American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold Read online

  A bullet cracked past Jefferson Pinkard’s head. He ducked, not that that would do him any good if the bullet had his name on it. Somewhere not far off, rebel Mexican machine gunners started firing at something they imagined they saw. A field gun banged away, flinging shells into the uplands town of San Luis Potosí.

  Like most Confederates, Pinkard had thought of the Empire of Mexico as his country’s feebleminded little brother—when he’d bothered thinking of it at all, which wasn’t very often. In the comfortable days before the war, the Empire did as the Confederacy asked. The Confederates, after all, shielded Mexico from the wrath of the USA, which had hated the Empire since its creation during the War of Secession.

  The truth, nowadays, was more complicated. The USA backed the rebels against the Empire. The CSA couldn’t officially back Maximilian III, but Freedom Party volunteers like Pinkard numbered in the thousands—and the Freedom Party wasn’t the only outfit sending volunteers south to fight the Yankees and their proxies.

  That all seemed straightforward enough. What Jeff hadn’t counted on was that there would have been—hell, there had been—rebels even without U.S. backing. Maximilian III would never land on anybody’s list for sainthood.

  Pinkard shrugged. “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch, by God,” he muttered. Behind him, another field gun, this one on his side, started answering the rebels’ piece. It seemed to be firing as much at random as the enemy gun.

  Stupid bastards, he thought, not sure whether he meant the enemy or his own side. None of them would have lasted long during the Great War; he was sure of that. Both sides were brave enough, but neither seemed to know just what it was supposed to do. They lacked the experience C.S. and U.S. forces had so painfully accumulated.

  Another machine gun started rattling. Ammunition was tight. Both sides imported most of it. That didn’t keep gunners from shooting it off for the hell of it. Who was going to tell ’em they couldn’t? They had the weapons, after all.

  A Mexican private came up to Jeff. Like Pinkard’s, his cotton uniform was dyed a particularly nasty shade of yellow-brown. It looked more like something from a dog with bad digestion than a proper butternut, but all the greasers and the Confederate volunteers wore it, so Jeff could only grouse when he got the chance. He couldn’t change a thing. The Mexican said, “Buenos días, Sergeant Jeff.” It came out of his mouth sounding like Heff. “The teniente, he wants to see you.”

  “All right, Manuel. I’m coming.” Pinkard pronounced the Spanish name Man-you-well. He took that for granted, though what the locals did to his never ceased to annoy him. He walked bent over. The Mexicans built trenches for men of their size, and he overtopped most of them by half a head. The rebel snipers weren’t nearly so good as the damnyankees had been up in Texas, but he didn’t want to give ’em a target. He nodded to Lieutenant Hernando Guitierrez. “What can I do for you, sir? En qué puedo servirle?” Again, he made a hash of the Spanish.

  It didn’t matter, not here. Lieutenant Guitierrez probably spoke better English than Pinkard did. He was every bit as tall, too, though not much more than half as wide through the shoulders. By his looks, he had a lot more Spaniard and a lot less Indian in him than did most of the men he commanded. He said, “I have a job for you, Sergeant.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Pinkard agreed.

  “Er—yes.” The Mexican lieutenant drummed his fingers on his thigh. Jeff had a pretty good idea what was eating the fellow. He was only a sergeant himself (and he’d never risen higher than PFC in the C.S. Army), but he got more money every month than Guitierrez did. And, although he was only a sergeant, it wasn’t always obvious that his rank was inferior to the other man’s. Why else were Confederate volunteers down here, if not to show the greasers the way real soldiers did things?

  “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” Jeff asked again, not feeling like pushing things today.

  Guitierrez gave him what might have been a grateful look. “You are familiar, Sergeant, with the machines called barrels?”

  “Uh . . . yeah.” Pinkard was familiar enough to start worrying, even though the clanking monsters had been few and far between in Texas during the Great War—especially on the Confederate side. “What’s the matter? The rebels going to start throwing ’em at us? That’s real bad news, if they are.”

