Out of the fogbank came…trouble. Confederate foot soldiers armed with antibarrel rockets and launching tubes ran through the smoke, flopped down behind the closest cover, and started working their way forward. U.S. machine-gun fire picked off some of them, and more of the riflemen who protected them, but they kept coming in the little rushes experienced troops used.

Before long, rockets trailing tails of fire flew toward Pikeville. More than one U.S. barrel that had stayed too long in its original firing position got hit. Michael Pound’s platoon came away unscathed; he’d ordered the machines back to secondary firing positions in the lull the smoke screen gave them.

A rocket slammed into the house where his barrel had been hiding. The house started to burn. Pound smiled to himself. The Confederates would think they’d killed the barrel. They might make some embarrassing mistakes if they thought their mischief-makers had done more than they really had.

And sure enough, a few minutes later a couple of platoons of C.S. barrels charged through the thinning smoke ready to break into Pikeville or die trying. Michael Pound earnestly preferred the second alternative. He was standing in the cupola of a machine that could make his preferences felt. The leading barrels were the latest Confederate model: excellent in their own right, but half a step behind his. They were out in the open. He had cover. It hardly seemed fair. But then, he didn’t want a fair fight. He wanted a fight he’d win.

“Front!” he shouted.

“Identified!” Sergeant Scullard continued with the ritual.

Three shots from Pound’s barrel killed two Confederate machines, and they were the leading two. One turned into a fireball. A couple of men got out of the other barrel. Machine-gun bullets reached for them, but they might have made cover. Part of Pound hoped they did. He’d bailed out of a stricken barrel himself. He knew what it was like. They were enemies, but they were also men doing the same job he was.

The Confederates kept coming. Another U.S. barrel set the last of theirs on fire less than a hundred yards outside of Pikeville. Several more green-gray barrels were also burning by then, some from enemy cannon fire, others from those damnable antibarrel rockets.

But the Confederates didn’t get into the town. They didn’t get around it, either. U.S. reinforcements poured in to make sure they couldn’t. Pound was only half glad to see them. He wished they’d stayed farther south and stormed toward Chattanooga.

Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover had the ribbon for the Purple Heart. He didn’t much want it. Nobody on either side much wanted a Purple Heart, but Dover didn’t think he’d earned his. A chunk of shrapnel had torn a bloody line across his forearm. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t worth fussing about. But the rule was that you got a medal if you bled. And so he had one.

Not a lot of officers in the Quartermaster Corps owned a decoration that said they’d been in combat. In a way, it was handy: it made line officers-and even line noncoms-take him seriously. But the wound was so trivial, the decoration embarrassed him.

It did when he had time to think about it, anyway. More often than not, he barely had time to breathe, let alone eat. He smoked like a chimney. As long as he kept breathing, he could do that. It didn’t keep him from doing the usual seventeen other things at the same time.

He knew before almost anyone else that the Confederate thrust from the east wasn’t going as well as the planners back in Richmond wished it were. As soon as the front just north of Chattanooga got its supply priority restored, he realized the Confederates either had an extravagant success and would soon swarm up from the south or had failed and would soon need to hold on for dear life here. The shipments of barbed wire and land mines said they wouldn’t be advancing.

He sent out the supplies as front-line units shouted for them. In the meantime, he quietly swore under his breath. A generation earlier, he’d seen what a losing war looked like. Now he stared another one in the face. He hadn’t thought Jake Featherston would land the Confederacy in a mess like this. Who had? Surely Featherston himself hadn’t. And a whole fat lot of good that does anybody, Dover thought.

Confederate gunboats came up the Tennessee River as far as Chattanooga and fired big shells at U.S. forces to the north. Then they turned around again and scooted south as fast as they could go, for U.S. airplanes struck at them whenever they got the chance. Land-based guns couldn’t be as big or move as fast as the ones the gunboats carried. But the boats had trouble moving fast enough to stay safe.

Dover could cheer for them without worrying that their performance reflected on him. The C.S. Navy was responsible for keeping them in fuel, hardtack, and munitions. Some Navy commander had to flabble about that. Dover just hoped their shells blew plenty of damnyankees to hell and gone.

His own worries were the usual sort: getting munitions and other supplies up from the rear and then making sure they reached the front. Keeping his dumps as close to the fighting as he could went a long way toward solving the second problem. The first was harder, especially since he had to deal with new sets of gatekeepers. The dumps in southern and western Tennessee that had nourished the Confederate armies were now withering themselves. Most of Dover’s shipments came up from Atlanta, and the quartermasters there had carved out a tidy little empire for themselves, one they didn’t care to disturb just because there was a war on.

“Your demands are excessive,” a colonel safely behind the lines told Jerry Dover. “You can’t possibly be expending so many antiaircraft shells.”

“No, huh?” Dover said. “What do you think I’m doing with ’em, pounding ’em up my ass?” Had that colonel in Atlanta been handy, Dover might have done some pounding with him.

Even though he didn’t say it, that message must have got across. In frigid tones, his superior said, “You are insubordinate.”

“Yes, sir,” Dover said proudly. “People keep telling me that. But the ones who do are always farther from the fighting than I am. The guys who really have to go out and shoot things at the Yankees, they like me fine. And you know what, sir? If I have to choose between them and you, I’ll take them any old time.”

“Have a care how you speak to me.” The colonel in Atlanta sounded like a man on the verge of apoplexy. “You’d better have a care, by God. I can have you court-martialed like that-like that, I tell you.” He snapped his fingers.

“Big fucking deal…sir.” Dover had heard such threats before. “If you do, they’ll kick my ass out of the Army. I’ll go to prison, where it’s safe, or I’ll go home to Augusta, where it’s safe. And I hope they ship you up here to take my place. It’d goddamn well serve you right. And if I don’t get those shells, my next telegram goes to Richmond, not to you.”

“You can’t do that!” the colonel gabbled. “It violates the chain of command!”

No doubt that would have impressed an officer who’d had proper training. It didn’t bother Jerry Dover one bit. “You think Jake Featherston will give a damn about the chain of command when he hears somebody isn’t doing his job and won’t do it? I think he’ll have you for breakfast…without salt.”

He was bluffing. He didn’t think any telegram of his would reach the President of the CSA. No doubt the colonel down in Atlanta didn’t, either. But there was always that chance… And if Featherston did descend in wrath on an obstructive colonel, that man would end up nothing but a smear on the bottom of his shoe.

Dover got his antiaircraft shells. That meant the front got its antiaircraft shells. If he had enemies down in Atlanta, he didn’t give a damn.