In At the Death

X

I 'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth." The voice coming out of the wireless set and the boundless arrogance it carried were absolutely unmistakable. The President of the CSA went on, "If the Yankees reckoned they'd blow me up when they dropped their fancy bomb, they reckoned wrong, and they went and killed a big old pile of innocent women and babies, the way the murderers always do."

"Damn!" Flora Blackford turned off the wireless in disgust. Blasting Jake Featherston off the face of the earth was the only way she saw to end this war in a hurry. Blasting Newport News off the face of the earth had its points, but it was only one town among many.

The lies Featherston could tell! To listen to him, the U.S. uranium bomb was designed solely to slaughter civilians. What about the one his men had touched off right across the Schuylkill from downtown Philadelphia? Well, that one was an attack against the U.S. government and military. It was if you believed Featherston, anyhow. Of course, if you believed Featherston there you also likely believed him when he said ridding his country of Negroes was a good idea, when he said the USA had forced him into war, and when he said any number of other inflammatory and improbable things.

If Jake Featherston said he believed in God, it would be the best argument Flora could think of for either atheism or worshipping Satan, depending. She nodded to herself and wrote that down on a notepad. It would make a good line in a speech.

One thing Featherston had said even before the U.S. uranium bomb went off did seem to be true, worse luck: the United States hadn't caught the Confederate raiders who'd brought the bomb north. Flora supposed those raiders wore U.S. uniforms and could sound as if they came from the USA. All the same, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would have to look into the Army's failure to hunt them down.

But the Joint Committee had something else on the agenda this morning. They were going across the Schuylkill for a firsthand look at what the explosion of a uranium bomb was really like.

As she took a cab to Congressional Hall to meet with her colleagues, she couldn't help noticing that a lot of west-facing buildings had their paint scorched or seared off. On some, the paint had come through intact only in patterns: taller structures closer to the blast had shielded part of the paint but not all.

"They say we blew that Featherston item right off the map," the driver remarked. He seemed healthy enough, but he was at least ten years older than Flora, which put him in his mid-sixties at the youngest.

"It isn't true," she answered. "I just heard him on the wireless."

"Oh," the cabby said. "Well, that's a…darn shame. Don't hardly see how we'll get anywhere till we smoke his bacon."

"Neither do I," Flora said sadly. "I wish I did."

When the cab pulled up in front of Congressional Hall, she gave him a quarter tip, which pleased him almost as much as seeing Jake Featherston stuffed and mounted would have. "Much obliged, ma'am," he said, touching a forefinger to the patent-leather brim of his cap. He was grinning as he zoomed away.

Flora wasn't surprised to find Franklin Roosevelt there with the members of the Joint Committee. "First we'll see what one of these damn things can do," he said. "Then you'll rake me over the coals for not getting ours first and for not keeping the Confederates from finishing theirs."

"Did you think they could beat us to it?" she asked.

He shook his big head. "No. I didn't think they had a prayer, to tell you the truth. They're formidable people. All the more reason for squashing them flat and making sure they never get up again."

"Sounds good to me," Flora said.

They went to the Schuylkill in a bus. Two Army officers helped Roosevelt out of his wheelchair and into a seat, then manhandled the chair aboard. "Considering some of the terrain we'll be crossing, maybe I should have brought a tracked model," he said, sounding a lot more cheerful than Flora could have under the same circumstances.

The bus didn't cross at the closest bridge. Some of the steel supporting towers on that one had sagged a bit, and Army engineers were still trying to figure out whether it would stay up. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had to chug north to find one that was sound. Then the bus went back south and west till wrecked buildings and rubble in the road made the driver stop.

"We're not quite a mile from the center of the blast," one of the officers said. "It gets worse from here."

He wasn't wrong. It got worse, and worse, and worse again. Before long, only what had been the stoutest, sturdiest buildings had any walls standing at all. Even they weren't just scorched but half melted in a way Flora had never imagined, much less seen.

One of the Army officers pushed Franklin Roosevelt forward. When the rubble got too thick to let the man advance with the Assistant Secretary of War, his colleague would bend and grab the front of the wheelchair. Together, the two would get Roosevelt over the latest obstacle and push him on toward the next.

Steel and even granite lampposts sagged like candles in the hot sun. How hot had it been when the bomb went off? Flora had no idea-some physicists might know. Hot enough, plainly. Hot enough and then some.

Somewhere between half a mile and a quarter of a mile from what the officers were calling ground zero, there was no sidewalk or even rubble underfoot. Everything had been fused to what looked like rough, crude glass. It felt like hard, unyielding glass under Flora's feet, too.

"My God," she said over and over. She wasn't the only one, either. She watched a Catholic Congressman cross himself, and another take out a rosary and move his lips in prayer. When you saw something like this, what could you do but pray? But wasn't a God Who allowed such things deaf to mere blandishments?

"Can the Confederates do this to us again?" someone asked Roosevelt.

"Dear Lord, I hope not!" he exclaimed, which struck Flora as an honest, unguarded response. He went on, "To tell you the truth, I didn't think they could do it once. But they've got an infiltrator-his name's Potter-who's so good, he's scary. We think he led their team. And so…they surprised us, damn them."

"Again," Flora said.

Roosevelt nodded. "That's right. They surprised us again. They almost ruined us when they went up into Ohio, and then they did…this. But do you know what? They're going to lose the war anyway, even if we didn't fry Jake Featherston like an egg the way he deserves."

"Why didn't we?" a Senator asked.

"Well, we had intelligence he was in the Hampton Roads area, and I still believe he was," Roosevelt replied. "But he wasn't right where we thought he was, which is a shame."

"Why didn't we catch the people who did this?" Flora said. "The ones who brought the bomb up here, I mean. The wireless has been saying we haven't, and I want to know why not. They can't play chameleon that well…can they?"

"It seems they can," Roosevelt said morosely. "Just before I joined you at Congressional Hall, I had a report that Confederate wireless is claiming the bombers got out of the United States. I can't confirm that, and I don't know that I'll ever be able to, but I do know we don't have them."

"Yes, I've heard the Confederates making the same claim." Flora kicked at the sintered stuff under her feet. "We don't have any witnesses, do we?"

"None who've come forward," Franklin Roosevelt said. "I'm sure there were some, but when a bomb like this goes off…" He didn't finish. Flora nodded anyhow. When a bomb like this went off, it took a whole neighborhood with it. Anyone who saw the truck-she supposed it was a truck-the bomb arrived in and wondered about it died in the blast.

"From now on, they'll be calling the police and the bomb squad any time anything bigger than a bicycle breaks down," a Congressman said.

"That's already happened," Roosevelt said. "It's got cops all over the country jumping like fleas on a hot griddle, but I don't know what we can do about it. People are nervous. And I'm afraid they've got a right to be."

"Anyone need to see anything else?" the Army officer behind him asked. When nobody said yes, the man started pushing Roosevelt back toward the bus.

The members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War went back, too. The bus took them east over the Schuylkill to Philadelphia General Hospital, the closest one to survive the blast. The Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases, only a couple of blocks from ground zero, was now as one with Nineveh and Tyre: a tallish lump in the melted glass, no more.

