As it happened, the squadron never did. They'd come into U.S.-held West Virginia and were heading for Confederate Virginia when they ran into a squadron of Hound Dogs flying north to shoot up the men in green-gray who wanted to invade their country. Fliers from each side spotted the other at about the same time. Both sides started shooting at about the same time, too.
Nobody'd planned the fight. Nobody'd expected it. Nobody backed away from it, either. It was a wild melee. Both Wrights and Hound Dogs were already on the deck; they had no altitude to give up. They just darted and swooped and fired. Gunners down below-Moss was damned if he knew whose gunners-seemed to blaze away impartially at both sides.
Moss thought he hit a Hound Dog, but the Confederate fighter kept flying. A Wright smashed into the ground. A fireball blossomed where it went down. He swore. That was one of his men surely dead; nobody could hope to bail out this low. A Hound Dog limped off toward the south trailing smoke. Moss hoped it crashed, too.
After several more airplanes went down or had to pull out of the fight, both sides broke off, as if licking their wounds. Moss and his squadron didn't shoot up the Confederates in northern Virginia. The Hound Dogs didn't shoot up U.S. soldiers in eastern West Virginia (they would have called it occupied northern Virginia). They'd battled one another to a standstill. At the moment, as far as he was concerned, that would have to do.
Armstrong Grimes sat cross-legged in front of a campfire on the outskirts of Provo, Utah. He leaned close to the flames. The night was chilly, and he had his tunic off. He was sewing a second stripe onto his left sleeve, and not having an easy time of it. "My aunt ought to be doing this, goddammit," he grumbled.
Across the fire from him, Rex Stowe was sewing a third stripe onto his sleeve. He raised an eyebrow. "Your aunt?"
"Yeah." Armstrong nodded. "She's only two years older than me. My granny got married again right when the Great War ended, and she had a kid just a little before my ma did. Clara would be good at this-and it would piss her off, too. We fight like cats and dogs."
"All right." Stowe laughed and shrugged. "Whatever makes you happy."
"What'd make me happy is getting the hell out of here," Armstrong said. "You fix that up for me, Corp-uh, Sarge?"
Stowe laughed again. "In your dreams. And now all the fresh young dumb ones can call you Corporal. Looks to me like we've got two ways to leave Utah any time soon. We can get wounded-or we can get killed."
It looked like that to Armstrong, too. He'd hoped Stowe would tell him something different. Not too far away, a machine gun started hammering. Armstrong and Stowe both paused in their sewing. Tunics or no tunics, they were ready to grab their rifles and do whatever they had to do to keep breathing. Then the gunfire stopped. The two noncoms looked at each other. "Is that good or bad?" Armstrong asked.
"Dunno," Stowe answered. "If they just overran one of our machine-gun nests, it's pretty bad, though." He pointed to a couple of privates. "Ustinov! Trotter! Go see what the hell's going on with that gun. Try not to get killed while you're doing it, in case the Mormons have got the position."
"Right, Sarge." The two men slipped away. Grimes didn't think a machine gun could fall with so little fuss, but the Mormons had already come up with too many surprises to leave him sure of anything.
He waited. If Ustinov and Trotter didn't come back pretty soon, the Army was going to need a lot more than two guys to set things right. Stowe must have thought the same thing. He put his tunic back on even though his new stripes were only half attached. So did Armstrong.
No gun suddenly turned the wrong way started spitting bullets. A sentry not far from the fire called a challenge. Armstrong heard a low-voiced answer. He couldn't make out what it was. That was good, because one of the Mormons' little games was to steal countersigns and use them to sneak infiltrators in among the U.S. soldiers. If Armstrong couldn't hear the countersign, odds were the enemy couldn't, either.
He shook his head at that. Up till a few weeks before, the Mormons hadn't been the enemy. They'd been his fellow citizens. But they didn't want to stay in the USA, any more than the Confederates had. The Confederates had made secession stick. They were genuine, sure-as-hell foreigners these days. The Mormons wanted to be, but the United States weren't about to let them go.
Ustinov and Trotter came back in. Trotter said, "Gun's still ours, Sergeant. He squeezed off a burst on account of he thought he saw something moving out in front of him."
"Thanks," Stowe said. "You guys did good. Sit your butts down and take it easy for a couple minutes."
Ustinov laughed. He was a big bear of a man; the noise reminded Armstrong of a rockslide rumbling down the side of a valley. "You take it easy around here, you start talking out of a new mouth," he said, and ran a finger across his throat in case anybody had trouble figuring out what he meant.
He wasn't wrong, either. The Mormons were playing for keeps. They'd tried rising up once before. The USA had pushed their faces into the dirt and sat on them for twenty years afterwards. They had to know that whatever happened to them if they lost again would be even worse. And they had to know the odds were all against their winning. They'd risen again anyhow. That spoke of either amazing stupidity or undying hatred-maybe both.
Hardly any Mormons surrendered. Not many U.S. soldiers were in much of a mood to take prisoners even when they got the chance. Every now and again, the Mormons took some. Oddly, Armstrong had never heard that they mistreated them. On the contrary-they stuck to the Geneva Convention straight down the line.
When he mentioned that, Sergeant Stowe spat into the campfire. "So what? Bunch of holier-than-thou sons of bitches," he said. Heads bobbed up and down. Armstrong didn't argue. How could he? If the Mormons hadn't been a pack of fanatics, would they have rebelled against all the might the United States could throw at them?
Later that night, U.S. bombers paid a call on Provo. They weren't the most modern models. Those went up against the Confederates-Armstrong hoped the attack in Virginia was going well. But the Mormons didn't have any night fighters, and they didn't have much in the way of antiaircraft guns. Second-line airplanes were plenty good enough for knocking their towns flat.
After the explosions to the north and west had stopped, a couple of Mormon two-deckers buzzed over the U.S. lines and dropped small-probably homemade-bombs on them. "Goddamn flying sewing machines," Armstrong grumbled, jolted out of a sound sleep by the racket.
Antiaircraft guns and machine guns turned the sky into a fireworks display with tracers. As far as Armstrong could tell, they didn't hit anything. If they fired off a lot of ammo, people would think they were doing their job. The racket killed whatever chance he'd had of going back to sleep.
When morning came, the Mormons started firing the mortars they used in place of conventional artillery. Like what passed for their air force, the mortars weren't as good as the real thing. Also like the makeshift bombers, the ersatz artillery was a lot better than nothing. And cries of, "Gas!" made Armstrong snarl curses as he put on his mask.
He wasn't the only one. "How are we supposed to fight in these goddamn things?" Trotter demanded.
Sergeant Stowe took care of that: "Can't very well fight if you suck in a gulp of mustard gas, either." He already had his mask on. From behind it, his voice sounded as if it came from the other side of the grave, but he wore the mask to make sure it didn't.
U.S. artillery wasted little time in answering. Some of the shells the U.S. guns flung gurgled as they flew: they were gas rounds, too. In a way, that pleased Armstrong; he wanted the Mormons to catch hell. In another way, though, it mattered very little, because the U.S. bombardment didn't do much to stop the hell he was catching.