The Grapple

“Is against regulations,” Rodriguez said.

“It’s not anything bad, not anything dangerous,” Bathsheba said. “Just tell Xerxes we love him an’ we’s thinkin’ about him.” Antoinette nodded.

Rodriguez didn’t. “Even if I find him”-he didn’t say, Even if he’s still alive-“maybe it’s code. I don’t take no chances.”

“Please, Mistuh Guard, suh,” Antoinette said. “Ain’t no code-swear to Jesus. Ain’t nothin’ but a Christian thing to do. Please, suh.” Unlike her mother, she was young and pretty. Even so, she didn’t promise to open her legs or go down on her knees if Rodriguez did what she wanted. Oddly, her not promising made him take her more seriously, not less. He lost track of how many times he heard promises like that. More than he wanted to collect. More than he could collect, too.

He sighed. “I see this Xerxes”-he stumbled over the peculiar name-“maybe I tell him this. Maybe.” He wouldn’t make any promises of his own, not where the guards with him could hear.

The older woman and the younger both beamed at him as if he’d promised to set them free. “God bless you!” they said together.

He nodded gruffly, then scowled at the other two guards in gray. “Come on. Get moving,” he said, as if they’d stopped for their business, not his.

All they said was, “Yes, Troop Leader.” That was what he said when someone with a higher rank came down on him. Now he had…some rank of his own, anyway. He enjoyed using it.

Would he pass on the message if he found that man on the other side? He didn’t really believe it was code. He also didn’t really believe it mattered one way or the other. Before long, that Xerxes was a dead man, and Bathsheba and Antoinette were dead women, too.

One of the Confederates up ahead of First Sergeant Chester Martin squeezed off a short burst from his automatic rifle. Martin had been about to jump out of his foxhole and move forward maybe twenty feet, maybe even fifty. Instead, he decided to stay right where he was for the next little while. He’d been wounded once in the Great War and once in this one. As far as he was concerned, that was enough and then some.

Didn’t the Confederates know they were supposed to be on the run in this part of Ohio? Didn’t they know they’d already pulled out of Columbus and they were hightailing it down toward the Ohio River? Didn’t they know they would have to fall back across the Scioto River into Chillicothe on the west side? Didn’t they know they couldn’t hold Chillicothe, either?

By the way they were fighting, they didn’t know any of that. They were bastards, yeah, no doubt about it, but they were tough bastards.

More automatic-weapons fire came from the west. Somebody not nearly far enough from Chester Martin let out a screech and then hollered for a corpsman. That was a wound, but it didn’t sound like too bad a wound. Martin knew what badly wounded men sounded like. He’d hear those shrieks in his nightmares till the day he died-which, given the way things worked, might be any day now.

From a hole in the ground not far from Chester’s, Second Lieutenant Delbert Wheat called, “Mortars! Put some bombs down on those gu

Mortar rounds started dropping on the Confederate line. Mortars were handy things to have. They gave infantry platoons instant artillery support, without even adding boiling water. Lieutenant Wheat made a pretty fair platoon leader, too. Before him, Martin had served with a couple of much less satisfactory officers. One of the things a first sergeant was supposed to do was keep the shavetail set over him from making too big a jackass of himself. Most second lieutenants never understood that. They labored under the delusion that they were in charge of their platoon.

A lot of them got killed laboring under that delusion. A first sergeant was also supposed to keep them from killing too many other people on their own side. The second lieutenants who survived went on to bigger and better things. First sergeants who survived got brand-new second lieutenants to break in.

Martin saw only one thing wrong with Lieutenant Wheat’s order. Just about every Confederate soldier carried either an automatic rifle or a submachine gun. The Confederates understood right from the start that they’d be outnumbered. They used firepower to make up for it.

These days, more than a few U.S. soldiers used captured C.S. automatic rifles. The biggest problem with them was that they needed captured ammunition to stay usable. Back when the Confederates were always pushing forward, captured ammo was hard to come by. Now Martin’s countrymen often overran C.S. positions. Both rifles and cartridges were in pretty fair supply.

Lieutenant Wheat stuck his head up like a groundhog looking around to see if it cast a shadow. Another burst of Confederate fire made him duck in a hurry. He popped up again a couple of minutes later, which was asking to get his head blown off.

“You want to be careful there, sir,” Martin said. “You show yourself twice ru

He didn’t want this particular platoon commander to stop a slug with his face. Wheat had a pretty good idea of what he was doing; odds were anyone who replaced him would be worse. Or maybe nobody would replace him for a while. Officers weren’t thick on the ground, and the brass might figure a first sergeant could handle a platoon for a while.

Martin figured he could, too. He led a company for a while during the Great War, when everybody above him got killed or wounded. They lost officers even faster in that war than they were losing them in this one. But, having proved he could command a company, Martin didn’t want to take over the platoon now. They’d never make him an officer-who ever heard of a fifty-year-old second lieutenant? He had plenty to do the way things were.

“Thanks for the tip, Sergeant,” Wheat said, as calmly as if Chester advised him to lead the fourth highest from his longest and strongest suit. “I’m trying to see how we can cross the Scioto.”

“We as in the division or we as in this platoon?” Chester asked, more than a little apprehensively. Before long, U.S. forces were bound to get over the Scioto somewhere. The luckless bastards who crossed the river first would pay the price in blood, though. They always did.

“This platoon, if we can,” Wheat answered, and damned if he didn’t stand up and look around one more time. “We’re only about a mile from the river, and the Confederates are pulling back across it. They may not even notice we’ve got the bridgehead on the other side till we’re too strong to throw back.”

What have you been smoking? Martin wanted to yell. The soldiers in butternut were alert. Just because they were the enemy, that didn’t mean they were morons. Most of this war was fought on U.S. soil. That at least argued the dummies were the ones in green-gray.

Another sputter of bullets made Wheat duck down again before Chester could say anything at all. And then the Confederates threw something new at them. That screaming in the sky wasn’t any ordinary artillery Martin had ever heard. And ordinary rounds didn’t come in trailing tails of fire. You mostly couldn’t see ordinary rounds at all till they burst.

Rockets, Chester thought. Featherston’s men were firing them at barrels. These were different-much bigger and nastier. They slammed down and went off with roars like the end of the world. He didn’t know how many burst all at once. A dozen? Two dozen? Something like that. However many it was, he felt as if God stamped on the platoon with both feet.

He wasn’t ashamed to scream. Hell, he was too scared not to. Nobody heard him, not through that roar. Even if somebody did hear him, so what? He wouldn’t be the only man yelling his head off. He was sure of that.