The Victorious Opposition (50 page)

And the United States hadn’t. Even with all the unrest—hell, the out-and-out rebellion—in Houston, the United States hadn’t. Morrell understood why. It would have cost too much, in money and in men. The USA would have had to put up barbed-wire emplacements the whole length of the border, and would have had to man them with an army. It would have been almost like a trench line from the Great War. No government, Democrat or Socialist, had been willing to do the work or deploy the manpower. And so the border remained porous, and so rebellion went right on simmering.

All that unhappy musing flew out of Morrell’s head the moment he spotted a plume of dust not much different from the one his command car was kicking up. This one, though, was coming from the east and heading west: heading straight into Houston. He had every reason to be where he was and doing what he was doing. Did that other auto?
Fat chance,
he thought.

He tapped Charlie Satcher on the shoulder. “You see that?” he said, pointing.

The driver nodded. “Sure as hell do, Colonel. What do you want to do about it?”

“Stop the son of a bitch,” Morrell answered.

“He may not want to stop,” Satcher observed.

“I know.” Morrell reached for the machine-gun triggers. “We have to persuade him he does want to after all—he just doesn’t know it quite yet.”

“Persuade him.” The driver’s grin showed a broken front tooth. “Right you are, sir.” He turned toward the motorcar that was raising the other dust trail.

Excitement flowered in Morrell. He was going into action, all on his own. He’d seen plenty of action in Houston, much of it brutal and unpleasant. Armored warfare against people who flung Featherston fizzes couldn’t very well be anything but brutal and unpleasant. This, though, this seemed different. This was fox and hound, cat and mouse. It was out in the open, too. Nobody could fling a bottle of flaming gasoline from a window and then disappear.

Before long, whoever was in the other motorcar spotted the one that held Morrell and his driver. Whoever he was, he kept on coming. Maybe that meant he was an innocent, though what an innocent would be doing sneaking over the border was beyond Morrell. More likely, it meant he hadn’t recognized the command car for what it was.

As the two machines got closer, Morrell’s driver said, “They’ve got a lot of people in there—and what’s that one bastard sticking out the window?”

A muzzle flash said it was a rifle. Nothing hit the command car—not for lack of effort, Morrell was sure. “Which side of the border is he on, do you think?” he asked.

“If he’s shooting at me, he’s on the side where I can shoot back,” Satcher answered without hesitation.

“I like the way you think,” Morrell said. The fellow with the rifle in the other motorcar fired again. This time, a bullet slammed into the command car. It must not have hit anything vital, because the machine kept running, and no steam or smoke or flame burst from its innards.

Morrell squeezed the machine gun’s triggers. Brass cartridge cases flew from the breech and clattered down around his feet. Tracers guided the stream of bullets towards and then into the other motorcar. Smoke immediately poured from its engine compartment. It skidded to a stop. The doors on the far side flew open. Several men got out and ran. A bullet knocked one of them down. Another man shot at Morrell from behind the automobile. Morrell hosed bullets back at him. The motorcar caught fire. The rifleman had to pull away from it. That made him an easier target. Down he went, too.

And once the auto started burning, it didn’t want to stop. As soon as the flames reached the passenger compartment, ammunition started cooking off. Some of the rounds were tracers. They gave the fire a Fourth of July feel.

“Ha!” Charlie Satcher said. “They
were
running guns.”

“Did you expect anything different?” Morrell asked. The driver shook his head.

A bullet cracked past Morrell’s head. That wasn’t one from the fireworks display in the motorcar—it had been deliberately aimed. He ducked, not that that would have done him any good had the round been on target. He’d known only a handful of men who could go through a fire fight without that involuntary reaction. It wasn’t cowardice, just human nature.

He tapped the driver on the back and pointed. “Go around there and give me a better shot at that fellow.”

“Right.” Satcher steered the car in the direction Morrell indicated. The rifleman from the auto coming out of Texas scrambled away, trying to keep the burning vehicle between the command car and himself.

That scramble proved his undoing. He was behind the trunk when either the fire or one of the rounds going off in the passenger compartment reached what the men from Texas had been carrying there. The explosion sent flaming chunks of motorcar flying in all directions. One slammed down about a hundred feet in front of the command car; Satcher almost rolled it steering clear.

