In at the Death Read online

  Blackledge had to wait for a Confederate officer to answer that; it wasn’t his place. After a couple of minutes, somebody did: “We’re ordered to hold this position. We don’t reckon you can drive us out. If you want to try, come ahead.”

  The lieutenant in green-gray saluted. “You asked for it. Now you’ll get it.” He turned around and went back to his own lines.

  “Hunker down, boys! Hunker down tight!” Sergeant Blackledge yelled. “We went and pissed the damnyankees off, an’ they’re gonna try and make us pay for it.”

  Jorge pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and went to work with it. What he could do to improve his foxhole wasn’t much, though. What U.S. guns could do to wreck it was liable to be a lot more. And the enemy’s cannon wasted little time before they started trying to knock Covington flat again. Jorge swore in English and Spanish when he heard gas shells gurgling in and people shouting out warnings. Gas wouldn’t do as much in the rain as it would on a clear day, but he still had to put on his mask. Raindrops on the glass in front of his eyes made him seem to peer through streaked and splattered windows. Could he shoot straight? If he had to, he had to, that was all.

  “Barrels!” That shout filled him with fear, because even with an automatic rifle he couldn’t do anything about a barrel. He had to depend on others to take care of that part of the job—and if they didn’t, he was dead even though he hadn’t made any mistakes.

  But they did. That antibarrel cannon knocked out two more U.S. machines in quick succession. The rest pulled back instead of charging into Covington.

  “You can’t answer,” Sergeant Blackledge jeered. “You ain’t got the balls to answer, you stinking Yankee cocksuckers.” Talking through the mask, he sounded as if his voice came from the far side of the moon. That made him seem more scornful, not less.

  No more barrels drew within range of the gun. U.S. infantry didn’t swarm forward, either. Machine gunners and riflemen—and the artillery—made the Confederates keep their heads down. Some of the machine guns were captured C.S. weapons. Jorge knew the difference when they fired. His own side’s guns spat far more rounds per minute than the ones the USA made.

  Like Blackledge, he thought the U.S. lieutenant was trying to bluff the defenders of Covington out of a position from which they couldn’t be forced. The truth turned out to be less simple. With all those shells landing close by, he didn’t want to stick up his head and look around. But before long he had to—he could hear something going on to the south.

  Because of what the rain was doing to the lenses on his gas mask, he couldn’t see very far. But things weren’t going well outside of town, though his ears told him more about that than his eyes could. Barrels were moving forward there—forward from the U.S. point of view, that is. They had plenty of artillery and small-arms support, too.

  What kind of line did the CSA have south of Covington? Jorge didn’t know. Up till now, he hadn’t worried about it. He realized that maybe he should have. Heavy fire came from a little east of due south. After a while, it came from due south. After another little while, it came from west of due south.

  You didn’t have to be a professor with frizzy, uncombed hair and thick glasses to figure out what that meant. The damnyankees had tried to force a breakthrough there, and it looked as if they’d done it. The next interesting question was what they would do with it. They didn’t keep anybody waiting long for an answer. Shells and machine-gun bullets came into Covington from the south as well as from the east and north. There was also firing from southwest of town, which wasn’t good. If the defenders held their ground much longer, they’d be hanging on to a surrounded town. Those stories didn’t have happy endings.

  Other soldiers saw the same thing. They must have—otherwise, why would they start slipping out of Covington to the west? And why would Sergeant Blackledge watch them slip away without ordering them to stop or, just as likely, shooting them in the back?

  “We gonna get orders to pull out, Sarge?” Gabriel Medwick asked.

  “Beats the shit out of me,” Blackledge answered. “If we don’t, though, we’ll spend the rest of the war in a POW camp…if the Yankees bother taking prisoners. If they don’t, we’ll be lucky if they waste the time to bury us.”

  Jorge didn’t worry much about what happened to his body once he was done using it. But he wasn’t—nowhere close. And dying to keep a third-rate town out of U.S. hands for a few extra minutes struck him as a waste of his precious and irreplaceable life. “When you gonna go, Sarge?” he called.

