In at the Death Read online

  Mouradian had already slammed the round into the breech. The gunner fired the piece. The cannon’s bellow was slightly muffled inside the turret. Smoke and fire spurted from the heart of the bushes. Michael Pound whooped and thumped Sergeant Scullard on the back. “Gimme another round!” Scullard told the loader. He fired again. More flames burst from the bushes. Shame Moses isn’t here, Pound thought.

  “Sir, I think that son of a bitch is history,” Scullard said.

  “I think you’re right,” Pound said. “And if you weren’t so quick—and if you weren’t so sure about what was hiding there—we would be instead.” He spoke into the intercom: “Move forward—carefully. I want to see what the hell we killed.”

  “Yes, sir,” the driver answered.

  By the time Pound’s barrel drew near, the bushes were burning briskly. Through them, he got a pretty good look at a low hull, a turret as smoothly curved as a turtle’s carapace, and a gun that looked as if it came off a destroyer.

  “Fuck,” Scullard said again. “Gonna be a ton of work killing these babies.”

  “We can do it. You did it,” Pound said.

  “I know,” the gunner said. “But they can kill us, too, easy as you please. I hope the Confederates don’t have a lot of ’em.”

  “Me, too,” Pound admitted. “We can’t go marching around like no gun can touch us any more—that’s for sure.” Sometimes U.S. new-model barrels, confident in their armor, would almost dare C.S. machines to shoot at them. If you did that against one of these barrels, they’d bury your ashes in a tobacco pouch.

  He got on the wireless to pass what he’d found to division HQ. “Roger that,” came the reply. “We’ve had a couple of other reports about them.”

  The soldier on the other end of the connection sounded calm and relaxed. Why not? He was well behind the line. “Why the devil didn’t you pass the word along?” Pound yelled. “You damn near got me killed!”

  “We said the losses were due to enemy barrels,” the wireless man answered, as if that were enough. He probably thought it was.

  Pound took off the earphones. “We can beat the enemy,” he said to nobody in particular, “but God help us against our own side.”

  “Headquarters being stupid again?” Scullard asked sympathetically.

  “They’d have to wise up to get to stupid.” Warming to his theme, Pound added, “They’ve got their headquarters in their hindquarters.”

  “And we’re the ones who’ll end up paying for it,” the gunner predicted.

  “Guy in one of our uniforms coming up,” Mouradian said.

  That sent Pound out of the cupola again, a captured Confederate submachine gun at the ready. Just because somebody wore a U.S. uniform, he wasn’t necessarily a U.S. soldier. But he stopped by himself before Pound could tell him not to come any closer. “You nailed that fucker,” he said. His harsh accent claimed he was from Kansas or Nebraska, but that didn’t prove anything, either.

  “Yeah,” Pound answered. “And so?”

  “More of ’em around—bound to be,” said the U.S. soldier—Pound supposed he was a U.S. soldier, anyhow. “Can you clear ’em out?”

  “Who knows?” Pound didn’t just look at the monstrous machine his barrel had just wrecked. He looked back at the U.S. barrel the Confederates had killed. Those were five men of his, five friends of his, gone in the wink of an eye. He hadn’t had even a moment to grieve. He still didn’t, not really.

  “Those other guys, they walked into a buzz saw,” the infantryman in green-gray said. “Bam! Bam! Bam! They went out one after another. I don’t think they ever knew what got ’em.”

  Pound hoped the men in the barrel from his platoon didn’t know what got ’em. Was that a 4½-inch gun on the C.S. machine? A fiveincher? Whatever it was, it was devastating.

  A Confederate machine gun started snarling. The foot soldier threw himself flat. Pound ducked down into the turret. He got on the platoon circuit with the survivors: “We’re moving up. For God’s sake, watch it. We aren’t the biggest cats in the jungle any more.”

  How many of those big barrels did Featherston’s men have? How fast were they? How maneuverable? How well did they do on bad ground? A barrel’s engine could be as important a weapon as its gun. But the gun in that bastard…

  “Kinda revs up the pucker factor, doesn’t it, sir?” Scullard said, which came unpleasantly close to echoing Pound’s thoughts.

