In at the Death Read online

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Joe Mouradian said, and handed him a long, heavy cartridge with the nose painted black.

  Scullard traversed the turret a little to the left. He peered through the rangefinder again, raised the gun, peered once more, muttered, and brought the cannon up a hair farther. Pound wouldn’t have hesitated so much. He had uncommon confidence in himself. He wasn’t always right, but he was always sure. He was sure he ought to keep quiet now. Scullard’s style was different from his, but the gunner usually hit what he aimed at.

  If he didn’t hit here, Pound intended to say not a word. It was long range, even for a gun that fired on a fast, flat trajectory like the 3½-incher.

  Boom! Inside the turret, the noise wasn’t too bad. Right outside, it would have seemed like the end of the world. Michael Pound looked through the periscopes, hoping he could see the shot fall if it missed.

  But it didn’t. The lead Confederate assault gun suddenly stopped. Greasy black smoke spurted from it. A hatch in the side opened. Somebody bailed out. More smoke belched from the hatch.

  “Good shot! Good shot!” Pound thumped Scullard on the back. “Now kill the next one. The others will think twice about coming on after that.”

  “I’ll try, sir,” the gunner said, and then, “AP again, Mouradian!”

  “Right.” The loader slammed another round into the breech.

  Scullard traversed the turret to the right. He fired again, then swore. That was a miss. Pound swore, too; he saw no puff of dust to mark where the shot came down. The wet weather complicated lives all kinds of ways.

  Scullard tried again. This time, the shot went home. The assault gun slewed sideways and stopped, a track knocked off its wheels. The enemy could probably fix it, but that would take a while. In the meantime, it was out of the fight, a sitting duck. Odds were somebody would blast it before it got fixed.

  Other U.S. barrels opened up. More C.S. assault guns and barrels got hit. Others stopped to return fire. Having expended three rounds from this spot, Pound figured it was time to move. They would have a good idea where he was, the same as if he’d lit three cigarettes on a match. He ordered the barrel back and to the left to a secondary firing position he’d marked out ahead of time.

  Nobody ever said the Confederates lacked guts. They pressed the attack hard. Pound could see only his little part of it, like any soldier at the front. Thanks to the mines and the machine guns and the barrels and the fighter-bombers that swooped down on the enemy, the men in butternut never made it across the open ground and into the pine woods. They tried three different times, which only meant they paid a higher price for failure than if they’d left well enough alone after the first time.

  When they sullenly pulled back late that afternoon, Pound said, “We ought to go after them. We might be able to walk right into Atlanta.”

  “Easy to walk into Atlanta, sir,” Scullard said. “If we do, though, how many of us’ll walk out again?”

  Pound grunted. Having seen what the fighting in Pittsburgh was like, he didn’t want to wind up on the other end of that. But watching the enemy get away went against all his instincts.

  Then rockets started screaming down on the open ground in front of the woods and on the trees as well. Blast made even the heavy barrel shudder on its tracks. The Confederates were doing everything they could to discourage pursuit. He feared the foot soldiers were catching it hard.

  Even so…“They won’t take Lawrenceville away from us like that,” he said.

  “No, sir,” Scullard agreed. “We’ll likely try a flanking move from there, I bet. If we can make them leave Atlanta without us going in and taking it away from them, that sounds goddamn good to me.”

  “To me, too,” Pound said. “The cheaper, the better.”

  The order to move forward came early the next morning. The axis of the advance was southeast: not straight towards Atlanta, but deeper into central Georgia. That warmed the cockles of Michael Pound’s heart. It also told him that General Morrell, whom he’d known for many years, still had what it took. Morrell was all but inviting the Confederates in Atlanta to strike at his flank again. If they did, he would give them lumps.

  They didn’t. Watching their first counterattack fail must have taught them something. Pound didn’t—wouldn’t—believe they’d lost too many men and too much equipment for another try. They’d counterattacked again and again, all the way down from the Ohio River—usually before they should have. And it had cost them a lot more than standing on the defensive and making U.S. forces come to them would have done. Maybe they were finally wising up.