"I think you people are a bunch of ghouls to rubberneck here," a harried doctor said. "And I think you were crazy or stupid or both at once to rubberneck over there. Don't you know that goddamn bomb left some kind of poison behind? We've had plenty of people who weren't too bad, and then their hair falls out and they start bleeding internally-and out their noses and eyeballs and fingernails and, uh, rectums, too-and they just up and die. You want that?"

"Nobody told us," a Senator said faintly.

"Nu? Now I'm telling you," the doctor said. "And now I've got to do some work."

Hearing that was plenty for Flora, but some of her colleagues wanted to see what the doctor was talking about. She went with them, and ended up wishing she hadn't. People with ordinary injuries were heartbreaking enough, and the bomb caused plenty of those. If a window shotgunned you with knifelike shards of glass, or if your house fell down on you and you had to lie in and under the ruins till somebody pulled you out, you weren't going to be in great shape.

But there were others, worse ones, who made her have a hard time sleeping that night, and for several nights afterwards. The people with what the nurses called uranium sickness, which had to be what the doctor described. And the burns…There were so many burns, and such horrible ones. How many hands with fingers fused together did she see, how many faces with melted noses, how many moaning sufferers with eyes boiled out of their heads?

She was glad to escape. She didn't have the stomach for such things. One of her colleagues said, "Well, at least we've paid the Confederates back for this."

By then, the members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War were climbing into their bus. Flora pointed back to the hospital. "I'm sure that makes the people in there very happy," she said.

The Congressman gave her an odd look. "I don't believe your heart's in this any more," he said. "You've been a rock since the start. Why not now?"

"Because now I've seen the difference between enough and too much," Flora answered. "And what these bombs do is too much." She looked a challenge at him. "Go ahead-tell me I'm wrong." He didn't. He couldn't. She hadn't thought he would.

A bner Dowling had dreamt of seeing Richmond in his professional capacity ever since his West Point days. Those were long behind him now, but here he was, striding through the streets of the captured Confederate capital with not a care in the world…except for breaking his neck in the rubble, stepping on a mine, setting off a booby trap, or getting shot by one of the snipers who still haunted the ruins.

He turned to his adjutant. "You know, it's a funny thing," he said.

"What's that, sir?" Angelo Toricelli was sporting silver oak leaves instead of gold on his shoulders-the spoils of victory.

"We mashed this damn place flat, but next to what happened to Philadelphia and Newport News it's nothing but small change."

"Oh." The younger officer nodded. "Well, we had to do it the hard way, not all at once. If they'd held out a little longer, though…"

"Wouldn't have broken my heart," Dowling said. "I know that sounds cold, but it's the Lord's truth. A superbomb's about the only thing that would have got these people's attention."

As if to underscore the point, somebody with an automatic weapon opened up in the distance. Dowling started to dive for cover, then checked himself: none of the bullets came anywhere near. A shattered storefront nearby had FREEDOM! painted on it. That graffito and CSA were everywhere in Richmond. The locals didn't like the idea of living under the Stars and Stripes for the first time since 1861.

Something moved back behind the storefront. Dowling's hand dropped to the.45 on his belt. It wasn't much of a weapon against an automatic Tredegar, but it was what he had. Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli's pistol leaped from its holster. "Come out of there!" he barked.

The kid who did couldn't have been much above seven years old. He looked at the green-gray uniforms, then asked, "You a couple of nigger-lovin' damnyankees?" Before Dowling or Toricelli could answer, the kid went on, "Got any rations? I'm mighty hungry."

"Why should we feed you if you call us names?" Dowling asked.

"What names?" The little boy didn't get it. He'd probably never heard U.S. soldiers called anything else. He rubbed his belly. "Gimme some rations. Y'all got any deviled ham?"

"Here, kid." Toricelli took a can out of a pouch on his belt and tossed it to the boy. "Now you got some. Scoot." The boy disappeared with his prize. Looking faintly embarrassed at himself, Toricelli turned to Dowling. "Maybe he'll grow up civilized."

"Yeah, maybe," Dowling said, "but don't hold your breath."

High overhead, a swarm of bombers flew south like wintering birds. Below the James, the Confederates still fought as stubbornly as they could. If they wouldn't give up, what was there to do but keep pounding them till they didn't have any choice? Dowling wished he could see something, but he couldn't.

"Once we win, do we really want to try to run this place?" he asked, speaking more to God than to his adjutant.

But his adjutant was the one who answered: "What choice have we got, sir?"

Dowling wished he knew what to say to that. If the USA beat the CSA, what happened next? As far as Dowling could see, the USA had two choices. The United States could leave an independent Confederacy, or they could reunite North America under the Stars and Stripes. An independent Confederacy was dangerous. What had just happened to Philadelphia told how dangerous it was.

But if Virginia returned to the USA…well, what then? If all these states that had been their own nation for eighty-odd years returned to the one from which they'd seceded, wouldn't they spend years trying to break away again? Wouldn't there be guerrillas in the mountains and the woods? Wouldn't there be people bombs in the cities? Wouldn't the locals send Freedom Party bastards to Congress, the way Kentucky and Houston had between the wars?

"Winning this goddamn war will be almost as bad as losing it would have been," Dowling said in a voice not far from despair.

"That crossed my mind, too, sir," his adjutant said. "How many of these sons of bitches will we have to kill?"

"As many as it takes," Dowling answered. "If we don't kill any more than that just for the fun of it, our hands are…pretty clean, anyway."

He had to look around to orient himself. The United States had knocked most of Richmond flat, while the Confederate defenders had flattened much of the rest. They'd fought hard. They never seemed to fight any other way. But there hadn't been enough of them to keep U.S. soldiers from breaking in.

Jefferson Davis. Robert E. Lee. Stonewall Jackson. Old Pete Longstreet. Woodrow Wilson. The famous Confederates of ages past had to be spinning in their graves-unless U.S. bombs had already evicted them. A pity Jake Featherston wasn't spinning in his. Well, the time for that was coming.

"You know, sir, in a way they're lucky here," Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli said.

"Oh, yeah? How's that?" Dowling asked.

"It's like I said before-if they'd kept fighting a little longer, they would have had a uranium bomb come down on their heads. Then they'd think what's left here was paradise by comparison."

"Well, you're bound to be right about that," Dowling said. "Except most of them wouldn't be doing any thinking-"

"Like they do anyway," his adjutant put in.

That stopped him, but only for a second. "Because they'd be dead," he finished. A lot of them already were. The stench in the air left no doubt of that.

Stench or no stench, though, he'd done something a lot of the most important people in U.S. history never managed. He'd remembered long-gone Confederate dignitaries before. Now Lincoln and McClellan, James G. Blaine and John Pope, and Teddy Roosevelt and George Custer sprang to mind. Not a one of them had ever set foot in Richmond. But here I am, by God! Dowling thought proudly.

"General! Hey, General Dowling, sir!" somebody behind him yelled. "Guess what, sir!"

"That doesn't sound so good," Angelo Toricelli said.

"No, it doesn't." Slowly, ponderously, Dowling turned. "I'm here. What is it?"

