In At the Death

XI

J onathan Moss savored the feeling of being at a forward air base again. He was a little southwest of Atlanta-not too far from where he'd pounded the ground with Gracchus' guerrillas. Comparing what he could do now with what he'd done then was funny, in a macabre way. The new turbo fighter could take him as far in an hour as he could march in a month.

Every time he flew off towards Alabama, he hoped to pay the Confederates back for all the time away from his specialty they'd cost him. The pilot who'd shot him down might have killed him instead. So might the soldiers who'd taken him prisoner. He didn't dwell on that. Resenting them for turning him into a guerrilla helped keep and hone his fighting edge.

His biggest trouble these days was finding someone to fight. The Confederates didn't-couldn't-put up many fighters any more. He had a pretty good notion of what his Screaming Eagle could do, but he wanted to put it through its paces against the best opposition the enemy could throw at it.

If the turbo wasn't going after the latest souped-up Hound Dogs or Razorbacks or Mules, it didn't have much point. It carried enough firepower to make a fair ground-attack aircraft, but only a fair one: it went so fast and covered so much ground, it couldn't linger and really work over a target. It had bomb racks, but using it as a fighter-bomber struck Moss as the equivalent of using a thoroughbred to pull a brewery wagon. Sure, you could do it, but other critters were better suited to the job.

And so he wished the United States had come up with it a year and a half earlier. It would have swept Confederate aircraft from the skies. As things worked out, enemy airplanes were few and far between anyhow, but getting them that way had taken a lot longer and cost a lot more.

His pulse quickened when he spotted a pair of Hound Dogs well below him. The newest Confederate aircraft got a performance boost by squirting wood alcohol into the fuel mix. They were a match for any U.S. piston-engined fighter. They weren't a match for a turbo-not even close.

He gave the fighter more throttle and pushed the stick forward. As he dove, he wondered what kind of pilots sat in those cockpits. These days, the Confederates had two types left: kids just out of flight school who might be good once they got some experience but didn't have it yet, and veterans who'd lived through everything the USA could throw at them and who'd be dangerous flying a two-decker left over from the last war.

The way these guys stuck together, leader and wingman, told him right away that they'd been through the mill. So did the speed with which they spotted him. And so did the tight turns into which they threw their aircraft. The one thing a turbo couldn't do was dogfight a Hound Dog. You'd get in trouble if you tried. They'd turn inside you and get on your tail in nothing flat.

Even if they did, they wouldn't stay there long. In a turbo, you could run away from anything in the world except another turbo.

Moss climbed again for a new pass. The Hound Dogs dove for the deck. He followed them down, smiling when his airspeed indicator climbed over 500. No piston job could touch that, not even diving for all it was worth.

They knew he was after them, all right. They stuck together all the same. Yes, they'd been flying together awhile, or more than awhile. He had to guess which way they'd break when he got close. He chose right, and that was right. They started to turn so they could shoot back at him, but his thumb had already come down on the firing button atop the stick.

When the cannon boomed, pieces flew from the C.S. wingman's Hound Dog. The pilot struggled for control and lost. The fighter spun toward the ground. The pilot wouldn't have an easy time bailing out.

Meanwhile, though, the leader was shooting at Moss. Well, he was trying to: your sights wouldn't let you lead a turbo airplane. It just flew too fast. The leader's tracers went behind the turbo as it zipped past him.

Swinging through as tight a turn as he could make, Moss came back at the C.S. fighter. The Hound Dog didn't want any more of him. Its pilot wanted nothing more than to escape. And he did, too, getting down to treetop height and dodging and jinking in a way Moss couldn't hope to match.

"All right, buddy-I'll see you some other time." Inside his cockpit, Moss sketched a salute. That was a good flyer over there on the other side. Yeah, he was a Confederate son of a bitch, but he made one hell of a pilot.

Time to break off, then. When Moss pulled back on the stick, the turbo seemed to climb hand over hand. No prop job could come close to matching that performance. You had to trade speed for height, but the turbo had so much speed that it sacrificed much less than a Hound Dog or similar U.S. fighter. If Moss could have seen this in 1914…

He'd flown a two-decker pusher when the Great War broke out. That was the only way anyone had figured out to get a machine gun firing straight ahead. No interrupter gear to fire through the spinning prop, not yet. Moss laughed. That technology was turning obsolete right before his eyes.

He hadn't had a wireless in his pusher, either. He hadn't had an enclosed cockpit, let alone oxygen. He hadn't worn a parachute. If he went down, he was a dead duck. And, with an airplane made of wood and canvas and glue and wire, with an engine almost aggressively unreliable, plenty of those early airplanes did go down, even with no enemies within miles.

He laughed once more. Now he sat behind sheet metal and bulletproof glass in an armored seat. He could fly more than twice as high as that pusher could have gone. But he still flew, or flew again, with aggressively unreliable engines. Maybe he could bail out now if they went south on him. On the other hand, maybe he couldn't.

Finding the airstrip from which he'd taken off was another adventure. Just any old field wouldn't do. The turbo had a high takeoff and landing speed. It needed a lot of runway. One that was fine for prop jobs likely wouldn't let him land.

Instead of the base, he spotted another airplane: a Confederate Grasshopper buzzing along over U.S. territory to see what it could see. Grasshoppers were marvelous little machines. They could hover in a strong headwind and land or take off in next to nothing. For artillery spotting or taking out casualties or sneaking in spies or saboteurs, they couldn't be beat. Moss knew that several captured specimens were wearing the U.S. eagle over crossed swords instead of the Confederate battle flag.

The guy in this one saw him coming before he got close enough to fire. It scooted out of the way with a turn no honest fighter could match. Try to shoot down a Grasshopper whose pilot knew you were there and you'd end up talking to yourself. It was like trying to kill a butterfly with an axe.

More for the hell of it than any other reason, Moss made another pass. With effortless ease, the Grasshopper evaded him again. He didn't even bother opening fire. And the observer in the back of the light airplane's cockpit squeezed off a burst at him with his pintle-mounted machine gun. None of the tracers came close, but the defiant nose-thumbing-it couldn't be anything else-tickled Moss' funny bone. He would have had a better chance against the Grasshopper in his 1914 Curtiss pusher than he did in a Screaming Eagle.

He made it back to the airfield and eased the turbo down to the ground. You had to land gently. The nosewheel was less sturdy than it should have been; sometimes it would break off if you came down on it too hard. The first couple of pilots who'd discovered that would never learn anything else now.

"How'd it go?" a groundcrew man asked as Moss climbed down from the cockpit.

"Nailed a Hound Dog," he answered. The groundcrew techs cheered. Somebody pounded him on the back. He went on, "His buddy dove for the deck and got away-bastard was good. And I made a couple of runs at a Grasshopper, but ffft!" He squeezed his thumb and forefinger together, miming a watermelon seed squirting out between them.

"Take an even strain, Colonel," a groundcrew man said. "Those suckers'll drive you bugshit." The others also made sympathetic noises.

"How'd she perform?" another tech asked.

