The Grapple (53 page)

He came back to himself the next morning when somebody gave him a shake and said, “You fuckin’ die under there, Pop?”

“I was restin’,” Cincinnatus said with as much dignity as he could manage around a yawn.

“Yeah, well, you’ll be
ar
rested if you don’t get your ass in gear,” the other soldier said, and he went off to torment somebody else.

Breakfast was scrambled eggs and more slices of that terrific ham. Wherever it came from, Cannizzaro and his merry men had a lot of it. “You ever see anybody skinny in the Quartermaster Corps?” Bruce Donovan asked.

“Yeah, well, what the hell?” Most of the time, Cincinnatus would have been as eager as the other driver to slander Sergeant Cannizzaro and his ilk. Since the guys at the supply dump were sharing their bounty this morning, he was willing to let them off easy.

He wasn’t jumping up and down at the idea of going back up north to get more supplies. Oh, the Army needed them—no doubt about it. But running the gauntlet again, even with armored escorts, didn’t thrill him.

That hardly crossed his mind before Donovan said, “To think I volunteered for this shit.” Cincinnatus couldn’t have put it better himself. Since he couldn’t, he finished his coffee and limped back to his truck.

The convoy hadn’t gone far before it had to stop. The Confederates must have sent bombers over in the night, and a couple of them had scored direct hits on the highway. The bombs must have been big ones, too—the craters were thirty or forty feet wide and at least half that deep. Nobody was going anywhere on that road, not for a while, especially since similar craters pocked the fields to either side.

Army engineers with bulldozers were busy repairing the damage. Soldiers in green-gray went through the bushes to clear out snipers so the engineers could work without harassing fire. That made Cincinnatus jealous, but the engineers weren’t even moving targets. They were sitting ducks.

More engineers were stretching lengths of steel matting—the kind used to make emergency airstrips—across the field to serve as a makeshift road while the real one was getting fixed. After about half an hour, the job was done well enough to suit them. They waved the lead truck forward.

Cincinnatus was glad he wasn’t driving lead. But where the deuce-and-a-half ahead of him went, he followed. The matting was a little higher than an ordinary curb would have been. His truck didn’t like climbing up onto the stuff, but it could. He bumped along, then jounced down, then climbed up onto another strip of matting. Skirting the bomb craters went slowly, but it went. And those soldiers out there beating the bushes were keeping him safe along with the engineers. He tipped his cap to them, though they couldn’t see him do it.

Everybody stepped on the gas once he got back onto the paved highway. Cincinnatus was happy to mash the pedal down to the floorboard. He knew he might be rushing toward danger, not away from it. All the same, he’d felt like a sitting duck himself back there. He was glad to get away.

Nobody got hurt on the run north from Delphi, which made it a good one. Only three or four shots were fired at the column. They sounded like .22 rounds to Cincinnatus. Those wouldn’t come from Confederate soldiers, who had better weapons, but from some civilian with a squirrel gun and a grudge. U.S. authorities had confiscated all the firearms they could. The penalties for holding on to rifles and pistols were bloodthirsty. The Confederate citizenry didn’t seem to care. Cincinnatus wished he were more surprised.

H
alfway to Camp Determination. That was how Abner Dowling looked at it. He wished he’d come farther. He wished his men could have moved faster. But he’d been stalled in front of Lubbock too damn long. The Eleventh Army—such as it was—was moving again. How much anybody back East cared…might be a different story.

He hadn’t got the reinforcements he hoped for. Everything the U.S. Army could lay its hands on was going into the drive toward Chattanooga. Dowling didn’t much like that, but he understood it.

One reason he wasn’t going as fast or as far as he wished he could was that the Confederates
were
bringing in reinforcements: Freedom Party Guard outfits that fought as if there were no tomorrow. They made Dowling scratch his head for all kinds of reasons.

“They’ve got fewer men in Tennessee and Kentucky than we do, right?” he asked his adjutant one hot, sticky summer morning.

“Certainly seems so,” Major Angelo Toricelli agreed.

“They’re in trouble over there and we’re not, right?” Dowling persisted.

“Unless our newspapers and wireless people are lying even harder than Featherston’s, yes, sir,” Toricelli said. “Possible, I suppose, but not likely.”

