Trucks rumbled into Beaver a few minutes past eleven. A Confederate major in proper uniform alighted from the first one and came looking for Tom. After being directed to the Quay House, he said, “Here we are, sir. You’ve been warned about us?”
“I sure have,” Tom Colleton answered.
“Good,” the major said. “Please bring some men with you to form a screen around the, ah, special soldiers as they go forward. We don’t want to have any unfortunate accidents.”
We don’t want the ordinary soldiers shooting up the special men, he meant. Tom nodded. “I understand, Major. I agree one hundred percent.”
Nobody had got out of the trucks a couple of blocks away. Tom rounded up a couple of squads’ worth of clerks and technicians and other rear-echelon troops and had them surround the silent vehicles. “What’s up, sir?” one of them asked, reasonably enough.
“Don’t be surprised and don’t start shooting when you see who gets out of these trucks,” Tom answered. “No matter what these men look like, they aren’t real damnyankees. They’re infiltrators. They’re going to cause trouble behind the enemy’s lines. If this goes well, it’ll make the advance on Pittsburgh a hell of a lot easier.” He turned to the major. “All right?”
“Couldn’t be better, sir. Thanks.” The major raised his voice: “You can come out now, boys!”
Tom’s men swore softly as the faux Yankees emerged. He couldn’t blame them; he muttered under his breath, too. They looked much too much like the real thing. Their uniforms and helmets were the ones he’d been shooting at for more than a year. They wore U.S. shoes and carried U.S. weapons. And, when they spoke, they sounded like damnyankees, too. That really made the hair on his arms and at the back of his neck want to stand on end.
One of his men said, “Sir, you sure these bastards is on our side?”
“If I was a real Yankee, I’d shoot you for that, you son of a bitch,” one of the men said. He wore a sergeant’s uniform, and sounded like a cocky noncom… a cocky noncom from New York City. He could have taken his act to the stage. In fact, he was taking it to the stage-and a bad review would cost him his neck.
“Come on,” Tom said. “I’ll take you up to the line. One of my companies is facing a sector where the enemy doesn’t really have much of a line in place against us-that’s what happens sometimes when you push hard.”
“Good,” the major said. “Can you start a little firefight somewhere else to distract the Yankees some more?”
The request made sense, even if it would get some of his men wounded or killed. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, and sent the order over the field telephone. A machine gun and some riflemen opened up off to the right. The enemy returned fire. Springfields sounded very different from automatic Tredegars. Machine guns differed, too. The U.S. weapons were closely related to their Great War ancestors. The C.S. model was lighter, cooled by air rather than a clumsy water jacket, and designed to put out absolutely as much lead as possible. It sounded like nothing so much as a giant tearing up an enormous sheet of cloth: the individual rounds going off blended into an almost continuous roar.
“All right, Major,” Tom told the officer in charge of the imitation Yankees when they got to the perimeter. “I’ve done what I can do. The rest is up to you and your boys. Good luck.”
“Thank you kindly, sir.” The major, at least, sounded like a proper Confederate. He turned to the men in his charge. “Come on. Y’all know the drill.”
“Yeah.” “Sure thing.” “No problem.” Those laconic grunts sounded as if they came from the wrong side of the border. One of the men muttered, “Goddamn cowflop cigarettes from now on.” Tom sympathized with that. Everybody knew how eager Yankees were for Confederate tobacco.
A few at a time, the Confederates in U.S. uniform slipped off into the night. Tom waited tensely. If gunfire erupted right in front of him, something had gone wrong up there. But everything stayed quiet. Could they have the passwords for this sector? If the enemy had any brains, he would change those every day. Tom knew his own side wasn’t perfect at that. He supposed the Yankees also were unlikely to be.
Everything stayed quiet. However the infiltrators were doing it, they were doing it. The company commander said, “If that doesn’t buy us a breakthrough, nothing will.”
Even talking about breakthroughs made a Great War veteran nervous. “We’ll see what happens, that’s all, Bobby Lee,” Tom answered. “And I reckon we’d better tighten up our own procedures.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Bobby Lee asked.
“What goes around comes around,” Tom answered. “You don’t suppose the damnyankees have men who sound like they come from the CSA? You don’t suppose they can get their hands on our weapons and uniforms? Like hell they can’t. I think we came up with this one first-I hope to God we did-but we’re liable to be on the receiving end one day.”
“Son of a bitch,” the young captain said. “My hat’s off to you, sir.” He took himself literally, doffing his helmet.
Tom snorted. “Never mind that. Just have our men ready to move fast if the order comes.”
“Yes, sir. They will be, sir,” Bobby Lee promised.
By the time Tom got back to Beaver, the buses that brought in the phony U.S. soldiers had gone. But Confederate barrels-with, he devoutly hoped, real Confederates inside them-were rumbling into town.
The storm broke the next afternoon. The barrels slammed into the shaky U.S. position, and it turned out to be even shakier than anybody would have expected. Enemy reinforcements showed up late, showed up in the wrong places, or didn’t show up at all. Unlike a lot of people, Tom Colleton had a pretty good notion of why that was so. He wondered what it was costing the Confederates in U.S. green-gray. We’d better make it worthwhile, he thought, and pushed his own men forward without mercy.
Jonathan Moss mooched back toward the barracks at the Andersonville POW camp from the latrine trenches. Nick Cantarella was coming the other way. He gave Moss a sour nod. “They still have guys looking up your ass when you take a crap?” he asked.
“Just about,” Moss answered. They both rolled their eyes. Ever since that downpour made part of the U.S. escape tunnel fall in on itself, the Confederates had been as jumpy as mice at a cat’s wedding. Moss knew they had every reason to be. Knowing it didn’t make him like it any better.
“Such fun,” Cantarella said. The Confederates still didn’t know who’d built the tunnel. That Cantarella kept on walking around proved as much. If the guards had had any idea what was what, he would have been in solitary confinement or manacles or leg irons or ball and chain or whatever else they thought up to keep POWs from absquatulating.
“I wonder if anyone has anything else going on,” Moss remarked.
“You never can tell,” said the captain from New York. “One of these days, the guards are liable to wake up and find out we’ve all flown the coop. What do they do then? Jump off a cliff? Here’s hoping.”
“Yeah. Here’s hoping.” Moss knew his own voice sounded hollow. He wanted out. He wanted out so bad he could taste it. He wasn’t the only POW who did, of course. The guards knew as much, too. They’d known that even before the tunnel collapsed. Now, with their noses rubbed in it, they tried to keep an eye on everybody all the time.
Wrinkling his own nose, Captain Cantarella walked on toward the latrine trenches. Jonathan Moss ambled back to the barracks. Other POWs nodded to him as he went by. He was one of the boys by now, not a new fish who drew dubious glances wherever he went and whatever he did. Having the enemy suspicious of you was one thing. It came with being a prisoner of war. Having your own side suspicious of you felt a lot worse.
“ ’Day, Major,” First Lieutenant Hal Swinburne said.
“Hello, Hal.” Moss hid a smile at his own thoughts of a moment before. Hal Swinburne hadn’t been at Andersonville very long, but nobody suspected him of being a Confederate plant. For one thing, three officers already incarcerated vouched for him. For another, he was a Yankees’ Yankee: he came from Maine, and spoke with such a thick down-East accent, half his fellow POWs had trouble following him. Moss couldn’t imagine a Confederate plant talking like that.