He got on the wireless to pass what he'd found to division HQ. "Roger that," came the reply. "We've had a couple of other reports about them."
The soldier on the other end of the connection sounded calm and relaxed. Why not? He was well behind the line. "Why the devil didn't you pass the word along?" Pound yelled. "You damn near got me killed!"
"We said the losses were due to enemy barrels," the wireless man answered, as if that were enough. He probably thought it was.
Pound took off the earphones. "We can beat the enemy," he said to nobody in particular, "but God help us against our own side."
"Headquarters being stupid again?" Scullard asked sympathetically.
"They'd have to wise up to get to stupid." Warming to his theme, Pound added, "They've got their headquarters in their hindquarters."
"And we're the ones who'll end up paying for it," the gunner predicted.
"Guy in one of our uniforms coming up," Mouradian said.
That sent Pound out of the cupola again, a captured Confederate submachine gun at the ready. Just because somebody wore a U.S. uniform, he wasn't necessarily a U.S. soldier. But he stopped by himself before Pound could tell him not to come any closer. "You nailed that fucker," he said. His harsh accent claimed he was from Kansas or Nebraska, but that didn't prove anything, either.
"Yeah," Pound answered. "And so?"
"More of 'em around-bound to be," said the U.S. soldier-Pound supposed he was a U.S. soldier, anyhow. "Can you clear 'em out?"
"Who knows?" Pound didn't just look at the monstrous machine his barrel had just wrecked. He looked back at the U.S. barrel the Confederates had killed. Those were five men of his, five friends of his, gone in the wink of an eye. He hadn't had even a moment to grieve. He still didn't, not really.
"Those other guys, they walked into a buzz saw," the infantryman in green-gray said. "Bam! Bam! Bam! They went out one after another. I don't think they ever knew what got 'em."
Pound hoped the men in the barrel from his platoon didn't know what got 'em. Was that a 4Ѕ-inch gun on the C.S. machine? A fiveincher? Whatever it was, it was devastating.
A Confederate machine gun started snarling. The foot soldier threw himself flat. Pound ducked down into the turret. He got on the platoon circuit with the survivors: "We're moving up. For God's sake, watch it. We aren't the biggest cats in the jungle any more."
How many of those big barrels did Featherston's men have? How fast were they? How maneuverable? How well did they do on bad ground? A barrel's engine could be as important a weapon as its gun. But the gun in that bastard…
"Kinda revs up the pucker factor, doesn't it, sir?" Scullard said, which came unpleasantly close to echoing Pound's thoughts.
"Maybe a little," he answered, his voice as dry as he could make it. He didn't want to admit he was scared, but he couldn't very well deny it, either. He got on the wireless: "Any chance of sending up some more armor to G-5? We don't know what's ahead of us, and it feels pretty naked around here."
"Well, we'll see what we can do," said the wireless operator on the other end of the line. He was sitting in a chair under canvas somewhere. For all Michael Pound knew, he was eating bonbons and patting a cute nurse on the ass to hear her giggle. He wasn't up here at the sharp end of the wedge, wondering if he'd cook like a pot roast in the next few seconds.
Two rounds of HE silenced that chattering machine gun. The country was pine woods and little clearings. Pound stayed away from the clearings when he could and dashed across when he couldn't. Somewhere ahead lay the Georgia Southern line, somewhere ahead and to the right the unreduced town of Fayetteville. If everything worked, the enemy would have to abandon it along with Atlanta. Pound had been confident. He wished he still were.
He also wished the enemy were still counterattacking. That would have made things easier. Then those big honking barrels would have had to show themselves. As things were, they lurked in ambush. The only way to find one was…the hard way.
Having foot soldiers along came in handy. Pound waited in the woods while the men in green-gray trotted across a field. A big round of HE slammed into the poor bloody infantry. Some U.S. soldiers went flying, while others flattened out and dug in.
"See where that came from, sir?" Scullard asked.
"Bearing was almost straight ahead of us-behind that twisted tree with the chunk of bark missing," Pound answered, peering through the periscopes. "If he's smart, he'll back away-he ought to figure our guys have armor with 'em."
"Maybe he'll get greedy instead," the gunner said.
Pound wouldn't have, but the enemy crew did. They fired twice more at the infantrymen in the field. They had good targets in front of them, and they were going to take advantage of it. To give them their due, they didn't have any room to retreat, not if the CSA wanted to hang on to the railroad line.
"Identify 'em now, Mel?" Pound asked.
"Oh, hell, yes," Scullard said, and then, to the loader, "AP!" He added, "Be ready for another round as fast as you can. If the first one doesn't do the trick, we've got to try again."
"Right," Mouradian said.
If the second one doesn't do the trick, we've got to get away-if we can, Pound thought. The C.S. barrel would know where the shots were coming from, and would answer. Pound didn't want to be on the receiving end of that reply.
The gun spoke twice in quick succession. Scullard didn't wait to see if the first round hit before sending the second on its way. As soon as he'd fired both of them, Pound shouted, "Reverse!" The barrel jerked backward.
No enemy antibarrel rounds came after it. Pound popped out of the turret to see what they'd done to the C.S. barrel. Smoke rose from behind the tree, an ever-growing cloud. He spotted motion back there-somebody'd got out and was running away. That impressed him in spite of himself. His own barrel wouldn't have let anybody inside survive, not after it got hit twice. The Confederates had themselves some deadly dangerous new toys here. He hoped like anything they didn't have too many of them.
V
Irving Morrell posed for U.S. photographers in front of the Atlanta city hall. New Year's Day for 1944 was chilly and overcast, with the wet-dust smell of rain in the air. Morrell didn't care. He would have posed for these pictures in the middle of a deluge.
"A year ago, we were still mopping up in Pittsburgh," he said. "Now we're here. We've done pretty damn well for ourselves, by God."
"Did you expect the Confederates to evacuate the city?" a reporter asked.
"They were going to lose it either way," Morrell answered. "The question was, would they lose Atlanta, or would they lose Atlanta and the army that was holding it? They saved a good part of the army by pulling out."
They'd saved more than he wished they would have. They'd started the evacuation at night, and bad weather had kept U.S. fighter-bombers on the ground, so their columns hadn't got the pounding they should have. Patton's army was still a going concern, somewhere over near the Alabama border. Morrell didn't know what his C.S. opposite number would do with the men he had left, but he figured Patton would think of something.
A rifle banged, not too far away. Holdouts and snipers still prowled Atlanta. The Confederates had planted lots of mines. They'd attached booby traps to everything from fountain pens to toilet seats. The Stars and Stripes might fly here, but the town wasn't safe, and wouldn't be for quite a while.
"How much does this victory mean?" another reporter called.
"Well, the enemy will have a lot tougher time fighting the war without Atlanta than he would have with it," Morrell said. "It was a factory town and a transport hub, and now he'll have to do without all that."