“Good thing there aren’t hardly any of them in our country,” the bodyguard said, proving he’d missed the point.
If he were smarter, if he were able to think straighter, he probably wouldn’t want to be a bodyguard. You couldn’t get all hot and bothered because people weren’t the way you wanted them to be. Oh, you could, but a whole fat lot of good it would do you. Taking them as they were worked better. Will this fellow see it if I spell it out in small, simple words? Jake wondered.
The decision got made for him. He knew what that rumbling, rushing sound in the air was. “Incoming!” he shouted, and was proud his yell came only a split second after the first artilleryman’s.
He sprang for the foxholes, and was down in one before the first shells landed. The men who fought the 105s were just as fast, or even faster. Some of his bodyguards, though, remained above ground and upright when shells burst not far away. They didn’t know any better-they weren’t combat troops. Here, ignorance was expensive.
“Get in a hole, goddammit!” he yelled. Some of the artillerymen were shouting the same thing. And the bodyguards who hadn’t been hit did dive for cover, only a few seconds slower than they should have. But a barrage was a time when seconds mattered.
Till things let up, Jake couldn’t do anything. If he came out of his foxhole, he was asking to get torn up himself. He wasn’t afraid. He’d proved that beyond any possible doubt in the last war. But he knew too well the CSA needed him. That kept him where he was till the U.S. bombardment moved elsewhere.
That bombardment wasn’t anything that warned of an attack. It was just harassing fire, to make the Confederates keep their heads down and to wound a few men. During the Great War, Jake had fired plenty of shells with the same thing in mind.
If he wasn’t the first one out of a foxhole when the shelling eased, he couldn’t have been later than the third. “Fuck,” he said softly. You forgot what artillery could do to a man till you saw it with your own eyes. One of his guards lay there, gutted and beheaded-except the reality, which included smell, was a hundred times worse and only a tenth as neat as the words suggested.
Another bodyguard lay hunched over on his side, clutching his ankle with both hands. He had no foot; he was doing his best to keep from bleeding to death. Jake bent beside him. “Hang on, Beau,” he said, far more gently than he usually spoke. “I’ll make you a tourniquet.” His boots-the same sort he’d worn in the field in the last war-had strong rawhide laces. He pulled one out, fast as he could. “Easy there. I got to move your hands so I can tie this son of a bitch.”
“Thank you, sir.” Beau sounded preternaturally calm. Some wounded men didn’t really feel it for a little while. He seemed to be one of the lucky ones, though he hissed when the President of the CSA tightened the tourniquet around his ragged stump. Jake used a stick to twist it so the stream of blood slowed to the tiniest trickle. He’d tended to battlefield wounds before; his hands still remembered how, as long as he didn’t think about it too much.
“Morphine!” he yelled. “Somebody give this poor bastard a shot! And where the hell are the medics?”
The men with Red Cross smocks were already there, taking charge of other injured guards. One of them knelt by Beau. The medic injected the bodyguard, then blinked to find himself face to face with Jake Featherston. “You did good, uh, sir,” he said. “He ought to make it if everything heals up all right.”
“Hear that, Beau?” Jake said. “He says you’re gonna be fine.” The medic hadn’t quite said that, but Jake didn’t care. He wanted to make the bodyguard as happy as he could.
“Fine,” Beau said vaguely. Maybe that was shock, or maybe it was the morphine hitting him. The medics got him onto a stretcher and carried him away. Jake wondered what kind of job he could do that didn’t require moving around. The President shrugged. Beau would be a while getting better, if he did.
The head of the bodyguard contingent came up with fire in his eye. He’d got his trousers muddy; Jake judged that accounted for at least part of his bad temper. When the man spoke, he did his best to stay restrained: “Sir, can we please move to a safer location? You see what almost happened to you here.”
Jake shook his head. “Not to me, by God. I know what to do when shells start coming down. I’m sorry as hell some of your men didn’t.”
“And if a shell had landed in your hole, Mr. President?” the bodyguard asked.
“It didn’t, dammit,” Jake said. The guard chief just looked at him. Jake swore under his breath. The man was right, and he knew it. Admitting somebody else was right and he himself wrong was the hardest thing in the world for him. He didn’t do it now, not in so many words. He just scowled at the bodyguard. “I reckon I’ve seen what I came to see.”
“Thank you, sir.” The man saluted. He called to the other guards who hadn’t been hurt: “We can get him away now!”
They all showed as much relief as a drummer who finds out his latest lady friend isn’t in a family way after all. And they hustled Jake back from the gun pit with Olympic speed. He thought it was funny. The guards thought it was anything but. One of them scolded him: “Sir, did you want to get yourself killed?”
If he’d asked whether Jake wanted to get the guards killed, the President would have gone up in smoke. But that wasn’t what he’d wanted to know, and so Jake Featherston only sighed. “No. I wanted to watch the damnyankees catch it.”
“Well, you’ve done that, and now you’ve seen we can catch it, too,” the bodyguard said. “Will you kindly leave well enough alone?”
“Sure,” Featherston said, and all the bodyguards brightened. Then he added, “Till the next time it needs doing.” Their shoulders slumped.
“We really shouldn’t be anywhere close to the line,” the guards’ leader said. “Damnyankee airplanes are liable to drop bombs on our heads. Even less we can do about that than we can about artillery, dammit.”
Jake laughed raucously. “Jesus H. Christ, don’t the damnyankees come over Richmond about every other night and drop everything but the fucking kitchen sink on our heads? Bastards’d drop that, too, if they reckoned it’d blow up.”
Some of the bodyguards smiled. Their chief remained severe. “Sir, you’ve got a proper shelter there, not a, a-hole in the ground.” He slapped at the knees of his trousers. Not much mud came away. He fumed. He didn’t like to get dirty.
“Hell of a lot of good a proper shelter did Al Smith,” Jake said. That made all the guards unhappy again. They didn’t like remembering all the things that could go wrong. Jake didn’t like remembering those things, either, but he would do it if he could score points off men who liked it even less.
The guard chief changed the subject, at least a little: “Sir, couldn’t you just stay somewhere safe and follow the war with reports and things?”
“No way in hell,” Jake replied at once. “No place’d stay safe for long. Soon as the Yankees found out where I was at, they’d send bombers after me. I don’t care if I went to Habana-they’d still send ’em. But that’s beside the point. Point is, you can’t trust reports all the goddamn time. Sometimes you’ve got to, yeah. You can’t keep up with everything by your lonesome. But if you don’t get your ass out there and see for yourself every so often, people’ll start lying to you. You won’t know any better, either, ’cause you haven’t been out to look. And then you’re screwed. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” the bodyguard said mournfully. He knew what that meant. It meant he and his men would have to keep worrying, because Jake would go on sticking his nose where the damnyankees could shoot it off.
Airplanes droned by overhead. Jake looked for the closest hole in the ground. So did most of the guards. They weren’t combat troops, no, but a trip to the field taught lessons in a hurry. The airplanes flew from west to east. They had familiar silhouettes. Jake relaxed-they were on his side.