American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (18 page)

  John J. Pershing was in his mid-sixties. He didn’t look younger than his years so much as tough and well-preserved for them. His jaw jutted. His gray Kaiser Bill mustache—the style was now falling out of favor with younger men—added to his bulldog appearance. His icy blue eyes seized and held Dowling.

  “Hello, Colonel. Take a seat. There’s coffee in the pot, if you care for some.”

  “No, thank you, sir. I’m just back from lunch,” Dowling answered.

  General Custer would have been even money or better to make some snide crack about his weight.

  Pershing simply nodded and got down to business: “I’m worried, Colonel Dowling. This place is like a powder keg, and I’m afraid the fuse is lit.”

  “Really, sir?” Dowling said in surprise. “I know Utah’s been a powder keg for more than forty years, but why do you think it’ll go off now? If the Mormons were going to rise against us, wouldn’t they have tried it when the Canucks did?”

  “Strategically, that makes good sense,” Pershing agreed. “But the trouble that may come here hasn’t got anything to do with what happened up in Canada. You are of course aware how we hold this state?”

  “Yes, sir: by the railroads, and by the fertile belt from Provo up to Ogden,” Dowling answered. “Past that, there’s a lot of land and not a lot of people, so we don’t worry very much.”

  “Exactly.” Pershing nodded. “We just send patrols through the desert now and again to make sure people aren’t plotting too openly.” He sighed. “Out in the desert, maybe a hundred and seventy-five miles south of here, there’s a little no-account village called Teasdale. A troop of cavalry rode through it a couple of weeks ago. The captain in command discovered several families that were pretty obviously polygamous.”

  “Uh-oh,” Dowling said.

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Pershing replied.

  Polygamy had been formally illegal in Utah since the Army occupation during the Second Mexican War.

  It hadn’t disappeared, though. Dowling wished it had, because, more than anything else, it got people exercised. Fearing he already knew the answer, he asked, “What did the cavalry captain do, sir?”

  “He applied the law,” Pershing said. “He arrested everyone he could catch, and he burned the offending houses to the ground.”

  “And he came out of this place alive? I’m impressed.”

  “Teasdale’s a very small town—smaller still, after he seized the polygamists,” Pershing replied. “And he is an able young man. Or he would be, if he had any sense to go with his tactical expertise. Naturally, even though this happened in the middle of nowhere, news got out right away. And, just as naturally, even a lot of Mormons who aren’t ardent polygamists are up in arms about it.”

  “Not literally, I hope,” Dowling said.

  “So do I, Colonel. But we must be ready, just in case,” Pershing said. “I’ve asked Philadelphia to send us some barrels to use against them at need. If the War Department decides to do it instead of reprimanding me for asking for something that costs money, I’m going to put you in charge of them. You became something of an expert on barrels, didn’t you, serving under General Custer and with Colonel Morrell during the war?”

 
  I became an expert on not getting myself court-martialed on account of barrels, is what I
became,
 Dowling thought.
Custer wanted to use them against War Department doctrine, and I had
to cover for him. Does that make me an expert?
 Aloud, he answered, “I’ll do whatever I can, sir.”

  “I’m sure of it,” Pershing said. “This may all turn out to be so much moonshine, you understand. The War Department may need a real rising from the Mormons before they send in the weapons that would have overawed them and stopped the rising in its tracks. And the powers that be may not send us anything even in case of rebellion. They’re in a cheese-paring mood back there, sure enough. They’ve stopped spending
any
money on improving barrels, you know.”

  “Yes, I do know that,” Dowling replied. “I don’t like it.”

  “Who would, with a brain in his head?” Pershing said. “But soldiers don’t make policy. We only carry it out, and get blamed when it goes wrong. I wonder how fast and how well the Confederate States are rearming.”

  “They aren’t supposed to be doing anything of the sort, sir,” Dowling said.

  Pershing tossed his head, like a horse bedeviled by flies. “I know that, Colonel. I wonder anyway.”

  A
bullet cracked past Jefferson Pinkard’s head. He ducked, not that that would do him any good if the bullet had his name on it. Somewhere not far off, rebel Mexican machine gunners started firing at something they imagined they saw. A field gun banged away, flinging shells into the uplands town of San Luis Potosí.

