Drive to the East

VIII

As the weather heated up, the POW camp near Andersonville, Georgia, did an increasingly good impression of hell. With the heat came humidity. With the humidity came thunderstorms that awed Jonathan Moss. The red dirt in the camp turned to something not a great deal thicker than tomato soup after one of those downpours.

And the mosquitoes came. Moss had known mosquitoes up in Canada, too. These seemed a larger and more virulent breed. He slapped and swore and itched. He was anything but the only one. Nick Cantarella said, “This one I smashed last night, you could hang machine guns under its wings and go to war in it.”

“Who says they don’t?” Moss answered. “That would account for the size of some of the bites I’ve got.”

The other officer laughed. “You’re a funny guy, Major.”

“Funny like a crutch,” Moss said, and then, “Colonel Summers ought to do something about it. We could all come down with yellow fever.”

“Do what?” Cantarella asked in reasonable tones. “Moses parted the Red Sea, but all he did was plague the Egyptians with bugs. God was the one who had to call ’em off.”

Patiently, Moss answered, “Moses couldn’t ask for bug repellent and Flit. Come to think of it, Pharaoh couldn’t, either. But Summers damn well can.”

“Oh.” Cantarella looked foolish. “Well, yeah.”

Moss didn’t ask him how escape efforts were going. He assumed they were still going. He also assumed that much rain did tunnels no good. He looked out the window, out beyond the barbed wire. Even if the prisoners did get out of the camp, could they cross several states and get back to the USA? They spoke with an accent very different from the locals’. They would be pursued-he pictured bloodhounds straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And the people they met-the white ones, anyhow-would be Freedom Party fanatics. Put that all together and staying in the camp started to seem the better bargain.

But life here was no picnic, either. And prisoners of war had a duty to escape. Moss knew he’d run if and when he found a chance. As for what would happen after that… He’d worry about such things when he had to, not before.

In due course, citronella candles appeared in the prisoners’ barracks. They filled the air with a spicy, lemony scent as they burned. The odor was alleged to discourage mosquitoes. Maybe Moss got bitten a little less often after that. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t. He wasn’t convinced, one way or the other.

Guards went through the camp with spray pumps. The mist that came out of them smelled something like mothballs and something like gasoline. Moss had no idea what it did to mosquitoes. It made him want to wear a gas mask. Since he didn’t have one, he just had to put up with it.

Again, he wasn’t sure how much difference the spraying made. The bugs didn’t disappear, however much he wished they would. Of course, nobody was spraying outside the camp. Even if mosquitoes died by the thousands inside the barbed wire, plenty of replacements flew on in to sample the flavor delights of prisoner of war on the hoof.

Colonel Summers, once prodded, kept right on complaining, both to the Confederate authorities and to his fellow prisoners. “What they really need to do is spray a thin film of oil over every pond and puddle they can find,” he said. “That would kill the mosquito larvae, and then we really might get some relief.”

“Well, why don’t they?” Moss said. “It wouldn’t just benefit us. Their own health would get better, too.” He thought like the attorney he was, weighing advantages and disadvantages.

Summers only shrugged. “They say they haven’t got the manpower for it.”

“In a way, that’s good news,” Moss said. “If they’re stretched too thin to take care of important things behind the lines, pretty soon they’ll be stretched too thin to take care of things at the front.” Like a lawyer-and like a prisoner-he bent reality so it looked better than it really was.

“That hasn’t happened yet.” Colonel Summers brought him back to earth with a dose of the current news.

“Are you sure, sir?” Moss asked. “Anything you see in the papers the guards give us is just so much Freedom Party garbage.”

“I’m sure.” And Summers sounded very sure indeed. Moss knew there were a couple of clandestine wireless sets in the camp. He knew no more than that, which was a good thing for all concerned. He looked around the barracks. Two or three of the men were new fish, new officers for whom nobody here could vouch. They probably came from the United States. They talked as if they did. But good Confederate spies would sound like Yankees. The less Summers said while they were around, the better.

Machine-gun fire woke Moss in the middle of the night not quite a week later. His first reaction was fury. They’d pulled off an escape attempt, and they hadn’t included him. His second reaction was despair. If the guards were shooting, the attempt couldn’t have amounted to much. Was this the best his countrymen could do?

He got very little sleep the rest of the night.

At roll call the next morning, the Confederate guards swaggered and strutted like pouter pigeons. “Damn niggers came sniffin’ round the camp last night,” one of them said. “We drove ’em off, though-you better believe it.”

However proud of themselves they were, their posturing only filled Moss with relief. Nothing inside here had gone wrong. If the guards wanted to jump up and down because they’d beaten back a few sorry guerrillas, they were welcome to, as far as he was concerned.

Later that day, he found an excuse to amble around the grounds with Nick Cantarella. As casually as he could, he asked, “Do we have any way of getting in touch with those colored men on the other side of the barbed wire?”

Cantarella took a couple of steps without saying anything. What he did say, at last, was, “I ought to tell you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why?” Moss asked. “They could do us a lot of good if we ever happened to get on the other side of the wire ourselves.”

“Maybe.” Cantarella paused to light a cigarette. It was one of the lousy U.S. brands that came in Red Cross packages from the north. Prisoners could sometimes get the much better Confederate tobacco from the guards. Quiet little deals like that happened every now and again. After the first drag, Cantarella made a face. “Tastes like straw and horseshit.” A moment later, he added, “Want one?”

“Sure.” Moss took one, then leaned close to get a light. The tobacco was bad, but bad tobacco beat the hell out of no tobacco. He blew out smoke and then asked, “How come just maybe?”

The other officer looked around before answering. Satisfied nobody else was in earshot, he said, “For one thing, if the Confederates catch us with them, we’re dead. No ifs, ands, or buts. Dead.”

That was probably true. Moss shook his head-no, that was bound to be true. The Confederate States played by the usual international rules when they fought the United States. They played by no rules at all when they fought their own Negroes. By all the signs, the Negroes returned the favor-if that was the word. Moss said, “But if we’ve got a better chance of not getting caught at all…”

“Maybe,” Nick Cantarella said again, even more dubiously than before. “But why should they help us get back to the USA?”

As if to a child, Moss answered, “Because we’re fighting Featherston, too.”

“Terrific,” the younger man said. “Doesn’t that make them more likely to give us rifles and enlist us? You want to be a guerrilla yourself? I don’t, or not very much. It’s not what I was trained for, but I wouldn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of convincing the smokes of that.” He’d been an artilleryman before he got caught.

“Some of the people here would be good at it,” Moss said. Infantry officers might make the black guerrillas considerably more effective. They really did have training in what the Negroes were trying to do. Moss himself was in Cantarella’s boat. All his military expertise, such as it was, centered on airplanes. He didn’t think the guerrillas would be taking to the air anytime soon.

A flight of a dozen biplanes buzzing along at not much above treetop height made him wonder if he was wrong. Those weren’t military aircraft, except in the sense that any aircraft could be military when you had them and the other fellows didn’t. As if to prove the point, and to show whose side they were on, they dropped bombs on the woods out beyond the prison camp. The explosions set Moss’ teeth on edge.

