Drive to the East

XIX

New Year’s Eve. One more day till 1943. Flora Blackford was back in her Philadelphia apartment. She hadn’t expected to be anywhere else. Even if she hadn’t campaigned at all, she thought she would have beaten Sheldon Vogelman. People in her district were used to reelecting her. She nodded to herself. It was a nice habit for them to have.

Joshua was out with friends. “I’ll be back next year,” he’d said. How long had people been making that joke? Probably as long as people had divided time into years. He was liable to come back drunk, too, even if he was underage. Well, if he did, the hangover the next morning ought to teach him not to do it again for a while. She could hope so, anyhow.

“Underage,” she muttered, and clicked her tongue between her teeth. He would turn eighteen in 1943. Old enough to be conscripted. And conscripted he probably would be. He was healthy. He didn’t have flat feet, a punctured eardrum, or bad eyes. Nothing could keep him out of the war-except being a Congresswoman’s son.

And he was as stubborn and as stupid as her brother had been in the last war. He didn’t want her to do anything to keep him out. Not even Uncle David’s artificial leg could make him change his mind. He didn’t believe anything like that would happen to him. No one ever believed anything would happen to him-till it did.

The telephone rang. It made her start. She hurried towards it, more relieved than anything else. If she was talking to somebody, she wouldn’t have to worry about Joshua… so much. “Hello?”

“Flora?” That cheerful baritone could belong to only one man.

“Hello, Franklin,” she said. “What can I do for you?” Roosevelt had never called her at the apartment before.

“How would you like to ring in the New Year with me at the War Department?”

She hesitated only a moment. “I’ll be over as soon as I can get a cab.”

“See you in a little while, then.” He hung up.

She didn’t think the USA’s military planners had a fancy party waiting for her. But the Assistant Secretary of War wasn’t going to go into detail about why he wanted to see her, not over the telephone. She called the cab company. They started to tell her she would have to wait half an hour. “It’s our busiest day of the year, lady. Sorry.” The dispatcher didn’t sound the least bit sorry.

“This is Congresswoman Blackford.” Flora didn’t tell him he would be sorry if she didn’t get a cab sooner than that, but she didn’t need to, either. He got the message, loud and clear.

A cab sat waiting when she got to the street. An ordinary person wouldn’t have been able to summon one so fast. Remembering that chafed at her Socialist sense of equality. She consoled herself by thinking she carried more responsibility than an ordinary person. From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs. Right now, she needed to get to the War Department in a hurry.

The cabby hopped out and held the door open for her. “Where to, ma’am?” he asked. She told him as she got in. He nodded. “Fast as I can,” he promised; the dispatcher must have let him know who she was.

He kept his word, but he couldn’t go very fast. Confederate bombers had been over the night before, so some of the roads had fresh craters, while sawhorses and red tape closed off others so specialists could try to defuse time bombs. Flora had heard their life expectancy was measured in weeks. That information was secret from the public, but she feared the specialists knew it.

Not far from downtown, the wreckage of a downed C.S. airplane further snarled traffic. “Nice to see we nail one every once in a while,” the taxi driver said. “Those… people need to pay for what they do.” The little pause said he’d remembered just in time that he carried someone important.

“Yes.” Flora almost spoke more strongly herself. There wasn’t enough plywood and cardboard in Philadelphia-there probably wasn’t enough in the world-to cover up all the windows the Confederates had blown out. So many buildings had pieces bitten from them, or were only charred ruins. Ordinary bombs could start fires, and the Confederates dropped incendiaries, too. One popular propaganda poster showed a long, skinny incendiary bomb with Jake Featherston’s bony face at one end clamped in a pair of tongs and about to go into a bucket of water. Underneath the sizzling Confederate President were three words: COOL HIM OFF!

“Here you go, ma’am.” The driver pulled up in front of the War Department. It had taken plenty of damage, too, even if it was built from the best reinforced concrete taxpayer dollars could buy. Most of its business went on underground these days. Flora didn’t know how far underground the tunnels ran. She didn’t need to know. Not many people did.

She paid the cabby. Her breath smoked as she went up the battered steps. She showed the sentries her identity papers. “I’m here to see Assistant Secretary Roosevelt,” she said.

“Hold on for a minute, ma’am.” One of them picked up a telephone and spoke into it. After not much longer than the promised wait, he hung up and nodded to her. “You can go ahead, ma’am. You’re legit, all right. Willie, take her to Mr. Roosevelt’s office.”

Willie looked younger than her own Joshua. He led her down endless flights of stairs. All she knew when he walked her along a corridor was that at least one more level lay below the one she was on. He stopped at a door with ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR neatly painted on the frosted-glass window. “Here you are, ma’am. When you need to come up, call the front desk and somebody will come down to guide you.”

Don’t go wandering around on your own, he meant. “All right,” Flora answered. Willie looked relieved.

She opened the door. “Hello, Flora! Come in,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said. Sitting at his desk, a cigarette holder in his mouth at a jaunty angle, he looked strong and virile. But he sat in a wheelchair, and went on, “You’ll have to excuse my not rising, I’m afraid.” A shrug of his broad shoulders might have added, What can you do?

“Of course,” Flora said quickly, and then, “Happy New Year.” She couldn’t go wrong with that.

“Same to you,” Roosevelt answered. “And I hope it will be a Happy New Year for the country, too. We’re in better shape now than we were when 1942 started, anyhow. I don’t think the Confederates will be able to get out of the noose around Pittsburgh, and that will cost them. That will cost them plenty.”

“Good,” Flora said. “Lord knows they’ve cost us plenty. Is that what you wanted to talk about tonight?”

“As a matter of fact, no. I wanted to tell you Columbus has discovered America.”

Flora didn’t know how to take that. With a smile seemed the best way. “I thought he might have,” she agreed. “Otherwise we’d be doing this somewhere else and speaking a different language-a couple of different languages, I expect.”

Roosevelt’s big, booming laugh filled the office. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right. But that’s the message we got back from Washington State-Hanford, the name of the town is-the other day. It means they’ve done the first big part of what they set out to do.”

“And what is that, Franklin?” she asked. “I’ve sat on the secret for so long, don’t you think I’m entitled to find out?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk about tonight,” he answered. “I have clearance from the President to tell you what’s what.” He cocked his head and gave her a coy, even an arch, smile. “So you want to know, eh?”

“Maybe a little,” Flora said, and Roosevelt laughed again.

“Tell me everything you know about uranium,” he said.

Flora sat silent for perhaps half a minute. “There,” she said. “I just did.”

This time, Roosevelt positively chortled. “Well, that’s what I said when this whole thing started-my exact words, to tell you the truth. Now I’m going to tell you what the professors with the slide rules told me.”

And he did. He was a lively, well-organized speaker. He could have lectured at any college in the country. Flora’s head soon started spinning even so. Uranium-235, U-238, uranium hexafluoride, centrifuges, gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion… It all seemed diffuse to her, and quite a bit of it seemed gaseous.

“What have they done out there now?” she asked.

“They’ve enriched enough uranium to have a self-sustaining reaction,” Roosevelt replied. Enriched, Flora had learned, meant getting a mix with more U-235-the kind that could explode-and less U-238, which couldn’t. A sustained reaction wasn’t an explosion, but she gathered it was a long step on the way towards one.

“If everything goes right and we get the weapon soon enough, this could win us the war, couldn’t it?” Flora said.

