Drive to the East

X

Too many things were happening all at once for Flora Blackford’s comfort. None of them seemed to be good things, either. The U.S. offensive in Virginia, on which so many hopes had been pinned, was heading nowhere. The new Confederate assault in Ohio, by contrast, was going much better than she wished it were. The Mormons still tied down far too many soldiers in Utah. And the Canadian uprising, from everything she could gather, was a lot more serious than the authorities were willing to admit in the papers or on the wireless.

All in all, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had plenty to do. She would rather it didn’t.

And there were other distractions. Her secretary stuck her head into the inner office and said, “Miss Clemens is here to speak with you, Congresswoman.”

“Thank you.” Flora meant anything but. Some things couldn’t be helped, though. “Send her in.”

In marched the reporter. Ophelia Clemens had to be fifteen years older than Flora, but still looked like someone who took no guff from anybody. There, at least, the two women had something in common. “Hello, Congresswoman. Mind if I smoke?” she said, and had a cigarette going before Flora could say yes or no. That done, she held out the pack. “Care for a coffin nail yourself?”

“No, thanks. I never got the habit,” Flora said, and then, “That’s a Confederate brand, though, isn’t it?”

“You betcha. If you’re gonna go, go first class,” Ophelia Clemens said. Flora didn’t know how to answer that, so she didn’t try. The reporter came straight to the point: “How many soldiers are we going to have to send up to Canada to help the Frenchies keep the lid on?”

“I don’t have a number for that,” Flora said cautiously. “You might do better asking at the War Department.”

“Yeah, and I might not,” Ophelia Clemens said with a scornful toss of the head. “Those people were born lying, and you know it as well as I do.”

Since Flora did, she didn’t bother contradicting the correspondent. “I’m afraid I still don’t have the answer. Even if it’s just one, it’ll be more than we can afford.”

Scritch, scritch. Clemens’ pencil raced across a notebook page. “That’s the truth-and it’s a good quote. How come the Confederates can advance whenever they want to, but we keep dropping the ball?”

“If I knew that, I’d belong on the General Staff, not here,” Flora said. Ophelia Clemens laughed, though she hadn’t been joking. She continued, “The Joint Committee is doing its best to find out.”

“Do you think keeping our generals on a red-hot grill will make them perform better?” the reporter asked.

“I hope we don’t do that,” Flora said.

“I hope you do,” Ophelia Clemens said. “They’d better be more afraid of us than they are of the enemy.” She waited to see if Flora would rise to the barb. When Flora didn’t, she tried another question: “Is our publicity making the Confederates treat their Negroes any different-any better, I should say?”

That, Flora was ready to comment on. “Not one bit,” she said angrily. “They’re as disgraceful as ever, and as proud of it as ever, too.”

The pencil flew over the page. “Too bad,” the correspondent said. “I’ve heard the same thing from other people, but it’s still too damn bad.”

“Nice to know someone thinks so.” Flora held up a hand. “This is off the record.” She waited. Ophelia Clemens nodded. Flora went on, “Too many people on this side of the border just don’t care, or else they say, ‘The damn niggers have it coming to them.’ ”

“Yes, I’ve seen that, too,” Clemens said. “All depends on whose ox is being gored. If the Freedom Party were going after Irishmen or Jews, they’d be squealing like a pig stuck in a fence.” She threw back her head and let out a sudden, startling noise. She knew what a stuck pig sounded like, all right. And then, raising an eyebrow, she added, “No offense.”

Flora had wondered if the older woman remembered she was Jewish. That answered that. She said what she had to say: “None taken.”

“Good. Some people can get stuffy about the strangest things. Where was I?” That last seemed aimed more at herself than at Flora. Flipping pages in the notebook, Ophelia Clemens found what she was looking for. “Oh, yeah. That.” She looked up at Flora. “Have you noticed there’s something funny in the budget?”

“There’s always something funny in the budget,” Flora answered. “We’re in a war. That just makes it funnier than usual.”

Ophelia Clemens sent her an impatient look. “This has to do with funny business in…” She checked her notes again. “In Washington, that’s where. Washington State, I mean. The government is spending money hand over fist out there, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out why.”

“Oh. That.” With those two words, Flora realized she’d admitted to knowing what that was. She hadn’t wanted to, but didn’t see that she had much choice. Sighing, she said, “Miss Clemens, I don’t know all the details about that, but I have been persuaded that keeping it secret is in the best interests of the United States. The less said about it, especially in the newspapers, the better.”

“You’ve been persuaded?” The correspondent raised a gingery eyebrow. “I thought you were hard to persuade about such things.”

“I am. I hope I am, anyway,” Flora said. “This is one of those times, though. Have you spoken with Mr. Roosevelt about this business?”

“No. Should I? Would he tell me anything?” Ophelia Clemens wasn’t writing now.

Flora took that for an encouraging sign. “I don’t know whether he would or not. I’m inclined to doubt it,” she said. “But I think he might have more to say than I would about why you shouldn’t publish.”

“Well, I’ll try him.” Clemens got to her feet. “I’ll try him right now, as a matter of fact.” She sent Flora a wry grin. “But you’ll be on the telephone before I can get over there, won’t you?”

“Yes.” Flora didn’t waste time with denials. “He needs to know. I told you-I do think this is that important.”

“All right. Fair enough, I suppose. Nice chatting with you-turned out more interesting than I figured it would.” With no more farewell than that, Ophelia Clemens swept out of the office.

No sooner had the door closed behind her than Flora was on the telephone to the War Department. Before long, she had the Assistant Secretary of War on the line. “Hello, Flora. To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?” Franklin Roosevelt inquired, jaunty as usual.

“Ophelia Clemens is on her way to see you,” Flora answered without preamble. “Somehow or other, she’s got wind of what’s going on in Washington.”

“Oh, dear. That doesn’t sound so good,” Roosevelt said. “I wonder how it happened.”

“I don’t know. I doubt she’d tell you,” Flora said. “But I thought you ought to know.”

“Thank you. She’s a chip off the old block, all right,” Roosevelt said. Flora made a questioning noise. Roosevelt explained: “Her father was a reporter out in San Francisco for a million years. He had a nasty sense of humor-funny, but nasty-and he spent most of it on the Democrats. If I remember straight, he died not long before the Great War started. Stan Clemens, his name was, or maybe Sam. Stan, I think.”

“You could ask Ophelia when she gets there,” Flora said. “She’s on her way now, and she’s not the kind of person who wastes a lot of time.”

Franklin Roosevelt laughed. “Well, I’m sure you’re right about that. I wonder what sort of cock-and-bull story I’ll have to tell her.”

“She knows at least some of the truth,” Flora warned, remembering how little of the truth she really knew herself. “If what she hears from you doesn’t match what she already knows, that will be worse than if you didn’t tell her anything at all. Think of the headlines.”

“ ‘Boondoggle to end all boondoggles!’ ” Roosevelt seemed to be quoting one. He also seemed to be enjoying himself while he did it. He went on, “Where did that word come from, anyway? It sounds like it ought to be something a Confederate would say.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Flora said. “I don’t know where it’s from, not for sure. I’ve certainly heard it. I don’t think you can live in Philadelphia without hearing it.”

