Brakes squealed when the driver stopped. Small-arms fire came from up ahead. “This about right?” the man asked.
“Should do,” O’Doull answered. Vince Donofrio’s head bobbed up and down.
They got out and started setting up what they’d taken down not long before. The corpsmen wrestled with canvas and ropes and tent pegs. As soon as they had the tent up, O’Doull and Donofrio put in the operating table and medical supplies. Before long, the doctor and senior medic were ready for business again. Eddie and his pals headed up toward the front to see what kind of business they could bring back.
“Hope we don’t see them for a while,” O’Doull said.
“That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” Donofrio cocked his head to one side, listening to the gunfire up ahead. “You really think all that shit’s flying around and nobody’s getting hurt?”
“No,” O’Doull admitted. “But you’re right. It would be nice.”
They had a respite of most of an hour. That was about how long the corpsmen would have needed to walk up to the fighting, find someone wounded and give him emergency first aid, and then lug him back to the relocated aid station.
The first wounded man came back cussing a blue streak. A bandage swathed his left hand. Another one soaked up blood from his left buttock. “Same fucking bullet clipped off a finger and a half and got me in the ass,” he growled.
“Could’ve been worse,” Donofrio said. “Could’ve been your other hand.”
“Up yours, Jack,” the wounded man told him. “I’m a lefty.”
“Oh.” For a moment, the medic looked as foolish as he sounded. “Sorry. How was I supposed to know?”
“You coulda kept your goddamn mouth shut.”
“Let’s get you on the table,” O’Doull said. “I’ll do what I can for your hand, and I’ll see if I can dig out the bullet.”
“Hot damn! So I get to turn the other cheek, huh?” the soldier said.
O’Doull winced. Donofrio reached for the mask attached to the ether cylinder with nothing but relief. Putting this guy under would shut him up, anyway.
XIX
Rain poured down from a leaden sky. Off in the distance, lightning flashed. Irving Morrell counted hippopotamuses-or was it hippopotami? Whichever, he counted twelve of them before the dull boom shook his barrel. The stroke was more than two miles away. But the rain, dammit, was here, there, and everywhere.
The barrel squelched forward through mud that was starting to look like tomato soup. U.S. armor all over northern Georgia was squelching-except in the places where it was flat-out stuck. The low ceiling grounded fighter-bombers. Even regular artillery was less accurate in godawful weather like this, and shell bursts spent themselves in the mud instead of spreading as they did most of the time.
“Dammit, we need to keep rolling,” Morrell muttered. But how? He’d broken out of the bridgehead south of Chattanooga. No way in hell the Confederates could drive U.S. forces back into the bottle and pound down the cork.
But Morrell didn’t think small. He wanted Atlanta. He wanted it so bad he could taste it. He wanted to see Jake Featherston try to fight a war with the Stars and Stripes flying over the chief Confederate junction between east and west. And he thought he could take Atlanta-as long as his men kept moving, kept pushing, didn’t let up on the bastards in butternut, didn’t give them a chance to regroup, reorganize, catch their breath.
October wasn’t listening to him. The summer had been drier than usual. Fall seemed to be making up for it all at once. “Unfair,” Morrell said. The enemy couldn’t stop him. The enemy had a devil of a time even slowing him down. Why was the weather doing the Confederacy’s dirty work for it?
Dirty work it was. Plowing through this gunk, the command barrel kicked up a bow wave like a destroyer at flank speed. But seawater was clean, not mixed with mud. Anyone this bow wave splashed would turn the color of rust-if he hadn’t already from trying to make his own way through the muck.
More lightning flashed. After a dozen or so hippos, thunder boomed. The rain came down harder than ever. Swearing under his breath, Morrell ducked down into the turret and closed the hatch behind him.
“Thank you, sir,” the new gunner said. Clark Ashton had an infectious grin. “Wondered if I’d have to start bailing there.”
“Not that wet,” Morrell said, though it didn’t miss by much. Frenchy Bergeron had shoulder straps with gold bars on them now, and a platoon somewhere around here. So did Michael Pound, if he hadn’t got hurt since Morrell saw him last. My gunners-a substitute for OCS? Morrell thought with a wry grin.
“No forty days and forty nights?” Ashton said. “Sure coming down like it. If you see a big boat with giraffes and elephants and a guy with a beard, you better watch out.”
“The Ark came down on Mount Ararat,” Morrell said. “That’s in Armenia, not Georgia. The Turks and the Russians have to worry about it. Not us, thank God.”
“Isn’t there a Georgia right next to Armenia?” Ashton asked. “Maybe we’ve floated over from this one to that one.”
“Maybe you’ve floated clean out of your skull,” Morrell said. The gunner took a seated bow, which wasn’t easy in the crowded turret. Morrell rolled his eyes. That only made Ashton bow again.
Word coming in on the command circuits made Morrell do worse than roll his eyes. Unit after unit reported that it couldn’t go forward. Artillery was bogging down too far behind the line to give any kind of worthwhile support. Armored cars couldn’t leave the roads to scout; their tires made them more prone to getting stuck in the mud than barrels or armored personnel carriers. Even infantry units were having heavy going…and soldiers hated nothing worse than flooded trenches and foxholes.
At last, Morrell decided struggling to go forward would cost more than it was worth. He ordered all front-line units to hold in place to give the artillery and logistics train a chance to catch up. He wanted to be ready to reopen the attack when the rains let up-if they ever did.
“You don’t think we’ll sink in the mud if we stop here, sir?” Ashton asked.
Morrell muttered under his breath. That didn’t just strike him as possible; it struck him as likely. He ordered the driver forward till they came to a paved road. That also had its drawbacks. The barrel was too exposed to make him happy. But the curtain of rain drumming down hid the machine almost as well as a smoke screen. And he didn’t want to have to summon an armored recovery vehicle to rescue him if he did bog down. His reputation would be a long time recovering from something like that.
“Here we are,” Ashton said. “The middle of nowhere. Isn’t it lovely this time of year?”
“This isn’t the middle of nowhere,” Morrell said. The gunner raised an eyebrow, as if to say he was too well-bred to argue but it sure looked that way to him. “It isn’t,” Morrell insisted. “Where we are right now, this has to be the southern end of nowhere. Down a little farther, you’ve got Atlanta, and Atlanta’s definitely somewhere.”
Clark Ashton thought for a bit, then nodded. “Somewhere we can’t get to right now,” he said.
“Well, no. Thanks for reminding me,” Morrell said. “When this barrel rolls into Atlanta, the war’s just a long spit from being over.”
Ashton listened to the rain pounding on the barrel’s metal skin. “Seems to me God’s got the long spit right now.”
Morrell grunted. “Seems that way to me, too, and I wish to hell it didn’t.” He patted the front pocket of his coveralls. “And I wish I could have a cigarette.”
“Good luck, sir,” the gunner said. Morrell’s chuckle was distinctly halfhearted. He wasn’t about to light up inside the turret. Barrelmen did that every once in a while, but you had to be really desperate for a butt to take the chance. He would have growled like an angry bear if Ashton or the loader smoked in here, which meant he couldn’t do it himself. Normally, he would have just stood up in the cupola if he wanted a nicotine buzz. With water coming down in buckets, that wouldn’t work, either.