Vern Green burst in a moment later. "What are we gonna do?" he cried.
Jeff told him what the Texas Ranger had said. "If you and the guards still want to try and skip, I still won't say boo," he finished. "Maybe you'll get away, maybe you'll get your ass shot off. I don't know one way or the other. With Edith and the kids here, I'm fuckin' stuck."
"Damnyankees'll hang you," Green warned.
"How can they? I was doing what Ferd Koenig told me to do," Jeff said. "Could I say, 'No, we got to treat the niggers better'? He'd shoot me if I did. 'Sides, the job needed doing. You know it as well as I do."
"Sure. But the Yankees won't." Green sketched a salute. "I am gonna try and get away. Wish me luck."
"Luck," Jeff said. Not much later, he heard spatters of gunfire in the near distance. He had a couple of drinks at his desk.
Two and a half hours after that, a man in a green-gray uniform with gold oak leaves on his shoulder straps walked in. "You're Brigade Leader Pinkard?" he asked in U.S. accents.
"That's right," Jeff said, a little surprised the Yankee officer got the Party title right.
"Major Don Little, U.S. Army," the other officer said, and then, "You're under arrest."
A rtillery fire came down near Armstrong Grimes' platoon-not real close, but close enough to make them pucker some. Through the man-made thunder, Squidface said, "How come we ain't in Texas?"
"How come you ain't a beautiful woman?" Armstrong answered. "How come you ain't even an ugly woman, for cryin' out loud? If you didn't know how to handle a gun, you'd be fuckin' useless."
"Ah, you've been talkin' to my old man again," Squidface said in mock disgust.
He remained stubbornly male. And central Alabama, where the war was very much alive, remained nothing like the state-or even the Republic-of Texas, where it had died. Instead, soldiers on both sides were doing the dying here. The Confederates didn't have enough to keep the United States away from Selma and Montgomery, but they didn't seem to know it yet.
Armstrong didn't mind showing them. He did mind getting killed or maimed on a bright spring day when the air smelled green and the birds sang and the bastards in butternut couldn't possibly win even if they wiped out every U.S. soldier south of Birmingham. Why couldn't they see the shit had hit the fan and just give up? That would have suited him fine.
But the Confederates down here were a stubborn bunch. They didn't just fight back-they kept throwing in local counterattacks. A little farther east, one of those had driven U.S. forces back ten or fifteen miles before it finally ran out of steam. By now, the enemy had lost all that ground again, and more besides. He'd thrown away men and barrels he couldn't possibly hope to replace. What the hell was the point? Armstrong couldn't see it.
Some of the shells from his latest barrage sounded funny. So did the bursts they made when they hit the ground. "Oh, for Chrissake!" Armstrong said, almost as disgusted with the men he was facing as he had been when he fought the Mormons. He raised his voice: "Gas!" he yelled. "They're throwing gas at us!" Why were they bothering? What was it supposed to prove?
He put on his mask. It was annoying. It was inconvenient. If they wanted to attack here, they'd have to wear masks, too, and be annoyed and inconvenienced. And his own side's gunners would probably give them a big, lethal dose as soon as they found out this crap was going on. Serve 'em right, Armstrong thought, sucking in air that smelled like rubber instead of spring.
Off to the left, somebody-he thought it was Herk, but how could you be sure when a guy was talking through a mask?-shouted, "Here they come!"
Armstrong peered in that direction through porthole lenses that needed cleaning. Sure as hell, the Confederates were pushing forward, their foot soldiers backed up by a couple of assault guns and one of their fearsome new barrels. Somebody must have fed their CO raw meat.
A U.S. machine gun started chattering. The masked soldiers in butternut dove for cover. The barrel's massive turret swung toward the machine-gun nest. The main armament fired once. Sandbags and somebody's leg flew through the air. The machine gun fell silent.
That did the Confederates less good than it would have earlier in the war. Armstrong had a captured automatic rifle. Squidface had his own gun. Herk was banging away with a C.S. submachine gun. Plenty of other captured weapons and U.S.-issue Tommy guns gave the guys on Armstrong's side a lot more firepower than they would have had even a year earlier.
Mortar rounds started landing among the unhappy C.S. soldiers, too. Armstrong whooped. "See how you like it, you bastards!" he shouted. "It's better to give than to receive!" Then a U.S. barrel put an AP round through an assault gun's glacis plate. The assault gun slewed sideways, sending greasy black smoke high into the sky. He whooped again. That pillar of smoke marked four men's funeral pyres. They weren't his buddies, so he didn't care.
A moment later, the other assault gun hit a mine and stopped with a track blown off. That was the signal for every U.S. barrel in the neighborhood to open up on it. It didn't last long-what could have? Recognizing the minefield, the enemy barrel's crew also stopped. A couple of rounds hit it, but bounced off. Armstrong stopped whooping and swore. AP rounds could penetrate those monsters-he'd seen it happen. But it didn't happen all the time.
And the metal monster started picking off U.S. barrels, one after another. Its big gun could penetrate any U.S. machine's frontal armor with no trouble at all. Still swearing, Armstrong wished for a stovepipe rocket like the ones Jake Featherston's men carried. If any of those had been captured, they didn't seem to be in the neighborhood. Too bad.
How come the Confederates get all the good stuff first? he wondered. They did, damn them. They'd carried automatic weapons against Springfields. They had the screaming meemies and the stovepipe antibarrel rockets and the long-range jobs. They even used the superbomb first.
And a whole fat lot of good it did them, because there weren't quite enough of them anyway, not if they wanted to conquer a country that could put three times as many soldiers in the field. He supposed Featherston's fuckers got the fancy weapons because they really needed them. The USA muddled along with ordinary stuff, and eventually got the job done.
The local Confederate attack bogged down when the big, nasty barrel stopped going forward. The C.S. infantry knew they couldn't push their foes out of the way without armor support. They went to ground and dug in. Artillery and mortar rounds rained down on them. Dig as they would, their holes weren't so good as the ones they would have had in prepared defensive positions.
Two fighter-bombers zoomed in and ripple-fired rockets from underwing racks. One of those, or maybe more than one, hit the C.S. barrel. The rocket got through the armor where the AP rounds hadn't. The barrel started to burn. Somebody bailed out of the turret. Every U.S. soldier around fired at the barrelman, but Armstrong thought he made it to cover. Too bad, he thought.
Whistles blew. Somebody who sounded like an officer yelled, "Let's push 'em back, boys! With their armor gone, they won't even slow us down." Then he said the magic words: "Follow me!"
If he was willing to put his ass on the line, he could get soldiers to go with him. "Come on!" Armstrong called, scrambling out of his own scrape in the ground. "Let's go get 'em! We can do it!"
And damned if they couldn't. Oh, some of the Confederates fought. There were always diehards who wouldn't quit till the last dog was hung. But there weren't very many, not this time around. Some of the men in butternut drew back toward their own start line. Others raised their hands as U.S. soldiers drew near.