Drive to the East

XIV

The telephone on Clarence Potter’s desk rang. He picked it up. “Potter here,” he said crisply.

“Hello, Potter there,” Jake Featherston rasped in his ear. “I need you to be Potter here, fast as you can, so get your ass on over right now.”

“On my way, sir.” Potter hung up. He grabbed his hat, closed and locked the office door behind him, and went upstairs to get a motorcar. From the War Department to the Gray House on Shockoe Hill shouldn’t have taken more than five minutes. In fact, it took more like fifteen. The U.S. air raid the night before had cratered several streets on the most direct routes.

“Sorry, sir,” the driver kept saying as he had to double back. Potter suspected the President would make him sorry, too, but he didn’t take it out on the luckless young soldier behind the wheel. When he arrived, he hopped out of the Birmingham, showed his ID to the guards at the entrance to the battered Confederate Presidential residence, and was escorted below ground to the enormous bomb shelter in which Jake Featherston operated these days.

New York City had skyscrapers. Potter wondered how long it would be before men built twenty, thirty, even fifty stories underground to keep from getting blown up when bombers came overhead. He laughed. That wouldn’t work in New Orleans, where the cemeteries were on top of the ground because of the high water table. Such details and anomalies aside, the picture seemed scarily probable.

Saul Goldman sat in the waiting room. Potter nodded to the director of communications. “Am I after you in line?” he asked.

“I don’t think so, General,” Goldman answered. “I think we go in together.”

“Do we?” Potter kept his voice as neutral as he could. Goldman was good at making propaganda, but the Intelligence officer didn’t want to be part of any propaganda, no matter how good. He’d had that argument with the President before. He hadn’t completely lost it, which only went to show how good his case was.

Featherston’s secretary stuck her head into the room. “Come with me, gentlemen.” Goldman caught Potter’s eye and nodded. Sure enough, they were an entry, like 3 and 3A at the racetrack.

When Potter came into the President’s sanctum, Featherston fixed him with a fishy stare and barked, “Took you long enough. What did you do-walk?”

“Sorry, sir. Bomb damage.” Potter had been braced for worse.

And Featherston let him off the hook after that, which also surprised him. “We need to get down to brass tacks,” the President said. “You’ve both heard about these people bombs up in the USA-Mormons strapping on explosives and blowing themselves to hell and gone as soon as they can take a raft of damnyankees with ’em?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Saul Goldman said. Potter nodded. Goldman went on, “We’ve been working on ways to play them up-to show the Yankees are so low and evil, people will kill themselves before they live under them.”

That sounded like a good line to take to Potter, but Jake Featherston shook his head. “I was afraid you were gonna do somethin’ like that,” he said heavily. “That’s how come I called you in here-to tell you not to. No way, nohow. Not a word about ’em out of us, and jam the Yankees hard as you can when they talk about ’em. You got that?”

“I hear you, sir, but I don’t understand.” Goldman looked and sounded pained. Clarence Potter didn’t blame him. Had he been in the communications director’s shoes, he would have been pained, too.

But Featherston repeated, “Not a word, goddammit, and I’ll tell you why.” He went on, “I don’t want the damn niggers to hear anything about people bombs, you hear me? Not one fucking word! Coons are enough trouble as is. You don’t reckon some of those bastards’d blow themselves to the moon if they could take a raft of decent white folks with ’em? I sure do.”

“But-” Saul Goldman began. Even starting the protest took nerve; not many people had the nerve to squawk to Featherston’s face.

Here, though, Potter agreed with the President. “I’m sorry, Mr. Goldman, but I think he’s right,” he said. “We’d better keep the lid on that one for as long as we can, because the niggers will make us sorry if we don’t.”

“Damn straight,” Featherston said.

The director of communications still looked unhappy. “Since you’ve made up your mind, sir, that’s the way we’ll do it.” He plainly thought the President was wrong to have made up his mind that way.

Jake Featherston just as plainly didn’t care. “Make sure you do. And pick up the jamming on the damnyankees, too. We will be sorry-we’ll be sorry as hell-if we can’t keep this quiet.”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. President. If you’ll excuse me…” The little Jew left the President’s office very abruptly.

As soon as the door clicked shut behind Goldman, Jake Featherston let out a long sigh. “I don’t like making Saul do like I tell him instead of like he wants to. He’s good-he’s damn good. You need to give a man like that his head. This time, though, I just don’t reckon I’ve got much choice.”

Potter nodded. “I think you’re right, Mr. President. I said so.”

“Yeah, you did.” Featherston eyed him. “You’re not one to do something like that just to make me wag my tail, either.”

Remembering the weight of the pistol in his pocket as he rode the train up to Richmond in 1936, Potter nodded again. “No, sir. Whatever else I am, I’m no yes-man.”

“Son of a bitch. I never would’ve known if you hadn’t told me.” Maybe Jake Featherston was remembering that pistol, too. He drummed his fingers on top of his desk. “Got a question for you, Mr. Straight Answer.”

“Go ahead,” Potter said.

“Those fucking Mormon people bombs-did any of your men give ’em the idea, or did they come up with it all by themselves?”

“Mr. President, our people did not have thing one to do with that,” Potter said positively. “Nobody in the CSA-no white man in the CSA, anyhow-is that crazy. The Mormons came up with it on their own.”

“All right. I believe you. But if I ever find out you’re lying to me about this one, I’ll have your head,” Featherston said. “People bombs hurt the damnyankees, yeah, but they can hurt us a lot worse. And you know as well as I do that Saul won’t be able to clamp down on the news forever. One way or another, this kind of shit always comes out.”

“I knew that, sir. I wasn’t sure you did,” Potter answered. People who weren’t in the intelligence business often had an exaggerated notion of how easy keeping a secret was.

Jake Featherston laughed at him. “I never went to a fancy U.S. college, General, but I reckon I may know a thing or two anyways.”

“That’s not what I meant, Mr. President,” Clarence Potter said stiffly.

Featherston laughed some more. “Yeah, likely tell.” But amusement didn’t live long on his face. It never did, not that Potter had seen. The President of the CSA always had to be angry at something or worried about something. And today he had something to be angry and worried about. “Damn niggers are gonna start blowin’ themselves up, sure as hell they are. Damfino how much we can do about it, either.”

“Massive reprisals,” Potter suggested. “Kill ten coons for every white a people bomb blows up, or twenty, or a hundred.”

“That won’t stop ’em,” Featherston predicted morosely. “There’ll always be some bastards who think, Who gives a damn what happens after I’m dead? And the ones who go after us without counting the cost are the ones we’ve got to be afraid of.”

He knew what he was talking about. The Freedom Party had always gone after its foes without counting the cost, whether those foes were Whigs and Radical Liberals, Negroes, or the United States. Potter said, “Yes, sir. You’re right-we’ll still have trouble even if we do that. But I think we’ll have less. We’ll make some niggers think twice before they turn into people bombs. And we’ll make the niggers who don’t want to blow themselves up think twice before they help or cover up for the ones who do. They’d better, anyhow, if they know they’re going to get shot after a people bomb goes off.”

“It could be.” Featherston picked up a pencil and wrote himself a note. “It’s a better scheme than anybody else has come up with, I’ll say that. Whatever else you are, General, you aren’t soft on niggers.”

“I should hope not, sir,” Potter said. “That’s how we first met, remember. I was trying to head off the Red uprising before it got started. I was after that officer’s body servant-”

“Pompey, his name was,” Jake Featherston said at once. Potter wouldn’t have remembered the Negro’s name if they’d set him on fire. Featherston had a truly marvelous memory for detail-and never forgot an enemy or a slight. He went on, “He was a mincing, prissy little bastard, thought his shit didn’t stink. Just what you’d expect from a stinking blueblood like Jeb Stuart III to have for a servant.” He looked as if he wanted to spit on the carpet, or possibly start chewing it.

