“A good line,” Taft echoed bitterly. “That’s all he cared about. But my God-if what he said about those other places is true…”
“That would be very bad,” Flora said, one of the larger understatements of her own political career. “The Confederates have had a lot of trouble with auto bombs. I wonder if they’re paying us back, or if it’s someone else.”
As she had to the reporter, Taft said, “I don’t know.”
She nodded. But her conscience niggled at her all the same. She’d applauded when she heard about auto bombs going off in the Confederate States. The Confederates, after all, deserved it for the way they treated their Negroes.
Again, who thought the United States deserved it? The Confederates, because the USA had had the gall to win the Great War? The Mormons, because the United States wouldn’t leave their precious Deseret alone? She would have bet one them, but what did she have for proof? Nothing, and she knew it. The Canadians, because the United States still held their land? The British, because the Americans had taken Canada away from them?
All of the above? None of the above?
Sounding both furious and frightened, Robert Taft went on, “We’d better get a handle on this business in a hurry. If we don’t, any damn fool with an imaginary grievance will think he can load dynamite into a motorcar and get even with the world.”
Flora’s thoughts hadn’t gone in that direction, which didn’t mean the Senator from Ohio was wrong. She said, “We’d better get a handle on this for all kinds of reasons.” Two firemen carried a moaning, bloody woman past her on a stretcher. She pointed. “There’s one.”
“Yes.” Taft tipped his fedora to her. “We have our differences, you and I, but we both love this country.”
“That’s true. Not always in the same way, but we do,” Flora said. Cops helped a wounded man stagger by. Flora sighed. “At a time like this, though, what difference does party make?”
Sergeant Michael Pound was not a happy man. His barrel-and, in fact, his whole unit of barrels-had finally escaped from the southern Ohio backwater where they’d been stuck for so long. They were facing the Confederates farther north. That should have done something to improve the gunner’s temper. It should have, but it hadn’t.
No, Pound remained unhappy, and made only the slightest efforts to hide it. He was a broad-shouldered, burly man: not especially tall, but made for slewing a gun from side to side if the hydraulics went out. He had a deceptively soft voice, and used it to say deceptively mild things. When he thought the men put above him were idiots, as he often did, he had a way of making sure they knew it.
What really irked him was that he’d been the gunner on Irving Morrell’s personal barrel. Whatever Morrell found out, Pound had learned shortly thereafter. Morrell hadn’t minded his sarcastic comments on the way the brass thought (if the brass thought at all: always an interesting question). And Michael Pound hadn’t thought Morrell was an idiot. Oh, no-on the contrary. The only thing wrong with Morrell was that his superiors hadn’t seen how good he was.
The Confederates had. After their sniper put a bullet in Morrell, Pound was the one who’d carried him out of harm’s way and back to the aid tent. Scuttlebutt said Morrell was finally back in action. That was good. The CSA would be sorry.
But Morrell wasn’t back in action here. That wasn’t good, and it especially wasn’t good for Michael Pound. He’d declined a commission several times. Now he was paying for it. Because of his reputation as a mouthy troublemaker, he didn’t even command his own barrel, though a lot of sergeants did. They’d put him under a young lieutenant instead. Pound didn’t know if they’d deliberately intended to humiliate him, but they’d sure done the job.
Bryce Poffenberger might have been born when Pound joined the Army, but probably hadn’t. But he owned a little gold bar on each shoulder strap, and Pound had only stripes on his sleeve. That meant Poffenberger was God-and if you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask him.
He never asked for Pound’s opinion. He didn’t seem to think the War Department had issued opinions to enlisted men. If he’d had a better notion of what he was doing himself, Pound wouldn’t have minded so much. But he never had been able to suffer fools gladly, and he never had been able to suffer in silence, either.
When Poffenberger ordered the barrel to stop on the forward slope of a hill, Pound said, “Sir, we would have done better to halt on the reverse slope.”
“Oh?” The second lieutenant’s voice already had a defensive quaver to it, and he’d known Pound for only a few days at that point. “Why, pray tell?”
