Jorge stared at the scrawled words. He read them two or three times, and they made no more sense than they had at the beginning. He couldn’t believe his father would kill himself, either. Some great wrong, his mother said. What could his father have done that was wrong? It wasn’t in his father to do such a thing…was it? He didn’t see how.
“You all right, buddy?” Gabriel Medwick asked. By the look on his face, Jorge got the idea he’d asked the same question before, maybe more than once, and hadn’t got an answer for it. Gabe went on, “You look like somebody just reduced your population, man. You got bad news from home?”
A white Confederate from Alabama could no more read Spanish than he could fly, Jorge reminded himself. He didn’t want to lie, but he didn’t want to tell the truth, either. “It’s not as good as it could be, anyhow,” he said.
“Not more trouble on top of your dad, I hope?” Medwick knew Hipolito Rodriguez was dead. He didn’t know how-up till this moment, Jorge hadn’t known how himself. I still don’t, dammit, he thought fiercely.
“No, not on top of my father, gracias a Dios,” Jorge said, which was even true. “Just…trouble winding up his affairs, I guess you would say.”
“That’s no good,” Gabe said seriously. “Stuff like that can get a whole family riled up, with lawyers or maybe guns, depending. Some neighbors of ours started feuding over a will, and now everybody hates everybody else. You don’t want something like that to happen.”
“No, no,” Jorge said again. “I don’t think it will. But everything is more…more complicated than anyone thought it would be.”
“Not easy when somebody dies. I’m sorry,” Medwick said.
“No, not easy,” Jorge agreed.
Before he could say anything more, his head went up like a hound’s when it took a scent. He didn’t smell anything, but he heard trouble in the air. Gabe Medwick shouted it louder than he did: “Incoming!” They both dove for the closest hole in the ground.
It wasn’t really big enough for both of them, but they made do. And when the U.S. shells started bursting around them, they both tried to make themselves as small as they could, which made the hole seem bigger. That had to be crazy, but Jorge thought it was true.
The damnyankees had shelled Confederate positions in front of Chattanooga before, but this was different. That had just been harassing fire. This time, they meant it. They wanted to blow a big hole in the Confederate line right here, smash on through it, and head straight for the city the soldiers in butternut had defended so long and so hard.
They were liable to get what they wanted, too. Jorge had never been in a bombardment like this, not here and not back in Virginia, either. Beside him, Gabe Medwick was screaming for his mother. He wasn’t hurt-he was just scared to death. Jorge couldn’t blame him, not when he was scared to death, too.
As suddenly as it had begun, the barrage stopped. “Up!” Jorge said. “We’ve got to get out and fight, or they’ll murder all of us.”
He looked around…and found he might have been in the mountains of the moon. After a pounding like that, could the Confederates fight back?
If you wanted something and the fellow who had it didn’t feel like handing it over, one way to get it was to put a big rock in your fist and then slug him. The USA wanted Chattanooga. The Confederates didn’t feel like giving it up. Lieutenant Michael Pound knew a certain amount of pride at being on the pointy end of the rock.
As soon as the U.S. bombardment let up, he got on the wireless circuit to the other barrels in his platoon: “Let’s go get ’em! They think they can stop us. I say they’re wrong, and I say we’ll prove it.”
In war, proving the other guy was wrong often meant proving he had no business breathing. Pound was ready to use that kind of logic against Jake Featherston’s men. Why not? Featherston had tried using it against the United States.
As his barrel rumbled forward, Pound wondered if he would spot General Morrell. This was Morrell’s operation, and Pound knew how Morrell thought, how he fought, better than anyone else except possibly George Patton. One thing Morrell did was lead from the front. He’d be here somewhere.
“Old home week,” Pound muttered.
“What was that, sir?” Sergeant Scullard asked.
“Nothing. Woolgathering,” Pound said, embarrassed the gunner had overheard him. He still wasn’t used to getting called sir, either.
The bow machine gun chattered, knocking over a couple of soldiers in butternut unlucky enough to get caught away from cover. Another Confederate dropped his submachine gun and raised his hands over his head. “What do I do, sir?” The question came back to Pound over the intercom.
“Let him live,” Pound answered. “We’ve got infantry along to scoop up prisoners, and he doesn’t look like he’ll do any more fighting. We’ll play fair when we can.” And when they couldn’t-and there would be times like that-he would do whatever needed doing, and he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
He stood up in the turret, riding with head and shoulders out so he could see more. Only a little small-arms fire was coming back at the barrels; the barrage had left the Confederates more discombobulated than usual. Maybe they were finally starting to crack. He could hope so, anyhow.
More soldiers in butternut threw away their weapons and surrendered-or tried to, anyway. A machine gun behind them opened up and cut down several of them. Even the enemy’s machine guns packed more firepower than their U.S. equivalents. C.S. machine guns fired too fast to let you hear individual rounds going off; the noise sounded like the Devil tearing a sail in half.
It was enough to make Pound duck down into the turret and slam the cupola lid shut behind him. He didn’t mind taking chances, but he didn’t like taking dumb ones, and you couldn’t get much dumber than to offer that gun a clean shot at you. “Can you spot the son of a bitch?” he asked Scullard.
“Haven’t yet, sir,” the gunner answered. “Shall I give him a round or two of HE if I do?”
“Damn straight,” Pound said. “They’re starting to shoot their own people now. They might as well be Russians or Japs.”
They rolled past wherever the machine gun was concealed without spotting it. Pound wasn’t too worried about that. Another barrel or the infantry would take care of it. He just hoped it wouldn’t cause many casualties before that happened. Any which way, the machine gunners were in more trouble than they knew what to do with. Somehow or other, soldiers who served machine guns-especially soldiers who served them right up to the last minute-had a lot of trouble surrendering.
Pound peered through the periscopes set into the cupola. It wasn’t as good as riding with his head out, but it would have to do. He wondered where the Confederate barrels were. They couldn’t stay very far behind the line, not unless they didn’t intend to fight this side of the Chattanooga city limits. So…where?
“Front!” The gunner spotted the first enemy machine before Pound did. It squatted hull-down behind the rubble of what had been a roadside diner. And its crew had seen this barrel before anyone spotted it. Even as the gunner yelled for an armor-piercing round, the enemy cannon swung toward the barrel and spat fire.
Clang! Less than a second later, the enemy AP round hit the turret. It was like having your head stuck in God’s cymbals when He clashed them together. But the thick, well-sloped armor kept the round from penetrating.
“Thank you, Jesus!” Scullard said.
“Amen!” Michael Pound laughed from sheer relief at being alive. By the shape of its turret, the enemy barrel was an old model, one that carried only a two-inch gun. That cannon was better than good enough when the war started, but not any more. “Give him some of his own medicine, if you please.”
“Yes, sir!” The gunner’s enthusiasm surely also sprang from relief. He fiddled with the gun-laying controls-but not for long, because they’d be reloading with frantic haste in that other barrel, and they might get lucky the second time around.