And he wasn’t wrong. During the Great War and even afterward, the Confederate States had had too many sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of founding fathers in positions of authority for no better reason than that their ancestors had done big things. It wasn’t like that anymore, Nathan Bedford Forrest III notwithstanding. Forrest was there because of what he could do, not because of what great-grandpa the cavalry general had done. The Freedom Party had swept away most of the Juniors and IIIs and IVs. And that, Potter was willing to admit, needed doing.

Featherston let the pencil fall. “All right, General. That’s about it, looks like. Main reason I wanted you here was to find out if those damn people bombs were your notion. But you gave me a good idea, and I reckon we’ll try it out when the time comes-and it will, goddammit. I thank you for that.”

Potter got to his feet. “You’re welcome, Mr. President. We’re on the same side in this fight.”

“In this one, yeah. How about some of the others?” But Featherston waved that aside. “Never mind. Get out of here.”

A man in a State Department uniform went in as Potter went out. Potter wondered what that was all about. He knew he could learn with a little poking and prodding. He also knew he’d catch merry hell if anybody found out he was doing it. You didn’t try to find out what was none of your business. That was one of the rules in this game, too. There were often good reasons why it was none of your business.

After the air conditioning under the Gray House, ordinary Richmond late summer seemed twice as hot and muggy as usual. A haze of dust and smoke hung over the Confederate capital: a souvenir of Yankee bombing raids. The same sort of haze was said to hang over Philadelphia.

Will anything be left of either side when this war is over? Potter wondered. More and more, it reminded him of a duel of submachine guns at two paces. Both countries could strike better than they could defend.

He didn’t know what to do about that. He didn’t think anyone else did, either. Maybe taking Pittsburgh away from the damnyankees really would knock them out of the fight. It had a chance of doing that, anyway. Potter couldn’t think of anything else that did.

A truck dumped gravel and asphalt on the street in front of the Gray House. A heavy mechanized roller started smashing it down into a more or less level surface. And it would stay level till the next time U.S. bombers visited Richmond, or the time after that, or perhaps the time after that.

The machine was more interesting to Clarence Potter than the job it was doing. Not long before, a swarm of Negroes with hand tools would have done work like that. No more. Machinery was much more common than it had been… and there weren’t so many Negroes around. Potter nodded to himself. Both halves of that suited him fine.

Hipolito Rodriguez awkwardly sewed a sergeant’s-no, a troop leader’s-stripes onto the left sleeve of his gray tunic. The letter that came with his promotion notice said it was for “contributions valuable to the safety and security of the Confederate States of America.” That left the guards at Camp Determination who hadn’t been promoted both puzzled and jealous. It also gave the noncoms whose ranks he’d suddenly joined something new to think about.

Tom Porter, who’d been Rodriguez’s squad leader till he got the promotion, added two and two and got four. “This has to do with those new buildings going up alongside the men’s and women’s half, doesn’t it?” he said.

“I think maybe it does, si,” Rodriguez answered. He was still getting used to the luxury of the noncoms’ quarters. He had a room of his own now, with a closet and a sink. No more cot in the middle of a barracks with a lot of other noisy, smelly guards. No more shoving everything he owned into a footlocker, either. He had more room to be a person as a troop leader; he wasn’t just one more cog on a gear in a vast machine.

“I know you helped give the commandant the idea for those new buildings,” Porter said. “If they work out as well as everybody hopes, I reckon you’ve earned your stripes.”

Porter’s acceptance helped ease the transition from ordinary guard to troop leader. It meant the other noncoms made it plain they would back Rodriguez if he ran into trouble. With that going for him, he didn’t, or never more than he could handle by himself. And those buildings rapidly neared completion.

Nobody ever called them anything but that. If you talked about one of them, it was that building. The guards knew what they were for; they’d been briefed. They had to be, by the nature of things. But, also by the nature of things, they didn’t call them by their right names. If you didn’t name something, you didn’t have to dwell on what it really was and really did. Not thinking about those things helped you sleep at night.

A few of the guards, men who’d come to Camp Determination as it went up, would sometimes talk about shooting Negroes in the swamps of Louisiana. They were mostly matter-of-fact, but they would also talk about comrades who couldn’t stand the strain. “So-and-so ate his gun,” they would say. That was how Rodriguez learned Jeff Pinkard’s new wife was a dead guard’s widow. He’d known she was married before; two boys made that obvious. The details…

“Poor son a bitch just couldn’t take it,” a guard said sympathetically.

“He shoot himself, too?” Rodriguez asked with a certain horrid fascination.

“Nope.” The veteran guard shook his head. “Chick must’ve got sick of guns. He ran a hose from his auto exhaust into the passenger compartment and fired up the motor. Sure as hell wish we’d’ve had those trucks back then. You don’t have to worry so much about what you’re doing when you load one of them.”

“The trucks, they came after this fellow kill himself?” Rodriguez said.

“That’s right.” The guard who was talking didn’t see anything out of the ordinary about that. Maybe there was nothing out of the ordinary to see. To Rodriguez, the timing seemed… interesting, anyhow. Senor Jeff was good at getting ideas from things that happened around him.

Rodriguez almost remarked on that. Then he thought better of it. He couldn’t prove a thing, after all-and he couldn’t unsay something once he’d said it. Better to keep his mouth shut.

And keeping his mouth shut proved a good idea, as it usually did. A few days later, an officer tapped him for special duty, saying, “The commandant tells me you won’t screw this up no matter what. Is that a fact?” He sent Rodriguez a fishy stare.

“I hope so, sir,” Rodriguez answered. He recognized that stare. He’d seen it before on white Confederates. They looked at him, saw a Mexican, and figured he wasn’t good for much. He asked, “What do I got to do?”

“Well, we’re going to test out one of those buildings,” the officer answered. “We’re going to pick about a hundred niggers and run ’em through it.”

“Oh, yes, sir. I do that. Don’t you worry,” Rodriguez said.

His confidence seemed to relieve the officer. “All right,” the man said. He drummed the fingers of his left hand against the side of his leg. His right sleeve was pinned up short, as his right arm ended just below the shoulder-he too came out of the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade. He went on, “This has to go good, mind you. We got bigwigs from Richmond comin’ out to watch the show.”

Rodriguez shrugged. “Maybe it go good. Maybe it go wrong. I dunno. All I know is, it don’t go wrong on account of me.”

The other man considered that. He finally nodded. “Fair enough. Make sure all the ordinary guards you’re in charge of feel the same way.”

“Si, senor. I do that,” Rodriguez promised.

Because they were trying things out for the first time-and because bigwigs from Richmond were watching-they used far more guards than they normally would have to deal with a hundred black men. They got the Negroes formed up in a ten-by-ten square. The inmates carried whatever small chattels they intended to take away to the new camp where they thought they were going.

That was part of the plan. As long as they thought they were going somewhere else, they would stay docile. They wouldn’t cause trouble unless they figured they were going on a one-way trip. The one-armed officer worked hard to keep them unsuspecting: “You men, we want y’all to be clean and tidy when we ship you out of Camp Determination. We’re going to get you that way before you leave. You’re gonna take baths. You’re gonna be deloused. No horseplay, or we will make your black asses sorry. Y’all got that?”

“Yes, suh,” the Negroes chorused. Black heads bobbed up and down. The Negroes didn’t think anything was wrong. They were dirty. Most if not all were lousy. They probably wanted to get clean, and they could see why the men who ran the camp would want them to be that way before they left. Oh, yes-everything made perfect sense to them. But it made a different kind of sense to the guards and their superiors.