“Think they’ll hit anything in there?” he asked Cantarella.

“Oh, they’ll hit something,” the other officer answered with an expressive shrug. “Whether it’ll be anything worth hitting… That’s liable to be a different question.”

“Looking like they were just tossing those bombs out of the cockpit,” Moss said. “That’s how this whole business got started, back when the Great War was new.”

“If you say so.” Cantarella wasn’t old enough to remember the start of the Great War. He sure as hell hadn’t been flying then, as Moss had.

A few days later, Moss put the question he’d asked Cantarella to Colonel Summers. The senior officer looked at him as if he’d suddenly started spouting Cherokee. “Trust a bunch of raggedy-ass niggers? You must be kidding, Major.” But for his accent, he sounded like a Confederate himself.

With such patience as he could muster, Moss asked, “Do you know anybody who hates Jake Featherston more-or who has better reason to?”

Summers ignored that. “Besides, Major, we’ve got no way to get in touch with the spooks.” He sounded like a man anxious to close off a subject he found distasteful. He might have been a maiden lady forced into talking about the facts of life.

Moss didn’t laugh in his face, which proved military discipline still held. He did say, “Sir, we have all kinds of deals cooking that stretch farther than the camp. Spread a few dollars around and you can do damn near anything.”

“Not this.” Summers spoke as if from On High. “Not this, by God. No Confederate guard is going to go out and get hold of the niggers for us. That’d be like asking them to cut their own throats.”

He had a point-of sorts. “There are bound to be ways if we look for them,” Moss persisted. “We haven’t even tried.”

“Once we’re outside the barbed wire, Major, you may put your faith in niggers or Christian Science or any other damnfool thing your heart desires,” Colonel Summers said. “Until then, I make the decisions, and I have made this one. Is that clear enough for you, or shall I be more explicit?”

“You are very clear… sir.” Moss turned the title of respect into one of reproach.

Summers heard the reproach and went red. “Will that be all, Major?” he asked in a voice like ice.

“I suppose so,” Moss answered bitterly. “After all, we’re not going anywhere, are we?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Jefferson Pinkard slammed down the telephone and scowled at it as if it were a rattlesnake. “Son of a bitch!” he added for good measure. He slammed a fist down on his desk. His coffee mug and the gooseneck lamp there jumped. He had to grab the lamp to keep it from toppling over.

He’d hated calls from Richmond ever since he started running camps. He had good reason for hating them, too. Richmond had a habit of wanting miracles, and of wanting them yesterday.

Jeff had already given them one-a more efficient, more secure way of disposing of excess Negroes than they’d ever had before. Now that wasn’t good enough for them anymore. He had to come up with something better yet. He hoped the other people who were running camps had got the same call. Let one of them have a brainstorm for a change!

“Fat chance,” he muttered. Some of those people could blow their brains out if they sneezed, goddammit.

He knew the question was ridiculous and unfair. That didn’t stop him from worrying at it like a dog worrying at a bone that was plumb out of meat. How could you get rid of more spooks faster than with this fleet of special trucks?

Oh, you could use more trucks, but that wasn’t the answer Richmond wanted to hear. Richmond wanted something different, something spiffy, something where you could wave a hand and all of a sudden a thousand Negroes weren’t there anymore.

And Richmond needed something like that, too. Pinkard couldn’t very well deny it. All he had to do was look across the railroad tracks at the new women’s half of the camp. Towns were getting their colored districts emptied out one after another. The blacks came into places like Camp Determination. They came in, and they didn’t come out again-not alive, anyway.

How many niggers were there in the Confederate States? How many could the camps dispose of every day? How long would the CSA need to start really cutting into their numbers?

“Gotta be done,” Jeff said heavily, as if someone had denied it. “It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.” Every now and then, the sheer amount of work he had to do tempted him toward self-pity.

He pushed back his chair and got to his feet. He could look out at the camp from the window-no substitute for prowling through it, but sometimes a fast way to spot trouble before it got out of hand. Barbed wire and machine-gun towers separated the administrative block from the seething misery in the main compound. At the moment, a long line of blacks was snaking forward, the skinny men often eager to board the trucks that would, they thought, take them to another camp. In fact, their journey would be strictly one-way. That they didn’t know it, was one of the beauties of the scheme, for their ignorance kept them docile.

Pinkard shook his head. How could you come up with anything better than this? Oh, sure, it used a lot of trucks, but so what? It did the job, didn’t it? Some people were just never satisfied, that was all.

He stuck his head into the chief guard’s office. Vern Green was second in command here, and needed to know where Jeff was when he wasn’t at the camp. “I’m going into town for a little while,” Pinkard told him. “Anything goes wrong, send somebody after me.”

“Will do, boss.” Green knew Jeff wouldn’t be anywhere but three or four places in Snyder, one of them far more likely than any of the other. Finding him wouldn’t be hard. Green couldn’t help adding, “Things are smooth, though.”

“Yeah, I know. They’re smooth now, anyways,” Pinkard said. “But just in case, I mean.”

“Sure, sure.” Vernon Green nodded. He smiled. He was no less ambitious than Mercer Scott had been back in Louisiana. Like Scott, Green undoubtedly reported back to someone in Richmond about how Jeff did his job. But he wasn’t so obnoxious about it. Scott had had a drill sergeant’s manner and a face like a boot. Green smiled a lot of the time, whether there was anything to smile about or not. He caught his flies with honey, not vinegar. He caught a lot of them, however he did it, and that was what a second-in-command was for.

As camp commandant, Pinkard had a motorcar laid on. He could have had a driver, too, but he didn’t want one. He could drive himself just fine. Guards saluted as he left the camp. He would have to go through all the boring formalities getting back in. He shrugged. He would have had the guards’ heads if they were anything but careful about letting people into Camp Determination.

Snyder, Texas, was a nice little town of perhaps three thousand people. Before the camp went up, business there had centered on cattle and on ginning the cotton grown in the surrounding countryside and making cottonseed cake that the cattle ate. The influx of guards had everybody in the four-street central business district smiling. By local standards, they made good money, and they weren’t shy about spending it. And new houses were going up, because a lot of the guards were married men, and didn’t want to live right by the camp.

Whoever’d named the roads in Snyder had no imagination at all. The ones that ran east-west were numbered streets. The ones that ran north-south were avenues, identified by letter. He pulled up in front of a house on Thirty-first Street near Avenue Q, in the southern part of town. Two boys were wrestling on the threadbare lawn in front of the house. They broke off when he got out of the motorcar.

“Papa Jeff!” they yelled. “It’s Papa Jeff!” They ran up to him and tried out a couple of tackles that would have drawn flags on any football field in the CSA or USA. Fortunately, they were still too little to flatten him.

He ruffled their hair. He liked Chick Blades’ sons. He liked Chick Blades’ widow even more. “Easy, there,” he told the kids, trying to pry them loose from his legs without damaging them. It wasn’t easy; they clung like limpets. “Is your mama home?” he asked them.

