Who will rid me of this turbulent priest? Henry II shouted, and in short order Thomas a Becket was a dead man. Featherston was more polite: instead of simply ordering his own men to do Potter in or even hinting that he wanted him dead, he sent the man he mistrusted off to where danger was apt to lie thicker on the ground than it did in Richmond.
Remembering some of the U.S. air raids he’d been through, Potter wondered if that was really so. But his was not to reason why. His was to do or, that failing, to die. He didn’t want to die and he wasn’t sure he could do, which left him in an unpleasant limbo.
He was in limbo another way, too: nobody’d ordered his brigade forward yet. If everything was going according to plan, it would have been committed two days earlier. He didn’t think the officers set over him were keeping the outfit in reserve because it had a green CO. A lot of brigades did these days. No, he feared the outfit hadn’t got the call because things up at the front were going to hell.
Even though he came out of Intelligence, he couldn’t get a handle on what the war west of the mountains looked like. Nobody wanted to say anything. That in itself was a bad omen. When things were going well, people-and the Freedom Party propaganda mill-shouted it from the housetops. When they weren’t…
Good news had a thousand fathers. Bad news was an orphan. The orphanage in Knoxville got more crowded by the day. Potter began to wonder if his brigade ever would get sent to the front. If it didn’t, why the devil had they called him out of Richmond? Had optimism run that far ahead of common sense? Maybe it had.
He was just about convinced he would go back to the capital without ever seeing real action when he got the order to move forward. That amused him about as much as anything ever did, and in the usual sardonic way. He had trucks. He had fuel. He’d made damn sure he did. The outfit was rolling inside of an hour. He might have left a few men behind in Knoxville, men who’d got leave and whom the military police hadn’t scraped out of the bars and whorehouses. He would worry about and, if need be, punish them later. Better to get where he needed to go when he needed to get there with not quite so many men than to wait around for the rest and show up late.
But he showed up late anyhow, though he didn’t intend to. Everything went fine till the brigade rolled past Harriman, about thirty-five miles west of Knoxville. Up till then, Highway 70 had been in pretty good shape. Occasional craters were patched up; Confederate engineers had repaired bombed bridges or set up makeshift spans to do duty for the ones the damnyankees had blown to smithereens.
After Harriman, it was a different story. The Yankees had hit the road hard enough and often enough to get ahead of the repair crews. Potter hadn’t seen such devastation since the Great War…except in Richmond, after a bad air raid. But those raids disrupted civilian life. These delayed soldiers on the way to the front, a much more serious business-especially if you were one of those soldiers.
Going off the roads and into the fields alongside them helped, but only so much. For one thing, the fields were cratered, too. Even trucks with four-wheel drive weren’t barrels; they didn’t laugh off big holes in the ground. And the lead trucks chewed up the ground and made it worse for the ones that came behind.
The worse the bottlenecks got, the more worried Potter grew. “We have to get rolling,” he said to whoever would listen to him, and scanned the western skies like a farmer fearing rain at harvest time. He feared something worse than rain. “If the damnyankees hit us while we’re stuck here…”
“Bite your tongue, sir,” advised the corporal at the wheel of his command car. “You say that kind of stuff, you’re liable to make it come true.”
To Clarence Potter, that was superstitious nonsense. He didn’t say so, though-what was the point? Fifteen minutes later, with the brigade still snarled, what both he and the corporal dreaded came true: the howl of airplane engines, rising swiftly to a scream.
He’d done what he could to get ready for air attack. He’d deployed the antiaircraft guns attached to the brigade and the heavy machine guns. He and his men weren’t caught flatfooted when the U.S. raiders struck them. Things could have been worse. As it worked out, they were only bad. Bad proved grim enough.
The damnyankees didn’t use Asskickers or their equivalents. They just mounted bomb racks under fighters, which turned their explosives loose from not much above treetop height. They hit the trucks on the road and those to either side of it. Fireballs blossomed. Chunks of blazing metal hurtled through the air. So did chunks of blazing flesh.
Like most, Potter’s command car carried a pintle-mounted machine gun. He banged away at the enemy airplanes. He’d gone through the whole Great War without firing a weapon at U.S. forces. Now he could hit back. The shattering noise and the stream of hot brass spitting from the breech filled him with fierce, primitive joy. Whether he hurt the damnyankees any was a different question. The unsleeping rational part of his brain knew that, even as the animal inside him whooped and squeezed the triggers and played the stream of tracers like a hose.
A fighter slammed into the ground not far away. That fireball dwarfed the ones the trucks sent up. Splashes of burning gasoline caught running soldiers. They dropped and writhed and rolled, screaming their torment all but unheard.
After the fighters unloaded their bombs, they came back to strafe the stalled column. The Confederates had invented the tactic two years earlier. Potter could have done without the flattery of U.S. imitation. He got more chances to use his machine gun. And the fighters, armed with four machine guns and two cannon each, got more chances to turn their weapons on him.
They badly outgunned him. They were making better than 300 miles an hour, while he was a sitting duck. The wonder wasn’t that they kept missing him. The wonder was that all their weaponry didn’t chew him to red rags.
Bullets cracked past his head. When bullets cracked, they came too damn close. Others kicked up puffs of dust from the dirt a few feet to the left of the command car, and then, a moment later, from the dirt a few feet to its right. He went on firing. Hardly even knowing he was doing it, he changed belts on the machine gun when the first one ran dry.
After what had to be the longest ten or fifteen minutes of his life, he ran out of targets. The U.S. fighters roared off toward the west. He looked around to see what they’d done-and discovered that what had been a brigade was no more than a shattered mess. Not all the trucks were on fire, but about one in three was. Some of the burning trucks carried ammunition, which started cooking off. Flying rounds would cause more casualties, and likely set more fires, too.
The stinks of cordite and burning fuel and burning rubber and burning meat filled the air. So did the cheerful pop-pop-pop! of exploding cartridges and the not so cheerful screams and moans of wounded men. Officers and noncoms shouted commands, trying to bring order out of chaos by sheer force of will. Order did not want to be born; chaos wasn’t ready to die.
Potter’s driver looked around and summed things up in a handful of words: “Jesus, what a fucking mess!”
“Now that you mention it, yes.” Potter sounded dazed, even to himself. He thought he’d earned the right. He’d had reports of what air strikes could do to troops. He’d read them carefully. He’d imagined he understood them. So much for that, went through his mind. The difference between reading about an air strike and going through one was about like the difference between reading about love and making love.
“You did good, sir,” his driver said. “That took balls, standing up there and firing on those bastards. A lot of guys would’ve run for the trees fast as they could go.”
Not far from the command car lay the corpse of a soldier who’d been running for the trees when a cannon round caught him in the middle of the back. The corpse was in two pieces-top half and bottom half. They lay several feet apart. “Running’s not guaranteed to keep you safe,” Potter said. Standing your ground and shooting back at the enemy didn’t guarantee it, either. A bomb had landed right by one of the brigade’s antiaircraft guns. The blast blew the gun itself ass over teakettle. Not much was left of the men who’d served it.