Return Engagement (38 page)

The train rattled west. Every so often, it would stop at a siding. They’d open the doors to the boxcars and let the soldiers out to stretch. The country gradually got flatter and drier. They clattered over the Mississippi between Quincy, Illinois, and Hannibal, Missouri. The bridge had a nest of antiaircraft guns around it. Armstrong doubted they would have done much good had Confederate bombers come calling.

Missouri gave way to Kansas. Armstrong discovered why they called them the Great Plains. Nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles. Western Colorado was the same way. But then, in the distance, the Rockies poked their way up over the horizon. Those were
mountains.
Nothing Armstrong had ever seen in the eastern part of the USA prepared him for country like that.

The next day, the train went over them. Even the passes were high enough to make his breath come short. He was glad he didn’t have to do anything serious there. The train went down the other side, but not so far down.

It stopped again in Grand Junction, Colorado, where the Gunnison and Colorado Rivers came together. Again, Armstrong was glad to get out and stretch. A sign on the train station said, biggest town in colorado west of the rockies. That might have been true, but it didn’t strike him as worth bragging about. If Grand Junction had ten thousand people, that was pushing things. It was full of frame houses, most of them painted white. Not far from the railroad yards, several factories and packing plants dominated the business district.

Railroad workers hooked up a car full of coal and scrap iron in front of the locomotive. Pointing, Armstrong asked, “What the hell’s going on there?”

Corporal Stowe laughed. Again, the sound didn’t hold a whole lot of mirth. “Goddamn Mormons are mining the train tracks. Better if they blow up a car full of junk than an engine with people in it.”

“Oh.” Armstrong thought that over. “Yeah, I guess so.” He eyed the forward car. “Bastards really are playing for keeps, aren’t they?”

“I said so before. You better believe it,” Stowe answered. Behind them, somebody blew a whistle. The noncom grimaced. “Time to get back in.”

“Mooo!” Armstrong said mournfully. Stowe laughed once more, this time as if he really meant it.

Armstrong couldn’t have said for sure when they crossed from Colorado into Utah. The train went at a crawl all the way. If that warning car did touch off a mine, the engineer wanted the damage to be as limited as possible. He was probably thinking more of his own neck than of his passengers’. Armstrong didn’t mind. He was in no great hurry to meet the Mormons.

Nothing blew up in the trip across the rebellious state, for which he was duly grateful. The train stopped at a place called Woodside. Soldiers threw the doors to the cars open. “Out!” they yelled. “Out! Out! Out! This here’s the end of the line.”

“Jesus!” Armstrong said when he got a look around. “It sure as hell looks like the end of the line.”

Grand Junction had been a small city. Woodside, Utah, was barely a wide place in the road. Along with a railroad depot, it boasted two gas stations and, between them, a trickle of water that had a sign above it:
WOODSIDE GEYSER. DO NOT DRINK
.

Armstrong jerked a thumb toward the sign. “What the hell’s that?”

“Bad water, that’s what,” answered one of the men who looked to have been there for a while. “Railroad dug for water back around the turn of the century and got a gusher they couldn’t cap. Only trouble was, it was
bad
water. People couldn’t drink it. Cows kept trying—and kept dying. Ain’t much of a geyser now, but from what the old-timers say it really used to be something.”

“Oh, boy.” Armstrong tried to imagine what being an old-timer in Woodside, Utah, would be like. If you had a chance between living here for fifty or sixty years and blowing out your brains, wouldn’t you think hard about picking up a rifle?

But even the old-timers had probably never seen Woodside the way it was now. Green-gray tents spread out in all directions. For reasons known only to itself and possibly to God, the Army had decided to make this miserable place its chief staging area for moves against the Mormon rebels farther west. The rebels were holding the parts of Utah worth hanging on to. They seemed perfectly willing to let the Army have the rest.

Off in the distance, artillery muttered and growled. Armstrong was more familiar with that noise than he wished he were. He wasn’t sorry to hear it at a distance, though. He’d heard artillery at much closer ranges than this. He’d heard soldiers after shells landed among them, too. He shoved that thought out of his mind. He didn’t want to remember what happened when things went wrong.

