They must have thought they’d killed and wounded more men than they had. That was the only thing Cincinnatus could think of. With just a pistol, he had to let them come near before he opened up. He eyed the bushwhackers. They wore dirty dungarees and dirtier flannel shirts. They were poorly shaved. When they got a little closer, they would probably stink.
They never got that close. One of the drivers had a Springfield, not a.45. He fired from behind a tire, worked the bolt, and fired again. Two guerrillas fell. The others started spraying lead as if it were going out of style.
The drivers fired back. They didn’t want the bushwhackers to concentrate on the man with the best weapon. Cincinnatus used the two-handed grip to steady the.45, but it still bucked like an unbroken stallion when he pulled the trigger. The man he aimed at ducked, the way almost everyone did when a bullet came too close.
Several bullets came too close to Cincinnatus. He was already down on his belly. He tried to flatten out like a squirrel after a deuce-and-a-half ran over it. Another guerrilla fell. The drivers’ cheers were punctuated by a shriek as one of them got hit.
In the films about fighting Indians on the Great Plains, the cavalry always charged over the hill in the last reel. It wasn’t the cavalry this time. It was an armored car and two command cars that carried.50-caliber machine guns. As soon as the U.S. soldiers in them got a look at what was going on, they hosed the irregulars down with gunfire. The men who fought for the Confederacy broke and flew toward the woods. Not many of them got there.
Even then, the bushwhackers didn’t give up. The machine gun hidden among the trees started shooting at the oncoming vehicles. The armored car didn’t need to worry about that, but the thin-skinned command cars did. The armored car had a small cannon, not just machine guns of its own. After it sent half a dozen rounds crashing into the woods, the enemy machine gun shut up in the middle of a burst.
Somebody in one of the command cars or the armored car must have used the wireless, because four or five fighter-bombers roared in and dropped their presents on the stand of trees. Cincinnatus hoped they blew the bushwhackers to hell and gone. No matter what he hoped, he knew some of them would get away. Maybe they would think twice about messing with the U.S. Army from now on. More likely, he feared, they wouldn’t.
He didn’t want to get out from behind his tire even after the armored car took up a position between the woods and the shattered convoy. Nobody could call him a cowardly coon, either, not when the white drivers also stayed right where they were.
A soldier got out of one of the command cars for a closer look at a dead irregular. A bullet from the woods made him throw himself flat. The armored car and the command car lashed the trees with machine-gun rounds. Another defiant bullet clanged off the armored car’s turret.
Nobody went anywhere till more trucks brought soldiers forward, some to clear the woods and others, engineers, to get rid of the rest of the mines the bushwhackers had planted. After that, still more trucks had to come up to salvage what the Kentuckians hadn’t destroyed-and to pick up the drivers.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” one of them said wearily as he climbed into the back of a deuce-and-a-half.
“I was too old for this shit a long time ago,” Cincinnatus said. “Remind me how come I signed up to do it again.”
“On account of you’re a damn fool,” the other driver said. Before Cincinnatus could even start to get mad, the white man added, “Just like me.” That took care of that.
The front lay just north of Winchester. Cincinnatus wished it were farther south still. He knew that was unfair. The U.S. Army had done in a couple of weeks what took months of slogging in the last war. And this wasn’t even the main U.S. thrust. That was farther west, and was moving faster.
He got a new truck that afternoon, and a new assignment. The kid lieutenant in the motor pool gave him a dubious look. “You sure you’re up for this, Gramps?” he said.
“It’s gonna help whip Jake Featherston, ain’t it?” Cincinnatus said.
“That’s the idea, yeah,” the lieutenant answered.
“Then I’m up for it,” Cincinnatus declared.
After another pause, the lieutenant-he was younger than Cincinnatus’ son Achilles, which made him seem very young indeed-nodded. “Well, when you put it that way-”
“I do,” Cincinnatus said.
“Fair enough. I can see why,” the lieutenant said. “Good luck.”
Cincinnatus drove within artillery range of the front. Nothing came down too close, for which he thanked God. “What the hell took youse guys so long?” said the quartermaster sergeant who took charge of the supplies the truck convoy delivered. “We been waitin’ for youse.” He was a hairy little Italian guy from New York City. His accent and Cincinnatus’ were a long way from each other.
He was also a long way from any place where bullets flew. His uniform was clean. It was even pressed. “Sorry to disoblige you, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus said, “but before I got down here, bushwhackers hit the convoy I was in. We had trucks blown up an’ men killed, so maybe you better do your grousin’ somewheres else.”
“You gotta lotta noive, talkin’ t’me that way,” the sergeant growled. “Who do you think you are?”
“I’m an uppity nigger tryin’ to kick Jake Featherston’s raggedy ass,” Cincinnatus answered. “We on the same side or not?”
The noncom’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. “You can’t talk to me like that. You can’t, you hear? Tell me your name. I’m gonna put you on report.”
“I’m Cincinnatus Driver. Do whatever you damn well please,” Cincinnatus said calmly. “Whatever you do, it ain’t gonna be worse’n what happened this morning.”
“You want to put him on report, put us all on report,” a white driver said. “He just told you what everybody was thinking. I’m Hal Williamson. Write it down.”
“Bruce Donovan,” another driver said. Everybody in the convoy gave the quartermaster sergeant his name. Somebody in the back of the crowd added, “You sad, sorry chickenshit asshole.”
“That does it! That fuckin’ does it!” the sergeant shouted. “Youse guys have had it.” He stormed off and returned a few minutes later with a captain in tow. “Listen to these wiseguys, sir!”
Cincinnatus and the other truckers were happy to let the captain listen. “We almost got killed today,” Cincinnatus said. “I don’t see him with no Purple Heart or Silver Star or nothin’.” Again, the rest of the drivers chimed in on his side.
After listening to them, the captain turned to his sergeant and said, “Take an even strain, Cannizzaro. It’s not like they were holding you up on purpose.”
“But, sir-” Sergeant Cannizzaro began.
“Take an even strain, I said,” the captain told him, more sharply this time. “The stuff is here now. Let’s get it out to the troops who need it.” He walked away, leaving the quartermaster sergeant staring after him. An officer with sense, Cincinnatus thought. He’d run into some before, but it didn’t happen every day.
Jerry Dover had a promotion. He wanted a second star on either side of his collar about as much as he wanted a third leg, but he was now officially a lieutenant-colonel. He was doing everything Colonel Travis W.W. Oliphant did before he went missing and more besides, so the powers that be seemed to have decided he deserved at least some of the vanished Colonel Oliphant’s rank.
Lieutenant-colonel wasn’t enough. To get the boneheads down in Tennessee to pay attention to him, he would have needed to be at least a lieutenant general-not a rank the Confederate States dished out every day.
“Listen, dammit,” Dover snarled over a bad telephone connection, “if you don’t get more ammo and gasoline up here pretty damn quick, you won’t need to worry about me pissing and moaning any more, that’s for sure.”