Since he didn’t have an axe, truckload after truckload of supplies would have to do. In the Great War, the USA was content to make the CSA say uncle. This time, the United States seemed to want to kill the Confederate States with an axe. Cincinnatus understood why, too. The United States almost had the axe fall on them.
The lead truck in the convoy didn’t run into an axe. It ran over a land mine, and started to burn. The lead truck never carried munitions, just because it was most likely to go boom. The driver probably didn’t have a chance. A different truck, chosen by lot, led every convoy. That could have been me, Cincinnatus thought, gulping.
No matter what happened to the lead truck, the convoy had to get through. The second truck drove off the road onto the soft shoulder on the right-and ran over another mine and blew up. “Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus yelped. He hit the brakes. There was going to be a holdup here-he could see that. If the third truck went off the road to the left, would it go sky-high, too? The driver didn’t want to find out. Cincinnatus wouldn’t have, either. The Confederates who planned this one had outthought their U.S. opposite numbers.
Just how badly they’d outthought them became obvious a moment later. When the U.S. trucks in the convoy were all stopped and all bunched up behind the two that were in flames, a machine gun and assorted automatic rifles and submachine guns opened up on them from the woods to the left. As soon as Cincinnatus heard the gunfire and saw muzzle flashes winking over there, he bailed out. He paused only to grab the.45 as he slid across the seat. He was damned if he’d get out of the truck on the driver’s side and make himself a perfect target for the C.S. holdouts or guerrillas or whoever the hell they were.
His bad leg and bad shoulder both howled protests at what he was making them do. He paid them no attention. Getting hit by an auto had been bad, very bad. Getting chewed up by machine-gun fire was one of the few things he could think of likely to be worse. He didn’t want to find out the hard way.
No more than a second or two after he threw himself to the ground and crawled behind a tire, a burst of bullets chewed up the cab of the truck. Glass from the windshield and the driver’s-side window blew out and then fell like rain.
Had the engine caught fire, he would have had to abandon the truck and make for the woods to the right. He would also have had to pray Confederates didn’t infest them, too. For the moment, though, the truck wasn’t burning.
A couple of wounded drivers cried out in pain. Other men, like Cincinnatus, crouched and sprawled in whatever cover they could find. One of them called, “Be ready! Those fuckers are liable to rush us.”
Can they be that smart and that dumb at the same time? Cincinnatus wondered. If he were in the woods, he would have kept shooting at the trucks till they all caught fire or started exploding. The Confederates had put themselves in a position where they could do that. Why wouldn’t they, then?
Confederate soldiers probably would have reasoned the same way he did. The men in the woods turned out not to be soldiers. They were amateurs, bushwhackers, guerrillas. They cared about the trucks, yes, but they wanted to kill people, too. Once they’d peppered the trucks with bullets, set some on fire, and flattened a lot of tires, they loped forward to deal with the drivers.
They must have thought they’d killed and wounded more men than they had. That was the only thing Cincinnatus could think of. With just a pistol, he had to let them come near before he opened up. He eyed the bushwhackers. They wore dirty dungarees and dirtier flannel shirts. They were poorly shaved. When they got a little closer, they would probably stink.
They never got that close. One of the drivers had a Springfield, not a.45. He fired from behind a tire, worked the bolt, and fired again. Two guerrillas fell. The others started spraying lead as if it were going out of style.
The drivers fired back. They didn’t want the bushwhackers to concentrate on the man with the best weapon. Cincinnatus used the two-handed grip to steady the.45, but it still bucked like an unbroken stallion when he pulled the trigger. The man he aimed at ducked, the way almost everyone did when a bullet came too close.
Several bullets came too close to Cincinnatus. He was already down on his belly. He tried to flatten out like a squirrel after a deuce-and-a-half ran over it. Another guerrilla fell. The drivers’ cheers were punctuated by a shriek as one of them got hit.
In the films about fighting Indians on the Great Plains, the cavalry always charged over the hill in the last reel. It wasn’t the cavalry this time. It was an armored car and two command cars that carried.50-caliber machine guns. As soon as the U.S. soldiers in them got a look at what was going on, they hosed the irregulars down with gunfire. The men who fought for the Confederacy broke and flew toward the woods. Not many of them got there.
Even then, the bushwhackers didn’t give up. The machine gun hidden among the trees started shooting at the oncoming vehicles. The armored car didn’t need to worry about that, but the thin-skinned command cars did. The armored car had a small cannon, not just machine guns of its own. After it sent half a dozen rounds crashing into the woods, the enemy machine gun shut up in the middle of a burst.
Somebody in one of the command cars or the armored car must have used the wireless, because four or five fighter-bombers roared in and dropped their presents on the stand of trees. Cincinnatus hoped they blew the bushwhackers to hell and gone. No matter what he hoped, he knew some of them would get away. Maybe they would think twice about messing with the U.S. Army from now on. More likely, he feared, they wouldn’t.
He didn’t want to get out from behind his tire even after the armored car took up a position between the woods and the shattered convoy. Nobody could call him a cowardly coon, either, not when the white drivers also stayed right where they were.
A soldier got out of one of the command cars for a closer look at a dead irregular. A bullet from the woods made him throw himself flat. The armored car and the command car lashed the trees with machine-gun rounds. Another defiant bullet clanged off the armored car’s turret.
Nobody went anywhere till more trucks brought soldiers forward, some to clear the woods and others, engineers, to get rid of the rest of the mines the bushwhackers had planted. After that, still more trucks had to come up to salvage what the Kentuckians hadn’t destroyed-and to pick up the drivers.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” one of them said wearily as he climbed into the back of a deuce-and-a-half.
“I was too old for this shit a long time ago,” Cincinnatus said. “Remind me how come I signed up to do it again.”
“On account of you’re a damn fool,” the other driver said. Before Cincinnatus could even start to get mad, the white man added, “Just like me.” That took care of that.
The front lay just north of Winchester. Cincinnatus wished it were farther south still. He knew that was unfair. The U.S. Army had done in a couple of weeks what took months of slogging in the last war. And this wasn’t even the main U.S. thrust. That was farther west, and was moving faster.
He got a new truck that afternoon, and a new assignment. The kid lieutenant in the motor pool gave him a dubious look. “You sure you’re up for this, Gramps?” he said.
“It’s gonna help whip Jake Featherston, ain’t it?” Cincinnatus said.
“That’s the idea, yeah,” the lieutenant answered.
“Then I’m up for it,” Cincinnatus declared.