Lee had always admired de Buys’s gallantry; to find it still displayed under such circumstances wrung from him a cry almost of despair: “Why, sir, why? What did we ever do to merit such treatment at your hands?”
“You know the answer to that,” de Buys said, and Lee remembered Andries Rhoodie’s voice, tolling like an iron bell: I do not threaten. I promise. Now the Rivington man permitted himself an expression: self-reproach. “Who would have thought we could bugger up this operation against the likes of you?”
“You mind your mouth, you son of a bitch,” the day laborer snarled, shaking de Buys like a rat. The Rivington man set his teeth against the agony that must have shot through him—then lashed out with a foot and caught his captor right between the legs. The day laborer collapsed with a groan, clutching at his privates. De Buys did not even try to run. He managed a haggard smile for Lee and another nod, as if inviting him to ask the next question.
Before Lee could speak, gunfire crackled in front of the building that had sheltered America Will Break since 1864. More screams and shouts arose from the civilians still milling about in Capitol Square. Konrad de Buys’s smile got wider. “You will not find us easy meat for your slaughter.”
“Nor did you find us so,” Lee said, which sobered the Rivington man.
Jefferson Davis said, “The snakes in their nest will presently discover, as this one has, that their plot against you miscarried, Mr. President. Again I urge you to repair to a location out of rifle range from that nest.”
Lee was about to refuse. Then he glanced at Konrad de Buys, saw the Rivington man watching him in turn. The intensity of de Buys’s gaze made him stop and think hard. The offices of America Will Break looked across Franklin Street to Mechanic’s Hall, not back toward Capitol Square. As Davis said, whatever Rivington men remained at their headquarters might well have thought their attack successful until armed men approached the building. If he stayed where he was, he gratuitously offered them a second chance to make it so.
“Very well, sir,” he said quietly. “Let us return to the Capitol, then, a building easily secured against anything short of artillery.” Davis’s nod was grateful Konrad de Buys’s face once more revealed nothing save pain and indifference. Most of the Rivington men were good at secreting away their thoughts, but Lee judged from the very blankness of the mask that de Buys concealed disappointment, not delight.
The plan had been for Sion Rogers to escort him from Capitol Square to the Presidential residence after the inaugural address, and for some other member of the Joint Committee on Arrangements to conduct Albert Gallatin Brown back to his rented house. The plan, thanks to the Rivington men, lay messily dead. So did Albert Gallatin Brown. Rogers, Lee thought, was only wounded…
Back at the Capitol, Lee sent urgent orders down to the armory and the powder works. There, if anywhere in Richmond, he would be able to lay hands on a decent number of properly trained soldiers. The Confederate capital was a city at peace; who would have imagined it needed garrisoning against its own? Lee stood surrounded by his country’s highest commanders, but they had no men to lead.
James Longstreet was saying something to the same effect, an old Indian-fighter’s joke about too many chiefs. Lee only half heard him; he was considering the extent of Konrad de Buys’s injuries. Shaking his head, he said, “You will need to see a surgeon.” Only when the words were out of his mouth did he realize he had been contemplating the best way to preserve the life of the man who, regardless of whether he had actually fired the fatal shot, had just killed his wife.
“A surgeon?” de Buys scoffed. “D’you think I care to live without my arms? That’s what he’d do to me, you know.”
“There is no other way to prevent the inevitable suppuration of your wounds—” Lee faltered. His surgeons—his time—knew no such way. The Rivington men might well.
But de Buys said,” Hang me and have done. You’ll get round to it soon enough, at all odds.” The hungry growls from everyone who heard him attested to the truth of that.
Someone tapped Lee on the back. He spun round. It was Colonel Dimmock, but for the bandsmen one of the lowest-ranking soldiers present. A bullet had clipped off the bottom of his right ear; though that side of his tunic was covered with blood, he seemed unaware he’d been wounded. He held out a weapon to Lee. “ ‘This was what those murdering swine were shooting with, sir.”