"Guess what?" the soldier said again, but then he told what: "We just found a whole family of nig-uh, Negroes, all safe and sound."

"Well, I'll be damned," Dowling said. A few blacks had come out of hiding when U.S. soldiers entered Richmond, but not many. After the uprising here, Jake Featherston's goons had been uncommonly thorough. Every surviving Negro seemed a separate surprise. "Who are they? How did they make it?"

"They were servants to some rich guy before the war," the soldier answered. "Carter, I think his name was, from the Tarkas estate. Or maybe I've got it backwards-dunno for sure, sir. But anyway, he and his people have been hiding them ever since colored folks started having trouble here."

"How about that?" Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli said. "Just when you think they're all assholes, somebody goes and does something decent and fools you."

"They're human beings," Dowling said. "They aren't always the human beings we wish they were, but they're human beings." He raised his voice to call to the soldier: "Send this Carter fellow to my headquarters. I'd like to talk to him."

"Will do, sir," the man replied.

Dowling's headquarters were in a tent in Capitol Square, not far from the remains of the statue of Albert Sidney Johnston. George Washington's statue, smothered in sandbags, still stood nearby. He got back there just before Jack Carter arrived. The Virginian was tall and trim and handsome, with gray eyes, black hair, and weathered features; he looked to be some age between thirty-five and sixty. "Welcome," Dowling told him. "I'd like to shake your hand."

Carter looked at him-looked through him, really. "I'm sorry, General, but I don't care to shake yours."

This wasn't going to go the way Abner Dowling had thought it would. Whatever Carter was, he wasn't the U.S. liberal somehow fallen into the CSA Dowling had thought him to be. "Maybe you'll explain why," the U.S. soldier said.

"Of course, sir. I'd be glad to," Jack Carter replied. "My chiefest reason is that I am a Confederate patriot. I wish you were hundreds of miles from here, suing for peace from victorious Confederate armies."

"That's nice," Dowling said. "Jake Featherston wishes the same thing. He won't get his wish, and you won't get yours. Santa Claus doesn't have those in his sack."

"Jake Featherston. Do me the courtesy, if you please, of not mentioning that name in my presence again." Carter's loathing might have been the most genteel Dowling had ever met, which made it no less real.

"Sorry about that. He's still President of the Confederate States."

"He's an upstart, a backwoods bumpkin. His father was an overseer." Jack Carter's lip curled. That was one of those things people talked about but hardly ever saw. Dowling saw it now. Carter went on, "My family has mattered in this state since before the Revolution."

A light went on in Dowling's head. "That's why you saved your Negroes!"

"Yes, of course. They've served us for as long as we've served Virginia. To lose them to the vulgar excesses of that demagogue and his faction…" Carter shook his head. "No."

"Noblesse oblige," Dowling murmured.

"Mock me if you care to. We did what we thought right for them."

Dowling wasn't sure whether he was mocking or not. Without a doubt, Carter had risked his own life and his family's to protect those of his servants. That almost required admiration. And yet…"Did you do anything for other colored people, Mr. Carter?"

"That was not my place," Carter said simply. "But you'll find I was not the only one to take the measures I thought necessary."

He was bound to be right. Some other whites had hidden Negroes and helped them escape the Freedom Party's population reductions. Some had, yes, but not very many. "Maybe you'd better go," Dowling said.

Jack Carter took a step back. "You thought we might be friends because of what I did. I assure you, sir, I am more sincerely your enemy than Jake Featherston ever dreamt of being. Good day." He bowed, then stalked out.

He might be a more sincere enemy, but Jake Featherston made a more dangerous one. Carter was content to abhor from a distance. Featherston wasn't. He wanted to kill what he didn't like, and he was much too good at it.

A sergeant with the wireless patch on his left sleeve burst into the tent. "Paris, sir!" he exclaimed.

"Paris?" Dowling's first thought, absurdly, was of Helen of Troy.

The sergeant set him straight: "Yes, sir! Paris! The Kaiser just blew it to hell and gone. Eiffel Tower's nothing but a stump, the report says!"

"Jesus Christ!" Dowling said, and then, "Will anything still be standing by the time this damn war gets done?"

N obody messed with Lavochkin's Looters as they fought their way up the South Carolina coast toward Charleston. Nobody shot at them from ambush. Nobody gave them any guff when they went through a town. Confederate soldiers who surrendered to them seemed pathetically grateful to have the chance.

"You see?" Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin said. "You can put the fear of God in these assholes. You can, and we did."

Chester Martin didn't answer that. He pretended he didn't hear it. He wished he could pretend he'd had nothing to do with the massacre in Hardeeville. But he had. He was no damn good at lying to himself. Even if he were, the nightmares that tore apart even his exhausted sleep would have made him stop trying.

He wasn't the only one who had them. Several guys in Lavochkin's platoon were jumpier than a cat at a Great Dane convention. Some replacements knew what was going on as soon as they came in. "Aren't you the guys who-?" they would say, and stop right there.

Others, more naпve or less plugged in, tried to figure out what was going on. They usually said something on the order of, "How come you guys are so weird?"

If anything bothered Lieutenant Lavochkin, he didn't show it. If anything, he was proud of what had happened in Hardeeville. "Nobody fucks with my outfit," he would tell anyone who wanted to listen. "I mean nobody. You fuck with us, tell the carver what you want on your goddamn headstone, 'cause you are all over with."

Captain Rhodes kept shaking his head. "I never expected anything like this to happen to me," he said one evening. He and Chester had got outside of some pretty good cherry brandy a Confederate had left behind. Booze blunted nightmares.

"War's a filthy business," Chester said. "God knows I saw that the last time around. I think the trenches were even worse than what we're doing now. For fighting in, I mean."

"Yeah, for fighting in," the company CO agreed. Or rather, half agreed, for he went on, "But what happened in Hardeeville, that wasn't fighting. That was just…murder for the fun of it. And what the Confederates are doing in those goddamn camps, that isn't fighting, either. That's murder for the fun of it, too, 'cause the smokes can't fight back. This war's filthier than the last one was. The horrible stuff then just kinda happened, 'cause they couldn't help it. This time, they're making it horrible on purpose."

He knew about the last war from what he'd read and what people told him. He wasn't anywhere near old enough to have fought in it. "You have a point, sir," Chester said. "Some of a point, anyway." Disagreeing too openly with a superior didn't do. But he damn well had been through the Great War. "What about the guys who started using gas? You think they weren't being horrible on purpose?"

"Well, you got me there," Rhodes admitted. Chester liked shooting the bull with him not least because he would admit somebody else had a point. He didn't have anything close to Boris Lavochkin's messianic confidence in his own rightness…and righteousness. What was Lieutenant Lavochkin but a scale model of Jake Featherston?

Featherston had flushed a whole country down the toilet. Lavochkin had only a platoon to play with-so far. But Chester was part of the platoon. If the lieutenant threw it away, the first sergeant went with it.

He didn't want to think about that, so he took another swig. Yeah, cherry brandy made a good thought preventer. The bottle was damn near empty. He passed it to Captain Rhodes, who put the kibosh on damn near.

