The Grapple

“Bet your butt, buddy,” the man answered. “You’re go

Cinci

On land, the landing craft ran well enough to get down into the river. On the Ohio, it ran well enough to cross. On the other side, it got up onto the bank. It didn’t do any of those things very well. That it could do all of them, even if badly, made it a valuable machine. The wall against which Cinci

A corporal pointed at him, and then at some other trucks. “Follow them!” the man yelled. Cinci

He began to wonder if they’d caught the Confederates flatfooted. There wasn’t a lot of incoming enemy fire. He didn’t miss it, and he hoped that what there was kept missing him. Whenever he could, he glanced east, toward Covington. He could see…exactly nothing. He hoped the police and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards hadn’t shipped all the Negroes in town off to camps farther south. He hoped Lucullus Wood and the other black Reds were finding ways to give the Confederates a hard time, even from behind barbed wire. All he could do was hope. He couldn’t know.

The convoy stopped by a battery of 105s. Soldiers swarmed aboard his truck and unloaded it with locustlike intensity. He waited to see if they would start swearing, the way they might if, say, he carried crates full of machine-gun belts. When they didn’t, he decided the corporal had sent him to the right place after all.

“Where do I go now?” he asked when the truck was empty. “Back across the river to load up again?”

“No, by God.” A U.S. soldier pointed south and west. “We just took a Confederate supply depot. I mean to tell you, the guy who was ru

“That don’t do us much good,” Cinci

“Yeah, but we got a lotta guys carrying their automatic rifles. Damn things are great, long as you can keep ’em in bullets,” the soldier said. “We got enough of their ammo at this here dump to keep a lot of our guys going for a long time.”

Cinci

This time, Cinci

Confederate prisoners marched glumly up the road toward the Ohio. The U.S. troops in green-gray who herded them along got them off the highway and onto the shoulder to keep them from slowing down the southbound trucks. Some of the men in butternut stared at Cinci

The U.S. soldiers who unloaded the truck didn’t seem so happy. “We’ve got our own ca

“Don’t blame me, friends,” Cinci

“Why didn’t they tell you to bring us a shitload of Confederate cigarettes?” the soldier said. “That woulda been worth somethin’.”

“Fuck it,” said another young man in green-gray. “We’re heading down into tobacco country. We’ll get our own smokes before long.”

“Yeah!” Two or three U.S. soldiers liked the sound of that. So did Cinci

“General Morrell, he knows what the hell he’s doing,” the first soldier said. Again, he got nothing but agreement from his buddies. Again, Cinci

Up ahead, Confederate guns boomed. A few shells came down not too far away. The soldiers laughed. “If that’s the best those bastards can do, they won’t even slow us down,” one of them said.

“They pulled this shit on us two years ago,” another one added. “Hell, I was in Ohio then. They caught me, but I slipped off before they took me very far. We didn’t know how to stop ’em. And you know what? I bet they don’t know how to stop us, either.”

No sooner had he spoken than several rocket salvos screamed down out of the sky. They didn’t land on the trucks, but half a mile or so to the east. Where the artillery hadn’t, they sobered the U.S. soldiers. “Well, maybe it won’t be quite so easy,” the first one said. “But I bet we can do it.”

Lieutenant Michael Pound thought he was getting the hang of commanding four other barrels instead of doing the gu

He studied the map. The next town ahead, on the north bank of the Green River, was called Calhoun. The hamlet on the south side of the river, Rumsey, was even smaller. They probably didn’t have a thousand people put together.

John Calhoun, Pound remembered, was a Southern politician before the War of Secession-and, therefore, a son of a bitch by definition. A town named after him deserved whatever happened to it. Pound didn’t know who Rumsey was. Nobody good, probably.

Calhoun and Rumsey together wouldn’t have mattered if not for the bridge between them. The James Bethel Gresham Memorial Bridge, the map called it, and noted that it was named for a Kentuckian who was one of the first Confederate soldiers to die in the Great War. He had it coming, Pound thought unkindly.

He eyed the bridge from the edge of the woods that encroached on Calhoun from the north. Binoculars made it seem to leap almost to within arm’s length. Some Confederate soldiers milled around in Calhoun, but not many, and they didn’t seem very well organized.

As usual, Pound didn’t need long to make up his mind. He got on the all-platoon circuit of his wireless: “Men, we are going to take that bridge away from the enemy.”

“How, sir?” That was Sergeant Frank Blakey, the next most senior barrel commander. “Won’t they just blow it when they see us coming?”

“Sure-if they recognize us,” Pound answered. “But if they don’t…” He explained what he had in mind.