  Like most Confederates, Pinkard had thought of the Empire of Mexico as his country’s feebleminded little brother—when he’d bothered thinking of it at all, which wasn’t very often. In the comfortable days before the war, the Empire did as the Confederacy asked. The Confederates, after all, shielded Mexico from the wrath of the USA, which had hated the Empire since its creation during the War of Secession.

  The truth, nowadays, was more complicated. The USA backed the rebels against the Empire. The CSA couldn’t officially back Maximilian III, but Freedom Party volunteers like Pinkard numbered in the thousands—and the Freedom Party wasn’t the only outfit sending volunteers south to fight the Yankees and their proxies.

  That all seemed straightforward enough. What Jeff hadn’t counted on was that there would have been—hell, there had been—rebels even without U.S. backing. Maximilian III would never land on anybody’s list for sainthood.

  Pinkard shrugged. “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s
our
son of a bitch, by God,” he muttered.

  Behind him, another field gun, this one on his side, started answering the rebels’ piece. It seemed to be firing as much at random as the enemy gun.

 
  Stupid bastards,
 he thought, not sure whether he meant the enemy or his own side. None of them would have lasted long during the Great War; he was sure of that. Both sides were brave enough, but neither seemed to know just what it was supposed to do. They lacked the experience C.S. and U.S. forces had so painfully accumulated.

  Another machine gun started rattling. Ammunition was tight. Both sides imported most of it. That didn’t keep gunners from shooting it off for the hell of it. Who was going to tell ’em they couldn’t? They had the weapons, after all.

  A Mexican private came up to Jeff. Like Pinkard’s, his cotton uniform was dyed a particularly nasty shade of yellow-brown. It looked more like something from a dog with bad digestion than a proper butternut, but all the greasers and the Confederate volunteers wore it, so Jeff could only grouse when he got the chance. He couldn’t change a thing. The Mexican said, “
Buenos días
, Sergeant Jeff.” It came out of his mouth sounding like
Heff
. “The
teniente
, he wants to see you.”

  “All right, Manuel. I’m coming.” Pinkard pronounced the Spanish name
Man-you-well
. He took that for granted, though what the locals did to his never ceased to annoy him. He walked bent over. The Mexicans built trenches for men of their size, and he overtopped most of them by half a head. The rebel snipers weren’t nearly so good as the damnyankees had been up in Texas, but he didn’t want to give ’em a target. He nodded to Lieutenant Hernando Guitierrez. “What can I do for you, sir?
En qué puedo
servirle?
 ” Again, he made a hash of the Spanish.

  It didn’t matter, not here. Lieutenant Guitierrez probably spoke better English than Pinkard did. He was every bit as tall, too, though not much more than half as wide through the shoulders. By his looks, he had a lot more Spaniard and a lot less Indian in him than did most of the men he commanded. He said, “I have a job for you, Sergeant.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Pinkard agreed.

  “Er—yes.” The Mexican lieutenant drummed his fingers on his thigh. Jeff had a pretty good idea what was eating the fellow. He was only a sergeant himself (and he’d never risen higher than PFC in the C.S. Army), but he got more money every month than Guitierrez did. And, although he was only a sergeant, it wasn’t always obvious that his rank was inferior to the other man’s. Why else were Confederate volunteers down here, if not to show the greasers the way real soldiers did things?

  “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” Jeff asked again, not feeling like pushing things today.

  Guitierrez gave him what might have been a grateful look. “You are familiar, Sergeant, with the machines called barrels?”

  “Uh . . . yeah.” Pinkard was familiar enough to start worrying, even though the clanking monsters had been few and far between in Texas during the Great War—especially on the Confederate side. “What’s the matter? The rebels going to start throwing ’em at us? That’s real bad news, if they are.”

  “No, no, no.” The Mexican officer shook his head. He had a sort of melancholy pride different from anything Pinkard had known in his own countrymen. “
We
have three, built in Tampico by the sea and coming up here to the highlands by railroad. I want you to lead the infantry when we move forward with them against the peasant rabble who dare to oppose Emperor Maximilian.”

