“What is it, then?” Being a transplanted Northerner, Pleasants was not yet intimately familiar with the rifle he carried.
Caudell shook his head without raising it.” Damned if I know. But the report is heavier, and he’s not firing clips, either. Listen—damn bullets just keep on coming.” He remembered how far away the trees on the other side of the clearing were, and how fast poor, overconfident Bob Southard had gone down. “Whatever he’s shooting, it’s got ungodly range.”
The firing stopped. “Stay down!” three people hissed at the same time. Mollie Bean added, “He’s tryin’ to find out just where we’re at.”
“We’ve got to spread out,” Caudell said. His initial terror at unexpectedly coming under fire was gone now, replaced by the more familiar fear that went with any combat. If he could not master that fear, he could live with it; four years of peace dropped away from him as if they had never been. When he spoke again, he might have been teaching a lesson his students already knew welclass="underline" “Henry, you and I will slide right. Ruffin, you and Alsie head left. M-Melvin, you stay here, give us some covering fire, and if anything goes wrong, you make sure you get back and give Captain Lewis the word.”
Mollie said, “Ought to be me with you instead of Henry, Nate. He ain’t that handy with a repeater.”
“But you know the country hereabouts best. That gives you the best chance of making it back to Nashville,” Caudell said. He made sense enough that she quit arguing. He took a deep breath. “Let’s go.” He slid backwards, into deeper cover. Henry Pleasants had no trouble staying with him, or staying low. He might have been a lieutenant colonel, but he’d learned to move like a red Indian.
Mollie’s AK-47 barked, three or four quick rounds sent in the direction from which the bullets ahead had come. The reply was almost instantaneous, a storm of fire so furious that Caudell realized he hadn’t left Mollie in a safe place after all. Against that monster gun, there didn’t seem to be any safe places.
Off to the left, Hopkins and Biggs started to fire. The gun hesitated for a moment, then began stuttering out death in a new direction. It chewed away at the brush that screened attackers from it. Caudell noticed he was thinking about it as if it were a sentient entity in its own right, and a malevolent one.
When he said something like that to Henry Pleasants, his friend laughed mirthlessly. “Now you know how I felt at Bealeton.”
Now crouching, now crawling, they scurried through the trees, guided by the deep, monotonous patter of the gun—and the gunner, Caudell reminded himself—they were stalking. Mollie kept squeezing off shots every minute or two. So did Alsie Hopkins and Ruffin Biggs. For a while, the hidden gunner continued his pattern of swinging back and forth between them. Then, apparently deciding Mollie wasn’t advancing and wasn’t dangerous where she was, he concentrated his fire on the two moving men.
“Shall we take some of the heat off them?” Pleasants asked, hefting the AK-47 he’d still never fired.
Caudell shook his head. “Not yet. Best way we can do that is get close enough to make sure our shots count.”
Pleasants sketched a salute. “Spoken like an officer.”
Most of an hour of slow movement went by before Caudell spotted muzzle flashes ahead and to his left. He went flat on his belly and wriggled forward like a cottonmouth. Henry Pleasants was right beside him. For some time, those flashes were all they saw. When at last they drew near enough to make out more, Caudell’s lips shaped a silent whistle. “He’s got his own little earthwork there.”
In back of concealing branches, heaped-up dirt warded the gunner against bullets from front, left, right. Either Hopkins or Biggs fired at him. A burst answered them, keeping them pinned well away. Caudell saw a flick of motion behind the long barrel of the gun that projected over the revetment. A plan shaped itself in his mind. He whispered to Pleasants, “Move away from me, over to that stump there. Next time he starts shooting; we’ll both try and take him out.”
“All right.” Ever so cautiously, Pleasants crawled into place. Caudell himself crouched behind a tree trunk. He waited, waited…Mollie fired. The hidden enemy did not reply. Then shots came from the left, from Biggs and Hopkins. A stream of bullets lashed out at them.
Caudell fired. So did Henry Pleasants. They were close enough to hear the enemy gunner’s cry of fear and rage. The long barrel swung toward Caudell with terrifying speed. Seen straight on, the muzzle flashes were bright as the sun. Bullets slammed into the trunk, just above his head.
All at once, the bullets were chewing up the treetops, not closing in on him. After a few seconds, the firing stopped. Wary of a trick, Caudell waited several minutes before peering round his sheltering tree trunk. The big, black gun barrel pointed up at the sky. In his mind’s eye, Caudell saw the Rivington man who had been back of it hit, saw his dying weight slump down onto the gun and raise the muzzle, saw him fall away so the bullets stopped corning.
Shaking with reaction, he called over to Pleasants: “You all right, Henry?” His voice shook, too.
“Yes, I think so.” Pleasants didn’t sound any too steady himself, which reassured Nate. “What the hell kind of gun is that, anyhow?”
“Damned if I know. Shall we go find out?” Caudell started to leave his cover.
But Henry Pleasants said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Nate.”
“What? Why not?”
“Two reasons. For one thing, we’ve done what Captain Lewis told us to do: we’ve found where these bastards have their southern pickets posted. And for two, look how well situated that gun is. Do you think it’s there all by its lonesome, or do you think there are more guns farther back, just waiting for us to show ourselves so they can cut us down?”
As if in response to Pleasants’s words, a new gun opened up, north and east of the one they’d taken out. Bullets cut twigs, spaanged off stones. Caudell, once more flat on his belly, could see no flashes. Hearing the deep, endless roar was quite bad enough. “All right, Henry, I’m convinced. Let’s get out of here.”
Getting out was almost as sticky as getting in had been. The sun was low in the west by the time they rejoined Mollie Bean. Ruffin Biggs and Alsie Hopkins were already there; Biggs wore a filthy bandage stuffed into the front of his right shoe. “I got a couple of toes gone, I reckon,” he said matter-of-factly. “Here on out, you can call me Gimpy.”
“What the hell kind of gun was that you went up against, Nate?” Mollie asked, unconsciously echoing Henry Pleasants.
Caudell could hear the concern she did her best to conceal. It wanted him. He wanted to squeeze the breath out of her, to prove to himself, flesh on flesh, that he was still alive. He couldn’t, not now. He said, “Henry here talked me out of going up to see.” When he explained why, his companions nodded.
Alise Hopkins said, “That there gun looks to shoot ‘bout as far as a Napoleon.” He shook his head. “Didn’t much fancy gettin’ shot at when I couldn’t hardly shoot back.”
Ruffin Biggs nodded again, this time to Pleasants. “Reckon you was right, Yankee—Cap’n Lewis’ll need to know about a gun like that, and so will Hit-’em-Again.”
“Forrest, you mean?” Henry Pleasants let out a dry chuckle. “Ruffin, I suspect he already knows.”
Guards round the Capitol, guards posted on the grounds of the presidential residence, a guard with an AK-47 in his carriage… Lee felt a prisoner of guards. And guards most of all at the corner of Ninth and Franklin, infantry and artillery both, protecting the most important secrets of the Confederacy.
The battered building that had housed America Will Break had changed since Lee visited it just after his men finally succeeded in breaking into the AWB sanctum. The hole in the outer wall of that hidden chamber was bigger now. It needed to be, to let light into the room: the glowing tubes on the ceiling had failed when the thing that chugged in the wall fell silent. A new canvas awning shielded the opening from the elements.