"Charleston up ahead," Chester said. "Won't be long now."

"One more city," Rhodes said.

"Oh, it's more than that." Chester knew he sounded shocked. But Rhodes would have gone to school in the lull of the 1920s. Back then, nobody thought you needed to remind anybody of just how and why the USA and CSA got to be mortal foes. They would stay peaceful and live happily ever after. And if pigs had wings…

Chester remembered his own school days, before the Great War. They pounded you over the head with the War of Secession then. They kept saying that one day the USA would pay the CSA back. And the United States did. And then the Confederate States had some backpaying to do. And that's how come I'm sitting on my ass somewhere south of Charleston, Chester thought.

"I wouldn't mind marching through there," he said. "Give them one in the eye for Fort Sumter, you know?"

"Well, yeah," Rhodes said. But it didn't mean so much to him. Martin could tell. He didn't have that This is where it all began, and we'll damn well end it here, too kind of feeling. Maybe Lieutenant Lavochkin would. Or maybe he hated the whole Confederacy equally. All things considered, Chester didn't want to ask him.

He woke with a headache the next morning. Strong coffee and a couple of aspirins helped. Incoming artillery, on the other hand…Even now, the Confederates counterattacked whenever they thought they could drive their foes back a couple of miles. A U.S. machine gun opened up no more than twenty yards from Chester. His head didn't explode, which only proved he was tougher than he thought.

Then he had to do some shooting of his own, and that was even worse. A lot of the Confederates didn't hit the dirt as fast as they should have. New men, Chester thought with an abstract sympathy that didn't keep him from killing them as fast as he could. They would have done the same to him if they could. But they'd got thrown into the fight too soon to know what they were doing, and a lot of them would never have the chance to learn now.

U.S. armor rattled up to put the final quietus on the Confederate attack. A couple of barrels had Negroes riding on them. The blacks had probably shown the barrel crews shortcuts through the coastal swamps. One of them gleefully blazed away at the men in butternut with a submachine gun. The cannons' bellow made Chester dry-swallow three more aspirins.

The barrels pushed past the U.S. foot soldiers and went after the Confederates. "Come on!" Lieutenant Lavochkin yelled. "Follow me! We don't leave them to do the work by themselves." He jumped out of his hole and loped along with the green-gray machines.

No matter what Chester thought about him, he was dead right there. Armor and infantry worked better as a team than either one did by itself. "Come on, guys!" Chester scrambled from his foxhole-he wasn't limber enough to leap the way the lieutenant did. "Let's go get those bastards!"

Some Confederates stayed stubborn to the end, took a few Yankees with them, and died. Some gave up as soon as they could. Most of those lived; killing in cold blood a poor, scared kid who only wanted to quit didn't come easy. The ones who hesitated were lost.

A youngster with a face full of zits and enormous gray eyes full of terror threw down his submachine gun and raised his hands high over his head. "Don't shoot me, Mr. Damnyankee!" he blubbered to Chester. He couldn't have been more than sixteen. "I give up!"

Chester gestured with the muzzle of his rifle. As it pointed to the young soldier's midsection, a dark stain spread across his crotch.

"Oh, Jesus!" he wailed. "I went and pissed myself!"

"It happens," Chester said. He'd done it himself in two wars now, but he wasn't going to tell that to a kid he was capturing. He gestured with the rifle again. "Go on back there, and they'll take care of you one way or another."

"Thank you! Thank you! God bless you!" Hands still high, the boy trudged off toward the rear.

And, one way or another, they would take care of him. Maybe they'd take him all the way back to a POW camp. Or maybe they'd just shoot him. Whatever they did, it wasn't Chester's worry any more.

The damned Confederates kept fighting as hard as they could. Chester captured another guy who had to be older than he was. The National Assault Force soldier had lost his upper plate, and talked as if he had a mouthful of mush. "Maybe we fought each other the lasht time around," he said.

"Could be," Chester allowed. "I was on the Roanoke front, and then in northern Virginia. How about you?"

"Nope. I wash in Tenneshshee," the Confederate retread said. "Never reckon you bashtards'd get into Shouf Carolina."

"You fuck with us, Pops, and that's what happens," Chester told him. "Go on back to the rear. They'll deal with you."

"Uh-huh," the old-timer said bleakly. Unlike the kid, he knew what could happen to him. But he went. He'd passed the first key test: he hadn't got killed out of hand. All the others would be easier. Of course, you only had to fail one and that was all she wrote.

"Come on!" Lieutenant Lavochkin shouted. "We push hard, we'll be in Charleston tomorrow! Maybe even by sundown!" Chester thought he was right, too. Try as they would, the Confederates didn't have enough to stop the men in green-gray.

All of which turned out to have nothing to do with anything. The wireless man shouted for Captain Rhodes: "Sir, we've got a stop order! Nobody's supposed to advance past map square Gold-5."

"Oh, yeah?" the company CO said. "Let me talk to Division." He talked. He listened. He talked some more. Then he did some shouting of his own: "All troops halt! I say again, all troops halt! We have to stop right here."

"No!" Lieutenant Lavochkin said. "We've got 'em licked! The brass can't screw us out of this."

"Lieutenant, the halt order comes straight from the War Department," Captain Rhodes said. "You can write 'em a nasty letter when this is all over, but for now we are damn well going to halt."

"No!" Lavochkin repeated.

"That is an order, Lieutenant." Rhodes' voice turned icy. "From the War Department and from me. Is that plain enough? Next stop, the stockade."

"They can't keep us out of Charleston!" Lavochkin raged. "The enemy hasn't got a chance! The dumbshit brass hats in Philly don't know diddly-squat. I'm going forward anyway, and taking my men with me. We'll see you in Charleston, too."

"No, sir," Chester Martin said. Lavochkin stared at him, caught between fury and astonishment. But a first sergeant was there to keep a lieutenant in line. Chester went on, "I think we better follow the order."

"You'll pay for this, Sergeant," Lavochkin said.

Chester shrugged. Slowly and deliberately, he sat down on the muddy ground and lit a cigarette. "I'll take my chances…sir." He wondered whether Lavochkin would go on by himself. The rest of the platoon was stopping. The lieutenant's face had murder all over it, but he stopped, too.

He fumed and swore for the next three hours. "God damn it to hell, I could have been in Charleston by now. We all could," he said. Chester didn't think so, but the lieutenant wasn't so far wrong. Why had the brass called a halt with the city so close?

When the fireball rose over Charleston, when the toadstool cloud-weirdly beautiful and weirdly terrifying-rose high above the town where the War of Secession started, he understood. So did Captain Rhodes. "Lieutenant, do you really want to get any closer to that place?" Rhodes asked.

"Uh, no, sir," Boris Lavochkin answered in an unwontedly small voice.

"Do you think following orders might be a good idea every once in a while, even if you don't happen to like them personally?" Captain Rhodes persisted.

"Uh, yes, sir."

"Congratulations. That is the right answer, Lieutenant. Do you realize you and whoever you dragged with you would have ended up dead if you did manage to break into Charleston?"

"Uh, yes, sir," Lavochkin said again, still more softly than usual.

"Then remember that, goddammit," Rhodes barked.