That did the trick better than any wrestling hold. “She sure is,” they said together, and dashed toward the house yelling, “Ma! Ma! Papa Jeff’s here!” If the racket wasn’t enough to wake the dead, it would have made them turn over in their graves a couple of times.

Edith Blades came out on the front porch. She was a nice-looking blond woman in her early thirties. Each time Jeff saw her, she seemed a little less ravaged by her husband’s suicide. Time did heal wounds. Jeff had got over the disastrous end of his first marriage to the point where he was game to try it again. And so was Edith, though she wouldn’t tie the knot till after the first anniversary of Chick Blades’ death. They were getting there.

“Hello, Jeff. Good to see you,” she said as he walked up to the porch. “How are things?”

“Things are…” He paused. “Well, they could be better.”

“Come in and tell me about it,” she said, and then, “Boys, go on and play. Papa Jeff will be with you in a little bit.”

They made disappointed noises, but they didn’t argue too much. They were good boys, well-behaved boys. She’d done a fine job with them, before Chick died and afterwards. Jeff admired that. He also admired the way she listened to him. He’d never known that with another woman-certainly not with his first wife. Animal heat had held him and Emily together-and then broken them apart.

“Set yourself down,” Edith said when she and Jeff went back into the living room.

“In a second.” He kissed her. She let him do that. In fact, she responded eagerly. Whenever he tried for more than a kiss, though, she told him they had to wait. That didn’t make him angry. He thought the more of her for being able to say no. Emily hadn’t, with him or with his best friend. But he didn’t want to remember Emily. “How you doin’ here?” he asked. “You got everything you need?”

“Sure do,” Edith answered. “And I’m not sorry to be out of Alexandria, out of that house, and there’s the Lord’s truth.”

“I do believe it.” Jeff wouldn’t have wanted to live in a house where somebody’d committed suicide. Actually, Chick had done it in his auto, but still… “What do you think of Texas?”

“There’s so much of it, and it’s so big and flat,” Edith answered. “Seemed like we were on the train forever, and that was just getting most of the way across one state. People act nice enough.” She held up a hand. “But tell me what’s gone wrong at the camp.”

Jeff did. The only thing he didn’t tell her was that Chick’s suicide with auto exhaust had given him the idea for the trucks that used their fumes to kill off Negroes. He would never say a word about that, not even if he was on fire. There was such a thing as talking too damn much.

When he finished, Edith was suitably indignant for him. “They’ve got their nerve,” she said. “After everything you’ve done cleaning up the colored problem for them, then they expect more? They should get down on their knees and thank God they’ve got a good man like you, Jeff.”

“Ha! Those… people in Richmond don’t notice anybody but their own selves,” Jeff said. Only belatedly, after venting his spleen, did he notice the size of the compliment she’d paid him. “Thank you, darlin’. You say sweet things.”

“You’re my sweetheart,” Edith said, her voice dead serious. “If I don’t stick up for you, who’s going to?”

Instead of answering with words, he kissed her again. She pressed herself against him. But when, ever optimistic, he let his hand fall on her thigh as if by accident, she knocked it away. He didn’t get mad-he laughed. “You’re somethin’.”

“So are you.” Edith was laughing, too. Even if she was, he remained sure she’d keep right on holding him at bay till their wedding night. It wasn’t as if she were a virgin-or she could have doubled up on Mary-but she was a respectable woman, and she acted like one.

For a moment, Jeff thought the deep thrumming he heard was the pounding of the blood in his veins. Then he realized it was outside himself. No sooner had he realized that than Edith’s kids ran in, yelling, “Ma! Papa Jeff! There’s a million airplanes up in the sky! Come look! Quick!”

“What the-?” Jeff was off the couch and heading for the door as fast as he could go, Edith right behind him.

They stared up and up and up. Passing high above them, scribing ruler-straight contrails across the sky, were more big airplanes than Jeff had ever seen before. They flew east in what was obviously a strong defensive formation: in staggered echelons where one bomber could easily fire on enemy fighters attacking another. And enemy fighters, here, could mean only one thing: Confederate fighters.

“Damnyankees.” Jefferson Pinkard made the calculation almost without conscious thought. “I bet they’re headin’ for Forth Worth and Dallas.”

“How could they?” Edith said.

“They’ve got their nerve, sending ’em out in the daytime.” Pinkard had a nasty feeling the bombers would get through. The war west of the Mississippi had been quiet. He doubted the Confederate authorities were ready for an attack on this scale. The damnyankees had pulled a fast one here.

“Will they drop bombs on us, Papa Jeff?” Frank Blades asked anxiously.

“Nah.” Now Jeff spoke with great assurance. He set a big, meaty hand on the boy’s shoulders. “Ain’t nothin’ here the Yankees would ever want to touch. Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, not as far as that goes.”

One thing Chester Martin had to give to Lieutenant Thayer Monroe: the kid could read a map. “We want to call down more fire on these emplacements in back of Fredericksburg, eh, Sergeant?” he said. “I make their positions out to be in square Green-6. That sound right to you?” There was something else Martin had to give him: he did ask the older man’s opinion, and sometimes even listened to it.

Martin looked out from the ruins of Fredericksburg toward the heights to the south and southwest. They weren’t mountains; they were hardly even hills. But they were plenty to let the Confederate field guns and mortars dug in on them make life hell on earth for the U.S. soldiers in the Virginia town.

“Yes, sir. I think Green-6 is right,” he said. The platoon commander called for the signalman with the field telephone, then shouted into it. U.S. artillery was still on the far side of the river. Chester had the nasty suspicion that the Confederates had let the U.S. Army get foot soldiers over the Rappahannock so they could bleed them white. All attempts to break out from the town had failed. None seemed likely to succeed, at least not to him.

“Goddammit!” Lieutenant Monroe hung up in disgust. “I can’t get through. Bastards must have cut the wires again.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Chester agreed. After a moment, he added, “I wonder how much truth there is in the talk you hear.”

“You mean about Confederates running around in U.S. uniforms and raising Cain?” the lieutenant asked. Chester nodded. After some thought, Thayer Monroe said, “I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s the sort of bastardly trick Featherston’s people would pull.”

Was it? It struck Martin as the sort of trick anybody with half an ounce of brains would pull, especially in a war where both sides spoke what was for all practical purposes the same language. He said, “I hope we’re doing the same thing to them, that’s all.”

Lieutenant Monroe looked astonished. “It goes dead against the Geneva Convention, Sergeant. If you’re caught in the enemy’s uniform, you get a blindfold and a cigarette. That’s too far to go for a good smoke.”

Chester dutifully chuckled, though he had Confederate cigarettes in his pocket. Plundering enemy corpses-and, here in Fredericksburg, plundering shops-kept front-line infantrymen supplied with better tobacco than they could get from their own country. Front-line service had few advantages, but that was one of them.

Freight-train noises filled the air. Monroe might not have been able to get through to U.S. artillery, but someone had. High explosives thundered down on the heights behind Fredericksburg. How much good they would do…

Through the din, the lieutenant said, “At least we don’t have any orders to get out of our holes and attack as soon as the barrage lets up.”

