Except as an obstacle, they and the others like them ignored the truck. They flowed around it, flowed past it-and kept the men in it from getting to where they could do anything about stopping the Confederate advance that had set the refugees in motion in the first place.
A Model T that edged around the truck held-Chester counted carefully-fourteen people. He wouldn’t have bet you could cram that many in as a stunt. This was no stunt; it was, literally, life and death. The ancient flivver ran, even if it sagged on its springs.
“Lord, what a fuckup,” the PFC said softly. Chester nodded and lit yet another cigarette. That was about the size of it.
Lieutenant Husak, meanwhile, started throwing a fit. “We’ve got to clear these people!” he yelled. “How are we supposed to fight a war if civilians keep getting in the way?” Civilians getting in the way weren’t an accidental consequence of Confederate attacks; Featherston’s men knew they would, and took advantage of it. Husak turned to the soldiers with him. “You men! Fix bayonets and get these refugees off the road. If an Asskicker comes by, we’re sitting ducks, and so are they.”
He wasn’t wrong. Chester hadn’t used his bayonet for anything but a knife and a can opener since the Great War. He put it on the business end of his Springfield now. It was still good for intimidating civilians.
“Get out of the road!” he shouted as he hopped down from the truck. He did his best to sound like a traffic cop. “Come on, people-move it! You’re blocking military traffic! You’ve got to get out of the way!”
Had the truck been full of soldiers, he would have got results faster. It wasn’t so easy with only half a dozen men at his back. The civilians didn’t want to listen. All they wanted was to get away from the Confederates. They returned to the highway as soon as Chester and his comrades went by.
And then a Confederate dive bomber did spot the column and the halted truck.
Chester knew what that scream in the sky was as soon as he heard it. “Hit the dirt!” he yelled, and took his own advice, scrambling away as fast as he could. The PFC dove for cover, too. The rest of the soldiers and the civilians were still mostly upright when the Mule machine-gunned them, dropped a bomb right in front of the truck, and roared back toward the west.
Screams. Shrieks. Raw terror. People running every which way. People down and bleeding-some writhing and howling, others lying still. Pieces of people flung improbably far. The truck going up like Vesuvius. Whatever problems Lieutenant Husak had with his temper, he’d never fix them now.
And now there was even more chaos and delay on the road than there had been before. Chester looked around. With the lieutenant dead, he was the highest-ranking man here. He wanted the responsibility about as much as he wanted a root canal. Want it or not, it had just landed in his lap. He got up and started doing what little he could to set things right.
Despite its quaint name, Tom Colleton found himself liking Beaver, Pennsylvania. The town sat in the middle of a mining and industrial belt near the border with Ohio, but was itself pleasant and tree-shrouded. He’d commandeered the ivy-covered Quay House, former home of a prominent Socialist politician, for his regimental headquarters.
The runner from division HQ, a few miles farther south, caught up with him there. After saluting, the corporal said, “Sir, I have a special order for you.”
It must have been special, or his superiors would have sent it by wireless or field telephone, enciphering it if they thought they had to. Tom nodded. “Give it to me, then.”
He expected the messenger to pull out a piece of paper for him to read and then destroy. Instead, it came orally. The powers that be really didn’t want anything that had to do with it falling into U.S. hands. “Sir, you are ordered to allow a special unit to pass through your lines, and to make sure the troops under your command do nothing to interfere with this special unit in any way.”
That said just enough to leave Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton scratching his head. “Of course I’ll obey, but I’d like to know a little more about what I’m obeying,” he said. “Why would my men want to interfere with this special unit, whatever it is? How can I tell them not to if I don’t know why it’ll cause trouble?”
“Sir, I was told you’d likely ask that question, and that I was allowed to answer it,” the corporal said seriously. “The answer is, this special unit is made up of men who can talk like damnyankees. They wear Yankee uniforms and act like U.S. soldiers.”
“Son of a bitch!” Colleton exclaimed. Whatever he’d expected, that wasn’t it. After a moment, he wondered why not. Troops like that could raise merry hell behind enemy lines. Of course, they’d have a short life and not a merry one if they got captured. But that was their lookout, not his. He asked, “How will they get up here without having some overeager kid in butternut shoot their asses off?”
He won a smile from the runner. “They’ve come this far, sir,” the corporal said. “They’ll have escorts who look the way they’re supposed to. And they’ll move up at night, when they’re less likely to be noticed.”
“All right. Makes sense.” Tom wondered if the special unit had come up from the CSA entirely by night, lying quiet and hidden by day. He couldn’t think of any better way to keep his own side from trying to kill them. He asked, “Can you tell me anything about what they’ll be doing?”
“No, sir,” the messenger answered. “They didn’t tell me, so I couldn’t tell the damnyankees in case I got caught.”
“Fair enough-that makes sense, too,” Tom said. “What time can I expect ’em? My men will need some warning.”
“They should get here about eleven o’clock,” the messenger said. “Please don’t brief your men too soon. If they get captured, or if they just start bragging to damnyankee pickets…”
“I understand.” What Tom understood was that he was between a rock and a hard place. His men did need warning, or they would do their best to murder the ersatz Yankees. If he had to hold off till the last minute for fear of breaching security, some of them might not get the word. “I’ll do what needs doing.”
“Yes, sir.” The corporal saluted. “If you’ll excuse me…” He headed back toward division HQ, presumably bearing word that the special unit could come ahead.
Tom shook his head in wonder. Then he got on the field telephone with his company commanders, trying to find out where U.S. lines in front of him were most porous. “What’s cooking, sir?” one of his captains asked. “We going to sneak raiders through?”
“You might say so, Bobby Lee,” Tom answered. “You’ve got the quiet sector, so you win the cigar. Alert your men that the infiltrators will have escorts, and that they are to follow the orders they get from those escorts. Got it?”
“Well enough to do what I’m told,” the captain answered plaintively. “Something funny’s going on, though, isn’t it?”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Tom didn’t want to go into detail on the telephone. The damnyankees were better than he wished they were at tapping telephone lines. He didn’t know some U.S. noncom with earphones was listening to every word he said, but he didn’t want to elaborate on what was going to happen, not when his own superiors had gone out of their way to keep from sending anything on the air or over the wires.
With his own curiosity aroused, he waited impatiently for nightfall. Somewhere off to the north, artillery rumbled. His own area stayed pretty quiet. He supposed his superiors wanted it that way. If the Confederate soldiers dressed as Yankees were going to cause the most trouble, they ought to go in where the real enemy wasn’t keyed up and ready to start shooting at anything that moved.