"Everything went fine this time around." Moss banged a fist off the side of his head in lieu of knocking wood. "Engines sounded good, gauges looked good all the way through, guns behaved themselves, nosewheel wasn't naughty." He turned to eye it. There it was, all right, looking as innocent as if its kind never, ever misbehaved. No matter how innocent it looked, he knew better.

Leaving the Screaming Eagle to the men who fed and watered it, he walked over to the headquarters tent to report more formally. His flight suit kept him warm up over thirty thousand feet. Here in the muggy warmth of Georgia spring, he felt as if it were steaming him.

Colonel Roy Wyden ran the turbo squadron. He was a boy wonder, just past thirty, with the ribbons for a Distinguished Service Cross and a Bronze Star among the fruit salad on his chest. When Moss told him he'd knocked down a C.S. fighter, Wyden reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle and two glasses. He poured a couple of knocks of good Tennessee sipping whiskey-spoil of war-and said, "Way to go."

"Thank you, sir." Moss tasted the drink and added, "Thank you, sir." Wyden grinned at him-and seemed even younger. Moss went on, "I went after a Grasshopper, too, but he got away a lot easier than the Hound Dog's buddy."

"Those goddamn things. There ought to be a bounty on 'em," Wyden said. "A Screaming Eagle isn't exactly the weapon of choice against them, either."

"Tell me about it!" Moss exclaimed. "He fired at me. I never laid a glove on him. He's back there somewhere laughing his ass off."

"They'll drive you to drink, all right." As if to prove it, Wyden sipped from his own whiskey. He glanced over to Moss. "Does that Hound Dog make you an ace in both wars?"

"No, sir. I made it the first time, but I've only got three this round," Moss said. "I spent too damn long on the shelf in Andersonville and then running around with the black guerrillas."

"You ought to get some credit for that. It's not like you didn't hurt the Confederates while you were doing it."

"The war on the ground's an ugly business." Some of the memories that surfaced in Moss' mind made him finish his drink in a hurry. "Our war with the CSA is ugly. The one the Negroes are fighting…No quarter on either side there. And what Featherston's fuckers would have done to me for fighting on the Negroes' side-"

"Better not to think about that," Wyden broke in.

"Yeah. I know. Just staying alive took luck. If the Confederates hadn't had all of their regulars fighting the USA, they would've hunted us down pretty damn quick. Jake should've started in on his blacks sooner, or else left them alone till after the war. Trying to get rid of them at the same time as he was fighting us only screwed him up."

"He figured he'd whip us quick and then take care of the smokes." Wyden got outside the last of his drink. "Tough shit, Eliot."

For some reason, Moss thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He started giggling. Nobody in the guerrilla band, not even Nick Cantarella, would have made that kind of joke. Moss hadn't known how much he missed it till he heard it again.

W hen George Enos saw land off the Oregon's port bow, he realized how much the war had changed. That was the coast of North Carolina out there. Even six months earlier, coming so close would have been asking to get blown to pieces. Now some of the big wheels back in Philadelphia thought the Navy could get away with it.

George hoped like hell they were right.

Two battleships, two heavy cruisers, two escort carriers to give them air cover, the usual destroyers and supply ships that accompanied a flotilla: now they were paying a call on the Confederate States. The gamble was that the Confederates couldn't pay a return call on them.

"Listen up, guys," said Wally Fodor, the chief in charge of George's antiaircraft guns. "We can put a hell of a lot of shells in the air. No goddamn Asskicker's gonna make a monkey out of us, right?"

"Right!" the gun crew shouted. George didn't know about the other guys, but he was as pumped up as he would have been if he were playing in a big football game. That was for glory and for cash, though. He was playing for his neck here.

Dive bombers roared off the baby flattops' decks. They would send a message to a state that had mostly been shielded from the war ever since it started. U.S. fighters circled overhead. Any Confederate airplanes that tried to visit the flotilla would get a warm reception.

Smoothly, almost silently, the Oregon's forward pair of triple turrets swung so the big guns bore to port. The barrels elevated a few degrees. "Brace yourselves!" Fodor yelled. He covered his ears with his hands and opened his mouth wide to help equalize the pressure inside his head.

In the nick of time, George did the same. The guns thundered, right over his head. He staggered-he couldn't help it. He felt as if somebody'd dropped a boulder on his noggin. In spite of his precautions, his ears wanted to move to a far country where things like this didn't happen. "Wow!" he said.

Shore had to be twenty miles away, maybe more. Some little while went by before the distant roar of bursting fourteen-inch shells came back to George's abused ears. He was amazed he heard them-or anything else.

"Good morning, Morehead City!" Wally Fodor whooped.

George imagined people going about their business, probably not even suspecting anything was wrong, when all of a sudden-wham! Fourteen hundred pounds of steel and high explosive coming down on your head could ruin your whole day.

The guns bellowed again. When George reached for his ears this time, it was to see if they were bleeding. They didn't seem to be. He couldn't imagine why not. The other battleship-she was the Maine-was firing, too. Those detonations were just loud. Or maybe his ears were so stunned that nothing this side of cataclysmic really registered.

"Well, if they didn't know we were in the neighborhood before, they damn well do now," Tom Thomas said. People mostly called the shell-jerker Ditto; George wondered what the devil his parents were thinking of.

More booms said the latest shells were striking home-or maybe those were bombs from the carriers' airplanes. Smoke began to rise from the shore. The cruisers from the flotilla had to get closer to land than the battlewagons before opening up. Their eight-inch main armament didn't have the range of the bigger ships' heavier guns. Before long, they started firing, too.

"This is so neat!" Ditto said. "Ever think we could get away with shore bombardment?"

"We ain't got away with it yet," Fodor answered. George Enos was thinking the same thing. But he was the new kid on the block, so he kept his mouth shut. The gun chief went on, "When we steam out of aircraft range, then I'll be happy. And even after that there's fuckin' subs."

The main armament fired again. Fired was the word, too. The gouts of flame that shot from the muzzles were almost as long as the gun barrels. If God needed to light a cigar, this was where He'd do it.

Up above the bridge, the Y-ranging antenna spun round and round, round and round. It would spot enemy airplanes on the way in, anyway. How much good that would do…Well, knowing the bastards were coming was better than not knowing they were.

Inshore from the Oregon, not far from the cruisers, a tall column of water suddenly sprang into being. A moment later, another one appeared, even closer to the U.S. warships.

"What the hell?" somebody said. "Those aren't bombs-we woulda got the word the bombers were loose."

"They must have shore guns," Wally Fodor said. "Soon as we spot the flashes, they're history. And they'll have a bitch of a time hitting us. We can move, but they're stuck where they're at."

A few more rounds fell near the cruisers. Then, as abruptly as they'd begun, they stopped. Either the Confederates had given up or U.S. gunfire put their cannon out of action. George neither knew nor cared what the right answer was. As long as those guns kept quiet, that suited him fine.

Then the PA system came to life with a crackle of static: "Now hear this! Now hear this! Enemy aircraft approaching from the north! Expect company in five or ten minutes!"

