'General!' Another woman called to him. This one was young and blond and pretty, pretty enough to remind him how long he'd been away from Agnes. She also looked mad enough to spit nails.
'Yes?' He'd give her the benefit of the doubt as long as he could.
'Those niggers of yours!' she snapped.
'What about 'em?' Morrell didn't want them getting out of hand and raping all the women they could catch. He could understand why they'd want to. He could sympathize, too. But he wasn't running a mob. He was running an army, or trying to.
'They looked at me. They leered at me, the grinning apes,' the blond woman said. 'You ought to string them up and horsewhip them.'
Morrell needed a moment to realize she was dead serious. When he did, he almost wished the Negroes had dragged her into an alley and done their worst. 'That's not how things'll work from here on out, so you'd better get used to it,' he said. 'Nobody gets whipped for looking. Heck, I'm looking right now. You're worth looking at, no offense.'
'Well, of course.' As pretty women often did, she took her good looks for granted. 'But I don't mind it from you-too much. You're a Yankee, but you're not a nigger.'
'If they touch you and you don't like it, you can complain. If anybody touches you and you don't like it, you can complain,' Morrell said. 'But they can look as much as they want.'
'You mean you won't do anything about it?' The blond woman sounded as if she couldn't believe her ears. She looked disgusted, almost nauseated.
'That's what I said,' Morrell told her.
'You damnyankees really are animals, then.' She pursed her lips, perhaps getting ready to spit at him.
'If you do anything stupid,' he said, 'you'll find out just what kind of animal I am. You won't like it-I promise.'
He didn't shout and bluster. That had never been his style. He didn't need to. He sounded like a man who meant exactly what he said, and for a good reason: he was. The local woman stopped looking like somebody saving up spit. She did look a little deflated. Then she gathered herself, flung, 'Nigger-lover!' in his face instead of saliva, and stalked off. Fury gave her a fine hip action. Morrell admired it. He was sure the Negro auxiliaries had, too.
Up till now, he hadn't had much use for Negroes. Few whites in the USA did. Had he seen a couple of black men staring at a white woman's butt on a street corner in, say, Indianapolis, that might have offended him. In Monroe, Georgia? No. In fact, he smiled. The enemies of his enemies were his friends, all right.
After dark, Confederate bombers came over Monroe and dropped explosives on the U.S. soldiers in and around the town-and on their own people. A thin layer of low clouds hung above Monroe, so the Confederates might as well have been bombing blind. They couldn't come over by day, not unless they wanted to get slaughtered. In their shoes, Morrell supposed he would have preferred bombing blind to not bombing at all, too.
He had a few minutes' warning from Y-ranging gear that spotted the approaching bombers and sounded the alarm before they started unloading. U.S. night fighters were also starting to carry Y-ranging sets. So far, those sets were neither very strong nor very easy to use, but they were already making night operations more expensive for the CSA. Pretty soon, electronics might make nighttime raids as risky as daylight ones.
Crouching in a trench with bombs crashing down around him, Morrell could see a day where neither side on a battlefield would be able to hide anything from the other. How would you fight a war then? You could be so strong you'd beat your enemy even if he did see what you had in mind. You could, yes, but it wouldn't be easy, or economical.
Or you could make him think all your fancy preparations meant one thing and then go and do something else instead. Morrell nodded to himself. If he had his druthers, he would play it that way. If the enemy kept staring at the cape, he wouldn't see the sword till too late. You saved your own men and matйriel that way…if you could bring it off.
The all-clear warbled. Morrell got out of the trench and went back to his cot. He didn't know how much damage the Confederates had done. Probably some-probably not a lot. Without a doubt, they'd screwed a lot of U.S. soldiers out of a night's sleep. That counted, too, though no civilians who hadn't got up groggy after an air raid would think so. Morrell yawned. His eyes closed. Air raid or not, the Confederates didn't screw him out of more than forty-five minutes.
J onathan Moss had been on the run ever since a tornado let him break out of the Andersonville POW camp. Joining Spartacus' band of Negro guerrillas had kept the Confederates from getting him (it had also kept the guerrillas from shooting him and Nick Cantarella). But joining them also ensured that he stayed on the run.
U.S. forces weren't far away now. The rumble of artillery and the thud of bursting bombs came from the north by day and night. Running off to the troops from his own side would have been easy as pie…if not for God only knew how many divisions' worth of Jake Featherston's finest between him and them.
'We gots to sit tight,' Spartacus told his men-again and again, a sure sign they didn't want to listen to him. 'We gots to. Pretty soon, the Yankees, they comes to us. Then we is free men fo' true. We is free at las'.'
Moss and Cantarella caught each other's eye. Moss doubted it would be so simple. By the New York infantry officer's raised eyebrow, so did he.
And, however much they wished they weren't, they turned out to be right. For a long time, the countryside a hundred miles south of Atlanta had been a military backwater: peanut farms and cotton fields, patrolled-when they were patrolled-by halfhearted Mexican soldiers and by militiamen whose stamina and skill didn't match their zeal. Good guerrilla country, in other words.
No more. With the U.S. irruption into northern Georgia, with the threat to Atlanta, southern Georgia suddenly turned into a military zone. Encampments and supply dumps sprouted like toadstools after a rain. Truck convoys and trains brought supplies and soldiers up toward the front.
All that gave Spartacus' band and the other black guerrillas still operating chances they'd never had before. If they mined a road and delayed a column of trucks, if they sprayed machine-gun bullets at a tent city in the middle of the night, they really hurt the Confederate war effort. From everything Jonathan Moss gathered from the news and rumors he picked up, the Confederate States couldn't afford even fleabites on their backside. They already had too much trouble right in front of them.
The enemy seemed to feel the same way. When Spartacus' guerrillas did strike, the men in butternut went after them with a ferocity they hadn't seen before. If Spartacus hadn't been fighting in country he knew better than the enemy did, the Confederates would have wiped out his band in short order. As things were, his men scrambled from woods to swamp, half a jump ahead of their pursuers.
Moss developed a new appreciation for possum and squirrel and turtle. The Negroes called one kind of long- necked terrapin, chicken turtles, presumably because of how they tasted. Moss couldn't see the resemblance. He didn't spend much time bitching, though; any meat in his belly was better than none.
Looking down at what was left of himself one weary evening, he said, 'Back before the war, I had a potbelly. One of these days, I'd like to get another one.'
'Some of the shit we eat makes Army rations look good,' Nick Cantarella agreed. 'Don't know that I could say anything worse about it.'
Amusement glinted in Spartacus' eyes as he looked from one white man to the other. 'I's mighty sorry to inconvenience you gents-mighty sorry,' he said. 'If 'n you knows where we kin git us some ribs and beefsteaks, sing out.'
'Steak! Jesus!' Cantarella started to laugh. 'I even stopped thinking about steak. What the hell's the point?'
'How about Confederate rations?' Spartacus asked, the mockery gone from his voice.
Hearing the change in tone, Moss grew alert. 'What do you have in mind, boss?' he asked.
Spartacus smiled; he liked hearing the white men in his band acknowledge that he outranked them. 'They got that new depot over by Americus,' he said.
'Think we can hit it?' Cantarella asked.
'Hope so, anyways,' Spartacus answered. 'I got me a pretty good notion where they keeps the ration tins, too. See, here's what I got in mind…'
He sketched on the muddy ground with a stick. He wouldn't have done so much explaining for the other Negroes, but he thought of the escaped U.S. soldiers as military professionals, and valued their opinion. With Nick Cantarella, that was justified. Moss knew it was a lot less so for him.
