In At the Death sa-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Jack Carter took a step back. "You thought we might be friends because of what I did. I assure you, sir, I am more sincerely your enemy than Jake Featherston ever dreamt of being. Good day." He bowed, then stalked out.

  He might be a more sincere enemy, but Jake Featherston made a more dangerous one. Carter was content to abhor from a distance. Featherston wasn't. He wanted to kill what he didn't like, and he was much too good at it.

  A sergeant with the wireless patch on his left sleeve burst into the tent. "Paris, sir!" he exclaimed.

  "Paris?" Dowling's first thought, absurdly, was of Helen of Troy.

  The sergeant set him straight: "Yes, sir! Paris! The Kaiser just blew it to hell and gone. Eiffel Tower's nothing but a stump, the report says!"

  "Jesus Christ!" Dowling said, and then, "Will anything still be standing by the time this damn war gets done?"

  N obody messed with Lavochkin's Looters as they fought their way up the South Carolina coast toward Charleston. Nobody shot at them from ambush. Nobody gave them any guff when they went through a town. Confederate soldiers who surrendered to them seemed pathetically grateful to have the chance.

  "You see?" Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin said. "You can put the fear of God in these assholes. You can, and we did."

  Chester Martin didn't answer that. He pretended he didn't hear it. He wished he could pretend he'd had nothing to do with the massacre in Hardeeville. But he had. He was no damn good at lying to himself. Even if he were, the nightmares that tore apart even his exhausted sleep would have made him stop trying.

  He wasn't the only one who had them. Several guys in Lavochkin's platoon were jumpier than a cat at a Great Dane convention. Some replacements knew what was going on as soon as they came in. "Aren't you the guys who-?" they would say, and stop right there.

  Others, more naпve or less plugged in, tried to figure out what was going on. They usually said something on the order of, "How come you guys are so weird?"

  If anything bothered Lieutenant Lavochkin, he didn't show it. If anything, he was proud of what had happened in Hardeeville. "Nobody fucks with my outfit," he would tell anyone who wanted to listen. "I mean nobody. You fuck with us, tell the carver what you want on your goddamn headstone, 'cause you are all over with."

  Captain Rhodes kept shaking his head. "I never expected anything like this to happen to me," he said one evening. He and Chester had got outside of some pretty good cherry brandy a Confederate had left behind. Booze blunted nightmares.

  "War's a filthy business," Chester said. "God knows I saw that the last time around. I think the trenches were even worse than what we're doing now. For fighting in, I mean."

  "Yeah, for fighting in," the company CO agreed. Or rather, half agreed, for he went on, "But what happened in Hardeeville, that wasn't fighting. That was just…murder for the fun of it. And what the Confederates are doing in those goddamn camps, that isn't fighting, either. That's murder for the fun of it, too, 'cause the smokes can't fight back. This war's filthier than the last one was. The horrible stuff then just kinda happened, 'cause they couldn't help it. This time, they're making it horrible on purpose."

  He knew about the last war from what he'd read and what people told him. He wasn't anywhere near old enough to have fought in it. "You have a point, sir," Chester said. "Some of a point, anyway." Disagreeing too openly with a superior didn't do. But he damn well had been through the Great War. "What about the guys who started using gas? You think they weren't being horrible on purpose?"

  "Well, you got me there," Rhodes admitted. Chester liked shooting the bull with him not least because he would admit somebody else had a point. He didn't have anything close to Boris Lavochkin's messianic confidence in his own rightness…and righteousness. What was Lieutenant Lavochkin but a scale model of Jake Featherston?

  Featherston had flushed a whole country down the toilet. Lavochkin had only a platoon to play with-so far. But Chester was part of the platoon. If the lieutenant threw it away, the first sergeant went with it.

  He didn't want to think about that, so he took another swig. Yeah, cherry brandy made a good thought preventer. The bottle was damn near empty. He passed it to Captain Rhodes, who put the kibosh on damn near.

  "Charleston up ahead," Chester said. "Won't be long now."

  "One more city," Rhodes said.

