“Sir, it’s my neck,” Pound answered. Again, were he speaking to a less exalted personage, some other part of his anatomy would have occurred to him.
Yes, escaping the turret did bring relief with it. He felt as if he were leaving a platoon commander’s responsibilities behind. Logically, that was nonsense, but logic and feelings had little to do with each other. He peered down through the engine louvers at the powerplant. “Anything special I should know about the motor, sir?” he asked. “Have they found any gremlins?”
“Some growing pains with the fuel pump, I’ve heard,” Wade answered. “Engine seems fairly well behaved, though-it’s a scaled-up model of the one we’ve been using in the older barrels.”
“I thought so from the look of it,” Pound said. “Well, we’ll see how it goes. How soon will we see how it goes?” One more probe couldn’t hurt.
It also didn’t help much. Chuckling, General Wade said, “It won’t be too long,” and Pound had to make what he could of that.
Armstrong Grimes still had his platoon. No eager young second lieutenant had come out of the repple-depple to take his place. He would have bet the replacement depot had no eager young second lieutenants. He was still very young himself, but not very eager. Nobody who’d been in Utah for a while was eager any more except the Mormons. They were getting pounded to bits a block at a time, but they had no give in them.
A commendation letter sat in Armstrong’s file for capturing the corporal who turned out not to be a corporal. They’d promoted Yossel Reisen to sergeant for his part in that. Armstrong didn’t flabble about not getting bumped up to staff sergeant. For one thing, he cared more about coming out in one piece than he did about rank. And, for another, getting promoted up to sergeant was pretty easy. Adding a rocker to your stripes wasn’t.
His whole regiment was out of line for R and R, or what passed for R and R in Utah: real beds, food that didn’t come out of cans, hot showers, and a perimeter far enough out to make it hard for the Mormons to snipe at you or drop mortar bombs on your head. No women, but there was an NCOs’ club where Armstrong could buy beer. Rank did have its privileges. He enjoyed them while he could.
Now he couldn’t any more. In a clean uniform, he trudged back up toward the fighting. The dirty, ragged, unshaven men coming south for R and R of their own eyed him and his comrades with the scorn veterans gave to anybody who looked new and raw. “Does your mama know you’re here?” one of them jeered-the oldest gibe in the world.
“Ah, fuck you,” answered one of the privates in Armstrong’s platoon. It wasn’t even a challenge-more an assertion that the man who’d spoken wasn’t worth challenging.
The vet coming back understood that tone. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “You didn’t look like you’d been through it before.”
“Yeah, well, fuck you anyway,” the private said. This time, he did smile when he said it.
“Come on, keep moving,” Armstrong said. “We’ve got so much to look forward to.”
“Funny,” Yossel said.
“Tell me about it,” Armstrong said. “I’m gonna grow a long blue beard and join the Engels Brothers.” That made his buddy shut up. Armstrong could see the wheels going round in Yossel’s head. He would be thinking that Armstrong had to know the Engels Brothers dyed their beards all the colors of the rainbow…didn’t he? He would also be wondering how Armstrong intended to grow a blue beard. Since Armstrong was wondering the same thing himself, he let it go there.
As soon as they got into the outskirts of Salt Lake City, the sniping started. Armstrong swore as he hit the dirt. This was supposed to be territory the USA controlled. Civilians here were supposed to be disarmed. With Utah under martial law, the penalty for keeping firearms was death. So was the penalty for harboring Mormon fighters. No one seemed to worry about that.
After a few minutes and a burst of machine-gun fire, the sniping stopped. The soldiers got to their feet again and tramped on. “Nice to be back at the same old stand, isn’t it?” Armstrong said.
“Lovely.” Yossel Reisen modified the word with a participle that brought a sour smile to Armstrong’s face.
The Mormons still held the military compound northeast of downtown Salt Lake City that the United States, with the tact that made the central government so beloved in Utah, called Fort Custer. Before becoming a national hero in the Second Mexican War, George Armstrong Custer hanged John Taylor-Brigham Young’s successor-and several other prominent Mormons on the grounds of that fort. Afterwards, Custer said his biggest regret was not hanging Abe Lincoln, too.
U.S. artillery and aircraft pounded the Mormon garrison up there. The Mormons replied with mortars and screaming meemies and whatever else they could get their hands on.
A lieutenant led the platoon Armstrong and his men were replacing. The officer showed no particular surprise at briefing a noncom. “A sergeant’s got the other platoon in this company, too,” he said. “Just dumb luck I haven’t stopped anything myself.” A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He looked beat to hell. But for the gold bars on his shoulders, he might have been a noncom, too.
Because he’d been through the mill, Armstrong gave him more respect than he would have otherwise. “Hope you stay safe, sir,” he said. “They got anything special up ahead of us I ought to know about? Places where they like to put mortars? Sniper spots? Infiltration routes?”
“Ha! You’re no virgin, sure as hell,” the lieutenant said.
“Bet your ass,” Armstrong told him, and then, “Uh, yes, sir.”
“‘Bet your ass’ will do fine.” The lieutenant laughed. “Don’t slip and say it back of the line, that’s all, or it’ll be your ass.” He pointed out the trouble spots on the other side of the line, and the places where U.S. soldiers had to keep their heads down if they didn’t want to turn into sniper bait. And he added, “Brigham’s bastards have some kind of headquarters about half a mile ahead of us. That’s what I figure, anyhow. More foot traffic up there”-he pointed-carefully-to show where-“than anything else is likely to account for.”
“You put snipers on ’em?” Armstrong asked.
“Oh, hell, yes,” the lieutenant said. “They’re sneaky as snakes about it now, but the traffic won’t go away.”
“Maybe some mortars’ll shift ’em,” Armstrong said. “Maybe they’ll go away and be somebody else’s headache. Hell, that’d do.” The lieutenant laughed again, for all the world as if he were kidding.
After the other platoon pulled back, Armstrong put his own snipers into some likely looking spots. He told them to pick off the first few Mormons they spotted. One of the snipers said, “I got it, Sarge. You don’t want those shitheels figuring we’re a bunch of damn greenhorns.”
“Right the first time, Urban,” Armstrong answered. “As soon as they know we know what the hell we’re doing, they’ll find somebody easier to pick on. Hell, I would.”
One of the Mormons took a shot at him as he left that nest. The bullet cracked past his head. He flattened out and crawled for a while after that. Yes, the guys on the other side were seeing what they were up against.
They tried a trench raid that night. Having acquired a nastily suspicious mind in the course of almost two years of fighting, Armstrong was waiting for it. He sited a couple of machine guns to cover the route he thought the enemy most likely to take, and he guessed right. The Mormons retreated as fast as they could-from the cries that rose, some of them were wounded. His platoon didn’t lose a man.
They left him and his men severely alone for the next two days. That suited him fine, even if it did make him wonder what they were up to. He assumed they were up to something. They usually were.
On the third morning, a Mormon approached under flag of truce. Armstrong shouted for his men to stop shooting. One thing the Mormons didn’t do was violate a cease-fire. They were scrupulous about that kind of thing. They always played fair, even if they played hard.