Pray tell? Pound thought. Had anyone since the Puritans really said that? Bryce Poffenberger just had, by God. Patiently, the sergeant answered, “Because on the reverse slope we’re hull-down to the enemy, sir. This way, the whole barrel makes a nice, juicy target.”
Lieutenant Poffenberger sniffed. “I don’t believe there are any Confederates close by.” He stood up in the turret to look out through the cupola. That was something good barrel commanders did. It took a certain nerve. Poffenberger might have been a moron, but he wasn’t a cowardly moron.
Not half a minute later, a round from a Confederate antibarrel gun assassinated an oak tree just to the barrel’s left. Poffenberger ducked back down with a startled squeak. Sometimes-not often-Sergeant Pound was tempted to believe in God. This was one of those times.
“Reverse!” Poffenberger ordered the driver. “Back up!” The Confederates got off one more shot at the barrel before it put the hill between itself and the gun. Lieutenant Poffenberger eyed Michael Pound. “How did you know that was going to happen, Sergeant?”
“I have more combat experience than you do, sir,” Pound answered matter-of-factly. So does my cat, and I haven’t got a cat.
“They warned me about you,” Poffenberger said. “They told me you had a big mouth and were insubordinate.”
“They were right, sir.” Pound knew he shouldn’t sound so cheerful, but he couldn’t help it.
The young lieutenant went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “They told me you were all puffed up because you’d served with Colonel Morrell for so long, and he used to let you get away with murder. They told me you’d started to think you were a colonel yourself.”
That did hold some truth, which Sergeant Pound also knew. He said, “Sir, there was one difference between when I talked to Colonel Morrell and when I talk to you.”
“Oh?” What’s that?” Poffenberger sounded genuinely intrigued.
“When I said something to the colonel, sometimes he’d believe me before the barrel almost blew up.”
Poffenberger was a fair-haired, fair-skinned youngster from somewhere in the upper Midwest. When he turned red, it was easy to see. He turned red as a traffic light now. “Maybe you have a point, Sergeant,” he choked out. “Maybe. But I command this barrel. You don’t. There’s no getting around that.”
“I don’t want to get around it, sir,” Pound answered earnestly. “I don’t want to be an officer. I could have been an officer years ago if I wanted to put up with the bother.” Watching Lieutenant Poffenberger’s jaw drop was amusing, but only for a little while. Pound added, “I don’t want to be an officer, but I don’t want to get killed, either. Not even sergeants like getting killed… sir.”
“I didn’t think they did.” Poffenberger couldn’t have sounded any stiffer if he’d been carved out of marble.
Pound pretended not to notice. He said, “Well, in that case, sir, don’t you think we ought to scoot to one side or the other? We’re hull-down here, but we’re not turret-down, and if those butternut bastards get a halfway decent shot at us, they’ll remind us the hard way.”
He waited. How stubborn was the lieutenant? Stubborn enough not to listen to somebody with a lower rank even if not listening made getting nailed with a high-velocity armor-piercing round much more likely? Some officers-more than a few of them-were like that. They wanted to be right themselves, even if it meant being dead right. Short
of knocking them over the head, what could you do?
But Poffenberger spoke to the driver, and the barrel shifted position. Quietly, Pound said, “Thank you, sir.”
“I didn’t do it for you.” The lieutenant was testy. “I did it for the sake of the barrel.”
Like a man who’d sweet-talked a girl into bed with him, Sergeant Pound cared little about the whys and wherefores. All he cared about was that it had happened. He didn’t point that out to Lieutenant Poffenberger. He didn’t want the lieutenant thinking he’d been either seduced or screwed. And if Poffenberger hadn’t done it for love… well, so what?
No steel dart came hurtling toward them. That was the only thing that mattered. A little later, a platoon of U.S. foot soldiers went over the hill and chased away the antibarrel cannon. A tiny triumph, no doubt, but anything that looked even a little like a victory pleased Pound.
Lieutenant Poffenberger had an extra circuit on his wireless set, one that hooked him to division headquarters. When he started saying, “Yes, sir,” and, “I understand, sir,” and, “We’ll be careful, sir,” Pound started worrying. Something had gone wrong somewhere, and what was even a tiny triumph worth?
