When he asked de Buys about his seeming invulnerability, the Rivington man smiled a nasty smile and said, “I told you we’d not be easy meat, General Lee.” Lee reached out and prodded his belly. It was hard, not with muscle but with metal or wood or something of that sort. Lee knew of no armor proof against rifle bullets. The Rivington men evidently did. No wonder the team of assassins had been so hard to bring down. He began to worry. If the Rivington men all wore it, they would be anything but easy meat.
As if to Underscore that concern, fresh firing broke out around the building America Will Break used. In a way, Lee supposed that was good news: it meant more troops were coming up to deal with the Rivington men. But it also meant they had not yet been dealt with.
The guards took Konrad de Buys away. The firing went on and on. A messenger dashed into the Capitol. Seeing Lee, he saluted raggedly and panted, “Marse Robert, them sons of bitches—begging your pardon, sir—they won’t give up for hell. We got a lot of men down out there, and I don’t know but one of theirs we kilt—son of a whore fell out the window he was shootin’ from. Can we bring up artillery to blast’ em out?”
“Whatever is wanted to accomplish the task at hand,” Lee replied at once. He ground his teeth. But for skirmishes inside Washington, his soldiers had scant experience fighting within the confines of cities. That did not appear to be true of the men of America Will Break. He thanked God that they were confined to a single building. A few hundred such fighters, especially armored like de Buys, might be able to seize and hold…even a town like Richmond. The thought was unpalatable but inescapable. He wondered how many Rivington men Rivington actually held.
Other messengers came in, bringing more word not only of the small battle across from Mechanic’s Hall but also of the carnage de Buys and his accomplices had worked. Lee’s heart sank with every piece of bad news: Alexander Stephens wounded; Judah Benjamin wounded; John Atkins, his choice to replace John Reagan as Postmaster General, dead; General Jubal Early dead with pistol in hand as he tried to attack the assassins; Jeb Stuart wounded. That last report hurt almost as if it had been one of his own sons, Past the bare fact of the injury, the messenger knew nothing. Lee bent his head and prayed the wound was not severe.
A Napoleon roared, and a moment later another. Lee heard the rending crash of twelve-pound iron roundshot battering masonry. He briefly wondered why the gun crews did not come to closer quarters and blast the Rivington men from their holes with case shot. Then he scorned himself for a fool. Even Springfields could murder an artillery crew that got close enough to fire case shot. Against riflemen with repeaters, the ploy was suicidal.
The brass cannon boomed again, and again, but then they fell silent. Small-arms fire continued. Lee paced the Hall of Delegates chamber like a caged lion, waiting for another messenger to come and let him know what was going on. He wished he could lead from the front, as he had in his U.S. Army days. But that role did not suit a commanding general, much less the President of the Confederate States.
At last a messenger did arrive. Lee all but sprang at him, only to recoil in dismay when he gave his news: “Bastards picked off the gunners faster’n they could serve their pieces, even at long range. They ain’t all dead, nothin’ like that, but most all of ‘em’s shot.”
Lee groaned. Sharpshooters with telescopes mounted above their rifles might have been able to hit artillerymen at a thousand yards or more, but he hadn’t thought AK-47s capable of such work. When he turned away, his eye fell on the—the UZI, de Buys had called it. He shook his head, annoyed at himself again. How could he assume AK-47s were the only guns in the Rivington men’s arsenal? The answer was simple but painfuclass="underline" he couldn’t.
Rifle fire rose to a new crescendo. Forgetting the dignity and importance of his office, Lee started for the doorway to find out what had happened and to take charge. Colonel Dimmock’s bulky body blocked his path. “No, sir,” the chief marshal said. “Here you stay till it’s over.”
“Stand aside,” Lee ordered. Dimmock did not move. He outweighed Lee by at least thirty pounds, and even the thought of forcibly shoving him aside reminded Lee that, trapped by his duty, he had to obey the chief marshal. He dipped his head to Dimmock. “I beg your pardon, sir. You are in the right.”
But waiting came hard, hard. The rattle of small-arms fire slowed, flared, slowed, flared once more, stopped. When the lull stretched to two minutes, Lee tried pushing past Colonel Dimmock again. Again the colonel refused to yield his place. Lee tossed his head like a man trying to bite his own ear. Dimmock ignored the show of temper. Bare moments later, the gunfire began again. Sighing, Lee apologized again.
A new messenger entered the Hall of Delegates. “Sir, it’s a hell of a mess out there. If those Rivington sons of bitches had a clear field of fire all around their damn building, we’d never get close enough to shoot at ‘em, all the lead they’re throwing around. We had us a little truce to move the wounded a while back—that’s what the quiet was. Hope you don’t mind that.”
“No, by no means,” Lee said. “We must do what we can for our men. Press on with the attack, and since the cover of the surrounding structures is proving our principal advantage, be sure to use it well.”
The soldier saluted and hurried away. The gunfire from around the AWB headquarters went on and on. It was nearly sunset when the racket peaked in a few seconds of sustained shooting at full automatic that stopped as abruptly as the fall of a headsman’s axe.
When yet another messenger came in, Lee pounced on him. The man looked weary but triumphant, an expression Lee had seen on soldiers since before the Mexican War. “The last of them murderin’ creatures is dead,” the fellow said. A cheer went up from everyone who heard him. He went on, “We finally got some troops into the building. Took some doin’—them Rivington bastards had the door barricaded so we couldn’t noways knock it down. Finally some of our boys made ‘em keep their heads down while some more went in through the windows. That distracted ‘em, made ‘em fight two bunches at once. They died hard, but they’s dead.”
“God bless you, Corporal,” Lee said. The messenger’s sleeves were bare of stripes. He looked confused for a second, then grinned enormously. Lee turned to Colonel Dimmock. “With your gracious permission, sir—?” The chief marshal stepped out of the doorway.
Officers and bandsmen formed up around Lee as he went outside. He did not want them, but they refused to go away. After brief annoyance, he decided he could not properly be angry with them: they had their duty, too. For that matter—something he thought of too late, had it been true—the last messenger might have been a Rivington man in disguise, aiming to lure him out of the safety of the Capitol.
He hurried west toward the statue of Washington. Capitol Square had emptied of healthy civilians, save for the doctors who moved from one of the wounded to the next, doing what they could. That, Lee knew, was pitifully little. No doubt the Rivington men, with their century and a half of added knowledge, could have given more effective treatment—but had it not been for the Rivington men, none of these poor wretches would have lain here at all. A small tincture of guilt colored Lee’s rage: had the people not come out to see and hear him, they would not lie here, either.
A four-wheeled military ambulance clattered eastward. Every bump made the wounded within cry out. Lee bit his lip. At least one of those wounded was a woman. War had spared him at least that horror. Now he met it in alleged peacetime, on what should have been one of the high days of his life.