George's stomach knotted. Here we go again, he thought. He'd had a ship sunk under him; he knew disasters could happen. He didn't want to remember that, but he didn't see how he could help it, either.

"Just like a drill," Chief Fodor said. "They haven't got us yet, and we aren't about to let 'em start. Right?"

"Right!" the gun crew shouted again. George was as loud as anybody. How loud he yelled made no difference in the bigger scheme of things, but it wasn't bad if it helped him feel a little better.

Some of the fighters that had been circling over the ships zipped away to see if they could meet up with the intruders before the C.S. airplanes got the chance to intrude. Others held their stations. If the enemy bombers got past the first wave of fighters, they still wouldn't have a free run at the flotilla.

"You've been through this before, right?" Fodor asked George. "I mean for real, not just for practice."

"Sure, Chief," George answered. "I've got it from the Japs and Featherston's fuckers and the limeys. I don't like it, but I can do it."

"That's all you need," the gun chief said. "I thought I remembered you lost your cherry, but I wanted to make sure."

Airplane engines scribed contrails across the sky. Their wakes, George thought. But the comparison with ships misled. It wasn't just that airplanes were so much faster. They also moved in three dimensions, not just two like surface ships.

A destroyer's antiaircraft guns started going off. So did the heavy cruisers'. Then George saw a couple of gull-winged ships that looked only too horribly familiar. "Asskickers!" he yelled, and his wasn't the only cry that rose.

One of the slow, ungainly Confederate dive bombers went down trailing smoke a moment after he shouted. It splashed into the Atlantic a mile or so from the Oregon, and kicked up more water than the shells the coastal guns had fired.

The other C.S. Mule bored in on the battleship. The Oregon heeled in as tight a turn as she could make, but she was large and cumbersome and much less nimble than, say, the Josephus Daniels would have been. That made her action less evasive than George wished it were.

He didn't have much time to worry about it. "Commence firing!" Wally Fodor shouted. The shell-jerkers started passing George ammo. He fed the twin 40mms' breeches like a man possessed. Casings leaped from the guns and clattered on the deck. Bursts-puffs of black smoke-appeared all around the attacking airplane.

But it kept coming. The bomb under its belly dropped. The Asskicker zoomed past, hardly higher than the tops of the battleship's masts. The bomb burst on the ocean, less than fifty yards from the Oregon.

Water hit George like a fist in the face. Next thing he knew, he was flat on his back, partly on the deck, partly on Ditto Thomas, who'd stood right behind him. "Get-glub! — offa me, goddammit!" Thomas spluttered, spitting out what looked like about half of the ocean.

"Yeah." George scrambled to his feet and gave Ditto a hand to haul him up, too. Ditto rubbed at his eyes. George's also stung from seawater. The other men from the gun crew were picking themselves up. Wally Fodor had a cut on his ear that bloodied the shoulder of his tunic. Could you get a Purple Heart for something like that? George wouldn't lose any sleep over it, and he didn't think Wally would, either.

At that, the number three mount got off lucky. Guys were down at the next 40mm mount, too, only they weren't getting up again. A fragment of bomb casing had taken off one sailor's head like a guillotine blade. Another man was gutted as neatly as a fat cod on a fishing trawler. But cod didn't scream and try to put themselves back together. And you couldn't gaff a sailor and put him on ice in the hold, though it might have been a mercy.

Stretcher-bearers carried him below. The Oregon boasted not one but two real doctors, not just a pharmacist's mate like the Josephus Daniels. Could they do anything for a guy with his insides torn out? Doctors were getting smarter all the time, and the fancy new drugs meant fever didn't always kill you. Even so…

George didn't get the chance to brood about it. "Come on!" Fodor yelled. Did the CPO even know he was wounded? "Back to the gun! We may get another shot at the sonsabitches!"

Suddenly, though, the sky seemed bare of Confederate aircraft. One limped off toward the north, toward land, trailing smoke as it went. The rest-weren't there any more. A rubber raft bobbed on the surface of the Atlantic: somebody'd got out of one of them, anyhow.

The Oregon's main armament boomed out another thunderous broadside. Half a minute later, the Maine also sent a dozen enormous shells landward. The air attack had made them miss a beat, but no more.

"Jesus!" George said, his ears ringing. "Is that the best those sorry suckers can do?"

"Sure looks like it." Chief Fodor sounded surprised, too. He noticed the blood on his shoulder, and did a professional-quality double take. "What the fuck happened here?"

"Maybe a splinter nicked you, or maybe you got hurt when the water knocked you down," George answered.

"I be damned," Fodor said. "I always heard about guys getting hurt without even knowing it, but I figured it was bullshit. Then it goes and happens to me. I be damned."

A U.S. destroyer steamed toward the downed Confederate flier. Somebody on the destroyer's deck threw the man a line. He didn't climb it. After a minute or so, a sailor went down into the raft with him and rigged a sling. The men on deck hauled the Confederate up-he must have been wounded. He was probably lucky not to be strawberry jam. Then they lowered the line to their buddy. Up he swarmed, agile as a monkey.

The big guns on both battlewagons bellowed again. If that was all the Confederates could do to stop them…If that was all, the Confederacy really was coming apart at the seams.

P aperwork. Jefferson Pinkard hated paperwork. He'd never got used to it. He didn't like being a paper-shuffler and a pen-pusher. He could manage it, but he didn't like it. Working in a steel mill for all those years left him with the driving urge to go out there and do things, dammit.

To soothe himself, he kept the wireless going. If he listened with half an ear to one of the Houston stations playing music, he didn't have to pay so much attention to all the nitpicking detail Richmond wanted from him. Muttering, he shook his head. No, not Richmond. Richmond was gone, lost, captured. Jake Featherston and what was left of the Confederate government were somewhere down in North Carolina now, still screaming defiance at the damnyankees and at the world.

Camp Humble went right on reducing population. Trains still rolled in from Louisiana and Mississippi and Arkansas and east Texas. Ships brought Negroes from Cuba to the Texas ports. He aimed to go right on doing his job till somebody set over him told him to stop.

Without warning, the song he was listening to broke off. An announcer came on the air: "We interrupt this program for a special proclamation from the Governor of the great state of Texas, the Honorable Wright Patman. Governor Patman!"

"What the-?" Jeff said. Something had hit the fan, that was for damn sure.

"Citizens of Texas!" Governor Patman said. "A hundred years ago, this state was an independent republic, owing allegiance to no nation but itself. We joined first the USA and then the CSA, but we have never forgotten our own proud tradition of…freedom." That was the Party slogan, yeah, but he didn't use it the way a good Party man would.

Jeff muttered, "Uh-oh." No, he didn't like the way Patman used it at all.

Sure as the devil, the Governor of Texas went on, "The Confederate government has brought us nothing but ruin and a losing war. The United States have already stolen part of our territory and revived the so-called state of Houston that blighted the map after the last war. They have killed our soldiers, bombed our cities, and ruined our trade. The Confederate government is powerless to stop them or even slow them down."

"Uh-oh," Pinkard said, and then, for good measure, "Aw, shit."