  "Oh, it's more than that." Chester knew he sounded shocked. But Rhodes would have gone to school in the lull of the 1920s. Back then, nobody thought you needed to remind anybody of just how and why the USA and CSA got to be mortal foes. They would stay peaceful and live happily ever after. And if pigs had wings…

  Chester remembered his own school days, before the Great War. They pounded you over the head with the War of Secession then. They kept saying that one day the USA would pay the CSA back. And the United States did. And then the Confederate States had some backpaying to do. And that's how come I'm sitting on my ass somewhere south of Charleston, Chester thought.

  "I wouldn't mind marching through there," he said. "Give them one in the eye for Fort Sumter, you know?"

  "Well, yeah," Rhodes said. But it didn't mean so much to him. Martin could tell. He didn't have that This is where it all began, and we'll damn well end it here, too kind of feeling. Maybe Lieutenant Lavochkin would. Or maybe he hated the whole Confederacy equally. All things considered, Chester didn't want to ask him.

  He woke with a headache the next morning. Strong coffee and a couple of aspirins helped. Incoming artillery, on the other hand…Even now, the Confederates counterattacked whenever they thought they could drive their foes back a couple of miles. A U.S. machine gun opened up no more than twenty yards from Chester. His head didn't explode, which only proved he was tougher than he thought.

  Then he had to do some shooting of his own, and that was even worse. A lot of the Confederates didn't hit the dirt as fast as they should have. New men, Chester thought with an abstract sympathy that didn't keep him from killing them as fast as he could. They would have done the same to him if they could. But they'd got thrown into the fight too soon to know what they were doing, and a lot of them would never have the chance to learn now.

  U.S. armor rattled up to put the final quietus on the Confederate attack. A couple of barrels had Negroes riding on them. The blacks had probably shown the barrel crews shortcuts through the coastal swamps. One of them gleefully blazed away at the men in butternut with a submachine gun. The cannons' bellow made Chester dry-swallow three more aspirins.

  The barrels pushed past the U.S. foot soldiers and went after the Confederates. "Come on!" Lieutenant Lavochkin yelled. "Follow me! We don't leave them to do the work by themselves." He jumped out of his hole and loped along with the green-gray machines.

  No matter what Chester thought about him, he was dead right there. Armor and infantry worked better as a team than either one did by itself. "Come on, guys!" Chester scrambled from his foxhole-he wasn't limber enough to leap the way the lieutenant did. "Let's go get those bastards!"

  Some Confederates stayed stubborn to the end, took a few Yankees with them, and died. Some gave up as soon as they could. Most of those lived; killing in cold blood a poor, scared kid who only wanted to quit didn't come easy. The ones who hesitated were lost.

  A youngster with a face full of zits and enormous gray eyes full of terror threw down his submachine gun and raised his hands high over his head. "Don't shoot me, Mr. Damnyankee!" he blubbered to Chester. He couldn't have been more than sixteen. "I give up!"

  Chester gestured with the muzzle of his rifle. As it pointed to the young soldier's midsection, a dark stain spread across his crotch.

  "Oh, Jesus!" he wailed. "I went and pissed myself!"

  "It happens," Chester said. He'd done it himself in two wars now, but he wasn't going to tell that to a kid he was capturing. He gestured with the rifle again. "Go on back there, and they'll take care of you one way or another."

  "Thank you! Thank you! God bless you!" Hands still high, the boy trudged off
toward the rear.

  And, one way or another, they would take care of him. Maybe they'd take him all the way back to a POW camp. Or maybe they'd just shoot him. Whatever they did, it wasn't Chester's worry any more.

  The damned Confederates kept fighting as hard as they could. Chester captured another guy who had to be older than he was. The National Assault Force soldier had lost his upper plate, and talked as if he had a mouthful of mush. "Maybe we fought each other the lasht time around," he said.

  "Could be," Chester allowed. "I was on the Roanoke front, and then in northern Virginia. How about you?"

  "Nope. I wash in Tenneshshee," the Confederate retread said. "Never reckon you bashtards'd get into Shouf Carolina."

  "You fuck with us, Pops, and that's what happens," Chester told him. "Go on back to the rear. They'll deal with you."

  "Uh-huh," the old-timer said bleakly. Unlike the kid, he knew what could happen to him. But he went. He'd passed the first key test: he hadn't got killed out of hand. All the others would be easier. Of course, you only had to fail one and that was all she wrote.

