He went on cursing in a harsh, steady monotone. Mantarakis didn’t blame him. It looked as if a whole great chunk had disappeared from the U.S. line-the U.S. line in an advance that had been, up till then, finally turning into the rout it should have been from the beginning.
Then a bullet cracked past his head. The Mormons weren’t trying to overwhelm only the part of the line they’d blown to kingdom come. They were aiming to take out all of it, to throw the Americans back as far as they could. Of itself, the Springfield jumped to Paul’s shoulder. He aimed and fired. A man in overalls went down, whether hit or diving for cover he couldn’t have said.
“Bad position to try to defend,” Captain Schneider muttered. “We don’t have a whole lot of wire in front of us.” He grabbed Carlton by the arm and pointed him west. “Go on down as far as there are any live men in the trench and tell them to fall back at a right angle to our line-or what used to be our line. We don’t want the Mormons to be able to roll us all up. They’ve got their breakthrough-we have to keep them from exploiting it too much.”
Carlton went. Mantarakis admired the captain’s presence of mind. In these circumstances, he himself was having enough trouble figuring out what he needed to do. Worrying about the bigger picture was altogether beyond him. Schneider was earning his pay today-assuming he lived to collect it. Right now, that didn’t look like the best bet in the world.
More and more Americans were shooting back at the Mormons now, but the enemy kept coming, some of them singing hymns as they advanced. They’d learned how to move forward against heavy fire, some shooting from cover to make their foes duck while others advanced. And they used their machine guns aggressively, manhandling the heavy weapons forward so they too could make the Americans keep their heads down.
“Jesus, you’d think we’d have killed all the damned Mormons in Utah by now,” Captain Schneider said. He was blazing away with the pistol he wore on his belt, and the enemy was close enough to the trench line for it to be about as effective a weapon as a Springfield.
“I wish we had,” Paul said with great sincerity. He was getting low on ammunition, and heaven only knew when more would come forward.
Three Mormons popped up out of a shell hole not fifty feet away. The winter sun pierced the haze rising from the exploded mine to glitter off the bayonets of the rifles they carried. Shouting the rebel battle cry-“Come, ye saints!”-they rushed for the trench.
Gordon McSweeney laughed the triumphant laugh of a man seeing the enemy delivered into his hands. He fired a single jet of flame that caught all three Mormons in it. Only one of them had even the chance to cry out. All three jerked and writhed and shrank, all in the blink of an eye, blackening into roasted husks like those of insects that littered the street below gas lamps of a summer’s evening.
“Come on!” McSweeney shouted. “Who wants the next dose? You might as well come ahead-you’re all going to hell, anyhow.”
The Mormons kept coming, up and down the line. Machine-gun fire hammered many of them into the ground, and McSweeney got to use his infernal weapon several more times. After that, the rebels avoided the stretch of trench where he was stationed; even their spirit proved to have limits. Here and there, they did break into the trench line, but they did not force the Americans out-not, at least, in the stretch where the line hadn’t been blown sky-high.
Farther west, Paul could trace the progress of the fighting only by where the gunfire was coming from. By the sound of it, the Mormons were pushing on south toward Clearfield through a gap that was bigger than he’d thought.
“How much dynamite did they pack underground, anyway?” he asked, as if anyone nearby had the slightest chance of knowing.
“Tons,” Captain Schneider said-not an exact answer, but one with plenty of flavor to it. “Has to be tons.” He shook his head in disbelief. “And if we’d been over there instead of over here-” That thought had already gone through Paul’s mind. If he’d been over there instead of over here, he’d have been blown up or buried or one of any number of other unpleasant possibilities. As things stood, all he had to worry about was getting shot. He hadn’t imagined that that could seem an improvement, but suddenly it did.
“What do we do now, sir?” he asked.
“Form a perimeter, try to hold on, hope there are enough government soldiers in Utah to patch something together again here,” the company commander answered.
Mantarakis nodded. Schneider gave straight answers, even if they weren’t the sort you were delighted to hear. If he was still alive tomorrow, and if he still remembered (he wondered which of those competing unlikelihoods was less likely), he’d have to tell the captain that.
Roger Kimball looked out from the conning tower of the Bonefish toward the northern bank of the Pee Dee. He hadn’t brought the submersible so far up the river this time as he had on his earlier run against the black rebels of the Congaree Socialist Republic, not yet, but he figured he’d end up going farther now than he’d managed then.
Tom Brearley stood up there with him. “What do you think of the new, improved model, Tom?” he asked his executive officer.
Brearley answered with the same serious consideration he usually showed: “You ask me, sir, the boat looked better before.”
“Yeah, you’re right about that,” Kimball admitted. “But who the hell ever thought they’d have to modify a sub to do gunboat duty?”
The plain truth was, nobody had ever thought of that. Nobody had imagined the need. But need and the Bonefish had been in the same place at the same time, and so…In the Charleston shipyard, they’d put steel armor all around the three-inch deck gun’s mount, so its crew could shelter against bullets from the riverbank. And they’d mounted the machine guns on circular slabs of iron with cutouts in them, so the gunners could revolve them with their feet to bear on any target. More steel armor coming up from the outer edges of the slabs gave the machine guns protection against rifle fire, too.
Kimball pointed toward the bank. “You ask me, that’s where our real improvement is.”
“Oh, the Marines? Yes, sir,” Brearley said. “This whole operation really makes you understand what the Army is talking about when it comes to how important seizing and holding ground is, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Kimball said, and then, under his breath, “To hell with the Army.” As far as he was concerned-as far as almost any Confederate States Navy officer was concerned-the Army was a dismal swamp that sucked up enormous sums of money, most of which promptly vanished without trace: money that could have gone for more battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines…
Marines, of course, were the Navy’s admission that some action on dry land did have to be contemplated every now and again, no matter how distasteful the notion might be. Somehow or other, somebody with pull had arranged to land a couple of companies of them at the mouth of the Pee Dee and have them work their way northwest along the river toward the black heart of the Congaree Socialist Republic.
Had Anne Colleton managed that? It was the sort of thing Kimball would have expected from her, but he didn’t know for a fact that she was alive. Whoever had thought of it, it was a good idea. The insurgent Negroes couldn’t ignore the Marines, and Kimball didn’t think any irregular troops in the world could stand against them.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a brisk pop-pop of small-arms fire broke out along the riverbank. He couldn’t see where the Negroes were; they’d concealed themselves in amongst the heaviest undergrowth they could find. But he knew where the Marines were; they’d made a point of keeping in touch with the Bonefish and apprising him of their position. He didn’t have to be a Jesuit to own enough logic to realize that the fellows who were shooting and weren’t Marines had to be the enemy.