Just past Dawson Springs, Mantarakis heard a buzzing in the air. His head swivelled rapidly till he spotted the aeroplane coming north. It skimmed along low to the ground, paralleling the road down which he was marching. For a moment, that made him think it was an American aeroplane returning from the front. Then he spied the Confederate battle flags painted on the fabric under each wing.
The pilot must have seen the regiment before Paul noticed him. He brought the aeroplane down even lower, right down to treetop height. That gave the observer a perfect chance to rake the column of U.S. soldiers with his machine gun.
Men screamed and fell and ran every which way. A few, cooler-headed than the rest, stood in place and fired back at the Rebel aeroplane with their Springfields. Mantarakis admired their sangfroid without trying to imitate it. He was utterly unashamed to dive into a muddy ditch by the side of the road. Bullets kicked up dirt not far away.
Ignoring the rifle fire, the aeroplane wheeled through a turn and came back south down the other side of the road, raking the regiment all over again. Then, pilot and observer no doubt laughing to each other about shooting fish in a barrel, it streaked away for home, going flat out now.
Mantarakis got out of the ditch. He was filthy and wet, as if he'd been in the trenches for a month instead of away from them. Muddy water dripped from the brim of his cap, his nose, his chin, his elbows, his belt buckle.
Gordon McSweeney stood like a rock in the middle of the roadway, still firing after the Confederate aeroplane although, by now, his chances of hitting it were slim indeed. Officers and non-coms shouted and blew whistles, trying to get the regiment back into marching order.
A familiar voice was missing. There lay Sergeant Peterquist, not moving. Blood soaked the damp, hard-packed dirt of the roadway. A bullet had torn through his neck and almost torn off his head. "Kyrie eleison," Mantarakis murmured, and made the sign of the cross.
"Popery — damned popery," McSweeney said above him.
"Oh, shut up, Gordon," Mantarakis said, as if to a pushy five-year-old.
The really funny thing was that the Orthodox Church reckoned the pope every bit as much a heretic as any Scotch Presbyterian did.
"You'll do his soul no good with your mummeries," McSweeney insisted.
Paul paid no attention to him. If Peterquist was dead, somebody would have to do his job. Mantarakis looked around for Corporal Stankiewicz, and didn't see him. Maybe he'd been wounded and dragged off, maybe he was still hiding, maybe… Maybe none of that mattered. What did matter was that he wasn't here.
Even if he wasn't, the job, again, needed doing. Mantarakis shouted for his section to form up around him, and then, as an afterthought, to get the dead and wounded off to the side of the road. A lot of people were shouting, but not many of the shouts were as purposeful as his. Because he sounded like someone who knew what he was doing, men listened to him.
Lieutenant Hinshaw had his whole scattered platoon to reassemble. By the time he got around to the section Sergeant Peterquist had led, it was ready to get moving again, which was more than a lot of the column could say.
"Good work," Hinshaw said, looking over the assembled men and the casualties moved out of the line of march (Stankiewicz was among them: shot in the arm on the Rebel aeroplane's second pass). Then he noticed the absence of non-coms. "Who pulled you people together like this?"
Nobody said anything for half a minute or so. Mantarakis shuffled his feet and looked down at the bloodstained dirt; he didn't want to get a name for blowing his own horn. Then Gordon McSweeney said, "It was the little Greek, sir."
"Mantarakis?" Most of the time, Paul was in trouble when the lieutenant called his name. But Hinshaw nodded and said, "If you do the work, you should have the rank to go with it. You're a corporal, starting now."
Mantarakis saluted. "Thank you, sir." That meant more pay, not that you were ever going to get rich, not in this man's Army. It also meant more duties, but that was how things went. You got a little, you gave a little. Or, in the Army, you got a little and, odds were, you gave a lot.
The pillar of black, greasy smoke rose high into the sky northwest of Okmulgee, Sequoyah, maybe higher, for all Stephen Ramsay knew, than an aeroplane could fly.
The fires at the base of that pillar didn't crackle, didn't hiss, didn't roar- they bellowed, like a herd of oxen in eternal agony. Even from miles away, as he was now, it was the biggest noise around. It was the biggest sight around, too: an ugly red carbuncle lighting up a whole corner of the horizon.
Captain Lincoln looked at the vast, leaping, hellish flames with sombre satisfaction. "We've denied that oil field to the enemy," he said.
"Yes, sir," Ramsay said. "Anybody tries to put out those fires, he's gonna be a long time doin' it."
"Less than you'd think, Sergeant, less than you'd think," Lincoln said. "Put a charge of dynamite in the right place and whumpl — out it goes. But even if the damnyankees do that, they won't be drawing any crude oil or gas from those wells for a long time, which was the point of the exercise."
"They sure won't, sir." Ramsay sighed and patted his horse's neck with a gloved hand. "Who would've thought the damnyankees could push us back like this? We don't do some fightin' back, they're gonna run us out of Se quoyah altogether, push us into Texas an' Arkansas."
"Too damn many of 'em." Lincoln spat down into the dirt. "We're liable to have to fall back through Okmulgee, and the chief of the Creek Nation will pitch a fit if we do."
"Yeah, well, if he doesn't like it, he's just going to have to go peddle his papers," Ramsay said. "Either that or pull some men out from under his war bonnet."
Lincoln sighed. The war had worn on him-not just the fighting, but the dickering, too. Ramsay hadn't figured dickering would be a part of war-if you had a gun, you could tell the other guy what to do, couldn't you? — but it was. The captain said, "We aren't like the USA. One of the reasons we fought the War of Secession was to keep the national government from telling the states what they had to do."
"Makes us a hell of a lot freer than the damnyankees," Ramsay said, it being an article of faith in the CSA that living in the USA was at most a short step better than living under the tyranny of the czars. These days, of course, Russia was an ally, so nobody said much about the czars, but the principle remained the same.
"Yeah, it does," Lincoln said with another sigh. "But it means sometimes we have to go through a whole lot of arguing to get through something the Yanks could deal with by giving a couple of orders. And here in Sequoyah, you may have noticed, it's even more complicated than it is anyplace else."
"Nov, that you mention it, sir, I have noticed that," Ramsay admitted, drawing a wan smile from the captain.
Sequoyah, by itself, was a Confederate state. But within its borders lay five separate nations, those of the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, the Five Civilized Tribes. They kept their local autonomy and guarded it with zeal; the governor of Sequoyah sometimes had more trouble getting their chiefs to cooperate with him than President Wilson did with the governors of the Confederate states. And, since a lot of the state's petroleum and oil lay under land that belonged to the Indian nations, they had enough money on their own to keep the state government coming to them hat in hand.
They were enthusiastic about the government in Richmond, not resigned like most people in the Confederacy. They had reason to be, because it kept the state government off their backs. But they expected the national government — which now meant the Army-to come through for them, too, and justify faith by works.
Lincoln said, "If I have to tell Charlie Fixico I'm pulling out of Okmulgee without even trying to defend the town, you know what he's going to do? He's going to write his congressman, back in Richmond. And since his congress man just happens to be named Ben Fixico, that makes me toast without any marmalade. But what am I supposed to do?"