The Grapple sa-2 Read online

  “No, sir.” His adjutant pointed to another photo. “Looks like the overflow goes here.”

  Dowling studied the picture. Trucks-they looked like ordinary C.S. Army trucks-stood next to a long, wide trench. The scale they provided gave him some notion of just how long and wide the trench was. It seemed to be full of bodies. Dowling couldn’t gauge its depth, but would have bet it wasn’t shallow.

  The photo also showed several similar trenches covered over with dirt. The trenches went out of the picture on either side. Dowling couldn’t tell how many filled-in trenches it wasn’t showing, either.

  “They go there, huh?” His stomach did a slow lurch. How many corpses lay in those trenches? How many more went into them every day? “Any idea how they get from the camp to the graveyard?”

  “How they get killed, you mean?” Toricelli asked.

  “Yes, dammit.” Dowling usually despised the language of euphemism that filled military and bureaucratic life. Here, though, the enormity of what he saw made him unwilling to come out and say what he meant.

  “Intelligence isn’t quite sure of that,” his adjutant said. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “It does to them.” Dowling jerked a thumb at that photo with the trenches. “Lord knows I’m no nigger-lover, Major. But there’s a difference between not loving somebody and setting up a factory to turn out deaths like shells for a 105.”

  “Well, yes, sir,” Major Toricelli said. “What can we do about it, though? We aren’t even in Lubbock, and this Snyder place is another eighty miles. Even if Lubbock falls, we’ll be a long time getting there. Same with our artillery. And what good would bombers do? We’ll just be killing spooks ourselves if we use ’em.”

  “I know what I’m going to do,” Dowling said. “I’m going to send these photos back to Philadelphia, and I’m going to ask for reinforcements. Now that Pittsburgh’s ours again, we ought to have some men to spare. We need to advance on this front, Major. We need it a lot more than we do some other places.”

  “Yes, sir. I think you’re right,” Toricelli said. “But will they listen to you back East? They see things funny on the other side of the Mississippi. We found out about that when we were trying to hold the lid down on the Mormons.”

  “Didn’t we just?” Dowling said. “Tell you what-let’s light a fire under the War Department’s tail. Can you get another set of those prints made?”

  “I’m sure I can, sir.”

  “Bully!” Every once in a while, Dowling still came out with slang whose best days lay back before the Great War. Toricelli loyally pretended not to notice. Dowling went on, “Send the second set of prints to Congresswoman Blackford. She’s been up in arms about how the Confederates are treating their niggers ever since Jake Featherston took over. If she starts squawking, we’re likelier to get those troops.”

  “That’s…downright byzantine, sir.” Major Toricelli’s voice held nothing but admiration.

  Dowling resolved to look up the word to see whether it carried praise or blame. He nodded to his adjutant. “Get me those extra prints. I’ll draft the letter to the General Staff. We’ll want to encrypt that before we send it.”

  “Oh, yes,” Toricelli said. When you were fighting a war with somebody who spoke the same language you did, you had to be extra careful about what you said openly. The only good news there was that the enemy had to be as careful as you were. Sometimes he slipped, and you could make him pay. Sometimes he pretended to slip, and you could outsmart yourself in a hurry if you weren’t careful.

  “Do that yourself, if you’d be so kind, Major,” Dowling said.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.” Dowling’s adjutant didn’t even blink. This was a hell of a war all kinds of ways. When you couldn’t be a hundred percent sure of the men in the cryptography section-you did without them whenever you could, or whenever you had something really important.

  Rolling a sheet of paper into his Underwood upright, Dowling banged away at it, machine-gun style, with his forefingers. The machine was at least twenty years old, and had an action stiff as a spavined mule’s. Fancy typists used all ten fingers. Dowling knew that-knew and didn’t care. Being able to type at all put him ahead of most U.S. generals.

  He tried to imagine George Custer pounding on a typewriter. The man under whom he’d served as adjutant during the Great War and for some years afterwards would have counted himself progressive for using a steel pen instead of a quill. Dowling wondered how many letters he’d typed up for Custer over the years. A whole great pile of them, anyhow. The old Tartar had had a legible hand. Dowling, who could fault him for plenty of other things, couldn’t deny that.