“Well, nobody knows for sure,” Roosevelt answered, “but the professors seem to think so.”

“The Germans are working on it, too?” she asked.

“Yes. No doubt about it. They’re the ones who found fission in the first place,” he said.

“All right. What about the Confederates?” Flora asked.

“We think they have something going on,” the Assistant Secretary of War said carefully. “We don’t know as much about it as we wish we did. We’re trying to find out more.”

“That sounds like a good idea.” Flora’s own calm meant she would have started screaming at him if he’d told her anything else. “How much do they know about what we’re doing?”

“That is the question.” Maybe Roosevelt was quoting Hamlet, maybe just answering her. “The truth is, we’re not sure. Counterintelligence hasn’t picked up whatever intelligence they’ve gathered on us.”

“I hope you’re trying everything under the sun,” Flora said, again in lieu of yelling.

“Oh, yes,” Roosevelt said. “So far, we’ve only figured out one defense against these atomic explosions.”

“Really? That’s one more than I’d imagined,” Flora said. “What is it?”

“To be somewhere else when they go off.”

“Oh.” Flora laughed. But Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t laughing now. He meant it. Another thing she hadn’t imagined was a race where the winners won everything and the losers were probably ruined forever. “How long between the, uh, sustained reaction and a real bomb we can use?”

Roosevelt spread his hands. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. The physicists say anywhere between six months and ten years, depending on how fast they can solve the engineering problems.”

“That’s no good!” Flora said. “If it’s ten years for us and six months for the CSA, we’ll never get the chance to finish.”

“They tell me it’s more likely to be the other way around,” Roosevelt said. “For one thing, we do seem to have started before the Confederates did. For another, we’ve got three times as many physicists and engineers and such as they do.”

“Serves them right for not educating their Negroes.” Flora stopped and grimaced. These days, the Confederates were doing worse with their Negroes than not educating them. Thinking of what they were doing made her say, “We’d better win this race.”

“I think we will.” Franklin Roosevelt sounded confident-but then, he usually did. “Whether we’ll win it in time to use one of those bombs in this war… That I don’t know, and I’d be lying if I said I did.”

“What about Germany and England and France? What about Japan?” Flora asked.

“As I said, we have to guess the Kaiser is somewhere ahead of us. How far, I don’t know,” Roosevelt said. “The others? I don’t know that, either. If we have intelligence about what they’re doing, it doesn’t come through me.” Flora thought it should have, but that wasn’t her province. She decided she had done the right thing by not making a fuss about the budget entry she’d found. If this worked, it would win the war.

And if it didn’t, how many hundreds of millions of dollars would they have thrown down a rathole? As 1942 passed into 1943, she tried not to think about that.

Armstrong Grimes had charge of a platoon. In the middle of Salt Lake City in the middle of winter, he could have done without the honor. But Lieutenant Streczyk was somewhere far back of the line, his left leg gone below the knee. He’d been unlucky or incautious enough to step on a mine.

One of these days, they might send another junior officer out to the front to take charge of things. But the Utah campaign got what other fronts didn’t want or need, and these days didn’t get a whole lot of that. Till some luckless and probably brainless lieutenant showed up, Armstrong had the job.

Yossel Reisen commanded the squad that had been his. “If this shit keeps up, we’ll be majors by the time we got out of here,” Armstrong said.

“I don’t even care if I’m a corporal when I get out of here,” Yossel answered. “As long as I get out, that’s all that matters.”

“Well, yeah. I’m not gonna tell you you’re wrong, on account of you’re not,” Armstrong said. “Wish to God the Mormons would pack it in and quit. They gotta know ain’t no way in hell they can win.”

“I don’t think they care. I think all they’ve got left is going down swinging.” Yossel paused to light a cigarette. He and Armstrong sprawled behind a stone wall that protected them from snipers. If Armstrong stuck his head up, he could see the rebuilt and rewrecked Mormon Temple ahead. He didn’t-if he were so foolish, a Mormon rifleman would put a round in his ear. After a drag, Yossel went on, “Jews were like that once upon a time. They rose up against the Romans whenever they saw the chance… and the Romans handed them their heads every damn time.”

Palestine, these days, was a sleepy Ottoman province. It had lots of Arabs, some Jews, and just enough Turks to garrison the towns and collect taxes. No matter how holy it was, nothing much ever happened there. Odds were nothing ever would.

Something erupted from behind the Mormon lines. “Screaming meemie!” Armstrong yelled.

The spigot-mortar bomb came down a few hundred yards away. Even that was close enough to shake him with the blast. “They really do love you,” Yossel Reisen said. “Ever since you had that Mormon strip, we’ve got more little presents like that than anybody else.”

“Oh, shut up,” Armstrong said, not because Reisen was wrong but because he was right. Armstrong wished he hadn’t given the Mormon a hard time, too. Fighting these maniacs was hard enough when you were just one enemy among many. When they were trying to kill you in particular… The most Armstrong could say was that they hadn’t done it yet.

U.S. artillery woke up about ten minutes later. Shells screamed into the area from which the screaming meemie had come. But then, the launcher was bound to be long gone.

“How far do you think it is to the Temple?” Armstrong asked. His voice sounded strange because he was talking through his gas mask. Some of the crap the Army threw at the Mormons was liable to blow back into the U.S. positions. And the Mormons still had gas of their own, which they fired from mortars whenever the artillery used it against them. Armstrong didn’t know whether they got it from the CSA or cooked it up in a basement in Ogden. He didn’t care, either. He did know it was a major pain in the rear.

Yossel Reisen also looked like a pig-snouted Martian monster in a bad serial. “Couple miles,” he answered, sounding almost as unearthly as he looked.

“Yeah, about what I figured,” Armstrong agreed. “How long you think we’ll need to get there? How hard will those Mormon fuckers fight to hang on to it?”

“Too long, and even harder than they’ve fought already,” Yossel said.

That wasn’t scientific, but it matched what Armstrong was thinking much too well. He said, “What do you think the odds are we’ll live through it?”

This time, Reisen didn’t answer right away. When he did, he said, “Well, we’re still here so far.”

Armstrong almost asked him what the odds of that were. The only reason he didn’t was, he already knew the answer. The odds were damn slim. He wouldn’t have been leading a squad if that people bomb hadn’t got Sergeant Stowe. He wouldn’t have had the platoon if that mine hadn’t nailed Lieutenant Streczyk. Either or both of those disasters could have happened to him just as easily. So could a thousand others. The same went for Yossel. But they were both still here, neither of them much more than scratched.

In the next few days, Armstrong really started wondering how long he would last. More and more barrels came forward. Most were the waddling monsters kept in storage since the Great War, but some more modern machines went into the mix. None, though, had the stouter turrets and bigger guns that marked the latest models. Every time one of those rolled off the assembly line, it headed straight for the closest Confederate concentration.

More artillery came in, too. And when the weather cleared enough for bombers and fighters to fly, there were more of them, and less antiquated machines, than usual. He knew the signs. The United States were gearing up for another big push.

All the support would help. When the balloon went up, though, it would still be man against man, rifle against rifle, machine gun against machine gun, land mine against dumb luck. Armstrong had a wholesome respect for the men he faced. Nobody who’d been in the line more than a few days had anything but respect for the men of what they called the Republic of Deseret.