“Come on, then,” the one-armed officer said. “Keep in formation, now, or you’ll catch it.” The Negroes had no trouble obeying. They often marched here and there through the camp in formation.

Guards opened the barbed-wire gate separating the main camp from that building. In the Negroes went. Two guards waited in an antechamber. One of them said, “Strip naked and stow your stuff here. Everybody remember who put what where. You get in a fight over what belongs to who, you’ll be sorry. You got that?” Again, the Negroes nodded.

So did Hipolito Rodriguez, watching as the black men shed their rags and set down their sorry bundles. This was a very nice touch. It convinced the prisoners they’d come back. The large contingent of guards was hardly necessary. A handful of men could have done the job. But Rodriguez understood why Jefferson Pinkard had assigned so many men to the prisoners. The more ready for trouble you were, the less likely you were to find it. And with visiting firemen watching, you couldn’t afford it.

A sign on the wall above an onward-pointing arrow said DELOUSING AHEAD. The Negroes who could read went that way without hesitation. Most of the others followed. “Move along, move along,” the guards said, and chivvied the rest of the men into the room at the end of the corridor.

It could hold a lot more than a hundred people-but this was, after all, only a test. Even here, the deception continued. A doorway was set into the far wall. A sign above it said TO THE BATHS.

At the officer’s nod, Rodriguez shut the door through which the Negroes had gone in. That door didn’t match the rest of the scene. It was thick and made of steel, and had rubber gasketing all around the edge to make an airtight seal. Rodriguez spun the wheel in the center of the door’s back, making sure it fit snugly against the frame and locking it in place.

Above the wheel, a small window with rounded corners let him look into the chamber he’d just sealed off. More rubber gasketing, inside and out, made sure what was inside that chamber would stay there.

Other windows were set into the chamber’s walls. They too were protected with rubber inside and out. Guards took their places at some of them. Higher-ranking camp officials and the delegation from Richmond already stood by the rest. They wanted to see how this building worked out.

Near the center of the chamber stood half a dozen steel columns, painted the same gray as the walls. The bottom two or three feet of them were not solid metal, but a grillwork too fine to poke a finger through. The naked Negroes in there milled about. Some of them went up to one column or another. A man rapped on a column with his knuckles. Rodriguez heard the dull clang.

He knew exactly when guards up above the ceiling poured the Cyclone into the columns. All the Negroes sprang away from them as if they’d become red-hot. Men started falling almost at once. Not all of them fell right away, though. Some ran for the doorway marked TO THE BATHS. They pounded on it, but-what a surprise! — it didn’t open.

And some ran back to the door through which they’d come. Desperate, dying fists battered against the steel. An agonized face looked out at Rodriguez, with only glass and the gasketing between them. Startled, he took a step away from the door. The Negro shouted something. Rodriguez couldn’t make out what he said. His words were drowned in the chorus of yells and screams that dinned inside the chamber.

As the insecticide took hold, the black man’s face slid down and away from the window. The frantic pounding on the door eased. One by one, the shouts and screams faded and stopped. Rodriguez looked in again. A few of the huddled bodies in the chamber still moved feebly, but only a few. After fifteen or twenty minutes, they all lay still.

A bell rang. Several heavy ceiling fans came on; he could feel their vibration through his feet. They sucked the poisoned air out of the chamber. After about ten more minutes, another bell chimed. Now the door marked TO THE BATHS opened-from the outside. Guards went in and carried corpses out to the waiting trucks.

Rodriguez nodded to himself. This would work. Those hundred black men hadn’t come close to filling the chamber. Of course, this was only a practice run. Now that they knew things really went about the way they’d expected, they could load in a lot more mallates. Load them in, take them out, load in the next batch… You could use ordinary trucks to haul away the bodies now, too, and you could pack them much tighter with dead men than you could with live ones. Yes, the scheme would definitely do what it was supposed to.

“Attention!” the one-armed officer called.

Automatically, Rodriguez stood stiff and straight. Here came Jefferson Pinkard with one of the men from Richmond: a burly fellow with a tough, square, jowly face. Rodriguez recognized him right way. It was the Attorney General, Don Fernando Koenig, the biggest man in the Freedom Party except for Jake Featherston himself! No wonder everything had to go just right today!

Pinkard and the Attorney General stopped. “Sir, this here’s my buddy, Hip Rodriguez,” the camp commandant said. “He helped give me the notion for this whole setup.”

“Well, good for him, and good for you, too, Pinkard. This is all first-rate work, and I’ll say so to the President.” Koenig stuck out his hand in Rodriguez’s direction. “Freedom!”

Dazedly, Rodriguez shook it. “Freedom, senor!”

Then Koenig clapped him on the back-man to man, not superior to inferior. “We’re going to have freedom from these damn niggers, aren’t we? And you’ve helped. You’ve helped a lot.”

“Yes, sir,” Rodriguez said. “Thank you, sir.”

Koenig and Pinkard went on their way. The rest of the guards stared at Rodriguez in awe.

Jake Featherston had been in Pennsylvania before. During the Great War, the Army of Northern Virginia had pushed up almost to within shelling distance of Philadelphia. That almost counted for everything. If the de facto capital of the USA had fallen along with Washington, would the enemy have been able to go on with the fight? No way to know now, but a lot of people in the CSA doubted it. As things were, Jake had survived the grinding retreat through Pennsylvania and Maryland and back into Virginia. He’d survived defeat, and hoped for victory.

Now he was within shelling distance of Pittsburgh, in the western part of Pennsylvania. Confederate 105s boomed in their gun pits, sending shells south toward the Yankee defenders and the factories and steel mills they fought to hold. He wanted to take off his uniform shirt and serve one of those 105s himself. He’d done that before, too, over in Virginia.

His bodyguards were more nervous now than they had been then. “Sir, if we can shell the damnyankees from here, they can reach us here, too,” one of them said. “What do we do then?”

“Reckon we jump in a hole, just like the gunners.” Jake pointed to the foxholes a few feet away from each 105.

“Yes, but-” the bodyguard began.

“No, no buts,” Featherston said firmly. “Chances are I’m safer here than I am back in Richmond, and that’s the God’s truth.”

The guard looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. The man was young, brave, and good at what he did. He also had all the imagination of a cherrystone clam. Most of the time, the lack didn’t affect the way he did his job even a dime’s worth. Every once in a while… “Sir, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice couldn’t have been any stiffer if he’d starched and ironed it.

“Hell I don’t,” Jake said. “Difference is, here I know where the enemy’s at. I know what he can do, and I know what I can do about it.” He pointed to the foxholes again. “In Richmond, any goddamn son of a bitch could be kitted out with explosives. If he’s got the balls to blow himself up along with me, how you gonna stop him?”

All his bodyguards looked very unhappy. Featherston didn’t blame them. He was very unhappy about people bombs himself. A man willing-no, eager-to die so he could also kill made a very nasty foe. War and bodyguarding both assumed the enemy wanted to live just as much as you did. If he didn’t give a damn…

If he didn’t give a damn, then what would stop a rational soldier or assassin wouldn’t matter a hill of beans to him. That seemed more obvious to the President of the CSA than it did to his guards. They didn’t want to admit, even to themselves, that the rules had changed.

This one said, “Mr. President, there’s no evidence anyone in the CSA has thought of doing anything like that.”

Jake Featherston laughed in his face. “Evidence? First evidence’ll be when somebody damn well does blow himself up. It’s coming. Sure as shit, it’s coming. I wish like hell we could stop it, but I don’t see how. We can’t jam all the U.S. wireless stations-too many of ’em. And they can’t hardly talk about anything else. Fucking Mormons.” He shook his head in disgust.