"Yes, sir," the young lieutenant said one more time. And no doubt he would…for a while. How long? Not long enough, I bet, Chester Martin thought.

P ortable wireless sets would have been a lot better if they lived up to their name. Luggable was more like it, as far as Leonard O'Doull was concerned. The damn things were too damn big and too damn heavy, and so were the batteries that powered them. Those batteries didn't last long enough, either.

Still, having a wireless set was better than not having one, especially since U.S. Wireless Atlanta went on the air. USWA had the power to punch through all the jamming the Confederates put out, and it brought the word-or the U.S. version of the word-into the heartland of the CSA: over near Birmingham, for instance.

It also gave U.S. personnel something to listen to besides Confederate Connie. Her sultry voice kept reminding O'Doull he'd been away from home too damn long. He knew she told lies every time she opened her mouth. Like hundreds of thousands of other guys, he kept listening to her anyway. She sounded like bottled sex.

When he said something like that one evening, Eddie nodded. Then the corpsman said, "She's probably sixty and fat and ugly."

"Yeah, she probably is-life works that way too goddamn often," O'Doull agreed. "But she sure sounds hot."

"She doesn't do that much for me," Sergeant Goodson Lord said.

O'Doull reached for his wrist. "Do you have a pulse, man?" Sergeant Lord jerked his arm away. Not for the first time, O'Doull wondered whether the senior medic was a fairy. How could you like women and not like Confederate Connie?

Eddie looked at his wristwatch. "Seven o'clock," he said. "Time for the news." He switched the wireless from Confederate Connie's music to USWA.

He couldn't have timed it better if he tried for a week. "Hello," said a deep voice with a distinctive U.S. accent. "I'm Eric Sevareid, and I'm here to tell you the real truth." All the men in the aid station grinned. How many times over how many years had they heard Jake Featherston open up a can of worms with that bullshit?

"Hope the Confederates listen up," Goodson Lord said. "They'd better." He might be a queer, but if he was, he was a patriotic queer. Long as he doesn't grab my ass, I can live with that, O'Doull thought, and felt proud of his own tolerance.

"Today, President La Follette again called for the surrender of the Confederate States," Sevareid said on the wireless. "In his words, 'Only by quitting the war now can the CSA hope to escape destruction of a sort the world has never seen before. Newport News and Charleston are just the beginning. We will put an end to this evil regime one way or another. Which way that will be is the only thing left for existing Confederate officials to decide.'"

"That's telling 'em!" Eddie said. He was as mild and inoffensive a little guy as ever came down the pike, but he hated the CSA. He wouldn't have had to see so much misery if not for Jake Featherston.

"Featherston's reply was, 'We aren't going to lay down for the United States, and they can't make us do it,'" Sevareid continued. "He is believed to have broadcast that reply from somewhere in North Carolina. Richmond, of course, is in U.S. hands. Featherston narrowly escaped the Newport News bomb, and U.S. forces are now pushing toward Hampton Roads. Before long, he will be a president without a country." The broadcaster's voice showed unmistakable satisfaction.

"In the European half of the war, German drives against Russia continue," Sevareid said. "The Tsar's army shows signs of disintegration, but Petrograd Wireless-now broadcasting from Moscow after the destruction of Petrograd-denies reports that the Tsar is seeking an armistice from Germany."

"If Russia bails out, England and France are done," Lord opined.

"France is about done anyway," Eddie said. "Bye-bye, gay Paree." He waved.

Half a lifetime spent in the Republic of Quebec speaking French almost all the time made O'Doull look at France differently from most Americans. It was the sun around which Quebec revolved whether they were on the same side or not. And when the heart of the sun was torn out…

"Despite the loss of Paris, France also denies any plan to leave the conflict," Eric Sevareid said. "The new King of France, Louis XIX, vows revenge against Germany. And Winston Churchill was quoted by the BBC as saying, 'We can match the Hun bomb for bomb. Let him do his worst, and we shall do our best. With God's help, it will be good enough.'"

"With him and Featherston, the bad guys have all the good talkers," Sergeant Lord said. "Doesn't seem fair."

"Churchill's a better speaker than Featherston any day," O'Doull said. "He's not such a bastard, either."

"That's what you say, Doc," Eddie put in. "Ask the Kaiser, and I bet he'd tell you different."

Since he was bound to be right-what did the Kaiser care about the CSA? — O'Doull didn't argue with him. He gave his attention to the wireless: "Japan has sent Russia an ultimatum over several Siberian provinces. If the Tsar's forces do not evacuate them, the Japanese threaten to take them by force."

"Wait a minute!" Lord said. "The Japs and the Russians are on the same side."

"They're on the same side against us," Leonard O'Doull said. "Otherwise? Forget it. The Japs already screwed England in Malaya. They've got Australia sweating bullets. They're the ones who've done the best for themselves in this war. If they'd driven us out of the Sandwich Islands, nobody could ever touch 'em."

"Won't be easy, even the way things are," Eddie said.

"They haven't used any of these new superbombs yet," O'Doull said. "I wonder how close they are to building one."

"Well, if they weren't working on 'em before, they sure as hell are now," Goodson Lord said. That was another obvious truth.

Back before the Pacific War, people in the USA would have wondered whether the Japanese were smart enough to do something like that. Not any more. The Pacific War was a push, or as close as made no difference, but Japan bombed Los Angeles while the United States never laid a glove on the home islands. This time around, the United States hadn't tried breaking through the Japs' island barricade, either. All the fighting had been on U.S. soil and in U.S. waters. The United States was too busy fighting for their life against the Confederacy to give Japan more than a fraction of their attention.

It had been quiet up at the front. Suddenly, it wasn't any more. Machine guns and automatic weapons started banging away. "It's getting dark outside!" Lord exclaimed. "What the hell do they think they're shooting at?"

"They don't care," O'Doull answered. "Somebody imagined he saw something, and as soon as one guy starts shooting they all open up."

"We better get up there," Eddie told his fellow corpsmen. They scurried out of the aid station. Before long, they'd likely be back with wounded men.

Eric Sevareid went on talking about the world and the USA. He had a good wireless voice, a voice that made you think he was your friend even though you'd never met him and never would. You wanted to believe what he said. You wanted to believe what Jake Featherston said, too, even after you knew what a liar he was. If he didn't believe it himself, he put on one hell of an act.

"Will the corpsmen be able to find us in the dark?" Goodson Lord asked.

"Don't know," O'Doull answered. "But I'll tell you something-I'm not gonna put on a light. If our own side doesn't shoot us because of it, the enemy would."

Not even fifteen minutes later, he heard the too-familiar shout of "Doc! Hey, Doc!" from somewhere off to the left.

"Hey, Eddie!" he yelled back. A battery of 105s was thundering behind the U.S. lines. Pretty soon, C.S. artillery would open up, too, or they'd start shooting off screaming meemies, and then hell really would be out to lunch.

In the meantime…"We got a sucking chest, Doc!" Eddie said.

O'Doull swore. That was a bad wound, one that would kill the soldier who had it unless everything went right-and might kill him anyway. "How are we fixed for plasma?" he asked Sergeant Lord.