Lee took the—rifle? Even as his mind formed the word, he rejected it. The firearm was too short and stubby to merit the name. It reminded him of nothing so much as an AK-47 that had somehow been washed and left on the line to shrink. Even the metal stock, he discovered, folded around against the body of the piece to save space. The gun weighed next to nothing. He supposed de Buys and his henchmen had carried such weapons exactly because they were easy to conceal until needed.
Though de Buys was seriously injured, he held the gun well away from the Rivington man as he asked, “What do you call this thing?”
“Why should I tell you anything?” de Buys said. Then he spat out a short, sharp fragment of laughter. “But what the hell difference does a name make? It’s an—” Lee heard the name as “Oozie.” Seeing him frown in perplexity, de Buys amplified, “U-Z-I, named after Uziel Gal, the Israeli who designed it.”
“Israeli?” Lee frowned again. “Does that mean Israelite? No, never mind, you needn’t answer.” He turned to the men who had hold of de Buys. “Take him to jail. Make certain he is securely guarded. If he will not see the surgeon, do not compel him to do so; he will, after all, soon stand trial.” The soldiers nodded. Like Lee, they knew de Buys would go up on the gallows shortly after the trial was over.
They turned the Rivington man around and started to march him out of the Hall of Delegates. Only then did Lee see the four or five bullet holes in the back of de Buys’s jacket. The man had no business being on his feet, not if he’d taken those hits along with—along with the two that had actually wounded him, Lee thought uneasily; “Wait!” he said.
When he asked de Buys about his seeming invulnerability, the Rivington man smiled a nasty smile and said, “I told you we’d not be easy meat, General Lee.” Lee reached out and prodded his belly. It was hard, not with muscle but with metal or wood or something of that sort. Lee knew of no armor proof against rifle bullets. The Rivington men evidently did. No wonder the team of assassins had been so hard to bring down. He began to worry. If the Rivington men all wore it, they would be anything but easy meat.
As if to Underscore that concern, fresh firing broke out around the building America Will Break used. In a way, Lee supposed that was good news: it meant more troops were coming up to deal with the Rivington men. But it also meant they had not yet been dealt with.
The guards took Konrad de Buys away. The firing went on and on. A messenger dashed into the Capitol. Seeing Lee, he saluted raggedly and panted, “Marse Robert, them sons of bitches—begging your pardon, sir—they won’t give up for hell. We got a lot of men down out there, and I don’t know but one of theirs we kilt—son of a whore fell out the window he was shootin’ from. Can we bring up artillery to blast’ em out?”
“Whatever is wanted to accomplish the task at hand,” Lee replied at once. He ground his teeth. But for skirmishes inside Washington, his soldiers had scant experience fighting within the confines of cities. That did not appear to be true of the men of America Will Break. He thanked God that they were confined to a single building. A few hundred such fighters, especially armored like de Buys, might be able to seize and hold…even a town like Richmond. The thought was unpalatable but inescapable. He wondered how many Rivington men Rivington actually held.
Other messengers came in, bringing more word not only of the small battle across from Mechanic’s Hall but also of the carnage de Buys and his accomplices had worked. Lee’s heart sank with every piece of bad news: Alexander Stephens wounded; Judah Benjamin wounded; John Atkins, his choice to replace John Reagan as Postmaster General, dead; General Jubal Early dead with pis
tol in hand as he tried to attack the assassins; Jeb Stuart wounded. That last report hurt almost as if it had been one of his own sons, Past the bare fact of the injury, the messenger knew nothing. Lee bent his head and prayed the wound was not severe.
A Napoleon roared, and a moment later another. Lee heard the rending crash of twelve-pound iron roundshot battering masonry. He briefly wondered why the gun crews did not come to closer quarters and blast the Rivington men from their holes with case shot. Then he scorned himself for a fool. Even Springfields could murder an artillery crew that got close enough to fire case shot. Against riflemen with repeaters, the ploy was suicidal.
The brass cannon boomed again, and again, but then they fell silent. Small-arms fire continued. Lee paced the Hall of Delegates chamber like a caged lion, waiting for another messenger to come and let him know what was going on. He wished he could lead from the front, as he had in his U.S. Army days. But that role did not suit a commanding general, much less the President of the Confederate States.