“Bet your ass it’s not,” Dowling said, which made the younger officer blink. “All right, then. We keep saying we can’t afford to send anything out here to the ass end of nowhere. But Featherston’s sending people, sending equipment, out here like it’s going out of style. I know he’s a son of a bitch, but up till now I never thought he was a
dumb
son of a bitch, you know what I mean?”

“Yes, sir,” Toricelli said. “I can only think of one thing.”

“Well, you’re one up on me if you can. Spit it out.” Dowling had always enjoyed feeling smarter than George Custer. Now he watched his own adjutant feeling smarter than he was.

“To the Confederates, sir, this isn’t the ass end of nowhere,” Toricelli said.

“Well, yes, but why not?” Dowling asked. “You can’t really mean they think killing off Negroes as fast as they can is more important than keeping us out of Chattanooga?”

The words hung in the air after he said them. The oppressive humidity might have borne them up. Major Toricelli nodded. “That’s it, sir. That
is
what I think. Nothing else makes sense to me.”

“Then Featherston really is off the deep end,” Dowling exclaimed.

“Could be, sir. I don’t know anything about that. I’m no head-candler. But whether he’s nuts or not, he’s still running the CSA, and nobody’s trying to stop him that I know of. When he yells, ‘Jump, frog!’ they all ask, ‘How high?’ on the way up.”

“Good God,” Dowling murmured. “If you’ll let your country go down the drain so you can do this instead…I’m not sure a head-candler can help you.”

“I hope nobody can help him,” Toricelli said. “But he’s been at war with Negroes about as long as he’s been at war with the USA. Don’t they say he had a chance to stop the uprisings in the last war, only his superior wouldn’t let him take a servant in for questioning? Something like that, anyway.”

“I think you’re right, or close enough,” Dowling said. “But if he beats us, he can do what he wants with the Negroes later. If he goes on killing them and we lick him…”

“They’re gone, and he dies happy,” Toricelli said.

“He sure as hell dies,” Dowling said. “Send the War Department a report showing the reinforcements we’ve run up against. Send them a summary of what we’ve been talking about, too. They should know we think he thinks that way. Don’t be shy about giving yourself credit, either. You were there ahead of me.”

“Thank you, sir.” Major Toricelli sounded as if he meant that. Dowling understood why. When he served under Custer, nothing was ever the great man’s fault. Anything good accrued to the great man’s credit. Here, Dowling consciously tried not to imitate his old boss.

He sent an armored probe forward—and got it bloodied. Yes, the Confederates finally were reinforced. They had new armor of their own, and that meant trouble. They’d go nipping in after his supply line next. He had the feeling he’d come about as far as he could, or maybe a little farther.

One thing the enemy didn’t have was much air power. Dowling summoned Colonel DeFrancis. “I want you to go after those barrels and self-propelled guns, Terry,” he said. “Go after their fuel dumps, too. Let’s see how much we can slow ’em down.”

“I’ll do my goddamnedest, sir,” DeFrancis said. “We’ve got some new inch-and-a-half guns mounted under dive bombers. Turns ’em into barrel busters. They dive, fire from close range, pull up and climb, then do it again. Engine decking hasn’t got a prayer of standing up to an armor-piercing round like that.”

“Sounds good to me,” Dowling told him. “Turn ’em loose. Let ’em hunt. Let’s see what they can do. Let’s see if they can keep those bastards off our necks.”

“Yes, sir!” Terry DeFrancis sounded enthusiastic. He often did, especially when Dowling was turning him loose on a new and exciting hunt. For most officers, as for most other people in executive positions, what they did was a job. Some of them were better at it than others, but for the able and not so able alike it was work. DeFrancis was different. He enjoyed what he did. He had a good time doing it. Maybe he got a hard-on watching things blow up. Dowling didn’t know—he didn’t ask. But the colonel’s enjoyment made him a better combat officer. He constantly looked for new ways to put the enemy in trouble. Chances were he grinned when he found them, too.

West Texas made good barrel country. It was nice and flat—you could see for miles. There weren’t a lot of forests for barrels to hide in, either. That made for a wide-open fight, and also for a fair fight. But if barrels had trouble hiding from one another, they also had trouble hiding from airplanes. The USA controlled the skies hereabouts. Abner Dowling aimed to make the most of it.