"We've got enough," Lord answered.

"Good," O'Doull said. "Grab a big needle-chances are we'll want to pour it in as fast as we can."

Sweat made the corpsmen's faces shine when they brought in the wounded soldier. Heat and humidity were starting to build toward summer. O'Doull noticed only out of the corner of his eye; most of his attention focused on the corporal on the stretcher. The man had bloody foam on his lips and nostrils. Sure as hell, he'd taken one through the lung.

"Get him up on the table," O'Doull told the corpsmen. To Goodson Lord, he said, "Get him under."

"Right," Lord said. He jammed the ether cone down on the noncom's face as soon as the corpsmen put him in position. The plasma line went in next. The corporal already seemed unconscious, so O'Doull started cutting even before the anesthetic would have fully taken hold. Seconds counted here.

When he opened the guy up, he found the chest cavity full of blood. He hadn't expected anything different. He had a fat rubber tube ready to go to siphon it out of there. How bad was the wound? Did he have time to tie off the major bleeders in the lung, or would he have to do something more drastic?

He needed only a moment to decide he couldn't do anything that took a long time. His vorpal scalpel went snicker-snack and took out the bottom two lobes of the right lung. That left him with just a few vessels to tie off, and he knew where they were-he didn't have to go looking for them. You could live with a lung and a third. You could live with one lung if you had to, though you wouldn't have an easy time if you did anything strenuous for a living.

With the worst of it done, he repaired the wound in the corporal's back. "What's his BP?" he asked as he worked.

"It's 95 over 68," Goodson Lord answered, checking the cuff. "Not real great, but it's pretty steady, anyway."

"All right." O'Doull dusted the inside of the chest cavity with sulfa powder, then started closing up. He'd read in a journal that the powder probably helped less than people said it did. He used it anyhow. Why not? It wouldn't hurt.

"What do you think?" Sergeant Lord asked while he finished. He left a honking big drain in the incision. That could come out later.

"If shock doesn't get him, if he doesn't hemorrhage…" O'Doull shrugged, wishing for a cigarette. "I've done what I can. Maybe he'll make it. I can hope so, anyway." The corporal would be dead for sure if he hadn't got here. If he lived-If he lives, score one for me, O'Doull thought. That wasn't a bad feeling to have, not even a little bit.

L ieutenant Michael Pound had fought through the Battle of Pittsburgh. He'd seen what a city looked like after two armies jumped on it with both feet. Now, on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, he was seeing it again.

Confederate General Patton was holed up inside Birmingham, and he wasn't coming out. The USA had forced him out of Atlanta, but he refused to pull what was left of his army out of the Alabama factory town. He refused to surrender, too. "If you want me, come and take me," he told the U.S. officers who went in to parley with him.

"I don't want to dig the son of a bitch out a block at a time," Sergeant Mel Scullard grumbled. "Expensive goddamn real estate, y'know?"

"Yeah." Pound nodded. "Maybe we won't have to."

"How come, sir?" the gunner asked. "Can't just leave him there."

"No, but if we gave one to Newport News and we gave one to Charleston, how long will it be before we give one to Birmingham, too?" Pound said.

Scullard laughed a particularly nasty laugh. "'Bye, George!" he said, waving. "See you in hell, like you deserve!"

"That'd be pretty good, all right," Joe Mouradian agreed. "But what if they blow us up, too? We ain't that far outside of town ourselves."

"Urk." Pound hadn't thought of that. The more he did, the more it worried him. The brass would be eager to get rid of Patton. After Jake Featherston and maybe Ferdinand Koenig, he was the most dangerous character the Confederacy had. If one of those superbombs took him out but hurt or maybe killed some of their own guys, how much would the fellows back in Philadelphia care? Not a whole hell of a lot, not unless a dedicated cynic like Michael Pound missed his guess.

He stuck his head out of the cupola for a quick looksee. He wasn't sure what a superbomb could do to Birmingham that lots and lots of ordinary bombs and artillery shells hadn't already done. The place had been torn up and burned more times than anybody could count. Everything that wasn't green was gray or black, and just about all the walls he could see either listed or had chunks bitten out of them or both.

But the remnants of Patton's Army of Kentucky still lurked in the ruins. They were stubborn men with automatic weapons and stovepipe rockets. They wouldn't be winkled out easily or cheaply. Maybe a superbomb could get rid of them the way DDT got lice out of clothes.

As if to prove the Confederate States were still in business, somebody squeezed off a burst from one of their carnivorous machine guns. Pound ducked down into the barrel. He didn't want to win a Purple Heart, not this late in the game. He didn't want to buy a plot, either.

"Anything worth going after, sir?" Scullard asked.

"Not…right this minute," Pound answered. He prided himself on being an aggressive soldier. And he was still ready to go forward whenever anybody told him to. Without anything obviously urgent ahead, though, he was just as well pleased to sit tight.

This must be what the end of the war feels like, he thought. Yeah, you were still willing. But how eager were you when pushing too hard might get you killed just when things wound down?

Sitting tight didn't mean sticking his head in the sand like an ostrich. Standing up in the open cupola wasn't smart right now. All right-next best thing, then. That was looking out through the periscopes built into the cupola. He couldn't see as much with them as he could head and shoulders above there, but…

"Powaski!" he shouted to the bow gunner and wireless man. "Ten o'clock! Somebody sneaking up on us, maybe 150 yards!"

"I'm on it," Powaski answered over the intercom. The bow gun wasn't useful very often. Pound had heard talk that the next generation of barrels would dispense with it and go with a four-man crew instead of five. This once, though, it was liable to be a lifesaver.

It started to chatter now. Pound watched tracers spang off brickwork and fly every which way. The turret hummed as Scullard traversed it so he could bring the coaxial machine gun-and maybe the cannon, too-to bear.

Like any well-trained gunner, Powaski squeezed off short bursts. You didn't want to burn out your machine-gun barrel and have to change the son of a bitch. But the butternut bastard behind the bricks got the bow gunner's rhythm quicker than he had any business doing. As soon as Powaski eased off the trigger after a burst, he popped up and let fly with a stovepipe rocket.

"Aw, shit!" Pound said. It was a long shot for one of those babies. Maybe this one would fall short or fly wide left or right like a bad field goal…

Maybe it would, but it didn't. It caught the barrel right in the glacis plate. The thick armor there nearly kept the hollow-charge warhead from penetrating. Nearly mattered with everything but horseshoes and hand grenades-and, it turned out, hollow-charge warheads, too.

Powaski and Neyer both screamed. Pound didn't think either of them had a prayer of getting out. And inside a barrel, nine million different things could catch fire, especially when a white-hot gout of flame played across them.

Pound screamed himself: "Out!" Some of the things that could catch fire were his boots and his coveralls. They could, and they did. He screamed again, without words this time. Then he shot out through the cupola. He never remembered opening it, but he must have.

Next thing he knew, he was on the ground beside the burning barrel, on the ground and rolling away. Mel Scullard had got out, too. More of his clothes than of Pound's were burning.