At last a messenger did arrive. Lee all but sprang at him, only to recoil in dismay when he gave his news: “Bastards picked off the gunners faster’n they could serve their pieces, even at long range. They ain’t all dead, nothin’ like that, but most all of ‘em’s shot.”
Lee groaned. Sharpshooters with telescopes mounted above their rifles might have been able to hit artillerymen at a thousand yards or more, but he hadn’t thought AK-47s capable of such work. When he turned away, his eye fell on the—the UZI, de Buys had called it. He shook his head, annoyed at himself again. How could he assume AK-47s were the only guns in the Rivington men’s arsenal? The answer was simple but painful: he couldn’t.
Rifle fire rose to a new crescendo. Forgetting the dignity and importance of his office, Lee started for the doorway to find out what had happened and to take charge. Colonel Dimmock’s bulky body blocked his path. “No, sir,” the chief marshal said. “Here you stay till it’s over.”
“Stand aside,” Lee ordered. Dimmock did not move. He outweighed Lee by at least thirty pounds, and even the thought of forcibly shoving him aside reminded Lee that, trapped by his duty, he had to obey the chief marshal. He dipped his head to Dimmock. “I beg your pardon, sir. You are in the right.”
But waiting came hard, hard. The rattle of small-arms fire slowed, flared, slowed, flared once more, stopped. When the lull stretched to two minutes, Lee tried pushing past Colonel Dimmock again. Again the colonel refused to yield his place. Lee tossed his head like a man trying to bite his own ear. Dimmock ignored the show of temper. Bare moments later, the gunfire began again. Sighing, Lee apologized again.
A new messenger entered the Hall of Delegates. “Sir, it’s a hell of a mess out there. If those Rivington sons of bitches had a clear field of fire all around their damn building, we’d never get close enough to shoot at ‘em, all the lead they’re throwing around. We had us a little truce to move the wounded a while back—that’s what the quiet was. Hope you don’t mind that.”
“No, by no means,” Lee said. “We must do what we can for our men. Press on with the attack, and since the cover of the surrounding structures is proving our principal advantage, be sure to use it well.”
The soldier saluted and hurried away. The gunfire from around the AWB headquarters went on and on. It was nearly sunset when the racket peaked in a few seconds of sustained shooting at full automatic that stopped as abruptly as the fall of a headsman’s axe.
When yet another messenger came in, Lee pounced on him. The man looked weary but triumphant, an expression Lee had seen on soldiers since before the Mexican War. “The last of them murderin’ creatures is dead,” the fellow said. A cheer went up from everyone who heard him. He went on, “We finally got some troops into the building. Took some doin’—them Rivington bastards had the door barricaded so we couldn’t noways knock it down. Finally some of our boys made ‘em keep their heads down while some more went in through the windows. That distracted ‘em, made ‘em fight two bunches at once. They died hard, but they’s dead.”
“God bless you, Corporal,” Lee said. The messenger’s sleeves were bare of stripes. He looked confused for a second, then grinned enormously. Lee turned to Colonel Dimmock. “With your gracious permission, sir—?” The chief marshal stepped out of the doorway.
Officers and bandsmen formed up around Lee as he went outside. He did not want them, but they refused to go away. After brief annoyance, he decided he could not properly be angry with them: they had their duty, too. For that matter—something he thought of too late, had it been true—the last messenger might have been a Rivington man in disguise, aiming to lure him out of the safety of the Capitol.
He hurried west toward the statue of Washington. Capitol Square had emptied of healthy civilians, save for the doctors who moved from one of the wounded to the next, doing what they could. That, Lee knew, was pitifully little. No doubt the Rivington men, with their century and a half of added knowledge, could have given more effective treatment—but had it not been for the Rivington men, none of these poor wretches would have lain here at all. A small tincture of guilt colored Lee’s rage: had the people not come out to see and hear him, they would not lie here, either.
A four-wheeled military ambulance clattered eastward. Every bump made the wounded within cry out. Lee bit his lip. At least one of those wounded was a woman. War had spared him at least that horror. Now he met it in alleged peacetime, on what should have been one of the high days of his life.
