damnyankees had been up in Texas, but he didn't want to give 'em a target. He nodded to Lieutenant Hernando Guitierrez. 'What can I do for you, sir? En que puedo servirle? ' Again, he made a hash of the Spanish.
It didn't matter, not here. Lieutenant Guitierrez probably spoke better English than Pinkard did. He was every bit as tall, too, though not much more than half as wide through the shoulders. By his looks, he had a lot more Spaniard and a lot less Indian in him than did most of the men he commanded. He said, 'I have a job for you, Sergeant.'
'That's what I'm here for,' Pinkard agreed.
'Er-yes.' The Mexican lieutenant drummed his fingers on his thigh. Jeff had a pretty good idea what was eating the fellow. He was only a sergeant himself (and he'd never risen higher than PFC in the C.S. Army), but he got more money every month than Guitierrez did. And, although he was only a sergeant, it wasn't always obvious that his rank was inferior to the other man's. Why else were Confederate volunteers down here, if not to show the greasers the way real soldiers did things?
'What can I do for you, Lieutenant?' Jeff asked again, not feeling like pushing things today.
Guitierrez gave him what might have been a grateful look. 'You are familiar, Sergeant, with the machines called barrels?'
'Uh… yeah.' Pinkard was familiar enough to start worrying, even though the clanking monsters had been few and far between in Texas during the Great War-especially on the Confederate side. 'What's the matter? The rebels going to start throwing 'em at us? That's real bad news, if they are.'
'No, no, no.' The Mexican officer shook his head. He had a sort of melancholy pride different from anything Pinkard had known in his own countrymen. ' We have three, built in Tampico by the sea and coming up here to the highlands by railroad. I want you to lead the infantry when we move forward with them against the peasant rabble who dare to oppose Emperor Maximilian.'
' You people built barrels?' Once he'd said it, Jeff wished he hadn't sounded quite so astonished. But that was too late, of course.
Lieutenant Guitierrez's lips thinned. 'Yes, we did.' But then he coughed. He was a proud man, but also an honest man. 'I understand the design may have come from the Confederate States-unofficially, of course.'
'Ah. I get you.' Jeff laid a finger by the side of his nose and winked. The Confederates couldn't build barrels on their own. The Yankees would land on them with both feet if they tried. But what happened south of the border was a different story. 'When does the attack go in, and what are we aiming for?'
'We want to drive them from those little hills where they can observe our movements. They are shelling San Luis Potosi from that forward position, too,' Guitierrez replied. 'If all goes well, this will be a heavy blow against them. As for when, the attack begins the morning after the barrels come into place.'
He didn't say when that morning would be. He was probably wise not to. For one thing, Pinkard had already discovered what manana meant. For another, barrels, no matter who built them, broke down if you looked at them sideways. Pinkard grunted. 'All right, Lieutenant. Soon as they get here, I'll lead your infantry against the rebels. You'll follow along yourself to see how it's done, right?'
He wasn't calling Guitierrez a coward. He'd seen the other man had courage and to spare. And Guitierrez nodded now. ' Claro que si, Sergeant. Of course. That is why you are here: to show us how it is done.'
Jeff grunted again. In one sense, the Mexican lieutenant was right. In another… Pinkard was here because his marriage was as much a casualty of the Great War as a fellow with a hook for a hand. He was here because he had a fierce, restless energy and an urgent desire to kill something, almost anything. He couldn't satisfy that desire back in Birmingham, not unless he wanted to fry in the electric chair shortly thereafter.
Three days later-not a bad case of manana, all things considered-the barrels came into position, clanking and rattling and belching and farting every inch of the way. Pinkard wasn't surprised to find more than half their crewmen were Confederate volunteers. He was surprised when he got a look at the barrels themselves. They weren't the rhomboids with tracks all around that the CSA, following the British lead, had used during the Great War. And they weren't quite the squat, hulking monsters with a cannon in the nose and machine guns bristling on flanks and rear the USA had thrown at the Confederacy.
They did have a conning tower like that of a U.S. barrel-their crewmen called it a turret. It revolved through some sort of gear mechanism, and carried a cannon and a machine gun mounted alongside it. Two more bow- mounted machine guns completed their armament. 'Since the turret spins, we don't need nothin' else,' a crewman said. 'Means we don't have to try and shoehorn so many men inside, neither.'
