“I’m afraid not, sir.” Toricelli walked in and set a sheet of paper on Dowling’s desk.
“Thanks.” The commander of the U.S. Eleventh Army peered down through his reading glasses. When he looked over the tops of them, Toricelli was in perfect focus, but the typewritten text in front of him blurred into illegibility.
He would just as soon have had it stay unreadable. Philadelphia told him he not only couldn’t have any more barrels-he couldn’t have any new artillery, either. He got the impression he was lucky to be able to keep what he had, and that it had taken special intercession from the Pope, or possibly from the Secretary of War, to keep him supplied with ammunition.
“So much for that,” he muttered.
“Sir?” Toricelli said.
“Philadelphia got all hot and bothered about Camp Determination-for about a month,” Dowling said. “Now they’ve got bigger fish to fry. Morrell’s drive into Tennessee is going well. I’m not complaining, mind you-don’t get me wrong. We need to give Featherston a couple of good ones right in the teeth. Lord knows he’s given us too many. But that means they’re forgetting everybody west of Morrell again.”
“Colonel DeFrancis-” his adjutant began.
Dowling shook his head. “His aircraft have been hitting other targets lately, too. I don’t blame him-we do need to knock out the enemy’s factories. But nobody seems to be paying attention to the poor damned niggers.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Major Toricelli said. “Signs are that the Confederates are shipping more blacks to the camp and taking more bodies away from it. We’ve got aerial recon photos showing they’ve dug a new trench in that field where they get rid of the bodies.”
“Bastards,” Dowling said. The word didn’t seem nearly strong enough. He doubted whether the language had words strong enough to say everything he thought about the Confederates who ran Camp Determination, the ones who fed Negroes into it, and the ones who, by backing the Freedom Party, proclaimed that it ought to exist.
Major Toricelli shrugged. “What can we do, sir?” By his tone of voice, he didn’t think the Eleventh Army could do anything.
Under normal circumstances, Dowling would have agreed with him. But circumstances here in west Texas weren’t normal. He couldn’t win the war here, no matter what he did. He couldn’t lose it no matter what he did, either. When he got plucked from Virginia and sent to the wilds of Clovis, New Mexico, they told him he’d be doing his job as long as he didn’t let the Confederates take Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Well, the Confederates damn well wouldn’t. They had to be flabbling about what was going on in Kentucky and Tennessee even more than the United States were. Their defensive force wouldn’t get many new men. He was still surprised it had got that unit of Freedom Party Guards.
“I want you to draft some new orders, Major,” Dowling said. Toricelli raised a questioning eyebrow. Dowling explained: “I want you to order this army to concentrate in and around Lubbock and to prepare for an advance as soon as possible. And get hold of Terry DeFrancis and tell him to get his fanny over here as fast as he can, because we’ll need all the air support we can get.”
“Yes, sir.” Toricelli hesitated. He’d already given the only proper answer a subordinate should. Even so, he went on, “What if the Confederates try getting around our flanks while we’re concentrating?”
“Well, what if they do?” Dowling returned. Major Torricelli’s eyebrow didn’t just rise this time. It jumped. Dowling didn’t care. “They haven’t got enough men or enough barrels around here to surround us and cut us off. This isn’t Pittsburgh, and it damn well won’t be. I aim to make enough of a commotion in these parts so that Philadelphia will have to notice me.”
“What happens if something goes wrong?” his adjutant asked.
“I go up before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War and they chop off my head,” Dowling said. That shut Major Toricelli up. Dowling was too old and too stubborn to worry much about what failure would do to his career. Toricelli doubtless worried about his, which was tied to his general’s. “Best way to keep everyone except the Confederates happy is to make sure things don’t go wrong. Draft those orders, Major, and get DeFrancis here on the double.”
“Yes, sir.” Toricelli saluted with mechanical precision and left.
Dowling chuckled under his breath. He’d given General Custer plenty of those halfhearted salutes. Somehow or other, the old boy made it work in the end, he thought. I will, too. See if I don’t.
Terry DeFrancis arrived within the hour. “What’s up, sir?” he asked. “Your adjutant made it sound like you’ve got something interesting cooking, but he wouldn’t go into any detail on the telephone.”
“Good for him,” Dowling said. When Confederate sympathizers weren’t cutting the telephone lines, they were tapping them. Security in occupied west Texas was an unending nightmare. Dowling explained what he had in mind.
“I like it,” Colonel DeFrancis said with a grin when he finished. “The more we do, the better we do, the more attention Philadelphia has to pay us. May I make one suggestion, though?”
“Go ahead,” Dowling told him.
“I think the axis of attack ought to be northeast, not southeast. For one thing, they’ll be looking for a drive on the camp. For another, it’s not much farther from here to Childress”-he used a map to show what he meant-“than it is to Snyder. If we take Childress, we cut Amarillo off from the east by road and by rail.”
Dowling had to think about that. Cutting Amarillo off was a bigger military objective than threatening Camp Determination. But the camp was a bigger political plum. Not without regret, he shook his head. “No, Colonel, we’ll continue on our present line for now. If we get the reinforcements we’re after, then we can worry about Amarillo. Prepare your mission plans accordingly.”
“Yes, sir,” DeFrancis said. Like Major Toricelli, he sounded dubious. Dowling didn’t care. One way or another, he was going to ram this through. If George Armstrong Custer’s ghost was looking over his shoulder, the old bastard must have smiled.
Shifting soldiers from yon to hither occupied the next four days. Dowling left only tiny screening forces on his flanks, calculating that he wasn’t likely to deceive the Confederates any which way-and also calculating that they didn’t have the manpower or the driving will to hurt his army while it was on the move.
He proved right. On the fifth morning, U.S. guns in and around Lubbock thundered. Bombers overhead dropped tons of death on the enemy. Fighters streaked low over the Confederate lines to shoot up trucks and command cars and troop columns and anything else they caught out in the open.
Two hours after the bombardment started, Dowling ordered his infantry and the little armor he had forward. He went forward himself, in a command car bristling with almost as many wireless aerials as a porcupine had spines. Major Toricelli, who was in the car with him, was also bristling. Dowling didn’t care about that, either. He wanted to see what happened at the front, not just hear about it from people who were really there.
The first thing he saw was a long file of prisoners in plain butternut and camouflage brown tramping back toward Lubbock, herded along by grinning U.S. soldiers in green-gray. Several of the U.S. soldiers carried captured C.S. automatic rifles-the perfect tools to use if prisoners got out of line. The glum Confederates seemed likely to behave themselves.
“Y’all don’t fight fair!” a Confederate yelled at the command car. Dowling waved back as if acknowledging a compliment.
Naturally, the terrain right on the Confederate side of the line had taken the heaviest pounding from U.S. bombs and shells. Dowling saw scenes right out of the Great War: cratered trench lines, rusty barbed wire with stretches smashed down flat by barrels so foot soldiers could get through, wrecked field guns lying on their sides. The only thing missing was the all-pervasive stink of death a landscape got after it changed hands three or four times, with neither able to bury all the corpses. Then the rats smiled and grew fat and frolicked as they fed on noisome flesh.