  “Maybe a little,” he answered, his voice as dry as he could make it. He didn’t want to admit he was scared, but he couldn’t very well deny it, either. He got on the wireless: “Any chance of sending up some more armor to G-5? We don’t know what’s ahead of us, and it feels pretty naked around here.”

  “Well, we’ll see what we can do,” said the wireless operator on the other end of the line. He was sitting in a chair under canvas somewhere. For all Michael Pound knew, he was eating bonbons and patting a cute nurse on the ass to hear her giggle. He wasn’t up here at the sharp end of the wedge, wondering if he’d cook like a pot roast in the next few seconds.

  Two rounds of HE silenced that chattering machine gun. The country was pine woods and little clearings. Pound stayed away from the clearings when he could and dashed across when he couldn’t. Somewhere ahead lay the Georgia Southern line, somewhere ahead and to the right the unreduced town of Fayetteville. If everything worked, the enemy would have to abandon it along with Atlanta. Pound had been confident. He wished he still were.

  He also wished the enemy were still counterattacking. That would have made things easier. Then those big honking barrels would have had to show themselves. As things were, they lurked in ambush. The only way to find one was…the hard way.

  Having foot soldiers along came in handy. Pound waited in the woods while the men in green-gray trotted across a field. A big round of HE slammed into the poor bloody infantry. Some U.S. soldiers went flying, while others flattened out and dug in.

  “See where that came from, sir?” Scullard asked.

  “Bearing was almost straight ahead of us—behind that twisted tree with the chunk of bark missing,” Pound answered, peering through the periscopes. “If he’s smart, he’ll back away—he ought to figure our guys have armor with ’em.”

  “Maybe he’ll get greedy instead,” the gunner said.

  Pound wouldn’t have, but the enemy crew did. They fired twice more at the infantrymen in the field. They had good targets in front of them, and they were going to take advantage of it. To give them their due, they didn’t have any room to retreat, not if the CSA wanted to hang on to the railroad line.

  “Identify ’em now, Mel?” Pound asked.

  “Oh, hell, yes,” Scullard said, and then, to the loader, “AP!” He added, “Be ready for another round as fast as you can. If the first one doesn’t do the trick, we’ve got to try again.”

  “Right,” Mouradian said.

  If the second one doesn’t do the trick, we’ve got to get away—if we can, Pound thought. The C.S. barrel would know where the shots were coming from, and would answer. Pound didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that reply.

  The gun spoke twice in quick succession. Scullard didn’t wait to see if the first round hit before sending the second on its way. As soon as he’d fired both of them, Pound shouted, “Reverse!” The barrel jerked backward.

  No enemy antibarrel rounds came after it. Pound popped out of the turret to see what they’d done to the C.S. barrel. Smoke rose from behind the tree, an ever-growing cloud. He spotted motion back there—somebody’d got out and was running away. That impressed him in spite of himself. His own barrel wouldn’t have let anybody inside survive, not after it got hit twice. The Confederates had themselves some deadly dangerous new toys here. He hoped like anything they didn’t have too many of them.

  V

  Irving Morrell posed for U.S. photographers in front of the Atlanta city hall. New Year’s Day for 1944 was chilly and overcast, with the wet-dust smell of rain in the air. Morrell didn’t
care. He would have posed for these pictures in the middle of a deluge.

  “A year ago, we were still mopping up in Pittsburgh,” he said. “Now we’re here. We’ve done pretty damn well for ourselves, by God.”

  “Did you expect the Confederates to evacuate the city?” a reporter asked.

  “They were going to lose it either way,” Morrell answered. “The question was, would they lose Atlanta, or would they lose Atlanta and the army that was holding it? They saved a good part of the army by pulling out.”

  They’d saved more than he wished they would have. They’d started the evacuation at night, and bad weather had kept U.S. fighter-bombers on the ground, so their columns hadn’t got the pounding they should have. Patton’s army was still a going concern, somewhere over near the Alabama border. Morrell didn’t know what his C.S. opposite number would do with the men he had left, but he figured Patton would think of something.

