Here came three of them, a leader and two more behind him making a V. They didn't look much different from the machine he commanded. They were a little boxier, the armor not well sloped to deflect a shell. But they hit hard; they carried two-inch guns, not inch-and-a-halfers. All things considered, U.S. and C.S. machines were about even when they met on equal terms.
Morrell didn't intend to meet the Confederates on equal terms. Hitting them from ambush was a lot more economical. "Range to the lead barrel?" he asked Sergeant Pound.
He wasn't surprised to hear Pound answer, "It's 320 yards, sir," without the slightest hesitation. The gunner had been traversing the turret to keep that barrel in the gunsight. He wasn't just ready. He was eager. That eagerness was part of what made him such a good gunner. He thought along with his commander. Sometimes he thought ahead of him.
"Let him have it," Morrell said.
"Armor-piercing, Sweeney!" Pound said, and the loader slammed a black-tipped round into the breech. The gunner traversed the turret a little more, working the handwheel with microscopic care. Then he fired.
The noise was a palpable blow to the ears. It was worst for Morrell, who'd just stuck his head out the cupola so he could see the effect of the shot. Fire spurted from the muzzle of the cannon and, half a second later, from the side of the Confederate barrel. Side armor was always thinner than at the front or on the turret.
"Hit!" Morrell shouted. "That's a goddamn hit!" Easier to think of it as the sort of hit you might make in a shooting gallery, with little yellow ducks and gray-haired mothers-in-law and other targets going by on endless loops of chain. Then you didn't have to contemplate that hard-nosed round slamming through armor, rattling around inside the fighting compartment, and smashing crewmen just like you-except they wore the wrong uniforms and they weren't very lucky.
Smoke started pouring from the wounded barrel, which stopped dead-and dead was the right word. A hatch at the front opened. A soldier in butternut coveralls-probably the driver-started to scramble out. Two machine guns opened up on him from Morrell's barrel. He crumpled, half in and half out of his ruined machine.
As Morrell ducked down inside the turret, it started traversing again. Sergeant Pound had commendable initiative. "Another round of AP, Sweeney!" he bawled. "We'll make meat pies out of 'em!" The loader gave him what he wanted. The gun bellowed again-to Morrell, a little less deafeningly now that he was back inside. The sharp stink of cordite filled the air inside the turret. The shell casing came out of the breech and clanged on the floor of the fighting compartment. It could mash toes if you weren't careful. Peering through the gunsight, Pound yelled, "Hit!" again.
"Was that us, or one of the other barrels here with us?" Morrell asked.
"Sir, that was us." The gunner was magisterially convincing. "Some of those other fellows couldn't hit a dead cow with a fly swatter."
"Er-right." Morrell stuck his head out of the cupola. All three of the lead Confederate barrels were burning now. Somebody in one of the other U.S. machines must have known what to do with his fly swatter.
A rifle shot from a Confederate infantryman cut twigs from the oaks above Morrell's head. He didn't duck. His barrel was well back in the shade. Nobody out there in the open could get a good look and draw a bead on him. That didn't mean a round not so well aimed couldn't find him, but he refused to dwell on such mischances.
He hoped the Confederates would try to charge his barrels. He could stand them off where he was for quite a while, then fall back to another position he'd prepared deeper in the woods. Defense wasn't his first choice, but that didn't mean he couldn't handle it. And the enemy, charging hard, might well be inclined to run right on to a waiting spear.
But the Confederates had something else in mind. After about ten minutes of confusion, they started lobbing artillery shells toward the woods. At first, Morrell was scornful-only a direct hit would make a barrel say uncle, and hits from guns out of visual range of their targets were hard as hell to come by. But then he caught the gurgling howl of the shells as they flew through the air and the white bursts they threw up when they walked toward the barrels.
Swearing, he ducked down into the turret and slammed the cupola hatch behind him. "Button it up!" he snarled. "Gas!" He got on the wireless to all the barrels he commanded, giving them the same message. "Masks!" he added to the men in his own machine. "That's an order, God damn it!"
Only when he put on his own mask did Pound and Sweeney reach for theirs. He couldn't see the driver and the bow gunner up at the front of the hull. He hoped they listened to him. If the barrel stayed buttoned up, the men would start to cook before too long. It might have been tolerable in France or Germany. In Ohio? Right at the start of summertime? In gas masks to boot?
Sergeant Pound asked an eminently reasonable question: "Sir, how the hell are we supposed to fight a war like this?"
"How would you like to fight it without your lungs?" Morrell answered. His own voice sounded even more distant and otherworldly than Pound's had. He couldn't see the gunner's expression. All he could see were Pound's eyes behind two round portholes of glass. The green-gray rubber of the mask hid the rest of the sergeant's features and made him look like something from Mars or Venus.
Looking out through the periscopes mounted in the cupola hatch was at best a poor substitute for sticking your head out and seeing what was going on. Shoving one of those glass portholes up close enough to a periscope to see anything was a trial. What Morrell saw were lots of gas shells bursting.
He did some more swearing. The barrel wasn't perfectly airtight, and it didn't have proper filters in the ventilation system. That was partly his own fault, too. He'd had a lot to say about the design of barrels. He'd thought about all sorts of things, from the layout of the turret to the shape of the armor and the placement of the engine compartment. Defending against poison gas hadn't once crossed his mind-or, evidently, anyone else's.
"What do we do, sir?" Sergeant Pound asked.
Morrell didn't want to fall back to that prepared position without making the Confederates pay a price. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce grin the gas mask hid. "Forward!" he said, first to Pound, then on the intercom to the driver, and then on the wireless. "Let's see if those bastards want to drop gas on their own men."
The barrel rumbled ahead. Morrell hoped not too much gas was getting into the fighting compartment. He could tell the instant they came out into the sunlight from the shade of the trees. It had been hot in the barrel before. It got a hell of a lot hotter when the sun started beating down on the hull and the turret.
Bullets began hitting the barrel as soon as it came out into the open, too. Morrell didn't worry about ordinary rifle or machine-gun rounds very much, not while he wasn't standing up and looking out through the cupola. (He didn't worry about them while he was, either. Afterwards, sometimes, was a different story.) But the Confederates had the same sort of.50-caliber antibarrel rifles as U.S. troops. Even one of those big armor-piercing bullets wouldn't penetrate the front glacis plate or the turret, but it might punch through the thinner steel on the barrel's sides.
Sergeant Pound and the bow machine gunner, a redheaded mick named Teddy Fitzgerald, opened up on the Confederate soldiers they'd caught in the open. Pound abandoned the turret machine gun after a little while. "H.E.!" he called to Sweeney, who fed a high-explosive round into the cannon. It roared. Through the periscopes, Morrell watched the round burst. A couple of enemy soldiers went flying.