'Take 'em out!' Lieutenant Lavochkin yelled. 'Take 'em all out!'
Chester's first shot knocked over the old man who thought watching a Yankee burn was funny. His second shot hit the old woman next to the old man right in the middle of the chest. She crumpled before she had a chance to screech. Of course, Chester's wasn't the only bullet that hit her-not even close. All the soldiers in the platoon were letting go with everything they had.
They started throwing grenades into the houses closest to them. A couple of men had grenade launchers on their rifles. They lobbed grenades all over Hardeeville, almost at random. 'It'll come down on somebody's head!' one of them whooped as he pulled the trigger and sent one off…somewhere.
The men and women and kids on the street went down as if scythed. Their dying cries-and the gunfire, and the grenades bursting randomly all over the little town-brought more people out to see what was going on. The U.S. soldiers shot them down, too.
It was madness, red-hot madness. Chester Martin felt it as he fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded, and slapped in clip after clip. He didn't know how many Confederates he killed. He didn't much care, either. Along with his buddies, he went through the town. By the time they got done, there wasn't much town left-it burned behind them. And just about everybody who'd lived in Hardeeville was dead.
Chester stood there shaking his head, like a man whose fever had suddenly broken. 'Wow,' he said, looking back on the devastation. 'What did we just do?'
'Settled their hash,' Lieutenant Lavochkin answered. 'I don't think too much of this needs to go into the after-action report, do you?'
'Christ, no!' Chester thought about some of the things he'd just done. He wished he hadn't. He wished he hadn't done them, too. So, no doubt, did Hardeeville. Well, it was too late for him, and much too late for the little town. He had the rest of his life to try to forget. Hardeeville…didn't, not any more.
C onfederate Connie was on the air again. To most people in the USA, the music the propaganda broadcaster played was hot stuff, at or past the cutting edge. Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Moss-he was still getting used to the silver oak leaves on his shoulder straps-had heard stranger, wilder rhythms when Spartacus' guerrillas got their hands on a guitar and a fiddle.
Here he was, at a big air base just outside of Dayton, Ohio, not far from where the Confederates swarmed over the border not quite three years before. The base didn't exist then. Now, unless the Kaiser's airmen had something fancier, it was the biggest training center in the world.
The song ended. Like most of the other guys at the base, Moss thought listening to Confederate Connie was more fun anyway. She had a contralto like a wet dream.
'Well, you Yankee boys, aren't you proud of yourselves?' she said, as if she were waiting for you to get back into bed with her and didn't want to wait very long. She was probably fifty-five and frumpy, but she sure didn't sound that way. 'Your brave soldiers went and wiped Hardeeville right off the map.'
'Where the hell's Hardeeville?' somebody asked.
'Shut up,' said Moss and two other men. Listening to Confederate Connie didn't just remind you why you fought. It reminded you why you were alive.
'That's right,' she went on. 'They marched into a defenseless town and they murdered everybody in it-men, women, children, everybody. Then they burned it down on top of the bodies. No more Hardeeville, South Carolina. Gone. Right off the map. Some fun, hey? Aren't you proud to live in a country that does stuff like that?'
Nobody could keep the men around the wireless set quiet after that. 'Oh, yeah, like the CSA never murdered anybody!' a pilot said.
'Where's your coons, you lying cunt?' somebody else added.
'If they killed everybody, how come you know it happened?' demanded yet another flier.
Confederate Connie actually answered the last question, saying, 'The Yankees missed a couple of women, though. They played dead in the blood and then got away. And now, to make you feel good about what your boys in green-gray managed to do, here's a tune by Smooth Steve and the Oiler Orchestra, 'How about That?''
Music blared from the wireless, more of the syncopated noise the Confederates liked better than most people in the USA did. Jonathan Moss listened with at most half an ear. He wasn't the only one; plenty of people were still telling Confederate Connie what a liar she was.