  “Pretty damn quick,” Blackledge said. “This place ain’t worth throwin’ myself down the crapper for. Unless somebody orders me to stay, I’m gone.” And if somebody did order him, he might suddenly become hard of listening. It wouldn’t surprise Jorge at all.

  Before long, a worried-sounding lieutenant said, “We’d better pull back. If we don’t, they’re liable to cut us off.”

  “Would you believe it?” Sergeant Blackledge said. “Boy, if the officers can see it, you know it must be obvious.”

  Despite the noncom’s sarcasm, Jorge felt better about pulling back with the lieutenant’s permission. U.S. forces didn’t make it easy. As soon as they realized the Confederates were withdrawing from Covington, men in green-gray pushed into the town from the northeast. Two mortar bombs burst closer to Jorge than he cared to think about. Fragments hissed and snarled past him. He felt a ghostly tug at his trouser leg, and looked down to discover a new tear. But he wasn’t bleeding.

  Things got more dangerous, not less, when he left Covington behind. The Yankees who’d broken through to the south lashed the fields with gunfire. Jorge was glad to scramble into a truck and get out of there much faster than he could have hoofed it.

  Gabe Medwick sat across from him. “We got to hold ’em somewheres, or else we ain’t gonna keep Atlanta,” he said. He might not be bright, but he had no trouble seeing that. Who would?

  “How can we hold, they keep pounding on us like this?” Jorge asked.

  “Beats me.” His buddy shrugged. “But if we don’t, we won’t just lose Atlanta. We’ll lose the damn war.”

  You also didn’t need to be bright to see that. Neither Jorge nor any of the other wet, weary soldiers in the truck tried to argue with him. They’d got out of Covington alive. Right now, that seemed more than enough.

  First Sergeant Chester Martin looked at his company’s new transport with a raised eyebrow. Command cars, halftracks, guerrilla-style pickup trucks with a machine gun mounted in the bed…anything that could move pretty fast and shoot up whatever got in the way. They were going to head east from Monroe, Georgia, till they ran into something tough enough to stop them…if they did. The Great War hadn’t been like this at all. In those days, both sides measured advances in yards, not miles.

  Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin, Martin’s platoon commander, didn’t remember the Great War or give a damn about it. Chester was supposed to ride herd on him, as he had with other young lieutenants. It wasn’t easy with Lavochkin, who had a mind and a cold, hard will of his own.

  Chester suspected Lavochkin wouldn’t stay a second lieutenant long. He had higher rank written all over him—if he didn’t stop a Confederate bullet. But one of the things that marked him for higher rank was a propensity for going where enemy bullets were thickest. Chester would have minded less had he not needed to go along.

  “My platoon—listen up!” Lavochkin said. And it was his platoon, which surprised Chester Martin more than a little. “We’re going to go out there, and we’re going to smash up every goddamn thing we bump into. We’re going to show these sorry clowns that their government and their troops aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. And we’re going to show them what war is like. If they wanted one so bad, let’s see how much they want it when it’s in their own backyard.”

  A savage baying rose from the men. Lavochkin was an unusual leader. He didn’t make his soldiers love him. He made them hate the other side instead. And he left them no doubt that
he felt the same way—or that he’d make them sorry if they were soft or hung back.

  “Nobody’s going to mind if you bring back goodies, either,” he finished. “Lavochkin’s Looters, that’s us! They’ll be howling from New Orleans to Richmond by the time we get through with ’em!”

  That got another fierce cheer from the men. They liked the idea of making the CSA pay for the war. They liked the idea of lining their own pockets while they did it, too. Chester caught Captain Rhodes’ eye. They shared bemused grins. Captain Rhodes was a pretty damn good company CO, but he didn’t know what to make of the tiger now under his command, either.

  The soldiers piled into their motley assortment of transport. Martin would have liked to get into a command car with Lieutenant Lavochkin, but Lavochkin didn’t want him that close at hand. He climbed into a halftrack instead. Yes, it was the lieutenant’s show, all right.