He called to the ambulance driver,” Are you taking them to General Hospital Number Twelve?”
“No, sir, I got to go on to Chimborazo,” the driver said. “Number Twelve’s full up.” He clucked to his horses, flicked the reins. The ambulance sped up. So did the cries from inside it. Lee’s heart went out to those poor hurt souls. Chimborazo Military Hospital, out on the eastern edge of town, was twice as far from Capitol Square as Military Hospital Number Twelve, which meant they would have twice the jolting journey to endure.
It also meant the butcher’s bill in the square was small only by comparison to a stand-up fight during the Second American Revolution. General Hospital Number Twelve could take in more than a hundred people. If it was already filled…He wondered just how many wounded had had to go to Chimborazo. He promised himself the Rivington men would pay for every one.
He started to go up to the covered platform on which he’d taken his oath of office, but stopped when he saw the dead and injured had been taken away. Only the bloody rills that ran down the timbers of the front and sides told of the chaos that had reigned here a few hours before.
He wondered where they had taken Mary. He wanted to see her, to say how sorry he was for inviting her up onto the stand, to say good-bye. No time now. He hoped she would know without his telling her. She was often sharp-tempered; with her endless bodily afflictions, who could blame her? But after thirty-seven years, she knew him—had known him, he corrected himself, still not truly believing it in his heart—about as well as one person can know another.
The bodies of the five men who had accompanied Konrad de Buys still lay where they had fallen. They were not a pretty sight. All but one had been shot in the head; the sole exception, who looked absurdly peaceful by comparison to his comrades, had bled to death from a thigh wound.
Rips in coats and shirts told of other rounds that had struck without doing damage. Lee’s lips thinned—they’d all been armored like de Buys. No wonder they’d been so hard to bring down. With that armor, maybe they’d thought they could escape once they’d done their murderous work. If so, they’d proved mistaken, there as elsewhere.
None of the assassins still gripped his UZI. Lee hoped that meant the guns had been taken to someone responsible—with luck, to Josiah Gorgas, who would no doubt be delighted to have such fascinating new toys to play with. And if not, well, if not, a thief would be able to use the UZIs only until they ran out of ammunition.
“Where now, sir?” one of the bandsmen asked whe
n Lee shifted his direction again.
“To the offices of America Will Break,” he said in a voice like stone.
The corner of Franklin and Ninth was another scene whose like Lee had not known since the war. As in Capitol Square, physicians and ambulances swarmed liked bees. Bullet holes scarred and pitted the face of Mechanic’s Hall. A Confederate soldier shot through the head hung half in, half out of one window. Across the street was an identically dead, identically placed Rivington man.
The headquarters of America Will Break had taken far worse damage than Mechanic’s Hall; the twelve-pounder shot had blown several gaping holes in its brick and marble front. Only blind luck the building didn’t go up inflames, Lee thought. Fire spread so easily and was so hard to fight. He remembered the charred Richmond of the Picture History of the Civil War, and had to shiver. That disaster could have happened here.
He pointed to the roof, above which the red, white, and black AWB flag still flew. “Someone cut that down at once.”
A couple of soldiers hurried off to do his bidding. One of them said, “We ought to save it with our captured Yankee battle flags.” That had not occurred to Lee; he’d simply wanted the hateful banner cast on the rubbish heap. But the soldier had a point. The Confederacy had won a battle here, but the cost, the cost…
Lee followed the men into the building, looked around curiously. Part of the curiosity sprang from his never having been here before; the Rivington men had come to him rather than he to them. But some of his curiosity was also professional: here he had the chance to learn what hard combat inside a building did to it. He shook his head, not liking what he saw.
The trail of blood and crumpled bodies led him to the suite of offices America Will Break had used. Corpses in Confederate gray far outnumbered those in mottled green; the Rivington men had fought like devils—or perhaps they had simply preferred dying in action to the gallows. Brass cartridge cases clinked, an incongruously cheerful sound, as Lee kicked them out of his path.
The Guns of the South Page 57