"Since the Confederate government cannot protect us, it is no longer a fit government for the great people of Texas," Governor Patman said. "Accordingly, by my order, the state of Texas is from this day forward no longer part of the so-called Confederate States of America. I hereby restore the Republic of Texas as a free and independent nation, on an equal footing with the Confederate States, the United States, the Empire of Mexico, and all the other free and independent nations of the world.

"As my first act as provisional President of the Republic of Texas, I have asked the government of the United States for an armistice. They have recognized my administration-"

"Jesus! I fuckin' bet they have!" Jeff exclaimed. What a mess! And he was, literally, in the middle of it.

"— and agreed to a cease-fire. All Texas soldiers are ordered to no longer obey the so-called Confederate authorities. All other Confederate troops within the borders of the Republic of Texas may hold in place and be disarmed by Texas authorities, or may withdraw to territory still under the rule of the so-called Confederate States. The United States have agreed that the forces of the Republic of Texas are not obliged to hinder this retreat, nor will we-so long as it remains peaceful and orderly. U.S. forces reserve the right to attack retreating C.S. forces, however, and neither will we interfere with them on the ground, in the air, or at sea.

"At this point in time, that is all. As peace returns at last after the madness of the Featherston administration, I call on God Almighty to bless the great Lone Star Republic of Texas. Thank you, and good afternoon."

"That was Governor-uh, excuse me, President-Wright Patman of the, uh, Republic of Texas." The wireless announcer sounded as flummoxed as everybody else had to be. He went on, "President Patman has brought peace to Texas, and what could be a more precious gift?"

"He's bugged out on the war, that's what he's done, the goddamn traitor son of a bitch!" Jeff Pinkard shouted, as if Patman and the announcer were there to hear him.

He remembered what Mayor Doggett had told him to do if the damnyankees got close: take his family and get the hell out in a civilian auto and civilian clothes. The advice looked a lot better now than it had then. But Raymond was tiny, and Edith still wasn't over birthing him, and…

The telephone rang. If that was Edith, and she'd listened to the wireless…"Pinkard here."

It wasn't Edith. It was Vern Green, and he'd listened to the wireless. "Fuck a duck!" the guard chief cried. "What the hell are we gonna do, sir? Can we get outa here? The damnyankees'll crucify us if they catch us."

"They're still way the hell over on the other side of the state," Jeff said uneasily.

"All the better reason to get out now, while we still can," Green said. "That asshole Patman, he's surrendering to them, near as makes no difference. There'll be U.S. soldiers all over Texas fast as they can move."

Part of Jeff said Vern Green was flabbling over nothing. There wouldn't be U.S. soldiers all over Texas no matter what-the state was too damn big for that. But there might be U.S. soldiers here at Camp Humble in the next day or two. The Yankees wanted this place closed down, and they wanted that bad.

He'd never dreamt he would have to worry about something like this. "Anybody who wants to disappear, I won't say boo," he said slowly. "Do what you think you gotta, that's all. Hell, you may be right."

"Much obliged, sir," Green said, and hung up. Jeff knew what that meant: he planned on bailing out.

How much did what he planned matter? A guard knocked on Jeff 's door. When the camp commandant let him in, the man said, "Sir, there's a Texas Ranger captain named Hezekiah Carroll out there, and he wants to see you."

Pinkard didn't want to see the biblically named Texas Ranger. What choice did he have, though? "All right," he growled. "Bring him on in."

Carroll was tall and weathered and tough-looking. But if he was as tough as he looked, why wasn't he in the Army? Before Jeff could ask him, he said, "You will have heard of the reestablishment of the Republic of Texas?"

"Yeah, I've heard of it. Getting out while the getting's good, are you?" Jeff said.

"Yes," Carroll answered baldly. "You will also have heard that Confederate troops may evacuate?"

"I heard that, too, all right," Jeff allowed. "What about it?"

"It doesn't mean you. That's part of the deal Governor-uh, President-Patman cut with the Yankees," Carroll said. "They say Confederate combat soldiers are welcome to leave. But you people-they want y'all. Crimes against humanity, they call it."

"Oh, my ass!" Pinkard exploded. "You gonna tell me you're sorry we're taking care of our nigger troubles? Yeah, sure-go ahead. Make me believe it."

Captain Carroll turned red. All the same, he said, "What I think hasn't got diddly-squat to do with it. I know damn well this is the best deal Texas can get. If you and your people try to evacuate this camp, we will stop you, and that's the God's truth."

"Christ! I never thought my own side would fuck me!" Jeff tried to figure out what to do. With all the machine guns in the guard towers, he could hold off the Rangers, or anybody else who didn't have artillery, for a long time. But what good did that do him when he needed to get the hell out of here?

None. Zero. Zip.

Maybe he could mount machine guns in some of the camp trucks and shoot his way past the Rangers. Yeah, it might work once, but it was more than a hundred miles from Humble to the Louisiana border. Could he win a running fight? Not a chance in church, and he knew it.

"I am a citizen of the Republic of Texas, and my country has an armistice with the USA," Carroll said. "I have to abide by the terms of the armistice, and I will. I'm only following orders, same as you were doing here. But the country that gave you orders is going down the crapper, and mine's just getting started."

Only following orders. That was the main defense Pinkard had if he ever did get in trouble for what the camps did. It sounded pretty goddamn hollow when somebody else threw it in his face.

"Listen-let's do it like this." He wasn't used to pleading; he hadn't had to do it for a lot of years. He gave it his best shot, though: "We can keep it unofficial. Let us slide on out of here a few at a time-how's that? Then nobody'll be any wiser when we're gone, nobody'll get in any trouble, and we can get back to doing what needs doing once we're somewhere that's still fighting." He didn't even cuss out Wright Patman, no matter how much he wanted to.

But Hezekiah Carroll shook his head. "Sorry about that-I am sorry about that. I would if I could, but I can't, so I won't. I don't reckon you understand how bad the damnyankees want you. They told the-the President they would bomb the living shit out of Austin if you got away."

"They're a bunch of nigger-lovers, that's why! And you're throwing in with 'em!" Jeff couldn't keep his temper down forever.

"What we are is out of the war. You think we want the damnyankees dropping one of those superbombs on Dallas? You think we want 'em to drop one on Houston or Austin or San Antone? You better think again, buddy."

"But-But-Christ on His cross, you're cutting the CSA off from Sonora and Chihuahua. You can't do that!"

"No, huh? Just watch us," Captain Carroll said. "White folks don't need all those greasers around anyway. If Francisco Josй wants 'em back, he's welcome to 'em, far as I'm concerned."

Realization smote Pinkard. "If we were smokin' their sorry asses, I bet you'd let us go!" he said.

Carroll neither affirmed nor denied. He just said, "Things are the way they are. And so you know, the Yankees are flying in a team to take charge of this place. They ought to be landing in Houston pretty soon. Won't be more than a couple of hours before they're here. Whatever you've got to say from now on, you can say to them." He left the office without a salute, without a nod, without a backwards glance.

Vern Green burst in a moment later. "What are we gonna do?" he cried.