Armstrong respected them so much, he wished he didn’t have to go after them one more time. Such wishes usually mattered not at all. This time, his fairy godmother must have been listening. The high command pulled his battered regiment out of the line and stuck in a fresh one that was at full strength.

“Breaks my heart,” Armstrong said as he trudged away from what was bound to be a bloody mess.

“Yeah, I can tell,” Yossel Reisen agreed. “I’m pretty goddamn disappointed myself, if anybody wants to know the truth.” They both laughed the giddy laughs of men who’d just got reprieves from the governor.

The rest of the soldiers heading back into reserve were every bit as relieved. They were dirty and skinny and unshaven. Their uniforms were faded and torn and spotted. A lot of them wore ordinary denim jackets and canvas topcoats liberated from the ruins instead of Army-issue warm clothing. Their eyes were far away.

By contrast, the men replacing them might have stepped out of a recruiting film. They were clean. Their uniforms were clean. Their greatcoats were the same green-gray as everything else. Armstrong was younger than most of the rookies, but felt twenty years older. These fellows hadn’t been through hell-yet.

“Does your mama know you’re here?” he called to a natty private moving up.

By the private’s expression, he wanted to say something about Armstrong’s mother, too. He didn’t have the nerve. It wasn’t just that Armstrong outranked him, either. The kid probably hadn’t seen action yet. Armstrong’s grubby clothes, his dirt, and his whiskers said he had. He’d earned the right to pop off. Before long, the youngster would enjoy it, too-if that was the word, and if he lived.

“Look at all these men.” Yossel nodded toward the troops marching past. “Remember when our regiment was this big?”

“Been a while.” Armstrong tried to work out just how long it had been. He needed some thought. “Shit, I think we’d taken enough casualties after the first time we ran into the Confederates in Ohio to be smaller than that outfit.”

“I think you’re right,” Yossel said. “And they never send enough replacements to get us back up to strength, either.”

“Nope.” Armstrong pulled out a pack of cigarettes, stuck one in his mouth, and offered them to Yossel. The other noncom took one. He lit it. Armstrong leaned close to get his started, then went on, “The ones we do get aren’t worth much, either.”

“If they live long enough, they mostly learn,” Yossel said. “Those first few days in the line, though…”

“Yeah.” Armstrong knew he’d lived through his opening brushes with combat as much by dumb luck as for any other reason. After that, he’d started to have a better idea of what went into staying alive when Featherston’s fuckers or Mormon fanatics tried to do him in. That gave him no guarantee of living through the war, something he knew but tried not to think about. But it did improve his chances.

Replacements got killed and wounded in large numbers, just because they didn’t know how not to. They didn’t dig in fast enough. They didn’t recognize cover when they saw it. They didn’t know when to stay down and when to jump up. They couldn’t gauge whether incoming artillery bursts were close enough to be dangerous. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that they got veterans killed, too, because they gave things away without even knowing they were doing it.

Most veterans tried to stay away from them those first couple of weeks. That wasn’t fair. It meant even more replacements became casualties than might have been otherwise. But it saved veterans’ lives-and it saved the pain of getting to know somebody who wasn’t likely to stick around long anyway.

A swarm of soldiers waited at the makeshift bus depot to go from the line back to some of the comforts of civilization: hot showers, hot food, clean clothes, real beds. Armstrong surveyed the swarm with a jaundiced eye. “Something’s fucked up somewhere,” he predicted.

“Bet your ass, Sarge.” That was one of the men already milling around. “Goddamn Mormons snuck a machine gun somewhere down the highway. They shot up a bus like you wouldn’t believe. Now everybody’s trying to hunt ’em down.”

“Christ, I hope so,” Armstrong said. “That’d be what everybody needs, wouldn’t it? — getting your goddamn head blown off when you’re on your way to R and R?”

“Sooner we kill all the Mormons, happier I’ll be,” the other soldier said. “Then we can get on with the real war. Finally starting to go our way a little, maybe.”

“Maybe, yeah. Depends on how much you believe of what they tell you.” Armstrong knew damn well the wireless didn’t tell the truth all the time. When he was in Ohio, it had gone on and on about U.S. victories and advances while the Army got bundled back and back and back again. He couldn’t prove it wasn’t doing the same thing about what was going on in Ohio and Pennsylvania now.

The other soldier spat a stream of brown tobacco juice. “There is that,” he allowed. Armstrong had thought about chewing tobacco himself. You could do it where the sight of a match or a glowing coal or even the smell of cigarette smoke would get you killed.

An officer called, “The route south has been resecured. Boarding will commence in five minutes.”

Do I want R and R enough to risk getting shot on the way? Armstrong wondered. He must have, because he got on the bus when his turn came.

When Cincinnatus Driver walked into the Des Moines Army recruiting station, the sergeant behind the desk looked up in surprise from his paperwork. Cincinnatus eyed him the same way: the sergeant held his pen between the claws of a steel hook.

“What can I do for you?” the sergeant asked.

“I want to join up,” Cincinnatus answered.

“Sorry, pal. We don’t use colored soldiers,” the sergeant said. “Navy takes colored cooks and stewards. If you want to, you can talk to them. You don’t mind my saying so, though, you’re a tad overage. That cane won’t do you any good, either.”

“You got a uniform on even though you got a hook,” Cincinnatus said.

“I was in the last one,” the recruiting sergeant said. “That’s where I got it. I’m no damn good at the front, but I can do this.”

“Well, I was in the last one, too,” Cincinnatus said. “Drove a truck haulin’ men an’ supplies in Kentucky and Tennessee. Been drivin’ a truck more’n thirty years now. Sure as hell can do it some more. Put me in a deuce-and-a-half and you got one more white boy can pick up a rifle and shoot at Featherston’s fuckers.”

“Ah.” The sergeant looked more interested. “So you want to be a civilian auxiliary, do you?”

“If that’s what you call it these days,” Cincinnatus answered. “Last time around, I was just a truck driver.” He eyed the man behind the desk. “They pay any better on account of the fancy name?”

“Oh, yeah, pal-and then you wake up,” the sergeant said. Cincinnatus chuckled; he hadn’t expected anything different. The veteran reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a fresh form. He did that with his left hand, which was still flesh and blood. Then he poised the pen over the blank form. “Name?”

“Cincinnatus Driver.”

After the sergeant wrote it down, he glanced over at Cincinnatus. “Heard of you, I think. Didn’t you get exchanged from the Confederates not so long ago?”

“Yes, suh, that’s right,” Cincinnatus said.

“You don’t call me ‘sir.’ You call me ‘Sergeant.’ ” The noncom scribbled a note. He handled the pen very well. As he wrote, he went on, “Just so you know, they’re gonna check you seven ways from Sunday on account of you were in the CSA.”

“They can do that,” Cincinnatus agreed. “They reckon a colored man’d help Jake Featherston, though, they’re pretty goddamn stupid.”

“Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it all depends,” the sergeant said. “Maybe they got your wife an’ kids down there, and they’ll feed ’em to the alligators unless you play along.”

“My wife an’ kids are right here in Des Moines,” Cincinnatus said.

“Good for you. Good for them,” the sergeant said. “You know what I mean, though. They’ll check. Now-you say you drove an Army truck in the Great War? What was your base? Who commanded your unit?”

“I drove out of Covington, Kentucky, where I come from,” Cincinnatus replied. “Fella who ran things was a lieutenant name of Straubing.”

The sergeant raised his right eyebrow. “Think he’d remember you?”