“Good thing there aren’t hardly any of them in our country,” the bodyguard said, proving he’d missed the point.

If he were smarter, if he were able to think straighter, he probably wouldn’t want to be a bodyguard. You couldn’t get all hot and bothered because people weren’t the way you wanted them to be. Oh, you could, but a whole fat lot of good it would do you. Taking them as they were worked better. Will this fellow see it if I spell it out in small, simple words? Jake wondered.

The decision got made for him. He knew what that rumbling, rushing sound in the air was. “Incoming!” he shouted, and was proud his yell came only a split second after the first artilleryman’s.

He sprang for the foxholes, and was down in one before the first shells landed. The men who fought the 105s were just as fast, or even faster. Some of his bodyguards, though, remained above ground and upright when shells burst not far away. They didn’t know any better-they weren’t combat troops. Here, ignorance was expensive.

“Get in a hole, goddammit!” he yelled. Some of the artillerymen were shouting the same thing. And the bodyguards who hadn’t been hit did dive for cover, only a few seconds slower than they should have. But a barrage was a time when seconds mattered.

Till things let up, Jake couldn’t do anything. If he came out of his foxhole, he was asking to get torn up himself. He wasn’t afraid. He’d proved that beyond any possible doubt in the last war. But he knew too well the CSA needed him. That kept him where he was till the U.S. bombardment moved elsewhere.

That bombardment wasn’t anything that warned of an attack. It was just harassing fire, to make the Confederates keep their heads down and to wound a few men. During the Great War, Jake had fired plenty of shells with the same thing in mind.

If he wasn’t the first one out of a foxhole when the shelling eased, he couldn’t have been later than the third. “Fuck,” he said softly. You forgot what artillery could do to a man till you saw it with your own eyes. One of his guards lay there, gutted and beheaded-except the reality, which included smell, was a hundred times worse and only a tenth as neat as the words suggested.

Another bodyguard lay hunched over on his side, clutching his ankle with both hands. He had no foot; he was doing his best to keep from bleeding to death. Jake bent beside him. “Hang on, Beau,” he said, far more gently than he usually spoke. “I’ll make you a tourniquet.” His boots-the same sort he’d worn in the field in the last war-had strong rawhide laces. He pulled one out, fast as he could. “Easy there. I got to move your hands so I can tie this son of a bitch.”

“Thank you, sir.” Beau sounded preternaturally calm. Some wounded men didn’t really feel it for a little while. He seemed to be one of the lucky ones, though he hissed when the President of the CSA tightened the tourniquet around his ragged stump. Jake used a stick to twist it so the stream of blood slowed to the tiniest trickle. He’d tended to battlefield wounds before; his hands still remembered how, as long as he didn’t think about it too much.

“Morphine!” he yelled. “Somebody give this poor bastard a shot! And where the hell are the medics?”

The men with Red Cross smocks were already there, taking charge of other injured guards. One of them knelt by Beau. The medic injected the bodyguard, then blinked to find himself face to face with Jake Featherston. “You did good, uh, sir,” he said. “He ought to make it if everything heals up all right.”

“Hear that, Beau?” Jake said. “He says you’re gonna be fine.” The medic hadn’t quite said that, but Jake didn’t care. He wanted to make the bodyguard as happy as he could.

“Fine,” Beau said vaguely. Maybe that was shock, or maybe it was the morphine hitting him. The medics got him onto a stretcher and carried him away. Jake wondered what kind of job he could do that didn’t require moving around. The President shrugged. Beau would be a while getting better, if he did.

The head of the bodyguard contingent came up with fire in his eye. He’d got his trousers muddy; Jake judged that accounted for at least part of his bad temper. When the man spoke, he did his best to stay restrained: “Sir, can we please move to a safer location? You see what almost happened to you here.”

Jake shook his head. “Not to me, by God. I know what to do when shells start coming down. I’m sorry as hell some of your men didn’t.”

“And if a shell had landed in your hole, Mr. President?” the bodyguard asked.

“It didn’t, dammit,” Jake said. The guard chief just looked at him. Jake swore under his breath. The man was right, and he knew it. Admitting somebody else was right and he himself wrong was the hardest thing in the world for him. He didn’t do it now, not in so many words. He just scowled at the bodyguard. “I reckon I’ve seen what I came to see.”

“Thank you, sir.” The man saluted. He called to the other guards who hadn’t been hurt: “We can get him away now!”

They all showed as much relief as a drummer who finds out his latest lady friend isn’t in a family way after all. And they hustled Jake back from the gun pit with Olympic speed. He thought it was funny. The guards thought it was anything but. One of them scolded him: “Sir, did you want to get yourself killed?”

If he’d asked whether Jake wanted to get the guards killed, the President would have gone up in smoke. But that wasn’t what he’d wanted to know, and so Jake Featherston only sighed. “No. I wanted to watch the damnyankees catch it.”

“Well, you’ve done that, and now you’ve seen we can catch it, too,” the bodyguard said. “Will you kindly leave well enough alone?”

“Sure,” Featherston said, and all the bodyguards brightened. Then he added, “Till the next time it needs doing.” Their shoulders slumped.

“We really shouldn’t be anywhere close to the line,” the guards’ leader said. “Damnyankee airplanes are liable to drop bombs on our heads. Even less we can do about that than we can about artillery, dammit.”

Jake laughed raucously. “Jesus H. Christ, don’t the damnyankees come over Richmond about every other night and drop everything but the fucking kitchen sink on our heads? Bastards’d drop that, too, if they reckoned it’d blow up.”

Some of the bodyguards smiled. Their chief remained severe. “Sir, you’ve got a proper shelter there, not a, a-hole in the ground.” He slapped at the knees of his trousers. Not much mud came away. He fumed. He didn’t like to get dirty.

“Hell of a lot of good a proper shelter did Al Smith,” Jake said. That made all the guards unhappy again. They didn’t like remembering all the things that could go wrong. Jake didn’t like remembering those things, either, but he would do it if he could score points off men who liked it even less.

The guard chief changed the subject, at least a little: “Sir, couldn’t you just stay somewhere safe and follow the war with reports and things?”

“No way in hell,” Jake replied at once. “No place’d stay safe for long. Soon as the Yankees found out where I was at, they’d send bombers after me. I don’t care if I went to Habana-they’d still send ’em. But that’s beside the point. Point is, you can’t trust reports all the goddamn time. Sometimes you’ve got to, yeah. You can’t keep up with everything by your lonesome. But if you don’t get your ass out there and see for yourself every so often, people’ll start lying to you. You won’t know any better, either, ’cause you haven’t been out to look. And then you’re screwed. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” the bodyguard said mournfully. He knew what that meant. It meant he and his men would have to keep worrying, because Jake would go on sticking his nose where the damnyankees could shoot it off.

Airplanes droned by overhead. Jake looked for the closest hole in the ground. So did most of the guards. They weren’t combat troops, no, but a trip to the field taught lessons in a hurry. The airplanes flew from west to east. They had familiar silhouettes. Jake relaxed-they were on his side.

None of the bodyguards relaxed. They weren’t supposed to, not while they were on duty. Their leader said, “Mr. President, can we please take you someplace where you’re not in quite so much danger?”

“Gonna fly me to the Empire of Brazil?” Jake quipped. A few guards gave him another round of dutiful smiles. Most stayed somber. He supposed that was just as well. Like sheep dogs, they had to be serious about protecting him. Trouble was, he made a piss-poor sheep.

Sometimes Sam Carsten thought the Navy didn’t know what to do with the Josephus Daniels. Other times he was sure of it. After the destroyer escort had threaded its way out through the minefields in Delaware Bay once more, he turned to Pete Cooley and said, “I swear to God they’re trying to sink us. I really do.”

