After another pause, the lieutenant-he was younger than Cincinnatus’ son Achilles, which made him seem very young indeed-nodded. “Well, when you put it that way-”
“I do,” Cincinnatus said.
“Fair enough. I can see why,” the lieutenant said. “Good luck.”
Cincinnatus drove within artillery range of the front. Nothing came down too close, for which he thanked God. “What the hell took youse guys so long?” said the quartermaster sergeant who took charge of the supplies the truck convoy delivered. “We been waitin’ for youse.” He was a hairy little Italian guy from New York City. His accent and Cincinnatus’ were a long way from each other.
He was also a long way from any place where bullets flew. His uniform was clean. It was even pressed. “Sorry to disoblige you, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus said, “but before I got down here, bushwhackers hit the convoy I was in. We had trucks blown up an’ men killed, so maybe you better do your grousin’ somewheres else.”
“You gotta lotta noive, talkin’ t’me that way,” the sergeant growled. “Who do you think you are?”
“I’m an uppity nigger tryin’ to kick Jake Featherston’s raggedy ass,” Cincinnatus answered. “We on the same side or not?”
The noncom’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. “You can’t talk to me like that. You can’t, you hear? Tell me your name. I’m gonna put you on report.”
“I’m Cincinnatus Driver. Do whatever you damn well please,” Cincinnatus said calmly. “Whatever you do, it ain’t gonna be worse’n what happened this morning.”
“You want to put him on report, put us all on report,” a white driver said. “He just told you what everybody was thinking. I’m Hal Williamson. Write it down.”
“Bruce Donovan,” another driver said. Everybody in the convoy gave the quartermaster sergeant his name. Somebody in the back of the crowd added, “You sad, sorry chickenshit asshole.”
“That does it! That fuckin’ does it!” the sergeant shouted. “Youse guys have had it.” He stormed off and returned a few minutes later with a captain in tow. “Listen to these wiseguys, sir!”
Cincinnatus and the other truckers were happy to let the captain listen. “We almost got killed today,” Cincinnatus said. “I don’t see him with no Purple Heart or Silver Star or nothin’.” Again, the rest of the drivers chimed in on his side.
After listening to them, the captain turned to his sergeant and said, “Take an even strain, Cannizzaro. It’s not like they were holding you up on purpose.”
“But, sir-” Sergeant Cannizzaro began.
“Take an even strain, I said,” the captain told him, more sharply this time. “The stuff is here now. Let’s get it out to the troops who need it.” He walked away, leaving the quartermaster sergeant staring after him. An officer with sense, Cincinnatus thought. He’d run into some before, but it didn’t happen every day.
Jerry Dover had a promotion. He wanted a second star on either side of his collar about as much as he wanted a third leg, but he was now officially a lieutenant-colonel. He was doing everything Colonel Travis W.W. Oliphant did before he went missing and more besides, so the powers that be seemed to have decided he deserved at least some of the vanished Colonel Oliphant’s rank.
Lieutenant-colonel wasn’t enough. To get the boneheads down in Tennessee to pay attention to him, he would have needed to be at least a lieutenant general-not a rank the Confederate States dished out every day.
“Listen, dammit,” Dover snarled over a bad telephone connection, “if you don’t get more ammo and gasoline up here pretty damn quick, you won’t need to worry about me pissing and moaning any more, that’s for sure.”
“You don’t know how bad things are down here,” said the colonel on the other end of the line. “The Yankees are bombing the shit out of the dams President Featherston built. We’ve got floods like you wouldn’t believe. Half the time we don’t have power, on account of they made so much of it. Roads are out, railroads are out-”
“If you don’t send us what we need to fight with, we’re out,” Dover interrupted. “You’ll be arguing with some damnyankee quartermaster, not me.” Some damnyankee quartermaster was enjoying the depot he’d put together outside of Covington. Nobody but nobody had dreamt the USA could move so fast.
“We’re trying,” the colonel said.
“You sure are,” Jerry Dover told him, but it went over his head. Dover would have bet on that. He went on, “This is a war, in case you didn’t notice…sir. If we don’t do it, we’re going to fucking lose.” He didn’t care what he said when he talked to a supplier. That was just as true when he talked to C.S. Army quartermasters as it had been when he talked to rascally butchers in Augusta.
“I am certain you are doing everything you can, Colonel,” said the officer down in Tennessee. “Why don’t you give me and my men credit for doing the same?”
Because from up here it looks like you’ve got your head up your ass. But Dover didn’t say that, though it was a damned near-run thing. What he did say was, “Get as much forward as you can. They’ve promised me they’ll hold on to Bowling Green no matter what.”
They’d also promised they would hold on to Covington no matter what. He’d believed them, which only proved anybody could be a fool now and then. He was more ready to evacuate and wreck this depot than he had been when the line lay farther north. Some Yankee writer once said, Trust everybody-but cut the cards. That struck Jerry Dover as good advice.
Even the colonel down in Tennessee, who had to worry about nothing worse than bombers and floods-mere details in Dover’s harried existence-could see they might have promised more than they could deliver. “Keep your options open,” he said, and hung up.
“Options. Right,” Dover said tightly. At the moment, he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, and that about summed up his options. The western U.S. column was already down about even with Bowling Green. The eastern one was still northeast of his current center. In a way, that was good news. It meant that, for the time being, he could resupply both crumbling Confederate fronts. But it also meant both fronts were liable to converge on him here, or even behind him. If that happened…
If that happens, I have to move like a son of a bitch to save anything, Dover thought glumly. Take what I can, blow up what I can’t. He already knew what was what, what would go and what would go up in smoke.
If this turned into the front, he was liable to have to turn into a combat soldier to get free of it. He muttered to himself; like every other white man his age in the CSA, he’d done a spell in the trenches in the last war. He wasn’t eager to repeat it. But if the damnyankees got in his way, he would try his best to run them over.
The telephone jangled. If it was that officious idiot in Tennessee, telling him something wouldn’t show up because somebody’d lost the paperwork…“Dover here,” he growled, a note of warning in his voice.
“This here is Major Kirby Bramlette over by Elkton,” the caller said. Dover had to look at a map to find Elkton southeast of Hopkinsville, which had fallen to the USA only the day before. It was also definitely south of Bowling Green, which wasn’t good news. Bramlette sounded right on the edge of being frantic as he went on, “You got any more o’ them antibarrel rockets, the ones infantrymen can shoot off? Looks like every Yankee barrel in the world is heading right at me.”
“You’ll have some in a couple of hours, if U.S. fighters don’t shoot up my trucks on the way,” Dover answered.
“Sooner’d be better,” Bramlette said. “Two hours from now, I’m liable to be dead.” He didn’t say anything about pulling back. The Confederates did that only when they couldn’t help it.
“Fast as we can get there.” Dover hung up and ran outside, yelling for drivers. When he’d assembled half a dozen, he said, “Load up on antibarrel rockets and get ’em to Elkton on the double.”