The Grapple

“What’s cookin’, sir?” Sergeant Bergeron asked.

“Nothing,” Morrell said. It wasn’t quite a lie-it was nothing that would matter to Frenchy. But damned if the broad shoulders on that barrel commander didn’t remind Morrell of Michael Pound. He knew they’d finally dragged his old gu

That barrel stopped and fired. Something too far away for Morrell to make it out very well burst into flames. Morrell slowly nodded. He wouldn’t want to be Michael Pound’s gu

“Steer left a little,” Morrell called to his driver. “Follow that platoon up ahead of us. They look like they’re going places.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said, and he did.

Sweat rivered off Morrell. He wished he were on the cool north German plain, pushing the British back through Holland. You could stand staying buttoned up in a barrel in weather like that. Doing it in late summer in southern Te

Michael Pound’s barrel-if that was Pound in the cupola-fired again. Something else blew up. Morrell mentally apologized to that gu

A shell clanged off another barrel in the platoon. The round didn’t penetrate; the sparks that flashed as it ricocheted away made a pretty fair lightning bolt. The barrel kept moving forward. That hit would have wrecked one of the early models, and probably would have killed a second-generation machine, too. But these babies didn’t just dish it out. They could take it, too.

“I’ll be goddamned,” Morrell said: one of the more reverent curses he’d ever used. “There’s the river.”

“The Te

“Damn straight. Maybe half a mile ahead,” Morrell answered.

“Let’s go grab the bank.” Yes, Frenchy’s promotion was way overdue-he had plenty of aggressive spirit.

And Morrell nodded. “Yeah. Let’s. Then we see what happens next.”

Getting there wasn’t easy. An antibarrel round disabled one of the machines from the platoon ahead. The barrel lost a track; the crew, safer than they would have been if they bailed out, stayed inside and fired back. Machine-gun rounds clattered off Morrell’s barrel. He had an advantage over junior officers: he could call in air strikes and artillery and get what he wanted when he wanted it. He could also summon reinforcements. He did all those things, and resistance faded.

“Careful, sir,” Frenchy Bergeron said when he opened the hatch and stood up in the cupola. He was being careful-or he thought he was, anyhow.

The loop of the Te

He cupped his hands and shouted to the platoon commander whose barrel idled not far away: “That is you, Michael! You did a good job getting here.”

“Thanks, sir. I was hoping to see you again.” Pound patted the top of his turret. “We’ve finally got what you could have given us twenty years ago. They should have listened then.”

“Ifs and buts,” Morrell said with a shrug. He wasn’t done being angry, but he was done thinking being angry made any difference.

Pound pointed south, toward Chattanooga. “How do we get over the river?” Even more than Frenchy, he had a grasp of the essential.

Morrell shrugged again. “I don’t know yet, but I expect we’ll think of something.”

“Georgia,” Jerry Dover muttered “I’m back in fucking Georgia.”

He wasn’t very far inside of Georgia, but he was south of the Te

As Dover had farther north, he built another dump, a dummy, not far from the genuine article. Experience made him sneakier. Instead of leaving this one out in the open, he camouflaged it…not too well. Instead of leaving it empty, he stored things he could afford to lose there: umbrellas, condoms, a good many cigarettes, cornmeal. He put more noncoms at the dummy depot, too, though he made sure they had the best bomb shelters they could. The more realistic the dummy seemed, the better its chance of fooling spies and reco

It got bombed, but not too heavily. The real depot also got bombed-again, not too heavily. The damnyankees dropped explosives on anything that looked as if it might be dangerous, even a little bit. Dover wished his own side could use bombs-and bombers-with such reckless abandon.

One reason the depots didn’t get hit harder was that the United States seemed to have decided the most dangerous things in northwestern Georgia were the highway and railroads up from Atlanta. In their place, Jerry Dover probably would have decided the same thing. If reinforcements and ammunition and rations couldn’t get close to Chattanooga, supply dumps didn’t matter.

Dover felt sorry for whoever was in charge of keeping the railroad line supplied with rails and crossties and switches and whatever the hell else a railroad line needed. That included everything you needed to fix bridges and reopen tu

When he told the joke to Pete, the quartermaster sergeant laughed fit to bust a gut. Then he said, “You know, sir, nobody who ain’t in the business would reckon that was fu

“Yeah, that crossed my mind, too,” Dover answered. “But what the hell? There are doctor jokes and lawyer jokes. Why not supply jokes?”

“Beats me,” Pete said. “Just having anything to laugh about feels pretty goddamn good right now, you know?”

“Tell me about it,” Dover said.

The more antibarrel cartridges and rockets he sent to the front, the more trouble he figured Confederate forces were in. Gunboats had almost stopped going up the Te

A field-post truck brought the mail to Dover’s depot. That kicked most people’s morale higher than any jokes could. Men who heard from home glowed like lightbulbs. The handful who didn’t seemed all the gloomier by contrast.

Jerry Dover had two letters from his wife. He also had one from Sava

But he read Sally’s letters with only half his attention. His eye kept going back to the envelope from Sava