The Grapple

“Oh, yes,” Toricelli said. When you were fighting a war with somebody who spoke the same language you did, you had to be extra careful about what you said openly. The only good news there was that the enemy had to be as careful as you were. Sometimes he slipped, and you could make him pay. Sometimes he pretended to slip, and you could outsmart yourself in a hurry if you weren’t careful.

“Do that yourself, if you’d be so kind, Major,” Dowling said.

“Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.” Dowling’s adjutant didn’t even blink. This was a hell of a war all kinds of ways. When you couldn’t be a hundred percent sure of the men in the cryptography section-you did without them whenever you could, or whenever you had something really important.

Rolling a sheet of paper into his Underwood upright, Dowling banged away at it, machine-gun style, with his forefingers. The machine was at least twenty years old, and had an action stiff as a spavined mule’s. Fancy typists used all ten fingers. Dowling knew that-knew and didn’t care. Being able to type at all put him ahead of most U.S. generals.

He tried to imagine George Custer pounding on a typewriter. The man under whom he’d served as adjutant during the Great War and for some years afterwards would have counted himself progressive for using a steel pen instead of a quill. Dowling wondered how many letters he’d typed up for Custer over the years. A whole great pile of them, anyhow. The old Tartar had had a legible hand. Dowling, who could fault him for plenty of other things, couldn’t deny that.

Of course, Custer had spent more than sixty years in the Army. He was one of the longest-serving soldiers, if not the longest-serving, in the history of the United States. Back when his career started, you had to be able to write with tolerable neatness. If you couldn’t, no one would be able to make out what you were saying.

Dowling read through his draft, pen-corrected a typo that had escaped him while the paper was on the platen, and took it to Major Toricelli. “Get this off to Philadelphia as fast as you can,” he said.

“I’ll tend to it right away.” Toricelli had already taken the code book out of the small safe that accompanied Eleventh Army as it advanced-and, at need, as it fell back, too.

“Good. Thanks. Now I need to get a letter ready for those photos that’ll go to Flora Blackford.” Dowling had met her before, in that she’d questioned him when he testified before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. He hadn’t appreciated her prodding then. If he could get her to prod in a way that did him some good, though, that was a different story. He wagged a finger at Toricelli. “Make sure we get that other set of prints pronto, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Now his adjutant sounded resigned. Dowling knew he was guilty of nagging. How often had he sounded like that when Custer gave him the same order for the fourth time? At least he-sometimes-noticed when he repeated himself. He wrote the letter, signed it, and gave it to Major Toricelli. The younger officer, who was deep in five-letter code groups, nodded abstractedly.

When Dowling walked out of the house he’d commandeered for a headquarters, the sentries in front of the porch stiffened to attention. “As you were,” Dowling said. The sentries had foxholes into which they could dive in case C.S. artillery reached Littlefield or enemy bombers came overhead.

A thick barbed-wire perimeter isolated headquarters from the rest of the small west Texas town. The wire was far enough from the house to keep an auto bomb from doing too much damage if one blew up outside it. Soldiers and matrons frisked people entering the perimeter to make sure none of them carried explosives. Dowling didn’t think he was important enough to make much of a target for a people bomb, but he didn’t take chances, either.

Headquarters occupied one of the few undamaged houses in Littlefield. The Confederates had made a stand here. They fought wherever they could find an advantageous position. They didn’t like retreating. But this country was so wide, they didn’t have enough men to hold on to all of it. He’d flanked them out here. He wasn’t having so much luck with that around Lubbock.

The Stars and Stripes floated above the house. Littlefield had been in the U.S. state of Houston till the Confederacy won the plebiscite here a little more than two years earlier. Now it was back in U.S. hands, and the locals liked that no better than they had before.

Dowling cordially despised the locals, too. He wished he could put up photographs of the murder camp and the mass graves outside Snyder-put ’em up all over town. He wished he could parade everybody in Littlefield past those graves, let people see what thousands of bodies looked like, let them find out what thousands of bodies smelled like. You sons of bitches, this is what you bought when you went around yelling, “Freedom!” all the goddamn time. How do you like it now?

What really scared him was, they were liable to like it just fine. He could easily imagine them looking down at all those contorted corpses and saying, Well, so what, you lousy damnyankee? They’re only niggers, for cryin’ out loud.

He scowled out at Littlefield, wishing his imagination didn’t work quite so well. All at once, he wanted nothing more than to wipe the town and everybody in it off the face of the earth.

Major Jerry Dover knew how to give men orders. He’d commanded at about the platoon level during the years between the wars. Bossing the cooks and waiters and busboys at the Huntsman’s Lodge in Augusta, Georgia, gave him most of the experience he needed to put on the uniform and tell people in the Confederate Quartermaster Corps what to do.

Being white and the boss had given him authority over the staff at the restaurant. Military law made a good enough substitute in the field. Dover hadn’t been out there long before one of his subordinates exclaimed, “Jesus, sir, you work us just like a bunch of niggers!”

“Good,” Dover answered, which made the grumbling corporal goggle and gape. “Good, goddammit,” Dover repeated. He was a foxy-featured man, wiry and stronger than he looked, with graying sandy hair and mustache. “We’ve all got to work like niggers if we’re going to whip those bastards on the other side.”

He drove himself at least as hard as he drove anybody under him. He left a trail of chain-smoked Raleigh butts and empty coffee cups behind him. He tried to be everywhere at once, making sure all sorts of supplies got to the men at the front when they were supposed to. The men who worked under him didn’t need long to figure that out. They swore at him as they shivered in the snow in southern Ohio, but his kitchen staff had sworn at him the same way while they sweltered over their stoves. The soldiers might not love him, but they respected him.

His superiors didn’t know what to make of him. Most of them were Regulars, men who’d stayed in butternut all through the lean times before Jake Featherston started building up the C.S. Army again. A colonel named Travis W.W. Oliphant-he got very offended if you left the W.W. out of any correspondence addressed to him, no matter how trivial-said, “You know, Major, you’ll just kill yourself if you try to run through every brick wall you see instead of going around some of them.”

“Yes, sir.” Dover ground a cigarette out under the heel of his left boot (Boot, Marching, Officer’s Field, size 9?C). He lit another one and sucked in smoke. Without a cloud of smoke around him, he hardly felt real. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, those damned idiots south of the Ohio finally got us about half as many of the 105 shells we’ve been screaming for as we really need. Gotta move ’em up to the people who shoot ’em out the guns.”

Travis W.W. Oliphant scratched his head. He looked like a British cavalry colonel, or what Jerry Dover imagined a British cavalry colonel would look like. “See here, Dover, are you trying to mock me?” he said.