“That’s because so many boondoggles live here,” Roosevelt said cheerfully.

“No doubt.” Flora didn’t sound cheerful, or anything close to it. “Is this project out in Washington another one?”

“If it works, no one will ever say a word about what we spent on it,” the Assistant Secretary of War answered. “And if it doesn’t, nobody will ever stop investigating us. I can’t do anything about it either way except hope it works and do everything I can to help the people who know more about it than I do.”

That sounded less encouraging than Flora wished it did, but was perhaps more honest than the usual glowing promises. She said, “I think you ought to tell Ophelia Clemens as much as you’ve told me”-however much that is-“and swear her to secrecy.”

“If she’ll swear to instead of swearing at.” Roosevelt sounded dubious.

“She may not like the administration. She may not even like the government, no matter who’s in charge,” Flora said. “But I’ll tell you one thing, Franklin: I promise she likes it better than she likes Jake Featherston.”

“Mm, you’ve probably got something there,” Roosevelt admitted. “No-you’ve definitely got something there. I think I’m going to have to call the President before I talk to her, but that’s what I’ll put to him. Before I go, though, I’ve got a question for you.”

“Go ahead. What is it?” Flora said.

“Midterm elections coming up this November. Has the Joint Committee talked about how we’re going to handle the House districts the Confederates are occupying? Thank God neither Senator from Ohio is up for reelection this year.”

“Senator Taft”-who was from Ohio-“has said the same thing,” Flora answered.

Roosevelt laughed. “I’ll bet he has!”

“Right now, the plan is to let the Congressmen in occupied districts hold their seats,” Flora added. “That seems only fair. And it doesn’t hurt that they’re pretty evenly split between Socialists and Democrats. There’s even a Republican.”

“Republicans.” Franklin Roosevelt laughed again, this time on a sour note. “The lukewarm, the politicians who can’t make up their minds one way or the other. No wonder the American people spewed that party out of their mouths.”

The language was from the New Testament, but Flora understood it. She was a Jew, but she was also an American, and the USA, for better or worse-no, for better and worse-was a Christian country. If you lived here, you had to accommodate yourself to that reality.

Of course, the Confederacy was also a Christian country… and what did that say about Christianity? Nothing good, she was sure.

Clarence Potter did not care for Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont. The dislike was plainly mutual. Potter thought FitzBelmont was a pompous stuffed shirt. Not being a mind reader, he didn’t know just what the physics professor thought of him. Probably that he was a military oaf who couldn’t add two and two without counting on his fingers.

That stung, since Potter reckoned himself a cultured man. He’d known a lot of military oafs in his time. To be thought one himself rankled.

His surroundings conspired against him. Instead of bringing Professor FitzBelmont back to Richmond, he, like Mohammed, had gone to the mountain-in his case, to the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Washington University was in Lexington, Virginia, not far from the Virginia Military Institute-what the damnyankees called the Confederate West Point.

War hadn’t come home here. It was something people read about in the newspapers and heard about on the wireless. Every once in a while, airplanes would drone by overhead. But the locals were still talking about a U.S. air raid on VMI the year before. After that calling card, the Yankees hadn’t come back. For Clarence Potter, who’d watched men work on unexploded bombs and who’d spent enough time underground to get little beady eyes like a mole, this was the next best thing to paradise. The streets weren’t full of rubble and broken glass. Artillery didn’t rumble in the distance. The air didn’t stink of smoke-and of death.

The university sat at the top of a sloping meadow at the northwest edge of Lexington. Professor FitzBelmont’s office, in one of the red brick buildings with white porticoes at the heart of the campus, had a fine view of the forested mountains to the west. The professor’s tweeds seemed far more appropriate here than Potter’s butternut uniform.

With such patience as Potter could muster, he said, “I have to understand this business as well as I can, Professor, to be able to give my people in the United States the best possible idea of what to look for.”

“Indeed.” Professor FitzBelmont looked like a maiden aunt called upon to discuss the facts of life with the madam of the local bawdyhouse. He looked just like that, in fact. He might not approve of Clarence Potter the soldier, but he definitely didn’t approve of Clarence Potter the spy.

Potter nodded to himself. He’d seen that before. “Professor, there isn’t a country in the world that can get along without an intelligence service. We spy on the damnyankees, yes, and you can bet your bottom dollar they spy on us, too. If they’re ahead of us in this uranium business, we need to do everything we can to catch up, don’t we?”

“Indeed,” FitzBelmont repeated, even more distaste in his voice than he’d shown the time before.

“Sir, you were the one who brought this to the President’s attention. You must have done that because you’re a patriotic citizen,” Potter said.

“I don’t want those people to beat my country again.” Henderson FitzBelmont packed more scorn into that than most Confederates did into damnyankees. He went on, “If that makes me a patriot, so be it. But if you expect me to jump up on my hind legs and shout, ‘Freedom!’ every other sentence, I fear you will be disappointed in me.”

He was either braver or more naive than Potter had thought-maybe both. The Intelligence officer said, “I don’t do that, either.” FitzBelmont’s eyebrow was eloquently skeptical. Potter continued, “By God, sir, I don’t. My politics have always been Whig, and I did everything I could to keep Jake Featherston from getting elected.” That was not only true, it was a spectacular understatement. He could talk about it, too, because it was common knowledge. Talking about going up to Richmond in 1936 with a pistol in his pocket was a different story. He finished, “I’m also a Confederate patriot, though. For better or worse”-for better and worse-“this is my country.”

Professor FitzBelmont studied him, perhaps seeing the man instead of the uniform this time. “Maybe,” he said at last.

“Maybe isn’t the right answer, Professor,” Clarence Potter said gently. “You can talk to me now, or you can have some less pleasant conversations with some much less pleasant people later on. Your call, either way.”

FitzBelmont didn’t try to misunderstand him. The physics professor did try to get huffy. “This is not the right way to get my cooperation, General. And if I don’t work with you wholeheartedly, how will you go forward?”

Potter’s smile, all sharp teeth, might have been borrowed from a gator. He named four physics profs at universities scattered across the CSA. Henderson V. FitzBelmont looked appalled. Still smiling carnivorously, Potter said, “Give me credit for doing my homework, please. If you were the only fellow in the country who could do this work, we couldn’t compete with the Yankees anyhow, because they have so much more manpower than we do-and that includes trained manpower along with every other kind. You may be important, Professor-you are important-but you’re not indispensable, and you’d better get used to it.”

Plainly, FitzBelmont wanted to be indispensable. How many years had he been the next thing to invisible? A lot, no doubt-who paid attention to a bespectacled physics professor? Well, important would damn well have to do. With a sigh, FitzBelmont said, “Tell me what you already know.”

“There are two kinds of uranium. U-235 will go boom. U-238 won’t, but maybe, if you do things to it, it will turn into something else that will go boom. I don’t quite follow that part. It seems like magic. But anyway, most of the uranium is 238, and it’s going to be harder than hell to separate the 235 out of it.” Potter paused. “How am I doing?”

“You’ll never make a physicist,” Professor FitzBelmont said.

