FRANK AND CROCKETT UNCOVERED their heads and looked at each other. The explosion had jolted the mountain itself, sending a hard quiver through the ground. The sound was still echoing across the ridges, inside their own skulls. For the first time in hours, no shots could be heard. As if a truce had been called. Even the insects were quiet. Silence, like awe, filled the valleys.
“That wasn’t no diney-mite,” said Crock. They both knew the heavy whump of an underground blast—the kind so common in the mines. But this was something else. Sharper, unmuffled, and above ground. “Sounded like France, what it sounded like.”
Frank looked up through the broken canopy. They were high on the spur of a ridge and the sun was starting to get low, the shadows growing long. He looked back at Crockett. “Artillery shell?”
“Didn’t sound like no howitzer to me.”
“Air bomb?”
The big Marine shook his head. He’d jested the leaflets could be just the start of what might befall them—but the reality was harder to fathom. “Cain’t be. Bombs, on American soil?” He touched the TEUFELSHUND tattoo on his chest and jutted his chin toward the far side of the mountain. “They wouldn’t dare, not even them sons of bitches. Hell, this is America.”
He said the word with tenderness, like the name of a daughter or lover or wife. Someone he loved unconditionally. A land for which he’d killed and nearly died in the war—who knew how many times.
Frank looked down at the scars along his own arms, the marks of heels and wrenches and tire irons. Even easier to pull a trigger or release a bomb from hundreds of feet away, thousands.
He shook his head. “You ask me, Crock, there’s different Americas. America if you got means or don’t, if you work in a tie or neckerchief, up in the office or down on the killing floor. White or colored, man or woman. Native or not. I reckon there’s Americas they’d drop a bomb on, and ones they wouldn’t even think it.”
“No,” said Crock. He couldn’t seem to swallow it. His face was twisted up.
Frank pointed over the man’s shoulder. “Look.”
A black plume was rising from the base of the mountain, rolling upward. Out of the smoke a biplane emerged, small as a flea, droning toward them.
The calm broke. Gunfire erupted from the mountainside, hundreds of miners trying to hit the machine. The pilot rolled and dived, cutting low across a ridge as high-powers cracked like whips from every side. Then the plane was banking, carving toward them at treetop level, coming straight up Crooked Creek with a second bomb.
Crockett’s eyes widened and he turned toward the men on the steep slope behind them. “Git cover!”
Frank slid down into the crater of an overturned chestnut tree, deep as a foxhole, turning back to realize Crockett hadn’t followed him. The big man was still up there on top of the ridge. He’d gone red with fury, almost purple, gathering up the Gatling gun in both arms and staggering to an exposed point on the spur. Now he was swinging the weapon around on its tripod, cranking the elevation screw, lifting the six barrels toward the airplane flying straight toward him.
Frank yelled at him but nothing came out of his mouth—as if he’d gone hoarse, lost his voice, the very air sucked out of his lungs. But it wasn’t that. The machine was just too loud as it bore down on them.