"Yeah, well, if they forget this is part of the country, too, pretty soon it won't be any more," Dover said. "Let's see how they like that."
"I know," Sawyer said wearily. "I've got two worries myself. I got to keep the soldiers supplied-that means you. And I've got to keep the rocket works going. We're hurting the USA with those things, damned if we're not."
"That's nice," Dover said. "In the meantime, I need boots and I need raincoats and I need ammo for automatic rifles and submachine guns. When the hell you gonna get that stuff for me?"
"Well, I can send you the ammunition," Brigadier General Sawyer answered. "That comes out of Birmingham, so it's no problem. The other stuff…Mm, maybe I can get some of it from New Orleans. Maybe."
"If you don't, I'm gonna have men coming down with pneumonia," Dover said. "Boots wear out, dammit, and they start to rot when it's wet like it is now. The guys who have shelter halves are wearing them for rain hoods, but they aren't as good as the real thing."
Sawyer sighed. "I'll try, Dover. That's all I can tell you. You aren't the only dumpmaster yelling his head off at me, remember."
"Why am I not surprised?" Dover hung up with the last word.
Dumpmaster was a word that fit him much too well right now. His supply depot was small and shabby. The nearest town, Edwardsville, was even smaller and shabbier. Close to a hundred years earlier, Edwardsville had been a boom town, for there was gold nearby. Then the mother lode in California shot the little Alabama gold rush right behind the ear. Some of the fancy houses built in Edwardsville's first-and last-flush of prosperity still stood, closed and gray and grim.
"Well?" Pete asked when Dover hung up.
"He promised us the ammo," Dover told the veteran quartermaster sergeant. "As far as the rest of it goes, we're screwed."
"Not us. We got the shit for ourselves," Pete said. Supply officers and noncoms lived well. That was a perquisite of the job. Pete went on, "It's the poor bastards a few miles east of here who get the wrong end of the stick."
Jerry Dover nodded unhappily. In the last war, the average Confederate soldier had been about as well supplied as his Yankee counterpart. Through the first couple of years of this fight, the same held true. But the Confederate States were starting to come apart at the seams, and the men were paying for it.
"Ammo's great," Pete went on. "What if everybody's too damn hungry and sick to use it, though?"
"I already told you," Dover answered. "In that case, we're screwed." He looked around to make sure nobody but Pete could hear before adding, "And we're liable to be."
Off to the northwest lay Huntsville, where the rockets came from. Off to the west lay Birmingham, where anything made of iron or steel came from. Off to the east lay damnyankees who knew that much too well. When they got ready to push west, could they go right on through the Confederates standing in their way?
Although Dover hoped not, he wouldn't have bet against it.
"How many niggers in these parts?" Pete asked, not quite out of a clear blue sky.
"Well, I don't exactly know," Dover answered. "I don't think I've seen any, but there could be some skulking around, like."
"Could be, yeah. I bet there are," Pete said. "I bet they get one look at what all we got here, then they light out to tell the Yankees."
"I bet you're right. We saw it often enough farther east," Dover said. "Maybe we ought to do some hunting in the woods around here." He remembered too well the black raiders who'd plundered his dump in Georgia.
"Maybe we should." Pete grinned. "I ain't been coon hunting since I was a kid."
"Heh." Dover made himself grin back. He'd heard jokes like that too many times to think they were very funny, but he didn't want to hurt Pete's feelings.
The hunt was no joke. Jerry Dover feared it was also no success. He couldn't get any front-line troops to join in, which meant he had to do it with his own men, men from the Quartermaster Corps. They could fight if they had to; they were soldiers. They'd had to a couple of times, when U.S. forces broke the lines in front of them. They hadn't disgraced themselves.
But there was a big difference between a stand-up fight and hunting down Negroes who didn't want to get caught or even get seen. Regular troops probably would have had a hard time doing that. It was more than the men from the supply dump could manage. They might have made the blacks shift around. They caught no one and killed no one. The day's only casualty was a corporal who sprained his ankle.
That evening, Birmingham caught hell. The bombers came right over the supply dump, flying from east to west. When the alarms went off, Dover scrambled into a slit trench and waited for hellfire and damnation to land on his head. As the Hebrews in Egypt must have done, he breathed a silent sigh of relief when the multi-engined Angels of Death passed over him, bound for other targets.
He felt guilty about that, and angry at himself, but he couldn't help it. Yes, the Confederacy was still going to get hurt. Yes, other men-and women, and children-were still going to get blown to bits. But his own personal, precious, irreplaceable ass was safe, at least till the sun came up.
He grimaced when he realized just how many U.S. airplanes were heading west. The damnyankees had loaded up their fist with a rock this time. Alabama boasted only two targets worth that much concentrated hate. The bombers' course told him they weren't bound for Huntsville. "Sorry, Birmingham," he muttered.
Birmingham, without a doubt, would be, and shortly was, even sorrier. He cowered in a trench more than seventy miles east of the city. Even from there, he could hear the bombs going off: a low, deep roar, absorbed almost as much through the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet as through the ears.
"Where the hell's our fighters?" Pete howled, as if Dover had a couple of dozen stashed away in the depot.
"We don't have enough," Dover answered. That had been true ever since the front lay up in Tennessee. It was more obviously, more painfully, true now. U.S. factories were outproducing their C.S. counterparts. Dover supposed U.S. pilot-training programs were outpacing their Confederate counterparts, too.
"How're we supposed to lick 'em if we can't go up there and shoot 'em down?" Pete wailed.
Jerry Dover didn't answer. The only thing he could have said was, We can't. While that was liable to be so, it didn't do anybody any good. If the writing was on the wall, Pete would be able to see it as well as anybody else.
The bombers didn't come back by the same route they'd taken going in. When Dover realized they weren't going to, he nodded in grudging respect. The Yankees weren't so dumb, dammit. C.S. antiaircraft guns would be waiting here for the returning airplanes. So would whatever night fighters the local Confederates could scrape up. Maybe Y-ranging gear could send the fighters after the U.S. bombers anyway. Dover hoped so. He was far from sure of it, though.
He wasn't sorry to climb out of the muddy trench. If chiggers didn't start gnawing on him, it would be nothing but dumb luck. Pete came out of his hole at about the same time. "Ain't this a fun war?" the sergeant said.
"Well, I could think of a lot of words for it, but I'd probably have to think a long time before I came up with that one," Dover answered.
"They knocked the shit out of Birmingham," Pete said.
"Can't argue with you."
Pete looked west, as if he could see the damage from where he stood. "You reckon the place can keep going after they hit it like that?"
"Probably," Dover replied. His eyes were well enough adapted to the dark to let him see Pete start. He went on, "Why not? We bombed plenty of Yankee towns harder than that, and they kept going. The USA hit Atlanta day after day, week after week, and it kept making things and shipping them out till just a little while before we finally lost it. Hard to bomb places back to the Stone Age, no matter how much you wish you could."