Moss wasn't so sure. He'd heard enough war stories to believe a unit could go hog wild and massacre anybody who got in its way. He didn't believe troops would do anything like that just for the fun of it. If somebody in Hardeeville had fired at them, though…In that case, the town was what soldiers called shit out of luck. Probably all the men who'd torn up the place wished they hadn't done it-now. That was liable to be a little late for Hardeeville's innocent-and not so innocent-civilians.
A fellow with a bombardier's badge above the right pocket of his tunic said, 'What's she getting her tit in a wringer for, anyway? I bet I blow up more people three times a week than those ground-pounders did. But I do it from twenty thousand feet, so I'm a fuckin' hero. It's a rough old war.'
Along with the bombardier's badge, he wore the ribbons for a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star with an oak-leaf cluster. If he wasn't a hero, he would do till the genuine article came along. He also had a view of the war cynical enough to give even Moss pause.
The next morning, Moss got summoned to the commandant's office. He wondered how he'd managed to draw that worthy's notice, and what kind of trouble he was in. Major General Barton K. Yount was a sixtyish fellow who might have looked like a kindly grandfather if he weren't in uniform. 'Have a seat, Moss,' he said. His accent suggested he'd been born somewhere not far from here.
'Thank you, sir,' Moss said cautiously, and sat with just as much care. The condemned man got a hearty meal went through his mind.
General Yount must have realized what he was thinking. 'I didn't call you in here to ream you out, Colonel,' he said. 'I want to ask you a question.'
'Sir?' The less Moss said, the less he might have to regret later on.
But Yount came straight to the point: 'You've flown a lot of different airplanes, haven't you?'
'Well, yes, sir. I started with a pusher job in 1914, and I'm still doing it, so I must have, eh?'
'That's right.' Yount smiled and nodded. 'How would you like to add a turbo job to the list?'
A crazy grin spread across Moss' face. 'Sir, I'd kill for a chance like that. Only reason I haven't is, I didn't know who needed bumping off.'
Turbos were going to turn propeller-driven airplanes obsolete as soon as the boys with the slide rules and the thick glasses worked the gremlins out of them. They were already sixty or eighty miles an hour faster than the hottest prop-driven fighters. The drawbacks were unreliable engines and landing gear, among other things. Turbos were widowmakers on a scale that hadn't been seen since the early days of the Great War. Moss was one of thousands of pilots who didn't give a damn. He wanted that chance so bad he could taste it.
Major General Yount's smile got wider. He knew Moss was kidding…up to a point. 'You've got it, Colonel. You can call it a reward for a hard time, if you like. There's one thing I do have to warn you about, though.'
'What? That it's dangerous? I already know, sir. I'm ready to take the chance.'
'No, no.' The training commandant shook his head. 'I assumed you knew that. But you also have to know that for the time being we aren't using turbo fighters anywhere except above U.S.-occupied territory. If you get shot down or forced to crash-land because of engine trouble, we don't want this machinery falling into enemy hands. You must agree to that before you begin flight training here.'
'Oh.' Moss didn't try to hide his disappointment. 'I wanted to go hunting.'
'I understand that. You wouldn't be a good fighter pilot if you didn't. But I hope you follow the reasoning behind the order.'
'Yes, sir,' Moss said reluctantly. Even more reluctantly, he added, 'All right, sir. I agree to the condition.'
'Good. In that case, report to Building Twelve at 0730 tomorrow morning. You'll learn about the care and feeding of your new beast.'
Several turbo fighters sat on the runway outside of Building Twelve. Moss got there early so he could walk around them before he went in. They looked weird as hell. The fuselage was almost shark-shaped. The wings swept back from root to tip. He'd never seen or imagined anything like that before. The turbos had no tailwheel. They sat on a nosewheel instead, so the fuselage rested parallel to the ground instead of sloping down from nose to tail. The engines sat in metal pods under the wings. Yeah, the new fighter was one peculiar bird. But the longer Moss stared, the more he nodded to himself. It might look different, but it also looked deadly.