'Sounds like somebody's been doing a lot of thinking about this business,' Pinkard said.
'Reckon so,' the other man agreed. 'Now if the same somebody would've thunk about the engine, too, we'd all be better off. A good horse can still outrun these miserable iron sons of bitches without breathing hard.'
During the Great War-even the attenuated version of it fought out in Texas-a big artillery barrage would have preceded the barrels' advance. Neither side in this fight had enough artillery to lay down a big barrage. It didn't seem to matter. The barrels rolled forward, crushing the enemy's barbed wire and shooting up his machine-gun nests. 'Come on!' Pinkard shouted to the foot soldiers loyal to Maximilian III. 'Keep up with 'em! They make the hole, an' we go through it. Stick tight, and the enemy'll shoot at the barrels and not at you so much.'
That was how things had worked during the Great War. In English and horrible Spanish, Jeff urged his men forward. Forward they went, too. The only thing he hadn't counted on was the effect barrels, even a ragged handful of barrels, had on troops who'd never faced them before. The rebels, or the braver men among them, tried shooting at the great machines. When their rifle and machine-gun bullets bounced off the barrels' armor, they seemed to decide the end of the world was at hand. Some ran away. The barrels' machine guns scythed them down like wheat at harvest time. Others threw down their rifles, threw up their hands, and surrendered. 'Amigo!' they shouted hopefully.
Jefferson Pinkard had never had so many strangers call him friend in all his born days. In Texas, the Confederates had gone raiding to catch a handful of Yankee prisoners. Here, prisoners were coming out of his ears. 'What do we do with 'em, Sergeant?' asked a soldier who spoke English-maybe he'd worked in the CSA once upon a time. 'We go-?' The gesture he made wasn't the throat-cutting one Pinkard would have used, but it meant the same thing.
For once, Jeff's blood lust was sated. Slaughter in the heat of battle was as fine as taking a woman, maybe finer. Killing prisoners felt like murder. Maybe I'm still a Christian, after all. 'Nah, they've surrendered,' he answered. 'We'll take 'em back with us. We'd better. Till those barrels break down, they're gonna keep bringin' in plenty more.'
'Si, es verdad,' the soldier said, and translated Pinkard's words for the other Mexicans. They all assumed he knew how to handle a flood of prisoners of war, too-including the prisoners themselves, who swarmed up to him to kiss his hands and even try to kiss his cheeks in gratitude for being spared.
'Cut that out!' he roared. It made him wish he had ordered a massacre. Instead, he led the captured rebels- who were even more ragged and sorry-looking than the Mexican imperialists-back out of the fighting. Once he got them behind the line, he had to figure out what to do with them next. Nobody else seemed to want to do anything that looked like thinking.
He commandeered some barbed wire and some posts to string it from. After he herded the prisoners into the big square he'd made, he told off guards to make sure they didn't head for the high country. Then he had to yell to make sure they got something-not much, but something-to eat and drink. And he had to go on yelling, to make sure manana didn't foul things up. By the time three or four days went by, all the Mexicans assumed he was in charge of the prisoner-of-war camp. Before very much longer, he started thinking the same thing himself.
C olonel Irving Morrell hated soldiering from behind a desk. He always had. As best he could tell, he always would. And he especially hated it when there was fighting going on and he found himself a thousand miles away. The reports filtering north from the civil war in the Empire of Mexico struck him as particularly maddening-and all the more so because he couldn't get anybody else in the War Department to take them seriously.
'God damn it, the imperialists are cleaning up with these new barrels of theirs,' he raged to his superior, a stolid senior colonel named Virgil Donaldson. He waved papers in Donaldson's face. 'Has anybody besides me read this material? By what it's saying, they've got just about all the features we put on our fancy prototype at Fort Leavenworth. But we built our prototype and said to hell with it. Those bastards have got a production line going in Tampico.'
Colonel Donaldson puffed on his pipe. He had a big red face and a big gray mustache. He looked more like somebody's kindly uncle than a General Staff officer. He sounded like somebody's kindly uncle, too, when he said,