No more aimed shots came, though Morrell needed a little while to be sure of that, because rounds did keep cooking off every now and then with a
pop-pop-pop
that would have been merry if he hadn’t known what caused it. He got a look at the Texan who’d been shooting at him, and wished he hadn’t. The rear bumper had torn off the man’s head and his left arm.

The grim sight didn’t unduly upset his driver. “For all I care, they can bury the bastard in a jam tin,” Satcher said, “either that or leave him out for the buzzards. If I was a buzzard, I’d sooner eat skunk any day of the week.”

His words seemed to come from a long way off. Firing the machine gun left Morrell’s ears temporarily stunned. He hoped the stunning was temporary, anyhow. Some of it probably wasn’t. He knew he didn’t hear as well as he had when he was younger. Would he go altogether deaf in another ten or twenty years? He shrugged. Not much he could do about that. It wasn’t the rarest ailment among soldiers.

“Sir?” Charlie Satcher said.

“What is it?” Morrell’s own voice seemed distant, too.

“I heard you had balls,” the driver answered. “The guy who told me, though, he didn’t know the half of it.”

Morrell shrugged. The motion told him how tense his shoulders had got in the fire fight. He didn’t think of himself as particularly brave. When the shooting started, he didn’t think much at all. Reaction took over. “They started it, Charlie,” he answered.

“Yeah,” Satcher said admiringly. “And you sure as hell finished it.”

“I wonder which side of the border we’re on.” Morrell shrugged again. “Doesn’t matter much, not when their auto went up like that. Nobody can say they weren’t running guns into Houston.”

“Damn well better not try,” the driver said. “Me, I thought I was gonna shit myself when that goddamn back seat landed in front of us.”

“Back seat? Is that what it was?” Morrell said. Charlie Satcher nodded. Morrell managed a laugh. “I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t notice. I was busy just then. You did a hell of a job getting around it. I noticed that.”

“Neither one of us would’ve been real happy if I hit it,” Satcher said. Morrell couldn’t very well argue with that. The driver asked, “Shall we head on back to Lubbock, sir?”

“I think we’d better,” Morrell replied. “I want to report to General MacArthur, and he’ll want to report to the War Department. I suppose
they’ll
report to the president, or maybe to the State Department. Somebody will have to figure out how loud we squawk.”

“Squawk, hell,” Satcher said. “We don’t scream our heads off, they deserve to roll like that last Confederate fucker’s.”

Morrell only shrugged. “I won’t tell you you’re wrong, but the people in Philly are liable to. Because I can tell you what Richmond’s going to say. Richmond’s going to say they didn’t know anything about these fellows, they didn’t have anything to do with them, and they aren’t responsible for them.”

“My ass,” Charlie Satcher said succinctly.

“Now that you mention it, yes,” Morrell agreed, and the driver laughed. But Morrell went on, “You know it’s crap, I know it’s crap, and Jake goddamn Featherston knows it’s crap, too, but how do you go about proving it’s crap?”

“Screw proving it,” Satcher said. “Blow the bastards to hell and gone anyway.”

“I
do
like the way you think,” Morrell said.

B
rigadier General Abner Dowling remembered George Armstrong Custer. There had been times—a great many times—when Dowling’s dearest wish would have been to forget entirely the officer whose adjutant he’d been for so long. Things didn’t seem to work that way, though. All those years with Custer had marked him for life. Scarred him for life, he would have been inclined to say in his less charitable moments. This was one of those days.

When Dowling thought of Custer nowadays, he thought of the general after the Great War, when Custer had come back to Philadelphia to fill an office and count corks and write elaborate reports on the best deployment of paper clips in the U.S. Army. With nothing real, nothing important, to do, Custer had wanted to jump out of a window. Dowling often thought the only thing that stopped him was his office’s being on the ground floor.

And now Dowling knew exactly how his superior had felt. Since coming back from Salt Lake City after the occupation of Utah ended, he’d filled an office and written elaborate reports on the best way to transport rubber bands to combat units. That was how it seemed, anyhow. He was on the shelf, and he was damned if he knew how to get off again.

If he was going to be stuck in Philadelphia, he’d hoped the War Department might at least channel reports of what was going on in Utah through him. He’d spent a lot of years—a lot of thankless years—in the state. He wondered if Winthrop W. Webb was still in business, or if the Mormons had figured out who Webb’s real bosses were and arranged an accident for him.

