In At the Death

I

Brigadier General Clarence Potter crouched in a muddy trench north of Atlanta. Overhead, U.S. bombers flew through what looked like flak thick enough to walk on. Potter saw smoke coming from a couple of enemy airplanes, but the airplanes went on about the business of pounding the hub of the Confederate States of America flat.

Most of the bombs fell behind Potter, in the heart of Atlanta. As usual, the United States were going after the railroad yards and the factories that made the capital of Georgia so vital to the CSA. As far as Potter could tell, the latest bombardments were overkill. By now, Atlanta's importance was gone with the wind.

The locals, those who hadn't refugeed out or been blown sky high, seemed stunned at what had happened to their city. Disasters, to them, were for other places. New Orleans had suffered the indignity of capture in the War of Secession. Louisville had been lost in that war, wrecked in the Second Mexican War, lost again in the Great War, and spent an embarrassing generation as a U.S. city afterwards. Richmond had been battered in the Great War, and was taking it on the chin even harder now. But Atlanta? Atlanta just kept rolling along.

Except it didn't. Not any more.

Bombs were falling closer now, working their way north. Potter had seen that happen before. The lead airplanes in a formation would put their bombs about where they belonged-or where the bombardiers thought they belonged, anyhow. Bombardiers farther back would use those early explosions as targets. But, being human, the bomber crews didn't want to hang around any longer than they had to, so they released their bombs a little sooner than they might have. Work that all the way back through a bomber stream, and…

"And I'm liable to get killed by mistake," Potter muttered. He was in his early sixties, in good hard shape for his age, with iron-gray hair and cold gray eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles. His specialty was intelligence work, but he commanded a division these days-the Confederacy was running low on capable, or even incapable, line officers. His cynical cast of mind either suited him for the spymaster's role or came from too many years spent in it. Even he didn't know which any more.

"General Potter!" a soldier yelled. "You anywhere around, General Potter?" No doubt for his own ears alone, he added, "Where the fuck you at, General Potter?"

"Here I am!" Potter shouted back. Not a bit abashed, the runner dove into the trench with him. "Why are you looking for me?" Potter asked crisply.

"You're General Potter? Our General Potter?" The young soldier didn't seem convinced despite Potter's dirty butternut uniform and the wreathed stars on either side of his collar.

"Afraid I am, son." Potter knew why the runner was dubious, too. "Back before the Great War, I went to college up at Yale. I learned to talk like a damnyankee to fit in, and it stuck. Now quit dicking around. What's up?"

"Sir, General Patton's on the telephone, and he needs to talk to you bad," the kid replied.

"Oh, joy." Potter had no trouble containing his enthusiasm. No matter what George Patton imagined he needed, Potter knew he didn't need to talk to Patton. But Patton commanded an army, not just a division. He headed all the forces trying to keep the USA away from Atlanta. Potter knew damn well he had to render unto Caesar-not that Patton thought Julius Caesar, or anyone else, his equal. "All right. Field telephone still at the same old stand?"

"Uh, yes, sir."

"Then you stay here. No point getting both of us blasted just because General Patton's got the galloping fantods."

"Thank you, sir." The runner gaped at him.

Potter hardly noticed. He scrambled out of the trench, getting more tomato-soup mud on his uniform. Fall 1943 had been wet. A good thing, too, he thought. Without the rain and the mud, the damnyankees'd probably be at the Atlantic, not Atlanta. He knew he exaggerated. He also knew he didn't exaggerate by as much as he wished he did.

He scuttled over the cratered landscape like a pair of ragged claws. Who was the crazy Englishman who wrote that poem? He couldn't come up with the name. Bombs whistled down from above. None did more than rattle his nerves.

The field telephone was only a couple of hundred yards from where he'd sheltered when bombs started falling. The soldier with the ungainly apparatus and batteries on his back huddled in a foxhole. Barring a direct hit, that was fine. Potter wished he hadn't thought of the qualifier. The operator held out the handpiece to him.

"Thanks," Potter said, and then yelled, "Potter here!" Field-telephone connections were generally bad, and bombs going off in the background definitely didn't help.

"Hello, Potter. This is Patton!" The army commander also shouted. No one was likely to mistake his rasping voice for anybody else's, even over a field telephone. Potter supposed the same was true of his own. That turned out not to be quite true, for Patton went on, "If the damnyankees capture a telephone, they can put on one of their men claiming to be you and talk me out of everything I know."

"Heh," Potter said dutifully. He was sick of being suspected and twitted because of the way he talked. "What do you need, sir? The runner said it was urgent."

"He's right," Patton answered. "I'm going to send the corps that your division is half of against the U.S. forces between Marietta and Lawrenceville. You'll go in by way of Chamblee and Doraville, and cut off the Yankees east of there. Once we drive them out of Lawrenceville or destroy them in place there, we reopen communications from Atlanta to the northeast."

"Sir, do you really think a one-corps attack will shift the U.S. forces in that area?" Potter tried to ignore the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Patton's answer to every military problem was to attack. He'd won great triumphs in Ohio and Pennsylvania in 1941 and 1942, but not the one in Pittsburgh that might have knocked the USA out of the war. And his counterattacks against U.S. forces in Kentucky and Tennessee and Georgia this year had cost the Confederate States far more men and matйriel than they were worth.

"We need to reopen that route now, General," Patton replied. "Even if that weren't obvious to anyone with a map, I have orders from the President."

What Jake Featherston wanted, Jake Featherston got. The only thing the President of the CSA wanted that he hadn't got was the one he'd needed most: a short, victorious war. Even getting a war the country could survive didn't look easy any more.

Speaking carefully, Potter said, "Sir, the Yankees already have more force in place than we can throw at them. If you try to knock a brick wall down with your head, you hurt your head worse than the wall."

"It's not so bad as that, Potter," General Patton insisted. "They offer us their flank. We can go through them like a ripsaw through balsa wood."

Potter admired him for not saying like a hot knife through butter. Patton had his own way of speaking, as he had his own way of doing things. For better and for worse, he was his own man. Right now, in Potter's view, it was for worse.

"If that's their flank, it's not soft, sir," Potter said. "And they have lots of artillery covering the approach. As soon as we start moving, we'll get plastered." Two bombs burst close enough to rattle him. "Hell, we're getting plastered now."

"We've had this argument before, farther north," Patton said heavily.

"Yes, sir. I have to say the results up there justified me, too," Potter said.

"I don't agree. And I don't have time for your nonsense, either, not now. As I say, my orders come from the President, and leave me no room for discretion," Patton said. "You will attack, or I will relieve you and put in someone else who will."

Do I have the courage of my convictions? Potter wondered. To his relief, he discovered he did. "You'd better relieve me, then, sir," he said. "I'm sorry for the men you'll throw away, but I won't be a party to it."

"You son of a bitch," Patton said. "You yellow son of a bitch."

"Fuck you…sir," Potter said. "Sorry, but you won't get to pin the blame for your mistakes-and the President's mistakes-on me."

"Brigadier General Russell will go forward to take your division," Patton said. "Don't wait for him. You are relieved, effective immediately. Come back here to central headquarters at once-at once, do you hear me? We'll see which shelf the War Department decides to put you on after that."

"On my way, sir," Potter answered, and hung up before Patton could say anything else. He shouted for a driver.

His yells attracted a captain on his staff before they got him a motorcar. "What's the commotion about, sir?" the officer asked.

