Walk in Hell

"Sir, if those barrels had kept ru

But the intelligence officer shook his head. "Lucky we were able to throw in as much as we did." Now he was the one who spoke quietly: "If we don't get more men in arms, be they white or black, we'll be reduced to standing on the defensive all along the line, and that's no way to win a war."

"Black soldiers." Featherston's lip curled.

"You know they can fight," Potter said. "You of all people should know that." He'd heard about the use to which Jake had put Perseus and Nero.

"Yes, sir, I do know that," Jake said. "But I'll be damned if I think they ought to get any kind of reward for trying to overthrow the government in the middle of the war. That's what giving 'em guns and giving 'em the vote would be. They stabbed us in the back. Somebody-anybody-does that to me, I'll make him pay." Some of the faces in his mind when he said that were black. Some were white and plump and prosperous, the faces of soldiers and bureaucrats in the War Department in Richmond.

Jonathan Moss peered down at the battlefield in dismay. The advance through Ontario toward Toronto had been slow and brutally expensive, but it had been a continuous advance. One enemy defensive line after another had been stormed and overwhelmed. Now, for the first time, American troops were in headlong, desperate retreat. From the air, they looked like ants fleeing a small boy's shoe.

That was, in effect, what they were. A handful of bigger shapes moved on the ground, grinding through American barbed wire and into the U.S. trenches. "Son of a bitch," Moss said, and the wind blew his words away. "The limeys and Canucks have barrels of their own."

They looked different from American barrels, of which he'd seen one or two. He flew lower for a better look, figuring that the more he could put in his report, the better it would be. That battalions of American infantrymen were getting much more intimately acquainted with the barrels advancing on them than he could in an aeroplane never once crossed his mind.

The lower he flew, the stranger the enemy barrels looked. They were forward-leaning rhomboids, with tracks going all the way around the outside of their hulls. He wondered why the Canucks-or was it the limeys?-had settled on such a stupid design till he saw a barrel climb almost vertically out of a trench into which it had fallen. However odd the setup seemed, it had its merits.

Instead of mounting a ca

"I wonder whose are better, theirs or ours," Moss said. He had no way to tell at the moment. American barrels still being thin on the ground, and used mostly to spearhead long-pla

Moss dove on the barrels, machine gun blazing. He walked his tracers across one, another, a third. As far as he could tell, they did the massive machines no harm. He cursed himself for a fool. American barrels were armored to hold out enemy machine-gun fire. Whatever you could say about the Canadians and the British, they weren't stupid. They'd do unto the USA as they'd been done by themselves.

He cursed his stupidity for another reason as well. The advancing foe loosed a storm of lead at his Martin one-decker. Ground fire had shot him down once already. Now again he heard the thrumming pop of bullets tearing through canvas.

Clang! That bullet hadn't torn through canvas-it had hit something metal. His eyes flicked over the instrument panel. Everything looked all right. If he was lucky, the bullet had ricocheted off the side of the engine block without breaking anything. If he wasn't lucky, he'd find out soon enough-most likely at the moment he could least afford to.

That clang, though, was an urgent reminder that he couldn't afford to linger indefinitely down here. He pulled back on the stick. The nose of his fighting scout rose.

As Moss gained altitude, Tom I

But not all the British and Canadians tried to shelter themselves from I

"Get out of there!" Moss shouted-uselessly, of course. "Get out of there while you can!" He looked around for Dud Dudley and Phil Eaker-they'd have to shepherd I

He swung the one-decker back toward the west. The smoke wasn't getting better. It was getting worse. "Climb, damn you!" Moss yelled to him, as if he could hear. The more altitude he gained, the farther he'd be able to glide when his engine quit. Moss knew all about that, the hard way.

I

Moss bared his teeth in an anguished grimace-it wasn't just smoke streaming back from the engine now, it was flame, too. The slipstream blowing in Moss' face made it hard for him to close his mouth again. The slipstream also blew the flames back toward Tom I

He beat at them with his fist and arm. They spread faster than he could knock them down. "Land it!" Moss screamed. "Land it, God damn you!" He wasn't cursing his friend. He was cursing fate, without a doubt the most dreadful fate any airman could face. Better to yank out your pistol and put one through your head than go down in a burning crate, as far as he was concerned.

That was especially true if you were going down in a burning crate from, say, fifteen thousand feet. If you were only a couple of hundred feet off the ground when your aeroplane caught fire, you had a chance to put it down and get the hell out before you roasted, too.

You had a chance… The trouble was, every yard of territory here abouts was as cratered as the surface of the moon: the USA had had to blast the Canucks off the land before advancing through it, and then, even after having had it taken from them, the Canadians and the limeys had shelled it to a faretheewell to make sure the Americans didn't enjoy owning it.

With a healthy aeroplane, Tom I

"Come on. Come on," Moss whispered, his hand trying to move on the joystick as if he were landing his own aeroplane. Despite smoke and flames and what had to be mortal fear, I

The Martin nosed down into a shell hole and flipped over. It kept right on burning. Nobody came out of it. Nobody was going to come out. Moss knew that. If the fire hadn't killed Tom, getting the engine and machine gun slammed back into his chest would have done the job.