Jeff told him what the Texas Ranger had said. "If you and the guards still want to try and skip, I still won't say boo," he finished. "Maybe you'll get away, maybe you'll get your ass shot off. I don't know one way or the other. With Edith and the kids here, I'm fuckin' stuck."

"Damnyankees'll hang you," Green warned.

"How can they? I was doing what Ferd Koenig told me to do," Jeff said. "Could I say, 'No, we got to treat the niggers better'? He'd shoot me if I did. 'Sides, the job needed doing. You know it as well as I do."

"Sure. But the Yankees won't." Green sketched a salute. "I am gonna try and get away. Wish me luck."

"Luck," Jeff said. Not much later, he heard spatters of gunfire in the near distance. He had a couple of drinks at his desk.

Two and a half hours after that, a man in a green-gray uniform with gold oak leaves on his shoulder straps walked in. "You're Brigade Leader Pinkard?" he asked in U.S. accents.

"That's right," Jeff said, a little surprised the Yankee officer got the Party title right.

"Major Don Little, U.S. Army," the other officer said, and then, "You're under arrest."

A rtillery fire came down near Armstrong Grimes' platoon-not real close, but close enough to make them pucker some. Through the man-made thunder, Squidface said, "How come we ain't in Texas?"

"How come you ain't a beautiful woman?" Armstrong answered. "How come you ain't even an ugly woman, for cryin' out loud? If you didn't know how to handle a gun, you'd be fuckin' useless."

"Ah, you've been talkin' to my old man again," Squidface said in mock disgust.

He remained stubbornly male. And central Alabama, where the war was very much alive, remained nothing like the state-or even the Republic-of Texas, where it had died. Instead, soldiers on both sides were doing the dying here. The Confederates didn't have enough to keep the United States away from Selma and Montgomery, but they didn't seem to know it yet.

Armstrong didn't mind showing them. He did mind getting killed or maimed on a bright spring day when the air smelled green and the birds sang and the bastards in butternut couldn't possibly win even if they wiped out every U.S. soldier south of Birmingham. Why couldn't they see the shit had hit the fan and just give up? That would have suited him fine.

But the Confederates down here were a stubborn bunch. They didn't just fight back-they kept throwing in local counterattacks. A little farther east, one of those had driven U.S. forces back ten or fifteen miles before it finally ran out of steam. By now, the enemy had lost all that ground again, and more besides. He'd thrown away men and barrels he couldn't possibly hope to replace. What the hell was the point? Armstrong couldn't see it.

Some of the shells from his latest barrage sounded funny. So did the bursts they made when they hit the ground. "Oh, for Chrissake!" Armstrong said, almost as disgusted with the men he was facing as he had been when he fought the Mormons. He raised his voice: "Gas!" he yelled. "They're throwing gas at us!" Why were they bothering? What was it supposed to prove?

He put on his mask. It was annoying. It was inconvenient. If they wanted to attack here, they'd have to wear masks, too, and be annoyed and inconvenienced. And his own side's gunners would probably give them a big, lethal dose as soon as they found out this crap was going on. Serve 'em right, Armstrong thought, sucking in air that smelled like rubber instead of spring.

Off to the left, somebody-he thought it was Herk, but how could you be sure when a guy was talking through a mask? — shouted, "Here they come!"

Armstrong peered in that direction through porthole lenses that needed cleaning. Sure as hell, the Confederates were pushing forward, their foot soldiers backed up by a couple of assault guns and one of their fearsome new barrels. Somebody must have fed their CO raw meat.

A U.S. machine gun started chattering. The masked soldiers in butternut dove for cover. The barrel's massive turret swung toward the machine-gun nest. The main armament fired once. Sandbags and somebody's leg flew through the air. The machine gun fell silent.

That did the Confederates less good than it would have earlier in the war. Armstrong had a captured automatic rifle. Squidface had his own gun. Herk was banging away with a C.S. submachine gun. Plenty of other captured weapons and U.S.-issue Tommy guns gave the guys on Armstrong's side a lot more firepower than they would have had even a year earlier.

Mortar rounds started landing among the unhappy C.S. soldiers, too. Armstrong whooped. "See how you like it, you bastards!" he shouted. "It's better to give than to receive!" Then a U.S. barrel put an AP round through an assault gun's glacis plate. The assault gun slewed sideways, sending greasy black smoke high into the sky. He whooped again. That pillar of smoke marked four men's funeral pyres. They weren't his buddies, so he didn't care.

A moment later, the other assault gun hit a mine and stopped with a track blown off. That was the signal for every U.S. barrel in the neighborhood to open up on it. It didn't last long-what could have? Recognizing the minefield, the enemy barrel's crew also stopped. A couple of rounds hit it, but bounced off. Armstrong stopped whooping and swore. AP rounds could penetrate those monsters-he'd seen it happen. But it didn't happen all the time.

And the metal monster started picking off U.S. barrels, one after another. Its big gun could penetrate any U.S. machine's frontal armor with no trouble at all. Still swearing, Armstrong wished for a stovepipe rocket like the ones Jake Featherston's men carried. If any of those had been captured, they didn't seem to be in the neighborhood. Too bad.

How come the Confederates get all the good stuff first? he wondered. They did, damn them. They'd carried automatic weapons against Springfields. They had the screaming meemies and the stovepipe antibarrel rockets and the long-range jobs. They even used the superbomb first.

And a whole fat lot of good it did them, because there weren't quite enough of them anyway, not if they wanted to conquer a country that could put three times as many soldiers in the field. He supposed Featherston's fuckers got the fancy weapons because they really needed them. The USA muddled along with ordinary stuff, and eventually got the job done.

The local Confederate attack bogged down when the big, nasty barrel stopped going forward. The C.S. infantry knew they couldn't push their foes out of the way without armor support. They went to ground and dug in. Artillery and mortar rounds rained down on them. Dig as they would, their holes weren't so good as the ones they would have had in prepared defensive positions.

Two fighter-bombers zoomed in and ripple-fired rockets from underwing racks. One of those, or maybe more than one, hit the C.S. barrel. The rocket got through the armor where the AP rounds hadn't. The barrel started to burn. Somebody bailed out of the turret. Every U.S. soldier around fired at the barrelman, but Armstrong thought he made it to cover. Too bad, he thought.

Whistles blew. Somebody who sounded like an officer yelled, "Let's push 'em back, boys! With their armor gone, they won't even slow us down." Then he said the magic words: "Follow me!"

If he was willing to put his ass on the line, he could get soldiers to go with him. "Come on!" Armstrong called, scrambling out of his own scrape in the ground. "Let's go get 'em! We can do it!"

And damned if they couldn't. Oh, some of the Confederates fought. There were always diehards who wouldn't quit till the last dog was hung. But there weren't very many, not this time around. Some of the men in butternut drew back toward their own start line. Others raised their hands as U.S. soldiers drew near.

"Don't shoot me! Sweet Jesus, buddy, I don't want to die!" an unshaven corporal called to Armstrong. Another Confederate soldier near him also held his hands high.

"Waddaya think?" Armstrong asked Squidface.