Try as Dowling would, he couldn’t find out. Somebody in the War Department was surely tending to affairs in Utah. Whoever it was, it wasn’t Dowling. He couldn’t even find out who it was. The only thing his efforts to find out got him was a visit from Lieutenant Colonel John Abell.

The more Dowling saw the General Staff officer, the less he liked him, even though Abell had been the one who’d told him he’d made general-officer grade. The man was slim and pale—downright bloodless, in fact. Had the U.S. Army been made up of ghosts rather than men, he would have been one of the handsomest ones in it. As things were, he made Dowling want to turn up the heat in the office even though the day was warm.

“Sir, you have been poking your nose into matters that do not concern you,” Abell said. “We discourage that.”

We? You have a tapeworm?
Dowling wondered. He remembered Irving Morrell talking about Abell during the war. At the time, he’d been sure Morrell was exaggerating. Now he found the other man had been speaking the gospel truth. He eyed the General Staff lieutenant colonel’s lean, pallid countenance and picked his words with care: “I don’t believe Utah’s affairs can fail to concern me, not when I was there so long.”

“If the War Department feels otherwise, why should you disagree?” Lieutenant Colonel Abell inquired.

“Because if I had anything to do with Utah, I could be useful to the Department,” Dowling answered. “With what people have me doing now—I mean, not doing now—I’m useless. Useful is better.”

“Don’t you trust the judgment of your superiors as to what is useful and what is not?” Abell asked silkily.

By the way spoke, he might have been one of those superiors, even if Dowling outranked him.
General Staff officers,
Dowling thought scornfully, and tried not to let his annoyance show. Even if Abell had a lower grade, he enjoyed much better connections. And so, still speaking carefully, Dowling said, “A quartermaster sergeant could do most of what I’ve been doing since I came back here, whereas I’ve got some specialized knowledge no sergeant can match. Using me without using that knowledge is inefficient.”

“Possibly,” Abell said, which meant he wasn’t about to admit it. “A pleasure talking to you.” He got to his feet and started for the door. With a hand on the knob, he turned back. “You know Colonel Morrell, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes.” Dowling nodded. “We worked together on the breakthrough that took Nashville.” That might have been impolitic, since the breakthrough had violated War Department doctrine on how to use barrels. Dowling didn’t much care, since it had also gone a long way toward making the Confederates throw in the towel.

“How interesting,” Lieutenant Colonel Abell said with a smile that displayed a lot of expensive dentistry. And then, silent as a specter, he was gone. Dowling wondered if he ought to have his office exorcised.

He’d hoped Abell’s questions would lead to something better in the way of work. For the next couple of weeks, his hopes were disappointed. He read about Irving Morrell’s encounter with gun runners on the border between Texas and Houston in the newspapers. Nobody in the War Department asked him about it in any official way. He wondered why Abell had bothered confirming that they were acquainted.
The better to blackball me,
he thought.

But, somewhat to his surprise, he did see the General Staff officer again. When John Abell next appeared—materialized?—in his office, the lieutenant colonel’s face bore a smile that seemed less than perfectly friendly. “So you are friends with Colonel Morrell, are you?” Abell said, a note of challenge in his voice. “And you’ve done the same sort of work, have you?”

Dowling hadn’t said he was friends with Morrell. He admired Morrell’s talent; what Morrell thought of him he wasn’t nearly so sure. But, sensing that a yes would annoy Lieutenant Colonel Abell more than a no, he nodded defiantly and said, “That’s right.”

“Very well, Brigadier General Dowling. In that case, I have some orders for you.” Abell spoke as if washing his hands of him.

To Dowling, anything would have been better than what he was doing now. “And those orders are . . . ?” he asked eagerly.

Abell heard that eagerness. It made him blink. By the fruit salad on his chest, he’d stayed in Philadelphia through the Great War. He no doubt thought his role more important than those of soldiers who actually went out and fought the enemy, too. He might even have been right, but Dowling didn’t care to dwell on that. “Sir, you will be sent to Kentucky,” he said now. “Your duty there will be similar to Colonel Morrell’s in Houston: you will help control agitation against the government of the United States. This
does
also relate to your experience in Utah, would you not agree?”