Drive to the East

Gustafson’s luck didn’t keep him-and George, and most of the rest of the people in the bar, including the barkeep-from getting grabbed and tossed into one of the paddy wagons that pulled up outside.

The SPs had a brig set up a couple of blocks away. It had probably been there for years, but George hadn’t known about it. They found out he and Dalby and Gustafson had legitimate liberty papers, and they found out the three men from the Townsend hadn’t started the fight. When they discovered Gustafson’s persuader, they took it away from him. He looked aggrieved, but he didn’t say anything. Under the circumstances, that was bound to be smart. Of course, Gustafson never had much to say.

Another paddy wagon delivered them to their ship and two more men to the destroyer tied up next to her. The officer of the deck eyed them as if he’d found them in his apple. “Well, well,” he said. “What have we got here?”

“Drunk and disorderly, sir,” a shore patrolman answered. “Tavern brawl on Hotel Street.”

“All right. We’ll take care of them,” the OOD said.

And they did. No one got very excited about it. Captain’s mast was something that happened now and again. George had never come up in front of one before. He might have been more worried if he were less hung over. That made him think more about internal miseries than any the Townsend’s skipper would inflict.

By their expressions, Dalby and Gustafson also had a bad case of the morning afters. Lieutenant Commander Brian McClintock glowered at each of them in turn. “Anything to say for yourselves?” he growled.

“No, sir,” Dalby said. George and Fritz Gustafson shook their heads. George wished he hadn’t. It only made the throbbing behind his eyes worse.

“Why the devil didn’t you get out of there before the SPs came? Now I have to notice this.” McClintock sighed. “Three days in the brig, bread and water.”

The brig was tiny and cramped. Through most of the first day, George didn’t want anything resembling food. He drank lots of water. It helped the hangover a little. By the time he got out, he was sick of piss and punk: Navy slang for the punishment rations. Making him sick of them so he didn’t want to do it again was part of the point of the sentence, but that didn’t occur to him.

Ordinary chow on the Townsend was no better than it had to be. It tasted like ma

“Didn’t figure you for a brawler, Enos,” somebody said.

“Yeah, well…” George shrugged and let the well-gnawed bone from his drumstick fall to the plate in front of him. He had a few bruises to show he’d been in a fight, and delivered the classic line with as much conviction as if no one had ever said it before: “You ought to see the other guy.”

Some British poet talked about ending the world with a whimper, not a bang. Tom Colleton figured that meant the limey had missed out on the Great War. It sure as hell proved he’d never set foot in one of the two or three Confederate pockets left in Pittsburgh.

That Tom didn’t know how many positions his countrymen still held spoke volumes about how bad things were. He was hungry. He was cold. He was lousy-he itched all the time. The regiment he commanded might have had a company’s worth of effectives, which made it one of the stronger units in this pocket. They were desperately low on ammo for their automatic weapons. Most of them carried captured U.S. Springfields instead. They had no trouble scrounging cartridges for them.

Only a couple of hundred yards from the edge of the pocket, the Allegheny rolled south towards its junction with the Monongahela. Tom Colleton felt a certain somber pride at being where he was. His regiment had pushed as far east as any Confederate outfit. They’d done everything flesh and blood could do.

They’d done it, and it hadn’t been enough.

Confederate commanders had already refused two U.S. surrender demands. Tom didn’t know who was in charge over the twitching, dying C.S. positions in Pittsburgh. A light airplane had sneaked into the city and taken out General Patton at the direct order of Jake Featherston. Patton might be useful somewhere else later on. Nobody could do much about what was going on here.

The wind picked up. Snow started to swirl. Crouched in the ruins of what had been a secondhand book shop, Tom lit a cigarette. He muttered something foul under his breath. It was U.S. tobacco, and tasted like straw. He’d taken the pack from a dead Yankee. No way to get the good stuff from home, not anymore.

U.S. barrels rattled forward. Before long, the damnyankees would take another shot at overru

“Give it up!” a U.S. soldier shouted across the narrow strip of no-man’s-land. “You’re dead meat if you stick it out. We play fair with prisoners.”

Tom knew some of his men had thrown down their rifles and saved their skins. They had orders to hold out, but blaming them for surrendering wasn’t easy. Still, what would happen if-no, when-the Yankees didn’t have to worry about the Confederates in Pittsburgh anymore? How many U.S. soldiers and barrels and guns and airplanes would that free up? How much would C.S. forces elsewhere have to pay?

All those things mattered. Living mattered more to a lot of people. Tom was too hungry and weary to care anymore one way or the other. And he thought like a soldier. As long as he still had bullets in his rifle, he wanted to shoot them at the damnyankees.

He wasn’t a professional. He hadn’t gone to VMI or the Citadel or one of the other schools that turned out the Confederacy’s professional officer corps. But he’d made it through the Great War and through more than a year and a half of this one. He knew what he was doing.

He hadn’t had any experience when they gave him a captain’s uniform in 1914. But he’d come from a plantation-owning family. In those i

I

He’d lived. He hadn’t even been badly hurt. And he’d liked spending the next twenty-odd years as a civilian. He’d gone into this second war with his eyes open. This time, he’d known from the start the Yankees would be tough.

And everything went just the way Jake Featherston said it would. Tom was part of the lightning thrust that carried Confederate troops all the way to Lake Erie. No one could have imagined the operation would go so well.

And no one could have imagined having it go well could mean so little. Maybe my eyes weren’t so wide open after all, Tom thought unhappily. He didn’t know one single Confederate who hadn’t been sure the United States would fold up once they got cut in half. But the USA-again! — proved tougher than the CSA figured.

Pittsburgh, then. Taking Pittsburgh would surely knock the damnyankees out of the fight and give the Confederates the victory they deserved. Except they didn’t take it. And if they were getting what they deserved… In that case, God had a nastier sense of humor than even Tom had imagined.

Pittsburgh then and Pittsburgh now. Pittsburgh now was cold and smoke and blood and fear. Pittsburgh now was that Yankee yelling, “Awright, then, you ast for it!” Most of the time, letting your enemy know you were going to hit him would be stupid-idiotic, even. If you already held all the aces, though, what difference did it make?