In at the Death Read online

  He’d just got back up onto the road—and breathed a sigh of relief because he’d made it—when an antibarrel rocket trailing fire streaked out of the woods and slammed into the armored car’s side. Those rockets were made to pierce much thicker armor than that. The armored car burst into flames.

  Cincinnatus fired into the trees again and again. Short bursts, he reminded himself. The muzzle wouldn’t pull up and to the right if he didn’t try to squeeze off too many rounds at a time. That fire trail pointed right back to where the man with the launcher had to be. If Cincinnatus could nail him…

  He growled out a triumphant, “Yeah!” when he did. A man in bloodied Confederate butternut staggered out from behind a loblolly pine and fell to his knees. Cincinnatus squeezed off another burst. The Confederate grabbed at his chest as he toppled. He lay there kicking. How many bullets did he have in him? Men often proved harder to kill than anyone who wasn’t trying to do it would imagine.

  This bastard, though, had surely killed everybody in the armored car. No hatches opened; no men got out. And the driver hadn’t got out of the blasted truck, either. No way in hell he could have. So the Confederate had extracted a high price for his miserable, worthless life. If all his countrymen did the same…

  But they couldn’t. Cincinnatus had already seen as much. The enemy soldiers had the advantage of playing defense, of making U.S. forces come to them. But the United States also had an advantage. They could pick when and where to strike. And they could concentrate men and barrels where they thought concentrating them would do the most good. Breakthroughs were easier to come by in this war than they had been the last time around.

  How many more would the USA need? Cincinnatus thought about that with half his mind while the rest got the truck rolling down the road again, and scanned the woods to either side. He’d spot the Confederates no doubt lurking in there only if they made a mistake—he knew that. Those bastards were human beings just like anybody else, though. They could screw up the same way U.S. soldiers could.

  A good thing, too. Cincinnatus’ shiver had nothing to do with the nasty weather. If the Confederates hadn’t screwed up a couple-three times, they’d be ruling the roost now. A few Negroes still survived in the CSA. Had Jake Featherston won everything his heart desired, everything south of the border would be lily-white.

  So…One more push into Savannah, and how long would the butternut bastards go on screaming, “Freedom!” with their goddamn country split in two? The United States could turn north and smash one half, then swing south and smash the other. Or maybe the body would die once the USA killed the head. Cincinnatus patted the submachine gun. He sure hoped so.

  Jorge Rodriguez and Gabriel Medwick both sewed second stripes onto their sleeves. Jorge was lousy with a needle and thread; back in Sonora, sewing was work for women and tailors. He was surprised to find his friend neat and quick and precise. “How come you can do that so good?” he asked, ready to rag on Gabe.

  “My ma learned me,” Medwick answered matter-of-factly. “She reckoned I ought to be able to shift for myself, and knowing how to sew was part of it.”

  That left Jorge with nothing to say. Ragging on his buddy was one thing. Ragging on Gabe’s mother was something else, something that went over the line. Instead of talking, Jorge sewed faster—not better, but faster. He wanted to get the shirt back on. Even sitting in front of a campfire, it was chilly out.

  Artillery opened up behind him, from the direction of Statesboro. Covington was a long way northwest now, and long gone. Statesboro guarded the approaches to Savannah. The town wasn’t that well fortified, not by what Jorge had heard. Why would it be? Back before the war, who would have imagined eastern Georgia would be crawling with damnyankees? Nobody in his right mind, that was for sure.

  Imagine or not, though, U.S. soldiers swarmed through this part of the state. Everybody figured they were heading for Savannah. They’d been pushing the Confederates back toward the southeast for weeks. Where else would they be going?

  Sergeant Hugo Blackledge appeared in the firelight. He had a gift for not being there one second and showing up out of nowhere the next: a jack-in-the-box with a nasty temper. He commanded the company these days. All the officers above him were dead and wounded, and replacements hadn’t shown up. Jorge’s promotion to corporal was older than Gabe’s, even if their sets of stripes had both arrived at the same time. That meant Jorge had a platoon, while his friend only led a section.

  “How’s it feel, making like lieutenants?” Blackledge asked with a certain sardonic relish.

  “Don’t want to be no lieutenant,” Gabriel Medwick said. “I got enough shit to worry about already.”

