Suddenly, Griffiths let out an indignant squawk. “What is it, sir?” Pound asked.
“Our men,” Griffiths answered. “Our soldiers-retreating!”
Pound got a brief look at them, too, and liked none of what he saw. “We’d better find an ambush position pretty quick, then, sir,” he said. “We’re going to have company.”
Griffiths didn’t get it right away. When he did, he nodded. A stone wall that hid the bottom half of the barrel wasn’t perfect cover, but it was a lot better than nothing.
“Have an AP round ready,” Pound told Bergman. The loader tapped him on the leg to show he’d heard.
“There’s one!” Griffiths squeaked with excitement. “Uh, front, I mean!”
“Identified,” Pound confirmed. “Range six hundred yards.” He added, “Armor-piercing.” Bergman slammed the round into the breech. With quick, fussy precision, Pound lined up the sights on the target: one of the new-model C.S. barrels. Now to see what this new gun could do. He nudged Lieutenant Griffiths. “Ready, sir.”
“Fire!” Griffiths said, and the cannon spoke.
Here in the turret, the report wasn’t too loud. The empty casing leaped from the breech and clattered down onto the deck. Cordite fumes made Pound cough. But he whooped at the same time, for fire spurted from the enemy barrel. “Hit!” he shouted, and Griffiths with him. The old gun wouldn’t have pierced that armor at that range.
“Front!” Griffiths said again, more businesslike this time. “About ten o’clock.”
“Identified,” Pound replied. He scored another hit. Whatever the Confederates wanted today, they weren’t going to buy it cheap.
Out of the line. Armstrong Grimes knew only one thing besides relief: resentment that he’d have to go back when his regiment’s turn in reserve was up. For the time being, though, nobody would be shooting at him. He wouldn’t be ducking screaming meemies. He wouldn’t wonder if the stranger in a green-gray uniform was really a U.S. soldier, and worry that that unfamiliar face might belong to a Mormon intent on cutting his throat or stabbing him in the back and then sneaking away.
He turned to Sergeant Rex Stowe, who tramped along beside him down what had been a highway and was now mostly shell holes. “Ain’t this fun?”
“Oh, yeah. Now tell me another one.” Stowe needed a shave. His helmet was on crooked. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He looked like most of the other U.S. soldiers trudging through the wreckage that had been Provo.
“Anybody figure this fight would take so long when it started?” Armstrong persisted. “We’ve been here forever, and we’re still not in Salt Lake City.” He was no lovelier than his sergeant, and had no doubt he smelled as bad, too.
“We’re doing it on the cheap,” Yossel Reisen complained. “We could end this mess in a hurry if we’d put enough men and barrels and bombers into it.”
“Write your Congresswoman,” Stowe said-a joke that had grown old in the company.
But Reisen answered, “I’ve done it. Aunt Flora says the Confederates and now Canada are taking away what we need.”
Sergeant Stowe didn’t seem to know what to say to that. Neither did Armstrong. They both outranked Yossel, but when it came to clout… Armstrong had none, and as far as he knew Stowe didn’t either. Yossel Reisen, on the other hand, had all the clout in the world-and didn’t want to use any of it.
If he had wanted to use it, he would have been anywhere but here. Provo looked as if God had dropped a cigarette here and then ground it out with a hobnailed boot. The city had fallen weeks ago, but smoke still rose here and there. The smell of death lingered, too. By the urgent insistence it took on every now and then, some of the dead were a lot more recent than the fall of the town.
As Armstrong and his buddies slogged south, other soldiers came north. They were cleaner and better barbered, but their faded uniforms and hard, watchful faces said this wasn’t the first time they were heading up to the front. “What’s new?” one of them called in Armstrong’s general direction.
“You know about the fucking spigot mortar?” he replied.
“Sure do.” The soldier going the other way nodded. “Ka-boom! They had that the last time I went up.”
“Yeah, but now they’ve started loading the screaming meemies with mustard gas. They can carry a lot of it, too.”
“Well, shit,” the other soldier said bitterly. “If it’s not one goddamn thing, it’s another. If I have to put on that rubber gear, the heat’ll kill me.”
It was probably somewhere in the upper nineties. That wasn’t so dreadful as it would have been back in Washington or Philadelphia. As people from out West never got tired of saying, it was a dry heat. That didn’t mean it wasn’t hot, though. And when you wore full antigas gear, you cooked in your own juices. Who needed humidity then?
A little blond girl came out of the ruins to stare at Armstrong. She was about eight years old, and would have been pretty if she weren’t scrawny and filthy and wearing what looked like a torn burlap bag for a dress. The stony hatred on her face didn’t help, either.
“Jesus!” He wanted to make the sign of the cross to ward off that look, and he wasn’t even Catholic. “She’ll shoot at us in the next go-round, and her kid’ll pick up a gun in the one after that.”
“We oughta just shoot all of these bastards and start over here,” Stowe said. “Treat ’em like the Confederates treat their niggers. Then we could do this place right.”
“You think Featherston’s fuckers really are doing that shit?” Armstrong said. “Seems hard to believe.”
“You’d better believe it-it’s true,” Yossel Reisen said. “My aunt knows more about that stuff than she ever wanted to find out. They’re filthy down there, really filthy.”
His aunt was likely to know if anybody did. Armstrong said, “Still seems crazy to me. Why would anybody want to do that to somebody else just on account of what he looks like? I mean, I’ve got no use for niggers, God knows, but I don’t want to kill ’em all.” He had no idea how many oversimplifications and unexamined ideas he’d packed into that, and was probably lucky he didn’t.
“People do it all the time,” Yossel said. “You’re not Jewish, that’s for sure.”
“Nope, not me.” Armstrong might have had more to say on the subject of Jews, too, but not where his buddy could hear it. You didn’t do things like that. Life at the front was tough enough as is. If you pissed off somebody who might save your ass one day soon, you only made it worse.
A sign led to the trucks that would take them back to the R and R center at Thistle. Before long, they’d have to leave again, but Armstrong looked forward to getting clean, getting deloused, and eating real food and sleeping on a real mattress.
As happened too often in the Army, somebody’d screwed up. There were far more soldiers than trucks to take them to Thistle or anywhere else. The men milled around, waiting for something to happen. A lot of Army life was like that. A captain climbed up on what was left of a brick wall and shouted that more trucks would be along in an hour or so. The cheers he drew were distinctly sarcastic. The catcalls, on the other hand, came from the heart. The captain turned red and got down in a hurry.
Armstrong didn’t know what drew his eye to the woman who walked toward the crowd of soldiers. Maybe it was just that she was a woman. Most of the ones he’d seen lately wore dungarees and carried rifles and wanted to kill him. He returned the favor the best way he knew how.
This one had on a dress, a baggy dress that reached almost to her ankles. Her face was pinched and pale. Maybe that was what kept Armstrong’s eye on her-not her good looks, though she wasn’t half bad, but her absolute determination. An alarm bell went off in his mind. He nudged Rex Stowe. “Sergeant, something’s wrong with that broad.” He pointed.