He did talk to Captain Rhodes, who, he was sure, knew his ass from his end zone. "If they're laying for us, sir, we'll be all dressed up with no place to go," he said.
"What do you think the odds are?" the company commander asked.
"Well, sir, we sure as hell won't take 'em by surprise twice," Martin answered.
"No, but how much can they do about it?" Rhodes said.
"Don't know, sir," Chester said. "I bet we find out, though. If I wanted to be a goddamn guinea pig, I would've bought myself a cage."
That made Captain Rhodes grin, but he didn't change his mind. "We've got our orders," he said. "We're going to go through with them. If we run into trouble, I expect we'll have backup. But I think we have a decent chance to bang on through, same as we did the last time around."
"Hope you're right, sir." Chester didn't believe it. Nobody above him cared what he believed. To the men in his platoon, he was God the Father to Lavochkin's Son and Rhodes' Holy Ghost. To the officers above him, he was just a retread with a big mouth. And the fellows with shoulder straps were the ones whose opinions mattered.
Two mornings later, the long, muscular armored column rolled down the road from Monroe to Good Hope, the same road the smaller raiding band had traveled not long before. Chester thought that might surprise whoever was in charge of the Confederate defenders. They wouldn't believe anybody could be dumb enough to hit them the same way twice running. Chester had trouble believing it himself.
They didn't run into any traffic on the way to Good Hope. They also didn't run into any ambushes, for which Chester was duly grateful. Maybe the C.S. brass really couldn't believe their foes would try the same ploy twice.
Good Hope looked like holy hell. Only a couple of people were on the street when the U.S. command cars and armored vehicles rolled in. The Confederate civilians didn't think the green-gray machines were on their side this time. They took one horrified look, screamed, and ran for their lives.
Maybe that did them some good; maybe it didn't. Machine guns and cannon cut loose as soon as the U.S. column came into the little town, and didn't let up till it rolled through. Martin looked back over his shoulder after he was outside of Good Hope. Clouds of smoke announced that raiders were on the loose. If the enemy had telephone and telegraph lines back up from the last assault, people were already letting C.S. military authorities know about the new one.
If there were any C.S. military authorities in this part of Georgia…Perhaps there weren't. Perhaps the Confederate States really were falling into ruin. Chester could hope so, anyhow.
Trouble came between Good Hope and Apalachee. The road went through some pine woods. The column stopped because a barricade of logs and rocks and overturned wrecked vehicles blocked it. Getting barrels up to knock the obstruction aside wasn't quick or easy, not with trees of formidable size alongside the narrow, badly paved road.
And as soon as the column bogged down, C.S. troops in the woods opened up with automatic weapons, mortars, and stovepipe rockets. Chester didn't think there were a whole lot of them, which didn't mean they didn't do damage. Several soft-skinned vehicles and a halftrack caught fire. Wounded men howled.
U.S. soldiers hit back with all the firepower they'd brought along: heavy machine guns and cannon on their vehicles, along with the rifles and automatic rifles and submachine guns the men carried. Nobody could come close to the column and live, which didn't help all that much when it wasn't going anywhere.
After half an hour or so, U.S. barrels did shoulder the roadblock out of the way. The column went on, minus the vehicles put out of action. When the soldiers got to Apalachee, they tore into it even more savagely than they had at Good Hope. Not much was left of the hamlet when they came out the other side.
Chester hoped they wouldn't duplicate the whole route from the last raid. That would give the Confederates more chances to bushwhack them, and would also mean they were tearing up more stuff they'd already wrecked once. He nodded in approval when they left the road and started cross-country, heading as close to due east as made no difference.
Whenever they came to a farmhouse, they shot it up. If the people who lived there made it very plain they were giving up-if they came out with hands high-the soldiers let them flee with the clothes on their backs. If they showed fight or even if they just stayed inside, they got no second chances.
A startling number of rural Georgians seemed to think a few rounds from a squirrel rifle or a shotgun would set the U.S. Army running. They paid for their education. None of them would ever make that mistake, or any mistake, again. Often, their families died with them.
"That's kind of a shame, sir," Chester said as a woman trapped in a burning farmhouse and likely wounded shrieked her life away.
"Think of it as survival of the fittest," Captain Rhodes replied. "If they're dumb enough to fire on us, they're too dumb to deserve to live."
"She probably didn't have a gun," Martin said.
The company commander shrugged. "She was dumb enough to marry somebody who did. We aren't here to talk to these people, Sergeant. We're here to teach 'em that fucking with the United States is as dumb as it gets."
Inside the farmhouse, cartridges started cooking off. The woman's shrieks mercifully faded. "I'd say she's got the point, sir," Chester said. "Fat lot of good it'll do her from here on out."
Before Rhodes could answer, Chester and he both heard airplane motors overhead. They expected U.S. fighter-bombers to pound whatever lay ahead of them. Then a fearsome scream rose with the rumble. Chester had heard that noise too many times, though not so often lately.
"Asskickers!" he yelled, and threw himself flat.
Anybody who could get to an automatic weapon opened up on the vulture-winged C.S. dive bombers. The Mules ignored the ground fire and planted their bombs in the middle of the thickest concentrations of vehicles they could find. One landed right on a halftrack. The fireball caught a couple of nearby soldiers and turned them into torches. The Asskickers came back again to strafe the U.S. soldiers. Machine-gun bullets stitched the ground much too close to Chester. He scraped away with his entrenching tool, not that it would do a hell of a lot of good.
And then the dive bombers were gone. Captain Rhodes looked around at the damage they'd done. "Fuck," he said softly. "You all right, Chester?"
"Yeah." Martin scrabbled in his pockets for a cigarette. "Boy, I forgot how much fun that was."
"Me, too," Rhodes said. "We've got used to dishing it out. That's a lot more fun than taking it."
"Bet your ass-uh, sir." Chester needed three tries before he could strike a match; his hands were shaking. Then he held out the pack to Rhodes. The company commander didn't waste time trying to light one on his own. He just leaned close to Chester and started his the easy way.
Lieutenant Lavochkin came up. "We ought to push on, sir," he said. "We can do a lot more damage before nightfall."
He didn't care about the air attack. All he wanted to do was keep hitting the Confederates. That was either admirable or slightly insane, depending. Captain Rhodes sighed and blew out a ragged plume of smoke. "We'll see to the dead and wounded, and then we'll go on," he said.
Some of the dead didn't leave enough remains to bury. Maybe the Confederates would tear up the graves the men in green-gray quickly dug, but Chester could hope they wouldn't. Plenty of C.S. soldiers lay in U.S. soil, for the most part quietly.
When the war was over, they would probably sort all of that out. They'd done the same thing after the Great War. By all the signs, this war was bigger and nastier than the one that had lasted from 1914 to 1917. What would they call it when it was done? The Greater War? The Worse War? Right now, it was just the War, commonly with an obscene adjective stuck on in front.