  “You said it,” Jorge agreed.

  As if to underline their worries, U.S. artillery came to life. Jorge listened anxiously, then relaxed as the shells roared over his head. That was counterbattery fire aimed at the C.S. guns. As long as the big guns shot at each other, as long as they left the front-line infantry alone, Jorge didn’t mind them…much.

  Sure enough, the U.S. shells came down well to the rear. Jorge finished sewing on his new stripes and put his shirt back on. Gabe, fussily precise, lagged behind.

  “What are we gonna do?” Jorge said.

  His buddy looked up from his sewing. “Fight the damnyankees. Keep fighting ’em till we chase ’em back where they came from.”

  “¿Como?” Jorge asked, startled into Spanish. The question sounded every bit as bleak in English: “How?”

  “President’ll figure out some kinda way.” Medwick sounded a hundred percent confident in Jake Featherston.

  Sergeant Blackledge lit a cigarette. “Don’t get your ass in an uproar about that kind of shit, Rodriguez,” he advised. “You can’t do nothin’ about it any which way. All we got to worry about is the damnyankees in front of us.”

  “That’s bad enough!” Jorge exclaimed, because Blackledge made it sound as if the U.S. soldiers were nothing to worry about. Rodriguez wished they weren’t but knew they were.

  “Yeah, well, so what? You’re still here. I’m still here. Hell, even pretty boy’s still here.” Blackledge blew smoke in Gabriel Medwick’s direction.

  “Up yours, too, Sarge,” Medwick said without rancor. When he first got to know Blackledge, he wouldn’t have dared mouth off like that. Neither would Jorge. And the formidable noncom would have squashed them like lice if they had dared. Now they’d earned the right, not least simply by surviving.

  “All we can do is all we can do,” Hugo Blackledge said. “We’ve put up a hell of a fight, seeing as they outweigh us about two to one.”

  “We’ll lick ’em yet,” Gabe said as he finally put his shirt back on.

  “Uh-huh.” Sergeant Blackledge nodded. Jorge had seen nods like that, from doctors in sickrooms where the patient wasn’t going to get better but didn’t know it yet. You kept his hope up as long as you could. Maybe it didn’t do any good, but it didn’t hurt, either. And he felt better, for a little while, anyway.

  Jorge’s dark eyes met the sergeant’s ice-gray ones in a moment of complete mutual understanding. Gabe didn’t get it, and probably wouldn’t till Savannah fell, if then—and if he lived that long. The patient in the sickroom was the Confederacy. And chances were it wouldn’t get better.

  “Got another one of those Dukes?” Jorge asked Blackledge.

  “Sure do. Here you go.” The older man held out the pack.

  Jorge got to his feet and walked over to take one. As he leaned forward so Blackledge could give him a light, he whispered, “We’re fucked, sí?”

  “Bet your sorry butt we are,” Blackledge answered.

  “Thanks.” Jorge sucked in smoke. But he was more grateful for the candor than for the cigarette.

  When morning came, he looked up the road along which he’d been retreating. A couple of dead Confederates lay there, about three hundred yards in front of the line. Nobody’d tried to retrieve their bodies. For one thing, it was too likely that U.S. snipers would shoo
t anyone who did. For another, C.S. engineers had booby-trapped the corpses. Any damnyankee who flipped them over looking for souvenirs would regret it.

  Nobody’d set up a kitchen anywhere close by. Jorge made do with a ration can. It was U.S.-issue deviled ham, the favorite canned meal on both sides of the front. Jorge hadn’t swapped cigarettes to get his hands on this one. He’d taken three or four cans off a dead Yankee. Looking at those bodies out there made him shake his head as he ate. Maybe he’d been lucky not to get blown to kingdom come.

  It wasn’t as if the damnyankees wouldn’t have other chances. Sooner or later—probably sooner—they would start pushing hard toward Savannah again. The only question was whether they’d do it right here or somewhere a little farther west. If they did it right here, Jorge knew he’d have to retreat or die. If they did it farther west, his choices would lie between retreating and getting cut off and trapped.