  "Come on!" Lieutenant Lavochkin shouted. "We push hard, we'll be in Charleston tomorrow! Maybe even by sundown!" Chester thought he was right, too. Try as they would, the Confederates didn't have enough to stop the men in green-gray.

  All of which turned out to have nothing to do with anything. The wireless man shouted for Captain Rhodes: "Sir, we've got a stop order! Nobody's supposed to advance past map square Gold-5."

  "Oh, yeah?" the company CO said. "Let me talk to Division." He talked. He listened. He talked some more. Then he did some shouting of his own: "All troops halt! I say again, all troops halt! We have to stop right here."

  "No!" Lieutenant Lavochkin said. "We've got 'em licked! The brass can't screw us out of this."

  "Lieutenant, the halt order comes straight from the War Department," Captain Rhodes said. "You can write 'em a nasty letter when this is all over, but for now we are damn well going to halt."

  "No!" Lavochkin repeated.

  "That is an order, Lieutenant." Rhodes' voice turned icy. "From the War Department and from me. Is that plain enough? Next stop, the stockade."

  "They can't keep us out of Charleston!" Lavochkin raged. "The enemy hasn't got a chance! The dumbshit brass hats in Philly don't know diddly-squat. I'm going forward anyway, and taking my men with me. We'll see you in Charleston, too."

  "No, sir," Chester Martin said. Lavochkin stared at him, caught between fury and astonishment. But a first sergeant was there to keep a lieutenant in line. Chester went on, "I think we better follow the order."

  "You'll pay for this, Sergeant," Lavochkin said.

  Chester shrugged. Slowly and deliberately, he sat down on the muddy ground and lit a cigarette. "I'll take my chances…sir." He wondered whether Lavochkin would go on by himself. The rest of the platoon was stopping. The lieutenant's face had murder all over it, but he stopped, too.

  He fumed and swore for the next three hours. "God damn it to hell, I could have been in Charleston by now. We all could," he said. Chester didn't think so, but the lieutenant wasn't so far wrong. Why had the brass called a halt with the city so close?

  When the fireball rose over Charleston, when the toadstool cloud-weirdly beautiful and weirdly terrifying-rose high above the town where the War of Secession started, he understood. So did Captain Rhodes. "Lieutenant, do you really want to get any closer to that place?" Rhodes asked.

  "Uh, no, sir," Boris Lavochkin answered in an unwontedly small voice.

  "Do you think following orders might be a good idea every once in a while, even if you don't happen to like them personally?" Captain Rhodes persisted.

  "Uh, yes, sir."

  "Congratulations. That is the right answer, Lieutenant. Do you realize you and whoever you dragged with you would have ended up dead if you did manage to break into Charleston?"

  "Uh, yes, sir," Lavochkin said again, still more softly than usual.

  "Then remember that, goddammit," Rhodes barked.

  "Yes, sir," the young lieutenant said one more time. And no doubt he would…for a while. How long? Not long enough, I bet, Chester Martin thought.

  P ortable wireless sets would have been a lot better if they lived up to their name. Luggable was more like it, as far as Leonard O'Doull was concerned. The damn things were too damn big and too damn heavy, and so were the batteries that powered them. Those batteries didn't last long enough, either.

  Still, having a wireless set was better than not having one, especially since U.S. Wireless Atlanta went on the air. USWA had the power to punch through all the jamming the Confederates put out, and it brought the word-or the U.S. version of the word-into the heartland of the CSA: over near Birmingham, for instance.

  It also gave U.S. personnel something to listen to besides Confederate Connie. Her sultry voice kept reminding O'Doull he'd been away from home too damn long. He knew she told lies every time she opened her mouth. Like hundreds of thousands of other guys, he kept listening to her anyway. She sounded like bottled sex.

  When he said something like that one evening, Eddie nodded. Then the corpsman said, "She's probably sixty and fat and ugly."

  "Yeah, she probably is-life works that way too goddamn often," O'Doull agreed. "But she sure sounds hot."

  "She doesn't do that much for me," Sergeant Goodson Lord said.

  O'Doull reached for his wrist. "Do you have a pulse, man?" Sergeant Lord jerked his arm away. Not for the first time, O'Doull wondered whether the senior medic was a fairy. How could you like women and not like Confederate Connie?

