the potato-mashers the Yanks and the Huns used-were fine for trench fighting. Bayonet and entrenching tool were even better, as far as Pinkard was concerned.
One by one, the men in butternut climbed out of the trench and crawled through the few pathetic lengths of wire that passed for a belt. Cross said, “This here wire reminds me of a bald fellow combin’ about the last three strands he’s got across his shiny old dome and pretendin’ he’s got hisself a whole head o’ hair. He may be fooled, but ain’t nobody else who is.”
Several soldiers chuckled in low voices. Pinkard didn’t, but he nodded at the aptness of the comparison. Because they had any barbed wire at all, the Confederate commanders in Texas often seemed to think they had great thickets of the stuff, as was true in Virginia and Tennessee-not that, from the news coming west, it had done the CSA a whole lot of good there, either.
A little to the north, a flare rose from the Yankee lines. It burned in the sky, a fierce white point of light. Under its glare, the advancing Confederate soldiers froze. Pinkard pressed his face into the dirt. It smelled of dust and of dead bodies. That stink of rotting flesh never left his nostrils; even more than cordite and coffee and tobacco, it was the definitive odor of the front, as hot iron was the definitive odor of the Sloss Foundry.
After what felt like forever, the flare finally faded. Jeff crawled on. He skirted shell holes when he could, but was always ready to dive into one if the U.S. soldiers opened up on the raiding party.
Cross muttered discontentedly: “Sure as hell, goddamn artillery’s gonna open up too goddamn soon. They ain’t gonna figure out we had to wait for the flare. Goddamn artillery can’t figure out to grab their asses with both hands, anybody wants to know.”
He was right. The Confederate soldiers hadn’t reached the Yankee wire-thicker than their own, but not much-when the three-inch guns behind the C.S. line started barking. Shells rained down on the U.S. position, making the sides and back of a box that isolated a stretch of the forward trenches.
Like the rest of the men in the raiding party, Pinkard wore a wire-cutter on his belt. He could crawl under most of the wire the damnyankees had laid, and snipped his way through the few places where he had trouble crawling. Somebody in the U.S. trench fired. Jeff didn’t think it was an aimed shot. He wanted to thank the Yankee for it; it told him exactly where the trench line was.
He yanked a grenade out of the sack, pulled off the ring, and chucked the bomb into the trench, as close to the Yankee rifleman as he could put it. The report was loud and hard and short. He threw more grenades. So did the rest of the raiders. Then, with a yell, he scrambled forward and leaped down into the U.S. trench.
“Hey there, you-” The words were spoken in a sharp Yankee accent. Jeff didn’t reach over his shoulder for his rifle. Faster to yank the entrenching tool off his belt and swing it in a short, flat arc. The shovel blade struck flesh and bit deep. The U.S. soldier went down with a groan. Then Pinkard unslung the Tredegar and ran along the firebay.
A potato-masher grenade hurled from a traverse exploded eight or ten feet in front of him. A fragment bit the back of his hand. Another tore through his tunic without grazing him. He dashed past the place where the grenade had gone off and into the traverse. A Yankee yelled and fired. He missed. Pinkard lunged with the bayonet. He grunted as it penetrated the U.S. soldier’s flesh, almost as he sometimes grunted when he penetrated Emily’s flesh.
The damnyankee shrieked and crumpled. Jeff fired and stabbed, stabbed and fired, till three or four more Yankees were down and none left on his feet in the traverse. He grunted again, an oddly sated sound.
Somebody touched him on the shoulder. He whirled, and would have spitted Hip Rodriguez if the Sonoran hadn’t beaten the bayonet aside with his own rifle. “We got to go back, Jeff,” Rodriguez said. “The sergeant, he blow the whistle. You no hear?”
Consumed in his orgy of killing, Pinkard hadn’t heard anything. He shook his head like a man coming out of a dream. “All right, Hip,” he said meekly. “I’ll come back with you.”
Rodriguez looked down the length of the traverse. Muttering, “Ten million demons from hell,” he crossed himself. To Jeff, he said, “You fight like a crazy man,
“Yeah,” Pinkard said. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
U.S. artillery pumped shells into no-man’s-land as the Confederate raiders crawled and scrambled back to their own line. One man took a splinter in the leg. One man hadn’t come out of the trench. Even so, Sergeant Cross reported to Captain Connolly with considerable pride: “Sir, we whaled the stuffing out of the sons of bitches. Pinkard here, he was worth a regiment all by hisself.”
“Good news, Sergeant,” the company commander said. “Well done, Pinkard.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jeff answered. His voice was dull, far away. The red mist of slaughter had retreated from his mind. He felt spent and empty. Emily cavorted once more behind his eyes.
Four fat freighters slowly steamed south. Watching them from the deck of the USS
Carl Sturtevant chuckled. “You aren’t looking at the world with the proper spirit, George,” he said, for all the world like a chaplain.
Enos snorted. “And you aren’t looking at the world like any petty officer I ever heard of,” he retorted. “You’re supposed to go ‘Goddamn right’ when I say something like that.”
The chief of the depth-charge projector crew laughed. “I never do what I’m supposed to if I can help it.”
“All right.” Enos chuckled, too. The ships wallowed along, painted in stripes and patches and gaudy colors that were supposed to make it hard for the skipper of a submersible to gauge either their range or their course. Whether the camouflage job did that or not, George couldn’t have said. It made the freighters ugly as sin, though. There he was certain.
Stripes zigzagged jaggedly over the
“What I want to do,” Enos said, “is get the bastard who almost torpedoed us a few weeks ago. Lord knows he’s still hanging around; he would have chewed up that other bunch of freighters if we hadn’t run him off.”
Sturtevant raised an ironic eyebrow. “I swear, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Lieutenant Crowder reported that submersible as probably destroyed, and if you don’t think Lieutenant Crowder knows everything in the world, well, shit, just ask him.”
“Yeah, and rain makes applesauce,” Enos said. They both laughed then; laughing at the pretensions of officers was a sailors’ tradition old as time.
“He’s not too bad a fellow,” Sturtevant allowed in an astonishing display of magnanimity, “as long as you don’t take him too serious. Give him a chance, though, and he’d have half of us up in aeroplanes and the other half down under the water in deep-sea diver suits, tryin’ to catch torpedoes like they were footballs the Rebs were throwing at us.”
“He does like gadgets,” Enos agreed. “At least the depth-charge projector is a pretty good gadget.”
A veteran seaman, Sturtevant had almost as little use for new-fangled devices as he did for young officers enamored of them. When he said, “Yeah, it’s not too bad,” he surely meant it as high praise, and that was how George Enos took it.
Enos stared out across the blue, blue water of the tropical Atlantic, looking for anything that might alert him to the presence of the Confederate submarine that also seemed to make its home in this stretch of ocean. He’d spied the stinking thing once-why not twice?
Ocean, squawking birds, sun standing higher in the sky every day-and far higher now than Enos had ever seen, anyway. Despite that fierce and brilliant light, he didn’t spot anything out of the ordinary.
He kept looking ahead of the freighters, ahead and off to one side. If the submersible did prowl in these waters, that was the direction from which it would attack. It couldn’t move very fast while submerged; it had to take the lead on the surface, then go under and slowly sneak toward its intended prey.
George did his best to think like the skipper of a submersible. One thing he knew: the skipper of the boat that had almost sunk the