Drop and roll and beat out the fire. That was what they taught you. Doing it while you were actually burning…Well, if you could do that, you were disciplined indeed. Michael Pound surprised himself-he was. He got some more burns on his hands putting out his boots and the legs to his coveralls, but he did it.

Easy, when it's either that or make an ash of yourself, he thought, and started to laugh. Then he realized it wasn't just his clothes-he'd been on fire, too. He howled like a wolf instead.

A foot soldier in green-gray ran up to Mel Scullard with a bucket of water and put him out. Scullard was already shrieking-yes, he'd got it worse than Pound. "Corpsman!" the soldier yelled, and then, "Hold on for a second, buddy, and I'll give you a shot."

What about me? Pound wondered. He fumbled for the wound kit on his belt. That was a brand new hell-an inferno, in fact-because his hands were burned. He managed to get out the syringe and stick himself. He wanted instant relief. Hell, he wanted a whole new carcass. Every second he had to wait seemed an eternity. Maybe this is what Einstein means about relativity.

Inside the burning barrel, ammunition started cooking off. He hoped it wouldn't keep medics back. The first team that got there carried Sergeant Scullard away. "We'll be right back for you, pal," a little bespectacled guy called to Pound. He didn't wait for an answer.

Right back turned out to be something more like fifteen minutes. By then, the morphine syrette had kicked in. It didn't make the pain disappear, but did shove it into a dark closet so Pound didn't have to give all of his attention to it. Anything was better than nothing.

Here came that same stretcher team. "Ease onto the litter, there," the little guy said-he seemed to be in charge. He looked at Pound's legs with experienced eyes. "Not too bad."

"It's never too bad when it happens to somebody else," Pound snarled, in no mood for sympathy.

The little guy blinked, then nodded. "Well, I'm not gonna tell you you're wrong." He turned to the other bearers. "On three…One…Two…Three!" Up went the stretcher.

"How come we get the heavy guy after the light one, Eddie?" a bearer grumbled.

"'Cause we're lucky, that's why," said the guy with the glasses. "Come on. Let's move."

They took Pound back to an aid station a few hundred yards behind the line. Morphine or no morphine, he yelled and swore whenever a stretcher-bearer missed a step. He felt ashamed at being such a slave to pain, which didn't mean he could do anything about it.

Red crosses flew everywhere on and around the aid-station tent, which didn't keep bullet holes from pockmarking the canvas. "Doc's still busy with your buddy," Eddie said. "Want another shot?"

"Yes, please!" Pound said, in lieu of grabbing him by the shirtfront and making him use the syrette. He hardly noticed the bite of the needle. The second shot really did send the pain off into some distant province.

He thought so, anyway, till they picked him up again and lugged him inside. That hurt in spite of all the morphine. "How's Mel?" he asked the doctor, who was scrubbing his hands in an enameled metal basin.

"He's the other burned man?" The doctor had a funny accent, half New England, half almost French-sounding. He waited for Pound to nod, then said, "I think he'll make it. He won't be happy for a while, though." He turned to Eddie. "Get this one up on the table, and we'll see how happy he'll be."

"Right, Doc," Eddie said.

Somebody-a medic, Pound supposed-stuck an ether cone over his face. The gas didn't just smell bad; it smelled poisonous. Even as consciousness faded, he tried to tear off the cone. They wouldn't let him.

When he woke up, his legs hurt so bad, he wasn't sure he'd really been anesthetized. But he lay in a bed somewhere that wasn't the aid station. His groan brought a real, live female nurse. She wasn't beautiful or anything, but she was the first woman from the USA Pound had seen in a devil of a long time. "In pain?" she asked briskly.

"Yes," he said, thinking, What the hell do you expect?

Even though she'd asked a dumb question, she had the right answer: "I'll give you a shot." As she injected him, she went on, "The tannic-acid dressings do hurt, I know, but you'll heal much better because of them. Your burns won't weep so much, and you're less likely to get infected."

"Oh, boy," Pound said. Everything else seemed secondary to the way he felt. He tried to look around, but his eyes weren't tracking real well yet. "Is Mel Scullard here?" he asked, adding, "He's my gunner."

"Yes, he's three beds down," the nurse said. "He hasn't regained consciousness yet."

Poor Mel. He did get it worse than I did, Pound thought. Then the morphine started to kick in. It struck faster now than it had right after he got burned. Maybe that meant he wasn't fighting so much pain. He could hope so, anyhow. "Ahh," he said.

"We have to be careful with this stuff," the nurse told him. "We don't want you getting hooked."

Right then, Pound couldn't have cared less if he had to stick a needle in his arm every hour on the hour for the rest of his life. If it made him stop hurting, that struck him as a good deal. Down underneath, there wasn't much difference between people and animals. War brought that out all kinds of ways. Pound wished like anything he hadn't found out about this one at firsthand.

T he officers' POW camp to which the Yankees took Jerry Dover was somewhere not far from Indianapolis. The train trip that brought him there wasn't much fun, but it was instructive just the same. Confederate wireless went on and on about all the sabotage that raiders behind U.S. lines were still perpetrating in Georgia and Tennessee and Kentucky.

Well, maybe they were. Even so, the train didn't have to stop once. It didn't even have to slow down. As far as Dover could tell, it didn't make any detours. Yes, bridges and overpasses were guarded. Yes, concrete blockhouses with machine guns sticking out of them protected some stretches of track. But trains seemed to get wherever they needed to go, and to get there on time.

Jerry Dover's train also had no trouble crossing the Ohio. All the bridges across what had been the C.S.-U.S. border should have been prime targets. They probably were. If this one, near Evansville, had ever been hit, it had also been efficiently repaired.

Evansville itself had been bombed. But it hadn't been flattened, the way so many Confederate cities were. It lay in the western part of Indiana, well away from the early thrust north that almost won the war for the CSA.

"They should have done a better job here," complained the artillery captain sitting next to Dover.

"It's a big country," Dover said. "They couldn't get all of it."

"Well, they should have," the younger man repeated glumly.

He wasn't wrong. But if the United States turned out to be too big to let the Confederacy smash them all up, didn't that go a long way toward explaining why the war was going as it was? It sure looked that way to Dover.

Actually reaching the camp also told Dover his country was fighting out of its weight. He knew how the CSA housed prisoners of war. The Confederacy's camps were no sturdier than they had to be, because his country had nothing to spare. They probably didn't break Geneva Convention rules-you didn't want to give the enemy an excuse to take it out on POWs from your side-but he would have been amazed if they didn't bend them.

Camp Liberty! (with the exclamation point-a sardonic name if ever there was one) wasn't like that. Dover wouldn't have wanted to assault it with anything less than an armored brigade. It didn't just have a barbed-wire perimeter: it had a wall and a moat, with barbed wire on top of the wall and outside the machine-gun towers beyond the water. You got in there, you weren't going anywhere.

Inside, the buildings were as solid as if they were meant to last a hundred years. Yes, Indiana had harder winters than Georgia, but even so… The lumber and the brickwork and the labor the United Statescould afford to lavish on a place like this were daunting.