  Eddie looked at his wristwatch. "Seven o'clock," he said. "Time for the news." He switched the wireless from Confederate Connie's music to USWA.

  He couldn't have timed it better if he tried for a week. "Hello," said a deep voice with a distinctive U.S. accent. "I'm Eric Sevareid, and I'm here to tell you the real truth." All the men in the aid station grinned. How many times over how many years had they heard Jake Featherston open up a can of worms with that bullshit?

  "Hope the Confederates listen up," Goodson Lord said. "They'd better." He might be a queer, but if he was, he was a patriotic queer. Long as he doesn't grab my ass, I can live with that, O'Doull thought, and felt proud of his own tolerance.

  "Today, President La Follette again called for the surrender of the Confederate States," Sevareid said on the wireless. "In his words, 'Only by quitting the war now can the CSA hope to escape destruction of a sort the world has never seen before. Newport News and Charleston are just the beginning. We will put an end to this evil regime one way or another. Which way that will be is the only thing left for existing Confederate officials to decide.'"

  "That's telling 'em!" Eddie said. He was as mild and inoffensive a little guy as ever came down the pike, but he hated the CSA. He wouldn't have had to see so much misery if not for Jake Featherston.

  "Featherston's reply was, 'We aren't going to lay down for the United States, and they can't make us do it,'" Sevareid continued. "He is believed to have broadcast that reply from somewhere in North Carolina. Richmond, of course, is in U.S. hands. Featherston narrowly escaped the Newport News bomb, and U.S. forces are now pushing toward Hampton Roads. Before long, he will be a president without a country." The broadcaster's voice showed unmistakable satisfaction.

  "In the European half of the war, German drives against Russia continue," Sevareid said. "The Tsar's army shows signs of disintegration, but Petrograd Wireless-now broadcasting from Moscow after the destruction of Petrograd-denies reports that the Tsar is seeking an armistice from Germany."

  "If Russia bails out, England and France are done," Lord opined.

  "France is about done anyway," Eddie said. "Bye-bye, gay Paree." He waved.

  Half a lifetime spent in the Republic of Quebec speaking French almost all the time made O'Doull look at France differently from most Americans. It was the sun around which Quebec revolved whether they were on the same side or not. And when the heart
of the sun was torn out…

  "Despite the loss of Paris, France also denies any plan to leave the conflict," Eric Sevareid said. "The new King of France, Louis XIX, vows revenge against Germany. And Winston Churchill was quoted by the BBC as saying, 'We can match the Hun bomb for bomb. Let him do his worst, and we shall do our best. With God's help, it will be good enough.'"

  "With him and Featherston, the bad guys have all the good talkers," Sergeant Lord said. "Doesn't seem fair."

  "Churchill's a better speaker than Featherston any day," O'Doull said. "He's not such a bastard, either."

  "That's what you say, Doc," Eddie put in. "Ask the Kaiser, and I bet he'd tell you different."

  Since he was bound to be right-what did the Kaiser care about the CSA? — O'Doull didn't argue with him. He gave his attention to the wireless: "Japan has sent Russia an ultimatum over several Siberian provinces. If the Tsar's forces do not evacuate them, the Japanese threaten to take them by force."

  "Wait a minute!" Lord said. "The Japs and the Russians are on the same side."

  "They're on the same side against us," Leonard O'Doull said. "Otherwise? Forget it. The Japs already screwed England in Malaya. They've got Australia sweating bullets. They're the ones who've done the best for themselves in this war. If they'd driven us out of the Sandwich Islands, nobody could ever touch 'em."

  "Won't be easy, even the way things are," Eddie said.

  "They haven't used any of these new superbombs yet," O'Doull said. "I wonder how close they are to building one."

  "Well, if they weren't working on 'em before, they sure as hell are now," Goodson Lord said. That was another obvious truth.

  Back before the Pacific War, people in the USA would have wondered whether the Japanese were smart enough to do something like that. Not any more. The Pacific War was a push, or as close as made no difference, but Japan bombed Los Angeles while the United States never laid a glove on the home islands. This time around, the United States hadn't tried breaking through the Japs' island barricade, either. All the fighting had been on U.S. soil and in U.S. waters. The United States was too busy fighting for their life against the Confederacy to give Japan more than a fraction of their attention.