“You don’t know how bad things are down here,” said the colonel on the other end of the line. “The Yankees are bombing the shit out of the dams President Featherston built. We’ve got floods like you wouldn’t believe. Half the time we don’t have power, on account of they made so much of it. Roads are out, railroads are out-”
“If you don’t send us what we need to fight with, we’re out,” Dover interrupted. “You’ll be arguing with some damnyankee quartermaster, not me.” Some damnyankee quartermaster was enjoying the depot he’d put together outside of Covington. Nobody but nobody had dreamt the USA could move so fast.
“We’re trying,” the colonel said.
“You sure are,” Jerry Dover told him, but it went over his head. Dover would have bet on that. He went on, “This is a war, in case you didn’t notice…sir. If we don’t do it, we’re going to fucking lose.” He didn’t care what he said when he talked to a supplier. That was just as true when he talked to C.S. Army quartermasters as it had been when he talked to rascally butchers in Augusta.
“I am certain you are doing everything you can, Colonel,” said the officer down in Tennessee. “Why don’t you give me and my men credit for doing the same?”
Because from up here it looks like you’ve got your head up your ass. But Dover didn’t say that, though it was a damned near-run thing. What he did say was, “Get as much forward as you can. They’ve promised me they’ll hold on to Bowling Green no matter what.”
They’d also promised they would hold on to Covington no matter what. He’d believed them, which only proved anybody could be a fool now and then. He was more ready to evacuate and wreck this depot than he had been when the line lay farther north. Some Yankee writer once said, Trust everybody-but cut the cards. That struck Jerry Dover as good advice.
Even the colonel down in Tennessee, who had to worry about nothing worse than bombers and floods-mere details in Dover’s harried existence-could see they might have promised more than they could deliver. “Keep your options open,” he said, and hung up.
“Options. Right,” Dover said tightly. At the moment, he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, and that about summed up his options. The western U.S. column was already down about even with Bowling Green. The eastern one was still northeast of his current center. In a way, that was good news. It meant that, for the time being, he could resupply both crumbling Confederate fronts. But it also meant both fronts were liable to converge on him here, or even behind him. If that happened…
If that happens, I have to move like a son of a bitch to save anything, Dover thought glumly. Take what I can, blow up what I can’t. He already knew what was what, what would go and what would go up in smoke.
If this turned into the front, he was liable to have to turn into a combat soldier to get free of it. He muttered to himself; like every other white man his age in the CSA, he’d done a spell in the trenches in the last war. He wasn’t eager to repeat it. But if the damnyankees got in his way, he would try his best to run them over.
The telephone jangled. If it was that officious idiot in Tennessee, telling him something wouldn’t show up because somebody’d lost the paperwork…“Dover here,” he growled, a note of warning in his voice.
“This here is Major Kirby Bramlette over by Elkton,” the caller said. Dover had to look at a map to find Elkton southeast of Hopkinsville, which had fallen to the USA only the day before. It was also definitely south of Bowling Green, which wasn’t good news. Bramlette sounded right on the edge of being frantic as he went on, “You got any more o’ them antibarrel rockets, the ones infantrymen can shoot off? Looks like every Yankee barrel in the world is heading right at me.”
“You’ll have some in a couple of hours, if U.S. fighters don’t shoot up my trucks on the way,” Dover answered.
“Sooner’d be better,” Bramlette said. “Two hours from now, I’m liable to be dead.” He didn’t say anything about pulling back. The Confederates did that only when they couldn’t help it.
“Fast as we can get there.” Dover hung up and ran outside, yelling for drivers. When he’d assembled half a dozen, he said, “Load up on antibarrel rockets and get ’em to Elkton on the double.”
“Where the fuck is Elkton?” one of them asked.
“Follow me. I’ll get you there.” By his accent, the man who spoke was from around these parts. You’d have to be, to know where Elkton was.
“Take your trucks to gate number nine,” Dover said. “Go in through there and make the first left you can.” He’d laid out the depot himself. He knew where everything was. If Major Bramlette needed cold-weather socks or prophylactics, he would have known where they were off the top of his head, too.
Confederate soldiers loaded the rockets and their stovepipe launchers onto the trucks. In the last war, Negroes would have done it. Not here, not now. The soldiers didn’t even grumble about nigger work. They just fetched and carried without a second thought. If blacks were working now, most of the soldiers working the depot could have been at the front with automatic rifles in their hands. That seemed obvious to Jerry Dover. The trouble he would land in if he said so out loud seemed even more obvious, so he kept his mouth shut.
Inside of half an hour, the trucks were on the way. Dover went back to his office and telephoned Major Bramlette. “Barring air strikes, they should get there in an hour or so. It’s what, about forty miles from here to where you’re at?” he said.
“Something like that, anyways,” Bramlette answered. “Thank you kindly, Colonel. You’ve done what you could. Now we just have to see if we can hold on that long.” As if to punctuate the comment, explosions came over the telephone line. All of a sudden, he didn’t have a connection. He swore, hoping the trouble was in the line and not because of a direct hit on Bramlette’s headquarters.
He didn’t find out till the trucks got back a little before sunset. “We delivered the rockets, sir,” said the head driver, a master sergeant named Stonewall Sloane. (Dover had seen his papers-that was his real name. Why his parents couldn’t have picked a different Confederate hero to name him after…Jerry Dover shrugged. How many babies born between 1934 and now were called Featherston? Too many-he was sure of that.)
“All right-you delivered them,” Dover said. Sloane nodded. He neither looked nor sounded happy. Dover asked the question he had to ask: “What went wrong?”
“Damnyankees had already shoved our guys out of Elkton by the time we got there, sir.” Stonewall Sloane paused to light a cigar. Dover had a cigarette going-but then, he usually did. The sergeant went on, “I hope the rockets can help us blow some of the Yankees to hell and gone. If they can’t…” He sent up gloomy smoke signals.
“Shit,” Dover said. “Whereabouts exactly did you make your delivery? Was it south of Elkton or east of it?”
“East, sir,” Sloane answered: a world of bad news in two words.
“Shit,” Dover said again. “They’re heading this way, then.”
“Don’t know if they want to take Bowling Green or get in behind it and cut it off,” Sergeant Sloane said. “They’ve been doing a lot of that crap lately. We did it in Ohio, so I reckon the United States learned their lessons from us.”
“Did they have to learn them so goddamn well?” Dover stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. Stonewall Sloane managed a thin smile. After a deep, savage drag, Dover asked, “You think we’ll have to get out of town? The more time we have, the more stuff we’ll be able to save.”
“Sir, I honest to God don’t know,” Sloane replied. “If you told me a month ago the Yankees could come this far this fast, I would’ve told you you were out of your goddamn tree. Uh-meaning no disrespect.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dover said dryly.
Stonewall Sloane sent him an appraising glance. The cigar twitched. “You’re all right, aren’t you?”