“I don’t want to be a physicist. That’s your job,” Potter said. “I want to know enough to be able to do my job. Tell me what my people need to look for to tell whether the damnyankees are separating 235 from 238, or if they’re doing this other stuff with 238 to make it go boom.”

He’d asked FitzBelmont the same thing when he first walked into the professor’s office. If FitzBelmont had started talking then, he could have saved both of them some time. Potter approved of saving time wherever he could. Some people, though, had to work up to things by easy stages.

Potter had done more homework than he’d shown the physics professor; he believed in keeping a couple of hole cards hidden. All the same, once FitzBelmont did start talking he had a hard time keeping up. Gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion, centrifuges…

Those were complicated enough, but what FitzBelmont called an atomic engine was worse. “Wait a minute,” Potter protested. “You really change the U-238 into another element?”

“That’s right.” FitzBelmont nodded.

“When I went to Yale back before the last war, my chemistry professor told us transmutation was impossible,” Potter said.

“So that’s why you talk the way you do,” Henderson FitzBelmont murmured. He shrugged narrow shoulders and went on, “Your chemistry professor was right, in a way. You can’t transmute elements chemically. Chemistry only has to do with the electrons around the nucleus. Change the nucleus, though, and you change the atom. And nuclear processes are much more energetic than chemical ones.”

“Do you have any idea how long it will take us or the Yankees to get the 235 for a bomb or to get one of your atomic engines going?” Potter asked. “Can we do it in this war? Can they?”

“Turning theory into engineering is never simple,” FitzBelmont said. “The researchers in the USA must think they can do it fast, or they wouldn’t be putting so much effort into it. And who knows where the Germans are? They were the ones who discovered uranium fission in the first place, after all.”

“Are England and France working on this stuff, too?” Potter asked.

“I’d be amazed if they weren’t. They have some talented people-more than we do, probably.” The parenthetical phrase, while true, plainly made Professor FitzBelmont unhappy. It made Clarence Potter unhappy, too. It was true in more areas than nuclear physics. The Confederacy’s biggest problem had always been doing all the things it needed to do with the number of white men it had to do them. Doing all of them had proved beyond its ability in the Great War. Potter had to hope it wouldn’t this time around.

That one of the things the CSA’s whites had to do was hold down the country’s blacks made things no easier. The Freedom Party’s determination to settle that mess once and for all helped justify its rule in Potter’s eyes. If whites didn’t have to worry about niggers, they could get on with the serious business of building the country they should have had from the beginning.

Incorporating blacks into the pool of trained manpower would also have reduced the drain on whites and on the CSA generally, but it never once crossed Clarence Potter’s mind-or those of any other whites in the Confederate States. They’d experimented with colored soldiers in the Great War… and some of those men, who’d learned what fighting was about, remained in arms against the CSA even now. No one in authority would make that mistake again.

Potter pulled his thoughts back to the business at hand. “You don’t know for a fact what the British and French are up to?”

“I’m afraid not.” FitzBelmont shook his head. “Whatever it is, they’ll be keeping it secret, too.”

“I suppose so.” Potter hesitated, then asked, “Are they likely to be ahead of us? If we get hold of them about it, will they be able to give us information that would help us move faster?”

“It’s possible, certainly. I don’t know how probable it is.”

“Have to find out.” Potter wrote himself a note. He wondered whether the British and French would help the Confederacy. They’d always looked on the CSA as a poor relation, a tool to keep the United States weak but never more than a local power. But if the Confederate States had this superbomb, they wouldn’t be a local power anymore. “One more question, Professor: do you think the Germans are helping the United States?”

Henderson V. FitzBelmont looked at him over the tops of those gold-framed spectacles. “You are the Intelligence officer, General. Surely you would know better than I.”

So there, Potter thought. The truth was, he had no idea. He didn’t think anyone in the CSA did. You couldn’t find an answer if you didn’t know you should be asking the question.

Glancing at his watch, FitzBelmont said, “Is there anything else? I have to go to class in a few minutes. Some of the people I’m teaching will probably be working with me when we start real work on this-if we do.”

“Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that, Professor,” Potter said. “If the damnyankees are going full speed ahead on this, we will be, too. We can’t afford not to, can we?” He imagined superbombs blowing Richmond and Atlanta and New Orleans off the map. Then he imagined them coming down on Philadelphia and New York City and Boston instead. He liked that much better.

Cleveland was a mess. Tom Colleton had been sure it would be a mess before his regiment got into the city. Built-up terrain was bad for barrels-too many places to ambush them. Machine-gun nests cut into the firepower edge his men had over their U.S. opponents. This was Great War fighting: block to block and house to house. It wasn’t the way the Confederates had wanted to fight this war.

Sometimes, though, you had no choice. Leaving Cleveland and its harbor untaken would have asked for worse trouble than slugging it out in the wreckage. A U.S. landing and a thrust south from the city would have played merry hell with supply lines. Meanwhile, though, a lot of good men were dying.

The only good news was that the damnyankees didn’t have as many men in the city as they might have. They’d weakened their defenses to put as much as they could into Virginia, and not all the men who’d gone were back. That let the Confederates keep pushing forward despite casualties. A lot of the big steel mills and refineries on the Flats by the lake, structures that could have turned into formidable fortresses, had already fallen. The Confederate advance had touched the Cuyahoga in a couple of places, but the men in butternut didn’t yet own bridgeheads on the east bank of the river.

Above the city, Confederate Hound Dogs and U.S. Wright fighters wrestled in the sky. When the Hound Dogs had the edge, Mule dive bombers screamed down to pound U.S. ground positions. When the Wrights gained the upper hand, they shot down the Asskickers before the bombers could deliver the goods.

Right now, the Confederates were on top in the air war. Maybe C.S. bombers had hit airstrips farther east, so U.S. fighters had trouble getting off the ground. Whatever the reason, Asskickers smashed U.S. positions that even barrels couldn’t take out. Antiaircraft fire was heavy, but antiaircraft fire was only a nuisance. Fighters were a Mule pilot’s great fear.

All the bridges over the Cuyahoga were down. Tom Colleton wondered if any bridges in the USA and the CSA didn’t have demolition charges, ready to go up at a moment’s notice. He wouldn’t have bet on it.

“Sir!” A runner came back from the line, a couple of hundred yards ahead. “Sir, looks like the damnyankees are pulling back. That machine gun that was givin’ us hell-it ain’t there no more.”

“No?” Tom’s suspicions roused before his eagerness. That was natural in anyone who’d seen more than a little war. “All right,” he said at last. “Send a patrol forward. Only a patrol, you hear me? They’re liable to be setting up to bushwhack us if we get too happy.”

“Yes, sir. Send a patrol forward.” The soldier started forward himself. He ran hunched over, dodging from cover to cover. Any runner who lasted more than twenty minutes learned that gait. Odds were it just put off the inevitable. Few runners were likely to last out the war.

Tom waited. He ordered the regimental reserve up closer to the front. If the U.S. soldiers truly had retreated, he wanted to be in position to take advantage of it. If they hadn’t… Well, the patrol would find out if they hadn’t.

The runner came back again. “Sir, they’re really gone,” he reported. “We’re moving up till we bump into ’em again.”