“What’s up, sir?” the sergeant prompted when his superior showed no sign of passing along whatever he’d learned.
Poffenberger gave him a resentful look, but maybe the lesson from the antibarrel gun was sticking, at least for a little while. “There are reports the Confederates are stirring around,” the lieutenant said unwillingly. Even more unwillingly, he added, “There are reports they’ve got a new-model barrel, too.”
Michael Pound nodded. “Yes, sir, I’ve heard about that. Did they give you any details on the beast?”
“What do you mean, you’ve heard about it?” Poffenberger’s eyes seemed ready to start from his head. “I just this minute got word of it.”
“Well, yes, sir.” Pound smiled. That only unnerved the lieutenant more, which was what he had in mind. “Trouble is, you have to wait for the wireless to tell you things. Enlisted men have their own grapevine, you might say. From what I’ve heard, the new enemy barrel’s supposed to be very bad news: bigger gun, better armor, maybe a bigger engine, too.”
“Jesus,” Poffenberger muttered, more to himself than to his gunner. “What the hell do we bother with espionage for? Put a few corporals on the job and they’d have Jake Featherston’s telephone number in nothing flat.”
“It’s FReedom-1776, sir,” Pound answered seriously. Poffenberger stared at him, convinced for one wild moment that he meant it. That told Pound everything he needed to know about how much he’d intimidated the lieutenant. In a gentle voice, he said, “I’m only joking, sir.”
“Er-yes.” Lieutenant Poffenberger gathered himself. The process was very visible, and so funny that Pound had to bite down on the inside of his lower lip to keep from laughing out loud. Carefully, Poffenberger asked, “How did Colonel Morrell ever put up with you?”
“Oh, we didn’t have any trouble, sir,” Pound answered. “Colonel Morrell wants to go after the bad guys just as much as I do. I hear they’ve sent him to Virginia. The people over there must be keeping him under wraps, or else we would have heard a lot more out of him.”
“I… see.” Poffenberger eyed Pound the way a man wearing a suit made of pork chops might eye a nearby bear. More than a little plaintively, the lieutenant said, “I want to go after the enemy, too.”
“Of course, sir,” Pound said in tones meant to be soothing-but not too soothing. “The point is, though, to be as sure as we can that we get them and they don’t get us.”
Poffenberger started to say something. After what had almost happened on the forward slope of the hill, though, he couldn’t say a whole lot, not unless he wanted Pound to blow a hole in it the way the antibarrel cannon had almost blown a hole in the machine he commanded. What he finally did say was, “You are a difficult man, Sergeant.”
“Why, thank you, sir!” Pound exclaimed, which only seemed to complete Lieutenant Poffenberger’s demoralization.
An officer? Who needs to be an officer? Pound thought, more than a little smugly. As long as you’ve got the fellow who’s supposed to be in charge of you eating out of the palm of your hand, you have the best of both worlds.
Bombers rumbled by overhead. Antiaircraft guns started up behind the U.S. lines-they were Confederate airplanes. By the way Poffenberger looked up at them through the cupola, they didn’t worry him nearly so much as the man with whom he shared a turret. Michael Pound… smiled.
VII
Mail call!”
Like most of his buddies, Armstrong Grimes perked up when he heard that. It wasn’t even so much that he expected mail. The only person who regularly wrote to him was his father, and Merle Grimes’ letters weren’t the most exciting in the world. But being reminded that people back home remembered the soldiers here in Utah were alive counted for a good deal.
“Jackson!” called the corporal with the mail bag.
“He’s on sentry duty,” somebody said. “I’ll take ’em for him.”
The soldier with the sack handed him half a dozen letters held together with a rubber band. He pulled out another rubber-banded clump. “Reisen!”
“I’m here,” Yossel Reisen answered, and grabbed his mail. He had a lot of family back in New York, and got tons of letters.
“Donovan!” The noncom with the mail held up some more letters and a package.
“He got wounded last Tuesday,” one of the gathered soldiers answered. The man with the mail bag started to put back the package. The soldier said, “If that’s cake or candy, we’ll keep it.”
“Depends,” the corporal said. “How bad is he?”
