Breakthroughs (16 page)

And, sure enough, Gibbon looked disgusted. “That damn Rokeby. All I can say is, it’s a good thing he ain’t got a cold, on account of he’d blow out his brains if he was to bring a hanky up to his nose. It ain’t Elsie that Hannebrink’s laying pipe for, it’s Paulette Tooker, three farms over.”

“He seemed pretty sure,” McGregor said doubtfully.

“Only holes Wilfred Rokeby knows a goddamn thing about are the ones between his stamps,” the storekeeper said. “Christ on His Cross, Arthur, when have you ever known Wilf to have his gossip straight?”

“Well, you’re right about that,” McGregor said. “Damn shame. I don’t know the Tookers what you’d call well, but I never heard anything bad about Paulette till now. I’d still sooner believe it was Elsie. She hasn’t been right since her husband went into the prisoner camp.”

“Believe what you want.” Gibbon’s voice showed his indifference.

“What other gossip have you got?” McGregor asked. “Spin it out and let’s see how much of it I believe.” Gibbon was happy to oblige. He knew something scandalous about almost all the Canadians in town, about half the Canadians on the farms, and about maybe one American in three. Whether what he knew bore any relation to the truth was a different question.

When the storekeeper finally ran down like a phonograph that needed winding, McGregor went out, brought his wagon around to the front of the store, and loaded his purchases onto it. He was very quiet and thoughtful all the way home. When he was almost there, he smiled.

Dirt fountained up as U.S. artillery pounded a Confederate machine-gun position in front of Jonesboro, Arkansas. “That’ll teach the goddamn sons of bitches,” Ben Carlton said gleefully as the barrage went on and on.

“Don’t blaspheme.” Sergeant Gordon McSweeney had lost track of how many times he’d warned the company cook about that. Carlton was as stubborn in sin as he was in reproof.

“Blow ’em to hell and gone,” Carlton said. McSweeney did not reprove that sentiment. He agreed with it. He expected Carlton would go to hell, too, but that had nothing to do with his hatred for the Confederates in their nest of sandbags and concrete. They were a good crew and they were brave and they had cost the U.S. troops across from them too many casualties.

At last, the guns fell silent. They’d been going on so long, McSweeney imagined he still heard them roaring for a few seconds after they’d quit. He didn’t put his head up over the parapet to see what they’d done to that position. If they hadn’t done enough, that was asking for a bullet in the face.

And they hadn’t. Defiantly, cockily, the Confederate machine gunners squeezed off a few quick bursts to let their foes know they were still in business at the same old stand.

“Bastards,” Ben Carlton snarled. “God damn those bastards to the hottest fire in hell for the next million years, and then think up somethin’ really bad to happen to ’em.”

“For the million years after that, they could eat your cooking every day,” McSweeney said, “for you will surely go down to that place of eternal torment yourself unless you leave off taking the name of the Lord in vain every time you open your mouth.”

Carlton glared at him. “Fine. I’m just tickled pink them brave, upstanding Confederate gentlemen lived through everything we flung at ’em. I’m dancin’ in the daisies that they get the chance to blow off the tops of some more of our heads. There. You satisfied, Mr. Holier-than-Thou?”

“No,” McSweeney said in a flat voice. “I am not satisfied. Bombardment by artillery is the wrong way to put a machine-gun nest out of action. You might as well try to kill a mosquito with a shotgun.”

“When the mosquitoes start bitin’ around here, we’ll kill ’em any which way we can,” Carlton said.

“You misunderstand,” McSweeney said. Carlton smirked. McSweeney fixed him with a pale-eyed glare that made the smirk drip off his face. “Not only that, you misunderstand on purpose. If that isn’t sinful, it is insubordinate. Shall we talk this over with Captain Schneider?”

Carlton visibly considered it. Whatever Schneider did to him was liable to be milder than what he’d get from McSweeney. Finally, he shook his head and ate crow. “No, Sarge. I’m sorry, Sarge.”

He didn’t sound sorry. McSweeney reluctantly decided not to press the point. He had other things on his mind anyhow. “Artillery, I tell you, is the wrong tool to use. I know the right tool.”

His eyes blazed. That was metaphorical, not literal, but Ben Carlton followed his thoughts even so. “How in…blazes you going to get close enough to those Confederate…bums to toast ’em before they put about a belt’s worth of bullets through you and your gaslight there?”