  A rifle banged, not too far away. Holdouts and snipers still prowled Atlanta. The Confederates had planted lots of mines. They’d attached booby traps to everything from fountain pens to toilet seats. The Stars and Stripes might fly here, but the town wasn’t safe, and wouldn’t be for quite a while.

  “How much does this victory mean?” another reporter called.

  “Well, the enemy will have a lot tougher time fighting the war without Atlanta than he would have with it,” Morrell said. “It was a factory town and a transport hub, and now he’ll have to do without all that.”

  The reporter waved at the wreckage. “Doesn’t look like he could have done too much with it even when he had it.”

  “You’d be amazed,” Morrell said. “We’ve seen how places that look beaten to death can go right on producing till they finally change hands.”

  A plaque on the bullet-pocked terra-cotta wall behind him said ATLANTA RESURGENS, 1847–1927. The city hall had gone up in the brief spell of prosperity that followed the CSA’s devastating postwar inflation. Then the worldwide economic collapse sucked down the Confederacy along with almost everybody else, and paved the way for the rise of Jake Featherston.

  “What do you aim to do now, General?” another reporter inquired.

  By his earnest voice and expectant look, he really expected Morrell to answer in detail. Some reporters never did figure out that their right to a good story stopped where it began to endanger U.S. soldiers. As gently as he could, Morrell said, “Well, I don’t want General Patton to read about it in tomorrow’s paper, you know.”

  “Will you drive west into Alabama or east toward the Atlantic?” This fellow was stubborn or stupid or both.

  “Yes,” Morrell answered. The reporter blinked. Some of his colleagues, quicker on the uptake, grinned. Morrell said, “That’s about all, boys. Happy New Year.”

  A few more flashbulbs popped. He didn’t mind that—the Confederates already knew he was in Atlanta. Bodyguards closed up around him as the press conference ended. He didn’t care for the guards, but he didn’t care to get killed, either. Enemy snipers would have loved to get him in their sights.

  The State Capitol wasn’t far away. A lot of people on his staff had wanted him to make his headquarters there. He said no, and kept saying no till they believed him. Demolition men were still going through the building, which looked like a scaled-down version of the Confederate Capitol in Richmond—at the moment, including bomb damage. They’d already found a couple of dozen booby traps there…and how many had they missed?

  A small, none too fancy house a couple of blocks away seemed a better, safer bet. The demolition experts had swept it, too, and found it clear. The Confederates didn’t have enough ordnance or time to booby-trap everything, which came as a relief.

  Morrell had other things to worry about, plenty of them. Sitting on his desk when he got back were photos of wrecked new-model C.S. barrels. By all reports, they were half a step ahead of the U.S. machines that had dominated the battlefield for most of 1943. How far could that race go? Would there be land dreadnoughts one day, with twelve-inch guns and armor thick enough to stop twelve-inch shells? You could build one now. What you couldn’t build was an engine that would make it go faster than a slow walk—if it moved at all.

  He was glad the reporters hadn’t asked him anything about the new enemy machines. He wouldn’t have had much of an answer for them, except to note that the Confederates didn’t seem to have very many. How long would that last? Hit Birmingham harder by air, he wrote. Notes helped him remember the million things he had to do. They were already dropping everything but the kitchen sink on the town. Have to throw that in, too.

  A large explosion stunned the air and his ears. He ducked, not that that would have done him any good had the blast been closer. He hauled out his notebook again. Hit Huntsville, too, he scribbled. Intelligence said the Confederates made their rockets there. Not many of them had crashed down on Atlanta yet, but how long would that last? Not long enough—he was dismally sure of it.

  He was also sure he couldn’t do a damn thing about the rockets except smash the factories that made them and the launchers that sent them on their way. Once they got airborne, there was no defense.

  If Featherston had had them from the beginning…That would have been very bad. He was content to leave the thought there. Neither side had all of what it needed when the war began. Part of what the war was about was finding out what you needed. He’d heard rumors that higher-ups in Philadelphia were all excited about some fancy new explosive. Maybe that would end up meaning something, and maybe it wouldn’t. They’d throw money and talent at it and see what happened next. What else could they do?