“Thank you, Jesus,” Chester Martin said, most sincerely.

His platoon commander nodded. Monroe could learn. The company, and the regiment of which it was a part, were in the line because so many men had tried to take the high ground in back of Fredericksburg: tried and bloodily failed. The Confederate gunners on those heights could murder every U.S. soldier in the world if the Army chose to come at them there. Machine guns and artillery swept the rising ground. Not even barrels had a chance of forcing their way forward.

Martin drew in a breath and made a face. Most of the time, you could forget about the stench of death on the battlefield-oh, not forget about it, maybe, but shove it down to the back of your mind. He’d thought about it, though, and that brought it up in his mind again. His guts did a slow lurch. Too many unburied bodies lay out there, bloating in the sun.

When the company went back into reserve, he would bring that stench with him-in his clothes, in his hair, on his skin. It took a long time to go away. And he’d smelled it in plenty of nightmares between the wars. Bad as it was here, it had been worse in the trenches on the Roanoke front, where the line went back and forth over the same few miles of ground for a couple of years, and where every square yard of ground was manured with a corpse or two.

Keeping his head down-he didn’t know whether the Confederates had any snipers close enough to draw a bead on him, and didn’t care to find out the hard way-he lit one of those smooth Confederate cigarettes and held the pack out to Lieutenant Monroe. “Thanks, Sergeant,” Monroe said. He leaned close for a light.

The smoke in Chester’s mouth and in his nose masked the smell of death. For that, one of the stables-scrapings cigarettes the USA turned out would have done as well. If you were going to go this way, though, why not go first class?

“I pity those poor bastards who don’t smoke,” Chester said out of the blue.

“Why’s that?” The lieutenant, not unreasonably, couldn’t follow his train of thought.

“On account of they can’t ever get out from under the goddamn smell.”

“Oh.” Thayer Monroe considered, then nodded. “Hadn’t looked at it like that, but you’re right.” He started to add something else, probably on the same theme, but all of a sudden he ducked down deep in the foxhole instead. “Incoming!”

“Aw, shit!” Martin got right down there with him. The Confederates were doing something sneaky-something gutsy, too. They couldn’t huddle in reinforced-concrete gun emplacements to serve their mortars. They had to come out into the firing pits to use them. But the nasty little bombs flew at Fredericksburg almost silently. With all the big stuff roaring by overhead, nobody was going to notice the mortars till they started bursting, which would be too late for some luckless soldiers.

And sometimes even being right on the money didn’t do you a damn bit of good. One of the reasons soldiers hated mortars was that the bombs went up at a steep angle and came down at an even steeper one. Plunging fire, the boys with the high foreheads called it. A foxhole didn’t protect you from a round that came right down in there with you.

Chester heard the boom. Next thing he knew, he was grabbing at his leg and bawling for a corpsman. Absurdly, the first thing that went through his mind was, Rita’s gonna kill me. When he could think of anything past his own pain, he got a look at Lieutenant Monroe-and wished he hadn’t. The platoon commander was the only reason Chester was still breathing. He’d been between Chester and the mortar round, and he’d taken almost all of it. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of him left, and what there was wasn’t pretty.

“That you, Sarge?” one of the stretcher bearers called.

“Yeah.” Chester forced out the word through clenched teeth.

The corpsman jumped down into the hole. He swore softly when he saw what had happened to Monroe, then turned to Chester. “How much of that blood is yours and how much is the other poor bastard’s?”

“Beats me.” Chester looked down at himself. He was pretty well drenched in the lieutenant’s mortal remains. He didn’t want to let go of the leg, though, or more of what soaked him would be his. He was much too sure of that. “Can you stick me and bandage me or put on a tourniquet or whatever the hell you’re gonna do? This hurts like a son of a bitch.”

“Right.” The corpsman jabbed Chester with a morphine syrette, then said, “Lemme see what you caught.” Blood flowed faster when Chester took his hand away from his calf, but it didn’t spurt. Frowning, the corpsman went on, “I think we can get by without a tourniquet.” He bandaged the wound, watched how fast the gauze turned red, and nodded to himself. “Hey, Elmer! Gimme a hand here, will ya? Let’s get the sarge outa this hole.”

“Sure.” The other corpsman hopped down in there, too. “Fuck,” he said when he got a look at the platoon commander’s ruined corpse. “Who was that, anyways?”

“Lieutenant Monroe,” Chester answered, a certain dreamy wonder in his voice. The painkiller hit hard and fast.

“He got it quick, anyhow,” Elmer said, about as much of a eulogy as anyone ever gave Thayer Monroe.

Despite the morphine, Martin howled when the grunting corpsmen got him up on flat ground. Mortar rounds were still landing not far away. A few fragments whistled by. Chester didn’t want to get hit again. But he didn’t want to stay at the front, either. With another grunt, the corpsmen carried the stretcher on which he lay, back toward the Rappahannock.

A white powerboat with big Red Crosses took him and the medics over the river. The Confederates weren’t supposed to shoot at such vessels, any more than they were supposed to shoot at ambulances. Accidents did happen, though.

When he got back to the field hospital, the first thing a doctor did was give him a shot. “Tetanus,” the man said. By then, Martin wouldn’t have cared if it was French dressing; he was feeling very woozy indeed. The doctor cut away his trouser leg and the bandage and looked at the wound. He nodded thoughtfully. “Not too bad, Sergeant. If it heals clean, you’ll be back on duty in a few weeks.”

“Terrific,” Chester said, more or less at random.

He got some more shots, these to numb the leg while the doctor sewed him up. Eyeing him, the man asked, “Did you have a Purple Heart in the last war?”

“Yeah. Oak-leaf cluster. Hot damn,” Martin answered.

“Heh.” The doctor sounded more tired than amused. He wrote notes on a form, then tied it to Chester’s wrist. “Orders for your disposition,” he explained.

“Yeah,” Chester said again. He’d always known the Army ran as much on paperwork as on bullets and canned rations.

He got stuffed into an ambulance and sent north up roads cratered by shellfire. Despite morphine and local anesthetic, the jolts made him groan and curse. His partner in misery, a PFC with a bandaged shoulder, was still very groggy from whatever he’d been under, and didn’t seem to feel a thing. Martin envied him.

The military hospital was up near the Potomac. Like the powerboat, like the ambulance, it was painted a dazzling white and had Red Crosses on the walls and roof. Chester would rather have been farther away, but Confederate bombers reached all the way up to New York City and Boston, just as U.S. warplanes had recently flown from New Mexico to unload hell on Forth Worth and Dallas.

A briskly efficient nurse in starched whites got him into a bed. “We’ll have to clean you up,” she remarked.

“That’d be nice,” he said vaguely. All he knew was that he wasn’t going anywhere for a while. And not going anywhere suited him fine.

Abner Dowling could have done without a summons to report to Warrenton, Virginia. That Daniel MacArthur wanted to see him did not fill his heart with joy. Instead, the news filled him with apprehension. He feared it meant MacArthur had come up with another scheme for discomfiting the Confederates. The only thing wrong with MacArthur’s schemes that Abner Dowling could see was that they didn’t work.

