The Grapple

Right this minute, Morrell was bivouacked with his lead barrels atop Mount Pleasant, in Lancaster, Ohio. The 250-foot sandstone rise looked down on the whole town. It had not lived up to its name. Not being fools, the Confederates put an observation post and several artillery batteries atop the rise, and protected them with pillboxes and machine-gun nests.

Clearing them out was a slow, bloody, expensive job. Morrell believed in bypassing enemy strongpoints wherever he could, letting slower-moving infantry clean up in the armor’s wake. Some strongpoints, though, were too strong to bypass. This, unfortunately, was one of them.

Dive bombers helped pound it into submission. Several 105s sprawled in the snow, knocked ass over teakettle by 500-pound bombs. Dead soldiers in butternut lay there, too. Some of them wore white camouflage smocks over their uniforms, which struck Morrell as a good idea. Good idea or not, it didn’t save them. Along with soot, their blood streaked the snow.

Crows and a couple of turkey vultures were feeding on the bodies. Standing up in his barrel’s cupola, Morrell waved his arms and yelled, “Yaaah!” A few of the birds flew away. Most of them ignored him.

The gu

“Sorry, Frenchy,” Morrell answered. Bergeron was a good man and a good gu

“Oh.” Bergeron thought about that for a little while. Then he said, “Yeah, those damn things are filthy, all right. Tell you one thing, though: I’m glad they’re chowing down on Featherston’s fuckers and not on us.”

“Me, too,” Morrell said, though he knew the carrion birds didn’t care whether their suppers came wrapped in butternut or green-gray. For that matter, the crows and vultures feasted on dead civilians, too.

“What’s it look like off to the west?” Bergeron asked.

Before answering, Morrell sca

Corporal Bergeron summed up his reaction to that in two words: “Well, shit.”

“You said a mouthful, Frenchy.” Morrell really had hoped he could cut off as many Confederates with this thrust as he had in and around Pittsburgh. Then, Jake Featherston forbade his men to withdraw. Morrell had hoped he would do it again. But evidently he was able to learn from experience. Too bad, Morrell thought. The Confederates were heading south in anything that would roll: truck convoys, barrels, commandeered civilian motorcars. Bombers and artillery and saboteurs did everything they could to knock the railroads out of action, but Ohio had such a dense net of tracks that it wasn’t easy. Every soldier, every barrel, every gun, every truck that got out now was a soldier, a barrel, a gun, a truck the USA would have to put out of action later on.

Morrell sca

“We get the country put back together again,” Frenchy Bergeron said.

You didn’t need to be a general to see that; a noncom would do just fine. The Confederates’ armored thrust had carried them all the way from the Ohio River up to Sandusky. They cut the United States in half. For more than a year and a half, goods and men moved from east to west or west to east by air (risky), on the waters of the Great Lakes (also risky, with C.S. airplanes always on the prowl), and over the Canadian roads and railroads north of the lakes (of limited capacity, and vulnerable to sabotage even before the Canucks rebelled).

“It’ll be better,” Morrell agreed. It probably wouldn’t be a whole lot better any time soon. The Confederates were professionally competent. They would have done their best to wreck the east-west highways and railroad lines they were now sullenly abandoning. Putting the roads and railways back into action wouldn’t happen overnight, especially since C.S. bombers would go right on visiting northern Ohio.

But now the Confederates were reacting to what Morrell and his countrymen did. For the first year of the war and more, the enemy had the United States back on their heels. The CSA called the tune. No more.

As Morrell watched, artillery rounds began falling near the Confederate convoy. The first few shells missed the road, bursting in front of or behind it. The trucks sped up. If they could get out of trouble…But they couldn’t, not fast enough. A round hit the road. The convoy had to slow down to go onto the shoulder. And then a truck got hit, and began to burn.

That was all Morrell needed to see. He was commanding a large, complex operation. But he was also a fighting man himself. When he saw trucks in trouble, he wanted to give them more.

His barrel carried a large, complicated wireless set. He could talk with his fellow armored units, with artillery, with infantry, or with bombers and fighters. He didn’t want to, not here. He used the company circuit any barrel commander might have clicked to: “We’ve got a Confederate convoy stalled on the road a few miles west. Let’s go get ’em!”

Along with the others nearby, his own machine rumbled down off Mount Pleasant. Even after giving up the high ground, they had no trouble tracking their quarry: the pyre from that one burning truck-and maybe from more by now-guided them straight to it.

They met a warm reception when they got there. The Confederates had to know trouble was on the way. They didn’t stay in the trucks waiting around to get shot up. Some of them made their way south on foot. And others had manhandled an antibarrel gun into position, and opened up on the U.S. machines as soon as they came into range.

The Confederates hit one, too, fortunately with a round that glanced off instead of penetrating. “Front!” Morrell said.

“Identified!” Frenchy Bergeron answered. “HE!” the gu

Brave bastards, Morrell thought, watching with his head and shoulders out of the cupola. Small-arms fire came his way, but not a lot of it. He ignored it with the stoicism of a man who’d known worse. One bullet was all he needed to make this as bad as it could be, but he didn’t think about that.

Then something different happened. A projectile trailing smoke and flame seemed to come out of nowhere. It slammed into a U.S. barrel and set it afire. Morrell couldn’t see if any of the men got out. He didn’t think so.

“What the fuck was that?” Bergeron must have seen it through the gunsight.

“I’ll be goddamned if I know,” Morrell answered.

He didn’t have to wait long. A couple of minutes later, another one of those darts of fire lanced out to incinerate a U.S. barrel. “It’s some kind of rocket, like on the Fourth of July,” Frenchy Bergeron said. “How the hell did they come up with that?”

“How? I don’t know, but they sure did.” Morrell ducked down into the turret. “Did you see where they’re shooting it from?”

“Yes, sir,” the gu

“All right. If they pop up again, try and shoot them before they can let go with it. I’ve got to get on the horn to my people.” He flipped to the circuit that would co