“Good. That’s good,” Tom said. His company commanders were up to snuff. They could see what needed doing without his telling them. He would have been angry if they’d waited for orders before advancing. He turned to his wireless man. “Get back to Division-let ’em know we’re up in square Blue-7.”

“Blue-7. Yes, sir,” the wireless man answered. When the next artillery duel started, Tom didn’t want his own side’s shells coming down on his men’s heads. Some would anyway-some always did. But there wouldn’t be so many if the gunners knew where his soldiers were.

Corpsmen wearing white smocks with the Red Cross on chest and back and helmets with the emblem painted in a white circle carried the wounded back to aid stations. “You’ll be fine,” Tom said more than once, and always hoped he wasn’t lying.

One of the injured men wore green-gray, not butternut. The corpsmen had no doubt risked their lives to bring in the Yankee. Nobody was supposed to shoot at them, but accidents-and artillery, which didn’t discriminate-happened. To be fair, U.S. medics did the same for wounded Confederates. The Geneva Convention was worth something, anyhow.

Geneva Convention or not, the smell of death filled Tom Colleton’s nostrils. So did the other stenches of war: cordite and shit and blood and fear. Just getting a whiff of that sharp, sour tang made him want to be afraid, too. It struck at an animal level, far below conscious thought.

Confederate artillery might have spared his men, but gunners in green-gray didn’t. Some of the shells gurgled as they flew through the air. Some of the bursts sounded… odd. Colleton swore. He knew what that meant. He’d known since 1915. “Gas!” he shouted, and yanked his mask out of the pouch on his belt. He pulled it on and made sure it fit snugly. “Gas!” he yelled again. This time, the mask muffled the word.

Others, though, were also taking up the cry. Somebody was beating on an empty shell casing with a wrench. The clatter penetrated the din of combat better than most other noises.

It was a hot, sticky summer day in Cleveland. It was, in fact, as hot and sticky as it ever got down in St. Matthews, South Carolina. The damnyankees had nastier winters than the Confederacy ever got, but their summers were no milder. As far as he could see, that meant they got the worst of both worlds.

Even without the mask, he didn’t feel as if he were getting enough air. With it, he might as well have been trying to breathe underwater. One of the gases the Yankees used could kill if a drop of it got on your skin. People were issued rubberized suits to protect them from the menace. Tom had never ordered his men to wear those suits. He didn’t know anybody who had. Especially in this weather, moving around in them steamed you in your own juices. Soldiers preferred risking the gas to dying of heat exhaustion, which more than a few of them had done.

He swore. The mask muffled the curses, too. Trust the high foreheads to come up with protection that made danger seem welcome by comparison. If that wasn’t a metaphor for the futility of war in general…

But this war in particular had better not be futile, not for the CSA. “Tell Division we need counterbattery fire, and we need it ten minutes ago!” he shouted to the wireless operator.

For a wonder, the Confederate guns woke up in short order. Some of what they threw at the Yankees was gas, too. Even when the shells flew by far overhead, you could hear the stuff sloshing inside them. Tom laughed. If anything was worse than being an infantryman under gas attack, it was trying to jerk shells with a gas mask on. Serves you right, you bastards, he thought savagely. See how you like it.

The U.S. bombardment slackened but didn’t stop. Then a flight of Mules swooped down on the Yankee gun positions. One of the Asskickers crashed in flames. Maybe it got hit; maybe the pilot didn’t pull out of his dive soon enough. What difference did it make, one way or the other? But the dive bombers did a better job of silencing the artillery than counterbattery fire had.

Some Confederate barrels clattered and crunched up to the front. Fighting inside one of them was no picnic in weather like this, either, especially when they needed to stay buttoned up tight against gas. But their guns blasted the U.S. soldiers out of the positions to which they’d withdrawn.

“Come on!” Tom shouted, running forward. “We can get to the river. Maybe we can even get over the river.” Before long, he caught up with the barrels, and then ran past them. Soldiers turned to stare at him. In their pig-snouted, portholed masks, they looked like the Martians in that Yankee film that had scared the pants off everybody a few years before the war. But he knew the magic words that would get them moving: “Follow me!”

That spell never failed. Men might balk at going forward alone, but they would go after an officer. Tom’s heart thudded in his chest. He hoped he didn’t fall over dead leading from the front. Middle-aged officers took that chance when they tried to lead young men.

To his relief, the barrels also rumbled forward. Armor and infantry working together were hard to stop. The damnyankees didn’t stop them. Tom whooped. “The river!” he yelled. There was the muddy Cuyahoga, winding its way north and west toward Lake Erie. The tail of a crashed fighter stuck up from the water near the far bank.

On that far bank, U.S. troops didn’t seem to know they had trouble. Tom ordered his men not to shoot across the river. He sent an urgent request back to Division for engineers with rubber boats. If they could cross in a hurry, set up a bridgehead on the far bank… Maybe they’d get slaughtered. Troops that tried to do too much too fast sometimes did. But maybe they’d shake the Yankees loose from the river line, too.

For a wonder, the engineers showed up in less than an hour. Soldiers piled into the boats as fast as the engineers could inflate them. The Confederates paddled like men possessed. But their foes didn’t stay bemused long enough. Heavy machine-gun fire from the east bank of the river turned them back with heavy losses.

C.S. barrels waddled forward and shelled the machine-gun nests. “Let’s try it again!” Tom shouted. This time, he scrambled into one of the black rubber boats himself. He’d get over the Cuyahoga or he’d probably die in it. He grabbed a paddle and thrust it into the muddy water.

The machine guns stayed quiet. The barrels had done their job, then. Rifle fire from the far bank was galling, but no worse than galling. Confederate machine guns, some on the barrels and others served by infantrymen, made the damnyankee riflemen keep their heads down.

A bullet cracked past Tom. When you heard that crack, the round came too damn close. He automatically ducked, not that it would have done him any good. Nobody thought anything less of him for ducking. Only a handful of nerveless people lacked that reflex.

Here came the far bank. “Let’s go!” Tom yelled, and paddled harder than ever. As soon as the rubber boat grounded on the mud, he leaped out and ran for the closest wreckage. He threw a grenade into what looked like the mouth of a cave in case any U.S. soldiers lurked there, then dove behind a burned-out truck carcass. “Stay down!” he called to his men. “If they want you, make ’em pay for you!”

More Confederates got over the Cuyahoga. U.S. soldiers rushed up to try to wipe out the bridgehead before it got established. A mortar bomb whispered down much closer to Tom than he would have liked. Fragments of hot, jagged steel snarled through the air. Not far away, somebody shrieked-some of those fragments had snarled through flesh instead.

Asskickers that stooped on the attacking men in green-gray might have been angels in camouflage paint. Tom Colleton yelled exultantly at the chance to get killed farther east in Ohio than other Confederates had before him.

Sergeant Michael Pound approved of the way Lieutenant Bryce Poffenberger’s combat education was coming. Lieutenant Poffenberger hadn’t gone and killed himself yet. Even more to the point, the barrel commander hadn’t yet gone and killed Sergeant Pound. Pound strongly approved of that.

