Sundown seemed to take forever. He knew it didn’t, but it sure seemed to. At last, as twilight deepened, the lead truck rumbled to life. Cincinnatus thumbed the starter button with vast relief. The engine caught at once. He wouldn’t have been heartbroken had it died. The false Confederates could have found another truck, and he would have stayed here. No such luck.

He turned on his headlights. He might as well not have bothered. The thin strip that masking tape didn’t cover gave a little more light than a smoldering cigarette, but not much. The truck convoy wouldn’t hurry down toward Chattanooga, not at night it wouldn’t.

It did keep its escort. That was good. In case anything went wrong, soldiers in real U.S. uniforms in the half-tracks might protect the impostors from men who didn’t know who and what they were. Those soldiers might protect the drivers, too. If ordinary U.S. troops spotted these fellows in butternut, everybody anywhere near them would need a hell of a lot of protecting. Cincinnatus was sure of that.

He rattled along at about fifteen miles an hour. Every once in a while, on a straight stretch of road, he got up to twenty or so. No shots came from the woods. Maybe all the bushwhackers went to bed early. He could hope, anyway. He followed the narrow stripe of tail light the truck ahead of him showed, and hoped that driver didn’t get lost. If he did, all the trucks behind him would follow him straight into trouble.

After a while, Cincinnatus went past the depot he’d visited earlier in the day. He thought it was the same one, anyhow. The artillery duel seemed to have flagged with the coming of night. A mosquito bit him on the arm. He swore and slapped and didn’t squash it. Next to the bite of a shell fragment, though, it seemed almost friendly.

Those stripes of red got a little brighter: the truck ahead was hitting the brakes. Cincinnatus did the same. The driver in back of him was paying attention, too, because that truck didn’t smack his rear bumper.

Somebody by the side of the road gestured with a dimmed flashlight. “You guys with the special cargo-over this way!” he called.

Like the rest of the convoy, Cincinnatus went over that way. The trucks were crawling along now. That made them quieter, but not what anybody would call quiet. With luck, though, gunfire masked most of their noise. This was about as close to the front as Cincinnatus had ever come. Peering through the windshield, he could see muzzle flashes across the river.

Another soldier with a feeble flashlight said, “Lights out!” Cincinnatus hit the switch and went from dimness to darkness. His eyes adapted fast, though. He soon spotted strips of white tape somebody-engineers?-had put down to guide the convoy to where it was supposed to go. He nodded to himself. They’d done things like that during the Great War, too.

“Here we are!” A loud, authoritative voice, that one. If it didn’t belong to a veteran noncom, Cincinnatus would have been amazed. He hit the brakes.

“Let’s go!” That voice came from the back of the truck. The U.S. soldiers in butternut piled out. They gathered with their pals from other trucks.

“Good luck.” Cincinnatus almost couldn’t force the words out.

Had the ordinary U.S. soldiers here been briefed? If they hadn’t, there’d be hell to pay in nothing flat. The thought had hardly crossed his mind before gunfire broke out. Some of the weapons were U.S., others Confederate. Shouts and screams filled the air.

“Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus burst out. He’d feared things might go wrong, but he hadn’t imagined they could go as wrong as this. Only shows what I know, he thought bitterly. The Army could screw anything up.

And then, little by little, he realized the chaos and the gunfire weren’t screwups after all. They were part of a plan. The fake Confederates got into rubber rafts and paddled across the Tennessee toward the southern bank, which real Confederates held. Tracers came close to those rafts, but Cincinnatus didn’t think they hit any of them.

He started to laugh. If the shooting fooled him, wouldn’t it fool Jake Featherston’s troops on the far bank? Wouldn’t they think some of their buddies were getting away from the damnyankees? And wouldn’t the phonies be likely to have all the passwords and countersigns real Confederates should have?

So what would happen to the genuine Confederates who greeted the troops they thought were their countrymen? They would get a brief, painful, and probably fatal surprise.

And what would happen then? Cincinnatus didn’t know, not in detail, but he could make some pretty good guesses. When he did, he laughed some more. The only thing he wished was that he were a white man in one of those rafts, carrying a Confederate automatic rifle. He wanted to see the look on the face of the first real Confederate he shot.

The counterfeits in butternut would be getting close. He couldn’t hear the shouts across the water, not for real, but he could imagine them in his mind’s ear. He sat in the cab of his truck and swatted at more mosquitoes. He wished for a smoke, but didn’t light up. He waited and waited and…

Sudden gunfire on the south bank of the Tennessee. As if that was a signal-and no doubt it was-U.S. artillery opened up. Cincinnatus could see where the shells came down by the flashes of bursting shells across the river. It made a tight box around the place where Featherston’s phony fuckers had come ashore. The artillerymen would have range tables and maps marked with squares so they could put their bombardment right where they needed it.

And more boats started across the river. These weren’t paddle-powered rubber rafts; Cincinnatus could hear their motors growling. They would land real U.S. soldiers in real U.S. uniforms and, no doubt, everything the troops needed to fight on the far side of the Tennessee: mortars and antibarrel guns and ammo and command cars and maybe even barrels. The invaders would secure the bridgehead, punch a hole in the enemy defenses, and then try to break out. And the whole enormous force on the north bank would slam in right behind them.

Cincinnatus waved, there in the deuce-and-a-half. “So long, Chattanooga!” he said. “Next stop, fuckin’ Atlanta!”

If things worked. Why wouldn’t they, though? Somebody’d planned this one to a fare-thee-well. Once the U.S. forces punched through the lines the Confederates had fortified, what could stop them? They’d be fighting in the open, and the enemy would have to fall back or get rolled up.

Small-arms fire on the other side of the river suddenly picked up. Cincinnatus whooped. He knew what that meant, knew what it had to mean. U.S. soldiers in green-gray were across the Tennessee. “Go, you bastards!” he yelled, as if they were his favorite football team. “Go!”

Jake Featherston didn’t order Clarence Potter court-martialed and shot for his failure in the flanking attack on the damnyankees in Tennessee. There was plenty of failure to go around. Featherston extracted a nastier revenge on the Intelligence officer: he kept him in a combat slot.

Potter protested, saying-accurately-that he was more valuable back in Richmond. No one felt like listening to him. The Confederate States needed combat officers. He wasn’t the only retread-far from it. Officers from the Quartermaster Corps, even from the Veterinary Corps, commanded regiments, sometimes brigades. When you ran short of what you needed, you used what you had.

They were using Potter. He hoped they didn’t use him up.

He wanted to do in Chattanooga what the United States had done in Pittsburgh. He wanted to tie the enemy down, make him fight house by house, and bleed him white. He thought Jake Featherston wanted the same thing. He hoped that, even if Chattanooga fell, the Confederates could take so much out of the U.S. forces attacking them that the Yankees would be able to go no farther. That would give the CSA a chance to rebuild and regroup.