For the rest of that day, things went right. He and his buddies lined up for showers—presumably not in water from the Woodside Geyser. They lined up again for chow. They got steaks and french fries, the first meal that didn’t come out of cans they’d had since leaving Ohio. It wasn’t a great steak, but the only thing really wrong with it in Armstrong’s eyes was that it was too damn small.

He slept on a real steel-framed cot with a real mattress that night. When first conscripted, he’d hated Army cots. They weren’t a patch on his bed back home. Compared to the floor of a jouncing freight car, though, or to sleeping in a muddy foxhole, this one was a good approximation of heaven. He got rid of at least a few of the kinks of travel before reveille the next morning.

Breakfast was even better than supper had been. Bacon and real scrambled eggs, biscuits with gravy, fresh-brewed coffee . . . He ate till he was groaningly full. He wasn’t the only one, either. The cooks had a devil of a time keeping ahead of the ravening hordes of hungry men.

Content with the world, Armstrong was slowly walking back to his tent when a metallic buzzing in the air made him look west. “What the hell’s that?” he said.

“Looks like a crop-duster,” another soldier said. The fabric-covered biplane certainly wasn’t very impressive. Armstrong felt as if he could run as fast as it flew. He knew that wasn’t so, but the impression remained.

A few men pointed at the biplane. More paid no attention to it at all as it sputtered along over the Army encampment at Woodside. Armstrong might have been the only one who saw a crate tumble out of it. He had time for no more than a startled, “What the—?” before the crate hit the ground.

Boom!
The next thing Armstrong knew, he was on the ground. That wasn’t the blast—it was reflex painfully acquired on the battlefield. When something blew up, you hit the dirt. You did if you wanted to keep breathing, anyhow.

A soldier off to his right didn’t hit the dirt fast enough—and let out a startled squawk of pain. He pulled a tenpenny nail out of his arm. The nail was red and wet with his blood from point to head.

“Find an aid station,” Armstrong said. “There’s a Purple Heart for you.”

The soldier just gaped at him. Ignoring the man, Armstrong jumped to his feet and ran toward the place where the makeshift bomb had gone off. The biplane, meanwhile, buzzed off in the direction from which it had come. Nobody took a shot at it. Very likely, only a handful of people had any idea it had dropped the improvised bomb.

Makeshift, improvised, or not, the bomb did everything its equivalent from a fancy ordnance factory might have done. It knocked things down. It blew things—and soldiers—up. It sprayed fragments of sharp metal (nails, here) all over the place. What more could you ask for from something that fell out of an airplane?

Armstrong tripped over a leg and almost fell. He gulped. Breakfast nearly came up. The rest of the man wasn’t attached to the leg. A little closer to where the Mormons’ explosive had hit, he found a soldier as neatly disemboweled as if he’d be cut up for butcher’s meat in the next few minutes. Then he came upon someone he could actually help: a sergeant with a mangled hand trying without much luck to bandage himself with the other. Kneeling beside him, Armstrong said, “Here, let me do that.”

“Thanks, kid,” the noncom got out through clenched teeth. “What the hell happened?” Armstrong told him in a few words. The sergeant swore. “Ain’t that a son of a bitch? Goddamn Mormons got bombers?”

“Looks that way.” Armstrong stared west, then shook his head. “Who knows what else they’ve got, too?”

B
rigadier General Abner Dowling rode a train east toward Philadelphia. The journey was one he would much rather not have made. He’d known it was coming, though. He hadn’t been recalled by the War Department. That would have been bad enough. But instead, he’d been summoned by the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. That was at least ten times worse.

Congress had formed such a committee once before, during the War of Secession. It hadn’t proved a good idea then. The committee had crucified officers it didn’t like, and terrorized more than it crucified. It hadn’t done a damn thing to keep the war from being lost. And now, just to prove how clever the elected rulers of the country were, they’d decided to reprise what hadn’t worked before.

And, of course, Abner Dowling was the first, to say nothing of the most obvious, target the committee had chosen. People from Bangor to San Diego were going to be yelling, “Who lost Ohio?” They were going to be pointing fingers and shouting for heads. And there was Dowling, right square in the crosshairs. They didn’t even need to look very hard.