Straubing had shot a Confederate diehard dead on Cincinnatus’ front porch. With a jerky nod, Cincinnatus said, “Reckon he would. He still in the Army?”

“Oh, you might say so.” The sergeant wrote another note. “There’s a Straubing who’s a brigadier general in logistics these days. Might not be the same man, but you don’t hear the name every day, and the specialization’s right. You know what logistics is?”

Are you a dumb nigger? he meant. But Cincinnatus did know the answer to that one: “Gettin’ men and stuff where they’re supposed to go when they’re supposed to get there.”

“Right the first time.” The sergeant nodded. “Bet you did drive a truck in the last war. Where else would you have heard the word?”

“I done said I did.” Cincinnatus paused. “But I bet you hear a lot o’ lies, sittin’ where you’re sittin’.”

“Oh, you might say so,” the sergeant repeated, deadpan. “You sure you want to go through with this, Mr. Driver?”

“Yes, suh-uh, Sergeant-an’ I tell you why,” Cincinnatus answered. The sergeant raised a polite eyebrow. Cincinnatus went on, “You just called me Mistuh. Ain’t no white man anywhere in the whole CSA call a colored man Mistuh. Call him boy, call him uncle if his hair’s goin’ gray like mine is. Mistuh? Never in a thousand years. An’ if you don’t respect a man, you don’t have no trouble killin’ him off.”

“Uh-huh.” The sergeant wrote something else on Cincinnatus’ papers. Cincinnatus tried to read what it was, but he couldn’t, not upside down. The man with the hook looked across the desk at the man with the cane. “Thanks for coming in, Mr. Driver. Like I told you, we’re going to have to look at you harder because the Confederates turned you loose. You have a telephone?”

“No, suh,” Cincinnatus answered.

“All right. We’ll send you a letter, then,” the sergeant said. “Probably be ten days, two weeks, something like that. We’ll see what General Straubing has to say about you.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.” Cincinnatus did it right this time. “When he was in Covington, he always treated the colored fellows who drove for him like they was men. Reckon he was the first white man I ever knew who did.”

Cincinnatus went home, not so happy as he’d hoped but not so disappointed as he might have been. He felt as if he were cluttering up the apartment. That was another reason he’d visited the recruiting station. But his urge to get even with the Confederates counted for more.

“Don’t want to jus’ sit here playin’ with my grandbabies,” he told Elizabeth. “I love my grandbabies, but I got some doin’ in me yet.”

“I didn’t say nothin’, dear,” his wife answered.

“I love you, too,” Cincinnatus said, mostly because she hadn’t said anything. They’d been married a long time. Despite the separations they’d gone through, she knew him better than anybody.

The letter from the recruiting station came eight days later. That was sooner than the sergeant had said. Cincinnatus didn’t know whether the quick answer meant good news or bad. He opened the letter-and still didn’t know. It just told him to come back to the station two days hence.

“Why couldn’t that blamed man say one way or the other?” he asked when he took it upstairs.

“You find out then, that’s all,” Elizabeth said. She was calmer than he was-and she wasn’t trying to find out what she’d be doing for the rest of the war.

Cincinnatus took a trolley to the recruiting station bright and early on the appointed day. He got there before it opened, and went across the street to a diner to get out of the cold. The guy behind the counter who served him a cup of coffee gave him a fishy look, but took his five cents without saying anything.

The one-handed sergeant got to the station when Cincinnatus was about halfway through the cup. He left it on the counter and limped over to find out what was what. The sergeant was getting his own pot of coffee going on a hot plate. He looked up without much surprise when the bell above the door jingled.

“Good morning, Mr. Driver,” he said. “You didn’t waste any time, did you?”

“No, suh-uh, no, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus said, and the noncom smiled at the self-correction. Cincinnatus wished he’d got it right the first time. He went on, “You gonna let me drive a truck, or shall I see what I can do in a war plant? Gotta do my bit some kind o’ way.”

Reaching into the top desk drawer, the recruiting sergeant pulled a sheet of Army stationery. “Here’s what Brigadier General Straubing has to say about you, Mr. Driver.” He set a pair of reading glasses on his nose. “ ‘I remember Cincinnatus well. He was a solid driver, clever and brave and resourceful. I have no doubts as to his loyalty or devotion to the United States.’ How’s that?”

“That’s-mighty fine, Sergeant. Mighty fine,” Cincinnatus said. “So you let me drive again?”

“We’ll let you drive,” the sergeant answered. “You said it yourself-if you go behind the wheel, a younger man gets to pick up a Springfield.”

“Ain’t quite what I said.” Cincinnatus knew he ought to leave it there, but he couldn’t. “What I said was, a white man gets to pick up a Springfield. I still don’t reckon that’s fair. Do Jesus, in the last war the Confederates let some o’ their colored men carry guns.”

“Yeah, and they’ve been regretting it ever since,” the sergeant said dryly. He held up his hook. “You can say it wouldn’t be like that here. You can say it, and I wouldn’t give you any grief about it, Mr. Driver, ’cause I think you’re likely right. But I don’t make the rules, and neither do you. The War Department says we’ll play the game like this, so we will. Do you want to do it, or don’t you? If you do, you’ve got about a million forms to fill out. If you don’t, well, thanks for stopping by.”

He had no give in him. He didn’t need to; the government backed him straight down the line. Cincinnatus sighed. “Let me have the damn forms. You ain’t what you oughta be, but you’re a damn sight better’n Jake Featherston.”

The sergeant had to go back to a filing cabinet to get the papers. “You’re a sensible man, Mr. Driver. The difference between bad and worse is a lot bigger than the difference between good and better.”

Cincinnatus started to answer, then stopped before he said anything. That would give him something to think about when he had the time. Now… paperwork. The recruiting sergeant had exaggerated, but not by much. Cincinnatus filled out forms till he got writer’s cramp-not an ailment he worried about very often.

Officially, he wasn’t joining the Army. Officially, he was becoming a civilian employee of the U.S. government. The undersigned agrees, acknowledges, and accepts that his duties may require him to enter areas not definitively known to be safe. He wasn’t sure what definitively meant, but he signed anyway. He knew he wasn’t going to be driving from Idaho to Minnesota.

For purposes of self-protection, employees hired for the aforementioned duty may be permitted to carry firearms, another form told him. He looked at the recruiting sergeant. “The Confederates catch me with a gun, they gonna shoot my ass,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” the sergeant answered. “If they catch you without a gun, they’ll shoot your ass anyway.” Since Cincinnatus couldn’t very well argue with that, he signed again.

At last, only one sheet of paper was left: a loyalty oath. Cincinnatus signed that, too, then set down the pen and shook his hand back and forth to work out the kinks. “Lot o’ paper to go through,” he said. “What do I do next?”

“Go home,” the sergeant told him, which caught him by surprise. “Bring a suitcase-a small suitcase-with you Monday morning. You report to the State Capitol, room… 378. After that, you do what they tell you.”

“All right. Thank you kindly, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus said.

“Thank you, Mr. Driver. You said it-you’re doing your bit.” The sergeant looked down at his hook for a moment, then up at Cincinnatus again. “And if you have to use a gun, make it count.”

“I do that, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus promised. “Yes, suh. I do that.”

