enough to have fought in it. 'You have a point, sir,' Chester said. 'Some of a point, anyway.' Disagreeing too openly with a superior didn't do. But he damn well had been through the Great War. 'What about the guys who started using gas? You think they weren't being horrible on purpose?'
'Well, you got me there,' Rhodes admitted. Chester liked shooting the bull with him not least because he would admit somebody else had a point. He didn't have anything close to Boris Lavochkin's messianic confidence in his own rightness…and righteousness. What was Lieutenant Lavochkin but a scale model of Jake Featherston?
Featherston had flushed a whole country down the toilet. Lavochkin had only a platoon to play with-so far. But Chester was part of the platoon. If the lieutenant threw it away, the first sergeant went with it.
He didn't want to think about that, so he took another swig. Yeah, cherry brandy made a good thought preventer. The bottle was damn near empty. He passed it to Captain Rhodes, who put the kibosh on damn near.
'Charleston up ahead,' Chester said. 'Won't be long now.'
'One more city,' Rhodes said.
'Oh, it's more than that.' Chester knew he sounded shocked. But Rhodes would have gone to school in the lull of the 1920s. Back then, nobody thought you needed to remind anybody of just how and why the USA and CSA got to be mortal foes. They would stay peaceful and live happily ever after. And if pigs had wings…
Chester remembered his own school days, before the Great War. They pounded you over the head with the War of Secession then. They kept saying that one day the USA would pay the CSA back. And the United States did. And then the Confederate States had some backpaying to do. And that's how come I'm sitting on my ass somewhere south of Charleston, Chester thought.
'I wouldn't mind marching through there,' he said. 'Give them one in the eye for Fort Sumter, you know?'
'Well, yeah,' Rhodes said. But it didn't mean so much to him. Martin could tell. He didn't have that This is where it all began, and we'll damn well end it here, too kind of feeling. Maybe Lieutenant Lavochkin would. Or maybe he hated the whole Confederacy equally. All things considered, Chester didn't want to ask him.
He woke with a headache the next morning. Strong coffee and a couple of aspirins helped. Incoming artillery, on the other hand…Even now, the Confederates counterattacked whenever they thought they could drive their foes back a couple of miles. A U.S. machine gun opened up no more than twenty yards from Chester. His head didn't explode, which only proved he was tougher than he thought.
Then he had to do some shooting of his own, and that was even worse. A lot of the Confederates didn't hit the dirt as fast as they should have. New men, Chester thought with an abstract sympathy that didn't keep him from killing them as fast as he could. They would have done the same to him if they could. But they'd got thrown into the fight too soon to know what they were doing, and a lot of them would never have the chance to learn now.
U.S. armor rattled up to put the final quietus on the Confederate attack. A couple of barrels had Negroes riding on them. The blacks had probably shown the barrel crews shortcuts through the coastal swamps. One of them gleefully blazed away at the men in butternut with a submachine gun. The cannons' bellow made Chester dry-swallow three more aspirins.
The barrels pushed past the U.S. foot soldiers and went after the Confederates. 'Come on!' Lieutenant Lavochkin yelled. 'Follow me! We don't leave them to do the work by themselves.' He jumped out of his hole and loped along with the green-gray machines.
No matter what Chester thought about him, he was dead right there. Armor and infantry worked better as a team than either one did by itself. 'Come on, guys!' Chester scrambled from his foxhole-he wasn't limber enough to leap the way the lieutenant did. 'Let's go get those bastards!'
Some Confederates stayed stubborn to the end, took a few Yankees with them, and died. Some gave up as soon as they could. Most of those lived; killing in cold blood a poor, scared kid who only wanted to quit didn't come easy. The ones who hesitated were lost.
A youngster with a face full of zits and enormous gray eyes full of terror threw down his submachine gun and raised his hands high over his head. 'Don't shoot me, Mr. Damnyankee!' he blubbered to Chester. He couldn't have been more than sixteen. 'I give up!'
