Was that motion, there behind a farmhouse by Hawkins, the street leading into Westmoreland from the northwest? Morrell brought up his binoculars. “Front!” he sang out. “In back of that yellow clapboard house.”
“Identified!” Bergeron said, and then, “Clapboard? That house go to a whorehouse?”
Morrell snorted and wheezed. He had to try twice before he could ask, “What’s the range?”
“Just over a mile, sir.”
“Can you hit it?”
“Bet your ass. I’ll kill the fucker, and he won’t dare open up on us till we get closer.”
“Do it, then.” Morrell ordered the barrel to a halt. The gunner traversed the turret till the long 3?-inch cannon bore on the C.S. barrel. The roar almost took Morrell’s head off. He used the field glasses again. “Hit!” he yelled. “Way to go, Frenchy! Son of a bitch is burning!”
“Damn straight,” Bergeron said. “They got any others hanging around, they’ll know they better clear out.” Other U.S. barrels started finding targets and setting them afire at a range the Confederates couldn’t hope to match. Sullenly, the surviving C.S. machines did pull back. They had to hope for wooded terrain where they had a better chance to strike from ambush. U.S. foot soldiers and barrels pushed into Westmoreland. The streets proved to be mined. That slowed them up, but not for long.
U.S. bombers left two major dams in northern Tennessee untouched-the one by Carthage and the one farther east near Celina. They didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts: they didn’t want the floods downstream to disrupt their own advance. The Confederates, desperate to slow U.S. ground forces however they could, blew both dams as they fell back over the Cumberland.
Michael Pound was not pleased. The floodwaters washed over the banks of the river and flowed across what had been fertile farmland. They turned it into something that more closely resembled oatmeal.
The new U.S. barrels had wide tracks. That meant each part of the track carried less weight than was true in older machines. It also meant they could keep going where older barrels would bog down. It didn’t mean they had an easy time.
Here and there, Confederate antibarrel guns and holdouts with rocket launchers lingered north of the Cumberland. “I hate those damn stovepipes,” Sergeant Mel Scullard said, using the name the men in green-gray had hung on the launchers. “Doesn’t seem fair, one miserable infantry son of a bitch able to take out a whole barrel all by his lonesome.”
“Especially when it’s your barrel-and your neck,” Pound observed dryly.
“You bet,” the gunner said.
“They always could, with a Featherston Fizz,” Pound said.
“That’s different,” Scullard insisted. “You could see those assholes coming, and you had a chance to kill ’em before they got to you. These guys, they stay hidden, they fire the lousy thing, and then they run like hell.”
“I know,” Pound said. “We’ve got to get something just like that so our guys can give the Confederates what-for.” Had he been as mouthy to his superiors when he was a noncom? He smiled reminiscently. He was sure he had.
That evening, he got summoned to an officers’ conclave. This was the sort of thing he’d always had to find out about from his own superiors till he finally couldn’t evade promotion. It proved less impressive than he’d imagined it would. A dozen or so officers, ranging up from his lowly second lieutenanthood to a light colonel, gathered in a barn that smelled maddeningly delicious: the former owners had used it for curing tobacco.
The lieutenant colonel lit a U.S. cigarette, whose nasty smoke seemed all the viler by comparison with the aroma of choice burley. “Intelligence says the Confederates have some Freedom Party Guards units in the neighborhood,” he announced. “You want to watch out for those guys.”
“What’s so special about ’em, sir?” a captain asked. “If you shoot ’em, they go down, right? If you shoot ’em enough times, they stay down, right?” Michael Pound smiled. Meeting someone who thought the way you did was always nice.
After another drag on his cigarette, the senior officer (who was younger than Pound) looked at it in distaste. “I think they made this thing out of camel shit,” he said. How he knew what camel shit tasted like when he smoked it was probably a question for another day. No matter how little he liked the Niagara, he kept on smoking it. “What’s so special?” he echoed. “They’re supposed to be Featherston’s elite force. They’ve got the best men, and they’ve got the best equipment. Just about all of them carry those goddamn automatic rifles, they’ve got plenty of stovepipes”-he used the new handle, too-“and their armor is the best the Confederates have.”
“Not good enough.” Pound and two other U.S. officers said the same thing at the same time.
The lieutenant colonel shook his head. “Even up, out in the open, we’ve got the edge. If they shoot from ambush when we’re out in the open…” He didn’t go on, or need to. Pound nodded reluctantly, but he nodded. A hit from a three-inch gun could kill his barrel. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it could.
“How do we know ’em when we see ’em?” somebody asked.
“They wear camouflage uniforms, not ordinary butternut,” the light colonel said. “They’ve caused a lot of trouble in Texas. This is the first report of ’em east of the Mississippi.”
“Just our luck,” Pound said. A couple of the other men in the barn sent him curious looks. He was the junior officer present. He was also the oldest man there. The combination was odd and awkward-awkward for other people, anyhow. Michael Pound didn’t much care. If they busted him back down to sergeant, he wouldn’t say boo. He’d found he could do more as an officer than as a noncom. That was nice, and the Confederates had reason to regret it on the Green River. But he wouldn’t mind looking through a gunsight again, either. That 3?-incher was a gunner’s delight. High muzzle velocity, a flat trajectory, better sights than earlier barrels had, too…
“You need to be aware they’re around,” the lieutenant colonel said. “And be aware our engineers are in the neighborhood, too. They’ll do their best to make ways for you to go forward where the flooding’s worse than usual.”
Now Pound beamed. That was good news. Army engineers were on the ball. Fighting wasn’t their job, but they did it when they had to. And they worked under fire without a peep. Solid men, sure as hell. He stuck up his hand. The lieutenant colonel nodded. “Sir, will they have bridging equipment to get us over the Cumberland?” Pound asked. “The sooner we can grab a bridgehead on the other side, the more the Confederates’ll have to flabble about.”
“You don’t think small, do you?” the light colonel said.
“No, sir.” Pound took the question literally and answered with a straight face.
He nonplused the colonel. The younger man rubbed his chin. “If we get that far, Lieutenant, I figure we’ll find some way to get over, too. Does that satisfy you?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Pound said. “But as long as those bastards are down, I want to keep kicking them. I want to kick their teeth in.”
Again, he sounded perfectly earnest. Again, he made the lieutenant colonel pause. At last, the man made the best of it, saying, “Your spirit does you credit. You can serve as an example for all of us. Any more questions?” He waited. Nobody said anything. He clapped his hands together once, softly. “All right, then. Let’s go get ’em.”
“What’s the word, sir?” Sergeant Scullard asked when Pound came back from the meeting.
Pound hid a grin. How many times had he asked officers the same question when he was a sergeant himself? More than he could count, that was for sure. “We drive for the Cumberland-and cross it if we can,” he answered, which overstated the case a bit. “The engineers will give us a hand. We may have Freedom Party Guards units in front of us. They’re supposed to be tough, and they’ve got A-number-one equipment, but we’ll make ’em say uncle.”
“Sounds good to me.” The gunner was a man after his own heart.