He turned around. For a moment, he thought the Rivington man had the trick of invisibility. Not only were his clothes splotchy, but he’d also painted his face in dark, jagged stripes. Only his fierce grin told where he was. Instead of his usual cap, he wore on his head what looked like a mottled pot. “What the devil’s that?” Caudell asked, pointing.
“A helmet,” Lang answered. “You bloody bastards can do just as you please, but I don’t fancy getting shot in the head—or anywhere else, come to that.” He had an AK-47 in his hands and another on his back. He stuffed something fair-sized and roundish into the muzzle of the rifle he was holding. When he fired, the report sounded strange, almost metallic. An instant later, another crash went up from the trenches. Lang must have seen Caudell’s flabbergasted expression. His voice was smug: “Rifle grenade.”
“Whatever you say.” Without thinking, Caudell grabbed the Rivington man by the arm and yanked him toward the fighting. “Come on. Let’s take ‘em out.” Only later did he remember that Lang could have thrown him through the air if he didn’t care to come along. But Lang just shrugged and followed.
The grenade bombardment cleared a long stretch of trench; Caudell stepped on and over bodies, some still, others thrashing in torment. Not only that, the rain of explosives seemingly from nowhere had set a good many unhurt Yankees running. Not all, though. A bluecoat raised himself up on one knee, fired from the hip. The bullet caught Benny Lang in the belly. “Oof!” he said.
Caudell cut the Federal down with a short burst of fire. Then he turned to see how Lang was. Actually, he was already sure. Belly wounds always killed, if not from loss of blood, then from fever.
But Lang was not down and screaming, was not, in fact, down at all. He hurried past Caudell, calling back over his shoulder, “Come on, damn it. They’re wavering. We can break them.”
“Wait a minute.” Caudell reached out and took Lang’s shoulder, this time to hold him back. “I saw you shot,” he shouted in the Rivington man’s face. “Why aren’t you dead?” Put that way, the question sounded stupid, but Caudell didn’t care. He didn’t think he believed in ghosts, either, but he would hardly have been surprised to feel his fingers sink straight through what should have been Benny Lang’s flesh.
But Lang remained solid. Under the brim of his helmet, his thin face bore a smirk. “Yes, I was shot. My belly’ll have a bruise tomorrow, too, I should expect. As for why I’m not dead—” He took Caudell’s hand, set it where the Minié ball had struck. Under his tunic, he wore something with flat, hard scales. “Flak jacket.”
“What’s a flapjack?” Caudell asked, wondering if he’d heard straight.
“It’s body armor. Now get moving, damn you. We’ve wasted too bloody much time here already.”
Caudell got moving, his mind awhirl. No one wore armor—armor thick enough to stop a rifle bullet would have put enough steel on a soldier to double his weight. But there went Benny Lang, moving lightly down the length of trench he’d cleared, the trench where his guts and his life hadn’t spilled into the dirt. Caudell wanted to shake the Rivington man like a terrier shaking a rat, to shake from him the secret of where he’d found that impossible armor.
The same place he found his rifle grenades, the first sergeant thought, and then, a moment later, the same place the Rivington men found these AK-47s. The only trouble was, Caudell could not imagine where in the world that place might be.
He did not dwell on it for long. The Federals tried to counterattack, but by then enough rebels had come forward to chew their assault to bloody rags. And then, without warning, a blast like the end of the world came from Fort Stevens. Caudell staggered. He dropped his rifle to clap both hands to his ears. Bursting shells filled the sky, a thousand Fourths of July an boiled down into an instant. Night turned to noon.
He saw Benny Lang’s lips move as that unnatural light faded, but his hearing was still stunned. He shook his head. As he stooped to recover his repeater, Lang put his mouth against his ear and screamed, “The magazine’s gone up!”
He heard the Rivington man as if from many miles away, but he heard him. Maybe he wouldn’t be deaf forever after an. And certainly, he thought as the ability to think slowly returned, Fort Stevens wouldn’t work any more murder against the men in gray.
A little later another magazine, this one from a fort farther away, also blew up. “Fort de Russy,” Lang shouted—he didn’t quite have to scream anymore for Caudell to hear him. “Or maybe that was Battery Sill, between Stevens and de Russy.” Caudell didn’t care which magazine it was. He was just glad it was gone.
He heard a roar ahead. That he heard it meant it was loud. Wondering what had gone wrong, he hurried toward the noise, his AK-47 at the ready. By the fickle light of explosions behind him, he scrambled up onto high ground. A good many Confederates were already there, all of them yelling like madmen. He stared, wondering what had taken possession of them. Then he started yelling himself. He and his comrades had fought their way through the Federal trenches. Now no set defenses remained between them and Washington City.
Which did not mean the untaken Yankee forts had quit fighting. He threw himself flat when a big shell came down far too close for comfort. “Keep moving!” an officer cried—a sensible command which Caudell had grown thoroughly tired of tonight. The officer went on, “The farther inside their lines we get, the fewer of those cannon will bear on us.” Suddenly given a good, sensible reason to move, Caudell scrambled to his feet and ran south as fast as he could go.
More shells shrieked by, these from the field guns of a battery east of the junction of the Seventh Street Road and the Milkhouse Front Road. The officer told off a detachment to take that battery in the rear. Most of the soldiers, Caudell among them, he sent south down the Seventh Street Road toward Washington. “Form by regiments if you can, by brigade if that’s the best you can do,” he said. “This won’t be just a parade—we’ll have more fighting to do.”
“Forty-Seventh North Carolina,” Caudell called obediently. “Kirkland’s brigade. Forty-Seventh North Carolina…”
Before long, he found himself with a solid band of North Carolinians, close to half of them from his own regiment. Benny Lang stayed with them. That pleased Caudelclass="underline" you never could tell when more of those rifle grenades might come in handy, or, for that matter, what other tricks the Rivington man had up his. sleeve. Caudell still wondered why he called his wonderful armor a flapjack.
Then from ahead came the roar of a volley of Minié balls and, hard on their heels, shouts and oaths. Word came back quickly: the Federals had thrown a makeshift barricade of logs across the road and were firing from behind it. “Flank ‘em out!” someone a few feet ahead of Caudell said. “Two squads to the left of the roadway, two to the right.”
“Who are you, to be giving orders?” Caudell demanded.
The man turned. Even in the darkness, his plump features, neat chin beard, and sweeping mustaches were unmistakable. So were the wreathed stars on his collar. “I’m General Kirkland, by God! Who are you, sir?”
“First Sergeant Nate Caudell, sir—47th North Carolina,” Caudell said, gulping.
“Well, First Sergeant, get up there and take one of those flanking squads,” Kirkland thundered.
Cursing his own big mouth, Caudell hurried forward toward the fighting. He passed Benny Lang. “You come, too,” he said. “One of those grenades of yours ought to startle the Yankees enough to make our job easier.” Lang nodded and came.