  Another big boom rattled his nerves. He didn’t know if the enemy was working on super-duper explosives. The ordinary sort people had been using since the end of the last century seemed plenty good enough.

  Now he had to figure out what to do himself. The reporter had given him his two basic choices: he could keep his original plan of driving to the sea, or swing west against Birmingham and Huntsville. If the War Department ordered him to go west, he would, he decided. Otherwise, he wanted to cut the Confederacy in half. If the offensive in Virginia came to something, where would Jake Featherston run then? And could the Confederate West stand on its own for long without orders from Richmond—and without Featherston’s ferocious energy available to stiffen spines? Finding out would be interesting.

  An aide stuck his head into the bedroom Morrell was using for an office. “Sir, the mayor of Atlanta would like to speak to you.”

  “He would, would he?” Morrell said. “So he didn’t run away with the Confederate army?”

  “I guess not, sir.”

  “Well, send him in, then. Let’s see what he’s got to say for himself.”

  The mayor had gray hair and was skinny as a rail. He introduced himself as Andrew Crowley. When Morrell asked him why he hadn’t fled, he answered, “I wanted to protect my people, so I chose to remain.” He threw back his head, a gesture straight out of a corny movie.

  “That’s nice,” Morrell said. “How many Negroes are you protecting?”

  “I was speaking of Confederate citizens, sir,” the mayor answered, “not of Confederate residents.” One word made all the difference in the world.

  “They all look like people to me,” Morrell said.

  “You don’t understand the way we do things in this country,” Crowley told him.

  “Maybe I don’t,” Morrell allowed. “Of course, if you hadn’t invaded mine I wouldn’t be down here now. Since I am, I have to tell you that murder looks a lot like murder, no matter who you do it to. I haven’t got a whole hell of a lot of sympathy for you, Mr. Mayor.”

  “We did what the government in Richmond told us to do,” Crowley insisted. “Don’t see how you can go and flabble about that.”

  “Yeah, sure. Now tell me you never once yelled, ‘Freedom!’ in all your born days.”

  Andrew Crowley’s hollow cheeks turned red. “I—” He stopped. Maybe he’d been about to deny
it. But how many people could give him the lie—to say nothing of the horse laugh—if he tried?

  “Here’s what’s going on,” Morrell told him. “We’ll try to keep your people from starving. We’ll try to keep them from coming down sick. If they stay quiet, we’ll leave ’em alone. If they don’t, we’ll make ’em sorry. Shoot at a U.S. soldier, and we’ll take twenty hostages and shoot ’em. Kill any U.S. soldier, and we’ll take fifty hostages and shoot ’em. Kill a Negro, and it’s the same price. Got that? Is it plain enough for you?”

  “You’re as cruel and hard as the government warned us you would be,” Crowley whined.

  “Tough beans, Mr. Mayor.” Was Morrell enjoying himself playing the tyrant? As a matter of fact, he was. “Your soldiers were every bit as sweet in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Only difference now is, the shoe’s on the other foot. Hope you like the way it feels.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” the mayor said. “Fifty people for a worthless nigger? If that’s not a joke, it ought to be.”

  “Chances are you don’t need to worry about it much,” Morrell said. “I bet you’ve taken most of yours off to be killed by now. Isn’t that right?”

  “Even if it is, the idea’s ridic—” Crowley broke off several words too late. He went red again, this time at what he’d admitted by letting his mouth run free.

  “Get out of my sight,” Morrell said. “I don’t think we’ve got much to say to each other. You wouldn’t like it if I told you what I thought. Just get out before I chuck you in the calaboose.”

  Crowley got. This probably wasn’t the interview he’d wanted to have. Morrell didn’t intend to lose any sleep about that. He went into the bathroom and washed his hands. He wasn’t Pilate, turning his back on the truth. He knew it when he ran into it, and its touch disgusted him.

  He was glad he was only a soldier. He didn’t have to try to figure out how to administer captured C.S. territory on any long-term basis. All he had to worry about was making sure the locals didn’t give his men too much trouble. The War Department didn’t care if he got rough doing it. That suited him fine, because the little he’d seen south of the Ohio inclined him to be gentle.