If the military clerk who signed him in were twenty-two years old and fit, Jerry Dover really would have been alarmed. But the man had to be at least sixty-five, with a white Kaiser Bill mustache the likes of which Dover hadn't seen since he quit fighting the damnyankees in 1917. Didn't this guy know they were as out of fashion as bustles? Evidently not; he seemed proud of his.

"You're in Barracks Twelve, and you'll sleep on cot seventeen," the clerk declared in harsh Midwestern tones. "Numbers are large. I don't think you can miss 'em."

After that, Dover felt he ought to get lost on general principles. He couldn't, though, because the Yankee was right. Directional signs told you just where everything was. Barracks 12 was a brick building with a poured-concrete floor. Starting a tunnel and keeping it hidden would be a bitch, or more likely impossible.

Two stout coal-burning stoves sat there to heat the hall in winter. A wireless set was playing an insipid Yankee tune when Dover walked in. The Confederates punished POWs for clandestine wirelesses. U.S. authorities equipped the halls with them. That was daunting, too.

A colonel in his late thirties ambled up to Dover. "Howdy. I'm Kirby Smith Telford," he said, Texas in his voice and in his name. "I'm the senior officer hereabouts. They caught me outside of Chattanooga late in '43."

Jerry Dover introduced himself. "They shot up my command car and got me in front of Huntsville," he said. "I was up near Chattanooga, too. Had to clear out my supply dump quick as I could when the damnyankees' paratroops came down."

"Yeah, that screwed everything up, all right." Telford watched him with a blue-eyed directness that looked friendly but, Dover realized, wasn't. "You sound like you've been around. I reckon somebody in here'll be able to vouch for you."

"Vouch for me?" Dover echoed. "I'm a POW, for crying out loud. What the hell else am I gonna be?"

He didn't think the colonel would have an answer for him, but Kirby Smith Telford did: "Maybe a Yankee plant. They try it every now and then, see what they can find out about us. Pretty soon you'll find out who you can talk in front of and who you've got to watch yourself with. I don't mean any offense, Colonel-don't get me wrong-but right now I don't know you from Adam, so I'll be careful what I say around you."

"However you please. I don't mean any offense, either, but right now I don't know how much difference it's gonna make," Dover said.

Telford's face clouded. "That's defeatist talk," he said stiffly.

"I've got news for you, Colonel. The damnyankees didn't capture me outside of Huntsville because we're winning."

The senior officer turned away from him without another word. Dover contemplated winning friends. He'd just lost one. Even if somebody did vouch for him now, Telford wouldn't want much to do with him. Well, too goddamn bad, Dover thought. If he doesn't like the truth, he can read a novel.

He found cot 17. It was a better bed than the one he'd had in his own tent. It had a footlocker underneath. Dover didn't have much to stick in there, not after the soldiers who caught him relieved him of his chattels personal. They hadn't shot him, and they could have. Next to that, robbery was a detail.

He stretched out on the cot. He'd been sitting up ever since he got on the train somewhere near the Alabama-Georgia border. Two minutes later, he was snoring.

What might have been the voice of God-if God talked like a Yankee-blasted him awake: "Supper call! Supper call!" The camp had a PA system! He was sure the Confederates had never thought of that.

Supper wasn't fancy, but it wasn't bad: fried chicken, green beans (overcooked, of course-the ex-restaurateur did notice that), and French fries. You could take seconds. The apple pie for dessert was actually pretty good. Dover turned to the captain sitting next to him and said, "Hell of a note when the enemy feeds us better than our own side did."

"Yeah." The younger officer-except for some other obvious retreads, all the men in here were younger than Dover-looked surprised. "Hadn't thought about it like that, but you're right."

If I am, what does it mean? Dover didn't like any of the answers that occurred to him. The most obvious one was the one that was probably true. The United States were enough richer than the Confederacy that they didn't have to worry about pennies and dimes. They could afford to do little things like build sturdy POW camps and give enemy soldiers decent rations. The CSA couldn't. The Confederates had enough trouble taking care of their own men.

Nothing to do after supper but troop back to the barracks hall. A couple of card games got started. Two officers bent over a chess set. By the way they shot pieces back and forth as the game opened, they'd already played each other a great many times.

Dover played a fair game of checkers, but chess had never interested him. He figured he'd play poker or bridge one of these days, but he didn't feel like it now. He went up to Kirby Smith Telford, who was reading a news magazine and shaking his head every now and then. "Can I get some paper and a pencil?" Dover asked. "I'd like to let my family know I'm in one piece."

"They'll have a Red Cross wire by now," Telford said, which was likely true, but he handed Dover a sheet of cheap stationery imprinted CAMP LIBERTY! an envelope, and a pencil. "Don't seal it when you're done," he warned. "Censors look over everything you write."

"I reckoned they would," Dover said. After more than ten years of Freedom Party rule in the CSA, he took censorship for granted. No reason the damnyankees wouldn't have it, too. "Thanks," he added, and went back to his own cot.

As he went, he felt Colonel Telford's eyes boring into his back. Did the other officer think he hadn't been respectful enough? Did they worry about that crap here? If they did, why, for God's sake? What difference did it make now? As for Dover, he'd cussed out generals. He was damned if he'd get all hot and bothered about somebody whose three stars didn't even have a wreath around them.

He wished he could have grabbed some table space. Writing at the cot was awkward, but he managed. Dear Sally, he wrote, I bet you will have heard by now that I'm a POW. I'm up here in the USA, in Indiana. I'm not hurt. They're treating me all right. I love you and the kids. I'll see you when the war is over, I guess. XOXOXOX-Jerry.

He looked at the letter. After a shrug, he nodded. It said everything he needed to say. He couldn't see anything the censor would flabble about. He folded the paper, put it in the envelope, and wrote his home address on the outside. No matter what Telford had said, he started to lick the glue on the flap, but caught himself in time. I'm a creature of habit, all right, he thought.

Somebody turned on the wireless. Women sang about war bonds in yapping Yankee accents. They wouldn't have made Dover want to buy. When the advertisement ended, an announcer said, "And now the news."

None of the news was good, not if you were a Confederate POW. Dover assumed U.S. broadcasts bent things the same way his side did. But you could bend them only so far before you started looking ridiculous. When the newsman said Birmingham was surrounded, it probably was. When he said U.S. soldiers had freed more starving political prisoners from rocket factories on the outskirts of Huntsville, they probably had. Using politicals for work like that sounded like something the Freedom Party would do. So did starving them.

And when the fellow said the Tsar was asking the Kaiser for an armistice, how could you doubt him? After Petrograd went up in smoke, Russia had hung on longer than Jerry Dover thought it could. But all good things came to an end. England and France would be in even more trouble now that Germany didn't have to fight on two fronts.

Two Confederate cities had already gone up in smoke. So had a big part of Philadelphia. The war on this side of the Atlantic sounded like a game of last man standing. Who could make superbombs faster? Who could get them where they needed to go? How long could the poor bastards on the other side stand getting pulverized?

Odds were the United States could make bombs faster. They made everything else faster. Odds were the USA could deliver the goods, too. How long could even Jake Featherston stay stubborn when death rained down on his country from the skies?

Camp Liberty! Dover winced. Odds were he'd get his liberty back when his country finished losing the war.