The look Morrell gave him should have left him charred worse than the burnt-out C.S. barrel. “I don’t want to respond to Featherston’s fuckers,” he ground out. The young lieutenant’s eyes widened, perhaps at the obscenity but more likely at the heresy. Morrell proceeded to spell it out: “I want to make Featherston’s fuckers respond to me. I can’t do that, can I, unless I can pull together enough barrels to get their attention?” It seemed obvious to him. Why didn’t it seem obvious to anybody else in a green-gray uniform?
“But, sir, if the infantry isn’t supported, the enemy will just slice through it, the way he has before.” The lieutenant sounded like a man trying to reason with a dangerous lunatic.
“He’s welcome to try,” Morrell said, which made the shavetail’s eyes get big all over again. “If I have a decent force of barrels of my own, though, I’ll land on his flank and cut his supply line neat as you please. Let’s see how much slicing he does without gasoline or ammo.”
He waited. The lieutenant contemplated. “Do you really think you could do that, sir?” He was too polite and too far under military discipline to call Morrell a liar in so many words, but he didn’t believe him, either.
“Would they have sent me here if they didn’t think I could?” Morrell asked. “Or don’t you think the War Department knows what it’s doing?”
“Sir, if the War Department knew what it was doing, would we be in a quarter of the mess we’re in?” the lieutenant replied.
Morrell stared at him as if he’d never seen him before. In a very real way, he hadn’t. He stuck out his right hand. When the lieutenant hesitated, Morrell grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down. “Congratulations!” he said. “That’s the first halfway smart thing I’ve heard out of you.”
“Uh, sir?” He’d bewildered the lieutenant.
“Always distrust what the people too far from the front line to hear small-arms fire tell you,” Morrell said. “Always. Most of what they think they know is going to be out of date or wrong some other way. It will have gone through too many mouths before it finally gets to them. And a lot of them won’t ever have got close enough to the front to hear small-arms fire. Half the time, they won’t understand what other people are trying to tell them even if it turns out to be the gospel truth. Sometimes it does-accidents will happen.”
The young officer eyed him. “What about you, sir?”
“There. That’s the second smart thing you’ve said.” Morrell grinned. “All I can tell you is, I’ve got an oak-leaf cluster for my damn Purple Heart. Do I pass inspection?”
“Uh, yes, sir.” The lieutenant blushed like a schoolgirl. A glance at the short row of fruit salad on his chest showed he’d never been wounded. He probably thought that made him less of a man. Morrell had had stupid notions like that till he got shot in the leg. Nothing like a wound infection to take the romance out of war.
He got down to business. “All right, then. How secure are the telephone lines out of this place?”
“Well, we do the best we can, sir, but I can’t guarantee the bastards in butternut aren’t tapping them,” the lieutenant said. “Same with the telegraph.”
“It would be,” Morrell muttered. A war between two countries that spoke the same language was harder than other kinds just about every which way. You had to assume the enemy was listening to everything you did, and that he knew what you were up to as soon as you did. You’d give him too much credit some of the time, but you didn’t dare give him too little.
You had to assume he was listening. You had to assume he knew what you were up to… “Do you know, Lieutenant, I hope he is. He’s almost bound to be, isn’t he?”
“Sir?” The blank look was back on the kid’s baby face.
Morrell clapped him on the shoulder. “Never mind. Point me at a typewriter. We do have messengers we can rely on, right?” If the lieutenant told him no, he was up the well-known creek without even a canoe, much less a paddle.
But the young officer nodded. “Oh, yes, sir. They’re very reliable, and they make sure to destroy what they’re carrying if they run into trouble.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear,” Morrell said. “Now where’s that typewriter?”
For the next couple of hours, he pounded away at it. He was no secretary; he typed with his two forefingers. He wasn’t fast, but he got the job done. A look at the messengers reassured him more than the lieutenant’s praise did. They were a raffish lot, men who could be counted on to get where they were going. And if they liberated booze or smokes or a steak along the way… well, so much the better.
He gave them oral orders. Then he handed them the dispatches he’d written. Off they went, in command cars, on horseback, on bicycles, on shank’s mare. Before long, one-word responses started coming in by telephone and telegraph. Received, Morrell heard, again and again and again. He marked the map, again and again and again.
When he was satisfied, he got on the telephone. He called officer after officer, delivered his orders, and hung up. Maybe this would work and maybe it wouldn’t. It seemed worth a try, though.
One thing: U.S. reconnaissance was good. Most people who lived in Ohio, especially in this northern part of it, wanted nothing to do with the Confederates. They slipped through enemy lines, risking their necks to report on what Jake Featherston’s men were up to. When Morrell heard the Confederates were assembling armor in Homeworth, a few miles west of Salem, he smiled to himself.
Their attack on Salem went in two days later. They came loaded for bear, convinced they had a big force of barrels in front of them. Morrell showed a few and shelled the Confederates heavily to slow them down. That only made them push harder. They’d just about reached Salem’s outskirts… when the real U.S. barrel force, which had concentrated some miles to the north, roared down and struck them in the flank.
The Confederates still might have made a fight of it. They had at least as many machines as the USA did, and theirs hit harder. But they were rattled, as anybody hit from a direction he didn’t expect would have been. They fell back in some disorder, and left a lot of barrels burning in front of Salem.
“That was amazing, sir!” Now the young lieutenant looked at Morrell with something not far from hero worship.
“That’s what we’re supposed to do, dammit,” Morrell said, wondering how-and if-he could bring off the same sort of thing again.
Abner Dowling was the man who’d spotted the Confederates thinning their lines in Virginia so they could send more men into Ohio. He hadn’t had the chance to attack them after he caught them doing that. Oh, no. His reward was thinning his own lines so the USA could try to smash through the Confederates’ position at Fredericksburg, which hadn’t worked at all. Now he was thinning them still further to send reinforcements to the West.
He took a half pint of whiskey out of his desk drawer and stared at it. Like most half pints, it was curved to fit the hand. He wasn’t a man who drank to excess. He remembered General Custer. With whiskey as with women, Custer could resist everything except temptation. And Custer with a snootful was even more a bull in a china shop than he had been any other time.
No, Dowling wasn’t like that-which didn’t mean he was teetotal, either. Every once in a while, a nip was welcome. Sometimes you needed not to think about things for a little while, and whiskey was the best thought preventer this side of a blackjack. He undid the metal screw top, raised the bottle to his lips, and took a healthy slug.
His adjutant chose that moment to walk in the door.
Captain Angelo Toricelli had been with him since his unhappy stay as commandant in Salt Lake City-another one of the garden spots of the universe. Unlike some adjutants, Toricelli understood that he wasn’t about to end up on Skid Row just because he drank now and again. It was embarrassing all the same.