What he didn’t approve of were the new Confederate barrels. No, that wasn’t quite true. He highly approved of them-as machines. What he didn’t approve of was that the long-snouted monsters had Confederates inside them and not U.S. barrelmen.

“We could have had barrels like that,” he told Lieutenant Poffenberger as they camped somewhere between Akron and Canton. “We could have had them more than ten years ago, but we didn’t want to spend the money.”

Incautiously, Poffenberger said, “And I suppose you were there at the creation.”

“Yes, sir,” Pound said-if the puppy forgot, he had to have his nose rubbed in it. “I was at the Barrel Works at Fort Leavenworth when General Morrell-of course, he wasn’t a general then, just a colonel-designed the prototype for the model we’re using now. If we’d had that then, we would have upgraded long since. I’m sure of it.”

Poffenberger stared at him. Firelight shone from the junior officer’s wide eyes. Not for the first time, he asked the question a lot of people had asked before him: “Why the devil aren’t you an officer, Sergeant?” What he meant by it was, Why the devil aren’t you out of my hair?

“I like what I’m doing, sir,” Pound replied in his best innocent tones. “Things are-looser this way.”

“Hrmp,” Poffenberger said, a noise that might have meant anything at all.

“If you’ll excuse me, sir…” Pound waited to be sure the lieutenant wouldn’t hold him, then walked over to the barrel. The driver, a blond from Dakota named Tor Svenson, was fiddling with the engine, wrench in one hand, flashlight in the other. Any good barrel crew did a lot of its own maintenance; the big, heavy machines operated at-or often past-the limits of engine, transmission, and suspension, and they broke down a lot even when coddled and cosseted. “What’s up, Svenson?”

The driver had been so engaged in what he was doing, he needed a moment to realize somebody was talking to him. When he looked up, a smear of grease darkened one Viking cheekbone. “Oh, it’s you, Sarge,” he said, relief in his voice. Relief that it wasn’t Second Lieutenant Bryce Poffenberger? Pound wouldn’t have been surprised. Svenson went on, “You notice how the beast doesn’t quite pick up fast enough when I goose it?”

“Uh-huh.” Pound nodded. “Figure it’s the carb?”

“Yah, but I can’t find anything wrong with the son of a bitch.”

“Let me have a look.” With a grunt, Pound heaved himself up onto the machine so he could look down on the engine. As a matter of fact, he did look down on it; it wasn’t powerful enough to let the barrel do everything he wished it could. He had a variety of wrenches and other tools in his coverall pockets. Some of them helped him adjust his beloved gun. The others clanked there because any barrelman who’d been at his trade for a while turned into a pretty fair mechanic.

Svenson had already partly disassembled the carburetor. Pound continued the attack with his own wrenches and, soon, a needle-nosed pliers and a jeweler’s screwdriver. Svenson watched with interest, occasionally offering a suggestion. He wasn’t a bad mechanic himself, but recognized Pound was a better one.

“What do you think?” the driver asked in due course.

“Looks to me like the metering rod’s not quite in synch with the throttle valve, so you get that delay when you want high power,” Pound answered. “I like a power jet better-less to go wrong. But we’ve got what we’ve got. Clean everything out there real well and it should be all right.” He crossed his fingers.

“Yah, I’ll do it, Sarge.” Some of the flat vowels of Scandinavia lingered in Svenson’s speech. “Thanks. I’m not sure I would’ve picked that up myself.”

“I expect you would have.” Pound didn’t know whether the driver would have or not, but Svenson worked hard. He was also a man whom a pat on the back helped more than a boot in the backside. He grinned a dirty-faced grin at Pound as he started setting the delicate mechanism to rights.

When they moved out the next morning, the engine was noticeably smoother. Pound reminded himself to say something nice to Svenson when they stopped somewhere. There wasn’t a lot of really open ground as they moved northwest towards Akron. Ohio was densely settled; suburbs spread from towns like tentacles. That meant a barrel commander had to have eyes in the back of his head to keep from walking into trouble.

Lieutenant Poffenberger did his best. He rode head and shoulders out of the cupola so he could look around in all directions. Staying buttoned up and using the periscopes was safer for the commander but much more dangerous for the barrel as a whole.

The open cupola also let a little fresh air into the machine. That was good; it felt hot enough in there to cook meat. At least the engine had a compartment of its own, which it hadn’t in Great War barrels. Pound wiped sweat off his forehead with a coverall sleeve and thought longingly of blizzards.

Foot soldiers trotted alongside the barrels. If they started yelling about gas-or if they started putting on masks, for they might not be heard no matter how they yelled-the machine would have to button up. That would be… even less pleasant than it was already.

For all of Lieutenant Poffenberger’s good intentions, he never saw the C.S. barrel that wrecked the one he commanded. The shot came from the side. Wham! Clang! It was like getting kicked by a mule the size of a Brontosaurus. The barrel stopped at once. The steel bulkhead between the engine compartment and the crew would hold fire at bay-for a little while.

“Holy Jesus!” Poffenberger yipped, his voice high and shrill.

“Sir, we’ve got to get out of here right now,” Michael Pound said urgently.

“Yes,” Poffenberger said. Had he said no, Pound would have clipped him and then got out anyway. Poffenberger started up through the cupola. A burst of machine-gun fire from that same Confederate barrel-or so Pound thought-made his body jerk and twitch. The lieutenant let out a thin, startled bleat and slumped back down into the turret.

He blocked Pound’s escape and the loader’s. Swearing, Pound heaved his body up again so he himself could get at the escape hatch on the far side of the turret. His hands left blood on the steel as he undogged the hatch. “Come on!” he shouted to the man who sat below him and to his left.

“What about the lieutenant?” asked the loader-his name was Jerry Fields.

“He’s gone. Get moving, goddammit! Next one hits right here.” Pound hauled himself out of the turret with his muscular arms. He crouched on the stricken barrel’s chassis, then dropped to the ground. The loader was right behind him. They used the barrel as cover against enemy fire from the flank. Flame and black smoke boiled up from the engine compartment. That would help hide them from Confederates trying to do them in.

A hatch opened at the front of the barrel. Tor Svenson and the bow gunner tumbled out one after the other. Pound shouted and waved to them. That enemy machine gun blew off the top of the bow gunner’s head. Svenson’s dash turned into a limp, and then a crawl.

As Pound crouched to bandage the driver’s leg, another armor-piercing round slammed into the barrel, just as he’d known it would. Ammunition started cooking off inside, the cheerful pop-pop-pop of machine-gun cartridges-like a string of firecrackers on the Fourth of July-mingling with the deeper roars of the shells for the main armament. The explosions blew what was left of Lieutenant Poffenberger’s body off the turret. More flames and smoke burst from the cupola-including a perfect smoke ring, as if Satan were puffing on a stogie.

“How is it, Svenson?” Pound asked.

“Hurts like a bastard,” the driver answered with the eerie matter-of-factness of a just-wounded man.

Pound nodded. The bullet had taken a nasty bite out of Svenson’s calf. Pound gave him a shot of morphine, then yelled for a corpsman.

“Feel naked outside the machine,” the loader said.