"I've been relieved," Potter said bluntly. The captain's jaw dropped. Potter went on, "Brigadier General Russell will take over for me. He's going to send you northeast to try to cut off the damnyankees in Lawrenceville. I don't think you can do that, but give it your best shot. When I told General Patton I didn't think you could, he pulled the plug on me. Orders from the President are that you've got to try. I wish you luck." He meant that. This wasn't the first time he'd got caught between loving his country and looking down his nose at the man who ran it.

He had time for a handshake before a command car showed up. The driver didn't seem happy at being out and about with bombs falling. Potter wasn't happy, either. What could you do?

They made it. They took longer than they would have without all the air raids-but, again, what could you do? Atlanta had taken a nasty beating. One little diner had a jaunty message painted on the plywood that did duty for a front window: OPEN FOR BUSINESS WHILE EVERYTHING AROUND US GOES TO HELL.

"What did you do-walk?" Patton growled when Potter strode into headquarters, which were in an ugly building on Block Place, just west of the cratered remains of the railroad yard.

"Might have been faster if I did," Potter answered.

Patton muttered. Potter wasn't contrite enough to suit him. Most men, seeing their military career going up in smoke, would have flabbled more. "I spoke with the President," Patton said.

"Oh, boy," Potter said.

Patton muttered some more. Potter wasn't impressed enough to suit him, either. Of course, Potter had had more to say to-and about-Jake Featherston than Patton ever did. "There's an airplane waiting for you at the airport," Patton ground out. "You're ordered back to Richmond."

"So the damnyankees can shoot me down on the way?" Potter said. "Why didn't Featherston order me executed here?"

"I wondered if he would," Patton retorted. "Maybe he wants to do it personally. Any which way, get moving. You'll find out what he has in mind when you get there-if you do. I hope you sweat all the way. Now get out."

"Always a pleasure," Potter said, and flipped Patton a salute in lieu of the bird.

Atlanta's airport was at Hapeville, nine miles south of town. The airplane was a three-engined transport: an Alligator, so called because of its corrugated aluminum skin. U.S. transports were bigger and faster, but Alligators got the job done. The Confederate States had had to rebuild their military from scratch in the 1930s. Not everything got fully modernized: too much to do too fast. Most of the time, slow, obsolescent transports didn't matter too much.

If, however, a U.S. fighter got on your tail…

Cussing Patton under his breath, Potter did sweat till the Alligator, which also carried several other officers and a nondescript civilian who might have been a spy, got well away from Atlanta. The airplane wasn't out of the woods yet; he knew that. U.S. aircraft from Kentucky and Tennessee raided western North Carolina and Virginia. But his odds had improved.

He started sweating again when they neared Richmond, which vied with Paris as the most heavily bombed city in the world. They got down just before sunset. Two hard-faced men in Freedom Party Guard camouflage uniforms waited for Potter. "Come with us," one of them growled as soon as he got off. Having no choice, he did, and wondered if he was going for his last ride.

W ithout much modesty, false or otherwise, Lieutenant Michael Pound reckoned himself the best platoon commander for barrels in the U.S. Army. He also would have bet he was the oldest platoon commander for barrels in the Army. He'd been learning armored warfare ever since most of his counterparts were born.

Right now, things were pretty simple. The Confederates were pushing north and east out of their defenses in front of Atlanta. If they broke through, they would cut off and probably cut up a lot of good men.

Michael Pound didn't think they had a chance in church of breaking through. He stood up in the cupola of his green-gray barrel to get a better look around than the periscopes could give him. His shoulders barely fit through the opening; he was built like a brick. He needed-and hated-reading glasses these days, but he still saw fine at a distance.

His barrel sat under the pines near the edge of a wood. The crew had draped branches over the glacis plate to help hide the big, bulky machine. The other four in the platoon sat not far away, in the best cover their ingenious commanders could find. Soggy fields of red mud-which looked unnatural to someone from close to the Canadian border like Pound-lay to the south. If the Confederates wanted to try coming this way, they couldn't very well fool anybody.

Which didn't mean they couldn't get fooled. From behind, Pound could see trenches and foxholes and machine-gun nests. From in front, most of those would be camouflaged. He could see the signs marking the borders of minefields, too. The enemy wouldn't spot them till too late…unless the sappers who'd laid the mines wanted them seen, to channel C.S. attacks.

More U.S. infantry waited among the trees with the barrels-and Pound's platoon was far from the only armor on hand. If the bastards in butternut figured this was an exposed flank, they'd get rapped on the knuckles in a hurry.

And they did. They must have. Artillery started screaming down on the fields and on the pine woods. Michael Pound ducked into the turret and clanged the hatch shut. He felt sorry for the poor bloody foot soldiers. They'd get bloodier in short order. Air bursts were very bad news for troops caught under trees. Shells fused to burst as soon as they touched branches showered sharp fragments on the ground below.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than fragments clattered off the barrel. They sounded like hail on a tin roof, which only proved you couldn't go by sound.

"Lord help the infantry," said Sergeant Mel Scullard, the gunner. He managed to put up with having a longtime gunner set over him-at least, he hadn't tried to brain Pound with a wrench while the platoon commander slept.

"I was thinking the same thing," Pound replied. "It does even out some, though. Nobody fires antibarrel rockets or armor-piercing rounds at them."

"Goddamn stovepipe rockets," Scullard said. "If I caught a Confederate with one of those things, I'd shove the launcher up his ass and then light off a round. And that, by God, would be that."

"My, my. How the boys in the striped pants who put together the Geneva Convention would love you," Pound said.

The gunner's opinion of the Geneva Convention and its framers was blasphemous, scatological, and almost hot enough to ignite the ammunition stowed in the turret. Laughing, Pound wagged a forefinger at him. Scullard used a different finger a different way.

Pound peered through the periscopes set into the cupola. Had he been standing up, he could have used field glasses for a better view. Another rattle of sharp steel against the barrel's armored skin reminded him there were times to be bold and times to be smart, and this sure as hell looked like a time to be smart.

And he could see enough, if not quite everything he wanted. "They're coming, all right," he said. "Infantry first-probably probing to find out where the mines are and whether we've got any weak spots. And when they find some, that's where the barrels will try and get through."

"Let the goddamn barrels come," Scullard said. "They'll regret it."

In the first year and a half of the war, U.S. forces were sorry more often than not when they came up against C.S. barrels. Confederate machines had bigger guns, stronger engines, and thicker, better-sloped armor. But the newest U.S. models finally got it right. Their 3Ѕ-inch guns outclassed anything the enemy used, and their powerplants and protection also outdid the opposition. With problems elsewhere, the Confederates were slow to upgrade their barrels.

Some of the machines advancing now weren't barrels at all, but squat, ugly assault guns. Pound, a purist, looked down his nose at them. But throw enough of them into the fight and something would probably give. Quantity had a quality of its own.

"What's the range to those bastards?" he asked.

Scullard checked the rangefinder. "More than a mile and a half, sir. Even a hit at that range isn't a sure kill-they've got thick glacis plates."

"Take a shot at the lead machine anyway," Pound said. "If you do kill it way the hell out there, the rest of them will know right away they've got a tough row to hoe."

"I'll do it, sir," the gunner answered. Then he spoke to the loader: "Armor-piercing!"

"I thought you'd never ask," Joe Mouradian said, and handed him a long, heavy cartridge with the nose painted black.

Scullard traversed the turret a little to the left. He peered through the rangefinder again, raised the gun, peered once more, muttered, and brought the cannon up a hair farther. Pound wouldn't have hesitated so much. He had uncommon confidence in himself. He wasn't always right, but he was always sure. He was sure he ought to keep quiet now. Scullard's style was different from his, but the gunner usually hit what he aimed at.