“It would have to be at night,” McSweeney thought aloud. “It would have to be at night, and I would need a diversion.”

“You need your head examined, that’s what you need.” Carlton went off down the trench line shaking his head.

McSweeney, on the other hand, went off and found his company commander. “Permission to stage a raid on the enemy’s trenches tonight, sir?” he asked. Captain Schneider nodded. McSweeney saluted. Sometimes things were very easy to arrange.

But, to his annoyance, Schneider came up to the forwardmost trench while the men who would take part in the raid were scrambling over the parapet. The company commander frowned. “It’s usual for raiders to take along an extra sack of grenades or two,” he remarked.

“Yes, sir, so it is,” McSweeney agreed. “We have them. You must have seen.”

“I saw,” Schneider said grimly. He pointed to McSweeney. “It is highly unusual, however, for a man to go on a trench raid festooned with a flamethrower.”

“I suppose it may be, sir.” When McSweeney shrugged, the heavy tank of jellied gasoline on his back dug into his kidneys. His voice sounded more innocent than it had any business being. “Of course, there aren’t that many flamethrowers in action.”

“There aren’t that many people crazy enough to want to use the damned things, either,” Schneider said. “What the hell have you got lurking at the back of your mind this time, Sergeant?”

“Sir, if we always do the same thing when we fight the Rebels, they’ll catch on and lick us. If we do something different every now and again, that will keep them guessing,” McSweeney answered. “If they’re guessing, even the same old thing will work better, because they won’t be looking for it so much.”

Captain Schneider gave him a fishy stare. “If I’d wanted strategy, Sergeant, I’d have talked with the General Staff.” He waited to see if that would squeeze any more details out of McSweeney. When it didn’t, he grimaced. “Sergeant, if you go and get yourself killed, I shall be annoyed with you.”

“I am in God’s hands, sir,” McSweeney said. “So long as He bears me up, I shall not fall. I do not believe He is ready to abandon me yet. May I go now? I don’t want the rest of them to get too far ahead of me.”

“And why is that?” Schneider asked. McSweeney stood mute. The captain raked him with a glance almost as hot as the flame that sprang from the nozzle of his flamethrower. When that failed to have any effect, Schneider said, “Go, then.” He turned his back, as if, like Pilate, washing his hands of the whole affair.

McSweeney climbed the sandbag steps out of the trench, scrambled over the parapet, and crawled toward the Confederate lines. He could hear, or thought he could hear, the rest of the raiders ahead. Their course swung a little to the right of being a straight line. His swung a little to the left.

Getting through his own wire was harder with the flamethrower on his back. Being quiet was harder, too. The tank rattled on his shoulders and banged and clanked whenever it hit a rock. He wished he would have thought to wrap it in a blanket before he set out, but he hadn’t, and it was too late.

He made his slow, cautious way toward that machine-gun position. As he crawled forward, he chuckled silently. He had plenty of new shell holes in which to conceal himself. That was an advantage, if a small one—the bombardment had revised the landscape so that it didn’t look as familiar to the Confederate gunners as it would have before.

Rifle fire erupted, perhaps half a mile to the south: by the sound, the Confederates were raiding U.S. trenches there. Machine guns on both sides opened up. The position toward which McSweeney was advancing fired in the direction of the U.S. line. The muzzle flashes from the machine guns were stuttering bayonets of flame. Tracers scribed brief orange lines of death through the night.

None of those tracers was aimed in McSweeney’s direction. He chuckled again as he scuttled forward. He’d sent out his party to keep the machine gunners from noticing his approach, and now the Rebs’ own raiding party was doing part of the job for him.

Slithering under and through the Confederate wire was a longer and tougher piece of work than getting through the sorry entanglements in front of his lines had been. For one thing, the Confederates had a little more wire than his side did. For another, moving silently was much more important here than it had been when he was several hundred yards farther away.

He inched forward. The concrete blockhouse that held the firing slits for the Confederate machine guns was only a hundred yards off…fifty…thirty…twenty. He stopped. He could incinerate it from here, but this was not the moment. He wanted some chance of getting back to his own lines again. If God chose not to give him one…well, that was God’s affair. Meanwhile, McSweeney would wait and hope and pray.