“No kidding,” Pound replied with feeling. He felt worse than naked-he felt like a snail yanked out of its shell. The infantrymen around him knew how to be soft-skinned slugs, but he had no idea. The.45 on his belt, a reasonable self-defense weapon for a barrel crewman, suddenly seemed a kid’s water pistol.

The war went on without him. Nobody cared that his barrel had been smashed, or that Lieutenant Poffenberger was nothing but torn, burnt, bleeding meat and the bow gunner’d had his brains blown out. Other U.S. barrels kept grinding towards Akron. For all he knew, some of them were hunting the C.S. machine that had put him out of action. Foot soldiers loped past. None of them stopped for the deshelled snails; as proper slugs, they had worries of their own.

A couple of corpsmen did come up. “All right-we’ll take charge of him,” one of them said. “Looks like you done pretty good.”

“Thanks,” Pound said. He turned to Jerry Fields. “Come on. Let’s get moving.”

“Where to?” the loader asked reasonably.

“Wherever we can find somebody who’ll put us back in another barrel, or at least give us something to do,” Pound answered. “We can’t stay here, that’s for damn sure.”

He couldn’t have been righter about that. The Confederates on the U.S. flank ripped into the advancing men in green-gray. A shell from a C.S. barrel slammed into the turret of a U.S. machine, letting him see what he’d been afraid of a couple of minutes earlier. The high-velocity round almost tore the turret right off the barrel. The men inside never had a chance. They had to be hamburger even before their ammo started cooking off.

“Jesus,” Fields said beside him. “That could’ve been us.”

“Really? That never occurred to me,” Pound said. The loader, for whom sarcasm was a foreign language, gave him a peculiar look.

In the face of concentrated automatic-weapons fire, U.S. foot soldiers went down as if to a reaper. A reaper is right-a grim one, Pound thought. All he knew about infantry combat was to stay low. That didn’t seem to be enough. He pulled out the.45, in case any Confederate soldiers got close enough to make it dangerous. It didn’t seem to be enough, either.

The attack unraveled. It quickly grew obvious the U.S. soldiers weren’t going to make it to Portage Lake, let alone into Akron. Instead of going northwest, they started going southeast as fast as they could. The question became whether they would be able to hang on to Canton, and the answer looked more and more like no.

Pound hated retreats. He wanted to do things to the enemy, not have those nasty bastards on the other side do things to him. But one of the things he didn’t want them to do was kill him. He fired several rounds from the.45. He had no idea whether he hit anybody. With luck, he made some Confederates keep their heads down. Without luck… No, luck was with him, for he got back to Canton-still in U.S. hands-alive and unhurt. And as for what the powers that be came up with next-he’d worry about that later.

Although the newspapers the Confederates let into the Andersonville prison camp boasted of C.S. victories and U.S. disasters, Major Jonathan Moss didn’t throw them away. That was not to say he believed them. Confederates in Cleveland? Ridiculous. Confederates in Canton? Preposterous. Confederates in Youngstown? Absurd.

And the news from more distant lands struck him as even less likely. The Japs threatening to take away the Sandwich Islands? The Russians driving toward Warsaw? He shook his head. Whoever came up with those headlines had a warped sense of humor. Only on the Western Front in Europe, where the papers admitted that Germany still had soldiers fighting, did even the tiniest hint of reality emerge.

Like the rest of the U.S. officers in the camp, though, Moss did hold on to the newspapers he got. Since the Confederates didn’t issue toilet paper and Red Cross packages held only a little, the product of Jake Featherston’s propaganda mills made the best available substitute.

He wasn’t the only one dubious about what sort of leaves Confederate headline writers loaded into their pipes. An indignant-looking captain named Ralph Lahrheim came up to him one breathlessly hot and muggy afternoon and waved a copy of a rag called the Augusta Constitutionalist in his face. “What do you think of this, Major?” Lahrheim demanded in irate tones. “What do you think?”

“That one? I don’t much like it,” Moss answered gravely. “It’s scratchier than most of the Atlanta papers.”

“No, no, no-that isn’t what I meant,” Lahrheim said. “I was talking about the story.”

“Oh, the story. Haven’t seen this one yet,” Moss said. The younger man-there weren’t a lot of older men in the camp-handed him the newspaper. He read the story Lahrheim pointed out, then made a reluctant clucking noise. “Well, Captain, a lot of Canucks don’t much like the USA.”

“Yeah, I know what. But could they throw us out of Winnipeg? Could they cut the east-west railroads?”

“I’m sure they could cut some of them,” Moss answered. “All? I don’t know about that. I don’t know how strong the rebels are in Winnipeg. I suppose they could drive us out for a while.”

“We’re busy a lot of other places,” Captain Lahrheim said, as if to declare that the Canadians couldn’t hope to cause the USA trouble if that weren’t so. That was true. It was also rather aggressively irrelevant.

It was, in fact, irrelevant enough that Moss couldn’t resist mocking it: “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

Lahrheim turned red. “You’re making fun of me.” He had a rubbery face that conveyed indignation even better than his voice.

“Not of you, Captain, not personally,” Moss said. The Andersonville camp was crowded; you had to be able to get along with people if you possibly could. Again, though, lawyer’s instinct or perhaps plain cussedness made him add, “You did say something silly.”

After a moment, Captain Lahrheim managed a laugh of sorts. “Well, maybe I did,” he allowed. But he remained indignant, even if he aimed his ire in a different direction. “Did you see how the damn Frenchies performed? Did you? They just cut and run, sounds like.”

“I did notice that, yes.” Moss was disappointed, if less surprised than the other officer. Men from the Republic of Quebec were tolerable occupation troops. Their mere presence had made English-speaking Canadians think twice about rising against the forces that had beaten them in the Great War. Once the Canucks had thought twice and rose anyway, the men from Quebec proved less then enthusiastic about putting them down. There weren’t enough Frenchies to go around, and they weren’t really trained for serious combat anyway.

“We have to do everything ourselves,” Lahrheim grumbled, a constant complaint in the USA. Maybe there weren’t enough Americans to go around, either. Jonathan Moss hoped there were, but how could you tell ahead of time?

Moss looked north. He didn’t know how much Lahrheim knew about the tunnel ever so quietly working its way out past the stockade. Since he didn’t know, he pretended the tunnel didn’t exist. But escape still filled his thoughts. If a good many men could break out, if they could cross Georgia and South Carolina and North Carolina and Virginia or maybe go up through Tennessee and Kentucky… If all that could happen, the United States would gain a few reinforcements.

All of which would matter-how much? On the big scale of things, probably not much. If the fate of the United States depended on a handful of escaping POWs, the country was in worse shape than anyone could imagine. But by escaping the prisoners would help the USA and hurt the CSA, which seemed worth doing. They would also embarrass the Confederates. The longer Moss stayed in Andersonville, the more appealing that looked.

Ralph Lahrheim also looked north, or rather northwest. “Storm coming,” he remarked.

Since Moss couldn’t argue with him, he nodded. Big thunderheads were building and rolling toward the prison camp. “Wouldn’t want to fly through those,” he said, which was the Lord’s truth. The clouds towered higher than a fighter’s ceiling, and were full of turbulence that could damn near tear the wings off an airplane.