If he didn't hit here, Pound intended to say not a word. It was long range, even for a gun that fired on a fast, flat trajectory like the 3Ѕ-incher.

Boom! Inside the turret, the noise wasn't too bad. Right outside, it would have seemed like the end of the world. Michael Pound looked through the periscopes, hoping he could see the shot fall if it missed.

But it didn't. The lead Confederate assault gun suddenly stopped. Greasy black smoke spurted from it. A hatch in the side opened. Somebody bailed out. More smoke belched from the hatch.

"Good shot! Good shot!" Pound thumped Scullard on the back. "Now kill the next one. The others will think twice about coming on after that."

"I'll try, sir," the gunner said, and then, "AP again, Mouradian!"

"Right." The loader slammed another round into the breech.

Scullard traversed the turret to the right. He fired again, then swore. That was a miss. Pound swore, too; he saw no puff of dust to mark where the shot came down. The wet weather complicated lives all kinds of ways.

Scullard tried again. This time, the shot went home. The assault gun slewed sideways and stopped, a track knocked off its wheels. The enemy could probably fix it, but that would take a while. In the meantime, it was out of the fight, a sitting duck. Odds were somebody would blast it before it got fixed.

Other U.S. barrels opened up. More C.S. assault guns and barrels got hit. Others stopped to return fire. Having expended three rounds from this spot, Pound figured it was time to move. They would have a good idea where he was, the same as if he'd lit three cigarettes on a match. He ordered the barrel back and to the left to a secondary firing position he'd marked out ahead of time.

Nobody ever said the Confederates lacked guts. They pressed the attack hard. Pound could see only his little part of it, like any soldier at the front. Thanks to the mines and the machine guns and the barrels and the fighter-bombers that swooped down on the enemy, the men in butternut never made it across the open ground and into the pine woods. They tried three different times, which only meant they paid a higher price for failure than if they'd left well enough alone after the first time.

When they sullenly pulled back late that afternoon, Pound said, "We ought to go after them. We might be able to walk right into Atlanta."

"Easy to walk into Atlanta, sir," Scullard said. "If we do, though, how many of us'll walk out again?"

Pound grunted. Having seen what the fighting in Pittsburgh was like, he didn't want to wind up on the other end of that. But watching the enemy get away went against all his instincts.

Then rockets started screaming down on the open ground in front of the woods and on the trees as well. Blast made even the heavy barrel shudder on its tracks. The Confederates were doing everything they could to discourage pursuit. He feared the foot soldiers were catching it hard.

Even so…"They won't take Lawrenceville away from us like that," he said.

"No, sir," Scullard agreed. "We'll likely try a flanking move from there, I bet. If we can make them leave Atlanta without us going in and taking it away from them, that sounds goddamn good to me."

"To me, too," Pound said. "The cheaper, the better."

The order to move forward came early the next morning. The axis of the advance was southeast: not straight towards Atlanta, but deeper into central Georgia. That warmed the cockles of Michael Pound's heart. It also told him that General Morrell, whom he'd known for many years, still had what it took. Morrell was all but inviting the Confederates in Atlanta to strike at his flank again. If they did, he would give them lumps.

They didn't. Watching their first counterattack fail must have taught them something. Pound didn't-wouldn't-believe they'd lost too many men and too much equipment for another try. They'd counterattacked again and again, all the way down from the Ohio River-usually before they should have. And it had cost them a lot more than standing on the defensive and making U.S. forces come to them would have done. Maybe they were finally wising up.

But if they were, it was liable to be too late. If they didn't come out of Atlanta, men and barrels in green-gray would curl around and cut them off from the east and south as well as from the north. And what would stop Irving Morrell's armor from slashing across the rest of Georgia to Savannah and the Atlantic and cutting the Confederacy in half?

Nothing Second Lieutenant Pound could see.

Here and there, the Confederates still fought hard. The Freedom Party Guard units, in their mottled uniforms, had the best gear the CSA could give them and a vicious determination to use it. They took few prisoners, and mostly didn't let themselves get captured. And their fanatical resistance got them…

Not very much. Jake Featherston didn't have enough Guard outfits to go around. He didn't come close. In between the towns they defended and the strongpoints they manned lay…again, not very much. Most Confederate soldiers, like most soldiers most places, weren't so enthusiastic about dying for their country. Militias of beardless boys and old men mixed bolt-action Tredegars from the last war with hunting rifles and shotguns. Some of them were brave. It hardly mattered. They didn't have what they needed to fight a real army.

Mel Scullard machine-gunned a kid who was running up to the barrel with a Featherston Fizz. The youngster fell. The burning gasoline from the bottle made his last minutes on earth even worse than they would have been otherwise.

With cold eyes, the gunner watched him die. "You want to play against the first team, sonny, you better bring your best game," he said.

"That's about the size of it," Pound agreed. "And most of their first team is in Atlanta, and it's doing them less and less good the longer it sits there. In the meantime, by God, we'll just clean up their scrubs."

C assius began to think he might live through the war. Black guerrillas who took up arms against the CSA and the Freedom Party always hoped to live, of course. But hoping and believing were two different things. Sooner or later, he'd figured, Gracchus' band would run out of luck. Then he'd either die on the spot or go to a camp the way his mother and father and sister had. Quick or slow, it would be over.

Now…Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't. He'd already watched U.S. fighter-bombers stoop on a truck convoy the Negroes stalled with a land mine planted in a pothole. What followed wasn't pretty, which didn't mean he didn't like it. Oh, no-it meant nothing of the sort.

And the rumble and growl of artillery in the northwest wasn't distant or on the edge of hearing any more. Now it grew into an unending roar, louder by the day and as impossible to ignore as a toothache. Whenever the guerrillas camped for the night, the same phrase was on their lips: "Damnyankees comin' soon."

They wanted the U.S. soldiers to get there soon. They would likely die if the U.S. soldiers didn't. They called them damnyankees anyhow. There as in so many other things, they imitated Confederate whites. They found yellow women prettier than brown ones and much prettier than black ones. They liked straight hair better than kinky, sharp noses better than flat. In all of that, they were typical of the Confederacy's Negroes.

The main way they weren't typical was that they were still alive.

Not far away, trucks rattled through the darkness, bringing C.S. troops forward to try to stem the U.S. tide. The guerrillas let most convoys go. They couldn't afford to get into many real fights with real soldiers. Gracchus had enough trouble scraping up new recruits as things were. Except for the scattered, harried rebel bands, not many Negroes were left in the Georgia countryside.

"Suppose the damnyankees come," Cassius said, spooning up beans from a ration a Mexican soldier would never open now. "Suppose they come, an' suppose they kill the Confederate sojers an' the ofays who put on white shirts and yell, 'Freedom!' all the goddamn time."

Gracchus was gnawing on a drumstick from a chicken liberated from a white man's coop. "Then we wins," he said, swallowing. "Then we starts puttin' our lives back the way they was 'fo' all this shit happen."

In a way, that sounded wonderful. In another way…"How? How we do dat, boss?" Cassius asked. "All the Yankee sojers in the world ain't gonna give me my ma an' pa an' sister back again. They ain't gonna bring back all the niggers the ofays done killed. We is like ghosts of the folks what used to be here but ain't no more."

Gracchus scowled as he threw the leg bone aside. "We ain't ghosts," he said. "The ones who got killed, they's ghosts. I bet this whole country have more hants'n you kin shake a stick at, this war finally done."