  “No, no, no.” The Mexican officer shook his head. He had a sort of melancholy pride different from anything Pinkard had known in his own countrymen. “We have three, built in Tampico by the sea and coming up here to the highlands by railroad. I want you to lead the infantry when we move forward with them against the peasant rabble who dare to oppose Emperor Maximilian.”

  “You people built barrels?” Once he’d said it, Jeff wished he hadn’t sounded quite so astonished. But that was too late, of course.

  Lieutenant Guitierrez’s lips thinned. “Yes, we did.” But then he coughed. He was a proud man, but also an honest man. “I understand the design may have come from the Confederate States—unofficially, of course.”

  “Ah. I get you.” Jeff laid a finger by the side of his nose and winked. The Confederates couldn’t build barrels on their own. The Yankees would land on them with both feet if they tried. But what happened south of the border was a different story. “When does the attack go in, and what are we aiming for?”

  “We want to drive them from those little hills where they can observe our movements. They are shelling San Luis Potosí from that forward position, too,” Guitierrez replied. “If all goes well, this will be a heavy blow against them. As for when, the attack begins the morning after the barrels come into place.”

  He didn’t say when that morning would be. He was probably wise not to. For one thing, Pinkard had already discovered what mañana meant. For another, barrels, no matter who built them, broke down if you looked at them sideways. Pinkard grunted. “All right, Lieutenant. Soon as they get here, I’ll lead your infantry against the rebels. You’ll follow along yourself to see how it’s done, right?”

  He wasn’t calling Guitierrez a coward. He’d seen the other man had courage and to spare. And Guitierrez nodded now. “Claro que sí, Sergeant. Of course. That is why you are here: to show us how it is done.”

  Jeff grunted again. In one sense, the Mexican lieutenant was right. In another . . . Pinkard was here because his marriage was as much a casualty of the Great War as a fellow with a hook for a hand. He was here because he had a fierce, restless energy and an urgent desire to kill something, almost anything. He couldn’t satisfy that desire back in Birmingham, not unless he wanted to fry in the electric chair shortly thereafter.

  Three days later—not a bad case of mañana, all things considered—the barrels came into position, clanking and rattling and belching and farting every inch of the way. Pinkard wasn’t surprised to find more than half their crewmen were Confederate volunteers. He was surprised when he got a look at the barrels themselves. They weren’t the rhomboids with tracks all around that the CSA, following the British lead, had used during the Great War. And they weren’t quite the squat, hulking monsters with a cannon in the nose and machine guns bristling on flanks and rear the USA had thrown at the Confederacy.

  They did have a conning tower like that of a U.S. barrel—their crewmen called it a turret. It revolved through some sort of gear mechanism, and carried a cannon and a machine gun mounted alongside it. Two more bow-mounted machine guns completed their armament. “Since the turret spins, we don’t need nothin’ else,” a crewman said. “Means we don’t have to try and shoehorn so many men inside, neither.”

  “Sounds like somebody’s been doing a lot of thinking about this business,” Pinkard said.

  “Reckon so,” the other man agreed. “Now if the same somebody would’ve thunk about the engine, too, we’d all be better off. A good horse can still outrun these miserable iron sons of bitches without breathing hard.”

  During the Great War—even the attenuated version of it fought out in Texas—a
big artillery barrage would have preceded the barrels’ advance. Neither side in this fight had enough artillery to lay down a big barrage. It didn’t seem to matter. The barrels rolled forward, crushing the enemy’s barbed wire and shooting up his machine-gun nests. “Come on!” Pinkard shouted to the foot soldiers loyal to Maximilian III. “Keep up with ’em! They make the hole, an’ we go through it. Stick tight, and the enemy’ll shoot at the barrels and not at you so much.”

  That was how things had worked during the Great War. In English and horrible Spanish, Jeff urged his men forward. Forward they went, too. The only thing he hadn’t counted on was the effect barrels, even a ragged handful of barrels, had on troops who’d never faced them before. The rebels, or the braver men among them, tried shooting at the great machines. When their rifle and machine-gun bullets bounced off the barrels’ armor, they seemed to decide the end of the world was at hand. Some ran away. The barrels’ machine guns scythed them down like wheat at harvest time. Others threw down their rifles, threw up their hands, and surrendered. “Amigo!” they shouted hopefully.