"We can take 'em down the road," Squidface answered.

"'Bout what I figured," Armstrong agreed. He raised his voice: "Herk! Take these guys down the road."

"You sure, Sarge?" Herk asked.

"Yeah-go on. Go deal with 'em," Armstrong said.

"Right." Herk gestured with his captured weapon. "Come on, you two." The Confederate soldiers eagerly went with him. After he led them around behind some trees, the submachine gun stuttered out two short bursts. He came back. "It's taken care of," he said.

"Attaboy. C'mon. Let's go," Armstrong told him. If you told one of your men to take somebody back, you really meant to make a prisoner of him. If you told your guy to take him down the road…Well, it was a hard old war. Sometimes you didn't have the manpower or the time to deal with POWs. And so-you didn't, that was all.

Somebody up in the middle of the fighting was on the horn to U.S. artillery. The USA didn't have screaming meemies, but battery after battery of 105s did a hell of a job. The barrage moved in front of the advancing soldiers, and fell with terrible power on the line from which the Confederates had jumped off. They couldn't hold that line, not with the men they had left after the counterattack failed. They would have done better not to try to hit back at the U.S. forces.

Sunset found Armstrong and his men several miles farther south than they had been at daybreak. He camped in an empty sharecropper village. He'd seen a lot of those here. This was supposed to be the Black Belt, the heart of Alabama Negro life. But the heart had been ripped out of the state.

Or so he thought, till a sentry said, "Sarge, we got niggers comin' in-maybe half a dozen."

"Fuck me," Armstrong said. That didn't happen every day. "Well, go on, Snake-bring 'em in. We can spare the rations for 'em."

"Right," Snake said-he had a rearing rattler tattooed on his left forearm. He came back a few minutes later with two skinny black men, an even skinnier woman, and three kids who were nothing but skin and bones…and, in the firelight, eyeballs and teeth.

The soldiers gave them food, which got their immediate undivided attention. After the Negroes had eaten enough to blunt the edge of their hunger, Armstrong asked, "How'd you people stay alive?"

"We hid. We stole," one of the men answered. His accent was so thick, Armstrong could hardly follow him.

"Now we is free again," the woman said. "Now we kin live again."

"Long as they's sojers here. Long as they's Yankees here," the second man said. "Reckon the white folks here'd get rid of us pretty damn quick if they seen a chance."

Armstrong reckoned the Negro was right. Not many white Confederates seemed unhappy about what had happened to the blacks who'd lived alongside them. The only thing the whites were unhappy about was losing the war.

"What is we gonna do?" the first man asked, as if a kid sergeant from Washington, D.C., had answers for him.

"Hang around with soldiers as much as you can. We won't screw you," Armstrong said, although he knew some of the guys in the platoon liked Negroes no better than most Confederates did. And some of the guys would want to screw the woman. Yeah, she was skinny as a strand of spaghetti. Yeah, she was homely. Yeah, she might have VD. If she stayed around very long, somebody would make a pass at her. And trouble would follow, sure as night followed day.

They can hang around with soldiers, Armstrong decided, but they won't hang around with my platoon. I'll send 'em to the rear, let somebody else worry about 'em. He nodded to himself. That definitely sounded like a plan.

And when he put it to the Negroes, they didn't squawk a bit. "Rear sounds mighty good," the first man said. "We done seen us enough fightin' to las' us fo' always." All the other blacks solemnly nodded.

Come to that, Armstrong had seen enough fighting to last him for always, too. Maybe, he thought hopefully, I won't have to see much more.

T here was a poem about the way the world ended. Jorge Rodriguez hadn't had as much schooling as his folks wished he would have. When you grew up on a farm in Sonora, you didn't get a whole lot of schooling. But he remembered that poem-something about not with a bang but a whimper.

He knew why it came to mind now, too. He was thinking that the fellow who'd written that poem didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

Buckingham, Virginia, wasn't a whole lot more than a wide spot in the road. It didn't even have a gas station, though it did boast a couple of hotels that dated back to before the War of Secession. It lay west and a little south of Richmond, and Jorge's outfit had orders to hold it in spite of everything the damnyankees could do.

The indomitable Hugo Blackledge had charge of the company-all the new officers were either casualties or missing in action. Jorge led one platoon, Gabe Medwick another. Blackledge looked around at Buckingham. "We'll dig in," he said. "We'll fight as long as we can, and then we'll pull back and fight somewhere else. This chickenshit hole in the ground ain't worth dyin' for, and that's the God's truth."

"That's not what the high command told us." Medwick sounded worried.

"They ain't gonna kill us for moving back after we fight," Jorge assured him. "They're too fucked up for that. But I think the sergeant, he's right. We make a big stand here, the damnyankees blow us up for sure." His wave encompassed the country town. "And for what, amigo? For what?"

Gabe had no answer for that. Nobody who'd done any fighting would have. Buckingham would have fallen a while ago if the main Yankee thrust from Richmond hadn't gone southeast, through Petersburg toward Hampton Roads. But the United States had enough men to push west, too…and the Confederacy, by all the signs, didn't have enough men to stop them.

Still, if you weren't going to surrender you had to try. Somebody's rear-guard action up ahead gave the company a couple of hours to entrench and to eat whatever rations and foraged food they happened to have on them. A command car towing an antiaircraft gun came through town. Sergeant Blackledge flagged it down. "Got any armor-piercing rounds?" he asked.

"A few," one of the gunners answered.

"Good," Blackledge said. "Stay here. You'll have a better chance to use 'em than you would have wherever the hell you were going." He didn't quite aim his automatic rifle at the command car, but he looked ready to. Jorge was one of the men who stood ready to back his play.

The gunner didn't need long to figure out what was what. "You talked us into it," he said after a barely perceptible pause. "Show us where to set up."

He and his crew had just positioned the gun when U.S. 105s started landing on Buckingham. The first few fell short, but the rest came down right in the middle of town. Huddling in a foxhole, Jorge knew what that meant: the Yankees had a forward artillery observer hidden in the trees somewhere, and he was wirelessing the fall of the shot back to the batteries that were firing. Killing him would have been nice, but who could guess where he lurked?

Fighter-bombers worked Buckingham over next. They dropped bombs. They fired rockets. And they dropped fish-shaped pods of jellied gasoline, as if the town were under attack by flamethrowers from the sky. Some burned men screamed. Some, Jorge feared, never got the chance. One of the fine hotels from before the days of the War of Secession went up in flames. It had lasted for a century, but no longer.

After the damnyankees softened up the town, infantry and armor came forward. Why do things the hard way when you could take it easy? That was what the U.S. officer in charge must have thought, anyhow.

But nothing turned out to be easy for the men in green-gray. That antiaircraft gun knocked out two barrels in quick succession. The others pulled back in a hurry. Machine-gun and automatic-weapons fire sent U.S. foot soldiers diving for cover. The Confederates in Buckingham raised a defiant cheer.

If they'd had barrels of their own, if they'd had air support, if they'd had more ground-pounders, they could have driven the enemy back toward the James. If they'd had all those things here, they also would have had them lots of other places. The war would have looked very different.

