"Hold it right there, motherfucker!" somebody with a U.S. accent yelled. "Drop that piece, or you're dead meat!"
Dover froze. He looked around wildly for somewhere to run, somewhere to hide. If he moved, the hidden Yankee could plug him before he took more than a couple of steps. Slowly and carefully, he set the automatic Tredegar on the ground. "I've got a pistol on my belt," he called. "I'm going to take it out and put it with the rifle."
"Don't get cute with it, asshole." That was another U.S. soldier, one with a deep bass rasp. Jerry Dover couldn't see him. "We got enough firepower to saw you in half like a fuckin' board."
"The last person who thought I was cute was my mother," Dover said, which won him raucous laughter from the unseen enemy troopers. Holding his.45 between thumb and forefinger, he laid it down next to the rifle. Then, without being asked, he raised his hands above his head. "You got me."
Not two but four U.S. soldiers cautiously came out of the bushes. Two of them had leaves and branches on their helmets, held in place with strips of inner tube. Two carried ordinary Springfields; one a heavy, clunky U.S. submachine gun; and one a captured C.S. automatic rifle. They all needed shaves. They smelled of old sweat and leather and tobacco and mud: like soldiers, in other words.
"Son of a bitch," one of them said as they drew near. "We got us a light colonel." The two stars on either side of Dover's collar weren't made to be visible from very far off. Why let snipers pick out officers the easy way?
"Cough up your ammo," said the guy with the Confederate weapon. Without a word, Dover gave him the clips he had left after shooting up the field telephones. His captors also relieved him of watch and wallet and cigarettes. He went right on keeping quiet. They weren't supposed to do that, but it happened all the time. And they didn't have to take him prisoner. He could end up dead if any one of them decided to pull the trigger.
"I guess we oughta send him back," said the one with the deep voice. He was a corporal, and one of the pair with leaves nodding above his head. "Officer like that, the guys in Intelligence can squeeze some good shit out of him."
"Maybe." The Yankee with the submachine gun aimed it at Dover's face. "Who are you, buddy? What do you do? C'mon. Sing."
"My name is Jerry Dover. I'm a lieutenant colonel." Dover rattled off his pay number. "I ran the supply dump back there by Albertville." According to the Geneva Convention, he didn't have to say that. Self-preservation argued it would be a good idea.
"Quartermaster, huh? No wonder you got good smokes," the one with the deep voice said. He turned to the guy with the automatic rifle. "Take him back to battalion HQ, Rudy. Don't plug him unless he tries to bug out."
"Gotcha," Rudy said. He gestured with the captured weapon. "Get movin', Pops. You run, it's the last dumbass stunt you pull."
"I'm not going anywhere, except wherever you take me," Dover said. He was so relieved not to get shot out of hand, he didn't even resent the Pops. He was old enough to be the damnyankee's father. "Will you please bury my sergeant there?" he asked his captors, pointing to the Birmingham. "He was a good man."
"We round up some more of you butternut bastards, they can take care of it," the corporal said. The Yankees weren't going to dig for an enemy themselves.
"Move it," Rudy said. Hands still high, Jerry Dover trudged off into captivity.
D uring the last war, Chester Martin remembered, the Confederates had seen the writing on the wall in northern Virginia. As the summer of 1917 went on, the spirit gradually leaked out of the men in butternut. They wouldn't stand and fight till they couldn't fight any more, the way they had earlier. They would throw away their rifles and put up their hands and hope their U.S. opposite numbers didn't murder them.
The same thing was happening in Georgia now. Even some of the Freedom Party Guards had the message: the Confederate States weren't going to win this time around, either. Some of the men in brown-splotched camouflage smocks had a hard time surrendering. But then, anybody who tried to surrender to Lieutenant Lavochkin had a hard time.
Chester admired the platoon leader's courage. Past that…If everybody on the U.S. side were like Boris Lavochkin, the war probably wouldn't have been anywhere near so tough. But Chester didn't think he wanted to live in a country that produced a lot of men like that. Living with one of them was tough enough.
Getting to Savannah seemed to have amounted to the be-all and end-all of General Morrell's strategy. Once the port fell, once the sickle slice cut the Confederacy in half, things were confused for a while. The powers that be needed some time to figure out what to do next. After you went to bed with the girl of your dreams, what did you say when you woke up beside her in the morning?
Martin's platoon, along with the rest of the regiment and a couple of more besides, crossed the Savannah River and went up into South Carolina. The swamps on that side of the river seemed no different from the ones in Georgia. The people over there spoke with the same mushy drawl. They hated damnyankees just as much as the Georgians did, even if they hadn't been able to muster more than a few soldiers to try to keep the invaders in green-gray out of their state.
"South Carolina seceded first, boys," Captain Rhodes told the company. "This goddamn state got the CSA rolling. Been a hell of a long time since then, but we finally get to pay the bastards back."
As far as Martin was concerned, too much water had gone under the bridge to care about which drop went first. What difference did it make now? He despised all the Confederate states equally. Why not? Men from each and every one of them were equally eager to do him in.
What did give him chills were the empty villages through which his outfit passed. He'd seen the like in Georgia. Once upon a time-say, up until a couple of years earlier-Negro sharecroppers had lived in them. Those people were almost all gone. He would have bet dollars to doughnuts they were almost all dead. Before long, their flimsy shacks would crumble and fall down, and then who would remember that they'd ever lived here?
Local whites didn't want to. Lieutenant Lavochkin brought the mayor of a little town called Hardeeville to a nameless village a couple of miles away. The mayor didn't want to come; a rifle to the back of his head proved amazingly persuasive.
"What happened to these people?" Lavochkin demanded.
"Well, I don't rightly know." The mayor was a white-mustached fellow named Darius Douglas. He walked with a limp that probably meant he had a Purple Heart stashed in a drawer somewhere.
"What do you mean, you don't know?" Lavochkin rapped out. "You suppose they all decided to go on vacation at the same time?"
Douglas had fine, fair skin. When he turned red, the flush was easy to see. "Well, I reckon not," he admitted. "But a lot of 'em was gone a while back, off to towns and such. The fancier the farm machinery got, the fewer the niggers we needed."
"How come we didn't see 'em in Savannah, then?" The lieutenant's voice was silky with danger. "How come we don't see 'em anywhere? How many niggers you got in Hardeeville, damn you?"
"Don't have any, I don't reckon, but we never did," Darius Douglas answered. "Hardeeville, it's a white folks' town. Niggers came in to work, but they didn't live there. They lived in places like this here."
"Do you know what you are? You're a lying sack of shit, that's what," Lieutenant Lavochkin snarled. "If you came out and said, 'Yeah, we killed 'em, and I don't miss 'em a fucking bit,' at least you'd be honest. This way…Christ, you know what you assholes did, but it makes you jumpy enough so you don't want to own up to it, not when you're talking to people like me."