More engineers were stretching lengths of steel matting-the kind used to make emergency airstrips-across the field to serve as a makeshift road while the real one was getting fixed. After about half an hour, the job was done well enough to suit them. They waved the lead truck forward.
Cincinnatus was glad he wasn’t driving lead. But where the deuce-and-a-half ahead of him went, he followed. The matting was a little higher than an ordinary curb would have been. His truck didn’t like climbing up onto the stuff, but it could. He bumped along, then jounced down, then climbed up onto another strip of matting. Skirting the bomb craters went slowly, but it went. And those soldiers out there beating the bushes were keeping him safe along with the engineers. He tipped his cap to them, though they couldn’t see him do it.
Everybody stepped on the gas once he got back onto the paved highway. Cincinnatus was happy to mash the pedal down to the floorboard. He knew he might be rushing toward danger, not away from it. All the same, he’d felt like a sitting duck himself back there. He was glad to get away.
Nobody got hurt on the run north from Delphi, which made it a good one. Only three or four shots were fired at the column. They sounded like.22 rounds to Cincinnatus. Those wouldn’t come from Confederate soldiers, who had better weapons, but from some civilian with a squirrel gun and a grudge. U.S. authorities had confiscated all the firearms they could. The penalties for holding on to rifles and pistols were bloodthirsty. The Confederate citizenry didn’t seem to care. Cincinnatus wished he were more surprised.
Halfway to Camp Determination. That was how Abner Dowling looked at it. He wished he’d come farther. He wished his men could have moved faster. But he’d been stalled in front of Lubbock too damn long. The Eleventh Army-such as it was-was moving again. How much anybody back East cared…might be a different story.
He hadn’t got the reinforcements he hoped for. Everything the U.S. Army could lay its hands on was going into the drive toward Chattanooga. Dowling didn’t much like that, but he understood it.
One reason he wasn’t going as fast or as far as he wished he could was that the Confederates were bringing in reinforcements: Freedom Party Guard outfits that fought as if there were no tomorrow. They made Dowling scratch his head for all kinds of reasons.
“They’ve got fewer men in Tennessee and Kentucky than we do, right?” he asked his adjutant one hot, sticky summer morning.
“Certainly seems so,” Major Angelo Toricelli agreed.
“They’re in trouble over there and we’re not, right?” Dowling persisted.
“Unless our newspapers and wireless people are lying even harder than Featherston’s, yes, sir,” Toricelli said. “Possible, I suppose, but not likely.”
“Bet your ass it’s not,” Dowling said, which made the younger officer blink. “All right, then. We keep saying we can’t afford to send anything out here to the ass end of nowhere. But Featherston’s sending people, sending equipment, out here like it’s going out of style. I know he’s a son of a bitch, but up till now I never thought he was a dumb son of a bitch, you know what I mean?”
“Yes, sir,” Toricelli said. “I can only think of one thing.”
“Well, you’re one up on me if you can. Spit it out.” Dowling had always enjoyed feeling smarter than George Custer. Now he watched his own adjutant feeling smarter than he was.
“To the Confederates, sir, this isn’t the ass end of nowhere,” Toricelli said.
“Well, yes, but why not?” Dowling asked. “You can’t really mean they think killing off Negroes as fast as they can is more important than keeping us out of Chattanooga?”
The words hung in the air after he said them. The oppressive humidity might have borne them up. Major Toricelli nodded. “That’s it, sir. That is what I think. Nothing else makes sense to me.”
“Then Featherston really is off the deep end,” Dowling exclaimed.
“Could be, sir. I don’t know anything about that. I’m no head-candler. But whether he’s nuts or not, he’s still running the CSA, and nobody’s trying to stop him that I know of. When he yells, ‘Jump, frog!’ they all ask, ‘How high?’ on the way up.”
“Good God,” Dowling murmured. “If you’ll let your country go down the drain so you can do this instead…I’m not sure a head-candler can help you.”
“I hope nobody can help him,” Toricelli said. “But he’s been at war with Negroes about as long as he’s been at war with the USA. Don’t they say he had a chance to stop the uprisings in the last war, only his superior wouldn’t let him take a servant in for questioning? Something like that, anyway.”
“I think you’re right, or close enough,” Dowling said. “But if he beats us, he can do what he wants with the Negroes later. If he goes on killing them and we lick him…”
“They’re gone, and he dies happy,” Toricelli said.
“He sure as hell dies,” Dowling said. “Send the War Department a report showing the reinforcements we’ve run up against. Send them a summary of what we’ve been talking about, too. They should know we think he thinks that way. Don’t be shy about giving yourself credit, either. You were there ahead of me.”
“Thank you, sir.” Major Toricelli sounded as if he meant that. Dowling understood why. When he served under Custer, nothing was ever the great man’s fault. Anything good accrued to the great man’s credit. Here, Dowling consciously tried not to imitate his old boss.
He sent an armored probe forward-and got it bloodied. Yes, the Confederates finally were reinforced. They had new armor of their own, and that meant trouble. They’d go nipping in after his supply line next. He had the feeling he’d come about as far as he could, or maybe a little farther.
One thing the enemy didn’t have was much air power. Dowling summoned Colonel DeFrancis. “I want you to go after those barrels and self-propelled guns, Terry,” he said. “Go after their fuel dumps, too. Let’s see how much we can slow ’em down.”
“I’ll do my goddamnedest, sir,” DeFrancis said. “We’ve got some new inch-and-a-half guns mounted under dive bombers. Turns ’em into barrel busters. They dive, fire from close range, pull up and climb, then do it again. Engine decking hasn’t got a prayer of standing up to an armor-piercing round like that.”
“Sounds good to me,” Dowling told him. “Turn ’em loose. Let ’em hunt. Let’s see what they can do. Let’s see if they can keep those bastards off our necks.”
“Yes, sir!” Terry DeFrancis sounded enthusiastic. He often did, especially when Dowling was turning him loose on a new and exciting hunt. For most officers, as for most other people in executive positions, what they did was a job. Some of them were better at it than others, but for the able and not so able alike it was work. DeFrancis was different. He enjoyed what he did. He had a good time doing it. Maybe he got a hard-on watching things blow up. Dowling didn’t know-he didn’t ask. But the colonel’s enjoyment made him a better combat officer. He constantly looked for new ways to put the enemy in trouble. Chances were he grinned when he found them, too.
West Texas made good barrel country. It was nice and flat-you could see for miles. There weren’t a lot of forests for barrels to hide in, either. That made for a wide-open fight, and also for a fair fight. But if barrels had trouble hiding from one another, they also had trouble hiding from airplanes. The USA controlled the skies hereabouts. Abner Dowling aimed to make the most of it.
His headquarters wasn’t close enough to the airstrip to let him hear DeFrancis’ dive bombers and fighter-bombers take off. Why put all your eggs anywhere near the same basket when the prairie was so wide? He stayed where he was, strengthened his flanks in case the aircraft didn’t do as much as he hoped they would, and waited to see what happened next.