  Jefferson Pinkard had never had so many strangers call him friend in all his born days. In Texas, the Confederates had gone raiding to catch a handful of Yankee prisoners. Here, prisoners were coming out of his ears. “What do we do with ’em, Sergeant?” asked a soldier who spoke English—maybe he’d worked in the CSA once upon a time. “We go—?” The gesture he made wasn’t the throat-cutting one Pinkard would have used, but it meant the same thing.

  For once, Jeff’s blood lust was sated. Slaughter in the heat of battle was as fine as taking a woman, maybe finer. Killing prisoners felt like murder. Maybe I’m still a Christian, after all. “Nah, they’ve surrendered,” he answered. “We’ll take ’em back with us. We’d better. Till those barrels break down, they’re gonna keep bringin’ in plenty more.”

  “Sí, es verdad,” the soldier said, and translated Pinkard’s words for the other Mexicans. They all assumed he knew how to handle a flood of prisoners of war, too—including the prisoners themselves, who swarmed up to him to kiss his hands and even try to kiss his cheeks in gratitude for being spared.

  “Cut that out!” he roared. It made him wish he had ordered a massacre. Instead, he led the captured rebels—who were even more ragged and sorry-looking than the Mexican imperialists—back out of the fighting. Once he got them behind the line, he had to figure out what to do with them next. Nobody else seemed to want to do anything that looked like thinking.

  He commandeered some barbed wire and some posts to string it from. After he herded the prisoners into the big square he’d made, he told off guards to make sure they didn’t head for the high country. Then he had to yell to make sure they got something—not much, but something—to eat and drink. And he had to go on yelling, to make sure mañana didn’t foul things up. By the time three or four days went by, all the Mexicans assumed he was in charge of the prisoner-of-war camp. Before very much longer, he started thinking the same thing himself.

  Colonel Irving Morrell hated soldiering from behind a desk. He always had. As best he could tell, he always would. And he especially hated it when there was fighting going on and he found himself a thousand miles away. The reports filtering north from the civil war in the Empire of Mexico struck him as particularly maddening—and all the more so because he couldn’t get anybody else in the War Department to take them seriously.

  “God damn it, the imperialists are cleaning up with these new barrels of theirs,” he raged to his superior, a stolid senior colonel named Virgil Donaldson. He waved papers in Donaldson’s face. “Has anybody besides me read this material? By what it’s saying, they’ve got just about all the features we put on our fancy prototype at Fort Leavenworth. But we built our prototype and said to hell with it. Those bastards have got a production line going in Tampico.”

  Colonel Donaldson puffed on his pipe. He had a big red face and a big gray mustache. He looked more like somebody’s kindly uncle than a General Staff officer. He sounded like somebody’s kindly uncle, too, when he said, “Take an even strain, Colonel Morrell. You’ll burst a blood vessel if you don’t, and then where will you be?”

  “But, sir—!” Morrell waved the papers again.

  “Take an even strain,” Donaldson repeated. He liked the phrase. Before Morrell could explode, Donaldson went on, “Who cares what a bunch of goddamn greasers are up to, anyway?”

  “But it’s not just greasers, sir,” Morrell said desperately. “These barrels have Confederate mercenaries as crew. They’ve got to have Confederates designing them, too. And the Confederate States aren’t allowed to build barrels. The armistice agreement makes that as plain as the nose on my face.”

  A ceiling fan spun lazily. A fly buzzed. Outside Donaldson’s window, summer heat made the air shimmer. The government building across the street from General Staff headquarters might have belonged to some other world, some other universe. Morrell laughed softly. He’d had that feeling about the General Staff before, with no tricks of the eye to start it going.

  Trying to come back to what he was sure was reality, he said, “We ought to protest to Richmond. The Confederate government is turning a blind eye toward what has to be several regiments’ worth of their veterans going south to fight on Maximilian’s side. That may not be against the letter of their agreements with us, but it’s dead against the spirit.”