Since they didn't have any reinforcements, they had to wait for the U.S. forces to regroup and take another crack at Buckingham. "Pull back into the woods south of town!" Sergeant Blackledge called. "We'll let them beat on the place while it's empty, then move back into our old holes and give 'em a surprise."

Smoke from the burning buildings in Buckingham helped screen the withdrawal from Yankee observers. And Blackledge knew just what was coming. More shells, more bombs, more rockets, and more napalm descended on Buckingham. Jorge crossed himself. He was glad to crouch half a mile away from all that destruction.

As soon as the last fighter-bombers roared off to the north, Sergeant Blackledge yelled, "C'mon! Hustle up! We gotta get back to our places before the enemy infantry starts moving up!"

Trotting forward, Jorge saw that the antiaircraft gun wouldn't stop any barrels this time around. It lay upside down, the tires on the gun carriage all burnt and melted and stinking. How many stovepipes did the company have? He swore under his breath. The cannon could kill from much farther away than one of those rockets.

At least no jellied gasoline smoldered in his foxhole. He slid down into it and waited for the push that was bound to come. He felt more resigned than afraid. He wondered why. Probably because he'd been in lots of other bad spots. What was one more? My grave, it could be.

Not far away, Gabe Medwick was praying. His version of the Lord's Prayer had words a little different from Jorge's. Protestant, the Sonoran thought condescendingly. But both versions meant the same thing, so how much did the words really matter?

"Hang in there, boys," Hugo Blackledge said. "We been screwin' so long with a limber dick, why the fuck can't we row the damn boat with a rope?" In spite of himself, Jorge laughed. Sometimes obscenity wasn't so far from prayer.

Here came the damnyankees again. They were more cautious this time-they didn't want another bloody nose. The Confederates in Buckingham held their fire till the enemy soldiers and fighting vehicles got very close. Then they all opened up at once. Howls of dismay from the U.S. soldiers said they'd hoped it would be easy this time. No matter what they hoped, it wasn't.

A lancehead riding a shaft of fire, a stovepipe rocket incinerated a green-gray barrel. But other U.S. machines sensibly stayed out of stovepipe range. They raked Buckingham with high-explosive rounds and machine-gun bullets. That let Yankee infantry grab a toehold on the north side of town-not enough Confederates could put their heads up to stop the enemy.

And the Yankees pushed forward to either side of Buckingham, too. There weren't enough men in butternut to hold them back. "Hey, Sarge!" Jorge called urgently. "We done what we could do here, sн?"

"Bet your ass." Blackledge raised his voice to a formidable roar: "Back! Back, goddammit! We'll make another stand at the next town south, wherever the fuck it is!"

Disengaging under fire wasn't easy, either. A less experienced outfit might not have been able to bring it off so neatly. But Jorge had plenty of practice making a getaway from overwhelming U.S. strength. So did his buddies. They left the wounded behind for the Yankees to take care of. That gave the hurt soldiers a better chance than they would have had if they got dragged along. The men in green-gray mostly fought fair.

The ground rose south of Buckingham. No roads led south, only tracks and game trails. The soldiers trudged past a couple of farms carved out of the forest. A woman in homespun stared at them from a cornfield. Was that a pipe in her mouth? Damned if it wasn't. Jorge hoped the Yankees wouldn't shell her farm trying to kill the retreating C.S. soldiers.

On he went. Armor wouldn't have an easy time coming after him, anyhow. Artillery started probing for the Confederates. Suddenly, Jorge hated the trees. Air bursts were deadly, and the only thing you could do to protect yourself was dig in with a roof over your head. Any hanging branch might touch off a shell and rain fragments down on you.

A hundred yards away from him, Gabe Medwick fell with a wail, clutching his arm. "No!" Jorge yelled, and rushed over to his friend. When he got there, he saw Gabe had a leg wound, too. With the best will in the world, the kid from Alabama couldn't go on.

"Hurts," Gabe got out through clenched teeth.

"I bet it does." Jorge clumsily injected him with morphine, then bandaged the wounds. The leg wasn't too bad. The arm…Jorge hoped Gabe would keep it, but it looked pretty chewed up. "The Yankees, they take care of you," Jorge said, feeling helpless.

"Don't want nothin' to do with no damnyankees." Gabe sounded like a petulant child.

"Here." Jorge gave him his canteen and some rations. "You sit tight and yell for them when they get close. Buena suerte, amigo." He hurried away, not knowing what else to say.

Before long, Jorge got to pick up a canteen from a man an air burst had shredded. There were worse things than getting wounded. The flies were just starting to gather on one of those things.

Jorge stumbled up to the top of the line of hills and then down the other side. The company, what was left of it, was hopelessly scattered. Through a break in the trees, Jorge caught a glimpse of a town down below. "That place is where we're going!" Hugo Blackledge yelled. "We'll form up there and figure out what the hell to do next."

What could they do? Jorge had no idea. But he had a target now, somewhere to go. As he picked his way through thicker stands of timber, the town disappeared, but he could always find it again. It looked bigger than Buckingham, not that that was saying much.

When he drew closer, he got a glimpse of armor in the town. He'd wondered when he would see more of it. Hell, he'd wondered if the Confederates had any armor left in central Virginia. There were already soldiers in the streets, too. Maybe the CSA could throw one more rally together. Even after you thought your side had done everything it could, it kept surprising you.

The first few men from the company, Jorge among them, had come out onto open ground within a quarter of a mile of the town when Sergeant Blackledge let out a theatrical wail of despair: "They're Yankees!"

And they were. They even had some sort of portable PA system. "Surrender!" somebody blared. "Surrender or die! First, last, and only warning! There is no escape!"

There wasn't, either. The barrels and the automatic weapons ahead could tear the dismayed Confederates to pieces. They'd lost their last race with the enemy. Blackledge set down his automatic rifle and walked into captivity with his hands and his head high.

If he can do it, so can I, Jorge thought. He laid his weapon on the ground and walked toward the waiting U.S. soldiers. One of them pointed into the town. "Line up by the courthouse," he said, not unkindly. "Some trucks'll take you off to prison camp."

"All right." Jorge pointed back the way he'd come. "We left wounded in the woods. My buddy's there."

"We'll get 'em-don't flabble about it. You move along now."

Dully, Jorge obeyed. The men with whom he'd endured so much tramped through the late-afternoon stillness in the little town of Appomattox-a sign on the courthouse gave him the name of the place-toward the end of the war.

T hings were quiet outside of Birmingham, and inside, too. Cincinnatus Driver approved of that. After all the shells that had flown back and forth, a truce was holding now. A U.S. officer had gone into Birmingham to confer with C.S. General Patton.

None of the drivers, of course, knew what the U.S. officer would tell the surrounded general. That didn't stop them from guessing. "If he don't quit, I bet we drop a superbomb on him," Cincinnatus said.

"Sounds good to me," Hal Williamson said. Several other men nodded. Williamson went on, "All the trouble Patton's caused, we ought to drop a bomb on the fucker anyway."

