“Where the hell are we, anyways?” someone asked as they scrambled out of the truck.
“Where we’re supposed to be,” Blackledge answered. “That’s all you assholes need to know.” He didn’t expect to be loved. That wasn’t his job.
Captain Cash, on the other hand, was friendly to his men. He could afford to be; he had bastards like Blackledge under him to handle the dirty work. “That town up ahead is Sparta,” he told the soldiers piling out of several trucks. “It’s still ours. We’ve got to make sure it stays ours. Any questions?”
A bird piped in a tree. All the birds up here in the north sounded strange to Jorge. Even the jays were peculiar. They acted quite a bit like the black-throated magpie-jays he knew back home, but they were only about half the size they should have been. That meant they could only screech half as loud.
“What are the Yankees throwing at us?” somebody asked after a pause.
“Everything but the outhouse,” Sergeant Blackledge answered before the captain could say anything. “If they figure out a way to dump that shit on us, they’ll use it, too.”
After that, no one seemed to want to know anything else. “Come on,” Captain Cash said into the uncomfortable silence. “Let’s go forward.”
When Jorge and his companions went into the line in Virginia, they’d replaced other soldiers who left the front for rest and refit and recuperation. Here, nobody was coming back as the replacements went forward. That couldn’t mean all the Confederates up there were dead, or the damnyankees would storm through the breach. But it probably did mean the high command couldn’t afford to take anybody out of the line, and that wasn’t good news or anything close to it.
Confederate 105s banged away at the enemy. Jorge was glad to hear them. They meant things hadn’t all gone to the devil, anyhow. The sun came up. It looked like a nice day.
Then U.S. guns started answering the 105s. Jorge knew enough to throw himself flat. He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started a foxhole. He’d long since learned how to dig without raising up more than a few inches off the ground. Pretty soon, he was in a hole, with the dirt heaped up in front of him to help block fragments.
Foxhole or not, though, he was still liable to get killed. The Yankees had more guns than his side did, and they weren’t shy about using them. That was when the gas started coming in. He hadn’t seen this kind of bombardment in Virginia. By the time he got there, the war had settled down to skirmishes, with neither side trying very hard to break through.
It wasn’t like that here. He needed no more than a few minutes to see as much. The damnyankees had already broken through-if they hadn’t driven all the way through Kentucky, they wouldn’t have been over the Cumberland and deep inside Tennessee. The Confederates were doing what they could to counterattack and throw the enemy back.
So far, everything they could do wasn’t nearly enough.
Even before the shelling stopped, fighter-bombers made it worse. Because they flew so low, they could put their bombs almost exactly where they wanted. They hit the C.S. artillery positions hard, and then came back to strafe whatever else looked interesting.
And then, from up ahead, Jorge heard a shout no foot soldier ever wanted to hear: “Barrels!”
The big, snorting monsters advanced in wedges. Jorge needed a little while to realize they weren’t all the same. The damnyankees put the largest and toughest ones in the lead. They blasted the way clear for the older barrels that came behind. Where are our barrels? he wondered. Wherever they were, they weren’t close enough to do anything about these machines.
One of the U.S. machines hit a mine and threw a track. Its machine guns and cannon went on firing even so. Jorge picked off a barrel commander standing up in the cupola with a quick burst from his automatic rifle. That barrel kept on coming, though, and sprayed machine-gun bullets all around.
“Back!” Sergeant Blackledge screamed. “We gotta get back, or we’re all dead!”
“What’s Captain Cash say?” Jorge asked.
“How can you say anything when you got your fucking head blown off?” the noncom said.
Jorge had no answer for that. The Confederates in and around Sparta, Tennessee, had no answer for the oncoming Yankees. Jorge didn’t want to get out of his foxhole, but he didn’t want to get killed where he crouched, either. He ran for a shattered house and made it. Then he ran again. He was lucky. A lot of people weren’t.
Brigadier General Clarence Potter had got used to long faces. Everybody in the War Department looked as if his favorite aunt had just walked in front of a bus. By the news leaking out of Kentucky and Tennessee, the whole Confederacy might have walked in front of a bus.
What goes around comes around, he thought unhappily. Up in Ohio, the CSA had taught the United States a lot of lessons about how to use armor and mechanized infantry and aircraft together. Who would have figured the damnyankees made such good students? Now they were giving lessons of their own.
And they had more in the way of blackboards and chalk and books than the Confederates ever did. Jake Featherston had counted on a quick, victorious war. When he didn’t get one, when he got another grapple instead…A good big man didn’t always lick a good little one, but that was sure as hell the way to bet.
If Potter wore a vinegar phiz, then, and if just about everybody he saw looked the same way-well, so what? People had earned the right to look gloomy. He took frowns as much for granted as he took the smell of smoke and corruption in the air and the sight of plywood or cardboard over almost every window. He hardly even noticed that the corners of everybody’s mouth turned down.
He hardly noticed, that is, till a young lieutenant-who wore the same hangdog expression as everybody else-escorted Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont into his office. No matter how tweedy FitzBelmont was, he looked as happy as if he’d just got engaged to an eighteen-year-old bathing beauty. Seeing his smile was like getting a surprise flashbulb in the kisser. Clarence Potter couldn’t remember the last time he’d met such unalloyed joy.
“What’s up?” he asked. “Whatever you’re drinking, I want a slug, too.”
Professor FitzBelmont had learned the ropes about security. He didn’t let out a peep till the lieutenant saluted, left, and closed the door behind himself. Only after the latch clicked did he say, “General, we are self-sustaining!”
“That’s nice,” Potter answered, deadpan. “So you’re making enough money that you don’t need a handout from the government, are you?”
“No, no, no!” FitzBelmont didn’t quite say, You damned fool, but the thought plainly hovered in his mind. Then he sent Potter a suspicious stare over the tops of his spectacles. “I believe you’re having me on.”
“Who, me?” Potter sounded as innocent as a guilty man could. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he quickly grew serious. “I’m not sure I do know what you’re talking about, so suppose you spell it out for me.”
“We have a lattice of uranium-enriched uranium, with more U-235 than you’d find in nature-and graphite that is producing more neutrons in each generation than it needs to generate in order to produce the next generation.”
“I see…I think. Does that mean it’ll go boom if you pull out all the stops or whatever you need to do?”
“Well-no,” FitzBelmont admitted. “But it is an indispensable first step.”