  Of course, Custer had spent more than sixty years in the Army. He was one of the longest-serving soldiers, if not the longest-serving, in the history of the United States. Back when his career started, you had to be able to write with tolerable neatness. If you couldn’t, no one would be able to make out what you were saying.

  Dowling read through his draft, pen-corrected a typo that had escaped him while the paper was on the platen, and took it to Major Toricelli. “Get this off to Philadelphia as fast as you can,” he said.

  “I’ll tend to it right away.” Toricelli had already taken the code book out of the small safe that accompanied Eleventh Army as it advanced-and, at need, as it fell back, too.

  “Good. Thanks. Now I need to get a letter ready for those photos that’ll go to Flora Blackford.” Dowling had met her before, in that she’d questioned him when he testified before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. He hadn’t appreciated her prodding then. If he could get her to prod in a way that did him some good, though, that was a different story. He wagged a finger at Toricelli. “Make sure we get that other set of prints pronto, too.”

  “Yes, sir.” Now his adjutant sounded resigned. Dowling knew he was guilty of nagging. How often had he sounded like that when Custer gave him the same order for the fourth time? At least he-sometimes-noticed when he repeated himself. He wrote the letter, signed it, and gave it to Major Toricelli. The younger officer, who was deep in five-letter code groups, nodded abstractedly.

  When Dowling walked out of the house he’d commandeered for a headquarters, the sentries in front of the porch stiffened to attention. “As you were,” Dowling said. The sentries had foxholes into which they could dive in case C.S. artillery reached Littlefield or enemy bombers came overhead.

  A thick barbed-wire perimeter isolated headquarters from the rest of the small west Texas town. The wire was far enough from the house to keep an auto bomb from doing too much damage if one blew up outside it. Soldiers and matrons frisked people entering the perimeter to make sure none of them carried explosives. Dowling didn’t think he was important enough to make much of a target for a people bomb, but he didn’t take chances, either.

  Headquarters occupied one of the few undamaged houses in Littlefield. The Confederates had made a stand here. They fought wherever they could find an advantageous position. They didn’t like retreating. But this country was so wide, they didn’t have enough men to hold on to all of it. He’d flanked them out here. He wasn’t having so much luck with that around Lubbock.

  The Stars and Stripes floated above the house. Littlefield had been in the U.S. state of Houston till the Confederacy won the plebiscite here a little more than two years earlier. Now it was back in U.S. hands, and the locals liked that no better than they had before.

  Dowling cordially despised the locals, too. He wished he could put up photographs of the murder camp and the mass graves outside Snyder-put ’em up all over town. He wished he could parade everybody in Littlefield past those graves, let people see what thousands of bodies looked like, let them find out what thousands of bodies smelled like. You sons of bitches, this is what you bought when you went around yelling, “Freedom!” all the goddamn time. How do you like it now?

  What really scared him was, they were liable to like it just fine. He could easily imagine them looking d
own at all those contorted corpses and saying, Well, so what, you lousy damnyankee? They’re only niggers, for cryin’ out loud.

  He scowled out at Littlefield, wishing his imagination didn’t work quite so well. All at once, he wanted nothing more than to wipe the town and everybody in it off the face of the earth.

  Major Jerry Dover knew how to give men orders. He’d commanded at about the platoon level during the years between the wars. Bossing the cooks and waiters and busboys at the Huntsman’s Lodge in Augusta, Georgia, gave him most of the experience he needed to put on the uniform and tell people in the Confederate Quartermaster Corps what to do.

  Being white and the boss had given him authority over the staff at the restaurant. Military law made a good enough substitute in the field. Dover hadn’t been out there long before one of his subordinates exclaimed, “Jesus, sir, you work us just like a bunch of niggers!”