MacArthur kept coming up with them, though. He had an endlessly fertile, endlessly inventive mind. If only he’d had a better sense of what was practical… Well, in that case he would have been someone else. Dwelling on it seemed pointless, which didn’t always stop Dowling.

The general commanding made his headquarters in a house different from the one he’d occupied the last time Dowling came to Warrenton. Then he’d chosen the fanciest place in town for his own. Perhaps knowing his habits, the Confederates had knocked that house flat-not while he was in it. Dowling tried not to think about whose war effort they would have helped more if they’d got MacArthur as well as the building.

Not that MacArthur’s current residence was anything to sneeze at. Having lost the most impressive place-and, no doubt, thereby endeared its owner to the USA for ever and ever-the American general had chosen the next grandest for his own: another Classical Revival home from before the War of Secession. Sandbagged machine-gun nests and a thicket of barbed wire around the place detracted from the air of quiet elegance the colonnaded entranceway tried to project.

Sentries gave Dowling a careful once-over before letting him inside the perimeter. Some of them carried Confederate-made submachine guns in place of bolt-action Springfields. “You really like those better?” Dowling asked a corporal who toted one of the ugly little weapons.

“Yes, sir, for what I’m doing here,” the noncom told him. “Wouldn’t care to take it up to the front. Not enough range, not enough stopping power. But for putting a lot of lead in the air right up close, you can’t beat it.”

“All right.” That struck Dowling as a well-reasoned answer. He did inquire, “What does General MacArthur say about your using a Confederate weapon?”

“Sir, he says he wished we made one as good.”

That also struck Dowling as a cogent comment. He wondered how MacArthur had come up with it. But that was neither here nor there. He walked on toward the house: Greek refinement surrounded by modern barbarity. But then, considering some of the things Athens and Sparta did to each other during the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks had surrounded refinement with their own barbarity.

One of MacArthur’s staff officers, a captain as lean and probably as swift as a greyhound, met Dowling at the door. “Please come with me, General,” the bright young man said after saluting. “General MacArthur is eagerly awaiting your arrival.”

Eagerly? Dowling wondered. What could make MacArthur eager to see him after the way they’d quarreled? Was the commanding general going to cashier him? Dowling resolved to fight like hell if MacArthur tried. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and he thought he’d done more things right than his superior.

“Here we are-in the map room,” the captain murmured. Daniel MacArthur had had a map room in the other house he used for a headquarters, too. If he’d had the sense to read the maps instead of just having them…

“Good afternoon, General,” MacArthur said. A cigarette-Confederate tobacco, by the smell-burned in the long holder he affected. He also affected an almost monastically plain uniform, one whose only ornaments were the stars on his shoulder straps. Custer, by contrast, had made his clothes more ornate and gaudy than tightly interpreted regulations would have allowed. Both approaches had the same purpose: to call special attention to the man wearing the uniform.

“Reporting as ordered, sir,” Dowling said, and waited to see what happened next.

“You were the one who discovered the Confederates were thinning their lines in front of us here in Virginia.”

By the way MacArthur said it, he didn’t think Dowling’s discovery would go down in history with Columbus’. His tone declared that Dowling might have been found picking his nose and wiping his finger on a trouser leg. Ignoring that, Dowling replied, “Yes, sir, I was the one. I’m sorry you discovered we couldn’t take advantage of that at Fredericksburg.”

He’d told the exact and literal truth there. He was sorry the U.S. attacks hadn’t succeeded. If they had, MacArthur would have become a hero. That wouldn’t have filled Dowling with delight. Custer was already a hero when Dowling got to know him. When the pompous windbag became a bigger hero, that didn’t delight Dowling, either. It hadn’t broken his heart, though. Custer’s success had meant the USA’s success. MacArthur’s would mean the same thing. Dowling prided himself on his patriotism. I’d admire a skunk who helped my country. He eyed MacArthur in a speculative way.

MacArthur was looking back, also in a speculative way. He was, no doubt, trying to tease an insult out of Dowling’s remark. But Dowling hadn’t said anything like, Only a blind jackass would have tried to break the Confederates’ line at Fredericksburg. He might have thought something like that, but MacArthur couldn’t read minds-and a good thing, too.

Ash almost as long as the first joint of a man’s thumb fell from MacArthur’s cigarette. The general commanding ground it into the expensive-looking rug. That was bound to make whoever owned the place love him even more than he did already. He lowered his voice to a portentous whisper: “I think I know where they’ve gone.”

“Do you, sir?” Dowling was ready to get news or gossip from anybody, even MacArthur. “Where?”

“To the west.” Yes, the general commanding sounded portentous, all right. Half a dozen Old Testament prophets could have taken lessons from him.

Once Dowling had the news, it didn’t strike him as improbable. “What are they going to do there?” he asked.

“I doubt they’ll dance around the Maypole and strew flowers over the landscape,” MacArthur replied.

“Very funny, sir.” Dowling lied dutifully. Why not? He’d had practice. “But I did wonder whether they were going to push toward Toledo and Detroit or go east toward Cleveland and Akron and-what’s the name of the place? — Youngstown, that’s it.” He felt proud of visualizing the map.

“Ah.” Daniel MacArthur nodded. He took another cigarette from his pack, stuck it in the holder, and lit it. With his prominent nose and his jowls wattling an otherwise thin face, he reminded Dowling of a chain-smoking vulture. “That, I must tell you, I do not know. If the budding Alexanders at the War Department do, they have not seen fit to impart that information to me.”

Dowling snorted. He was little more fond of the functionaries at the War Department than MacArthur was. He realized he’d acquired his attitude from George Custer. That realization didn’t thrill him, but also didn’t change his mind. He said, “In case they do attack in the West, what’s the best thing we can do here?”

He could see he’d made MacArthur unhappy again. He needed a moment to figure out why. MacArthur didn’t want to be reduced to a sideshow. He wanted to be the main event. But even MacArthur could see he wouldn’t be the main event if major fighting erupted in the West once more. Reluctantly, he said, “Keep the enemy as busy as we can, I suppose. If you see a better choice, point it out to me.”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” Dowling said. What was the world coming to when one of Daniel MacArthur’s proposals made sound military sense?

“Very well. I may call on your corps to try to break through the Confederate defenses and threaten Richmond,” MacArthur said now.

I failed at one end of my line, so I’ll try the other. That was what it amounted to. Dowling gave a mental shrug. MacArthur had the right to ask that of him-and the busier the Confederates were in Virginia, the smaller their chance to send even more men west. With a little luck, they might even have to bring some back. Dowling said what needed saying: “Of course I’m at your service, sir. Whatever you require of me, I’ll do.”

Nothing made Daniel MacArthur happier than unhesitating obedience. He looked quite humanly pleased as he answered, “Thank you, General. That was very handsomely said.”

