That made Cincinnatus blink. “Work out all right?” he asked.
“They’ve been married almost twenty years. People are used to them,” the other driver said. “Every once in a while, John’ll hear something stupid if he’s standing in line for a film with Helen or out at a diner or something like that, but it’s not too bad.” He chuckled. “Of course, he’s my big brother-he goes about six-three, maybe two-fifty. I don’t care if you’re green-you want to be careful what you say around him.” He was of ordinary size himself.
“Does make a difference,” Cincinnatus agreed. He wondered if John Butler was named for John Brown; with two s’s in his first name, Douglass Butler was bound to be named for Frederick Douglass.
Before he could ask, somebody shouted that their trucks were ready to roll. “Got to get moving,” Butler said. “I want to parade through Nashville or Birmingham or one of those places. And if I hear some Confederate asshole yell, ‘Freedom!’-well, I want to pull out my.45 and blow his fucking head off.”
He sounded altogether matter-of-fact about it, the way a U.S. white man would have. But for the color of his skin, he might as well have been a U.S. white man. He seemed as sure of his place in the world and as comfortable with it as any white man, whether from the USA or the CSA. Cincinnatus, whom life had left forever betwixt and between, envied him for that.
He climbed into the cab of his truck, slammed the door, turned the key in the ignition, and put the beast in gear. South and east he rolled, back toward Findlay. No shellfire fell on the road this time. U.S. guns, or maybe dive bombers, had silenced the Confederate batteries that were shelling it. Cincinnatus approved. Unlike Douglass Butler, he didn’t want to use his.45 for anything. He had it. He could use it if he had to. But he didn’t want to.
What if Jake Featherston was right in front of you? He glanced over to the pistol. Well, you could make exceptions for everything. Dream as he would, though, he didn’t expect to be sharing a diner with the President of the CSA any time soon.
When he rolled into Findlay, he got waved through the town. “What’s goin’ on?” he called to a soldier with wigwag flags.
“We broke through again, that’s what,” the white man answered. “They need their shit farther forward.”
“I like that,” Cincinnatus said, and drove on.
Shells were falling not far from the new unloading area, but they’d been falling in Findlay and beyond it only a couple of hours before. The men who hauled crates out of the back of his truck had an air of barely suppressed excitement. They didn’t seem to think the Confederates would be able to slow this latest push.
Do Jesus, let ’em be right, Cincinnatus thought. That Ohio should be liberated didn’t matter so much in and of itself-not to him, anyway. But he could see that U.S. soldiers would have to clear the Confederates out of their own country before they started doing what really did matter-to him, anyway. If the United States were going to lick Jake Featherston, they would have to do it on Featherston’s turf.
Cincinnatus thought about the last time he’d driven trucks full of munitions through Kentucky and Tennessee. He thought about the Confederate diehards who’d shot up his column more than once. Then he thought about U.S. artillery and bombers blowing all those people to kingdom come.
War was a filthy business for everybody, no doubt about it. Cincinnatus wanted a little more filth to come down on the other side. He didn’t think that was too much to ask.
Brigadier General Irving Morrell was a man in a hurry. He always had been, ever since his days as a company commander at the start of the Great War. He took the first position he ever attacked-and he got shot charging with the bayonet when he ran out of ammunition. That taught him an important lesson: like anything else, being in a hurry had its disadvantages.
It also had its advantages, though. Massing barrels and smashing Confederate lines made the CSA say uncle in 1917. At the Barrel Works at Fort Leavenworth after the Great War, Morrell designed a machine with all the features a modern barrel needed: a reduced crew, a powerful engine, a big gun in a turret that turned through 360 degrees, and a wireless set.
He designed it-and he found nobody in the USA much wanted it. The Great War was over, wasn’t it? There’d never be another one, would there? Being a man in a hurry sometimes put you too far ahead not only of the enemy but also of your own side.
By the time it became clear the Great War wouldn’t be the last one after all, the state of the art all over the world had caught up with Morrell’s vision. Germany and Austria-Hungary built barrels incorporating all the features he’d envisioned more than fifteen years earlier. So did France and England and Russia. And so did the Confederate States.
So did the United States, but belatedly and halfheartedly. When the fighting started, Morrell had to try to defend Ohio without enough machines-and without good enough machines. He failed. Even in failure, he alarmed the Confederates. A sniper gave him an oak-leaf cluster for his Purple Heart and put him on the shelf for weeks.
Returning to duty, he didn’t have much luck in Virginia, a narrow land bristling with fortifications. But he was the architect of the U.S. thrust that cut off, surrounded, and destroyed the Confederate army that fought its way into Pittsburgh. Now the armored force he led was driving west through Ohio. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. If, somewhere south of Columbus, his force could meet up with the one pushing southeast from northwestern Ohio and Indiana, they would trap all the Confederates to the north of them in another pocket.
He didn’t think Jake Featherston could afford to lose one army. He knew damn well the President of the CSA couldn’t afford to lose two. What could be better, then, than giving Jake exactly what he didn’t want?
Right this minute, Morrell was bivouacked with his lead barrels atop Mount Pleasant, in Lancaster, Ohio. The 250-foot sandstone rise looked down on the whole town. It had not lived up to its name. Not being fools, the Confederates put an observation post and several artillery batteries atop the rise, and protected them with pillboxes and machine-gun nests.
Clearing them out was a slow, bloody, expensive job. Morrell believed in bypassing enemy strongpoints wherever he could, letting slower-moving infantry clean up in the armor’s wake. Some strongpoints, though, were too strong to bypass. This, unfortunately, was one of them.
Dive bombers helped pound it into submission. Several 105s sprawled in the snow, knocked ass over teakettle by 500-pound bombs. Dead soldiers in butternut lay there, too. Some of them wore white camouflage smocks over their uniforms, which struck Morrell as a good idea. Good idea or not, it didn’t save them. Along with soot, their blood streaked the snow.
Crows and a couple of turkey vultures were feeding on the bodies. Standing up in his barrel’s cupola, Morrell waved his arms and yelled, “Yaaah!” A few of the birds flew away. Most of them ignored him.
The gunner tapped him on the leg. “What the hell, sir?” Corporal Al Bergeron said plaintively. “You scared the crap out of me there.”
“Sorry, Frenchy,” Morrell answered. Bergeron was a good man and a good gunner-maybe not quite so good as Michael Pound, who was one of a kind in several different ways, but damn good just the same. Morrell explained why he made his horrible noise.
“Oh.” Bergeron thought about that for a little while. Then he said, “Yeah, those damn things are filthy, all right. Tell you one thing, though: I’m glad they’re chowing down on Featherston’s fuckers and not on us.”
“Me, too,” Morrell said, though he knew the carrion birds didn’t care whether their suppers came wrapped in butternut or green-gray. For that matter, the crows and vultures feasted on dead civilians, too.