Aclear predawn morning in mid-January. When Irving Morrell looked west, he saw red flares in the sky-Confederate recognition signals. When he looked east, he saw more red flares. The Confederates to the east and west could probably see each other’s flares, too. Only twenty or thirty miles separated them, twenty or thirty miles and the force Morrell commanded.

So far, the C.S. rescue force pushing east hadn’t been able to reach the men trapped in and around Pittsburgh. Morrell didn’t intend that they should, either. He turned to his wireless man. “Send ‘Rosebud’ to Philadelphia, Jenkins,” he said.

“ ‘Rosebud.’ Yes, sir.” The wireless operator didn’t know what the code phrase meant. He sent it anyway. A moment later, he nodded to Morrell. “Received, sir.”

“Good,” Morrell said. “Now we see how they like that.”

“Yes, sir,” Jenkins repeated. “Uh, what’s it all about, sir?”

Morrell didn’t think the wireless man could be a Confederate plant. He didn’t think so, but he didn’t take any chances, either. “It means Featherston’s fuckers are going to have some tough sledding, that’s what,” he said. That seemed safe enough-the younger man still didn’t know where or how.

He could have meant sledding literally. Snow blanketed eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Everywhere he looked, everything was white-except for the soot smears that marked burnt-out barrels, wrecked strongpoints, and other works of man.

Artillery boomed, off to the north. Those were U.S. guns, throwing death at the Confederates pushing in from the west. The men in butternut who hung on around Pittsburgh hadn’t pushed west to try to join them. Maybe they were too short of fuel to move. By now, Featherston’s transport aircraft had taken a devil of a beating. And they were flying in from farther and farther away, too, as U.S. bombers plastered their fields.

Had Morrell been running the Confederates’ show, he would have ordered the C.S. troops in Pittsburgh to break out no matter what. Yes, they would have given up the city. Yes, they would have taken losses. But if they’d done it soon enough, they would have saved most of their men and some-maybe a lot-of their equipment. Now they were in real trouble.

That didn’t break Morrell’s heart. For the first year of the war, everything Jake Featherston tried seemed golden. He’d jumped on the United States with both feet. He’d held the USA down, too, even though he ran a smaller country. That had really alarmed Morrell. Featherston didn’t just intend to lick the United States. He intended to conquer them. Morrell wouldn’t have believed it was possible-till the Confederates cut the USA in half.

After that, it was hang on tight and try to survive. Looking back on things, the U.S. counteroffensive in Virginia was ill-conceived. Sure, charge right into the teeth of the enemy’s defenses. Featherston had known the United States were coming, and he’d baked a cake-a reinforced-concrete cake. Fredericksburg? The Wilderness? Nobody in his right mind would want to attack in places like those.

That didn’t stop Daniel MacArthur, of course. He attacked, and paid for it, and attacked again, and got another bloody nose. He hurt the CSA, too, but not in proportion.

“Sir, there’s enemy pressure near Cambridge,” Jenkins reported.

“Is there?” Morrell said. The men and barrels in butternut would be coming along the east-west highway that went through the manufacturing town. A north-south road also ran through Cambridge. Morrell and the couple of dozen barrels he personally commanded were in bivouac along it, a few miles south of the place. Charging to the attack was a major’s job, not a one-star general’s. All at once, Morrell didn’t care. “Then let’s hit them, shall we?”

Within twenty minutes, his barrels were rolling north. The sun came up as they got moving. Infantrymen accompanied them, some riding barrels, some in trucks, some in half-tracked troop carriers that could cross ground where even a four-wheel-drive truck bogged down. When the fighting started, the foot soldiers would jump out and go to work.

The Confederates had stalled just outside of Cambridge. Morrell could see why: it was a tough nut to crack. It sat on a rise, and dominated the ground on which Featherston’s men had to approach. Several butternut barrels burned. But there was already fighting just outside the town. The chatter of automatic weapons made Morrell grind his teeth. The Confederates had plenty of firepower.

Still, he was hitting them in the flank when all their attention was focused ahead of them. “Front!” he called to his gunner.

“Identified!” Frenchy Bergeron answered, a quarter of a heartbeat slower than he should have. Maybe Morrell was overcritical; maybe Michael Pound had spoiled him for other gunners. Morrell yelled to the driver. The barrel stopped. The gun slewed a few degrees to the left. It roared.

“That’s a hit!” Morrell whooped with glee as the C.S. barrel caught fire. A pair of crewmen got out and ran for the closest trees. They didn’t make it. Morrell picked another target. “Front! — the one next to the upside-down auto.”

“Identified!” Bergeron sang out. The turret traversed again. The cannon shouted. The Confederate barrel went up in flames. Morrell whooped again.

For two or three minutes, the U.S. machines had it all their own way. Their enemies didn’t seem to realize where the devastating fire was coming from. Then the Confederates rallied. Most of their barrels were new models, with the well-sloped armor and the big gun. When they turned toward the U.S. barrels on their flank, they suddenly became much harder to knock out. And those three-inch guns began taking a toll on the barrels Morrell led.

But in confronting Morrell’s barrels, the Confederates left themselves vulnerable to the U.S. defenders holed up in Cambridge. The force in the town didn’t seem to have many barrels, but did have plenty of antibarrel cannons. Those began picking off the C.S. barrels that turned to expose their thinner side armor to them.

A clear day had disadvantages as well as advantages. Confederate Asskickers screamed down out of the sky to bomb the antibarrel cannons. The dive bombers put several guns out of action in the space of a few minutes. Asskickers were hideously vulnerable to U.S. fighters, but no U.S. fighters seemed to be in the neighborhood. They were probably out chasing Pittsburgh-bound transports.

Morrell swore under this breath, and then over it. No matter how you tried, the pieces didn’t all fit together the way you wanted them to. If everything worked the way you hoped it would, you’d win the war in a couple of weeks, and you’d hardly take any casualties. If…

Fortunately, the Fuckup Fairy visited both sides. Considering all the Confederates trapped in the Pittsburgh pocket, she’d sprinkled more of her magic dust on Jake Featherston lately than she had on the U.S. General Staff. And if that wasn’t a miracle of rare device, Morrell had never seen one.

He ducked down into the turret to use his fancy wireless set. “Close with them!” he called to his crews. “Front to front, they can hurt us from farther away than we can hurt them. If we get in close, it evens out.”

What had Horatio Nelson said? No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy, that was it. Nelson had a better turn of phrase than Irving Morrell. They both thought the same way, though.

Engine growling, Morrell’s barrel raced forward. His driver had got the order along with the others. A couple of bullets clanked off the machine’s steel hull. Bullets didn’t matter. Confederate foot soldiers could shoot at the barrel till the cows came home. A three-inch armor-piercing round, unfortunately, was another story.

It was a wild melee, there on the snow-covered fields. The two barrel forces got within point-blank range of each other. Whoever shot first won. U.S. barrel turrets had hydraulic traverse. The Confederates had to crank theirs around by hand. It gave the green-gray barrels a small edge on the ones painted butternut.

And the antibarrel fire from Cambridge didn’t stop. After as wild a half hour as Morrell had known, the Confederates sullenly drew back. They’d lost fifteen or twenty barrels, and taken out about half as many U.S. machines. “We smashed ’em, sir!” Bergeron exclaimed.

“Maybe,” Morrell said. “I hope so. But maybe they’re just waiting till reinforcements come forward. If they are, we’ve got some problems.” He smiled. That was putting it mildly. He didn’t know where he would find reinforcements. The Confederates had stretched him about as thin as they’d stretched themselves. If what he had here and what was in Cambridge couldn’t stop Featherston’s men, they might link up with their trapped comrades after all.

