take care o' that my own self.'
'Well, you can't,' Jorge said. 'They catch you deserting, they shoot you. Then they hang up your body to give other people the message.'
'It'd be worth it. Then Thelma Lou'd know how much I love her,' Ray said.
Jorge wondered why he'd got stuck listening to this crap. He himself hadn't had a fiancйe, let alone a wife, back in Baroyeca. The few times he'd lain down with a woman, he'd had to put money on the dresser first. But he was the platoon leader. That must have made him seem to Ray like someone who knew what he was doing. He wished he seemed that way in his own eyes.
He knew enough to be sure Ray was talking like a fool. Anybody who wasn't in love with Thelma Lou would have known that. 'She just laugh when you get in trouble,' Jorge said. 'Then she go on fooling around with this asshole.'
'Not if I kill him, she don't.' Ray was as stubborn as he was stupid, which took some doing.
'Then she fool around with somebody else,' Jorge said. 'A gal who cheats on you once, she cheats on you lots of times. You don't get her back like she never screwed around at all.' Ray's jaw dropped. Plainly, that had never crossed his mind. Dumb as rocks, Jorge thought sadly. He went on, 'Or maybe this letter you got, maybe it's bullshit. Whoever sent it to you, there ain't no return address, right?'
'I dunno,' Ray said, which covered more ground than he realized. 'You might could be right, but I dunno. Kinda sounds like somethin' Thelma Lou'd go and do.'
So why do you give a damn about her? Jorge didn't scream it, however much he wanted to. He could tell it would do no good. 'You can't go nowhere,' he said. 'You don't want to let your buddies down, right?' Ray shook his head. He wasn't a bad soldier. Jorge pressed on: 'You can't get leave, and there's lots of military police and Freedom Party men between here and your home town. So stay. All this stuff, if it really is anything, it'll sort itself out when the war's done. Why worry till then?'
'I guess.' Ray didn't sound convinced, but he didn't sound like someone on the ragged edge of deserting, either.
Sergeant Blackledge swore when Jorge warned him of the trouble. 'This ain't the first time he's had trouble with that cunt,' he said. 'But you were dead right-if he does try and run off, he ain't gonna get far, and he'll land in more shit than Congress puts out.'
Half an hour after that, a captain and a second lieutenant and six or eight enlisted men showed up: a new company CO, a platoon commander, and some real live (for the moment, anyhow) reinforcements. Would wonders never cease? The captain, whose name was Richmond Sellars, walked with a limp and wore a Purple Heart ribbon with two tiny oak-leaf clusters pinned to it.
'I told 'em I was ready to get back to duty,' he said, 'so they sent my ass here.' He pointed to the lieutenant, who had to be at least forty and looked to have come up through the ranks. 'This is Grover Burch. Who's in charge now?'
'I am, sir. Sergeant Hugo Blackledge.' Blackledge likely wasn't happy to see company command go glimmering. Jorge wasn't thrilled about losing his platoon. The good news was that he wouldn't have to listen to complaints like Ray's so much. They'd be Burch's worry, and Sergeant Blackledge's, too.
'Well, Blackledge, why don't you fill me in?' Sellars said. He'd seen enough to know he'd be smart to walk soft for a while.
The sergeant did, quickly and competently. He said a couple of nice things about Jorge, which surprised and pleased the new corporal. Then Blackledge pointed northwest. 'Not really up to us what happens next, sir,' he said. 'The damnyankees'll do whatever the hell they do, and we've got to try and stop 'em. I just hope to God we can.'
F orward to Richmond! That had been the U.S. battle cry in the War of Secession. It would have been the battle cry during the Great War, except the Confederates struck north before the USA could even try to push south. And in this fight…
In this fight, the CSA had held the USA in northern Virginia. The Confederate States had held, yes, but they weren't holding any more. Abner Dowling noted each new U.S. advance with growing amazement and growing delight. After U.S. soldiers broke out of the nasty second-growth country called the Wilderness, the enemy just didn't have the men and machines to stop them. The Confederates could slow them down, but the U.S. troops pushed forward day after day.