Cassius didn't exactly believe in hants. He didn't exactly not believe in them, either. He'd never seen one, but so many people were sure they had, he had trouble thinking they were all crazy or lying. He did say, "Hants ain't slowed down the ofays none."

"Might be even worse without 'em," another Negro said.

"How?" Cassius asked, and nobody seemed to want to answer that.

He didn't want to take the argument with Gracchus any further. He didn't want the guerrilla chieftain to think he was after that spot himself. As far as Cassius was concerned, Gracchus was welcome to it.

But, even if he kept quiet, he still thought he was right. Blacks in the CSA had had a vibrant life of their own, much of it lived right under the white majority's noses. With so many Negroes dead, how would the survivors ever start that again? How could they even live alongside the whites who hadn't tried to stop Freedom Party goons from stuffing them into trains for one-way journeys to camps, who'd often cheered to see them disappear? What could they be but a sad reminder of something that had once been alive but was no more? And if that wasn't a ghost, what was it?

The next morning, a scout came back in high excitement. "The Mexicans, they's pullin' out!" he said.

"They ain't goin' up to the front to fight?" Gracchus asked. "You sure?"

"Sure as I's standin' here," the scout replied. "They's marchin' south."

"They ain't here to fight the damnyankees," Cassius said. "They is here to keep us in line."

Francisco Josй's men were less enthusiastic about going after Negroes than white Confederates were. But their being here let the Confederacy put more men in the field against the United States. They did inhibit the rebel bands…some.

"If they's buggin' out fo' true, they must reckon the Confederate Army can't hold the Yankees back no mo'." Gracchus' voice rose with excitement. "Do Jesus, I hope they's right!"

The black guerrillas got another surprise the next day. A Confederate captain approached a scout with a flag of truce. The scout blindfolded him and brought him into camp. No one offered to take the blindfold off once he got there, either.

That didn't seem to faze him. "I have a proposition for you people," he said.

"Go on. Say your say. Tell your lies," Gracchus answered.

"No lies. What I ask is very simple: leave us alone while we fight the USA," the C.S. officer said. "You stay quiet, we won't come after you. We'll even give you rations so you don't have to plunder the countryside."

"Put rat poison in 'em first, I reckon," Gracchus said.

"If you agree, I will come back as a hostage and food taster," the captain said. "Don't jog our elbow. That's all we want. You tell us no, you'll get the stick instead of the carrot. I promise you that."

"Shoulda started leavin' us alone a hell of a long time ago," Cassius said.

Shrugging, the soldier said, "Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. Too late to worry about it now, though. It's water under the bridge."

"Easy fo' you to say, ofay." Some of Gracchus' rage and hatred came out. "You ain't got no dead kinfolks."

"Hell I don't," the captain said, and Cassius realized he hated them at least as much as they hated him. "Damnyankee bombs blew up my mother and father and sister. Another sister'll limp forever on account of 'em. And you're helping the USA. Far as I'm concerned, we ought to feed you rat poison, and better than you deserve. But I don't give those orders. I just follow them."

"You got nerve." Gracchus spoke now with a certain reluctant admiration.

"I told you-I've got orders," the Confederate said. "So what'll it be? Will you back off and let us fight the United States, or do we come in here and clean out all of you raggedy-ass coons?"

Gracchus didn't answer right away. He wasn't an officer with a chain of command behind him and the automatic authority to bind and to loose. He couldn't order his fighters to obey a truce if they didn't want to. Cassius knew he didn't. He spoke to the captain: "You coulda done that, reckon you would've a long time ago."

"You don't get it, boy," the white said, and never knew how close he came to dying on the spot. He continued, "Before, you were just a rear-area nuisance. But if you think we'll let you fuck with us when the front's so close, you better think again."

Maybe he had a point of sorts. But even if he did…"What happens when the Yankees push you outa here?" Cassius ground out. "You reckon we ain't got us a lot o' bills to pay? You reckon we ain't gonna pay 'em soon as we git the chance?"

That got home. The C.S. captain bit his lip. "All the more reason for us to get rid of you now," he said.

"You kin try." Gracchus seemed to have made up his mind. "Yeah, you kin try, but I don't reckon you kin do it. When the war started, you coulda got what you wanted from us easy. All you had to do was leave us alone. Well, you didn't do nothin' like that. You know what you done. Like my friend here say"-he named no names-"we owes you too much to set it down. We takes you back to your own folks now. Ain't got nothin' left to say to each other no more."

As the scout led the blindfolded officer away, Cassius found himself nodding. Gracchus had nailed that, probably better than he knew. All across the Confederate States of America, whites and Negroes had nothing left to say to each other.

"Reckon we better get outa here," Gracchus said after the white man in butternut was gone. "They ain't gonna wait around. Soon as he tell 'em we say no, they gonna pound the shit outa where they thinks we's at."

He proved a good prophet. Artillery started falling not far from their camp inside of half an hour. A couple of Asskickers buzzed around overhead, looking for targets they could hit. The Negroes stayed in the woods till nightfall.

"You reckon they come after us from the same direction as that captain?" Cassius asked Gracchus.

"Mos' likely," the guerrilla leader answered.

"Maybe we oughta rig us an ambush, then," Cassius said. "That'll learn 'em they can't run us like we was coons an' they was hounds."

"We is coons," Gracchus said with a grim chuckle. He clapped Cassius on the back. "But yeah, you got somethin' there. We see what we kin do."

Next morning, right at dawn, close to a company of Confederate soldiers approached the woods where the guerrillas sheltered. Cassius and a couple of other Negroes fired at them, then showed themselves as they scurried away. That was dangerous. A fusillade of bullets chased them. But nobody got hit.

Shouting and pointing, the Confederates pounded after the fleeing blacks. Down deep, the ofays still thought Negroes were stupid and cowardly. They wouldn't have pursued U.S. soldiers with so little caution.

The machine gun opened up from the flank and cut them down like wheat before the scythe. The Confederates were brave. Some of them tried to charge the gun and take it out with grenades. They couldn't work in close enough to throw them. The white soldiers broke off and retreated. They did it as well as anyone could, leaving not a wounded man behind.

"We done it!" Cassius whooped. "We fuckin' done it!"

Gracchus was less exuberant. "We done it this time," he said. "Ofays ain't gonna make the same mistake twice. Next time, they don't reckon it's easy."

That struck Cassius as much too likely. Gracchus moved his band away from the ambush site as fast as he could. Artillery and bombs from above started falling there a few minutes later-probably as soon as the beaten Confederate soldiers could send back word of where they ran into trouble.

Armored cars and halftracks began patrolling the roads around the guerrilla band. The Negroes got one with a mine, but the vehicles trapped them and hemmed them in, making movement deadly dangerous. Before long, they started getting hungry. The rations the Confederate captain had promised in exchange for quiet seemed better to Cassius every time his belly growled.

"Reckon we kin hold 'em off when they come again?" he asked Gracchus.

"Hope so," the guerrilla leader answered, which was a long way from yes.

Cassius made sure his rifle was clean. He didn't want it jamming when he needed it most. How much good it would do him against a swarm of Confederates supported by armor…he tried not to think about.

Then one night the northwestern sky filled with flashes. Man-made thunder stunned his ears. The C.S. attack the guerrillas were dreading didn't come. The Confederates needed everything they had to hold back the U.S. forces hitting them.

And everything they had wasn't enough. Soldiers and vehicles in butternut poured back past and through the guerrillas' little territory. They weren't interested in fighting the blacks; they just wanted to get away. Wounded men and battered trucks and halftracks floundered here and there. The Negroes scrounged whatever they could.