“I don’t much fancy being under them when they get here, either.” Captain Lahrheim retreated toward the prisoner barracks.

He wasn’t a particularly clever man, which didn’t mean he was wrong here. Moss didn’t fancy staying out in the open once the storm broke, either. The rain would be bad enough. If you were unlucky, lightning would be worse.

The first raindrops started kicking up puffs of dust from the red dirt just as Moss ducked into his barracks. The inevitable nonstop card game paused for a moment as people made sure he was someone to be trusted. Then the players got back to the serious business at hand: “I’ll see that, and I’ll raise you five clams.”

More rain fell, drumming on the roof. That roof would start leaking any minute. Men who weren’t playing cards set buckets and pots where they’d do the most good. Lightning flashed. God’s artillery followed close on its heels.

“Well, this is fun,” somebody said. The crack got a laugh, but a laugh distinctly nervous around the edges.

Having grown up in Chicago and spent a lot of time in Ontario, Moss had seen his share of several different flavors of bad weather. What Georgia got, though, was different from anything he was used to. It was more… energetic was the first word that came to mind, and it fit pretty well.

Rain came down as if Noah were somewhere just over the next rise. Moss didn’t know about forty days and forty nights, but the next forty minutes marked as ferocious a cloudburst as he’d ever imagined. Lightning crackled again and again, a couple of times close enough to make all his hair stand on end. The thunder that followed sounded like a dress rehearsal for the end of the world.

“Liable to be tornadoes on the edge of a storm like this,” a POW observed.

“We’re safe, then. We’re not on the edge. We’re in the goddamn middle,” another prisoner said.

“Besides, who’d notice anything as small as a tornado in the middle of this?” a would-be wit added. He got a laugh, but all he did was prove he didn’t know the first thing about tornadoes, as several POWs from the Midwest loudly explained to him. Moss agreed, even if he didn’t fuss and fume about it. Wherever tornadoes went, they made themselves noticed.

Colonel Summers looked less and less happy with each minute the downpour went on. Moss had a pretty good notion why, too. He sidled up to the senior officer and murmured, “How well is the tunnel shored up?”

“We’ll find out, won’t we?” was all Monty Summers said. Moss nodded. If something went wrong, there was damn-all he or any other prisoner could do about it right this minute.

Before too long, he stopped worrying about the tunnel. He started worrying about whether they would have to be rescued by rowboat instead. That seemed a much more immediate problem. He also wondered whether the Confederates had any rowboats handy. Had they anticipated storms this big?

Looking out the windows helped very little. Except when lightning tore across the sky, it was almost night-dark. And what the lightning illuminated was mostly a bumper crop of raindrops.

But after something less than an hour, the storm eased. The thunderheads glided off to the east with ponderous dignity. The subtropical sun of Georgia summer came out again. The ground started to steam-not just the puddles and ponds the rain had left behind but the ground itself.

Colonel Summers strode to the north-facing window. The starch came out of his shoulders; he might have aged ten years in ten seconds. “There’s a hole in the ground not far from the deadline inside the fence,” he said, his tone that of a man in the room with a deathbed. And so he might have been, for that hole meant the passing of many men’s hopes.

No one had ever accused the Confederate guards of brilliance. If they’d had any brains at all, they would have been at the front doing something more useful for their country than this. But they didn’t have to be Sir Isaac Newton to figure out that holes in the ground, especially long, straight ones like this, didn’t happen by themselves.

One of the guards who’d squelched through the mud to the subsidence sighted along it as if down the barrel of a rifle. What he saw when he did was the barracks where Moss stood waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He didn’t have to wait long. The Confederates advanced on the building. One of them fell on his can in the slick red mud. Normally, the U.S. captives would have laughed and jeered at his clumsiness. No one made a peep now. The guards were unlikely to find much funny about an escape attempt, especially one they hadn’t noticed till the storm betrayed it.

“Y’all come out right now!” one of them shouted. “Y’all come out or else.”

The prisoners did come out; Moss, for one, didn’t think the guards were kidding about that or else. Crashing sounds from inside the barracks declared that the Confederates were taking the place apart, looking for where the tunnel started. Along with everybody else in green-gray, Moss stood glumly in the mud, waiting for them to find it.

And they did. He’d known they would. They were stupid, but not stupid enough to miss it. Their leader came out with his face even hotter than the weather. “You sons of bitches!” he screamed. “How dare you try and escape from this here prison? How dare you?”

“We have the right.” Moss spoke up, the lawyer in him touched by that peculiar brainless fury. “The Geneva Convention says so.”

That rocked the Confederate guard officer back on his heels. But he rallied, barking, “It also says I got the right to punish the bastards who try an’ break out. ’Fess up, y’all. Who worked on that there tunnel? Rest of you’ll have an easier time if we can punish the real criminals.”

Every single U.S. prisoner raised his hand at the same time. Most of them hadn’t had anything to do with the tunnel. Some, the new fish, hadn’t even known it was there. They raised their hands anyway, without hesitation. Moss was proud of them.

What the guard officer felt was something else again. “All right. All right,” he said heavily, and snorted like a boar hog. “Y’all reckon you’re so goddamn smart. Well, you’ll all catch it together, then, and see how you like that.” He stormed away. Moss hoped he would take a pratfall in the mud, but no such luck. The rain was on the Confederate side every which way today.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull was about to get on a train that would take him back from Virginia to Ohio (or perhaps, given the way things were going, only to western Pennsylvania) when a clerk bounced out of a command car with a canvas sack slung over his shoulder. “Hang on, Doc!” he called. “I got mail for youse guys.”

Youse guys was as far outside the bounds of ordinary English as the Confederate y’all. A lot of languages had separate forms for second-person singular and plural. English didn’t, but kept trying to invent them. The thought flashed through O’Doull’s mind and flew away in a split second, replaced by simple joy. “Give it here,” he told the clerk. “I thought it would be weeks catching up with us.”

Red Crosses adorned the tops of the cars and the sides of the locomotive. Locomotive and cars alike were painted white. With luck, that would keep the Confederates from dropping bombs on the train or machine-gunning it from the air. There had been a few horrible incidents, but only a few. There had also been a few south of the Mason-Dixon line. O’Doull wondered if Jake Featherston’s propaganda machine had manufactured those, but wouldn’t have been surprised if they proved real. War was full of things like that.

He stopped worrying about the war when he saw his wife’s handwriting on a letter with a stamp from the Republic of Quebec. Sorting through the pile, he found several of those, and one from his brother-in-law, Georges Galtier. Seeing that one made him smile in a different way. Among his wife’s relatives, Georges was the zany, the cuckoo, the odd man out-sometimes very odd indeed.

“Gotta go, Doc. Good luck to you.” Without waiting for a reply, the Army mail clerk hopped back into the command car and drove away.

O’Doull carried the stack of envelopes and magazines and newspapers and small packages up into the train. “Mail call!” he shouted, and for the next couple of minutes he was the most popular guy around.

Once the mail was all doled out, that popularity naturally faded. Only Granville McDougald hung around. He looked glum. To show why, he held up an envelope. It had a big handstamp on it: RETURN TO SENDER. ADDRESSEE DECEASED.

