might happen in the next couple of minutes.
Don't think about it, Pound told himself. If you think about it, you'll get cold feet. 'Then gun it,' he said. He was sure his own platoon would come with him. The rest…Don't think about that, either.
The engine roared. The barrel zipped forward. Flat out, it could do better than thirty. On rough ground, going like that would have torn out the kidneys of the men inside. On the road, it was tolerable…barely.
'Shoot first if you see anything,' Pound advised, shouting over the noise.
'Going this fast, the stabilizer ain't worth shit,' the gunner answered.
'Shoot first anyway. Even if you miss, you make the other guy duck. Then you can make your second shot count.'
Scullard grunted. Pound knew damn well he was right, but he could see that it wasn't the sort of thing where you'd want to bet your life if you didn't have to.
As they neared Columbiana, they found there were Confederate soldiers on the road. The men in butternut hadn't figured the Yankees would be dumb enough or crazy enough to thunder down on them like that. The bow machine gun and the coaxial machine gun in the turret both started jackhammering. The C.S. troops scattered.
'Give 'em a couple of rounds of HE, too,' Pound said. 'Something to remember us by, you know?'
'Yes, sir!' Scullard said enthusiastically, and then, to the loader, 'HE!'
The main armament thundered twice. A 3Ѕ-inch shell carried enough cordite to make a pretty good boom when it burst. One round went off in the middle of a knot of fleeing Confederates. Men and pieces of men described arcs through the air.
'Nice shot!' Pound yelled. Only later did he remember he was cheering death and mayhem. They were what he did for a living, his stock in trade. Most of the time, he took them for granted. He wondered why he couldn't quite do it now.
Then he did, because the barrel roared into Columbiana. He had no time to think about killing-he was too busy doing it. The barrel crew might have been an extension of his arm, an extension of his will.
'Where the hell is Lester Street?' he muttered. That was where the C. B. Churchill Company was, and had been since 1862. A glance through the periscopes built into the cupola told him what he needed to know. The biggest building in town, the one with the Stars and Bars flying over it, had to be the munitions factory. 'Send a couple of HE rounds in there, too,' he told the gunner. 'Let 'em know they've just gone out of business.'
'Right.' But before Scullard could fire, machine-gun bullets rattled off the barrel's sides and turret, clattering but doing no harm. The bow gunner sent a long burst into a general store with a big DRINK DR. HOPPER! sign out front. Pound had tried the fizzy water, and thought it tasted like horse piss and sugar. The enemy machine gun abruptly cut off.
Boom! Boom! Pound watched holes appear in the munitions plant's southern wall. He giggled like a kid. Sometimes destruction for its own sake was more fun than anything else an alleged adult could do. He wondered whether Jake Featherston had an advanced case of the same disease.
And then he got more in the way of destruction than even he wanted. Maybe one of those HE rounds blew up something inside the factory. Maybe somebody in there decided he'd be damned if he let the plant fall into U.S. hands. Any which way, it went sky high.
Pound and his barrel were more than half a mile away. Even through inches of steel armor, the roar was overwhelming. The barrel weighed upwards of forty tons. All the same, the front end came off the ground. The machine might have been a rearing horse, except Pound was afraid it would flip right over onto its turret. Scullard's startled 'Fuck!' said he wasn't the only one, either.
But the barrel thudded back down onto its tracks. Pound peered out through the periscopes again. One of the forward ones was cracked, which said just how big a blast that was. It must have knocked half of Columbiana flat.
'Well,' he said, 'we liberated the living shit out of this place.'
F lora Blackford was listening to debate on a national parks appropriation bill-not everything Congress did touched on the war, though it often seemed that way-when a House page hurried up to her. His fresh features and beardless cheeks said he was about fifteen: too young to conscript, though the Confederates were giving guns to kids that age, using up their next generation.
'For you, Congresswoman,' the page whispered. He handed her an envelope and took off before she could even thank him.
She opened the envelope and unfolded the note inside. Come see me the second you get this-Franklin, it said. She recognized the Assistant Secretary of War's bold handwriting.
Any excuse to get away from this dreary debate was a good one. She hurried out of Congressional Hall- leaving was much easier than getting in-and flagged a cab. The War Department was within walking distance, but a taxi was faster. When Franklin Roosevelt wrote, Come see me the second you get this, she assumed he meant it.
'Heck of a thing about this Russian town, isn't it?' the driver said.
'I'm sorry. I haven't heard any news since early this morning,' Flora said.
'Bet you will.' The cabby pulled up in front of the massive-and badly damaged-War Department building. 'Thirty-five cents, ma'am.'
'Here.' Flora gave him half a dollar and didn't wait for change. A newsboy waved papers and shouted about Petrograd, so something had happened in Russia. Maybe the Tsar was dead. That might help the USA's German allies.
She hurried up the scarred steps. At the top, her Congressional ID convinced the guards that she was who she said she was. One of them telephoned Roosevelt's office, deep in the bowels of the building. When he'd satisfied himself that she was expected, he said, 'Jonesy here'll take you where you need to go, ma'am. Somebody will check you out as soon as you get inside.'
Check you out was a euphemism for pat you down. The tight-faced woman who did it took no obvious pleasure from it, which was something, anyhow. After she finished and nodded, Jonesy-who looked even younger than Flora's own Joshua-said, 'Come along with me, ma'am.'
Down they went, stairway after stairway. Her calves didn't look forward to climbing those stairs on the way up. Franklin Roosevelt had a special elevator because of his wheelchair, but no mere Congresswoman-not even a former First Lady-got to ride it.
'Here we go.' Jonesy stopped in front of Roosevelt's office. 'I'll take you up when you're done.' Don't go wandering around on your own. Nobody ever came out and said that, but it always hung in the air.
The captain in the Assistant Secretary of War's outer office nodded to Flora. 'Hello, Congresswoman. You made good time. Go right in-Mr. Roosevelt is expecting you.'
'Thanks,' Flora said. 'Can you tell me what this is about?'
'I think he'd better do that, ma'am.'
Shrugging, Flora walked into Franklin Roosevelt's private office. 'Hello, Flora. Close the door behind you, would you, please? Thanks.' As always, Roosevelt sounded strong and jovial. But he looked like death warmed over.
He waved her to a chair. As she sat, she asked, 'Now will you tell me what's going on? It must be something big.'
'Petrograd's gone,' Roosevelt said bluntly.
'A newsboy outside was saying something about that,' Flora said. 'Why does it matter so much to us? To the Kaiser, sure, but to us? And what do you mean, gone?'
'When I say gone, I usually mean gone,' Franklin Roosevelt answered. 'One bomb. Off the map. G-O-N-E. Gone. No more Petrograd. Gone.'
'But that's imposs-' Flora broke off. She was as far from Catholic as she could be, but she felt the impulse to cross herself even so. She was glad she was sitting down. 'Oh, my God,' she whispered, and wanted to start the mourner's Kaddish right after that. 'The Germans…Uranium…' She stopped. She wasn't making any sense, even to herself.
But she made enough sense for Roosevelt. He nodded, his face thoroughly grim. 'That's right. They got there first. They tried it-and it works. God help us all.'
'Do they have more of them?' Questions started to boil in Flora's head. 'What are they saying? And what about the Russians? Have England and France said anything yet?'