Etiquette required an honest answer to that question. After brief consultation, another soldier said, “He can probably eat it. Send it back to the field hospital.”
Some more names were called, including Armstrong’s. He had a letter from his father and, he was surprised to see, one from Aunt Clara. His aunt, a child of his grandmother’s old age, was only a couple of years older than he was. They’d fought like cats and dogs ever since they were tiny. He wondered what the devil she wanted with him now.
Before he could open it, the guy with the sack called, “Appleton!”
Tad Appleton’s birth name was something Polish and unpronounceable. That, at the moment, didn’t matter. Three men put what did matter into two words: “He’s dead.” One of them added, “Stopped a.50-caliber round with his face, poor bastard.” Armstrong found himself grinding his teeth. When Appleton’s body got back to Milwaukee, they’d bury him in a closed casket. No undertaker in the world could fix up what that bullet had done to him.
“Here, then.” The soldier with the mail tossed a package to the men gathered around him. That also followed etiquette-such things shouldn’t go to waste.
More letters and packages got passed out, till the sack was empty except for mail belonging to the wounded and the dead. The corporal with the sack bummed a cigarette and stood around talking with the men to whom he’d delivered the mail. A few soldiers who hadn’t got anything stood there dejectedly. Their buddies consoled them as best they could. That wasn’t just for politeness’ sake. Armstrong had seen more than one man, forgotten by the folks back home, stop caring whether he lived or died.
He opened the letter from his aunt. It turned out to be a wedding announcement. Clara was marrying somebody named Humphrey Baxter. “Humphrey?” Armstrong said. “Who the hell names their kid Humphrey?”
“There’s that actor,” Reisen said. “You know, the fellow who was in The Maltese Elephant.”
“Oh, yeah. Him.” Armstrong nodded. “This ain’t him, though, I’ll tell you that. This guy’s probably a bad actor-you know what I mean? He’s our age-gotta be-and he’s not in the Army. He’s pulling some strings somewhere, sure as hell.” He eyed the announcement with distaste. “Damn paper’s too stiff to wipe my ass with.” He scaled it away.
The letter from
his father mentioned Clara’s upcoming wedding, too. Merle Grimes had little to say about Clara’s intended. Armstrong nodded to himself. His old man had seen the elephant, and took pride in it. He wouldn’t have much use for somebody who’d managed to wiggle out of conscription.
Yossel Reisen was methodically going through his mail. He held up one letter. “My aunt was in a meeting room when that auto bomb went off in front of Congress.” He always played down being the nephew of the former First Lady. If he hadn’t downplayed it, Armstrong didn’t suppose he would have had to put the uniform back on at all. Unlike this Humphrey Baxter item, Yossel pulled his weight.
“She get out all right?” Armstrong asked.
“Uh-huh. Not a scratch, she says,” Reisen answered. “She wasn’t near the front of the building, thank God.”
“That’s good,” Armstrong said, and then, “Goddamn Mormons.” The Latter-Day Saints hadn’t claimed responsibility for the recent wave of auto bombs, but Deseret Wireless didn’t go out of its way to deny anything, either. Its tone was, Take that! Serves you right, too.
“They look just like anybody else,” Yossel said. “That makes them hard to catch, hard to stop.”
“Don’t it just?” Armstrong’s agreement was ungrammatical but heartfelt. He added, “I don’t like the way Confederate Connie goes on and on about it.”
“Well, who would?” Yossel paused. “Even when you know she’s full of crap, though, she’s fun to listen to.”
“Oh, hell, yes!” Armstrong’s agreement there was heartfelt, too. Nobody he knew took Confederate Connie even a quarter of the way seriously. Like every wireless broadcaster from the CSA, she was Jake Featherston’s mouthpiece. But a doozie of a mouthpiece she was, and she sounded like a doozie of a piece, period-she had the sexiest voice Armstrong had ever heard.
She spent a lot of time between records gloating about the auto bombs that had U.S. cities so on edge. “Now you-all know how we feel,” she would say. “We’ve been putting up with these contraptions for years. You laughed when it happened to us. Do you-all reckon we’re laughing now?” She would pause. She would giggle. “Well, you know what?… You’re right!”
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