Northern Blood Read online

  Northern Blood

  Northern Wolf Series

  Book Three

  Daniel Greene

  Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Greene

  Cover Design by Tim Barber

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Characters are fictional and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is completely coincidental. All names, organizations, places and entities therein are fictional or have been fictionalized, and in no way reflect reality. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

  Sign up for Daniel’s spam-free newsletter, The Greene Army, and receive special offers and updates on his new releases. Click here to sign up.

  For my Mother - for showing us that hard work, dedication, and determination are the path to success, and that no one, not even the strongest among us, makes it alone. Thank you for the unending support.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Historical and Personal Note

  Extras

  About the Author

  Books by Daniel Greene

  Chapter One

  April 29, 1864

  Libby Prison, Richmond, Virginia

  “Roll ‘em!” Major Olmsted called out in the stinking night air.

  With heavy sighs and disrupted snores, the imprisoned Union officers began the communal shift in sleeping positions like a herd of entrapped cattle.

  The rotation of bodies was a labored one. The men would have to more or less all roll over at the same time, but it resembled more an old man tossing in his bed by the moonlight, achy and slow, trying to steal comfort wherever possible. Every man was wedged into the others like an enormous drawer filled with spoons all facing the same way, almost two hundred men moving at once.

  Rats squeaked in the corners, sounding like tittering children, and a man awoke from a nightmare with a call for his mother. One man coughed and another cursed the men nearby for the stench.

  Libby Prison was never meant to hold men. Early in the war, the Confederate government had a surplus of prisoners and nowhere to put them so they modified a chandlery on the embankments of the James River to store them. But there was a problem. Even if they wanted to stock the warehouse with them, it was never meant to keep this many.

  The stink of two hundred unwashed men always seemed to hang in the air longer when they all moved at once; it smelled as if they lived inside an overflowing latrine and this was only one of six giant rooms.

  Wolf tried to adjust onto his shoulder then scratched at his snarled beard with his index finger to avoid using his thumb. The weight of an arm draped over him from behind, stinging and rubbing the raw skin on his back, making him cringe.

  “Back off, Roberts.” He jerked his shoulder, and his friend’s hand fell around Wolf’s waist. He ignored it. This was the way they all slept every night. Together. In the winter, the only way to stay warm was by soaking in the scant body heat from the man beside you.

  The back of the head in front of him was snowy white in the darkness. With a slap of his cheeks, the officer ahead of Wolf passed gas in his direction, forcing him to gulp down the fetid odor with a grit of his teeth and a wrinkle of his nose.

  Using the remaining meat of his arm as a makeshift pillow, he tried to get comfortable. It was nearly impossible to sleep on his back with the freshly branded skin.

  Although summer had come for Richmond, the nights were still cool despite the crowded men. Cold air would flow through the open windows in gusting breezes. It was a bittersweet feeling in the night: on one hand, it wiped away the stench but on the other chilled the men clothed in tatters. Wolf tightened his colonel’s coat around his body, snuggling into the collar as much to escape Reynolds’s flatulence as the cold.

  Reynolds began to snore to the tune of an overworked sawmill. Despite the noise, Wolf found himself dozing back off into a dusky sleep until Major Olmsted was giving the call of reveille.

  The thickly bearded major stood near a far wall next to the willowy Lieutenant Elm. The young Lieutenant from the 1st Maine cleared his throat, spit, and then began singing the bugle call in a loud baritone voice. “Ba-ba-bup-ba-da-bup-bup,bup-ba-da-bup-bup,bup-ba-da-bup-bup-baa-ba.” They begrudgingly awakened as he continued to sing.

  Discipline, duties, and routine kept the captured Union officers sane during their confinement to the second floor of the prison that they never could leave even for a breath of fresh air. A man didn’t know the depth of his need for the outdoors until he was deprived of it. Then stick him in an overcrowded room with one latrine and no way out and watch him squirm as it slowly maddens him.

  Inch by inch the confinement eats away at his soul until nothing remains but a husk of a man. Then one day he voluntarily steps out in front of one of the open windows, providing the bored as hell Confederate guards below some target practice. Wolf had seen it done.

  A broken captain from the 34th Indiana just stood one day, basking in the fishy breeze from the James River docks. The sunlight shone on his face, making him glow, and despite the calls from his comrades to return to the safety of the interior, he basked in it.

  His friends called to him. “Please, Joseph, come back.”

  “They’ll do it, Joe. Don’t give the rebs the satisfaction.”

  Wolf and Roberts could only watch. They knew the captain ushered in his own death at the hand of a rebel sharpshooter who would end in it all with lead and smoke. The men around him ducked, covering their heads, calling to him to lay down.

  It only took one shot. The crack of a rifled musket boomed below, echoing off the walls of the warehouses. The bullet knocked the captain’s head backward. He collapsed almost peacefully, a Minié ball rattling the insides of his skull.