  “Good,” Dover answered, which made the grumbling corporal goggle and gape. “Good, goddammit,” Dover repeated. He was a foxy-featured man, wiry and stronger than he looked, with graying sandy hair and mustache. “We’ve all got to work like niggers if we’re going to whip those bastards on the other side.”

  He drove himself at least as hard as he drove anybody under him. He left a trail of chain-smoked Raleigh butts and empty coffee cups behind him. He tried to be everywhere at once, making sure all sorts of supplies got to the men at the front when they were supposed to. The men who worked under him didn’t need long to figure that out. They swore at him as they shivered in the snow in southern Ohio, but his kitchen staff had sworn at him the same way while they sweltered over their stoves. The soldiers might not love him, but they respected him.

  His superiors didn’t know what to make of him. Most of them were Regulars, men who’d stayed in butternut all through the lean times before Jake Featherston started building up the C.S. Army again. A colonel named Travis W.W. Oliphant-he got very offended if you left the W.W. out of any correspondence addressed to him, no matter how trivial-said, “You know, Major, you’ll just kill yourself if you try to run through every brick wall you see instead of going around some of them.”

  “Yes, sir.” Dover ground a cigarette out under the heel of his left boot (Boot, Marching, Officer’s Field, size 9?C). He lit another one and sucked in smoke. Without a cloud of smoke around him, he hardly felt real. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, those damned idiots south of the Ohio finally got us about half as many of the 105 shells we’ve been screaming for as we really need. Gotta move ’em up to the people who shoot ’em out the guns.”

  Travis W.W. Oliphant scratched his head. He looked like a British cavalry colonel, or what Jerry Dover imagined a British cavalry colonel would look like. “See here, Dover, are you trying to mock me?” he said.

  “Mock you? No, sir.” Dover scratched his head, too. “Why would you say that? I’m just trying to do my job.”

  “You’re not a Regular,” the senior officer said.

  “No, sir,” Dover agreed. “So what? I can still see what needs doing. I can still get people to do it, or else do it myself.”

  “There are people in this unit who think you’re trying to show them up,” Colonel Oliphant said.

  Dover scratched his head again. He blew out another stream of smoke. “Sir, don’t the Yankees give us enough trouble so we haven’t got time to play stupid games with ourselves? I work hard. I want everybody else to work hard, too.”

  “We won’t get the job done if we wonder about each other-that’s for sure,” Oliphant said. “We’ve all got to pull together.”

  “What am I supposed to do when I see some people who won’t pull?” Dover asked. “You know some won’t as well as I do, sir. Plenty of men in the Quartermaster Corps who like it here because they’re in the Army, so nobody can complain about that, but they aren’t what you’d call likely to see a damnyankee with a piece in his hand and blood in his eye.”

  “You’re in the Quartermaster Corps,” Colonel Oliphant pointed out.

  “So are you, sir.” Dover stamped out the latest cigarette and lit a replacement. “You want to send me up to a line battalion, go right ahead. I happen to think I help the country more where I’m at, on account of I really know what the fuck I’m doing here. But if you want to ship me out, go on and do it. I was in the line last time around. Reckon I can do it again. Where were you…sir?”

  Travis W.W. Oliphant didn’t answer right away. He turned red, which told Dover everything he needed to know. Had Oliphant ever fired a rifle, or even an officer’s pistol, in anger? Dover didn’t believe it, not even for a minute.

  “You are insubordinate, Major,” Oliphant said at last.

  “About time somebody around here was, wouldn’t you say?” Dover saluted and walked away. If the high and mighty colonel wanted to do something about it, he was welcome to try. Jerry Dover laughed. What was the worst Oliphant could do? Get him court-martialed? Maybe they’d drum him out of the Army, in which case he’d go back to the restaurant business in Augusta. Maybe they’d throw him in a military prison, where he’d be housed and fed and out of the war. About the worst thing the goddamn stuffed shirt could do was leave him right where he was.

  Did Oliphant have the brains to understand that? Did the colonel know his ass from his end zone? Dover only shrugged. He didn’t really care. Oliphant would do whatever he did. In the meantime, Dover would do what he had to do.