For once, Dowling made his farewells without getting the impression of breaking off an artillery duel. As he headed for his green-gray motorcar, another one-a bright blue civilian Olds-pulled up alongside it. A woman not far from his own age got out. Her hair was the pinkish white peculiar to aging redheads. She moved with a brisk spryness that belied her years.

“Hello, Colonel Dowling. No, excuse me-hello, General Dowling. I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said. “Got a cigarette?”

A broad smile spread over Dowling’s face. “Hello yourself, Miss Clemens. I sure do. Here you are.” He pulled the pack from his pocket and handed it to her.

“Thanks.” Ophelia Clemens lit one and sucked in smoke. Then she stuck out her hand. When Dowling took it, she gave his a firm pump and let it go. The formalities satisfied, she nodded toward MacArthur’s headquarters and asked, “So how’s the Great Stone Face?”

One of the reasons Dowling had always liked her, as a reporter and as a person, was that she said what was on her mind. He, of course, did not enjoy the privilege of being outside the chain of command. He answered, “General MacArthur seems well.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “Then how come he’s dumb enough to keep feeding troops into a meat grinder like Fredericksburg?”

“I’m afraid I’m not the one to answer that, since he is my superior and since my corps is stationed at the other end of our line.” Having said what any loyal subordinate ought to say, Dowling couldn’t resist adding, “If you need to know his views, you’ll have to ask him yourself.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Ophelia Clemens said, and Dowling wanted to hug himself with glee. Unlike a lot of correspondents, she had no patience with bloated egos or double talk. She had cut through Custer’s pompous bluster like a regiment of barrels going through Sioux Indians. He didn’t think she’d have any trouble doing the same with MacArthur. Then she surprised him by asking, “And how have you been?”

“Oh, tolerable. Yes, tolerable’s about right.” Dowling batted his eyelashes at her. “I didn’t know you cared.”

She was taking a drag, and choked on it. She went alarmingly red. Dowling had to pound her on the back. When she could talk again, she wheezed, “God damn you, General-you caught me by surprise.”

“Sorry, Miss Clemens.” Dowling more or less meant it.

“A likely story,” she said, sounding more like her herself. “You’re just trying to get rid of me so you don’t have to answer questions about how things got screwed up this time.”

“I thought you already had all the answers,” he teased.

She shook her head. “Not yet. But I aim to get ’em.” With determined stride, she advanced on Daniel MacArthur.

The Townsend slid over the improbably blue waters of the tropical Pacific as smoothly as if Japanese airplanes had never bombed her. As George Enos, Jr., swabbed her deck, he looked over the side every now and again to see if he could spot the feathery wake of a periscope.

When he did it once too often to suit a petty officer, that worthy barked, “Enos, you’re goldbricking. You think your eyeballs are gonna spot something our hydrophones miss?”

“Probably not.” George knew better than to make a challenge too blatant. “But you never can tell, can you?”

“I can tell when you’re goofing off,” the petty officer said. After the one growl, though, he went off to harass somebody else. George’s answer held enough truth to let him wiggle off the hook.

He swabbed conscientiously for a while, in case the petty officer came sneaking back and caught him doing too close to nothing. He wasn’t terrified of the man, the way some ordinary seamen were. For one thing, he was in his thirties himself; the other man didn’t put him in mind of an angry father. For another, he’d been yelled at by experts on the Sweet Sue. What was one more fellow with a big voice? Getting along was easier, but one more bawling-out wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Fighters buzzed overhead. These days, American ships didn’t sail out of range of land-based aircraft from the Sandwich Islands. Somebody in Honolulu, or perhaps somebody back in Philadelphia, had finally had a rush of brains to the head. George wished that would have happened sooner. The Townsend would have been better off for it.

Or maybe it wasn’t such a rush of brains. About fifteen minutes later, the destroyer’s klaxons hooted for general quarters. George threw the mop into the bucket and ran for his antiaircraft gun. He didn’t know whether the skipper had spotted an enemy submarine or aircraft or just had a case of the galloping jimjams. That wasn’t his worry. Being ready to do his little bit to keep the ship safe was.

He got to the twin-40mm mount just ahead of Fremont Dalby. If you were ahead of your gun chief, you were doing all right. “You know what’s going on?” Dalby panted.

“Nope. All I know is, I run like hell when I hear the siren,” George answered.

Dalby chuckled. “Long as you do know that, what you don’t know doesn’t matter anywhere near as much.”

The rest of the sailors who served the gun took their places within another minute or so. The Townsend’s intercom crackled to life: “Now hear this. We have detected aircraft approaching from the northwest. Y-ranging gear says we have about fifteen minutes. Assistance from more land-based airplanes is promised. That is all.” A pause. “Do your duty and all will be well.”

George laughed a sour laugh. “ ‘All will be well.’ Yeah-unless we get blown to kingdom come, anyway.”

“I’d like to see those Army assholes get more fighters out here in fifteen minutes, too,” Dalby added. “Matter of fact, I would like to see it, but I’m not gonna bet the damn farm.”

Two other destroyers cruised with the Townsend, a reconnaissance in force north of Kauai. The American powers that be wanted to tell the Japs the Sandwich Islands weren’t going to be their ham and cheese on rye. That was what the American authorities wanted to say, yeah, but they were liable to be offering the patrol up as an hors d’oeuvre.

Fritz Gustafson kept things short and to the point: “Give me lots of ammo. Can’t do much without it.” There was a loader’s notion of practicality.

As usual, the time between the call to general quarters and the appearance of enemy fighters seemed an eternity and an eyeblink at the same time. One of the 40mm mounts on another destroyer opened up. Tracers tiger-striped the sky. Shells burst here, there, everywhere. The only trouble was, George couldn’t spot any airplanes but the U.S. fighters.

“Spring fever,” Dalby said scornfully.

“Better too soon than too late,” Gustafson said. That was thoroughly practical, too.

And then everybody spotted the Japs. The American fighters zoomed toward them. All three destroyers put up a curtain of anti-aircraft fire. Japanese fighters rushed ahead to hold the enemy away from the torpedo-carriers and dive bombers they shepherded. Almost at the same time, two fighters plunged into the Pacific. One carried the Rising Sun, the other the eagle in front of crossed swords.

George pointed. “Torpedo bomber, coming at us!”

He didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so ugly in all his life. In fact, the airplane carrying the torpedo under its belly-offset slightly to the left-was smoothly streamlined. The torpedo itself was a straight tube with a bluntly curved nose and with fins at the stern: a splendid piece of industrial design. But it was designed to sink his ship and to kill him. If that didn’t make it ugly in his sight, nothing could.

Streams of tracers converged on the Japanese aircraft. George wasn’t the only one who’d spotted it. The pilot had to fly straight and low to launch his fish. That left him a perfect, and perfectly vulnerable, target while he did it. He was a brave man; he did what he’d been trained to do. His airplane exploded into fire. But the torpedo was in the water by then.

“HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththee-” George prayed in a rapid gabble. The prayer he chose took him by surprise. He’d turned Catholic because Connie made it plain she wasn’t about to marry him if he didn’t. He hadn’t thought he took it seriously, not till now. Somebody’d said there were no atheists in foxholes. The deck of a ship under torpedo attack evidently counted.