  But if they were, it was liable to be too late. If they didn’t come out of Atlanta, men and barrels in green-gray would curl around and cut them off from the east and south as well as from the north. And what would stop Irving Morrell’s armor from slashing across the rest of Georgia to Savannah and the Atlantic and cutting the Confederacy in half?

  Nothing Second Lieutenant Pound could see.

  Here and there, the Confederates still fought hard. The Freedom Party Guard units, in their mottled uniforms, had the best gear the CSA could give them and a vicious determination to use it. They took few prisoners, and mostly didn’t let themselves get captured. And their fanatical resistance got them…

  Not very much. Jake Featherston didn’t have enough Guard outfits to go around. He didn’t come close. In between the towns they defended and the strongpoints they manned lay…again, not very much. Most Confederate soldiers, like most soldiers most places, weren’t so enthusiastic about dying for their country. Militias of beardless boys and old men mixed bolt-action Tredegars from the last war with hunting rifles and shotguns. Some of them were brave. It hardly mattered. They didn’t have what they needed to fight a real army.

  Mel Scullard machine-gunned a kid who was running up to the barrel with a Featherston Fizz. The youngster fell. The burning gasoline from the bottle made his last minutes on earth even worse than they would have been otherwise.

  With cold eyes, the gunner watched him die. “You want to play against the first team, sonny, you better bring your best game,” he said.

  “That’s about the size of it,” Pound agreed. “And most of their first team is in Atlanta, and it’s doing them less and less good the longer it sits there. In the meantime, by God, we’ll just clean up their scrubs.”

  Cassius began to think he might live through the war. Black guerrillas who took up arms against the CSA and the Freedom Party always hoped to live, of course. But hoping and believing were two different things. Sooner or later, he’d figured, Gracchus’ band would run out of luck. Then he’d either die on the spot or go to a camp the way his mother and father and sister had. Quick or slow, it would be over.

  Now…Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t. He’d already watched U.S. fighter-bombers stoop on a truck convoy the Negroes stalled with a land mine planted in a pothole. What followed wasn’t pretty, which didn’t mean he didn’t like it. Oh, no—it meant nothing of the sort.

  And the rumble and growl of artillery in the northwest wasn’t distant or on the edge of hearing any more. Now it grew into an unending roar, louder by the day and as impossible to ignore as a toothache. Whenever the guerrillas camped for the night, the same phrase was on their lips: “Damnyankees comin’ soon.”

  They wanted the U.S. soldiers to get there soon. They would likely die if the U.S. soldiers didn’t. They called them damnyankees anyhow. There as in so many other things, they imitated Confederate whites. They found yellow women prettier than brown ones and much prettier than black ones. They liked straight hair better than kinky, sharp noses better than flat. In all of that, they were typical of the Confederacy’s Negroes.

  The main way they weren’t typical was that they were still alive.

  Not far away, trucks rattled through the darkness, bringing C.S. troops forward to try to stem the U.S. tide. The guerrillas let most convoys go. They couldn’t afford to get into many real fights with real soldiers. Gracchus had
enough trouble scraping up new recruits as things were. Except for the scattered, harried rebel bands, not many Negroes were left in the Georgia countryside.

  “Suppose the damnyankees come,” Cassius said, spooning up beans from a ration a Mexican soldier would never open now. “Suppose they come, an’ suppose they kill the Confederate sojers an’ the ofays who put on white shirts and yell, ‘Freedom!’ all the goddamn time.”

  Gracchus was gnawing on a drumstick from a chicken liberated from a white man’s coop. “Then we wins,” he said, swallowing. “Then we starts puttin’ our lives back the way they was ’fo’ all this shit happen.”

  In a way, that sounded wonderful. In another way…“How? How we do dat, boss?” Cassius asked. “All the Yankee sojers in the world ain’t gonna give me my ma an’ pa an’ sister back again. They ain’t gonna bring back all the niggers the ofays done killed. We is like ghosts of the folks what used to be here but ain’t no more.”

  Gracchus scowled as he threw the leg bone aside. “We ain’t ghosts,” he said. “The ones who got killed, they’s ghosts. I bet this whole country have more hants’n you kin shake a stick at, this war finally done.”