Chester gestured with the muzzle of his rifle. As it pointed to the young soldier's midsection, a dark stain spread across his crotch.
'Oh, Jesus!' he wailed. 'I went and pissed myself!'
'It happens,' Chester said. He'd done it himself in two wars now, but he wasn't going to tell that to a kid he was capturing. He gestured with the rifle again. 'Go on back there, and they'll take care of you one way or another.'
'Thank you! Thank you! God bless you!' Hands still high, the boy trudged off toward the rear.
And, one way or another, they would take care of him. Maybe they'd take him all the way back to a POW camp. Or maybe they'd just shoot him. Whatever they did, it wasn't Chester's worry any more.
The damned Confederates kept fighting as hard as they could. Chester captured another guy who had to be older than he was. The National Assault Force soldier had lost his upper plate, and talked as if he had a mouthful of mush. 'Maybe we fought each other the lasht time around,' he said.
'Could be,' Chester allowed. 'I was on the Roanoke front, and then in northern Virginia. How about you?'
'Nope. I wash in Tenneshshee,' the Confederate retread said. 'Never reckon you bashtards'd get into Shouf Carolina.'
'You fuck with us, Pops, and that's what happens,' Chester told him. 'Go on back to the rear. They'll deal with you.'
'Uh-huh,' the old-timer said bleakly. Unlike the kid, he knew what could happen to him. But he went. He'd passed the first key test: he hadn't got killed out of hand. All the others would be easier. Of course, you only had to fail one and that was all she wrote.
'Come on!' Lieutenant Lavochkin shouted. 'We push hard, we'll be in Charleston tomorrow! Maybe even by sundown!' Chester thought he was right, too. Try as they would, the Confederates didn't have enough to stop the men in green-gray.
All of which turned out to have nothing to do with anything. The wireless man shouted for Captain Rhodes: 'Sir, we've got a stop order! Nobody's supposed to advance past map square Gold-5.'
'Oh, yeah?' the company CO said. 'Let me talk to Division.' He talked. He listened. He talked some more. Then he did some shouting of his own: 'All troops halt! I say again, all troops halt! We have to stop right here.'
'No!' Lieutenant Lavochkin said. 'We've got 'em licked! The brass can't screw us out of this.'
'Lieutenant, the halt order comes straight from the War Department,' Captain Rhodes said. 'You can write 'em a nasty letter when this is all over, but for now we are damn well going to halt.'
'No!' Lavochkin repeated.
'That is an order, Lieutenant.' Rhodes' voice turned icy. 'From the War Department and from me. Is that plain enough? Next stop, the stockade.'
'They can't keep us out of Charleston!' Lavochkin raged. 'The enemy hasn't got a chance! The dumbshit brass hats in Philly don't know diddly-squat. I'm going forward anyway, and taking my men with me. We'll see you in Charleston, too.'
'No, sir,' Chester Martin said. Lavochkin stared at him, caught between fury and astonishment. But a first sergeant was there to keep a lieutenant in line. Chester went on, 'I think we better follow the order.'
'You'll pay for this, Sergeant,' Lavochkin said.
Chester shrugged. Slowly and deliberately, he sat down on the muddy ground and lit a cigarette. 'I'll take my chances…sir.' He wondered whether Lavochkin would go on by himself. The rest of the platoon was stopping. The lieutenant's face had murder all over it, but he stopped, too.
He fumed and swore for the next three hours. 'God damn it to hell, I could have been in Charleston by now. We all could,' he said. Chester didn't think so, but the lieutenant wasn't so far wrong. Why had the brass called a halt with the city so close?
When the fireball rose over Charleston, when the toadstool cloud-weirdly beautiful and weirdly terrifying-rose high above the town where the War of Secession started, he understood. So did Captain Rhodes. 'Lieutenant, do you really want to get any closer to that place?' Rhodes asked.
'Uh, no, sir,' Boris Lavochkin answered in an unwontedly small voice.
'Do you think following orders might be a good idea every once in a while, even if you don't happen to like