  After another puff on that pipe, Colonel Donaldson said, “Nice idea, but don’t hold your breath. President Sinclair is looking for good relations with the CSA. He doesn’t want to bother Richmond with trifles, and he thinks anything this side of a Confederate invasion of Kentucky is a trifle.”

  Morrell muttered something under his breath. It wasn’t that he thought Donaldson was wrong. No, he feared his superior was right. “Why did we bother to win the war, if we won’t make it count?”

  “You’d have to talk to President Sinclair about that, Colonel Morrell,” Donaldson answered. “Why isn’t my job, or yours, either. It’s for the civilians. They decide what to do, and they tell us. Doing it is our department.”

  “I know, sir.” The lesson had been drilled into Morrell since his West Point days. During the War of Secession, U.S. generals had spoken of overthrowing the republic and becoming military dictator. Then they’d gone out and lost the war, so they’d never had the chance to do more than talk about it. No one had wanted to take the risk of such things since, though it was only now, a lifetime later, that the United States had to deal with the consequences of victory rather than defeat.

  “In fairness, we could use some peace and quiet with Richmond right about now,” Donaldson said. “After all, we’ve got Germany to worry about, too.”

  “Well, yes,” Morrell admitted reluctantly. He knew why he was reluctant to admit any such thing, too: “But if we ever do fight the Kaiser, that’ll be the Navy’s worry, not the Army’s. At least, I have a devil of a time seeing how the Germans could invade us, or how we could land troops in Europe.”

  “It wouldn’t be easy, would it?” Donaldson said. “But, of course, a lot depends on who’s friends with whom. The Germans have the same worries about France and England as we do about the CSA. And God only knows what’s going to happen to the Russians, even now. They’re having more trouble putting down their Reds than the Confederates ever did during the war.”

  “Not our worry, thank God.” Morrell chuckled. The puff of smoke Donaldson sent up might have been a fragrant question mark. Morrell explained: “The Russian Reds make up the best names for themselves. I especially like the two who are operating in that town on the Volga—Tsaritsin, that’s the name of the place. The Red general is the Man of Steel, and his second-in-command goes by the Hammer. The Reds in the CSA weren’t so fancy.”

  “They were nothing but a bunch of coons,” Donaldson said. “You can’t expect much from them.”

  That made Morrell thoughtful. “I wonder,” he said. “I do wonder, sir. When I was in the field, I ran up against Negro re
giments a few times. Far as I could tell, they didn’t fight any worse than raw regiments of white Confederate troops.”

  “Huh.” The older man sounded deeply skeptical. But then he shrugged. “That’s not our worry, either, thank God.”

  “No, sir,” Morrell agreed. “Are you sure there’s no point to writing that report about the barrels down in Mexico, sir? I really do think that’s alarming.”

  Donaldson sighed the sigh of a man who’d been a cog in a bureaucratic machine for a long time. “You can write the report, Colonel, if it makes you happy. I’ll even endorse it and send it on. But I can tell you what will happen. The most likely thing is, nothing. It’ll go into a file here along with a million other reports. That’s what happens if you’re lucky.”

  “I don’t call that luck,” Morrell said.

  “Compared to the other thing that could happen, it’s luck,” Donaldson told him. “Believe you me, it’s luck. Because the other thing that could happen is, somebody reads the report and passes it on to somebody else, somebody outside the General Staff, and it gets into the hands of one of those precious civilians—say, somebody like N. Mattoon Thomas, the assistant secretary of war.”

  “But he’s just the man—just the sort of man—who ought to see a report like this one,” Morrell said. “He thought well of the one I did on the mess in Armenia.”

  “Well, maybe. But maybe not, too. Armenia’s a long ways off, you see. The Confederate States are right next door,” Colonel Donaldson said. “If you’re lucky, he reads it and then he throws it into a file in the War Department offices. Different file, but that’s all right.” He held up a hand to silence Morrell, then went on, “If you’re not so lucky, he reads it and he thinks, Who’s this smart-aleck soldier trying to tell me how to do my job? And if that’s what somebody like N. Mattoon Thomas thinks, pretty soon you’re not here in Philadelphia any more. You’re commanding a garrison in the middle of nowhere: Alberta or Utah or New Mexico, somewhere like that.”