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Cinci
He growled out a triumphant, "Yeah!" when he did. A man in bloodied Confederate butternut staggered out from behind a loblolly pine and fell to his knees. Cinci
This bastard, though, had surely killed everybody in the armored car. No hatches opened; no men got out. And the driver hadn't got out of the blasted truck, either. No way in hell he could have. So the Confederate had extracted a high price for his miserable, worthless life. If all his countrymen did the same…
But they couldn't. Cinci
How many more would the USA need? Cinci
A good thing, too. Cinci
So…One more push into Sava
J orge Rodriguez and Gabriel Medwick both sewed second stripes onto their sleeves. Jorge was lousy with a needle and thread; back in Sonora, sewing was work for women and tailors. He was surprised to find his friend neat and quick and precise. "How come you can do that so good?" he asked, ready to rag on Gabe.
"My ma learned me," Medwick answered matter-of-factly. "She reckoned I ought to be able to shift for myself, and knowing how to sew was part of it."
That left Jorge with nothing to say. Ragging on his buddy was one thing. Ragging on Gabe's mother was something else, something that went over the line. Instead of talking, Jorge sewed faster-not better, but faster. He wanted to get the shirt back on. Even sitting in front of a campfire, it was chilly out.
Artillery opened up behind him, from the direction of Statesboro. Covington was a long way northwest now, and long gone. Statesboro guarded the approaches to Sava
Imagine or not, though, U.S. soldiers swarmed through this part of the state. Everybody figured they were heading for Sava
Sergeant Hugo Blackledge appeared in the firelight. He had a gift for not being there one second and showing up out of nowhere the next: a jack-in-the-box with a nasty temper. He commanded the company these days. All the officers above him were dead and wounded, and replacements hadn't shown up. Jorge's promotion to corporal was older than Gabe's, even if their sets of stripes had both arrived at the same time. That meant Jorge had a platoon, while his friend only led a section.
"How's it feel, making like lieutenants?" Blackledge asked with a certain sardonic relish.
"Don't want to be no lieutenant," Gabriel Medwick said. "I got enough shit to worry about already."
"You said it," Jorge agreed.
As if to underline their worries, U.S. artillery came to life. Jorge listened anxiously, then relaxed as the shells roared over his head. That was counterbattery fire aimed at the C.S. guns. As long as the big guns shot at each other, as long as they left the front-line infantry alone, Jorge didn't mind them…much.
Sure enough, the U.S. shells came down well to the rear. Jorge finished sewing on his new stripes and put his shirt back on. Gabe, fussily precise, lagged behind.
"What are we go
His buddy looked up from his sewing. "Fight the damnyankees. Keep fighting 'em till we chase 'em back where they came from."
"їComo?" Jorge asked, startled into Spanish. The question sounded every bit as bleak in English: "How?"
"President'll figure out some kinda way." Medwick sounded a hundred percent confident in Jake Featherston.
Sergeant Blackledge lit a cigarette. "Don't get your ass in an uproar about that kind of shit, Rodriguez," he advised. "You can't do nothin' about it any which way. All we got to worry about is the damnyankees in front of us."
"That's bad enough!" Jorge exclaimed, because Blackledge made it sound as if the U.S. soldiers were nothing to worry about. Rodriguez wished they weren't but knew they were.
"Yeah, well, so what? You're still here. I'm still here. Hell, even pretty boy's still here." Blackledge blew smoke in Gabriel Medwick's direction.
"Up yours, too, Sarge," Medwick said without rancor. When he first got to know Blackledge, he wouldn't have dared mouth off like that. Neither would Jorge. And the formidable noncom would have squashed them like lice if they had dared. Now they'd earned the right, not least simply by surviving.
"All we can do is all we can do," Hugo Blackledge said. "We've put up a hell of a fight, seeing as they outweigh us about two to one."
"We'll lick 'em yet," Gabe said as he finally put his shirt back on.
"Uh-huh." Sergeant Blackledge nodded. Jorge had seen nods like that, from doctors in sickrooms where the patient wasn't going to get better but didn't know it yet. You kept his hope up as long as you could. Maybe it didn't do any good, but it didn't hurt, either. And he felt better, for a little while, anyway.
Jorge's dark eyes met the sergeant's ice-gray ones in a moment of complete mutual understanding. Gabe didn't get it, and probably wouldn't till Sava
"Got another one of those Dukes?" Jorge asked Blackledge.
"Sure do. Here you go." The older man held out the pack.
Jorge got to his feet and walked over to take one. As he leaned forward so Blackledge could give him a light, he whispered, "We're fucked, sн?"
"Bet your sorry butt we are," Blackledge answered.
"Thanks." Jorge sucked in smoke. But he was more grateful for the candor than for the cigarette.
When morning came, he looked up the road along which he'd been retreating. A couple of dead Confederates lay there, about three hundred yards in front of the line. Nobody'd tried to retrieve their bodies. For one thing, it was too likely that U.S. snipers would shoot anyone who did. For another, C.S. engineers had booby-trapped the corpses. Any damnyankee who flipped them over looking for souvenirs would regret it.