And then Cassius spotted an advancing barrel painted not butternut but green-gray. It had a decal of an eagle in front of crossed swords on each side of the turret. He burst into unashamed tears of joy. The damnyankees were here at last!

A fter capturing Camp Determination and the vast mass graves where its victims lay, Major General Abner Dowling had trouble figuring out what the U.S. Eleventh Army should do next. He'd handed the United States a huge propaganda victory. No one could deny any more that the Confederates were killing off their Negroes as fast as they could.

Some of the locals were horrified when he rubbed their noses in what their country was up to. The mayor of Snyder, Texas, and a few of its other leading citizens killed themselves after forced tours of the graves.

But others remained chillingly indifferent or, worse, convinced the Negroes had it coming. Only coons and goddamn troublemakers were phrases Dowling never wanted to hear again.

He scratched at his graying mustache as he studied a map of west Texas tacked on the wall of what had been the mayor's office. Snyder, under military occupation, was doing without a mayor for now. "What do you think, Major?" he asked his adjutant. "Where do we go from here?"

Major Angelo Toricelli was young and handsome and slim, none of which desirable adjectives fit his superior. "Amarillo's too far north," he said judiciously. "We don't have the men to hold the front from here to there."

Dowling eyed the map. If that wasn't the understatement of the year, it came in no worse than second runner-up. "Abilene, then," he said. It was the next town of any size, and it didn't lie that far east of Snyder.

"I suppose so." If Major Toricelli was eager to go after Abilene, he hid it very well. Dowling knew why, too. Even if the Eleventh Army captured Abilene…Well, so what? Taking it wouldn't bring the USA much closer to victory or do anything more than annoy the Confederates.

With a sigh, Dowling said, "We've pretty much shot our bolt, haven't we?"

"Unless they're going to reinforce us, yes, sir," his adjutant answered.

"Ha! Don't hold your breath," Dowling said. Hanging on to the men Eleventh Army had was hard enough.

"Maybe you'll get a new command, sir," Major Toricelli said hopefully.

"Sure. Maybe they'll send me to Baja California." Dowling's voice overflowed with false heartiness.

His adjutant winced. The USA had tried to take Baja California away from the Empire of Mexico during the last war, tried and failed. This time around, the United States seemed to have succeeded. And, having taken Baja California away from Mexico, what did the USA have? Baja California, and that was all: miles and miles and miles of the driest, most godforsaken terrain in the world.

Holding Baja California mattered for only one reason. It let the United States sit over the Confederates in Sonora. U.S. ships could block the outlet to the Gulf of California. U.S. airplanes in Baja California could easily strike the C.S. port at Guaymas. Of course, Confederate aircraft in Sonora could hit back at the warships and the air bases. They could, and they did. The luckless brigadier general in charge of that operation was welcome to it, as far as Abner Dowling was concerned.

"With what you've done here, you ought to get a command closer to the Schwerpunkt," Major Toricelli said.

"How about Sequoyah?" Dowling asked innocently.

That was closer to the center of things than west Texas, which didn't mean Toricelli didn't wince again anyhow. Sequoyah was a bloody mess, and probably would go on being one for years. Thanks to a large influx of settlers from the USA, it had voted not to rejoin the Confederacy in Al Smith's ill-advised plebiscite. But the Indian tribes in the east, who'd prospered under Confederate rule, hated the U.S. occupation. And most of the oil there lay under Indian-held land.

The oil fields had gone back and forth several times in this war. Whoever was retreating blew up what he could to deny the oil to the enemy. When the United States held the oil fields, Confederate raiders and their Indian stooges sabotaged whatever wasn't blown up. That led to U.S. reprisals, which led to bushwhacking, which led to hell in a handbasket.

"About the only thing we could do to make Sequoyah work would be to kill all the redskins in it." Dowling sighed. "And if we do that, how are we any better than the goddamn Confederates?"

"Those Indians really are fighting us," Toricelli said.

"Sure." Dowling's chins wobbled as he nodded. "But if you listen to Confederate wireless, you hear all the stories about the terrible wicked black guerrillas. Some of that's got to be bullshit, sure. But not all of it, because we both know the War Department helps the guerrillas when it can."

Major Toricelli looked unhappy, but he nodded. One of the reasons Dowling liked him was that he would look facts in the face, even when they were unpleasant.

As if on cue, a soldier from the signals unit stuck his head into the office and said, "Sir, we just got a message that needs decoding."

"I'll take care of it," Toricelli said, and hurried away. Dowling wondered what was going on. Eleventh Army wasn't important enough to receive a lot of encrypted transmissions. The Confederates were welcome to read most of the usual messages it did get.

"Well?" Dowling asked when his adjutant came back forty-five minutes later.

"Well, sir, we're ordered to step up air attacks against Abilene." Toricelli had the look of a man who'd gone hunting in the mountains and brought home a ridiculous mouse.

"We can do that," Dowling allowed. He even understood why the order was coded-no point to letting the Confederates haul in more antiaircraft guns to shoot down U.S. bombers. But, after what he and Toricelli were talking about, the order felt anticlimactic, to say the least.

Colonel Terry DeFrancis was one of the youngest officers of his rank in the Army. He was also one of the better ones; his fighters had established U.S. dominance in the air over west Texas. "Pound the crap out of Abilene?" he said when Dowling told him about the new order. "Sure. We can do that, sir. I'll step up the recon right away, so we know what we're up against."

"Step up the recon over other targets, too," Dowling said. "No use advertising what we're up to."

"Will do, sir," DeFrancis promised. "You're sneaky, you know that?"

"Well, I try." Dowling paused to light a cigarette. No two ways about it-Raleighs and Dukes beat the hell out of anything the USA made. And Confederate cigars…Reluctantly, Dowling brought his mind back to the business at hand. "That's one thing I had to pick up on my own. General Custer never much went in for being sneaky."

"What was it like serving under him?" Colonel DeFrancis asked.

"It wasn't dull, I'll tell you that. He always knew what he wanted to do, and he went ahead and did it." Dowling nodded. That was true, every word of it. It was also the sanitized, denatured version of his long association with the man who was, by his own modest admission, the greatest general in the history of the world. Dowling suspected he'd kept Custer from getting sacked several times. He also suspected he'd kept himself from getting court-martialed at least as often. But Terry didn't need to hear about that.

"Was he as much of an old Tartar as everybody says?" DeFrancis had already heard something, then.

"Well…yes." Dowling couldn't say no without making himself into a bigger liar than he wanted to be.

"But he won the war, pretty much. He got the job done. Morrell was under his orders when he used that armored thrust to roll up the Confederates and take Nashville."

"That's true." Dowling gave a reminiscent shiver. Custer and Morrell had gone against War Department orders to mass their barrels. Dowling himself had lied like Ananias, writing reports that denied they were doing any such thing. Had Philadelphia found out he was lying, or had the attack failed…The aftermath wouldn't have been pretty.

And it wasn't a sure thing, not ahead of time. A lot of Custer's straight-ahead charges at the enemy failed, and failed gruesomely. Dowling knew how nervous he was before the barrels crossed the Cumberland. If Custer had any doubts, he never showed them.

"You know, Colonel, he really is the hero of the last war. In an odd way, he's the hero of the whole first part of this century," Dowling said. "He knew what he wanted to do, and he found a way to make it work."

"We just have to go and do the same thing, then," DeFrancis said. "I expect we can." He saluted and hurried off.

Abner Dowling stubbed out his cigarette. He didn't have George Armstrong Custer's relentless drive, or even Terry DeFrancis'. He was a sane man in a business where the crazy and the obsessed often prospered. He hoped his ability to see all sides of a problem gave him an edge over commanders with tunnel vision. He hoped so, but he was a long way from sure it did.