That wouldn’t be good. Not even slightly.

He drew back to the outskirts of the town. He had more cover for his remaining barrels there. The Confederates had got themselves mired in a big house-to-house fight in Pittsburgh. If they tried coming this way again, he aimed to give them a smaller one in Cambridge.

Time crawled by. The Confederates didn’t return to the attack. Maybe they couldn’t scrape together any more reinforcements after all. Morrell hoped not. They’d already put in a stronger attack from the west than he’d expected. They were bastards-no doubt about that. But they were formidable bastards-no doubt about that, either.

After the Confederates left him alone for a couple of hours, he sent foot soldiers down the west-facing slope to reoccupy the open ground where his force and theirs had clashed. When another hour went by with everything still quiet, he sent three or four barrels down there, too. They took up positions behind the burnt-out hulks of dead machines.

“Not like those assholes to stay quiet so long,” Bergeron remarked.

“No, not usually,” Morrell said. “I hope I know why they’re doing it, but I’m not sure yet.” The longer the Confederates held off, the higher his hopes rose.

The officer in charge of the infantry down below showed initiative. He ordered scouts west to see what the enemy was up to. When he got on the wireless to Morrell, he sounded as if he could hardly believe what the men told him. “Sir, they’re pulling back,” he said. “Looks like almost all of ’em are heading west as fast as they can go.”

“Are they?” Morrell breathed. That was as far as his hopes had gone, and maybe a couple of furlongs further.

“Yes, sir,” the infantry officer said. “I’ve got four independent reports, and they all tell me the same thing. They’re leaving a screen behind to slow us down if we come after them, but most of their force is going like nobody’s business.”

“Thank you, Major. Thank you very much,” Morrell said. “Out.” After he broke the connection, he murmured, “Son of a bitch-it worked.”

“Sir?” Bergeron asked.

“Rosebud.” Morrell could talk about the code name now. “We took what we could piece together in northern Indiana and the northwestern corner of Ohio and threw it east against the Confederates from there. And they don’t have anything around those parts that can stop it. They stripped themselves naked to mount this push toward Pittsburgh. The only prayer they’ve got of holding the corridor up to Lake Erie is breaking off the attack and using their men from this force to defend instead.”

“But if they do that, their guys inside Pittsburgh are screwed.” The gunner saw the key point in a hurry.

“They sure are,” Morrell said. This still wasn’t the two big simultaneous attacks planners on both sides dreamt of. It was about one and a half. It might be enough. Maybe the Confederates’ position in Ohio would unravel even if they did go over to the defensive. Morrell aimed to make it unravel if he could. He got on the all-hands wireless circuit. “The enemy is retreating. We’re going after him.”

Jefferson Pinkard stood outside the house in Snyder, Texas, where his wife and two stepsons lived. He kept staring northwest, toward Lubbock and toward the damnyankees not far outside the town. He couldn’t hear the artillery-it was too far away. But it was close enough to let him imagine he could when he was feeling gloomy. He felt plenty gloomy this morning.

Edith came out with him in spite of the raw wind blowing down from the north. He’d never seen such a place for wind as the West Texas prairie. No matter what direction it came from, it had plenty of room to get a good running start. “What’s the matter?” she asked him.

“Wondering what the devil we’re gonna do if Lubbock falls,” he answered. “If Lubbock falls, there’s not a… heck of a lot between the Yankees and here. Just miles.” He didn’t worry that much about Snyder itself. The locals could always evacuate to the east. But Camp Determination… Camp Determination was a different story.

“They can’t expect you to take all the niggers out of that place.” Edith knew he worried about the camp, not the town.

“No, don’t reckon they can.” Jeff let it go at that. But the bathhouses that weren’t bathhouses, the trucks with the sealed passenger compartments, the mass graves-all those would be worth millions to damnyankee propaganda. Richmond wouldn’t want such secrets getting out. How could he do anything to stop that, though?

You could drive the trucks away. You could, he supposed, blow up the bathhouses. That would make Camp Determination look like an ordinary concentration camp… till the damnyankees found the mass graves. How many tens, how many hundreds, of thousands of corpses lay in them? Pinkard didn’t know, though he could have figured it out from camp records.

He did know the graves were too big to hide. Even if he bulldozed the ground flat, the bodies and bones remained below. And somebody was bound to blab. Somebody always blabbed. Some secrets you couldn’t keep, and that was one of them.

“Records,” he said to himself.

“Records?” Edith said. “The kind you listen to? The kind you dance to?”

Jeff didn’t answer. Those weren’t the records he had in mind. Just like any other big operation, the camp generated lots of paperwork. If the U.S. Army got close, that paperwork would have to disappear, too. Right this minute, he didn’t know where all of it was. He did know it wasn’t all in the same place, and he couldn’t get rid of all of it in a hurry. And he realized he would have to fix that as soon as he could.

The things you never reckon you’ll have to worry about, he thought. But that was foolish. He’d fought not too far from here a generation before. The Yankees had pushed east from New Mexico then. Why shouldn’t they be able to do it again?

Because we were going to lick ’em this time. Because Jake Featherston promised we’d lick ’em this time. Jeff believed what Jake Featherston said. He’d believed him ever since first hearing him in Birmingham not long after the end of the last war. He didn’t want to think-he hardly dared think-the President of the CSA might be wrong.

He muttered again, this time without words. Whether he wanted to or not, he had to be ready to do what he could in case the Confederates didn’t come out so well in this particular part of the war. (Putting it like that meant he didn’t have to dwell on how things were going across the length and breadth of the North American continent.).

When Edith looked northwest, she had other things on her mind. “Jeff…” she said.

“What is it?”

“Will… Will the boys be all right? The war’s not as far away as I wish it was.”

“Things aren’t bad now. I don’t reckon they’ll turn bad real quick. If the damnyankees get into Lubbock, or if they get past Lubbock, maybe you and the boys ought to go east for a bit.”

His wife nodded. “I’ve got some stuff packed up in case we have to leave in a hurry.”

“Good. That’s good, babe,” Jeff said. “Should be easy enough to get away. Nothing around here is what you’d call a great big target.”

“What about the camp?” Edith asked.

“Nah.” He shook his head. “Don’t you worry none about that. What’s in the camp? Niggers. Who gives a… darn about niggers?” To anyone else, he would have said, Who gives a rat’s ass? or something like that. But he tried to watch his language around Edith. He answered his own question: “Nobody does, not on either side of the border.”

She nodded again, reassured. “Well, you’re right about that, Lord knows. They’re nothing but our misfortune.”

Jeff kissed her. “That’s just what they are, all right.” Not even Saul Goldman and the other fancy-pants slogan-makers for the Freedom Party had ever put it any better. He went on, “They’re not going to be such a big misfortune after a while, though; that’s for sure.”

He didn’t talk in any detail about what Camp Determination did, not even to Edith, not even if she’d been married to a guard at Camp Dependable in Louisiana before she said her I do’s with him. Nobody who didn’t wear the uniform needed to know the details. He felt a certain lonely pride in the knowledge of what he did to serve the Confederate States. He was part of the war, just as much as if he commanded a division of troops.

Edith didn’t ask for details, either. She just said, “All right,” and let it go at that.