  Nobody seemed to expect a U.S. force to head east from Monroe. Morrell’s troops had been using the town as a pivot point for the move to isolate Atlanta. They held off C.S. attacks from the north and, that done, wheeled around Atlanta instead of trying to break in. But with the main city in Georgia still in Confederate hands, no one in butternut was ready for raiders to strike in any other direction.

  Every time the U.S. soldiers spotted an auto or truck on the road, they opened up with their machine guns. What .50-caliber slugs did to soft-skinned vehicles wasn’t pretty. What they did to softer-skinned human beings was even uglier. The shock from one of those thumb-sized bullets could kill even if the wound wouldn’t have otherwise.

  And when Lavochkin’s Looters and the rest of Captain Rhodes’ company rolled into High Shoals, the first hamlet east of Monroe…It would have been funny if it weren’t so grim. The locals greeted them with waves and smiles. It didn’t occur to them that soldiers from the other side could appear in their midst without warning.

  Lieutenant Lavochkin showed them what a mistake they’d made. He sprayed bullets around as if afraid he’d have to pay for any he brought back to Monroe. Women and children and old men ran screaming, those who didn’t fall. Glass exploded from the front windows of the block-long business district. And Lavochkin howled like a coyote.

  When he opened up, everybody else followed his lead. Grenades flew. A soldier with a flamethrower leaped out of a halftrack and shot a jet of blazing jellied gasoline at the closest frame house. It went up right away.

  High Shoals had to be too small to have a militia of its own. There were probably as many U.S. soldiers as locals in the little town. In moments, though, two or three people found old Tredegars or squirrel guns and started shooting back. Chester spotted a muzzle flash. “There!” he yelled, and pointed toward the window from which it came. A machine gun and several rifles answered, and no more bullets came from that direction.

  The raiders hardly even slowed down. Leaving ruin and death and fire behind them, they went on along the road toward Good Hope, a town that was about to see its name turn into a lie. Good Hope might have been a little larger than High Shoals, but the people there were no more ready for an irruption of damnyankees than their fellow Georgians farther west had been.

  In Good Hope, all the U.S. machine guns opened fire at once. People fell, shrieking and writhing and kicking. They looked like civilians anywhere in the USA. One of the women who caught a bullet was a nice-looking blonde. Waste of a natural resource, Chester thought, and fired his rifle at a man with a big belly and a bald head with a white fringe of hair. Another round caught him at the same time as Chester’s. He didn’t seem to know which way to fall, but fall he did.

  When the shooting started, some people came rushing out of houses and shops to see what was going on. People always reacted like that. It was the worst thing they could do, but a good many did. They paid the price for mistimed curiosity, too.

  Lavochkin shot up the filling station. That got a good blaze going in nothing flat. He whooped as flames shot skyward from the pumps. “See how you like it, you bastards!” he yelled. “Hope your whole town burns in hell!”

  As in High Shoals, a few determined people in Good Hope tried to fight back. Bullets came from upstairs windows and from behind fences. Overwhelming U.S. firepower soon silenced the locals’ rifles and pistols. But one alert and determined man drove his auto sideways across the street to try to keep the green-gray vehicles from going any deeper into Georgia. He paid for his courage with his life. A fusillade of bullets not only killed him but flattened three of the tires on the motorcar.

  And in the end he delayed the U.S. column only a few minutes. A halftrack rumbled forward and shoved the hulk out of the way. “Good thing we didn’t set the son of a bitch on fire,” Chester said. “Then we would’ve had to look for a way around.”

  “Screw it,” said the soldier sitting next to him. “We would’ve found one. C’mon, Sarge. You think these sorry civilian assholes can stop us?”

  “Doesn’t look like it—that’s for sure,” Chester answered.

  East of Good Hope, the column bumped into a platoon of short, swarthy soldiers in uniforms of a khaki yellower than the usual Confederate butternut. Mexicans, Chester realized, probably out chasing Negro guerrillas.

  Like the locals, the Mexican troops took a few fatal seconds too long to realize the approaching soldiers weren’t on their side. Some of Francisco José’s men waved and took a few steps toward the command cars and halftracks.