Major Toricelli stuck his head into the office. "Sir, there's a local who wants to see you. His name is Jeffries, Falstaff Jeffries. He runs the big grocery on the edge of town."

"Has he been searched?" Dowling didn't want to talk to a people bomb, or even a fellow with a pistol in his pocket. But his adjutant nodded. So did Dowling. "All right. Send him in. You know what's eating him?"

"No, sir. But I expect he'll tell you."

Falstaff Jeffries didn't live up to his name. He was short and skinny and somber, nothing like Shakespeare's magnificent clown. He did have the virtue of coming straight to the point: "Where am I going to get more food, General?"

"Where were you getting it?" Dowling asked.

"From farther east. That's where everything comes from out here," Jeffries answered. "Except now I'm on the wrong side of the line. Folks're gonna start getting hungry pretty damn quick unless somebody does something about it."

"I don't think anyone will starve," Dowling said. "Plenty of rations, if it comes to that."

The storekeeper looked at him as if he'd just ordered no presents at Christmastime. "Rations." Jeffries made it into a swear word. "How in blazes am I supposed to run a business if you go around handing out free rations?"

"A minute ago, you were talking about people going hungry," Dowling reminded him. "Now you're flabbling about where your money's coming from. That's a different story, and it's not one I care much about."

"That's on account of you don't have to worry about feeding your family." Falstaff Jeffries eyed Dowling's expanse of belly. "You don't worry about feeding at all, do you?"

"I told you-nobody'll starve," Dowling said tightly. "Not you, not your family, and not me, either."

"But my store'll go under!" Jeffries wailed.

"There's a war on, in case you didn't notice," Dowling said. "You're alive, you're in one piece, your family's all right. Count your blessings."

Jeffries muttered something under his breath. Dowling wouldn't have sworn it was "Damnyankee," but he thought so. The grocer rose. "Well, I can see I won't get any help here."

"If you think I'll open our lines so your supplies can get through, you're even crazier than I give you credit for, and that's not easy," Dowling said.

Jeffries took a deep breath, then seemed to remember where he was and to whom he was talking. He left without another word, which was no doubt wise of him. Abner Dowling hadn't acted like a military tyrant in the west Texas territory Eleventh Army had conquered, but the temptation was always there. And, if he felt like it, so was the power.

L ieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover was not a happy man. The Confederate supply officer had had to pull back again and again, and he'd had to wreck or burn too much that he couldn't take with him. His dealings with the higher-ups from whom he got his supplies, always touchy, approached the vitriolic now.

"What do you mean, you can't get me any more antibarrel rounds?" he shouted into a field telephone. Coming out of the restaurant business in Augusta, he was much too used to dealing with suppliers who welshed at the worst possible time. "What are the guns supposed to shoot at the Yankees? Aspirins? I got plenty of those."

"I can't give you what I don't have," replied the officer at the other end of the line. "Not as much getting into Atlanta as there ought to be these days."

Dover laughed a nasty, sarcastic laugh. "Well, when the U.S. soldiers come marching in, buddy, you'll know why. Have fun in prison camp."

"This is nothing to joke about, goddammit!" the other officer said indignantly.

"Who's joking?" Dover said. "Only reason they haven't gone in yet is, they don't want to have to fight us house to house. But if you don't get out pretty damn quick, they'll surround the place-and then you won't get out."

"General Patton says that won't happen," the other officer told him, as if Patton had a crystal ball and could see the future.

"Yeah, well, when a guy wants to lay a girl, he'll say he'll only stick it in halfway. You know what that's worth," Dover said. "You want to keep the Yankees away from your door, get me those shells."

"I don't have any I can release."

"Aha!" Jerry Dover pounced. "A minute ago you didn't have any at all. Cough up some of what you're holding out on me, or you'll be sorry-will you ever."

"If I do that, they'll put my tit in a wringer," the officer in Atlanta whined.

"If you don't, you'll get your ass shot off," Dover said. "And I'll tell all the front-line soldiers you're holding out on me. You can find out if our guys or the Yankees get you first. Doesn't that sound like fun?"

"You wouldn't!" The other officer sounded horrified.

"Damn right I would. I was in the trenches myself the last time around. I know how much real soldiers hate it when the quartermasters don't give 'em what they need to fight the war."

"I'll report your threats to General Patton's staff!"

"Yeah? And so?" Dover said cheerfully. "If they put me in the line, maybe I'm a little worse off than I am here, but not fuckin' much. If they throw me in the stockade or send me home, I'm safer than you are. Why don't you just send me the ammo instead? Don't you reckon it's easier all the way around?"

Instead of answering, the supply officer in Atlanta hung up on him. But Dover got the antibarrel ammunition. As far as he was concerned, nothing else really mattered. If the other man had to tell his superiors some lies about where it went, well, that was his problem, not Dover's.

Even with that shipment, the Confederates east of Atlanta kept getting driven back. Too many U.S. soldiers, too many green-gray barrels, too many airplanes with the eagle and crossed swords. If something didn't change in a hurry…If something doesn't change in a hurry, we've got another losing war on our hands, Dover thought.

He'd never been one who screamed, "Freedom!" at the top of his lungs and got a bulge in his pants whenever Jake Featherston started ranting. He'd voted Whig at every election where he could without putting himself in danger. But he had some idea what losing a second war to the USA would do to his country. He didn't want to see that happen-who in his right mind did? Following Featherston was bad. Not following him right now, Jerry Dover figured, would be worse.

He stepped away from the field telephone, shaking his head, not liking the tenor of his thoughts. How could anybody in the Confederacy have thoughts he liked right now? You had to be smoking cigarettes the Quartermaster Department didn't issue to believe things were going well.

Or you had to read the official C.S. Army newspaper. A quartermaster sergeant named Pete handed Dover a copy of the latest issue. It was fresh from the press; he could still smell the ink, and it smudged his fingers as he flipped through The Armored Bear.

If you looked at what the reporters there said, everything was wonderful. Enemy troops were about to get blasted out of Georgia. A shattering defeat that will pave the way for the liberation of Tennessee and Kentucky, the paper called it. The Armored Bear didn't say how or when it would happen, though. Soldiers who weren't in Georgia might buy that. Jerry Dover would believe it when he saw it.

The Armored Bear spent half a column laughing at the idea that the damnyankees could threaten Birmingham. This industrial center continues to turn out arms for victory, some uniformed reporter wrote. A year earlier, the idea of U.S. soldiers anywhere near Birmingham really would have been laughable. C.S. troops were battering their way into Pittsburgh. They went in, yes, but they didn't come out. Now the story sounded more as if the writer were whistling his way past the graveyard. Had the Yankees wanted to turn on Birmingham, it would have fallen. Dover was sure of that. They thought Atlanta was more important, and they had the sense not to try to do two things at the same time when they could make sure of one.

Photos of night-fighter pilots with gaudy new medals on their chests adorned the front page. The story under the photos bragged of air victories over Richmond, Atlanta, Birmingham, Vicksburg, and Little Rock. That was all very well, but why were U.S. bombers over all those towns?

And another story bragged of long-range rockets hitting Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh (not a word about the great battle there the year before), and Nashville (not a word that Nashville was a Confederate city, either).

There is no defense against these weapons of vengeance. Traveling thousands of miles an hour, they strike powerful blows against the Yankee aggressors, the paper said. Soon improved models will reach New York, Boston, Indianapolis, and other U.S. centers that imagine themselves to be safe. Confederate science in the cause of freedom is irresistible.

