found the prospect of a big battle even less appealing than supper the night before.
XI
Paul Mantarakis looked around. Most of what he saw was mountains baking under a savage sun. The rest was waterless valley full of boulders and cactus and nothing any man in his right mind could possibly want to own, let alone want it badly enough to take it away from the poor fools unfortunate enough to be in possession of it at the moment.
When he said that out loud, Gordon McSweeney’s big, fair head went up and down in agreement. “Amen,” the Scotsman said. “The Empire of Mexico is welcome to it, for all of me.”
“You ought to take another couple of salt tablets, Gordon,” Paul said. “You look like a lobster that’s been in the pot too long.”
For once, he was thankful for his swarthiness. Even here in Baja, California, all he did was go from brown to browner. Back in the normal world of the USA he dimly remembered, the whiter you were, the more breaks you got. Here, all you got was sunburn and heatstroke.
Captain Wyatt tramped past them. He wasn’t cooked quite so badly as McSweeney, but he was suffering, too. He said, “If we take this miserable stretch of land away from the Mexicans, we’ll be able to keep an eye on the Confederate Pacific coast-if the Rebs have any Pacific coast left once the war is done.”
“That’d be fine, sir,” Mantarakis said. “But once we’ve got bases here, how do we keep them supplied? No railroads except the one we built ourself. No roads, either, not unless you call what we’re on a road.”
“This isn’t just a road, Sergeant,” Captain Wyatt said. “This is damn near
“A shame and a disgrace that the Rebs still
“Well, you’re right about that, Lord knows,” Captain Wyatt said. “But they are, and, from everything I’ve heard, it’s not much easier fighting over in Sonora than it is here.” He made a sour face. “And, of course, we’re starved for everything here, because we’re so far west. The war on the other side of the Mississippi is the big top; we’re just the sideshow.”
Something glinted for a moment, high on the side of the conical mountain ahead. Mantarakis pointed to it, saying, “Sir, I think the Mexicans-or maybe it’s the Rebs; who knows? — have an observation post way the hell up there.”
“Up on the slope of the Volcano of the Three Virgins, you mean?” Wyatt said. Paul nodded. The captain shrugged. “I would, sure as the devil, if I were in their shoes. I didn’t see anything. Show me again where you think it’s at.” After Mantarakis pointed, the captain nodded. “A little bit above that crag there?” He shouted for a runner, gave the fellow the location Mantarakis had spotted, and told him, “Pass it on to the field artillery. Maybe a howitzer can reach him from here. If that’s no good, we’ll just have to get used to them keeping an eye on everything we’re doing.”
Mantarakis said, “Haven’t seen much in the way of real fighting since we got down here. Not that I miss it,” he added hastily, “but are these Mexicans any good?”
“They won’t be as good as the Mormons were,” Ben Carlton put in. “’Course, nobody’s going to be as good as the Mormons were, unless I miss my guess. But if they were all that bad, we’d’ve already licked ’em.”
“Something to that,” Captain Wyatt agreed. “But we’ve been fighting the terrain as much as the Empire of Mexico, and there are some Rebs, too, helping their pals. But if you ask me-”
Paul didn’t ask the company commander. He didn’t have a chance to ask the company commander. A whistle in the air made him throw himself to the ground without consciously thinking he needed to do that. A shell burst, maybe fifty yards away.
He had his entrenching tool out and was busy digging himself a foxhole before the second shell came down. “Where are they coming from?” somebody shouted. “Don’t see any flash or anything.”
“Got to be a trench mortar,” Paul yelled back. “They must have put a couple of them on these hills, figured they’d drop some bombs on us. Trouble is, we don’t have any trenches.” He felt naked trying to fight without one, too.
“I’ll lay odds you’re right, Sergeant,” Captain Wyatt said. “The Mexicans don’t have any money to speak of; they can’t afford real artillery. In a place like this, though, what they’ve got is plenty good.”
It was, in Paul Mantarakis’ opinion, better than plenty good. Shells or bombs or whatever they were kept falling on the Americans. The ground, under a few inches of sandy dust, was hard as a sergeant’s heart (that Paul thought such things proved he’d come up through the ranks). He couldn’t get the foxhole deep enough to suit him.
And then somebody shouted, “Here come the bastards!” Resentfully, he threw down the entrenching tool and set his rifle against his shoulder. The enemy wasn’t playing fair. How was he supposed to kill them without getting hurt himself if they wouldn’t let him dig in properly?
Trench mortars up on the hilltops might have been Mexicans. Like any American, he thought of Mexico as backwards and corrupt and bankrupt; if the Emperor had been able to pay his bills, he wouldn’t have had to sell Chihuahua and Sonora to the CSA. And when the United States had fought Mexico, back before the War of Secession, they’d actually won. So Paul, in spite of what Captain Wyatt had said, expected any soldiers bold enough to charge to be Confederates propping up their allies.
But he was wrong. These men wore a khaki lighter than Confederate issue, so light it was almost yellow. In this terrain, it gave better protection than green-gray. They wore widebrimmed straw hats, too, not felts or steel derbies. And their shouts yipped like coyotes’ howls; they weren’t the cougar screams the Rebs used for battle cries.
Mantarakis fired, one of the first who did. Several Mexicans went down. He didn’t think they were all hit; they were taking cover, too. A bullet kicked dust into his face. He shivered despite the heat. A miss was as good as a mile, or so they said, but what did they really know, whoever
Fire was coming at the Americans from the front and from both flanks. That wasn’t good. That was how you got shot to pieces. That was also probably why, after most of two years of war, the Americans hadn’t got to Santa Rosalia yet.
“Let’s get moving,” Mantarakis shouted to his squad. “We stay here, they’re going to chop us to bits.” Not without a pang of regret, he quit the unsatisfactory foxhole he’d dug and headed off to the right to see if he couldn’t do something about the flanking fire coming from that direction. His men followed him. He’d known of officers who found out too late they were moving all by themselves. Most of them hadn’t come back from moves like that.
Rifle bullets buzzed past him, clipped branches from the chaparral through which he ran, and made dust spurt up again and again. He noted all that only peripherally. What he did note, with glad relief, was that the Mexicans hadn’t brought any machine guns forward with them. Maybe machine guns were like proper artillery: too expensive for them to afford. He fervently hoped so.
He dove behind a sun-wizened bush, snapped off a couple of rounds to make the enemy keep their heads down, and then got moving again. He came cautiously around a yellow boulder that might have been there since the beginning of time-and almost ran into a Mexican soldier doing the same thing.
They stared at each other. The Mexican had two cartridge bandoliers crisscrossed over his chest, which made him look like a bandit. His bristly mustache and the black stubble on his chin only added to the impression.
Paul saw the Mexican very distinctly, as if a sculptor had carved him and the entire scene behind him into a sharp-edged simulation of reality. The man seemed to raise his rifle with dreamlike slowness, though Paul’s swung to bear on him no more swiftly.
They both fired at essentially the same instant. Time speeded up then. The Mexican let out a startled grunt and reeled away, blood coming from a small hole in the front of his uniform and a huge gaping exit wound about where his left kidney was-or had been.