  He didn’t think the C.S. line could hold. As for counterattacks…Well, no. When a sergeant commanded a company, when a new corporal was leading a platoon, this army would have a devil of a time holding its ground. Pushing the enemy back seemed far beyond its power.

  Too many damnyankee soldiers. Too many damnyankee barrels. Too many airplanes with the eagle and crossed swords. With Atlanta gone, with Richmond in trouble, with Birmingham getting pounded, how could the Confederacy reply?

  No U.S. troops came close enough to try to plunder the booby-trapped corpses. That left Jorge more relieved than anything else. Advancing U.S. soldiers would have meant more hard fighting. He’d seen enough—more than enough, in fact—to last him a lifetime. He knew he hadn’t seen the end of things here. Either he’d have to do more fighting or he’d have to fall back. Chances were, he’d have to do both. If he didn’t have to do either one today, or maybe even tomorrow, so much the better.

  Quiet lasted through the afternoon and into the evening. He smoked and ate and dozed and listened to the problems of a soldier in his platoon who had woman trouble back in North Carolina. Somebody’d sent Ray a letter that said his wife (or maybe fiancée; Jorge wasn’t quite sure) was fooling around on him with a mechanic who was back there because he’d already lost an arm in the fighting.

  “Shoulda blown off his shortarm instead,” Ray said savagely. “What I want to do is, I want to go on home and take care o’ that my own self.”

  “Well, you can’t,” Jorge said. “They catch you deserting, they shoot you. Then they hang up your body to give other people the message.”

  “It’d be worth it. Then Thelma Lou’d know how much I love her,” Ray said.

  Jorge wondered why he’d got stuck listening to this crap. He himself hadn’t had a fiancée, let alone a wife, back in Baroyeca. The few times he’d lain down with a woman, he’d had to put money on the dresser first. But he was the platoon leader. That must have made him seem to Ray like someone who knew what he was doing. He wished he seemed that way in his own eyes.

  He knew enough to be sure Ray was talking like a fool. Anybody who wasn’t in love with Thelma Lou would have known that. “She just laugh when you get in trouble,” Jorge said. “Then she go on fooling around with this asshole.”

  “Not if I kill him, she don’t.” Ray was as stubborn as he was stupid, which took some doing.

  “Then she fool around with somebody else,” Jorge said. “A gal who cheats on you once, she cheats on you lots of times. You don’t get her back like she never screwed around at all.” Ray’s jaw dropped. Plainly, that had never crossed his mind. Dumb as rocks, Jorge thought sadly. He went on, “Or maybe this letter you got, maybe it’s bullshit. Whoever sent it to you, there ain’t no return address, right?”

  “I dunno,” Ray said, which covered more ground than he realized. “You might could be right, but I dunno. Kinda sounds like somethin’ Thelma Lou’d go and do.”

  So why do you give a damn about her? Jorge didn’t scream it, however much he wanted to. He could tell it would do no good. “You can’t go nowhere,” he said. “You don’t want to let your buddies down, right?” Ray shook his head. He wasn’t a bad soldier. Jorge pressed on: “You can’t get leave, and there’s lots of military police and Freedom Party men between here and your home town. So stay. All this stuff, if it really is anything, it’ll sort itself out when the war’s done. Why worry till then?”

  “I guess.” Ray didn’t sound convinced, but he didn’t sound like someone on the ragged edge of deserting, either.

  Sergeant Blackledge swore when Jorge warned him of the trouble. “This ain’t the first time he’s had trouble with that cunt,” he said. “But you were dead right—if he does try and run off, he ain’t gonna get far, and he’ll land in more shit than Congress puts out.”

  Half an hour after that, a captain and a second lieutenant and six or eight enlisted men showed up: a new company CO, a platoon commander, and some real live (for the moment, anyhow) reinforcements. Would wonders never cease? The captain, whose name was Richmond Sellars, walked with a limp and wore a Purple Heart ribbon with two tiny oak-leaf clusters pinned to it.

  “I told ’em I was ready to get back to duty,” he said, “so they sent my ass here.” He pointed to the lieutenant, who had to be at least forty and looked to have come up through the ranks. “This is Grover Burch. Who’s in charge now?”