“I think we’ll be all right, sir,” the exec said. “We will as long as Confederate airplanes don’t spot us, anyhow.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “As long as.” His ship was ordered to strike at the CSA. U.S. flying boats and other aircraft constantly patrolled the United States’ coastal waters. If there was intelligence to say the Confederates didn’t do the same thing, he hadn’t seen it.

“Mission seems simple enough,” Cooley said. “We start heading in as soon as night falls, land the raiders, pick ’em up, and get the hell out of there.” He sounded elaborately unconcerned.

Sam snorted. “One of these days, Pat, somebody needs to explain the difference between ‘simple’ and ‘easy’ to you.”

“I know the difference,” Cooley said with a grin. “An easy girl puts out right away. A simple girl’s just dumb, so you’ve got to snow her before she puts out.”

“All right, dammit.” In spite of himself, Sam laughed. The exec wouldn’t take things seriously. Maybe that was as well, too. “Just so we don’t get spotted. And our navigation better be spot-on, too.”

“I’ll get us there, sir,” Cooley promised.

As with shiphandling, Sam was learning to use sextant and chronometer to know where the ship was and where it was going. He thought it was the hardest thing he’d ever tried to pick up. The Navy had tables that made it a lot easier than it was in the days of iron men and wooden ships, but easier and easy didn’t mean the same thing, either. Sorrowfully, Sam said, “This is the first time in a million years I wish I’d paid more attention in school.”

“You’re doing real well, sir, for a-” Two words too late, Pat Cooley broke off. He tried again: “You’re doing real well.”

For a mustang. He hadn’t quite swallowed enough of that. Or maybe it had been for a dumb mustang. Taking sun-sights and then trying to convert them to positions sure as hell made Sam feel like a dumb mustang. He painfully remembered the time when he’d screwed up his longitude six ways from Sunday and put the Josephus Daniels halfway between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The only thing the exec said then was, “Well, the infantry could use the fire support.” Sam thought that showed commendable restraint.

For now, he swung the destroyer escort well out into the North Atlantic before steaming south. He figured that was his best chance to get where he was going undetected. He didn’t know that it was a good chance, but good and best also weren’t always synonyms. The ocean wasn’t nearly so rough as it would be when winter clapped down, but it wasn’t smooth, either. Sailors and Marine raiders spent a lot of time at the rail.

Sam might not have been much of a navigator. He might not have been the shiphandler he wished he were. He might-he would-burn if the sun looked at him sideways. But by God he had a sailor’s stomach. Some of the youngsters in the officers’ mess and some of the Marine officers who dined with them looked distinctly green. Sam tore into the roast beef with fine appetite.

“Be thankful the chow’s as good as it is,” he said. “When we’re on a long patrol or going around the Horn, it’s all canned stuff and beans after a while.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Lieutenant Thad Walters said. The Y-range operator bolted from the mess with a hand clapped over his mouth. Carsten hoped the J.G. got to a head before he wasted the cooks’ best efforts.

Lieutenant Cooley brought the Josephus Daniels about 125 miles off the North Carolina coast just as the sun was sinking in flames in the direction of the Confederacy. “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be, sir,” the exec said.

“Fair enough.” Sam nodded. “All ahead full, then. Course 270.”

“All ahead full. Course 270,” Cooley echoed. “Aye aye, sir.” He called the order for full power down to the engine room. The ship picked up speed till she was going flat out. Sam wished for the extra ten knots she could have put on if she were a real destroyer. Of course, they never would have dropped a mustang on his first command into a real destroyer. He knew damn well he was lucky to get anything fancier than a garbage scow.

Lieutenant Walters seemed to have got rid of what ailed him. The Y-range operator was still a little pale, but kept close watch on his set. If the ship could spot an enemy airplane before the enemy spotted her, she would have a better chance of getting away. The darker it got, the happier Sam grew. He didn’t think the Confederates had aircraft with Y-ranging gear. He sure hoped they didn’t.

“Keep an eye peeled for any sign of torpedo boats, too,” he warned. “A fish we’re not expecting will screw us as bad as a bomb.”

“Yes, sir,” Walters said, and then, “Aye aye, sir.” We’re doing everything we know how to do, Sam thought. Now-is it enough?

The Josephus Daniels ran on through the night. Listening to her engines pound, Sam felt she was yelling, Here I am! to the world. If she was, the world stayed deaf and blind. Every so often, Lieutenant Walters looked over at him and shrugged or gave a thumbs-up. CPO Bevacqua on the hydrophone kept hearing nothing, too.

Shortly before 2300, the commander of the Marine detachment came onto the bridge. “About an hour away, eh, Captain?” he said.

“That’s right, Major,” Sam answered. Mike Murphy outranked him-except that nobody on a ship outranked her skipper. Murphy understood that, fortunately. He was a black Irishman with eyes as blue as a Siamese cat’s-bluer than Sam’s, which took doing. Carsten went on, “Your men are ready?”

“Ready as they’ll ever be.” Murphy pointed into the darkness. “They’re by the boats, and they’ll be in ’em in nothing flat.” He snapped his fingers.

“Good enough,” Sam said, and hoped it would be.

Not quite an hour later, the shape of the western horizon changed. It had been as smooth and flat there as in any other direction. No more. That deeper blackness was land: the coast of the Confederate States of America. “Here we are, sir,” Pat Cooley said. “If that’s not Ocracoke Island dead ahead, my career just hit a mine and sank.”

So did mine, Sam thought. The Navy Department might blame an exec who’d been conning a ship for botched navigation. The Navy Department would without the tiniest fragment of doubt blame that ship’s skipper. And so it should. The destroyer escort was his ship. This was his responsibility. Nothing on God’s green earth this side of death or disabling injury could take it off his shoulders.

“Send a petty officer forward with a lead and a sounding line,” Sam said, an order more often heard in the riverboat Navy than on the Atlantic. But he didn’t want the Josephus Daniels running aground, and she drew a lot more water than any river monitor. She needed some water under her keel. Cooley nodded and obeyed.

Feet thudded on the deck. “Sir, we’ve spotted a light about half a mile south of here!” a sailor exclaimed. “Looks like it’s what we want!”

It wouldn’t be the Ocracoke lighthouse at the southwestern tip of the island; that had gone dark at the beginning of the war. If you didn’t already know where you were in these waters, the Confederates didn’t want you here. Major Murphy quivered like a hunting hound. “I’d best join my men, I think,” he said, and left the bridge.

“Very pretty navigation, Pat,” Sam said. “Bring us in a little closer and we’ll lower the boats and turn the Marines loose.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Cooley said, and then, to the engine room, “All ahead one third.” The Josephus Daniels crept southwest.

After a breathless little while, Sam said, “All stop.” The executive officer relayed the order. The ship bobbed in the water. Sam sent a sailor to Major Murphy to let him know everything was ready. Murphy had no doubt figured that out for himself, but the forms needed to be observed.

Lines creaking in the davits, the boats went down to the ocean. For this raid, they’d been fitted with motors. One by one, they chugged toward the shore that was only a low, darker line in the night. North Carolina barrier islands were nothing but glorified sandbanks. Every time a hurricane tore through, it rearranged the landscape pretty drastically. Sometimes, after a hurricane tore through, not much landscape-or land-was left in its path.

“Confederates at that station are going to think a hurricane hit ’em,” Sam murmured.

He didn’t know he’d spoken aloud till Pat Cooley nodded and said, “Hell, yes-uh, sir.”

Grinning, Sam set a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Pat. We’re on the same page.”

Gunfire crackled across the water. Sam tensed. If something had gone wrong, if the bastards in butternut somehow knew the Marines were coming… In that case, the destroyer escort’s guns would have to do some talking of their own. The wireless operator looked up. “Sir, Major Murphy says everything’s under control.”