  As soon as he stepped out of the butternut tent, a cold breeze from the northwest started trying to freeze his pointed nose off his face. “Fuck,” he muttered. He hadn’t been up in Ohio long, but the weather was really and truly appalling. Augusta got a cold snap like this maybe once in five years. Ohio could get them any time from November to March, by what he’d seen. He wondered why the hell the CSA wanted to overrun country like this in the first place.

  Not all the trucks into which cursing Confederates were loading crates of shells had started life down in Birmingham. Some were captured U.S. machines, with slightly blunter lines, slightly stronger engines, and suspensions that would shake a man’s kidneys right out of him on a rough road. They had butternut paint slapped on over the original green-gray. They had butternut paint slapped on their canvas canopies, too. Rough use and rough weather were making it peel off. Dover hoped that wouldn’t get some luckless driver shot by somebody on his own side.

  The drivers were safe if those trucks didn’t get moving. Dover rounded on a quartermaster sergeant. “What’s the slowdown about?” he demanded.

  “Sir, we were suppose to get a couple dozen military prisoners to help us load, and they ain’t showed up,” the sergeant said stolidly. “We’re doin’ what we can with what we got. Ain’t like the last war-no nigger labor gangs up here.”

  Jerry Dover muttered discontentedly. He’d never been a big Freedom Party man; he thought Jake Featherston was more a blowhard than anything else. Without Negroes, the Huntsman’s Lodge either couldn’t have operated at all or would have had to charge three times as much. Negroes had done a lot for the Army in the Great War. Not this time around. Featherston didn’t trust them-and he’d given them abundant good reason not to trust him.

  Before saying anything, Dover eyed the quartermaster sergeant’s hands. They were muddy and battered, with a couple of torn fingernails. He’d been humping crates just like everybody else. Nobody could complain about effort. “All right, Sergeant. Do the best you can. I’ll track those damn convicts for you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the noncom said.

  The convicts wouldn’t work the way Negroes would have in the last war. They’d know they were doing nigger work, and they’d do it badly just to remind people they weren’t niggers and the work was beneath their dignity. That they might get their countrymen killed because they worked badly wouldn’t bother them. That they might get themselves killed wouldn’t bother them, either. Showing they were good and proper white men counted for more.

  Were Dover a convict, he knew he would act the same wa
y. No less than the men who’d fallen foul of military justice, he was a Confederate white man. He’d probably had more experience with Negroes than any white since the days of overseers. That had nothing to do with the price of beer. There were some things a Confederate white man wasn’t supposed to do.

  Of course, one of the things Confederate white men weren’t supposed to do was lose a war to the USA. If not losing meant they had to do some other things they wouldn’t normally, then it did, that was all. So Dover thought, anyhow. Some of his countrymen seemed to prefer death to dirtying their hands.

  Shells burst a few hundred yards away. Dover didn’t flinch, didn’t duck, didn’t dive for cover. They’d have to come a lot closer than that before he started flabbling. Back in the last war, he’d learned to gauge how dangerous incoming artillery was. The knack came back in a hurry this time around.

  Most of the older men working with these crates had it. Some of the younger ones didn’t. What did worry Dover was that the damnyankees’ guns were close enough to strike what should have been the Confederates’ safe rear in Ohio. That showed how badly things had gone wrong. With so many men dead or captured in and around Pittsburgh, the defenses farther west were crumbling. One U.S. thrust was coming west from Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, the other southeast from northern Indiana and northwestern Ohio. If they met, they would enfold even more irreplaceable Confederate troops in a pocket.

  Dover went over to the field telephone station. The state of the art there had improved a lot since the Great War. Then people used Morse more often than they shouted into field telephones, just to make sure their message got through. Now you knew the guy on the other end of the line would hear you.

  Whether he felt like listening to you might be a different story. For years, Dover had battled people who tried to palm off lower-quality meat and seafood and vegetables on him and to give him what he needed later than he needed it. Now he turned all his suavity and charm on the Confederate military policemen who hadn’t delivered the promised convicts on time.