  “
You people
built barrels?” Once he’d said it, Jeff wished he hadn’t sounded quite so astonished. But that was too late, of course.

  Lieutenant Guitierrez’s lips thinned. “Yes, we did.” But then he coughed. He was a proud man, but also an honest man. “I understand the design may have come from the Confederate States—unofficially, of course.”

  “Ah. I get you.” Jeff laid a finger by the side of his nose and winked. The Confederates couldn’t build barrels on their own. The Yankees would land on them with both feet if they tried. But what happened south of the border was a different story. “When does the attack go in, and what are we aiming for?”

  “We want to drive them from those little hills where they can observe our movements. They are shelling San Luis Potosí from that forward position, too,” Guitierrez replied. “If all goes well, this will be a heavy blow against them. As for when, the attack begins the morning after the barrels come into place.” He didn’t say when that morning would be. He was probably wise not to. For one thing, Pinkard had already discovered what
mañana
meant. For another, barrels, no matter who built them, broke down if you looked at them sideways. Pinkard grunted. “All right, Lieutenant. Soon as they get here, I’ll lead your infantry against the rebels. You’ll follow along yourself to see how it’s done, right?” He wasn’t calling Guitierrez a coward. He’d seen the other man had courage and to spare. And Guitierrez nodded now. “
Claro que sí,
 Sergeant. Of course. That is why you are here: to show us how it is done.”

  Jeff grunted again. In one sense, the Mexican lieutenant was right. In another . . . Pinkard was here because his marriage was as much a casualty of the Great War as a fellow with a hook for a hand. He was here because he had a fierce, restless energy and an urgent desire to kill something, almost anything.

  He couldn’t satisfy that desire back in Birmingham, not unless he wanted to fry in the electric chair shortly thereafter.

  Three days later—not a bad case of
mañana
, all things considered—the barrels came into position, clanking and rattling and belching and farting every inch of the way. Pinkard wasn’t surprised to find more than half their crewmen were Confederate volunteers. He
was
surprised when he got a look at the barrels themselves. They weren’t the rhomboids with tracks all around that the CSA, following the British lead, had used during the Great War. And they weren’t quite the squat, hulking monsters with a cannon in the nose and machine guns bristling on flanks and rear the USA had thrown at the Confederacy.

  They did have a conning tower like that of a U.S. barrel—their crewmen called it a turret. It revolved through some sort of gear mechanism, and carried a cannon and a machine gun mounted alongside it.

  Two more bow-mounted machine guns completed their armament. “Since the turret spins, we don’t need nothin’ else,” a crewman said. “Means we don’t have to try and shoehorn so many men inside, neither.”

  “Sounds like somebody’s been doing a lot of thinking about this business,” Pinkard said.

  “Reckon so,” the other man agreed. “Now if the same somebody would’ve thunk about the engine, too, we’d all be better off. A good horse can still outrun these miserable iron sons of bitches without breathing hard.”

  During the Great War—even the attenuated version of it fought out in Texas—a big artillery barrage would have preceded the barrels’ advance. Neither side in this fight had enough artillery to lay down a big barrage. It didn’t seem to matter. The barrels rolled forward, crushing the enemy’s barbed wire and shooting up his machine-gun nests. “Come on!” Pinkard shouted to the foot soldiers loyal to Maximilian III. “Keep up with ’em! They make the hole, an’ we go through it. Stick tight, and the enemy’ll shoot at the barrels and not at you so much.”

  That was how things had worked during the Great War. In English and horrible Spanish, Jeff urged his men forward. Forward they went, too. The only thing he hadn’t counted on was the effect barrels, even a ragged handful of barrels, had on troops who’d never faced them before. The rebels, or the braver men among them, tried shooting at the great machines. When their rifle and machine-gun bullets bounced off the barrels’ armor, they seemed to decide the end of the world was at hand. Some ran away. The barrels’ machine guns scythed them down like wheat at harvest time. Others threw down their rifles, threw up their hands, and surrendered.
“Amigo!”
 they shouted hopefully.