  Cassius didn’t exactly believe in hants. He didn’t exactly not believe in them, either. He’d never seen one, but so many people were sure they had, he had trouble thinking they were all crazy or lying. He did say, “Hants ain’t slowed down the ofays none.”

  “Might be even worse without ’em,” another Negro said.

  “How?” Cassius asked, and nobody seemed to want to answer that.

  He didn’t want to take the argument with Gracchus any further. He didn’t want the guerrilla chieftain to think he was after that spot himself. As far as Cassius was concerned, Gracchus was welcome to it.

  But, even if he kept quiet, he still thought he was right. Blacks in the CSA had had a vibrant life of their own, much of it lived right under the white majority’s noses. With so many Negroes dead, how would the survivors ever start that again? How could they even live alongside the whites who hadn’t tried to stop Freedom Party goons from stuffing them into trains for one-way journeys to camps, who’d often cheered to see them disappear? What could they be but a sad reminder of something that had once been alive but was no more? And if that wasn’t a ghost, what was it?

  The next morning, a scout came back in high excitement. “The Mexicans, they’s pullin’ out!” he said.

  “They ain’t goin’ up to the front to fight?” Gracchus asked. “You sure?”

  “Sure as I’s standin’ here,” the scout replied. “They’s marchin’ south.”

  “They ain’t here to fight the damnyankees,” Cassius said. “They is here to keep us in line.”

  Francisco José’s men were less enthusiastic about going after Negroes than white Confederates were. But their being here let the Confederacy put more men in the field against the United States. They did inhibit the rebel bands…some.

  “If they’s buggin’ out fo’ true, they must reckon the Confederate Army can’t hold the Yankees back no mo’.” Gracchus’ voice rose with excitement. “Do Jesus, I hope they’s right!”

  The black guerrillas got another surprise the next day. A Confederate captain approached a scout with a flag of truce. The scout blindfolded him and brought him into camp. No one offered to take the blindfold off once he got there, either.

  That didn’t seem to faze him. “I have a proposition for you people,” he said.

  “Go on. Say your say. Tell your lies,” Gracchus answered.

  “No lies. What I ask is very simple: leave us alone while we fight the USA,” the C.S. officer said. “You stay quiet, we won’t come after you. We’ll even give you rations so you don’t have to plunder the countryside.”

  “Put rat poison in ’em first, I reckon,” Gracchus said.

  “If you agree, I will come back as a hostage and food taster,” the captain said. “Don’t jog our elbow. That’s all we want. You tell us no, you’ll get the stick instead of the carrot. I promise you that.”

  “Shoulda started leavin’ us alone a hell of a long time ago,” Cassius said.

  Shrugging, the soldier said, “Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. Too late to worry about it now, though. It’s water under the bridge.”

  “Easy fo’ you to say, ofay.” Some of Gracchus’ rage and hatred came out. “You ain’t got no dead kinfolks.”

  “Hell I don’t,” the captain said, and Cassius realized he hated them at least as much as they hated him. “Damnyankee bombs blew up my mother and father and sister. Another sister’ll limp forever on account of ’em. And you’re helping the USA. Far as I’m concerned, we ought to feed you rat poison, and better than you deserve. But I don’t give those orders. I just follow them.”

  “You got nerve.” Gracchus spoke now with a certain reluctant admiration.

  “I told you—I’ve got orders,” the Confederate said. “So what’ll it be? Will you back off and let us fight the United States, or do we come in here and clean out all of you raggedy-ass coons?”

  Gracchus didn’t answer right away. He wasn’t an officer with a chain of command behind him and the automatic authority to bind and to loose. He couldn’t order his fighters to obey a truce if they didn’t want to. Cassius knew he didn’t. He spoke to the captain: “You coulda done that, reckon you would’ve a long time ago.”

  “You don’t get it, boy,” the white said, and never knew how close he came to dying on the spot. He continued, “Before, you were just a rear-area nuisance. But if you think we’ll let you fuck with us when the front’s so close, you better think again.”