  “Let ’em have it, boys!” Captain Rhodes sang out. Everybody who could get off a shot without endangering U.S. soldiers in front of him opened up. The Mexicans went down like wheat before the harvester. A few tried to run. A few tried to shoot back. They got off only a handful of rounds before they were mowed down, too. A U.S. corporal yowled and swore and clutched his shoulder. Chester thought he was the first U.S. casualty of the day.

  Southeast of Good Hope lay Apalachee. Rhodes ordered the U.S. vehicles to stop about a mile outside of town. Lieutenant Lavochkin’s broad features clouded over. “You’re not going to let this place off easy, are you, sir?” he demanded. “That’s not what we’re here for.”

  “I know what we’re here for, Lieutenant. Keep your shirt on.” The company commander seemed to enjoy putting Lavochkin in his place. Chester Martin would have, too, but it wasn’t always easy for a noncom. Rhodes went on, “Mortar crews—out! Let’s give them a few rounds from nowhere before we pay our respects. That should make them good and glad to see us when we roll into town.”

  As the men with the light mortars set up and started lobbing bombs towards Apalachee, Lieutenant Lavochkin smiled a smile Chester wouldn’t have wanted to see aimed at him. Lavochkin pointed it toward the enemy, where it belonged. He gave Rhodes the most respectful salute Martin had ever seen from him.

  Apalachee might have been an ants’ nest that somebody had kicked when Captain Rhodes’ company came in. People were running every which way. Wounded men and women screamed. A few buildings had chunks bitten out of them.

  A middle-aged man in a business suit ran toward the lead command car. The left arm of his jacket was pinned up: he had no arm to fill it. “Thank God you’re here!” he yelled. “We got a call from Good Hope that there were Yankees loose, and then they went and mortared us.”

  “How about that?” Boris Lavochkin took aim with the command car’s machine gun.

  “Uh-oh,” the Georgian said: the last phrase that ever passed his lips. He started to turn away, which did no good at all. Lavochkin’s burst almost cut him in half.

  People shrieked and fled. Bullets and grenades made sure they didn’t get far. Wails filled the streets. Chester shot a man who was reaching into the waistband of his trousers. Did he have a pistol stashed there? Nobody except him would ever know now. The bullet from the Springfield blew off the top of his head.

  “This hardly seems fair,” said the private next to Chester. “Not like we’re fighting soldiers or anything.”

  “They’re all the enemy,” Chester answered, working the bol
t and chambering a new round. “If they can’t find enough soldiers to keep us from getting at civilians, what does that say?”

  “I bet it says we’re winning.” The private grinned. He had a captured C.S. automatic rifle, and lots of magazines for it. Unlike Chester, he hardly bothered aiming. He just sprayed bullets around. Some of them were bound to hit something.

  “I bet you’re right.” Chester Martin shot a man who drove his auto into range at exactly the wrong time. The fellow might not even have known U.S. soldiers were loose in Apalachee. He didn’t get much of a chance to find out, either.

  Lieutenant Lavochkin shot up another gas station—he seemed to enjoy that. This one rewarded him with a spectacular fireball. Had he been closer when he opened up, the flames might have swallowed his command car.

  “Whoa!” shouted the kid next to Chester. “Hot stuff!”

  “Yeah,” Chester said. “We’re hot stuff, and the Confederates can’t do much about it, doesn’t look like. If we had enough gas, I bet we could make it damn near to the ocean.”

  “That’d be something,” the private said.

  But things stopped being so much fun not long after they got out of Apalachee. An enemy barrel blew a command car into twisted, burning sheet metal. U.S. soldiers leaped out of the vehicles that carried them and stalked the metal monster. It wasn’t a new model, but it was plenty tough enough. It wrecked another couple of vehicles and shot several soldiers before somebody clambered up on top of it and threw grenades into the turret. That settled that: the barrel brewed up.

  “Fools,” Boris Lavochkin said scornfully. “They didn’t have infantry along to protect it.”

  “They probably didn’t have any to spare,” Chester said. Lavochkin thought that over. Then he smiled again. Any soldier in butternut who saw that smile would have wanted to surrender on the spot.