If a Congressman can spot me, I must be obvious,
Dowling thought savagely. He could make a good guess about what would happen when he got to the de facto capital. They were going to pin everything on him. They would say that, if the U.S. forces in Ohio had had a general who knew his ass from a hole in the ground, everything would have gone fine, and soldiers in green-gray would have chased those butternut bastards all the way down through Kentucky and into Tennessee, if not into Alabama and Mississippi.

They’d expect him to fall on his sword, too. What else could he do? He’d issued the orders—the orders that hadn’t worked. If he’d issued some different orders, wouldn’t things have turned out differently? Wouldn’t they have turned out better?

Of course they would. That was how Congress, with its infinite wisdom and twenty-twenty hindsight, was bound to see things, anyhow.

“Oh, yes. Of course,” Dowling muttered. The woman across the aisle from him gave him an odd look. He ignored her.

An hour out of Pittsburgh, the train slowed and then stopped. They hadn’t come to a town, not even a whistlestop. They were out in the middle of nowhere, or as close to the middle of nowhere as you could get in a crowded state like Pennsylvania. A telegraph line ran next to the tracks. A big crow—a raven?—sat on the wire staring in through the window at Dowling.
I’m not dead yet,
he thought. Then he wished that last word hadn’t occurred to him.

An important-looking man in an expensive suit and a dark homburg reached up and grabbed the cord that rang for the conductor. In due course, that blue-uniformed worthy appeared. “See here,” the important-looking man said. “I demand to know what has happened to this train. I have an urgent engagement in the capital.”

Dowling had an urgent engagement in the capital, too. He wasn’t eager enough to make a fuss about it, though. As far as he was concerned, the train could sit there as long as it pleased. He glanced out at the big black bird on the wire.
If we do wait a long time, you’ll starve before I do.

The conductor was a tall, pale, skinny man who looked as if he’d been working on trains forever. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said in a broad Down East accent. “Th’ engineer calls it sabotage.” He stretched out the final
a
till it seemed to last about a minute and a half.

“Sabotage!” Half a dozen people in the car echoed the word; all of them pronounced it much faster than the conductor had.

“Ayuh,” he said. Dowling needed a moment to understand that meant yes. “Hole in the track up ahead. Hole in the
ground
up ahead. Damn
big
hole.” He spoke with a certain dismal satisfaction.

“How long are we going to be stuck here?” the important-looking man asked. “My missing that meeting would be a disaster—a disaster, I tell you.”

“Well, if you care to, you can walk.” The conductor stretched that last
a
as far as he had the one in
sabotage.
The important-looking man glared furiously. Several other people snickered. That only made Mr. Urgent Meeting more unhappy. The conductor continued, “They got a crew workin’ on it. Be another hour, hour and a half, I reckon.”

Some passengers sighed. Some groaned. The important-looking man fumed. Dowling wondered just how much sabotage the Confederates were bringing off in the USA.
Not as much as we are in the CSA, I hope.
He also wondered how Lucullus Wood and the other stubborn blacks in Kentucky were doing. Maybe the Confederates would have hit Ohio even harder than they had if not for Negro sabotage. But they’d hit plenty hard enough as things were, dammit.

The promised hour to an hour and a half stretched out to closer to three. Dowling hadn’t expected anything different. The crow or raven flew away. The important-looking man almost had a fit of apoplexy. Dowling almost hoped he would.

By the time the general got into Philadelphia, night had fallen. The train crawled in with blackout curtains over the windows and with no light on the engine. No one knew if Confederate bombers would come over; no one wanted to give them targets if they did. The station had black cloth awnings stretched over the platforms. Dim lights gathered arriving passengers through double curtains of black cloth into the more brightly lit interior.

“General Dowling?” The officer who waited inside was tall and lean and fair—pale, really—almost to the point of ghostliness. He wore eagles on his shoulder straps. His arm-of-service colors were the gold and black of the General Staff.

“Hello, Colonel Abell,” Dowling said stiffly.
Et tu, Brute?
was what went through his mind. He had not got on well with General Staff officers since the days of the Great War. Part of that was guilt by association; he’d served with George Custer and Irving Morrell, both men who had little use for the stay-at-homes in Philadelphia and weren’t shy about letting those stay-at-homes know it. And part of it was that Abner Dowling felt the same way. If John Abell and his fellow high foreheads were to help the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War ease Dowling out . . .