  Maybe he had a point of sorts. But even if he did…“What happens when the Yankees push you outa here?” Cassius ground out. “You reckon we ain’t got us a lot o’ bills to pay? You reckon we ain’t gonna pay ’em soon as we git the chance?”

  That got home. The C.S. captain bit his lip. “All the more reason for us to get rid of you now,” he said.

  “You kin try.” Gracchus seemed to have made up his mind. “Yeah, you kin try, but I don’t reckon you kin do it. When the war started, you coulda got what you wanted from us easy. All you had to do was leave us alone. Well, you didn’t do nothin’ like that. You know what you done. Like my friend here say”—he named no names—“we owes you too much to set it down. We takes you back to your own folks now. Ain’t got nothin’ left to say to each other no more.”

  As the scout led the blindfolded officer away, Cassius found himself nodding. Gracchus had nailed that, probably better than he knew. All across the Confederate States of America, whites and Negroes had nothing left to say to each other.

  “Reckon we better get outa here,” Gracchus said after the white man in butternut was gone. “They ain’t gonna wait around. Soon as he tell ’em we say no, they gonna pound the shit outa where they thinks we’s at.”

  He proved a good prophet. Artillery started falling not far from their camp inside of half an hour. A couple of Asskickers buzzed around overhead, looking for targets they could hit. The Negroes stayed in the woods till nightfall.

  “You reckon they come after us from the same direction as that captain?” Cassius asked Gracchus.

  “Mos’ likely,” the guerrilla leader answered.

  “Maybe we oughta rig us an ambush, then,” Cassius said. “That’ll learn ’em they can’t run us like we was coons an’ they was hounds.”

  “We is coons,” Gracchus said with a grim chuckle. He clapped Cassius on the back. “But yeah, you got somethin’ there. We see what we kin do.”

  Next morning, right at dawn, close to a company of Confederate soldiers approached the woods where the guerrillas sheltered. Cassius and a couple of other Negroes fired at them, then showed themselves as they scurried away. That was dangerous. A fusillade of bullets chased them. But nobody got hit.

  Shouting and pointing, the Confederates pounded after the fleeing blacks. Down deep, the ofays still thought Negroes were stupid and cowardly. They wo
uldn’t have pursued U.S. soldiers with so little caution.

  The machine gun opened up from the flank and cut them down like wheat before the scythe. The Confederates were brave. Some of them tried to charge the gun and take it out with grenades. They couldn’t work in close enough to throw them. The white soldiers broke off and retreated. They did it as well as anyone could, leaving not a wounded man behind.

  “We done it!” Cassius whooped. “We fuckin’ done it!”

  Gracchus was less exuberant. “We done it this time,” he said. “Ofays ain’t gonna make the same mistake twice. Next time, they don’t reckon it’s easy.”

  That struck Cassius as much too likely. Gracchus moved his band away from the ambush site as fast as he could. Artillery and bombs from above started falling there a few minutes later—probably as soon as the beaten Confederate soldiers could send back word of where they ran into trouble.

  Armored cars and halftracks began patrolling the roads around the guerrilla band. The Negroes got one with a mine, but the vehicles trapped them and hemmed them in, making movement deadly dangerous. Before long, they started getting hungry. The rations the Confederate captain had promised in exchange for quiet seemed better to Cassius every time his belly growled.

  “Reckon we kin hold ’em off when they come again?” he asked Gracchus.

  “Hope so,” the guerrilla leader answered, which was a long way from yes.

  Cassius made sure his rifle was clean. He didn’t want it jamming when he needed it most. How much good it would do him against a swarm of Confederates supported by armor…he tried not to think about.

  Then one night the northwestern sky filled with flashes. Man-made thunder stunned his ears. The C.S. attack the guerrillas were dreading didn’t come. The Confederates needed everything they had to hold back the U.S. forces hitting them.

  And everything they had wasn’t enough. Soldiers and vehicles in butternut poured back past and through the guerrillas’ little territory. They weren’t interested in fighting the blacks; they just wanted to get away. Wounded men and battered trucks and halftracks floundered here and there. The Negroes scrounged whatever they could.