  Today, the men went about their morning routines. Those that had toothbrushes, a most lucrative luxury of only the luckiest, brushed their teeth. Others went to prepare food. Clusters of men sat in semicircles trading smudged newspapers that had already been read by hundreds of eager officers, grasping for any bit of information they could find.

  A few played cards and others went about searching for rats to exterminate, or if the rodents were substantial enough, add them to whatever rations were available for the day.

  Furniture was sparse and cherished among the men. The few stools and tables they used had been crafted from old crates.

  Roberts scratched his head, picking at an infestation of lice that had taken residence upon his scalp. With no good way to bathe, th
e lice colonized the filthy prisoners with impunity. “How’d you sleep?”

  “About as good as you could expect in this hellhole.”

  “I didn’t sleep bad. Had a dream about Rosie last night.” A roguish grin crossed Roberts’s boyish cheeks.

  “Not while you held me. Tell me it was when you were turned to the other side.”

  Roberts’s grin didn’t subside. “We’re pals, right? Ain’t no shame in it.”

  Wolf sighed, pushing himself to his feet. He shook his arms, trying to loosen the stiffness from them. “Better than Reynolds’s farts.” He locked hands with Roberts and helped him upright.

  They weaved through the too-sick-and-tired-to-stand Union officers. The longer they’d been imprisoned, the worse off the captives were. Over seven weeks of quarter rations combined with his battered body and Wolf felt it too. He felt beaten. Not defeated, but ground down like a knife sharpened too many times. Colonel Dahlgren’s slender coat was starting to fit better by the day over Wolf’s once thick shoulders.

  Wolf and Roberts waded through the sea of dirty blue prisoners toward a group of twenty waiting near the locked prison door. The sun hadn’t crept through the windows casting the prisoners in dim shadows. They were all part of the first shift of prisoners to cook meals for their room and were known simply as the “mess squad.”

  Lieutenant Colonel James Sanderson was in charge of the kitchen operations for the entire prison and had organized the men into mess squads. Each squad was entrusted with the rations for their room. However, that didn’t matter much when they had to scrape together whatever they could.

  A winding crank was winched on the other side of the door. After the escape almost three months ago, a retractable staircase had been installed, thus preventing the prisoners from leaving the upper floors at night. With a loud thump, the stairs settled on the floor below.

  Heavy footsteps echoed upwards like a man nailing boards with the heel of his boot. The door vibrated beneath a meaty fist. “Get back,” Wolf said quietly. The mess squad took an uneasy rearward step. If they crowded the door too close, they risked a beating.

  The jangle of keys sounded on the other side. Then the soft splat of tobacco juice hit the floorboards. The door jerked open. If a man was too close, it would have bopped his skull.

  A mountainous tangle-bearded man stuck his head through the doorway. “Get back, rats. Get back.” His yellow-toothed smile was as cruel as he was large. The guard opened the door wide, stepping inside. A thick hand held a long cudgel, and he tapped it in his other palm. He wore a soiled gray private’s infantry jacket. It was open, revealing a brown shirt that masked its stains. Matted chest hair like a full-grown grizzly bear, crept from underneath. His trousers were brown, and a long dagger dangled from his belt.

  The dagger was a heavy double-sided blade. Wolf recognized it instantly because it had once been his. He’d stolen it from a captain in Cobb’s Legion. In turn it was stolen from Wolf during his capture. Now the cruel guard the prisoners only knew as Griff carried the fine weapon.

  “Smells like a dung heap fell into a sewer,” Griff said. His dark eyes held a crude intelligence. He knew enough to vary his abuse of the men.

  “Stinkin’ rats.” He was joined by another hulking guard. His eyes held a diminished glow of even less intellect than his partner, but Hank was equally as ruthless and in every way Griff’s equal in size and strength. Both men were large enough to make Wolf question his ability to take them down one on one. Yet he would relish a go with either of the guards.

  “Nice and slow, stinkies,” Hank said, waving them by with his baton.

  The Union prisoner mess squad filed past the men one at a time. Hank touched each man with his club. It was a slight tap, more of a warning than anything else. Made the men feel like children in the schoolhouse. He supposed that was the point, ultimate emasculating control.

  Roberts walked past with his head hunched and Wolf hurriedly followed, trying to not be noticed. The stick slapped Wolf’s chest, pressing in the center and halting him.

  “I see you, Colonel.” Hank licked his blubbery lips. “You got something tricky in you.” He cocked his head to the side.

  Griff leaned in on Wolf’s other side. His breath smelled like sour beer mixed with an old spittoon that hadn’t been cleaned in twelve years. “No ideas out of you.” His stick shifted beneath Wolf’s chin, lifting it roughly upward. “You healed up pretty nice. Be a shame if we had to teach you another lesson.”

  “I ain’t looking for trouble,” Wolf grunted.

