“Yes, sir,” the man in green-gray said. “Just wanted to let you know Featherston’s fuckers have armor coming forward. One of our artillery-spotting airplanes saw the barrels.”
“All right-thanks,” Griffiths said. The soldier sketched a salute and left. Griffiths ducked down into the turret. “What do you think, Sergeant?”
Pound had enormous respect for artillery spotters. They flew low and slow, and often got shot down. But that had only so much to do with the lieutenant’s question. “Well, sir, if he’s legit we’ll find out pretty soon,” Pound said.
“Yes,” Griffiths said. “But that kind of message can’t hurt us, so he must be the real thing, right?”
“Well, no, sir, not quite,” Pound answered patiently. “He could have had a harmless message just waiting in case we were on our toes. If he did, he’s out there looking for somebody else to screw.”
“Oh,” Griffiths said in a hangdog voice. “I didn’t think of that.” A moment later, softly and to himself, he added, “Dammit!”
“Don’t worry about it, sir,” Pound said. “You did what you were supposed to do. Nobody could ask for anything more.”
“I’m supposed to see more than you do, though.” The barrel commander sounded fretful. “If I don’t, then you ought to be the officer.”
“I don’t want to be an officer, sir,” Pound said for what had to be the hundredth time in his career. Senior enlisted men were supposed to curb junior officers’ enthusiasms. That was at least as important a part of their job as anything else. Most junior officers didn’t know it. Pound didn’t know how to say it without offending the lieutenant. If he didn’t say anything, Griffiths couldn’t get his ass in a sling. He kept quiet.
A few minutes later, the Confederates laid on an artillery barrage. Griffiths kept the hatch up on the cupola as long as he could. When gas rounds started gurgling in, though, he clanged it shut. “Button up!” he yelled over the intercom to the driver and bow gunner. Then he put on his gas mask. Resignedly, Pound did the same. With autumn here, wearing it wasn’t so awful as it had been during the summer. Even so, it cut down his vision, and it was awkward to use with a gunsight. Lieutenant Griffiths had an even harder time seeing out the cupola periscopes through his mask’s portholes.
Shrapnel clanged off the barrel’s chassis. A barrage like this wasn’t dangerous to armor except in case of an unlucky direct hit. Pound traversed the turret so the big gun-the pretty big gun, anyway-bore on the approach route he would use if he were a Confederate barrel commander. Griffiths set a hand on his shoulder to say he understood and approved.
Not much later, the barrel commander sang out: “Front!”
“Identified,” Pound answered-he saw the ugly beast, too. “Range 350.”
“You lined up on him so nicely, Sergeant,” Griffiths said. “Go ahead and do the honors.”
“Yes, sir,” Pound said, and then, to Bergman, “Armor-piercing.”
“Armor-piercing,” the loader echoed, and slammed a round in the breech.
Pound adjusted the main armament’s elevation just a little. The C.S. barrel came on, sure nothing nasty was in the neighborhood. Pound wouldn’t have been that confident. The enemy machine was one of the new models. Maybe that made the commander feel invulnerable. Infantrymen in butternut loped alongside, automatic rifles at the ready.
The U.S. barrel’s gun spoke. Pound’s mask kept out the cordite fumes. The shell casing clanged on the fighting compartment floor. “Hit!” Lieutenant Griffiths yelled. “That’s a hit!”
Smoke and fire spurted from the stricken C.S. barrel. The U.S. bow gunner opened up on the Confederate foot soldiers. One of them spun, his rifle flying out of his hands. He crumpled, right out there in the open. Other Confederate soldiers went down, too. They were more likely diving for cover than hit. Nobody came out of the barrel. Flames and a cloud of smoke burst from the cupola hatch. Five men dead, Pound thought, and then, Well, they wanted to kill me. I like it better this way.
He tapped Lieutenant Griffiths. “Sir, shouldn’t we move out of here and find another firing position? Next enemy barrel that comes this way is going to know where we’re at. Most ambushes only work once.”
“Good point,” the barrel commander said, and then, over the intercom to the driver, “Back us out, Mancatelli. Shift us over behind that pile of bricks to the left.”
He hadn’t been ready to move quite soon enough, but he’d had a backup firing position in mind when he did. It was a pretty good one, too; Michael Pound would have suggested it if Griffiths hadn’t seen it himself. But he had. No, he wasn’t such a helpless puppy after all.
After the barrel backed out of the garage, Mancatelli stayed in reverse long enough to move forward toward the secondary position. That kept the front glacis plate and the front of the turret facing the direction from which the barrel was likeliest to take fire. It avoided exposing the machine’s thinner side armor. Those who served in barrels knew their weaknesses best-except, maybe, for those who tried to destroy them.
Peering out through the gunsight, Pound saw soldiers in butternut pointing to where the barrel had been. That probably meant they were warning it was still there. Nobody pointed toward the wreckage behind which it now hunkered down. If a machine weighing upwards of twenty tons could be sneaky, this one had just done the trick.
And here came a pair of Confederate barrels. “Front!” Griffiths sang out. “The one on the right, Sergeant.”
“Identified,” Pound acknowledged. “Bergman, we’re going to have to do this fast as hell, because that other bastard will start shooting at us as soon as we nail his pal.” He assumed he would nail the first barrel; he had all the arrogance a good gunner should. As he traversed the turret, he added, “So give me two rounds of armor-piercing, fast as you can, when I say, ‘Now.’… Now!”
The first round clanged home. Pound fired. He got his hit, on the enemy barrel’s turret. The second round was in the breech well before he’d brought the gun to bear on the second Confederate barrel-and the new turret had a hydraulic traverse, too, a feature he adored. His gun and the enemy’s belched fire at the same instant. The C.S. barrel burst into flames. The Confederate’s round slammed into the rubble, slammed through the rubble, but slowed enough so that it clanged off the U.S. barrel’s glacis plate instead of penetrating.
“Two hits! Two!” Griffiths yelled. He pounded Pound on the back. Cecil Bergman thumped him on the leg, which was the only part of him the loader could reach. They both told him what a wonderful fellow he was.
“Thank you, sir,” he said to Griffiths. Then he added, “I’d like to go on being wonderful a while longer, too, so could we please find another firing position?”
Griffiths laughed, but the barrel moved. That was all that really mattered.
Night came earlier now. As autumn deepened, U.S. bombers could spend more time above Richmond and other Confederate cities. Jake Featherston hated that as much as he loved C.S. bombers’ being able to spend more time over cities in the United States.
Except for that, night and day meant little to him in the shelter under what was left of the Gray House. He slept in odd chunks, a couple of hours here, three there, and stayed awake in equally odd chunks between the stretches of sleep.
Everyone around him had to adapt to that. If Jake was awake at four in the morning and needed to talk to Nathan Bedford Forrest III, Forrest could damn well get his ass over to the Gray House at four in the morning. The same went for Ferd Koenig and Clarence Potter and Saul Goldman and Lulu and the rest of his inner circle. He seemed to thrive on his erratic sleep schedule. No one else did.