The Townsend was a greyhound of the sea, capable of well over thirty knots. Why, then, did she feel as if she were nailed in place? The heeling, surging turn she made might have been filmed in slow motion. It might have been, but it wasn’t. It took her out of harm’s way, for the torpedo raced past her stern.

“Thank you, Jesus.” Fritz Gustafson used words as if he had to pay for them. He packed a lot of meaning into those three.

Meatballs on its wings and fuselage, a Jap fighter shot up the destroyer. Bullets clanged and snarled and whined in wild ricochets. Wounded men screeched. Every antiaircraft gun on the ship tried to knock the pilot into the Pacific. He darted away just above the wavetops, untouched or at least still flying.

Fremont Dalby gave credit where it was due: “He’s a motherfucking son of a bitch, but he’s a motherfucking son of a bitch with balls. I hope he gets home.”

“I don’t.” George was not inclined to be chivalrous.

Then, suddenly, the sky was full of airplanes-airplanes blazoned with the American eagle and swords. They threw themselves at the Japs. The Army was on the ball after all. Ignoring the enemy fighters where they could, the fighters bored in on the torpedo-carriers and dive bombers-those were the ones that could sink ships. The Americans outnumbered the Japanese aircraft. Before long, the Japanese decided they’d had enough and flew off in the direction from which they’d come.

No dive bombers had attacked the Townsend. George was pretty sure of it. Even near misses kicked up great columns of water and threw splinters of bomb casing every which way. He couldn’t have ignored anything like that in his singleminded ammunition-passing… could he?

One of the other destroyers hadn’t been so lucky. Black, greasy smoke poured from her. A bomb had burst near her bow. She wasn’t dead in the water, but she couldn’t do much more than crawl. Even as he watched, her starboard list got worse.

Sailors bobbed in the water not far from her. The bomb blast had blown them off her deck. Some-corpses-floated face down. Others struggled to stay above the surface. Still others, in life jackets, didn’t have that worry.

As the Townsend swung toward her stricken comrade, the exec’s voice blared from the intercom: “All hands! Lower lines and nets and life rings for rescue!”

Sailors rushed to obey. The other destroyer slumped lower in the water. They weren’t going to be able to save her. Men started coming up on her deck from below. Some of them helped wounded buddies. They were going to abandon ship.

“That could be us,” George said.

He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud till Dalby nodded. “That damn near was us last year,” the gun chief said. “We pick up these sorry bastards and then figure out what to do next.”

Pausing to take on survivors carried risks of its own. If a Japanese submersible prowled these waters, the Townsend would be a sitting duck for it. George thought of his father. But the senior George Enos thought the war was over when his destroyer went down. George, Jr., knew better. Again, he kept an eye peeled for periscopes. This time, no one reproved him. He was a long way from the only sailor doing the same thing.

“Pull hard, you lazy fuckers! Put your backs into it! Haul that line!” a petty officer screamed. By his orders, he might have been serving aboard a nineteenth-century ship of the line. But the destroyer’s men weren’t swinging from one tack to the other; they were bringing a sailor up on deck.

He clung to the rope for dear life. His feet thudded against the side of the ship. “God bless you!” he gasped when he came aboard. He got down on hands and knees and puked his guts out. Nobody could possibly have blamed him for that; he was covered from head to foot in heavy fuel oil, so that he looked as if he’d just escaped from a minstrel show. But if you swallowed much of that stuff, it would kill you as surely as a bullet would. Heaving up your guts was one of the best things you could do.

“Ain’t this a fuckup?” one of the rescued men said as he stood there dripping. “Ain’t this just a grand fuckup? We wanted to see if there was Japs there. We found out, all right. Didn’t we just?”

Didn’t we just? The mournful words echoed inside George’s head. He turned to Fremont Dalby and said, “I wonder if we’ll be able to hang on to the Sandwich Islands.”

“We wouldn’t have any trouble if the Japs were the only thing on our plate,” Dalby said. “We could lick ’em easy enough. But this is the ass end of the goddamn war. Whatever they can spare from fighting the CSA and the big mess in the Atlantic and holding Canada down-whatever they can spare, we get that.”

“It’s not enough,” George said.

Dalby shrugged. “They haven’t thrown us out yet. They’re not fighting anybody else, either. But the Sandwich Islands are even harder for them to get at than they are for us.”

“I guess so.” George knew he sounded dubious. He felt dubious. He’d seen too much to feel any other way. And if he hadn’t, one look at the draggled survivors from the other destroyer would have been plenty to show him.

Hipolito Rodriguez packed his worldly goods into a duffel bag. He didn’t know how many times he’d done that when he was in the Army during the last war-enough so that he hadn’t lost the knack, anyhow. Shouldering the duffel wasn’t as easy as it had been then, though. A lot more years had landed on him since, and almost getting electrocuted hadn’t helped.

All the same, he managed. Some of the other guards from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades were in no better shape than he was. They managed, too. If you couldn’t manage, you shouldn’t have been here at all.

“Well done, men,” said Tom Porter, the troop leader-essentially, the top sergeant. “God knows we do need to fumigate these barracks-we’ve got more bugs in ’em than you can shake a stick at. I’m not telling you one goddamn thing you don’t already know.”

“Got that right,” a guard drawled. He mimed scratching-or maybe he wasn’t miming. Rodriguez had found out about delousing stations during the Great War, too. They’d changed a little since then-a little, but not nearly enough.

“It’s all them niggers’ fault,” another guard said. “They’s filthy, and we git their vermin.”

He was bound to be right about that. The rank smell of Camp Determination was always in a guard’s nostrils. Put lots of unwashed men and women together with Texas heat and humidity and it was no wonder you raised a bumper crop of every kind of pest under the sun.

The exterminators were a cheerful crew who’d come west from Abilene. BUGGONE! their trucks said. On the side of each was painted a man walking up to an overgrown cockroach. He had a mallet behind his back; the roach wore an apprehensive expression.

“Y’all got dogs or cats or canaries or snakes or goldfish or whatever the hell still in the building?” one of the men asked, fumbling in the breast pocket of his coveralls for a cheap cigar. “Better get ’em out if you do, on account of this stuff’ll kill ’em deader’n shit.”

A couple of the guards did have pets, but they’d taken them out. When the exterminator lit that cheroot, one of Rodriguez’s comrades asked him, “You gonna kill the bugs with the smoke from that goddamn thing?”

Laughing, the fellow answered, “How’d you guess? Now our secret’s out.”

He and his crew covered the barracks with an enormous tent of rubberized cloth. They could make it as big as they wanted; squares of the stuff zipped together. Rodriguez admired that-it struck him as good design.

One of the squares had a round hole in it that accepted the tube from the machine that pumped the poison into the tent: again, good design. The exterminators didn’t leave anything to chance, any more than the people who’d designed Camp Determination had done. A small gasoline engine powered the machine, which was hooked up to a gas cylinder with a large skull and crossbones painted on it.