  “No one looks for it,” Griff said. “But somehow we find it.” He shoved Wolf with a fist and banged him into the stairwell, but he managed to keep on his feet. His bad leg struggled under the assault. The lieutenant behind him took a step back and all of the officers cast their eyes down.

  Wolf stood back up straight, keeping his eyes forward.

  “I always remember a face. Especially an ugly one like yours,” Griff said. “Let me see your hands.”

  Praying to God the man didn’t take a swing at them, Wolf held out his hands in front of his chest. The nails atop his thumbs were cracked and yellow, having been drilled to relieve the pressure from where they’d been crushed by Captain Marshall Payne during his interrogation. Over the past seven weeks, they’d mostly healed, his itchy and broken fingers shrinking back down to a more normal if still swollen size.

  “How’s them thumbs?”

  Wolf’s hands shook a bit.

  Griff rested his stick along the tops of Wolf’s hands, letting him bear its weight. “Maybe Payne will come back? Ask a few more questions.” He watched Wolf from the side, judging the fear and tension in his demeanor. He leaned closer to his ear, calmly speaking like he would to a calf before putting him under the knife. “Or maybe I can ask a few questions, huh? How would that be?”

  “I don’t got nothing to say.”

  Griff stood back. “I bet you don’t. Nothing worth a damn.” Wielding his stick, he pushed Wolf off balance again. “Get on out of here, you ugly son of a bitch.”

  Wolf propped himself along the stairwell down the steps. The officers ahead of him had already rounded the corner to the kitchen.

  “Well, he ain’t running nowhere,” Hank said with a laugh.

  Wolf ignored his captors, hurrying before they started after him again. To be beaten in the morning was rare but not unheard of. He wouldn’t put it past the guards to go after a man. Nothing was off limits under the savage rule of the prison’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Erasmus Ross. In fact, all of it seemed condoned if not encouraged.

  Near the bottom of the stairs stood another couple of guards. Gray uniformed with white and blue shirts underneath, each wore a wide-brimmed hat. One smoked a cigar; the other had a huge bulge in his lower lip. The door to the city street hung open behind them, mocking Wolf’s imprisonment.

  A bird chirped. Men called out to one another. Horse-drawn carts clopped by. A group of slaves sang as they unloaded cargo on the docks. The guards were so confident that the prisoners wouldn’t run, they left the door open to the outside.

  Across the street sat the barracks for the other guards not on duty. Smoke drifted from campfires. Still more guards rested near street corners waiting for a captive to make an appearance by a window.

  Wolf turned the corner passing more guards at desks, an area for sick prisoners, a few offices for the Confederate officers, and a communal kitchen.

  As the first mess squad to enter the kitchen, the men lit fires in the four stoves. A box of daily rations was resting atop a stove and filled with bags of cornmeal and flour and maybe a sweet potato hidden in there. No meat. The meat rations had stopped before Wolf and Roberts had been captured.

  The other officers were already starting the process of mixing the meal with water and baking dense flat breads.

  Being in the kitchen while they cooked the bread was its own special type of torture. Every man had no choice but to indulge in the delicious smell wh
ile it became food for the others. It was a living nightmare of hunger-driven fantasies. The heat from the stoves was welcome now, but the other officers made sure to remind them that in the summer they would suffer.

  Wolf and Roberts were at the end of the line, having been deemed too new to properly respect the actual cooking. As the bread was removed and stacked, dirty pots and pans came their way. They would scrub the scalding pans and rotate them back over for use or prep them for the next group, restocking them atop the stoves.

  Roberts took charred and burnt bread, scraping the bottom of each pan with his blackened fingernails for a little extra to eat. Wolf did the same but was forced to scrub the pans with his knuckles to avoid using his damaged thumbs. The action left his knuckles chafed and raw.

  Sanderson stuck his head inside the kitchen. His gray beard was streaked with black and he had cold brown eyes. “Next shift is a’clamoring up there. Are you men almost finished?”

  “Yes, sir,” Captain Harold Reynolds said. Their mess squad leader was the same man who had helped treat Wolf after his interrogation. The white-haired surgeon from the 5th Iowa Volunteer Infantry Regiment bent over, eyeing inside a stove. “Last one’s just finishing.”

  “Very good. We shouldn’t keep the men waiting. A hungry man is a desperate man.”

  “Aren’t they,” came a voice from the hall. The men peered over their shoulders. They knew that shrewd voice anywhere.

  Sanderson bowed his head speaking in deference. “Lieutenant Ross, sir.”

  A short man in a gray uniform and glasses poked his head inside the kitchen with leisure. His eyes quickly counted the men, taking stock of their faces. He was the commanding officer and a former clerk of the prison. He was as cruel as he was calculating, always counting the prisoners. “I trust that today’s rations will be enough?” he asked of Sanderson. Ross eyed him, almost daring him to say the truth about its inadequacies.