Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

"That's really more Counterintelligence's cup of tea, sir. I just wanted to alert you to the possibility," Potter said. "I don't want to step on General Cummins' toes any more than I have already."

"Oh, I'll put him on it, too. Don't you worry about that," Forrest said. "You've already done some thinking about this, though. Kindly do some more." Trailing smoke, he hurried out the door.

"Gopher traps," Potter muttered. He did some more muttering, too, while he finished the cigarette and stubbed it out. It wasn't as if he weren't already riding herd on 127 other things, all of which were in his bailiwick. And it wasn't as if General Cummins weren't a perfectly competent officer. Potter wanted to put the whole business on the back burner.

He wanted to, but he found he couldn't. He kept worrying at it in odd moments. It might have been a bit of gristle stuck between his teeth. It kept drawing his attention no matter how much he wished it wouldn't.

"Gopher traps." He kept saying it, too. If only Forrest hadn't come up with such a good phrase. It commanded attention whether Potter felt like giving it or not.

For the next few days, as he watched the growing U.S. storm in the north, he tried hard not to think about catching any possible spies in the War Department. He was, in fact, clacking away at a report summarizing news from spies in Kansas and Nebraska when he suddenly stopped and stared out the window, his eyes far away behind his spectacles.

His gaze returned to the report. It was as dull as it deserved to be. Not a hell of a lot was going on in Kansas and Nebraska. Not a hell of a lot had ever gone on in that part of the USA. In spite of that, he started to smile. In fact, he started to laugh, and the report had not a single funny word in it.

He walked over to Lieutenant General Forrest's office. The chief of the General Staff wasn't in the men's room. That being so, Potter had no trouble getting in to see him. The power of these wreathed stars, he thought. He'd never expected to become a general officer. He'd ten times never expected to become a general officer with Jake Featherston as President of the CSA. But here he was.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked up from whatever paperwork jungle he'd been hacking his way through. "Morrell?" he asked. "If he's up there, the other shoe'll drop on us any day now."

"No, sir. Haven't heard a thing about him." Potter shook his head. "I may have found a gopher trap, though."

"Well, that's interesting, too." Forrest waved him to a chair. "Why don't you sit down and tell me all about it?"

"Let me show you this first." Potter set the report on Kansas and Nebraska on Forrest's desk. "Glance over it, sir, if you'd be so kind." After Forrest did, he nodded. Potter explained. He finished, "You see how I could do that, don't you, sir?"

"I believe I do." Forrest looked the report over one more time. "It would mean a good deal of extra typing for you-because if you take this on, you're not going to trust it to a secretary."

"Oh, good heavens, no, sir. Of course not." Potter was shocked. "The thought never once crossed my mind."

"Good. I believe you-you sound like a schoolteacher talking about the bawdyhouse next door to her apartment building." The chief of the General Staff chuckled. Potter was less amused, but let it pass. Chuckling still, Forrest went on, "I should have remembered you run spies. You think about these things more than an ordinary officer is liable to."

"Well, I should hope so!" Clarence Potter exclaimed. "Ordinary officers…" He shook his head. "I read a memoir once, by one of Robert E. Lee's couriers. In the Pennsylvania campaign, he almost lost a set of Lee's special orders-the damned fool had wrapped them around three cigars. If McClellan had found out how badly Lee had divided the Army of Northern Virginia, who knows how much mischief he could have done? An enlisted man saw the orders fall and gave them back. If he hadn't, that courier's name would be mud all over the CSA."

"You do have to pay attention to little things," Forrest agreed. He tapped the report with his fingernail. "Go ahead with what you've got in mind. I'll be interested to see what you turn up."

"Yes, sir." Potter's smile was all sharp teeth. "What-and who."

Colonel Irving Morrell hadn't read the Iliad since he got out of the Military Academy, almost thirty years ago now. Chunks of it still stuck in his mind, though. He didn't remember the anger of Achilles so much as the Greek hero sulking in his tent after he'd quarreled with Agamemnon.

All things considered, Morrell would rather have sulked in Achilles' tent than in Caldwell, Ohio, where he found himself ensconced for the moment. Caldwell was a town of fifteen hundred or two thousand people, a few miles west of Woodsfield. It was the county seat for Noble County, as a sign in front of the county courthouse declared. That made him feel sorry for the rest of the county.

Caldwell was a coal town. People had been mining coal there for more than sixty years, and it showed. The air was hazy with coal dust. When Morrell needed to hawk and spit, he spat black. There were no red brick buildings in Caldwell. There were no white frame houses, either. The brick buildings were murky brown, the frame houses gray. The people seemed as subdued as their landscape. A lot of them seemed covered in a thin film of coal dust, too.

All things considered, Caldwell would have made Irving Morrell gloomy even if he'd gone into the place cheery as a lark. Since he'd gone in sullen, he would have been satisfied to come away without hanging himself. Even that much sometimes seemed optimistic. Caldwell was where what would have been his grand attack against the base of the Confederate salient in Ohio had ingloriously petered out. Sabotage and Confederate Asskickers had brought his armor to a standstill.

That wasn't the worst of it, either. He'd thought it would be, but he'd been wrong. As he watched some of his precious barrels chained onto flatcars bound for the East Coast, his fury and frustration grew too large to hold in. He turned to Sergeant Michael Pound, who was always good for sympathy over imbecilities emanating from the War Department. "I'm being robbed, Sergeant," he said. "Robbed, I tell you, as sure as if they'd held a gun to my head and lifted my wallet."

"Yes, sir," Pound said. "If they're going to take your barrels, the least they could do would be to take you, too. Seems only fair."

"They don't want me anywhere near Philadelphia," Morrell said. "They want me to keep fighting here in Ohio. They've said so."

"They just don't want to give you anything to fight with," Sergeant Pound said. "They'll probably set you to making bricks without straw next."

"You mean they haven't?" Morrell said. "By God, I was doing that for years at Fort Leavenworth. We had the prototype for a modern barrel twenty years ago-had it and stuck it in a back room and forgot about it. Christ, Sergeant, you went back to the artillery when they closed down the Barrel Works."

"I'm glad you don't hold it against me, sir," Pound said.

"A man has to eat. There's nothing in the Bible or the Constitution against that," Morrell said. "If there were no barrels to work on-and there damn well weren't-you needed to be doing something."

"That was how I looked at it, too." Pound suddenly snapped his fingers. "I'll bet I know one of the reasons why they're taking your barrels away from you."

"More than I do," Morrell said sourly. "Tell me."

"They're the biggest bunch we can get our hands on this side of the Confederate salient," Pound said. "Everything west of here has to go the long way around, up through Canada-either that or on Great Lakes freighters that the enemy can bomb."

Morrell eyed him. "Normally, Sergeant, when I say somebody thinks like a General Staff officer, I don't mean it as a compliment. This time, I do. That makes much more sense than anything I've been able to think of." He paused. "How would you like me to recommend you for a commission? You have the brains to do well by it. You have more in the way of brains than four out of five officers I know, maybe more."