When Jeff got back to Camp Determination, he summoned the camp’s chief engineer, a dour assault band leader-the Party equivalent of a major-named Lyle Schoonover, and told him what he needed. One of the reasons Schoonover was dour, and that he held a Party rank and not one in the regular Army, was that he’d lost his right leg below the knee. He heard Pinkard out, nodded, and said, “I’ll take care of it.”

“Not just the bathhouses, mind,” Jeff said. “Set something up where we can get rid of the records in a hurry, too.”

“I said I’d take care of it.” Schoonover sounded impatient. “I meant all of it.”

“You meant all of it…” Jefferson Pinkard tapped the three wreathed stars on the left side of his collar.

The engineer had only one star on each side of his collar, and no wreath. He gave Jeff a dirty look, but said what he had to say: “Sir.”

“That’s more like it,” Jeff said. “I’m in charge here, dammit, for better and for worse. Now that things don’t look so good, we’ve got to ride it out the best way we know how.”

Schoonover’s expression changed. There was respect on his narrow features now-reluctant respect, maybe, but respect all the same. Jeff smiled, down inside where it didn’t show. Educated people often started out looking down their noses at him. He hadn’t finished high school. Before he wound up running prison camps, he was a steelworker and a soldier of fortune. But he had a good eye for what needed doing. He’d always had it, and it let him get and stay ahead of a lot of people who thought they were more clever than he was.

“You’re not running from trouble, anyway-sir,” Schoonover said.

“Trouble’s like a dog. You run from it, it’ll chase you and bite you in the ass,” Pinkard said. A startled grunt of laughter escaped Schoonover. Jeff went on, “You go at it, though, sometimes you can make it run instead.”

“Wish we could make the damnyankees run,” the assault band leader said.

“That ain’t the point.” Educated or not, Jeff knew enough to say isn’t. He used ain’t with malice aforethought. “The damnyankees are the Army’s trouble. Them finding out about what all we’re doin’ here-that’s our trouble. That’s what we can take care of on our own.”

“Some of it, anyhow,” Schoonover said. “Those graves won’t disappear all by themselves.”

“Well, you’re right. I already figured that out myself, too,” Jeff said. “But since we can’t do anything about ’em, no point to flabbling about ’em, either. We got to take care of what we can take care of, that’s all.”

Lyle Schoonover got to his feet. He moved well, as long as he didn’t have to get anywhere in a tearing hurry. “Fair enough, sir. That’s a sensible attitude.” His salute didn’t seem too grudging. He left Pinkard’s office. If you didn’t know he’d been maimed in the Great War, his gait wouldn’t give it away.

He hadn’t been gone more than ten minutes before the telephone on Jeff’s desk jangled. Jeff picked it up. “Pinkard here.” He wondered what had gone wrong now. Telephone calls while he was at work were rarely good news.

“Hello, Pinkard. This is Ferd Koenig.”

“What can I do for you, sir?” Jeff tried to stay cool. Calls from the Attorney General were never good news.

“You’ve got the damnyankees a little closer to you than we thought you might,” Koenig said.

“Yes, sir. That’s a fact.” Jeff began to suspect he knew why Koenig was calling. “We’re doing what we can to get ready, just in case.”

“Are you?” the Attorney General said. “Like what?”

With the conversation with the camp engineer fresh in his mind, Pinkard went into detail-maybe more detail than Ferdinand Koenig wanted to hear. He finished, “Nothin’ we can do about the graves, sir. Except for them, though, we can have this place looking like an ordinary concentration camp mighty quick.”

“All right,” Koenig said when he got done. The Attorney General sounded more that a little stunned. Yes, Jeff had told him more than he wanted to know. Serves you right, Jeff thought. After a moment to gather himself, Koenig continued, “Sounds like you’ve done everything you could.”

“You come up with anything else, sir, you just tell me, and I’ll take care of it,” Pinkard promised. He didn’t believe Koenig could. If he’d thought the man back in Richmond would have orders for him, he would have kept his mouth shut.

“I’ll do that.” By the Attorney General’s tone, he didn’t want to talk to anybody from Camp Determination for quite a while. That suited Jeff fine; he didn’t want to talk to Ferd Koenig, either. Koenig added, “I’ll tell the President how thorough you’ve been out there. He’ll be glad to have the good news.”

“Thank you kindly, sir.” Jeff might not be an educated man, but he could read between the lines. He heard what Koenig didn’t say: that Jake Featherston hadn’t had much good news lately. “Things aren’t going so good up in Yankeeland, are they?”

“They could be better.” By the Attorney General’s heavy sigh, they could be a lot better. Koenig went on, “But with any luck at all, the Army will do its job up there by Lubbock, and everything you’re doing will be like putting a storm cellar into a house-it’ll be nice to have, but you won’t really need it.”

“Here’s hoping, sir,” Pinkard said.

“Yeah, here’s hoping. Freedom!” Ferdinand Koenig hung up.

“Freedom!” Jeff echoed, but he was talking to a dead line. He put the handset back in its cradle. How much freedom could the CSA enjoy if the USA came down and took it away? The Negroes in his domain? Their freedom? They never entered his mind.

January in the North Atlantic was about as bad as it got. Waves threw the Josephus Daniels this way and that. The destroyer escort had a course she was supposed to follow. Keeping to it-keeping anywhere close to it-was a long way from easy. Even knowing exactly where the ship lay was a long way from easy.

Sam Carsten had only one thing going for him: he didn’t get seasick no matter what. Pat Cooley was a good sailor, but the exec looked a little green. A lot of the men seemed even less happy with their own insides than they had when they whipped the British auxiliary cruiser a couple of months earlier.

Cleaning crews with mops and buckets kept patrolling the heads and passageways. The faint reek of vomit persisted all the same. Too many sailors were too sick to hold in what they ate. More often than not, they couldn’t use the rail, either. To try would have asked to get washed overboard.

Waves and spray made the Y-ranging gear much less reliable than it would have been in better weather and calmer seas. Thad Walters looked up from his screens and put the best face on things he could: “Well, sir, the damn limeys’ll have just as much fun finding us as the other way round.”

“Oh, boy,” Sam said in hollow tones. “They’ll find Newfoundland. They’ll find the Maritimes. They’ll find trouble for the USA-find it or make it.”

“That’s the name of the game for them, sir,” Lieutenant Cooley said.

“I know. But the name of the game for me is stopping them if I can,” Sam answered.

“Sir, with that gunship to our credit we’re still a long way ahead,” the exec answered.

“No.” Sam shook his head. “That’s ancient history. Anything that happened yesterday is ancient history. What we do today matters. What we’re going to do tomorrow matters. Forget the old stuff. We’ve still got a big job ahead of us.”

The Y-ranging officer and the exec exchanged glances. “Sir, I’m sorry you didn’t go to Annapolis,” Cooley said. “To hell with me if you wouldn’t have flag rank. You’ve got more killer instinct than anybody else I know.”

“What I haven’t got is the brains to make an admiral,” Sam said. “You know it, I know it, and the Navy Department sure as hell knows it. I’m damn proud I’ve come as far as I have.”

“You’ve got plenty of brains, sir. You’ve got as many as any officer I’ve served under,” Cooley said. “It’s just too bad you had to start late.”

“Well, thank you very much, Pat. That’s white of you,” Carsten answered. He knew the exec meant it; whatever else the younger man was, he was no brown-noser.

