Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Yes, sir.” Pound surprised himself by smiling at the lieutenant. What Griffiths said made perfectly good sense. Pound wouldn’t have thought the junior officer had it in him.

Confederate Asskickers screamed down out of the sky to bomb and machine-gun U.S. positions. What seemed like every antiaircraft gun in the world opened up on them. So many guns blazed away, Pound wondered if some of them hadn’t kept quiet before to lure the Confederate dive bombers into a trap. Three or four Mules didn’t pull up from their dives, but went straight into the ground. The explosions made the ground shake under his barrel. He saw one funeral pyre through the hole that had held the garage window.

“Good riddance,” he muttered.

“Amen,” Cecil Bergman said. The loader added, “See anything out there that needs killing, Sarge?”

“Quiet right now,” Pound answered.

“Good,” Bergman said-not a bloodthirsty attitude, but a sensible one. Nobody in his right mind was eager for combat. You had a job to do, you did it, and you tried not to think about it. When you had to think about it, you thought about targets and barrels. You didn’t think about men. Because those sons of bitches on the other side had a job to do, too, and theirs was turning you into a target. If that also meant turning you into raw hamburger or burnt hamburger, they would try not to think about it.

“Somebody coming over to us,” Griffiths said, and then, “He’s in our uniform.”

“Right,” Pound said, and pulled the.45 on his belt out of its holster. Confederates in U.S. uniform, Confederates who talked like U.S. soldiers, had caused a lot of grief in Pennsylvania. “Make sure he’s got the right countersign before you let him get close.”

“I intend to, Sergeant.” Griffiths sounded like a small boy reproving his mother. The barrel commander popped out of the cupola. “Foxx!” he said.

“Greenberg,” the soldier answered. Michael Pound relaxed-mostly. That was the right countersign. The Confederates had their own football heroes. They were unlikely to know the names of a couple of U.S. running backs. Of course, they might have captured a prisoner and torn the countersign out of him. Pound didn’t relax all the way.

He was glad to see Lieutenant Griffiths didn’t, either. “That’s close enough, soldier. I don’t know you,” Griffiths said. Pound grinned, down there where nobody but Cecil Bergman could see him. Maybe the lieutenant wasn’t such a little boy after all.

“Yes, sir,” the man in green-gray said. “Just wanted to let you know Featherston’s fuckers have armor coming forward. One of our artillery-spotting airplanes saw the barrels.”

“All right-thanks,” Griffiths said. The soldier sketched a salute and left. Griffiths ducked down into the turret. “What do you think, Sergeant?”

Pound had enormous respect for artillery spotters. They flew low and slow, and often got shot down. But that had only so much to do with the lieutenant’s question. “Well, sir, if he’s legit we’ll find out pretty soon,” Pound said.

“Yes,” Griffiths said. “But that kind of message can’t hurt us, so he must be the real thing, right?”

“Well, no, sir, not quite,” Pound answered patiently. “He could have had a harmless message just waiting in case we were on our toes. If he did, he’s out there looking for somebody else to screw.”

“Oh,” Griffiths said in a hangdog voice. “I didn’t think of that.” A moment later, softly and to himself, he added, “Dammit!”

“Don’t worry about it, sir,” Pound said. “You did what you were supposed to do. Nobody could ask for anything more.”

“I’m supposed to see more than you do, though.” The barrel commander sounded fretful. “If I don’t, then you ought to be the officer.”

“I don’t want to be an officer, sir,” Pound said for what had to be the hundredth time in his career. Senior enlisted men were supposed to curb junior officers’ enthusiasms. That was at least as important a part of their job as anything else. Most junior officers didn’t know it. Pound didn’t know how to say it without offending the lieutenant. If he didn’t say anything, Griffiths couldn’t get his ass in a sling. He kept quiet.

A few minutes later, the Confederates laid on an artillery barrage. Griffiths kept the hatch up on the cupola as long as he could. When gas rounds started gurgling in, though, he clanged it shut. “Button up!” he yelled over the intercom to the driver and bow gunner. Then he put on his gas mask. Resignedly, Pound did the same. With autumn here, wearing it wasn’t so awful as it had been during the summer. Even so, it cut down his vision, and it was awkward to use with a gunsight. Lieutenant Griffiths had an even harder time seeing out the cupola periscopes through his mask’s portholes.

Shrapnel clanged off the barrel’s chassis. A barrage like this wasn’t dangerous to armor except in case of an unlucky direct hit. Pound traversed the turret so the big gun-the pretty big gun, anyway-bore on the approach route he would use if he were a Confederate barrel commander. Griffiths set a hand on his shoulder to say he understood and approved.

Not much later, the barrel commander sang out: “Front!”

“Identified,” Pound answered-he saw the ugly beast, too. “Range 350.”

“You lined up on him so nicely, Sergeant,” Griffiths said. “Go ahead and do the honors.”

“Yes, sir,” Pound said, and then, to Bergman, “Armor-piercing.”

“Armor-piercing,” the loader echoed, and slammed a round in the breech.

Pound adjusted the main armament’s elevation just a little. The C.S. barrel came on, sure nothing nasty was in the neighborhood. Pound wouldn’t have been that confident. The enemy machine was one of the new models. Maybe that made the commander feel invulnerable. Infantrymen in butternut loped alongside, automatic rifles at the ready.

The U.S. barrel’s gun spoke. Pound’s mask kept out the cordite fumes. The shell casing clanged on the fighting compartment floor. “Hit!” Lieutenant Griffiths yelled. “That’s a hit!”

Smoke and fire spurted from the stricken C.S. barrel. The U.S. bow gunner opened up on the Confederate foot soldiers. One of them spun, his rifle flying out of his hands. He crumpled, right out there in the open. Other Confederate soldiers went down, too. They were more likely diving for cover than hit. Nobody came out of the barrel. Flames and a cloud of smoke burst from the cupola hatch. Five men dead, Pound thought, and then, Well, they wanted to kill me. I like it better this way.

He tapped Lieutenant Griffiths. “Sir, shouldn’t we move out of here and find another firing position? Next enemy barrel that comes this way is going to know where we’re at. Most ambushes only work once.”

“Good point,” the barrel commander said, and then, over the intercom to the driver, “Back us out, Mancatelli. Shift us over behind that pile of bricks to the left.”

He hadn’t been ready to move quite soon enough, but he’d had a backup firing position in mind when he did. It was a pretty good one, too; Michael Pound would have suggested it if Griffiths hadn’t seen it himself. But he had. No, he wasn’t such a helpless puppy after all.

After the barrel backed out of the garage, Mancatelli stayed in reverse long enough to move forward toward the secondary position. That kept the front glacis plate and the front of the turret facing the direction from which the barrel was likeliest to take fire. It avoided exposing the machine’s thinner side armor. Those who served in barrels knew their weaknesses best-except, maybe, for those who tried to destroy them.

Peering out through the gunsight, Pound saw soldiers in butternut pointing to where the barrel had been. That probably meant they were warning it was still there. Nobody pointed toward the wreckage behind which it now hunkered down. If a machine weighing upwards of twenty tons could be sneaky, this one had just done the trick.