His headquarters wasn’t close enough to the airstrip to let him hear DeFrancis’ dive bombers and fighter-bombers take off. Why put all your eggs anywhere near the same basket when the prairie was so wide? He stayed where he was, strengthened his flanks in case the aircraft didn’t do as much as he hoped they would, and waited to see what happened next.

Custer wouldn’t wait,
he thought.
Custer would charge ahead regardless.
And no doubt he was right, because Custer always aimed to get the bit between his teeth and charge ahead regardless. About four times out of five, he ended up wishing he hadn’t. The fifth time…The fifth time left him with his reputation as a great general, because the fifth time he charged the other side shattered instead of his own.

Dowling knew he wouldn’t go down in the history books as a great general. The two likeliest candidates this time around were Irving Morrell and George Patton. Patton got off to a fast start in Ohio, but Morrell was making up ground—literally as well as metaphorically—in Kentucky and Tennessee. Who held higher honors in the books would probably depend on who won the war.

Some men who realized they weren’t going to be great generals turned into failures instead. They drank too much, or they became sour martinets, or they forgot about discipline for themselves and everybody under them. Dowling tried not to commit those particular sins. If he couldn’t be a great general, he could be a pretty good one, and that was what he aimed at.

He awaited developments, then. A great general probably would have forced them. A pretty good general could decide he was in no position to force them, which seemed plain as a punch in the nose to Dowling. He consoled himself by deciding it would take a great general to beat him, and so far his Confederate counterpart had shown no signs of greatness. If anything, the fellow on the other side seemed to have more trouble making up his mind than Dowling did.

The awaited developments…didn’t develop. No column full of Freedom Party Guards and enemy armor crashed into Dowling’s flank from the wide open spaces to the north or south. Dowling briefly wondered whether his opposite number had had his imagination surgically removed when he was only a lad.

Then the aerial reconnaissance photos came in. Terry DeFrancis came in with them—and with a spring in his step and a cigar in his mouth. “Will you look at these, sir?” he said. “Will you just look at them?”

“If you quit waving them around, I will,” Dowling said.

“Sorry, sir.” DeFrancis set them on his desk.

Dowling spread them out so he could look at several at once. They all seemed to feature vehicles on fire and pillars of smoke mounting up to the sky. Some of the burning vehicles were trucks, but quite a few were barrels. “You hit them hard,” Dowling said.

“Sir, we fucking pulverized them, pardon my French,” DeFrancis said. “They were driving along without a care in the world, right out in the open, and we caught ’em naked with their legs spread. We screwed ’em, too. We screwed ’em to the wall.”

“With news like that, you can speak French to me any old day,” Dowling said.

“Thank you, sir.” Colonel DeFrancis grinned around the cigar. He grew a little more serious as he went on, “Air power matters here. It
really
matters. We’ve got it, and the other guys don’t. That gives them just as much trouble approaching us as a fleet of battleships has approaching an airplane carrier.”

“Don’t get carried away,” Dowling warned. “They can do things battleships can’t. They can camouflage themselves. They can spread out, so you don’t catch so many of them together. I suppose they can even use dummies and hit with their real force while you attack those.”

DeFrancis eyed him. “Sir, I’m glad we’re on the same side. You’ve got an evil, nasty, sneaky mind.”

“You say the sweetest things, Colonel.” Dowling batted his eyelashes at the younger man. Watching a portly, sixtyish general simper and flirt was almost enough to make DeFrancis swallow his stogie. As his air commander had before, Dowling quickly sobered. “You’re doing a terrific job, Terry. I just don’t want you to get too confident.”

“Fair enough, sir,” DeFrancis said. Dowling hoped he meant it. When you were winning, when things were going your way, it was easy to think victory was meant to be. Custer always did. Hell, Custer thought victory was meant to be even when he’d just taken a shellacking. His confidence made his troops pay a fearful butcher’s bill.

In the end, Custer made his vision of victory real. Dowling wanted DeFrancis to do that without causing his own side the misery Custer had. “What’s the next thing you can do that would hurt the enemy most?” Dowling asked.

“Catch another column flatfooted,” DeFrancis replied at once.

Dowling tried again: “What’s the next thing you can do that would hurt the enemy most, assuming he’s not an idiot?”