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“If we don’t have an army to fight them . . .”
“Perhaps we do not need one. It seems to me we already have all we need. Wasn’t it Napoleon who said that when two opposing armies are in close proximity, a dogfight will start a battle?”
White is a popular color in West Virginia. I am told one of the best eateries in Charleston is a floating, white-painted bar and restaurant called the Float.
It was popular with both the Moondaggers and Tarheel forces. Even when they were in civilian clothes, it was easy to tell the difference between the forces by their facial hair. The Moondaggers wore full beards for the most part; the Tarheels elaborate sideburns and mustaches.
Word had gone around that there had been a fight at the Float a few nights ago, when the Moondaggers, who maintained all-male forces, accosted a pair of female Tarheel helicopter pilots.
“Which of the two is the more volatile?”
“Hard to say. Those men from the Carolinas will get into a brawl quickly enough, but the Moondaggers will kill at the drop of a hat.”
“Then it’s the Moondaggers.”
Glassy went into the bar to try to buy cigarettes, and she came out with a Tarheel beret hidden up her skirt.
We found one of their trucks parked outside the bar, and Glassy kept watch while Mancrete and I went to work on it. By the time we’d finished, it looked like it had passed through a robotic digestive system. We left a Tarheel beret sitting on the dashboard.
Two Moondaggers appeared, one helping the other, who was ill. I decided that a refreshing swim in the Kanawha River was in order.
MYTHIC ARMY
The destruction the Moondaggers and the Tarheel Rangers inflicted on each other was minor but very real. The local commanders knew what was happening and did their best to dial down the emotions of their men.
Dealing with the reality on the ground in the Coal Country was one matter; reporting to their respective superiors in the Ordnance and the Control was another. They might be blamed, or worse, they might be ordered to start carrying out full-scale warfare against their opposite numbers.* They explained the murders and losses as being the work of guerillas.
Operations analysts on both sides worked the numbers and arrived at a guerilla army close to five-thousand strong. My best estimate of our numbers in the field at that point was between two hundred and seven hundred.
The other freeholds had their own agents in both headquarters, so they saw the same assessments the Kurian Order compiled.
The Dreadcoats deserved every line of their mistaken reputation. For their numbers, they did damage beyond anything you could expect that a squad-sized (later a company) team short of a mob of Southern Command’s Bears might accomplish.
We had more volunteers than we could handle. We armed the best ones with captured weapons and sent them to the mountains to be trained by clans like the MacTierneys; the others we asked only to pass information about enemy strength, movement, and intentions.
With our ranks swelled with volunteers from the hill people and town, we forced the members of the Kurian Order back into their garrisons. We also received a few deserters into our ranks; even a Moondagger shaved off his beard and joined us. Some left as quietly as they came, after a few weeks of rough living on poor food. As I recall, the Moondagger stuck, and became quite the connoisseur of MacTierney White Whiskey.
We didn’t have the ability to train them. All we could do was pair the new recruits with a veteran and hope that the elder could keep the younger alive until he learned how to shoot from cover and find food on the march.
Still, there were many deaths. The Tarheel Rangers knew how to fight guerillas; they spotted us with their aircraft, pummeled us with light artillery, then brought in helicopters full of men to mop us up. All we could do was try to bring down a helicopter here and there with machine guns.
One thing was certain. Only a trickle of coal was leaving this section of mountains, mostly by truck. Now that we had some real explosives, we were bringing train traffic out of the mines to a standstill. They simply didn’t have enough manpower to guard the lines and fix what we wrecked.
We were always very careful with enemy bodies. We arranged them, neatly, covered at roadsides of major thoroughfares with whatever identification and documentation we could find intact.
Our own dead were treated with a little less reverence. I passed through towns where they were hanging from traffic lights at the main intersection. Sometimes they weren’t even our own dead. The Moondaggers would lose six and then grab the first eighteen Coal Country men they could find and execute them, using the ratio that one Moondagger equaled three ordinary men.
We baited a trap for the Moondaggers, expecting just such a raid. We had some of our new men pepper a Moondagger patrol—a lucky shot killed one of theirs.
The nearest village was a five-building-wide spot in the road that didn’t even qualify for a community center, just a roadside market with an emergency reserve of twenty gallons of gas and twenty gallons of diesel under lock and key.
The Moondaggers liked to travel in groups of SUVs, roaring up the little roads in fast-moving, almost bumper-to-bumper convoys. Sometimes they would drive two or three abreast when they could, filling the road with radiator grille and tire. The sight was as terrifying as a charge of Cossacks with drawn sabers, I’m here to tell.
• • •
We did our best to wreak havoc in the wake of the Moondaggers pursuing the Southern Command forces over the mountains and into Kentucky.
I fear we made things difficult for the legworm clans, because we heard from civilians that the Moondaggers were outraged by our little pokes and jabs and blamed the Kentuckians for them. The standard Moondagger reprisal was three deaths for every one inflicted, and though we were inflicting the deaths, the Kentuckians were paying for our actions.
