Morrell’s barrels raced by-raced through-a column of refugees U.S. fighter-bombers had hit from above. In 1941, the Confederates gleefully strafed Ohioans who didn’t care to live under the Stars and Bars. Refugees clogged roads. Refugees who’d just been hammered from the air clogged them even better. So the Confederates taught.

And now they were learning the same lesson for themselves. Kentuckians-or maybe they were Tennesseans by now-who didn’t want to live under the Stars and Stripes fled south as people from Ohio had fled north and east two years earlier. When they got hit by machine guns and cannon fire and bombs from above, it was as horrible as it had been in the USA.

Dead and wounded children and women-and a few men, mostly old-lay in the roadway. Children with dead parents clutched corpses and screamed grief to the uncaring sky. People’s most precious possessions were scattered everywhere. Automobiles burned.

A woman standing by the body of a little girl stared at Morrell with terrible eyes as his barrel rattled past. The shoulder was wide here-the oncoming barrels didn’t need to plow straight through what was left of the refugee column. The woman picked up a rock and threw it at Morrell. It clanged off the barrel’s side. “What the hell?” Frenchy Bergeron said.

“It’s all right.” Morrell ducked down into the turret. “Just a dissatisfied customer. If that was me out there and all I had was a rock, I expect I’d throw it, too.”

He straightened up and looked out again. The Confederates didn’t try to hold back the advancing U.S. troops till they got to a hamlet called Westmoreland. Morrell looked for it on his Kentucky maps, didn’t find it, and checked the sheets for northern Tennessee. That was how he was sure he’d crossed the state line. A sign said, WESTMORELAND-STRAWBERRY CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. Here as May passed into June, the crop was no doubt coming to full, sweet ripeness…or it would have been, anyhow. The treads of Morrell’s barrel and all the others speeding south with it churned the strawberries into jam.

Was that motion, there behind a farmhouse by Hawkins, the street leading into Westmoreland from the northwest? Morrell brought up his binoculars. “Front!” he sang out. “In back of that yellow clapboard house.”

“Identified!” Bergeron said, and then, “Clapboard? That house go to a whorehouse?”

Morrell snorted and wheezed. He had to try twice before he could ask, “What’s the range?”

“Just over a mile, sir.”

“Can you hit it?”

“Bet your ass. I’ll kill the fucker, and he won’t dare open up on us till we get closer.”

“Do it, then.” Morrell ordered the barrel to a halt. The gunner traversed the turret till the long 3?-inch cannon bore on the C.S. barrel. The roar almost took Morrell’s head off. He used the field glasses again. “Hit!” he yelled. “Way to go, Frenchy! Son of a bitch is burning!”

“Damn straight,” Bergeron said. “They got any others hanging around, they’ll know they better clear out.” Other U.S. barrels started finding targets and setting them afire at a range the Confederates couldn’t hope to match. Sullenly, the surviving C.S. machines did pull back. They had to hope for wooded terrain where they had a better chance to strike from ambush. U.S. foot soldiers and barrels pushed into Westmoreland. The streets proved to be mined. That slowed them up, but not for long.

U.S. bombers left two major dams in northern Tennessee untouched-the one by Carthage and the one farther east near Celina. They didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts: they didn’t want the floods downstream to disrupt their own advance. The Confederates, desperate to slow U.S. ground forces however they could, blew both dams as they fell back over the Cumberland.

Michael Pound was not pleased. The floodwaters washed over the banks of the river and flowed across what had been fertile farmland. They turned it into something that more closely resembled oatmeal.

The new U.S. barrels had wide tracks. That meant each part of the track carried less weight than was true in older machines. It also meant they could keep going where older barrels would bog down. It didn’t mean they had an easy time.

Here and there, Confederate antibarrel guns and holdouts with rocket launchers lingered north of the Cumberland. “I hate those damn stovepipes,” Sergeant Mel Scullard said, using the name the men in green-gray had hung on the launchers. “Doesn’t seem fair, one miserable infantry son of a bitch able to take out a whole barrel all by his lonesome.”

“Especially when it’s your barrel-and your neck,” Pound observed dryly.

“You bet,” the gunner said.

“They always could, with a Featherston Fizz,” Pound said.

“That’s different,” Scullard insisted. “You could see those assholes coming, and you had a chance to kill ’em before they got to you. These guys, they stay hidden, they fire the lousy thing, and then they run like hell.”

“I know,” Pound said. “We’ve got to get something just like that so our guys can give the Confederates what-for.” Had he been as mouthy to his superiors when he was a noncom? He smiled reminiscently. He was sure he had.

That evening, he got summoned to an officers’ conclave. This was the sort of thing he’d always had to find out about from his own superiors till he finally couldn’t evade promotion. It proved less impressive than he’d imagined it would. A dozen or so officers, ranging up from his lowly second lieutenanthood to a light colonel, gathered in a barn that smelled maddeningly delicious: the former owners had used it for curing tobacco.

The lieutenant colonel lit a U.S. cigarette, whose nasty smoke seemed all the viler by comparison with the aroma of choice burley. “Intelligence says the Confederates have some Freedom Party Guards units in the neighborhood,” he announced. “You want to watch out for those guys.”

“What’s so special about ’em, sir?” a captain asked. “If you shoot ’em, they go down, right? If you shoot ’em enough times, they stay down, right?” Michael Pound smiled. Meeting someone who thought the way you did was always nice.

After another drag on his cigarette, the senior officer (who was younger than Pound) looked at it in distaste. “I think they made this thing out of camel shit,” he said. How he knew what camel shit tasted like when he smoked it was probably a question for another day. No matter how little he liked the Niagara, he kept on smoking it. “What’s so special?” he echoed. “They’re supposed to be Featherston’s elite force. They’ve got the best men, and they’ve got the best equipment. Just about all of them carry those goddamn automatic rifles, they’ve got plenty of stovepipes”-he used the new handle, too-“and their armor is the best the Confederates have.”

“Not good enough.” Pound and two other U.S. officers said the same thing at the same time.

The lieutenant colonel shook his head. “Even up, out in the open, we’ve got the edge. If they shoot from ambush when we’re out in the open…” He didn’t go on, or need to. Pound nodded reluctantly, but he nodded. A hit from a three-inch gun could kill his barrel. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it could.

“How do we know ’em when we see ’em?” somebody asked.

“They wear camouflage uniforms, not ordinary butternut,” the light colonel said. “They’ve caused a lot of trouble in Texas. This is the first report of ’em east of the Mississippi.”

“Just our luck,” Pound said. A couple of the other men in the barn sent him curious looks. He was the junior officer present. He was also the oldest man there. The combination was odd and awkward-awkward for other people, anyhow. Michael Pound didn’t much care. If they busted him back down to sergeant, he wouldn’t say boo. He’d found he could do more as an officer than as a noncom. That was nice, and the Confederates had reason to regret it on the Green River. But he wouldn’t mind looking through a gunsight again, either. That 3?-incher was a gunner’s delight. High muzzle velocity, a flat trajectory, better sights than earlier barrels had, too…