked.

  “We get them off the roads so they don’t tie up our movements,” Dowling answered. That had been standard operating procedure ever since the shooting started. It had also proved easier said than done. The refugees wanted to get away. They didn’t give a damn about moving over to let soldiers by. After some more low-voiced swearing, Dowling went on, “Once we do that, we see to their food and medical needs. But we’ve got to keep the roads clear. How are we supposed to stop the Confederates if we can’t even get from here to there?”

&nb
sp; “Beats me, sir,” Tompkins said. He didn’t say the U.S. Army hadn’t been able to stop the Confederates even when it had moved freely. Of course, he didn’t need to say that, either. Headquarters for U.S. forces in Ohio wouldn’t have been in a feed shop in Bucyrus if it weren’t true.

  The horns went on and on. The refugees had probably bumped up against the U.S. lines on the south side of town. Abstractly, Dowling could know a certain detached sympathy for them. They hadn’t asked to have their lives turned upside down. Concretely, though, he just wanted to shunt them out of the way so he could get on with the business of fighting the enemy.

  He wasn’t thrilled about letting them through his lines, either. Sure as hell, the Confederates would have planted spies among the fugitives. They seemed to be taking espionage and sabotage a lot more seriously in this war than they had in the last one. The USA had trouble gauging how seriously they were taking it, because not all their operatives were getting caught.

  He knew his own side was doing the same in the CSA. He’d commanded in Kentucky before the state fell back into Confederate hands. After U.S. forces had to pull out, he’d arranged to keep the new occupiers occupied. He only wished he would have seen more results from U.S. efforts and fewer from the Confederates’.

  An auto screeched to a stop in front of the feed store. A harried-looking sergeant came in. “Sir, what are we going to do with those bastards?” he said. “They’ve got a lawyer out in front of ’em. He says they’ve got a Constitutional right to come through.”

  Abner Dowling did not like lawyers. He said, “Tell the guy to go to hell. Tell him Ohio’s under martial law, so all his Constitutional rights are straight down the toilet. If he gives you any lip after that, tell him we’ll goddamn well conscript him into a ditch-digging detail unless he shuts up. If he doesn’t shut up, you do it—and if he doesn’t have bloody blisters on his hands inside of two hours after that, you’re in big trouble. Got it?”