Sure enough, the gunfire died away. Sam had nothing to do but wait. He drummed his fingers on the metalwork in front of him. Waiting was always a big part of military life. Right this minute, it was also a hard part.

“There we go!” Pat Cooley pointed. Fire rose from the station.

“Yeah, there we go, all right,” Sam agreed. “Other question is, did the Confederates get off an alarm call before we finished overrunning the place?” He shrugged. “Well, we’ll find out.”

Not very much later, sailors peering over the starboard rail called, “Boats coming back!” Sam almost said something like, Stand by to repel boarders! He wondered when the skipper of a ship this size last issued an order like that. But these boarders were on his side-or they’d damned well better be.

Raising boats was harder than lowering them. He had nets out against the sides of the ship for the Marines and their prisoners-he hoped they’d have prisoners-to climb if the crew couldn’t do it. But they managed. He went down to the deck and met Major Murphy there. “Everything go well?” he asked.

“Well enough, Captain,” the Marine officer answered. “We lost one man dead, and we have several wounded we brought back.” The groans on deck would have told Sam that if Murphy hadn’t. The Marine went on, “But we destroyed that station, and we’ve brought back prisoners to question and samples of Confederate Y-ranging gear for the fellows with thick glasses and slide rules to look at. What they do with the stuff is up to them, but we got it. We did our job.”

“Sounds good,” Sam said. “Now my job is to make sure we deliver the goods. Is everybody back aboard ship?”

“I think so,” Major Murphy said.

An indignant Confederate came up to them. “Are you the captain of this vessel?” he demanded of Sam. “I must protest this-this act of piracy!” He sounded like an angry rabbit.

“Go ahead and protest all you please, pal,” Sam said genially. “And you can call me Long John Silver, too.” Major Murphy and several nearby Marines spluttered. Sam went to the rail to make sure no boats or Marines were unaccounted for. Satisfied, he hurried back up to the bridge.

“Are we ready to leave town, sir?” Pat Cooley asked.

“And then some,” Sam said. “Make our course 135. All ahead full.”

“All ahead full,” Cooley echoed, and passed the order to the engine room. “Course is… 135.” He sounded slightly questioning, to let Sam change his mind without losing face if he wanted to.

But Sam didn’t want to. “Yes, 135, Pat,” he said. “I really do want to head southeast, because that’s the last direction the Confederates will look for us. Once we get away, we can swing wide and come back. But I figure most of the search’ll be to the north, and I want to get away from land-based air the best way I know how. So-135.”

Cooley nodded. “Aye aye, sir-135 it is.” The Josephus Daniels steamed away from the North Carolina coast at her sedate top speed.

Brigadier General Irving Morrell did not like getting pushed around by the Confederates. They’d done it in Ohio, and now they were doing it in Pennsylvania. They had the machines they needed to go forward. He didn’t have as many machines as he needed to stop them. It was as simple as that.

Men… Well, how much did men count in this new mechanized age? The United States had more of them than the Confederate States did. The question was, so what?

A nervous-looking POW stood in front of Morrell. In the other man’s beat-up boots, Morrell would have been nervous, too. He said, “Name, rank, and pay number.”

An interpreter turned the question into Spanish. A torrent of that language came back. The interpreter said, “His name is Jose Maria Castillo. He is a senior private-we would say a PFC. His pay number is 6492711.”

“Thanks.” Morrell studied Senior Private Castillo. The prisoner from the Empire of Mexico was medium-sized, skinny, swarthy, with mournful black eyes and a big, bushy mustache like the ones a lot of Confederate soldiers had worn during the Great War. His mustard-yellow uniform would have given good camouflage in the deserts on Mexico’s northern border. Here in western Pennsylvania, it stood out much more. Morrell said, “Ask him what unit he’s in and what their orders were.”

More Spanish. The POW didn’t have to answer that. Did he know he didn’t have to? Morrell wasn’t about to tell him. And he answered willingly enough. “He says he’s with the Veracruz Division, sir,” the interpreter reported. “He says that’s the best one Mexico has. Their orders are to take places the Confederates haven’t been able to capture.”

“Are they?” Morrell carefully didn’t smile at that. He suspected any number of Confederate officers would have had apoplexy if they heard the Mexican prisoner. If the Veracruz Division was the best one Francisco Jose had, the Emperor of Mexico would have been well advised not to take on anything tougher than a belligerent chipmunk. The men all had rifles, but they were woefully short on machine guns, artillery, barrels, and motorized transport. The soldiers seemed brave enough, but sending them up against a modern army wouldn’t have been far from murder-if that modern army hadn’t been so busy in so many other places.

The prisoner spoke without being asked anything. He sounded anxious. He sounded, frankly, scared out of his wits. Morrell had a hard time blaming him. Surrender was a chancy enough business even when two sides used the same language, as U.S. and C.S. soldiers did. Would-be POWs sometimes turned into casualties when their captors either wanted revenge for something that had happened to them or just lacked the time to deal with prisoners. If a captive knew no English… He likely thinks we’ll eat him for supper, Morrell thought, not without sympathy.

Sure enough, the interpreter said, “He wants to know what we’re going to do with him, sir.”

“Tell him nobody’s going to hurt him,” Morrell said. The interpreter did. Jose Castillo crossed himself and gabbled out what had to be thanks. Every once in a while, war made Morrell remember what a filthy business it was. That a man should be grateful for not getting killed out of hand… Roughly, Morrell went on, “Tell him he’ll be taken away from the fighting. Tell him he’ll be fed. If he needs a doctor, he’ll get one. Tell him we follow Geneva Convention rules, if that means anything to him.”

The prisoner seized his hand and kissed it. That horrified him. Getting captured had, in essence, turned a man into a dog. He gestured. The interpreter led Jose Castillo away. Morrell wiped his hand on his trouser leg.

“Don’t blame you, sir,” one of his guards said. “God only knows what kind of germs that damn spic’s got.”

Germs were the last thing on Morrell’s mind. He just wanted to wipe away the touch of the desperate man’s lips. If he couldn’t feel them anymore, maybe he could forget them. He needed to forget them if he was going to do his job. “He’s out of the fighting now,” he said. “He’s luckier than a lot of people I can think of.”

“Well, yeah, sir, since you put it that way,” the guard said. “He’s luckier’n me, for instance.” He grinned to show Morrell not to take him too seriously, but Morrell knew he was kidding on the square. Only a few hard cases really liked war; most men endured it and tried to come through in one piece.

From everything Morrell had heard, Jake Featherston was part of the small minority who’d enjoyed himself in the field. Morrell couldn’t have sworn that was so, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. Who but a man who enjoyed war would have loosed another one on a country-two countries-that didn’t?

That guard shifted his feet, trying to draw Morrell’s attention. Morrell nodded to him. The soldier asked, “Sir, is it true that the Confederates are inside Pittsburgh?”

“I think so, Wally,” Morrell answered. “That’s what it sounds like from the situation reports I’ve been getting, anyhow.”

“Son of a bitch,” Wally said.

“It isn’t what we had in mind when this whole mess started,” Morrell allowed. What the USA had had in mind was a victory parade through the ruined streets of Richmond, preferably with Jake Featherston’s head on a platter carried along at the front. Richmond was close to the border, which didn’t mean the United States had got there. They hadn’t in the War of Secession or the Great War, either.

“So what are we gonna do?” Wally asked-a thoroughly reasonable question. “How come we don’t just pitch into ’em?”

“Because if we do, we’d probably lose right now,” Morrell said unhappily. “We don’t have enough men or materiel yet. We’re getting there, though.” I hope.

