The Grapple by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

exasperated noise down deep in his throat. Yes, a crewman in a barrel had face-hardened steel between himself and the enemy’s attentions. An infantryman had nothing but his helmet, which wouldn’t even keep out small-arms fire. On the other hand, nobody used antibarrel cannon or antibarrel mines or Featherston Fizzes to try to knock out individual foot soldiers. Lieutenant Griffiths wasn’t thinking about that.
    “There it is—about one o’clock,” Griffiths said. “Do you see it now, Sergeant?”
    As Pound traversed the turret, he looked through the gunsight. Sure enough, there was the malignantly flashing machine-gun muzzle. “Yes, sir,” he said, and then, to the loader, “HE!”
    “HE!” Bergman loaded a white-tipped high-explosive round into the breech.
    The gun roared. The noise was tolerable inside the turret. To Lieutenant Griffiths, out there in the open, it must have been cataclysmic. Soldiers joked about artilleryman’s ear, but they were kidding on the square.
    When the machine gun kept firing, Pound swore. A 2.4-inch HE shell just didn’t carry a big enough bursting charge to be very effective. He’d seen that in Pittsburgh, and he was seeing it again in among the trees here. “Give me another round,” he told Cecil Bergman.
    “You got it, Sarge.” The loader slammed the shell home.
    An instant before Pound fired, Don Griffiths groaned. Pound didn’t let himself pay attention till the second HE round was on the way. He saw the Confederate machine gun fly one way and a gunner, or some of a gunner, fly another. But he had no time to exult; Griffiths was slumping down into the turret.
    “How bad is it, sir?” Pound asked, swearing at himself—if he’d knocked out the gun first try, the lieutenant might not have got hit.
    “Arm,” Griffiths answered through clenched teeth. He had to be biting down hard on a scream. Sure as hell, his left sleeve was bloody, and blood dripped from his hand down onto the shell casings on the fighting compartment floor.
    “Can you wiggle your fingers?” Pound asked. Griffiths tried, but gasped and swore and shook his head. He’d had a bone shattered in there, then—maybe more than one. Pound took a morphine syrette from the wound pouch on his belt, stuck it into Griffiths’ thigh, and pushed home the plunger. Then he said, “Let’s bandage you up.”
    He had to cut away the sleeve to get at the wound. He dusted it with sulfa powder and packed it with gauze. As soon as he could, he’d get Griffiths out of the barrel and send him to the rear with some corpsmen.
    “You’ve got yourself command here whether you want it or not.” The lieutenant sounded eerily calm, which meant the morphine was taking hold.
    “Even if I did want it, sir, I wouldn’t want it like this,” Pound said, which was true. “You’ll be back soon.” He hoped that was true.
    He stuck his own head out of the cupola. With the machine gun gone, all he had to worry about were ordinary Confederate infantrymen and maybe snipers in the trees. He looked around. Sometimes luck was with you, though he wished it would have shown up a little sooner. But he did see a couple of corpsmen with Red Crosses on smocks and armbands and helmets. He waved to them.
    “What’s up?” one of them yelled.
    Before Pound could answer, a bullet cracked past. He ducked. He knew it was a useless reflex, which didn’t mean he could help himself. He hoped it was a random round. If it wasn’t, the medics would have two casualties to deal with.
Unless, of course, I get killed outright,
he thought cheerily.
    “Got a wounded officer. Forearm—broken bones,” he called after he straightened up.
    “All right—we’ll take care of him,” the corpsman said. “Can you swing sideways so the barrel covers him while you get him out of the hatch?”
    Pound liked that idea about as much as he liked a root canal. Expose the barrel’s thin side armor to whatever guns the goons in butternut had up ahead? But the