  “I am, sir. Sergeant Hugo Blackledge.” Blackledge likely wasn’t happy to see company command go glimmering. Jorge wasn’t thrilled about losing his platoon. The good news was that he wouldn’t have to listen to complaints like Ray’s so much. They’d be Burch’s worry, and Sergeant Blackledge’s, too.

  “Well, Blackledge, why don’t you fill me in?” Sellars said. He’d seen enough to know he’d be smart to walk soft for a while.

  The sergeant did, quickly and competently. He said a couple of nice things about Jorge, which surprised and pleased the new corporal. Then Blackledge pointed northwest. “Not really up to us what happens next, sir,” he said. “The damnyankees’ll do whatever the hell they do, and we’ve got to try and stop ’em. I just hope to God we can.”

  Forward to Richmond! That had been the U.S. battle cry in the War of Secession. It would have been the battle cry during the Great War, except the Confederates struck north before the USA could even try to push south. And in this fight…

  In this fight, the CSA had held the USA in northern Virginia. The Confederate States had held, yes, but they weren’t holding any more. Abner Dowling noted each new U.S. advance with growing amazement and growing delight. After U.S. soldiers broke out of the nasty second-growth country called the Wilderness, the enemy just didn’t have the men and machines to stop them. The Confederates could slow them down, but the U.S. troops pushed forward day after day.

  A command car took Dowling and his adjutant past burnt-out C.S. barrels. Even in this chilly winter weather, the stink of death filled the air. “I didn’t believe I’d ever say it,” Dowling remarked, “but I think we’ve got ’em on the run here.”

  “Yes, sir. Same here.” Major Angelo Toricelli nodded. “They just can’t hold us any more. They’ll have a devil of a time keeping us out of Richmond.”

  “I hope we don’t just barge into the place,” Dowling said.

  He glanced over at the driver. He didn’t want to say much more than that, not with a man he didn’t know well listening. His lack of faith in Daniel MacArthur was almost limitless. He’d served with MacArthur since the Great War, and admired his courage without admiring his common sense or strategic sense. He doubted whether MacArthur had any strategic sense, as a matter of fact.

  “I’ve heard we’re trying to work out how to get over the James,” Major Toricelli said.

  “I’ve heard the same thing,” Dowling replied. “Hearing is only hearing, though. Seeing is believing.”

  A rifle shot rang out, not nearly far enough away. The driver sped up. Toricelli swung the command car’s heavy machine gun toward the sound of the gunshot. He didn’t know what was going on. He couldn’t know who’d f
ired, either. The shot sounded to Dowling as if it had come from a C.S. automatic rifle, but about every fourth soldier in green-gray carried one of those nowadays—and the other three wanted one.

  Toricelli relaxed—a little—as no target presented itself. “Back in the War of Secession, they would have had a devil of a time taking the straight route we’re using,” he remarked. “The lay of the land doesn’t make it easy.”

  “Around here, the lay of the land’s got the clap,” Dowling said. His adjutant snorted. So did the driver. An adjutant was almost obligated to find a general’s jokes funny. A lowly driver wasn’t, so Dowling felt doubly pleased with himself.

  He’d been exaggerating, but only a little. The rivers in central Virginia all seemed to run from northwest to southeast. Major Toricelli was right. Those rivers and their bottomlands would have forced men marching on foot to veer toward the southeast, too: toward the southeast and away from the Confederate capital.

  But barrels and halftracks could go where marching men couldn’t. And U.S. forces were pushing straight toward Richmond whether Jake Featherston’s men liked it or not.

  So Dowling thought, at any rate, till C.S. fighter-bombers appeared. The driver jammed on the brakes. Everybody bailed out of the command car. The roadside ditch Dowling dove into was muddy, but what could you do? Bullets spanged off asphalt and thudded into dirt. Dowling didn’t hear any of the wet slaps that meant bullets striking flesh, for which he was duly grateful.

  A moment later, he did hear several metallic clang!s and then a soft whump! That was the command car catching fire. He swore under his breath. He wouldn’t be going forward to Richmond as fast as he wanted to.

  He stuck his head up out of the ditch, then ducked again as machine-gun ammo in the command car started cooking off. Embarrassing as hell to get killed by your own ordnance. Embarrassing as hell to get killed by anybody’s ordnance, when you came right down to it.