A command car took Dowling and his adjutant past burnt-out C.S. barrels. Even in this chilly winter weather, the stink of death filled the air. 'I didn't believe I'd ever say it,' Dowling remarked, 'but I think we've got 'em on the run here.'
'Yes, sir. Same here.' Major Angelo Toricelli nodded. 'They just can't hold us any more. They'll have a devil of a time keeping us out of Richmond.'
'I hope we don't just barge into the place,' Dowling said.
He glanced over at the driver. He didn't want to say much more than that, not with a man he didn't know well listening. His lack of faith in Daniel MacArthur was almost limitless. He'd served with MacArthur since the Great War, and admired his courage without admiring his common sense or strategic sense. He doubted whether MacArthur had any strategic sense, as a matter of fact.
'I've heard we're trying to work out how to get over the James,' Major Toricelli said.
'I've heard the same thing,' Dowling replied. 'Hearing is only hearing, though. Seeing is believing.'
A rifle shot rang out, not nearly far enough away. The driver sped up. Toricelli swung the command car's heavy machine gun toward the sound of the gunshot. He didn't know what was going on. He couldn't know who'd fired, either. The shot sounded to Dowling as if it had come from a C.S. automatic rifle, but about every fourth soldier in green-gray carried one of those nowadays-and the other three wanted one.
Toricelli relaxed-a little-as no target presented itself. 'Back in the War of Secession, they would have had a devil of a time taking the straight route we're using,' he remarked. 'The lay of the land doesn't make it easy.'
'Around here, the lay of the land's got the clap,' Dowling said. His adjutant snorted. So did the driver. An adjutant was almost obligated to find a general's jokes funny. A lowly driver wasn't, so Dowling felt doubly pleased with himself.
He'd been exaggerating, but only a little. The rivers in central Virginia all seemed to run from northwest to southeast. Major Toricelli was right. Those rivers and their bottomlands would have forced men marching on foot to veer toward the southeast, too: toward the southeast and away from the Confederate capital.
But barrels and halftracks could go where marching men couldn't. And U.S. forces were pushing straight toward Richmond whether Jake Featherston's men liked it or not.
So Dowling thought, at any rate, till C.S. fighter-bombers appeared. The driver jammed on the brakes. Everybody bailed out of the command car. The roadside ditch Dowling dove into was muddy, but what could you do? Bullets spanged off asphalt and thudded into dirt. Dowling didn't hear any of the wet slaps that meant bullets striking flesh, for which he was duly grateful.
A moment later, he did hear several metallic clang!s and then a soft whump! That was the command car catching fire. He swore under his breath. He wouldn't be going forward to Richmond as fast as he wanted to.
He stuck his head up out of the ditch, then ducked again as machine-gun ammo in the command car started cooking off. Embarrassing as hell to get killed by your own ordnance. Embarrassing as hell to get killed by anybody's ordnance, when you came right down to it.
After the.50-caliber rounds stopped going off, Dowling cautiously got to his feet. So did the driver. Dowling looked across the road. Major Toricelli emerged from a ditch there. He wasn't just muddy-he was dripping. His grin looked distinctly forced. 'Some fun, huh, sir?'
'Now that you mention it,' Dowling said, 'no.'
'We'd better flag down another auto, or a truck, or whatever we can find,' Toricelli said. 'We need to be in place.'
He was young and serious, even earnest. Dowling had been through much more. With a crooked grin, he replied, 'You're right, of course. The whole war will grind to a halt if I'm not there to give orders at just the right instant.'
Who was the Russian novelist who'd tried to show that generals and what they said and did was utterly irrelevant to the way battles turned out? Dowling couldn't remember his name; he cared for Russian novels no more than he cared for Brussels sprouts. With the bias that sprang from his professional rank, he thought the Russian's