Jerry Dover thoughtfully read that story over again. Unlike some of the others, it told no obvious lies. He hoped it was true. If the Confederates could pound the crap out of U.S. targets without wasting precious pilots and bombers, they might make the enemy say uncle. It struck him as the best chance they had, anyway.

On an inside page was a story about a football game between guards and U.S. POWs down at Andersonville, south of Atlanta. A photo showed guards and prisoners in football togs. Dover thought the piece was a failure. So what if the guards won? If they were healthy enough to play football, why the hell weren't they healthy enough to fight?

Maybe that wasn't fair. And maybe the guards had pull that kept them away from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Dover knew which way he'd bet.

The story almost pissed him off enough to make him crumple up the paper and throw it away. Almost, but not quite. One thing in chronically short supply was toilet paper. Wiping his butt with the football-playing guards struck him as the best revenge he could get.

Later, he asked if Pete had seen the story about the Andersonville football game. The noncom looked disgusted. "Oh, hell, yes," he answered. "Closest those bastards ever get to real Yankees, ain't it?"

"Looks that way to me," Dover said. "I wondered if you saw things the same."

"Usually some pretty good stuff in The Armored Bear," Pete said. "Shitheads who turn it out fucked up this time, though."

Maybe he imagined soldiers-sergeants like himself, say-sitting around a table deciding what to put into the Army newspaper. Dover would have bet things didn't work like that. The writers likely got their orders from somebody in the Department of Communications, maybe in a soldier's uniform but probably in a Party one. Everything in the paper was professionally smooth. Everything made the war and the news look as good as they could, or a little better than that. No amateur production could have been so effective…most of the time.

But when the truth stared you in the face, what a paper said stopped mattering so much. "Reckon we can stop the damnyankees?" Pete asked. "If we don't, seems like we're in a whole peck o' trouble."

"Looks that way to me, too," Dover answered. "If they take Atlanta…Well, that's pretty bad."

We should have stopped them in front of Chattanooga, he thought glumly. Now that they're through the gap and into Georgia, they can go where they please. The paratroop drop that seized Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge from the Confederates and made them evacuate Chattanooga was a smart, gutsy operation. Dover admired it while wishing his side hadn't been on the receiving end.

When night fell, he slept in a tent with a foxhole right next to it. U.S. bombers came over at night even more often than in the daytime. The heavy drone of engines overhead sent him diving into the hole even before the alarm sounded. Bombs burst with heavy thuds that reminded him of earthquakes. He'd never been in any earthquakes, but he was sure they had to be like this.

Antiaircraft guns thundered and lightninged, filling the air with the sharp stink of smokeless powder. Dover listened hopefully for the concussive thud of stricken bombers smashing into the ground, but in that he was disappointed. Fewer bombs fell close by than he expected from the number of airplanes overhead, which didn't disappoint him a bit.

Then something fluttered down from the sky like an oversized snowflake and landed on top of his head. He grabbed the sheet of cheap pulp paper. The flash of the guns showed him a large U.S. flag, printed in full color, with text below that he couldn't make out in the darkness and without his reading glasses.

"More propaganda," he murmured with a sigh of relief. If the damnyankees wanted to drop their lies instead of high explosives, he didn't mind a bit. Had that been a bomb falling on his head…

He stuck the sheet into a trouser pocket and forgot he had it till the next morning. Only when it crinkled as he moved did he remember and take it out for a look.

Confederate soldiers, your cause is lost! it shouted, and went on from there. It urged him to save his life by coming through the lines holding up the picture of the Stars and Stripes. Maybe U.S. soldiers wouldn't shoot him if he did that, but it struck him as a damn good recipe for getting shot by his own side.

If his own side's propaganda was bad, the enemy's was worse. Look at the disaster Jake Featherston has led you into. Don't you want true freedom for your country? it said. All Jerry Dover wanted-all most Confederates wanted-was to see the Yankees go away and leave his country alone. They didn't seem to understand that. If the sheets falling from the sky meant anything, they thought they were liberators.

"My ass," Jerry Dover said, as if he had a U.S. propaganda writer in the tent with him. The United States had invaded the Confederate States four times in the past eighty years. If they thought they'd be welcomed with anything but bayonets, they were even bigger fools than Dover gave them credit for-not easy but not, he supposed, impossible.

And if the Confederates wanted to change their government, they could take care of it on their own. All the bodyguards in the world wouldn't keep Jake Featherston alive for long if enough people decided he needed killing. No Yankees had to help.

Dover started to chuck the propaganda sheet, then changed his mind. "My ass," he said one more time, now happily, and put it back in his pocket. As with the story in The Armored Bear, he could treat it as it deserved.

N ovember in the North Atlantic wasn't so bad as January or February, but it was bad enough. The Josephus Daniels rode out one big swell after another. On the destroyer escort's bridge, Sam Carsten felt as if he were on God's seesaw. Up and down, up and down, up and down forever.

"You still have that hydrophone contact?" he shouted down the speaking tube to Vince Bevacqua.

"Yes, sir, sure do," the chief petty officer answered. "Coming in as clear as you can expect with waves like this."

"All right, then. Let's give the submersible two ashcans," Sam said. "That'll bring it to the surface where we can deal with it."

He shouted the order over the PA system. The launcher crew at the Josephus Daniels' bow sent the depth charges flying into the ocean one at a time, well ahead of the ship. They were set to detonate not far below the surface. Sam felt the explosions through the soles of his feet.

Something rude came out of the speaking tube. "Had my earphones on when the first one burst," Bevacqua said. "That'll clean your sinuses from the inside out." He paused, then went on, "The sub's making noises like it's blowing water out of its dive chambers. Ought to be coming to the surface."

"We'll be ready for anything," Carsten promised.

And the destroyer escort was. Both four-inchers bore on the submarine when it surfaced. So did several of the the ship's twin 40mm antiaircraft guns and her.50-caliber machine guns. A swell washed over the sub's bow-and almost washed over the conning tower, too. This weather was tough to take in the Josephus Daniels. It had to be ten times worse in a submersible.

Sailors ran up a flag on the sub: the white, black, and red jack of the Imperial German Navy. Sam breathed a sigh of relief. "This is the one we're supposed to meet, all right," he said.

"So it would seem, sir," Lieutenant Myron Zwilling agreed. Sam wished he had more use for the exec. Zwilling was brave enough and more than willing enough, but he had all the warmth and character of an old, sour-smelling rag. Men obeyed him because he wore two stripes on his sleeve, not because he made them want to.

The submersible's signal lamp started flashing Morse. "We-have-your-package," Sam read slowly. "He knows English, then. Good."

He handled the destroyer escort's blinker himself. WILL APPROACH FOR PICKUP, he sent back.

COME AHEAD. BE CAREFUL IN THESE SEAS, the sub signaled.

Sam wished Pat Kelly were still aboard. But his old exec had a ship of his own, a newer, faster ship than the Josephus Daniels. He was probably showing his whole crew what a demon shiphandler he was. Sam wasn't, and never would be. Neither was Zwilling. Since he wasn't, Sam kept the conn himself.

As he steered closer to the submersible, he ordered Bevacqua to keep paying close attention to any echoes that came back from his hydrophone pings. The CPO laughed mirthlessly. "Oh, I'm on it, Skipper. Don't you worry about that," he said. "It's my neck, too, after all."

"Good," Sam said. "Long as you remember."