As a matter of fact, things could have been worse. The Confederates had been planning to surround Pittsburgh instead of swarming into it, but U.S. counterattacks hadn’t let them do that. Now they had to clear the Americans from a big city house by house and factory by factory. That wouldn’t come easy or cheap. Again, Morrell hoped it wouldn’t, anyhow.

He’d been screaming at every superior in Pennsylvania to let him concentrate before he counterattacked. He’d been screaming at Philadelphia to get him enough barrels so he’d have a legitimate chance of getting somewhere when he finally did. He was sure he’d made himself vastly unpopular. He couldn’t have cared less. What could they do to him? Dismiss him from the Army? If they did, he would thank them, take off the uniform, and go back to Agnes and Mildred outside of Fort Leavenworth. Whatever happened to the country after that… happened. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be his fault.

Before long, he discovered they could do something worse than dismissing him. They could ignore him. They could, and they did. His requests for more barrels and more artillery fell on deaf ears. Since they wouldn’t dismiss him, he sent a telegram of resignation to the War Department and waited to see what came of that.

He didn’t want them to accept it. He thought he could hit the Confederates harder than anyone they could put in his slot. But if they thought otherwise, he wasn’t going to beg them to let him stay. Maybe they would give his replacement the tools they were denying him. If someone else got the weapons he wasn’t getting, that made him less indispensable than he thought himself now.

No answering telegram came back. Instead, less than twenty-four hours later, Colonel John Abell showed up on his doorstep. No, Brigadier General Abell: he had stars on his shoulder straps now. “Congratulations,” Morrell told the General Staff officer, more or less sincerely.

“Thank you,” Abell answered. “For some reason, I’m considered an expert on the care and feeding of one Irving Morrell. And so-here I am.”

“Here you are,” Morrell agreed in friendly tones. “Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

“As a matter of fact, it looks like rain,” Abell said-and it did. He gave Morrell a severe look. It was like being haunted by the ghost of an overstrict schoolteacher. “See here, General-how dare you threaten to resign when the country is in crisis?”

“After all these years we’ve been banging heads, you still don’t know how I work.” Morrell wasn’t friendly anymore. “How can you care for me and feed me if you don’t know where I live or what I eat? I wasn’t threatening anything or anybody. I’ve just had enough of being asked to do the impossible. If you put someone else here, maybe you’ll support him the way you should.”

“You are the recognized expert on barrel tactics-recognized by the Confederates as well as your own side.” Abell spoke the words as if they tasted bad. To him, they probably did. He said them anyhow. He did have a certain chilly integrity.

“Confederate recognition I could do without,” Morrell said. As if in sympathy, his shoulder twinged. The enemy wanted him dead-him personally. That was why he tolerated Wally and the other bodyguards he didn’t want. He knew too well the Confederates might try again. Anger rising in his voice, he went on, “And if the War Department thinks I’m so goddamn wonderful and brilliant and all that, why do I have to send a letter of resignation to get it to remember I’m alive?”

“That is not the case, I assure you,” John Abell said stiffly.

“Yeah, and then you wake up,” Morrell jeered. “Now tell me another one, one I’ll believe.”

“We are trying to meet your needs, General.” If Abell was angry, he didn’t show it. He was very good at not showing what he thought. “Please remember, though, this is not the only area where we are having difficulties.”

“Difficulties, my ass. The Confederates are in Pittsburgh. They’re going to tear hell out of it whether they keep it or not. That’s not a difficulty-that’s a fucking calamity. Tell me I’m wrong. I dare you. I double-dare you.” Morrell felt like an eight-year-old trying to pick a fight.

“If we destroy the Confederate Army causing the devastation in Pittsburgh, that devastation may become worthwhile,” Abell said.

Morrell clapped a hand to his forehead. If he was going to be melodramatic, he’d do it in spades. “Christ on His cross, Abell, what do you think I’m trying to do?” he howled. “Why won’t Philadelphia let me?”

“You will agree the cost of failure is high,” Abell said.

“You make sure I fail if you don’t support me,” Morrell said. “Is that what you’ve got in mind?”

“No. Of course not. If we didn’t want you here, we would have put someone else in this place,” Abell said. “We had someone else in this place before you recovered from your wound, if you’ll remember.”

“Oh, yes. You sure did.” Morrell rolled his eyes. “And my illustrious predecessor scattered barrels all over the landscape, too. He aimed to support the infantry with them. Perfect War Department tactics from 1916.”

John Abell turned red. In the last war, the War Department had thought of barrels as nothing more than infantry-support weapons. George Custer and Morrell had had to go behind Philadelphia’s back to mass them. The War Department would have stripped Custer of his barrels if it found out what he was up to-till he proved his way worked much better than its.

“That’s not fair,” Abell said once his blush subsided. “We did put you here to set things right, and you can’t say we didn’t.”

“All right. Fine.” Morrell took a deep breath. “If that’s what you want, I’ll try to give it to you. Let me have the tools I need to do my job. Stand back and get out of my way and let me do it, too.”

“And if you don’t?” Now Abell’s voice was silky with menace.

Morrell laughed at him. “That’s obvious, isn’t it? If I make a hash of it, you’ve got a scapegoat. ‘Things went wrong because General Morrell fucked up, that no-good, bungling son of a bitch.’ Tell every paper in the country it’s my fault. I won’t say boo. If I have what I need here and I can’t do what needs doing, I deserve it.”

“You’ll get what’s coming to you,” the General Staff officer said. “And if you don’t deliver once you get it, you’ll really get what’s coming to you. I’m glad you think it seems fair, because it will happen whether you think so or not.”

“Deal.” Morrell stuck out his hand. John Abell looked surprised, but he shook it.

The other sailor tossed five bucks into the pot. “Call,” he said.

“Ten-high straight.” George Enos, Jr., laid down his cards.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” The other sailor couldn’t have sounded more disgusted if he tried for a week. George understood when he threw down his own hand: he held an eight-high straight.

“Got him by a cunt hair, George,” Fremont Dalby said as George scooped up the cash. It was a nice chunk of change; they’d gone back and forth several times before the call. Losing would have hurt. It wouldn’t have left George broke or anything-he had better sense than to gamble that hard-but it would have hurt. Dalby scooped up the cards and started to shuffle. “My deal, I think.”

“Yeah.” George wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. The compartment where they played was hot and airless. A bare bulb in an iron cage overhead gave the only light. The door said STORES on the outside, but the chamber was empty. The sailors sat on the gray-painted deck and redistributed the wealth.

Fremont Dalby passed George the cards. “Here. Cut.” George took some cards from the middle of the deck and stuck them on the bottom. Dalby laughed. “Whorehouse cut, eh? All right, you bastard. I had my royal flush all stacked and ready to deal, and now you went and fucked me. Some pal you are.”

“Sorry,” George said in tones suggesting he was anything but. As the CPO dealt, George asked, “Ever see a real royal flush in an honest game?”

“Nope, and I’ve been playing poker for a hell of a long time,” Dalby answered. “I saw a jack-high straight flush once. That was a humdinger of a hand, too, on account of it beat four queens. But I knew the people, and they weren’t dealing off the bottom of the deck or anything.”

Nobody else in the game admitted to seeing a royal flush, either. George looked at his cards. None of them appeared to have been introduced to any of the others. This wasn’t a jack-high straight flush; it was jack-high garbage. He almost threw it away, but he’d won the last hand, so he stayed in and asked for four cards.

That left him with a pair of jacks. When Dalby called for jacks or better to open, he put in a dollar. The hand got raised twice before it came back to him. He tossed it in with no regret except for the vanished dollar. Fremont Dalby ended up taking it with three kings.

George had just started to shuffle when the klaxons called men to battle stations. Everyone paused just long enough to scoop up the money in front of him. “To be continued,” somebody said as the poker game broke up. And so, no doubt, it would be; it seemed as unending as any movie serial.