Rodriguez had seen poison-gas cylinders during the last war. He asked the fellow with the nasty cigar, “You use chlorine or phosgene? I remember how chlorine kill all the rats in the trenches. More come later, though.” The trenches had been heaven on earth for rats and mice.

“Nah, this here is a different mix,” the exterminator told him. “It’s stronger than any of the stuff they used back then.”

“Bueno,” Rodriguez said. “This means, maybe, the bugs don’t come back for a while once you kill them?”

“Maybe,” the man answered. By the way he hesitated before he said it, Rodriguez decided he meant no. Sure enough, he continued, “We get paid to kill all the little bastards that’re in there now. What happens after that… If you leave out ant syrup and spray Flit around and keep the place clean so you don’t draw roaches, you’ll do pretty good. And you can always call us out again.”

“Bueno,” Rodriguez repeated, more sourly this time. Like undertakers, exterminators weren’t likely to go out of business anytime soon.

The engine came to noisy life. Whatever was in the gas cylinder started going into the tented barracks hall. Rodriguez got a tiny whiff of something that smelled sort of like mothballs but a hell of a lot stronger. That whiff was plenty to convince him he didn’t want to breathe any more of it. He moved away from the barracks in a hurry, and noticed the exterminators had already put some distance between themselves and their machinery.

“How soon can we go back in after y’all leave?” a guard asked one of the Buggone people.

“You folks did leave the windows and doors open so the place can air out?” the exterminator asked in return. The guard nodded. The exterminator said, “Well, in that case you oughta be safe goin’ in there tonight-say, after ten.”

Several guards swore. Rodriguez gave a mental shrug. Some things you just couldn’t help. What was the point of getting all excited about those?

“Wish we could fumigate the damn niggers like they was bugs,” a guard said.

Unfortunately for him, he said it where Tom Porter could hear him. The underofficer reamed him out for it: “Goddammit, Newcomb, watch your fool mouth. This here is a transit camp. It ain’t nothin’ else but a transit camp. You let the idea get out that it is somethin’ else and you turn the devil loose. Do you want that? Do you? Answer me when I talk to you, goddammit!”

“No, Troop Leader,” Newcomb said hastily.

“Then shut up, you hear me? Just shut up,” Porter said, and put his hands on his hips like an angry parent scolding a five-year-old. “You’ve all heard this shit before. To hell with me if I know what’s so hard about keeping your damnfool mouths shut, but y’all leak like a pail with a hole in it. We got to keep the niggers in camp tame, or we buy ourselves all kinds of shit. They go wild on us, we got to watch our backs every second like they did in the camps in Mississippi and Louisiana. Y’all want that? Do y’all?” Now he was yelling at every guard in earshot.

“No, Troop Leader,” they chorused, Rodriguez loud among them.

“All right, then,” the troop leader said, at least partly mollified. “Try and remember. You’re makin’ your own lives easier if you do.”

When Rodriguez patrolled the camp-either the men’s or the women’s half-he tried to watch his back every minute anyway. He didn’t know anybody who came from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade who didn’t. Anybody who’d lived through the last war had seen for himself that not having eyes in the back of your head was a good way to end up dead in a hurry. Some of the younger fellows, the men who’d been Party stalwarts or guards but hadn’t actually known combat, were the ones who strolled through the compounds without a visible care in the world. Sooner or later, one of them would get knocked over the head. That might teach the others some sense. Rodriguez hoped it would, anyhow.

His shift was on the women’s side today. He would have gone up with the window shade if he’d accepted all the favors offered him. The women figured their lives could be easier if they had a guard on their side, and they knew what they had to give to get one. If he wanted favors like that, he could have them. When they got thrown in his face half a dozen times a day, he mostly didn’t want them.

“These nigger bitches is all whores,” opined his partner, an Alabaman named Alvin Sprinks.

“It could be,” Rodriguez said. He didn’t think it was, at least under most circumstances, but he didn’t feel like arguing. Life was too short.

A couple of guards with submachine guns at his back, Jefferson Pinkard prowled through the women’s camp. Rodriguez had seen how his wartime buddy made his own rounds in Camp Determination, going where he wanted to go when he wanted to go there. That was just an extension of the rule of watching your back all the time. To a man of Pinkard’s rank, the whole camp was his back.

“You think we get a lot of pussy thrown at us? Man, what about him?” Sprinks sounded jealous. Rodriguez only shrugged. If they tried to give you more than you wanted or could use, who cared how much more than that they tried to give you?

Pinkard spotted him, waved, and made a sudden left turn to head his way. The guards tramped along behind him like a couple of well-trained hounds. “How you doin’, Hip?” the camp commandant called.

“Not bad, sir. Thank you.” Rodriguez was always careful to show respect for his friend’s rank. Nobody’d called him Hip since the Great War ended; it was the sort of nickname only an English-speaker would use. From Pinkard, it didn’t bother him; it reminded him of the days when they’d been miserable side by side.

“Your barracks got fumigated this morning-ain’t that right?” Pinkard asked.

“Yes, Senor Jeff.” In spite of himself, Rodriguez was impressed by Pinkard’s grasp of detail. Nothing went on in Camp Determination that he didn’t know about, often before it happened.

“Bet you’ll be glad to get rid of the bugs,” Jeff said.

“Oh, yes, sir.” Rodriguez nodded. “But it is like anything else, si?” He had the brains not to talk directly about the way the camp worked, not where mallates could overhear. “One batch goes away, but before long there is another.”

“Yeah, well, then we’ll call out those Buggone folks one more time and do it all over again. We’ll-” Pinkard broke off. He looked around the women’s half of Camp Determination. Then he looked back at Hipolito Rodriguez. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. “Son of a bitch!”

“What is it?” Rodriguez asked.

“Don’t rightly know yet,” Jeff answered. “Might be nothin’. But it might be somethin’ big, too. You never can tell till you go and find out. If it is, I promise you I’ll get you what you deserve for it. Don’t want you to be like Chick Blades, who never did find out what he came up with.”

Rodriguez scratched his head. “What you mean, Senor Jeff?”

“Never mind. Don’t worry about it. It happened a long time ago, back in Louisiana.” Pinkard shook his head, as if at something he didn’t want to remember but couldn’t forget. He gathered himself. “You got to go on with your rounds, and so do I. See you later. Freedom!” Off he went, his guards in his wake.

“What the devil was that all about?” Alvin Sprinks asked.

“I don’t know,” Rodriguez said truthfully. “The commandant, he has an idea, I think.”

“Reckon so.” Despite agreeing, Sprinks sounded doubtful. The next idea he had would be his first. He could read and write-Rodriguez didn’t think there were any guards who couldn’t-but he didn’t like to.

“When we gonna git outa this place?” a gray-haired colored woman asked as the guards started through the camp again.

">“Soon, Auntie, soon,” Rodriguez answered. Alvin Sprinks nodded solemnly. Rodriguez thought he would laugh or give the game away in some different fashion, but he didn’t. Maybe the troop leader had put the fear of God in him, at least for a while. He might not have his own ideas, but he could get them from someone else.