American Front

With a squeal of metal against metal, a hinged roof on top of the armored car and a door in its side came open. The machine gu

He never got any farther than that. Somebody's carbine barked at almost point-blank range. The back of his head blew off in a spray of blood and brain and bone. He collapsed, dead before he knew what hit him. With a cry of horror, the armored-car driver tried to dive back into his machine. Several more shots stretched him lifeless beside it.

"Chew our people up and make like it's a game you can just walk away from, will you?" Ramsay said. He hadn't fired at the men who'd surrendered, but he didn't miss them a bit, either.

"You want to fight us, get on a horse and fight fair," somebody else added, which made troopers' heads bob up and down in agreement.

Captain Lincoln set his hands on his hips and snarled in exasperation. "God damn it to hell, now we got to blow up that machine," he said. "Otherwise the Yankees'll find the bodies like that and start shootin' our prisoners, too."

The armored car went up in a ball of flame as a stick of dynamite set off the gasoline in the fuel tank. Machine-gun bullets, ignited by the fire, added brisk popping sounds as they cooked off one after another.

"All right, we did what we came to do," Lincoln said, looking from the funeral pyre of the armored car to the wrecked stretch of track. "Let's get back home."

Ramsay was happy to obey. Yes, they'd done what they'd come to do, but the cost- Of every three men who'd left Sequoyah, only two were going back, and one of them was wounded. And all that, or almost all of it, from one armored car that bogged down pretty fast.

He spurred his horse up close to Captain Lincoln's. "Sir, what's cavalry supposed to do when we run into four or five of those machine gun-totin' machines, not just the one like we fought today?"

Lincoln didn't answer for so long, Ramsay started to wonder if he'd heard. The captain looked back over his depleted command. "I don't know, Corporal. I just don't know."

"Come on! Come on! Come on!" Captain Irving Morrell urged his men forward. Dust spurted up under his boots as, with every stride, he penetrated deeper into Confederate Sonora. "The faster we move, the less chance they have of setting up lines against us."

One of his soldiers, sweat soaking through his uniform as he slogged through the desert under the weight of a heavy pack, pointed up into the sky. "They already got their lines set, sir," he said.

Morrell hadn't heard the buzz of a spying Confederate aeroplane, but looked up anyhow. He burst out laughing. No aeroplane up there, just half a dozen vultures, all of them circling hopefully. "They won't get us, Altrock," he said. "They're waiting for us to feed 'em some Rebs."

"That must be how it is, sir," the infantryman agreed. He stepped up his pace to match that of his commander.

"You bet that's how it is," Morrell said, kicking at the light brown sandy dirt. "Didn't we give 'em a blue-plate special when we crossed from Nogales into New Montgomery?"

Several men nodded enthusiastically in response to that. The bombardment of the Confederate town had done everything it was supposed to do, silencing the enemy's guns and sending civilians streaming away in panic- white Confederates, their black servants and laborers, and the brown folk who'd lived there since the days before the Rebels bought Sonora from a Mexico strapped for cash to pay England and France what it owed. The garrison had fought, but they'd been outnumbered as well as outgu

Morrell meant to do everything he could to make sure that line got cut. He was a lean man in his mid-twenties, with a long face, light eyes, and sandy hair he wore cropped close to his skull. He gulped a salt tablet and washed it down with a swig of warm water from his canteen. Other than that, he ignored the sweat gushing from every pore. He ignored everything not directly concerned with the mission, and pursued everything that was with a driving energy that brought his men along, too.

"Come on!" he called again, stepping up the pace. "We've cracked the shell. Now we get to suck the meat out."

One of his first lieutenants, a big, gangly fellow named Jake Hoyland, moved up alongside him, map in hand. "Next town ahead is Imuris," he said, pointing. "There's some mines around there, too: copper mines. Cocospera." He read the name off the map with the sublime disregard for Spanish pronunciation growing up in Michigan gave him.

"The division will secure those, and the United States will exploit them," Morrell said. "We have an advantage over our German allies here, Jake."

"Sir?" Hoyland wasn't much given to strategic thought. He'd make captain one day, but he probably wouldn't rise much further than that.

Patiently, Morrell explained: " Germany is attacking France on a narrow front, and the French and the damned English can be strong against them all along it. We have about the population of Germany, and the Confederacy and Canada together close to the population of France, but we have thousands and thousands of miles of frontier with our enemies, not a few hundred. Except in a few places, defense in depth becomes impossible."

"Oh. I see what you mean." Maybe Hoyland even did. He pointed to the map again. "How will we exploit these Cocospera mines?"

"Probably with the niggers the Rebels brought in to work them," Morrell answered, shrugging. "That's not our worry. Our worry is to take them."

"Yes, sir." Now Hoyland wiped his face with his sleeve, leaving a smear of dust on his cheek. "Even hotter here than it was up in the USA, you ask me."

"We've only come twenty miles, for God's sake," Morrell said in some exasperation. "We've got a long haul before we get to Guaymas."

He looked back over his shoulder. Dust clogged the horizon to the north, hiding the men and horses and ca

The Rebels knew as much, too. Their frontier force had been smashed in the opening U.S. attack, but they were still doing what they could to resist. Off to the northeast of Imuris, the desert rose up into low, rolling hills. They'd mounted some three-inch field guns up on the high ground, and were banging away at the advancing U.S. column.

More dust rising from the U.S. left showed cavalry-or, more likely, mounted infantry-peeling off to deal with the Confederates. Those nuisance field guns had accomplished their objective: to distract some of the American force from its primary mission.

Morrell refused to be distracted. He scrambled between strands of barbed wire that marked the outer bounds of some ranch's property. He could see the ranch house and its outbuildings a couple of miles ahead, shimmering in the heat haze. As on the U.S. side of the border, ranches were big here; because water was scarce and precious and the ground scrubby as a result, you needed a lot of acreage for your stock.

He didn't see any of that stock. The owner, whoever he was {an old-time Mexican or a Southern Joh