A wave crashed over the Josephus Daniels’ bow. White water cascaded back. No sailors manned the ship’s antiaircraft guns. They would have gone overboard in a hurry if they’d tried. No carrier-based aircraft could fly or hope to land in weather like this, either, so things evened out.

“Boy, this is fun,” Lieutenant, J.G., Walters said, raising his eyes from the electronic display for a moment.

“This time of year, the weather’s a worse enemy than the limeys and the frogs and the damn Confederates all rolled together,” Sam said. “When spring finally comes around, we’ll all get serious about the war again.”

“Sub drivers are always serious,” Cooley said.

“That’s a fact. And they’ve got it easy once they submerge-that’s another fact,” Sam agreed. “But God have mercy, I wouldn’t want to be a submersible skipper here and now, not even a little bit. They have to get into position on the surface, remember. They’re way too slow underwater to do it there. I’ll tell you one thing-I wouldn’t like to be a sub captain trying to stay up with us here.”

“Wouldn’t be a whole lot of fun, would it?” the exec allowed after a moment’s contemplation.

“Not hardly.” Sam thought about the wave his ship had shrugged off. He thought about the captain of a submarine standing on top of the conning tower when a wave like that washed over his boat. He thought about that skipper either washed out to sea or, if held in place by a line, doing his best imitation of a drowned puppy. He thought about Lord only knew how many gallons of the North Atlantic going down the hatch and into the submersible. He was glad to be thinking about such things as the captain of a destroyer escort. They couldn’t happen to him. They sure could to a sub driver.

Somewhere out in the North Atlantic, such things probably were happening to several submarines from both sides right this minute. Sam hoped no enemy boats were within a hundred miles. Then he hoped no U.S. boats were within a hundred miles, either. You were just as dead if your own side sank you as you were any other way. And in weather like this, mistakes were too simple.

Things only got worse. Snow and sleet blew down out of the north, coating the Josephus Daniels’ deck and lines and railings with ice. Sam ordered everyone who had to go up on deck to wear a lifeline. Ice made slipping even easier than it had been before.

After leaving the bridge, Sam went down to the wireless shack. One of the yeomen there was telling the other a dirty story. He broke off when his pal hissed. Both ratings sprang to attention.

“As you were,” Sam said. “You can finish that joke if you want to, Hrolfson. Don’t mind me if I don’t laugh real hard-I’ve heard it.”

“It’s all right, sir,” Petty Officer Hrolfson said, not relaxing from his stiff brace. “It’ll keep. What can we do for you, sir?”

“What’s the last weather forecast?” Sam asked.

“Ours or theirs?” Hrolfson said. The USA and the UK both sent predictions to their ships. The United States had broken the British weather code. The limeys had likely broken the American code, too; it wasn’t a tough cipher. Both sides had weather stations in Greenland and Newfoundland and Labrador and Baffin Island to keep an eye on conditions as they developed. Sam had heard quiet, deadly warfare went on up there in the northernmost reaches of the world.

“Whatever you’ve got,” he said now.

“Well, sir, the limeys figure the storm’s good for about another three days. Our guys figure it’ll blow out sooner than that,” Hrolfson said.

Sam grunted. “I’d bet on the Englishmen.” He usually did when their reports disagreed with the ones from the Navy Department. And the blow he was in now felt strong enough to last a long time.

“We’ve got more stations up there than they do,” Hrolfson said. “How come their forecasts are better than ours?”

“More experience, I guess,” Sam answered. “They’ve been doing this a long time, and we didn’t get serious about it till the war.” The ship plunged down into a trough. He steadied himself without even knowing he’d done it. “What else have we got besides the weather reports?”

“Well, the BBC says England won a big battle against the Germans in the North Sea,” Hrolfson told him. “The Kaiser’s English-language news station says Churchill’s full of shit.”

Sam sighed. “That figures, I guess. Nobody who wasn’t there will really know what’s what-and the people who were there won’t be sure, either. I still couldn’t tell you who won the Battle of the Three Navies.”

“You were there, sir?” said the other yeoman, whose name was Lopatinsky. “My uncle was there, too. He used to say the same thing. He was in the Dakota when the hits jammed her steering and she made that circle through the fleet.”

“Son of a-gun!” Sam said. “I was in the Dakota, too. What’s your uncle’s name?”

“Kruk, sir,” Lopatinsky answered. “Jerzy Kruk-people call him Jerry most of the time.”

“Son of a bitch!” This time, Sam didn’t sanitize it. “I knew him. Kind of a big gut, eyes green like a cat’s, ears that stuck out, and a go-to-hell grin. He fought one of the one-pounders topside, right?”

“That’s him,” Lopatinsky said. “His gut’s even bigger nowadays, but he’s still got that damn grin.”

“What’s he doing these days?” Carsten asked.

“Coal miner. We’re a family of miners, down in West Virginia,” Lopatinsky said. “I went down below myself for a couple of years, but I figured there’s got to be a better way to make a living.”

“That’s how I got off the farm,” Sam said. “Take it all together and I expect I was right.”

“I feel the same way, sir,” the yeoman said. “Yeah, we get shot at, but so what? At least we can shoot back. The roof comes down or the mine floods, what can you do about it? Not much.”

“Here’s something, sir.” Hrolfson had been listening intently to whatever was coming in through his earphones. “Our wireless says we’ve sent the Confederates in Pittsburgh a messenger under flag of truce. He’s asking for their surrender.”

“That is good news,” Sam said. “What are the Confederates doing?”

Hrolfson listened for a little while longer before shrugging. “They don’t say anything about that, sir.”

“Ha!” Lopatinsky said. “That means the Confederates told ’em to fold it till it was all corners.” Carsten nodded. That was his guess, too. If you listened to the wireless much these days, you had to learn to sift through the crap to get at the few nuggets of truth the broadcasters were, as likely as not, trying to hide.

“If they don’t give up pretty soon, we’ll kill all of them.” Hrolfson sounded as if he looked forward to it.

So did Sam. Even so, he said, “Depends on how many of our guys they can take out before they go down. If they hurt us bad enough, then it’s not a bad bargain for them even if they do buy a plot.”

“Think they can do that, sir?” Lopatinsky asked anxiously.

“I hope not, and that’s the best answer I can give you.” Sam tapped the two broad gold stripes on his sleeve. He was proud he’d got them. He hadn’t dreamt of coming so far when he scrambled up the hawse hole into officers’ country. “I know a little something about what we do on the water. Land fighting-the only thing I know is, I’m glad I’m not in it. It’s a nasty, bloody business. When we go into action here, it’s usually over in a hurry, anyhow.”

“Yes, sir,” Lopatinsky said. “How long did we need to knock that limey out?”

“I didn’t look at my watch, but it wasn’t long.” Sam let it go at that. If one of the Karlskrona’s big shells had hit the Josephus Daniels, the fight might have been over even quicker, with the wrong side winning. That bastard carried big guns, even if she had no armor and only a freighter’s engines.

“Could she have sunk us if she hit us?” Hrolfson asked, proving ignorance could be bliss.

“You bet your sweet ass she could,” Sam blurted. Hrolfson and Lopatinsky both stared at him. He laughed self-consciously. “You wanted a straight answer. You got one.”

“You usually give ’em, Skipper. That’s good,” Lopatinsky said. Hrolfson nodded. They made Sam almost as proud as knocking out the Karlskrona had done.