German subs weren't the only ones prowling the North Atlantic. Plenty of U.S. boats were out here, too. More to the point, so were British, French, and Confederate submarines. The odds against any one of them being in the neighborhood were long, but so were the odds against filling an inside straight, and lucky optimists did that every day.

In both the Great War and this one, U.S. admirals and their German counterparts dreamt of sweeping the British and French fleets from the North Atlantic and joining hands in the middle. It hadn't happened then, and it wouldn't happen this time around, either. The enemy kept the two allies apart, except for sneaky meetings like this one.

NEAR ENOUGH, the submersible's captain signaled. But Sam steered closer, anticipating the next swell with a small motion of the wheel. The sub's skipper waved to him then, seeing that he knew what he was doing. He lifted one hand from the wheel to wave back. THROW A LINE, came the flashes from the ugly, deadly, rust-streaked boat.

IS THE PACKAGE WATERPROOF? Sam asked.

JA, the submersible skipper answered. Sam knew more German than that; his folks had spoken it on the farm where he grew up. He ordered a line thrown. A German sailor in a greasy pea jacket and dungarees ran along the sub's wet hull to retrieve it. Sam wouldn't have cared to do that, not with the boat pitching the way it was. But the man grabbed the line, carried it back to the conning tower, and climbed the iron ladder, nimble as a Barbary ape.

The German skipper tied the package, whatever it was, to the end of the line. Then he waved to the Josephus Daniels. The sailor who'd cast the line drew it back hand over hand. When he took the package off it, he waved up to Sam Carsten on the bridge.

After waving back, Sam got on the blinker again: WE HAVE IT. THANKS AND GOOD LUCK.

LIKEWISE FOR YOU, the German answered. He lifted his battered cap in salute. Then he and the other men on the conning tower disappeared into the dark, smelly depths of the submersible. The boat slid below the surface and was gone.

A moment later, the sailor brought the package-which was indeed wrapped in oilskins and sheet rubber, and impressively sealed-up to the bridge. "Here you go, sir," he said, handing it to Sam and saluting.

"Thanks, Enos," Carsten answered. The sailor hurried away.

"Now into the safe?" the exec asked.

"That's what my orders are," Sam agreed.

"Wonder why the brass are making such a fuss about it," said Thad Walters, the Y-ranging officer.

"Beats me," Sam answered with a grin. "They pay me not to ask questions like that, so I'm going to lock this baby up right now. Mr. Zwilling, come to my cabin with me so you can witness that I've done it. Mr. Walters, you have the conn." Having a witness was in the orders, too. He'd never had anything on board before that came with such tight security requirements.

"Aye aye, sir." The exec's voice stayed formal, but he sounded more pleased than otherwise. Red tape was meat and drink to him. He would have done better manning a desk ashore and counting turbine vanes than as second-in-command on a warship, but the Navy couldn't fit all its pegs into the perfect holes. You did the best you could in the slot they gave you-and, if you happened to be the skipper, you did the best you could with the men set under you. If they weren't all the ones you would have chosen yourself…Well, there was a war on.

Sam's cabin wasn't far from the bridge. It wasn't much wider than his own wingspan, but it gave him a tiny island of privacy when he needed one. Along with his bed-which he didn't get to use enough-he had a steel desk and a steel chair and the safe.

He shielded it with his body as he spun the combination so the exec couldn't see it: more orders. The metal door swung open. "I am putting the package in the safe," he intoned, and did just that. "The seals are unbroken."

"Sir, I have observed you doing so," Myron Zwilling said, like a man giving responses to a preacher in church. "And I confirm that the seals are unbroken."

"All right, then. I'm closing up." Sam did, and spun the lock once more to keep it from showing the last number.

"Now we go back to Boston?" the exec said.

"Just as fast as our little legs will carry us," Sam replied. Zwilling gave him a look of faint distaste. Sam sighed silently; if the exec was born with a sense of whimsy, he'd had it surgically removed as a kid. And the Josephus Daniels' legs were indeed little. She couldn't make better than about twenty-four knots, far slower than a real destroyer. The only reason that occurred to Carsten for picking her for this mission was that she was one of the most anonymous ships in the Navy. The enemy wouldn't pay much attention to her. If he didn't command her, he wouldn't pay much attention to her himself. As they left the cabin, Sam added, "I am locking the door behind me."

"Yes, sir," Zwilling said. "You're also supposed to post two armed guards outside until you remove-whatever it is-from the safe."

"Go get two men. Serve them out with submachine guns from the arms locker and bring them back here. I'll stand guard in the meantime," Sam said. "If Jake Featherston's hiding under the paint somewhere, I'll do my goddamnedest to hold him off till you get back with the reinforcements."

"Er-yes, sir." The exec seemed relieved to get away.

This time, Sam sighed out loud. Pat would have sassed him right back instead of taking everything so seriously. Well, what could you do?

Before long, the armed guards took their places in front of the door to the captain's quarters. Sam went back to the bridge. "I have the conn," he announced as he took the wheel from Walters. "I am changing course to 255. We are on our way back to Boston." He rang the engine room. "All ahead full."

"All ahead full. Aye aye, sir." The response came back through a speaking tube. The black gang would wring every knot they could from the Josephus Daniels. The only trouble was, she didn't have many knots to wring.

Every mile Sam put between himself and the spot where he'd met the U-boat eased his mind. That it also meant he was one mile closer to his own country did nothing to make him unhappy, either. He wanted nothing more than to get…whatever it was out of his safe and off his ship. He didn't like having men with automatic weapons outside his door at all hours of the day and night. Were it up to him, he would have been much more casual about the mysterious package. But it wasn't, so he followed orders.

He also followed orders in maintaining wireless silence till he got within sight of Cape Ann, northeast of Boston. A couple of patrolling U.S. seaplanes had already spotted him by then and, he supposed, sent their own wireless signals, but nobody-especially not his exec-would be able to say he hadn't done everything the brass told him to do.

Two Coast Guard cutters steamed out from Rockport and escorted the Josephus Daniels across Massachusetts Bay as if she had royalty on board. Sam didn't think the Germans could have dehydrated the Kaiser and stuffed him into that flat package, but you never could tell.

When a pilot came aboard to steer the destroyer escort through the minefields outside of Boston harbor, Sam greeted him with, "The powers that be won't like it if you pick the wrong time to sneeze."

The pilot had flaming red hair, ears that stuck out like jug handles, and an engagingly homely grin. "My wife won't like it, either, sir," he answered, "and that counts a hell of a lot more with me."

"Sounds like the right attitude," Sam allowed. Myron Zwilling clucked like a fretful mother hen. Yes, he worshipped at Authority's shrine.

They got through the invisible barricade and tied up in the Boston Navy Yard. As soon as they did, a swarm of Marines and high-ranking officers descended on them. One of the captains nodded when he saw the guards outside Sam's door. "As per instructions," he said.

"Yes, sir," Sam said, and when was that ever the wrong answer?

Everybody waited impatiently till he opened the safe and took out the package. He wondered what would happen if he pretended to forget the combination. Odds were the newcomers had somebody who could jigger the lock faster than he could open it with the numbers.

"Here you go, sir." He handed the package to a vice admiral. "Any chance I'll ever know what this is all about?"

"No," the man said at once. But then he unbent a little: "Not officially, anyhow. If you can add two and two, you may get a hint one day."

Even that little was more than Carsten expected. "All right, sir," he said.

"Officially, of course, none of this ever happened," the vice admiral went on. "We aren't here at all."

"How am I supposed to log that, sir? 'Possessed by ghosts-summoned exorcist'?" Sam said. The vice admiral laughed. So did Sam, who was kidding on the square.