“I’m sorry, Granny,” O’Doull said. “Who is it?”

“Fellow I’ve known since the Great War. He lost a hand then, so they wouldn’t let him stay in the Army, not even as a medic. Dammit, Don was a good guy-one of the best. Now I’ve got to see if I can come up with his sister’s address, find out what happened to him.”

The letter had gone to Trenton, New Jersey. Confederate bombers certainly reached that far. But other things could happen to a middle-aged man, too. As a middle-aged man himself, O’Doull knew that much too well. “I’m sorry he’s gone,” he repeated. “Whatever it was, I hope it was quick.”

“Yeah. Amen,” McDougald said. They’d both seen too many men who lingered in agony and would not let go of life, even if some of them wanted to. A fast end-dead before he knew what hit him-was far from the smallest mercy the world had to offer, and the world didn’t offer it often enough.

“Here.” O’Doull reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of brandy. “Have a knock of this. Medicinal, you know.”

“Sure. Thanks, Doc. You’re a medical genius.” McDougald took the bottle and raised it in salute. “Here’s to you, Don.” He took one long swig, then handed it back. O’Doull put it away and closed the bag.

As an officer, O’Doull had a Pullman berth. He took his letters there to read them in curtained-off privacy. He opened the one from Georges first. It was the usual nonsense from his brother-in-law: the usual nonsense with the usual ironic sting. Aren’t you glad I am not an English-speaking Canadian? Georges wrote-in English, not the French that was his usual language and that he used for almost all of the letter. He went on in English for one more sentence: If I were, you might have to shoot me. After that, he returned to his own tongue and the usual doings in and around Riviere-du-Loup.

O’Doull wondered whether Georges had had someone else compose that English for him. He would have studied the language in school before the Great War, when Quebec was still part of Canada, but when would he have needed it since? Of course, being Georges, he might have remembered it just so he could make a sarcastic nuisance of himself thirty years later. The uprising in anglophone Canada worried O’Doull, too, and not because he might be called on to pick up a rifle himself.

He went through his wife’s letters one by one, starting with the earliest. He got more gossip from Riviere-du-Loup, and a different view of a small scandal involving a greengrocer and the butcher’s wife. Georges had treated the whole thing as a joke. To Nicole, the butcher was a brute and his wife looking for happiness wherever she could find it. O’Doull himself knew all the people involved, but not well. He wouldn’t have cared to judge where, if anywhere, the rights and wrongs lay.

Nicole didn’t talk about the Canadian uprising till her next to last letter. Then she wrote, There is a bill in the House of Deputies to extend military service. I am lighting candles and praying it does not pass.

“So am I, sweetheart,” O’Doull muttered, and then, “Moi aussi.” He’d seen news about that bill, too. The United States were doing everything they could to get the Republic of Quebec to contribute more men to quelling the revolt north of the forty-ninth parallel. That way, the United States wouldn’t have to pull so many of their own men off the fighting front against the Confederates, or even out of rebellion-wracked Utah.

But if the Republic of Quebec did contribute more soldiers, one of them was much too likely to be a young man named Lucien O’Doull. One of the great advantages of living in Quebec was that the country was technically neutral, even if it inclined toward the USA. Leonard O’Doull hadn’t had to worry about his boy’s becoming a soldier. He hadn’t had to-but now he did.

Nicole, naturally, kept a close eye on the bill’s progress. Her latest letter reported that it had come out of committee. I do not know anyone who favors this bill, not a single soul, she wrote bitterly. It moves forward anyway. It moves forward because the politicians are afraid of what the United States will do to us if it fails.

She was bound to be right about that. Without the United States, there wouldn’t have been a Republic of Quebec. The Republic’s economy had very strong ties to the USA, as strong as the Americans could make them. If Quebec made the United States unhappy, the USA could make the Republic unhappier.

O’Doull swore under his breath. He understood both sides, but, because of Lucien, hoped the Republic’s politicians would show some backbone. All politics is personal, he thought.

After getting everything off her chest, his wife went back to family chatter and the nine-days’ wonders of Riviere-du-Loup. It was as if she didn’t want to look at what she’d written about the bill, either. Only one more sentence at the end of the letter betrayed her worry: I wish you were home.

“I wish I was home, too, dammit,” O’Doull muttered. But he damn well wasn’t, and whose fault was that? No one’s but his own. The United States were his country, and he’d volunteered to help them in a way that best matched his skills and talents. And so here he was in a white-painted train, rumbling along toward more trouble. “Happy day.”

He wondered how the United States could find more trouble than they already had. With Japan bearing down on the Sandwich Islands, with the Confederates raising hell in Ohio and heading for Pennsylvania, with the Mormons still kicking up their heels in Utah and the Canucks north of the border, that looked as if all the troubles in the world, or at least on the continent, had come home to roost.

Back before the Great War, people had talked about how encircled the United States were, with the CSA, Canada, Britain, and France all keeping a wary eye on the giant they’d tied down. The country had burst its bounds in the war, and dominated North America for a generation. Now everybody else was trying to get the ropes back on again.

If Canada broke away from U.S. occupation, if British influence returned to the northern part of the continent, how long could the Republic of Quebec stay independent? That had to be on the minds of the politicians in Quebec City. It was on Leonard O’Doull’s mind, too. But so was his son, and his son counted for infinitely more.

Engine puffing, iron wheels screeching against the track and throwing up sun-colored sparks, the train stopped. O’Doull opened the curtains in front of the window and looked out. They were, as far as he could tell, in the middle of nowhere. Something had gone wrong up ahead, but he couldn’t make out what.

The conductor was a Medical Service corporal. O’Doull hoped he made a better corpsman than conductor, because he wasn’t very good at his secondary role. But he did have an answer when the doctor asked him what had happened farther west: “Sabotage.” He seemed to take a certain somber pleasure in the word.

“ ’Osti!” O’Doull burst out, which made the noncom give him a curious look. O’Doull looked back in plain warning. The other man decided walking down the corridor would be a good idea.

O’Doull shook his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the corporal. No, the trouble was just the opposite. As long as Confederate operatives sounded reasonably Yankeelike, they could hide in plain sight till they went off to work mischief in the middle of the night.

No doubt U.S. operatives were doing the same thing on the other side of the border, and helping C.S. Negroes in their sputtering civil war against Jake Featherston’s government. O’Doull hoped they were, anyhow. But that didn’t do him, or this train, any good at all.

Three hours later, after a repair crew filled in a crater and laid new track across it, the train got rolling again. By then, the sun was going down in the west and O’Doull was going up in smoke. If he was going to be useful, he wanted to be useful. He couldn’t do a damn thing stuck here on a train track.

Unlike most trains, this one rolled through the night all lit up. Trains full of soldiers and weapons and raw materials sneaked along, trusting to darkness to hide them from Confederate aircraft. This one showed its true colors, and the enemy left it alone.

">There were whispers that the Confederates sometimes used the Red Cross to disguise troop movements. O’Doull hoped that wasn’t so. It would make C.S. raiders want to disregard the symbol when the USA used it, and it would make the United States distrust even legitimate Confederate uses. Things were hard enough as they were. Did they have to-could they-get even worse?