Off to his right, two grenades banged. Several others followed in short order. Rifles barked, Springfields and, with a slightly different note, Tredegars. Shouts erupted, and a high shrill scream that had to burst from the throat of a desperately wounded man.

Through the din, McSweeney heard the machine guns scrape against the rims of their firing slits as their crews traversed them. He heard the gunners curse his country. He shook his head. The Lord punished those who did such things. “And I am His instrument,” he whispered.

The machine guns opened up. More screams rose. McSweeney hoped Confederates were doing all the screaming, but doubted that was so. He felt sorry that some of the raiders he’d sent out would be hurt or killed, but only so sorry. God had made the world so some things simply could not be done without loss.

He got to his feet, pointed the nozzle of the flamethrower in the direction of the firing slits, and pulled the trigger. The action, after he’d worked on it, was smooth as glass. Flaming gasoline leaped the gap. The machine guns fell silent. The men who had served them, though, screamed like damned souls.

McSweeney shook his head. Torments of this world were brief, not eternal, and Satan surely had fires hotter than any of mortal devising. The Scotsman dropped back into the shell hole. Bullets creased the air. Half a minute later, he rose again and gave the machine-gun nest another taste of the lash of fire.

Cartridges inside the blockhouse began cooking off. No more screams came from it; the men inside were already cooked. McSweeney dropped down once more. He thought about standing again for a third dose of flame, but in the end thought better of it. The Confederates were howling with fury. Bullets buzzed overhead, thick as bees. He wondered if the Rebs would come out of the trenches after him. They didn’t. He smiled his alarming smile. Few men in his section would have been happy about going after a foe with a flamethrower, either.

He made his slow way back across no-man’s-land to his own lines, commending his soul to God all the way. If a bullet chanced to strike the fuel tank on his back—if God willed that a bullet should strike the fuel tank on his back—he would learn what sort of death he dealt out to others.

God did not so will. He scrambled over the parapet and down into his own trenches. Hunting down Captain Schneider, he said, “Sir, I can report that that machine-gun position will not trouble us again for some time to come.”

Schneider said nothing at all. He stood there in the dark, shaking his head. Ben Carlton happened to be standing not far away. “Goddamn but you’re a crazy son of a bitch, Sergeant,” he declared.

“Don’t blaspheme,” McSweeney answered automatically, and then, when he really heard what the company cook had said, “Thank you.”

Till his latest troubles started, Cincinnatus had never set foot in the Covington, Kentucky, city hall. Before the war started, a Negro in the CSA saw the inside of a city hall only if he was in some kind of trouble. Before the war, Cincinnatus had always stayed out of trouble. But he hadn’t stayed out since, and now the Yankees were grilling him.

Actually, Luther Bliss wasn’t quite a Yankee. He was the chief of the Kentucky State Police in the readmitted administration—head of the secret police, in other words. “Now, then, boy,” he said in a mild voice, “tell me again how that Kennedy son of a bitch happened to get himself shot dead on your doorstep.”

The only thing Cincinnatus had going for him was that the authorities didn’t really know how much trouble he was in. “I tol’ you an’ tol’ you, suh,” he answered, sounding as stupid as he could, “I don’t rightly know. I used to work fo’ the man, is all.”

A muscle in Bliss’ right cheek jumped. A scar, as from a knife, cut that cheek, which made the tic more noticeable. “Lots of people used to work for the Rebel son of a bitch,” he said, mildly still. “How come he chose
you
?” His eyes, a peculiar pale brown, were very intent.

“I ain’t got a clue, suh,” Cincinnatus said. “Could I please go back to workin’ reg’lar again, suh? If I can’t do my job on account o’ you folks askin’ me questions all the time, things git hard back home fo’ my wife an’ my little boy an’ me.”

Bliss steepled his fingers and leaned across the table toward him. “Now let’s just talk about your job, shall we? Lieutenant Kennan gives you a good character from the days when you were working on the docks, and Lieutenant Kennan, I happen to know, doesn’t hardly give niggers good characters a-tall.” His own accent thickened. Was he trying to lull Cincinnatus into thinking him a fool?

If he was, he failed. Cincinnatus could tell how good at his job he was, stubborn as a hound and sneaky as a snake. “I worked hard for the man,” Cincinnatus said. “I work hard every place I work.”