His feet clanged on the deck as he ran for the nearest stairway. Dalby was older and rounder, but stayed with him all the way. They got to their antiaircraft gun at the same time. Along with the Townsend, three other destroyers surrounded the Trenton. The escort carrier’s fighters buzzed high overhead. Kauai lay somewhere to the southeast. They were out tweaking the Japs again, much as Francis Drake had singed the beard of the King of Spain. Like King Philip, the Japs were liable to singe back.

“Is this real or a drill, Enos?” Dalby said. “I got five bucks says it’s a drill.”

The odds favored him. They had many more drills than real alerts. Still, in these waters… “You’re on,” George said. They shook to seal the bet.

“Now hear this! Now hear this!” the intercom blared. “Aircraft from the Trenton are attacking a Japanese carrier. The Japs are sure to try to return the favor if they can. Be ready. It is expected that the Trenton will be their main target, but we want to remind them that we love them, too.”

“There’s a fin you owe me,” George said happily. “That’ll buy one of the boys some shoes.”

“My ass,” Fremont Dalby said, his voice sour. “It’ll buy you a couple of shots and a blowjob from a Chinese whore on Hotel Street when we get back to Pearl.”

Since he was probably right, George didn’t argue with him. He just said, “Well, that’s a damn sight better than nothing, too.” The gun crew laughed. Even the CPO’s lips twitched.

They waited. Before too long, the executive officer said, “Y-ranging gear reports inbound aircraft. They aren’t ours. We’re going to have company in about fifteen minutes. Roll out the welcome mat for our guests, boys.” Five minutes later, he came back on the loudspeakers: “Trenton’s aircraft report that that Jap carrier is on fire and dead in the water. Score one for the good guys.”

Cheers rang out up and down the Townsend’s main deck, and probably everywhere else on the ship, too. The crew had faced savage air attacks more than once. Getting their own back felt wonderful.

“Those Jap pilots are liable to know they can’t go home again,” Dalby warned. “That means they’ll give it everything they’ve got when they hit us. Knock ’em down as quick as you can so they don’t crash into the ship or something.”

Knocking down airplanes was hard enough without any extra pressure to do it fast. George just shrugged. Unless somebody got hurt, all he had to do was make sure the gun had enough ammo to keep shooting. What happened after that was Dalby’s responsibility, not his.

The Y-range antenna swung round and round. George and everybody else up on deck peered northwest, the direction from which trouble had so often come before. The Townsend picked up speed. She would want to do as much dodging as she could. George glanced over toward the Trenton. The carrier couldn’t pick up a lot of speed. Her engines wouldn’t let her.

“There they are!” somebody yelled.

George swore softly. Those were Jap airplanes, all right. Their silhouettes might have been more familiar to him than those of U.S. aircraft. The half dozen fighters in combat air patrol over the little U.S. fleet streaked toward the enemy. Japanese escort fighters were bound to outnumber them. Their pilots would want to take out as many enemy strike aircraft as they could before the enemy shot them down. A pilot’s life wasn’t always glamorous. George wouldn’t have traded places with anybody up there.

An airplane tumbled out of the sky, leaving a comet’s trail of fire and smoke all the way down to the Pacific. “That’s a Jap!” someone shouted. George hoped he knew what he was talking about.

This wasn’t like the last few times the Townsend had ventured out in the direction of Midway. The main attack wasn’t aimed at the destroyer. The Japs wanted the Trenton. A carrier was really dangerous to them, as aircraft from the converted freighter had just proved. Destroyers? Destroyers were nuisances, annoyances, worth noticing now only because they tried to keep enemy aircraft away from the Trenton.

That made the 40mm crews’ jobs easier. They were less rattled, less hurried, than they had been when enemy dive bombers singled the Townsend out for attention. George fed his gun shells. Fritz Gustafson loaded them into the breeches. At Fremont Dalby’s command, two other sailors shifted the antiaircraft gun in altitude and azimuth. Empty shell casings clattered down onto the deck by the gun crews’ feet. Every so often, George or Gustafson would kick them out of the way so nobody tripped over them.

The Townsend’s five-inch guns blasted away at the Japs. Their shells could reach a lot farther and packed much more punch, but they couldn’t fire nearly so fast. Their roar, on top of the thunder from all the smaller weapons, hammered the ears. George wondered whether he’d be able to hear at all by the time the war ended.

And the big guns’ blast shook and jarred loose damn near everything on the deck. The last time they’d cut loose, a sailor George knew ended up spitting a filling out into the palm of his hand. He’d been lucky, too, even if he didn’t think so when the pharmacist’s mate played dentist on him. Stray too close to a five-incher’s muzzle when it went off and blast could kill, even if it didn’t leave a mark on your body. George didn’t aspire to be a corpse, unmarked or otherwise.

“Hit!” The whole gun crew shouted at the same time when a Japanese dive bomber they’d been shooting at suddenly wavered in the air and started trailing smoke. “We got the son of a bitch!” George added exultantly.

That pilot must have known he had nowhere to go. With his own carrier in flames, he wouldn’t have had anywhere to go even if his engine were running perfectly. Taking a hit must have rubbed his nose in it. He dove for the Trenton. Instead of releasing his bomb and trying to pull up, he seemed intent on using his airplane as an extra weapon.

A hail of antiaircraft fire from the escort carrier said its gunners realized the same thing. They scored more hits on the dive bomber, but didn’t deflect it from its course. The ship swung to starboard-slowly, so slowly. A carrier built from the keel up as a warship would have had a much better chance of getting away.

But that turn, small as it was, saved the Trenton. Maybe the enemy pilot was dead in the cockpit, or maybe the heavy fire severed the cables to his rudder and ailerons so he couldn’t swerve no matter how much he wanted to. He splashed into the Pacific a hundred yards to port of the carrier. His bomb went off then, sending up a great plume of white water. A near miss like that would damage the Trenton with fragments, and might make her leak from sprung seams. But it wouldn’t turn her into a torch and send her to the bottom.

“Fucker had balls,” Fritz Gustafson said with grudging respect. As grudgingly, George nodded. Trying to get in a last lick at your foe when you knew you were a goner took nerve.

Not so many Japanese airplanes were left in the sky now. U.S. fighters and ferocious AA had knocked down a lot of them. Then George watched something that chilled him to the bone. A Jap fighter pilot heeled his undamaged airplane into a dive and swooped on the Trenton like a hunting falcon. He didn’t try to save himself-all he wanted to do was damage that carrier the only way he had left. That he would die if he succeeded couldn’t have mattered to him. He wasn’t going home anyway.

The Trenton shot him down. His fighter broke up and fell in flaming pieces into the sea. But he’d given the other Japs an idea-or maybe he’d told them over the wireless what he aimed to do. One after another, they all dove on the American ships below them. Dead men themselves, they didn’t want to die alone.

George’s gun put as many rounds as it could into a fighter. The Japanese didn’t make their aircraft as sturdy as Americans did-not that a U.S. fighter would have survived a pasting like that. But the Jap wasn’t trying to survive, only to take Americans with him. He didn’t quite make it. His burning airplane crashed into the ocean off the Townsend’s starboard bow.

One fighter did crash on the Trenton’s flight deck-and then skidded off into the sea, trailing flames. It scraped eight or ten sailors off the ship with it. Fires lingered on the flight deck after the Jap was gone. Damage-control parties beat them down with high-pressure seawater. By the time the escort carrier’s strike aircraft got back, she was ready to land them. “By God, we did it,” George said. In the waters off the Sandwich Islands, Americans hadn’t said anything like that for a while, but they’d earned the right today. George said it again, with feeling.