More nods, Cincinnatus' among them. "I wonder when he'll come out," the Negro said. The officer, a major, had gone in not far from their encampment. If he came out the same way, maybe he would tell them what was what. You could hope so, anyway.

"How long d'you think he'll give Patton?" somebody asked.

"I wouldn't give him long," Williamson said. "If it's surrender or get one of those bombs in the kisser, what does he need to figure out?"

Cincinnatus lit a cigarette. Not even tobacco smoke soothed him much. He wanted to know what was going on there inside the battered heart of the Confederate industrial town.

So did the other drivers. "That Patton's a stubborn bastard," one of them said. "What if he doesn't give in?"

"His funeral, in that case," Cincinnatus said, and then, "Couldn't happen to a nicer fella… Well, it could happen to Jake Featherston, but I reckon that's comin', too."

Williamson pointed into the ruin that was Birmingham. "Here comes our guy," he said. "And look! He's got one of those butternut bastards with him."

Sure enough, two men came out of the city, each of them carrying a large flag of truce. The C.S. officer looked clean and neat despite the disaster that had befallen the place he was defending. He also looked as unhappy as if he were burying his only son. That told Cincinnatus most of what he needed to know.

"They givin' up, suh?" he called to the U.S. officer, the rising lilt in his voice saying he already had a good notion of the answer.

All the drivers burst into cheers when the major nodded. "They sure are," he answered, "or it looks that way, anyhow. We've still got a few little things to iron out-that's why Captain Monroe is with me."

The Confederate started to give the men standing near the big green-gray trucks a polite nod. Then he saw Cincinnatus among them. "You have those damned black terrorists here?" he demanded of the officer in green-gray.

"I ain't a guerrilla." Cincinnatus spoke for himself. "I don't blame those folks for risin' up-don't get me wrong-but I ain't one of them. I'm a citizen of the USA, and proud of it, too."

"That's telling him!" Hal Williamson said.

Captain Monroe looked even more mournful than he had before. The U.S. major, whose name Cincinnatus still didn't know, grinned from ear to ear. "You asked, Captain," he said. "Now you know."

"It's still wrong," Monroe said stubbornly. "Niggers got no business fighting."

"You call me nigger again, you ofay asshole, you ain't gonna last to dicker your goddamn surrender," Cincinnatus said. Captain Monroe's jaw dropped all the way to his chest. He couldn't have been more astonished if an Army mule had cussed him out.

"Somebody doesn't seem to agree with you," the U.S. major observed. "And since he's here, maybe he's got a point, you know?"

Monroe shook his head. Cincinnatus hadn't expected anything different. Speaking of Army mules…When it came to the Confederates' views of Negroes, they could have given the beasts mulishness lessons.

As the two officers went back to confer with U.S. higher-ups, Hal Williamson thumped Cincinnatus on the back. "That butternut bastard can't make nasty cracks about you!"

"He better not," Cincinnatus said. "The guys who can talk are the guys who end up winnin'. You lose, you got to listen to the fellas on the other side doin' the braggin'."

"That's us!" Two drivers said it at the same time. Cincinnatus nodded.

After that, with the ceasefire holding, the drivers had nothing to do but sit around and smoke and eat and play cards. Cincinnatus didn't mind, not even a little. Nothing could go wrong while he was in the middle of a big U.S. army. Nobody was likely to shoot at him from ambush. His truck wouldn't hit a mine and explode in flames. And they gave him the same combat bonus for this as they did for driving through bushwhacker country.

Three hours later, the U.S. major and C.S. Captain Monroe returned, both of them with their white flags. The officer in green-gray was all smiles, while Monroe, his shoulders slumped, his head bowed, showed nothing but gloom.

"It's all over," the U.S. major said. "They'll come out. One more nail in the coffin, and a big one, too."

"Did you have to say that?" Monroe barked.

"I'm sorry, Captain, but will you tell me it's not the truth?" the major asked. The Confederate officer didn't answer, which in itself told everything that needed telling. The major nodded to the group of truck drivers. "We gave them one thing: Patton gets to address his men after they lay down their arms."

"Why not?" Cincinnatus said. "Talk is cheap." His pals laughed. The U.S. major didn't, but mostly, Cincinnatus judged, to keep from offending his C.S. counterpart. As for Captain Monroe, his glare said Cincinnatus belonged in a camp even if he was a U.S. citizen. Cincinnatus scowled back, remembering how close he'd come to ending up in one. How many other Negroes from Covington's barbed-wire-enclosed colored district were still alive? Any? He just didn't know.

The two officers went back into Birmingham. Cincinnatus listened to shouts, some of them amplified, inside the city. Spreading the word, he judged. After another hour or so, Confederate soldiers started coming out. They weren't carrying weapons, and they held their hands above their heads. A few had bits of white rag tied to sticks. They were skinny, and their uniforms had seen a lot of wear, but, like Captain Monroe, they all looked surprisingly well bathed and well groomed. Patton was supposed to be a stickler for stuff like that.

They weren't shy about scrounging ration tins from anybody in green-gray they saw. "Thanks, pal," one of them said when Cincinnatus tossed him a can. Then the man did a double take at his dark skin. He looked at the can. "Yeah, thanks," he repeated, and went on.

"Wow," Hal Williamson said. "This place made half the shit they threw at us, seems like. And now it's out of business." He mimed swiping the back of his hand over his forehead in relief.

"So where do we drop the superbomb we were gonna put here?" another driver asked.

"New Orleans. Gotta be New Orleans." The answer came to Cincinnatus as soon as he heard the question. "Satchmo won't like it, but too bad for him."

"No offense, Cincinnatus, but I don't much care for the music he plays," Hal said.

Cincinnatus shrugged. "Well, I can see that, 'cause it ain't what you're used to. Me, I grew up in the CSA, so it sounds right to me. And he's damn good at what he does, whether you like it or not."

"So is Jake Featherston," Williamson said, which was true but not exactly a compliment. Cincinnatus thought about rising to it and arguing for real, but why? When a whole Confederate army was surrendering, what point to a dumb little quarrel?

More and more soldiers in butternut and Freedom Party Guards in camouflage uniforms trudged out of Birmingham. The Party guards looked even sorrier about giving up than the Army men did. Had they seen any chance to fight on, they would have grabbed it. But they didn't-even they knew the jig was up.

Hall nudged Cincinnatus. "Look! That's Patton! That has to be Patton."

"Sure does," Cincinnatus said. Nobody else would have worn a chromed helmet with wreathed stars picked out in gold. Nobody else would have worn not one but two fancy six-shooters, either. Patton's look of loathing made everything from the other soldiers and the Freedom Party Guards seem downright benign by comparison.

Patton already had U.S. soldiers walking along watching him as if he were a lion in a zoo-a dangerous beast that couldn't hurt anybody any more. Cincinnatus and the rest of the drivers fell in with them.

The Confederate soldiers-now the Confederate POWs-stood in rough ranks in a battered, cratered field. U.S. troops, many armed with captured automatic weapons, guarded them. More U.S. soldiers rubbernecked like Cincinnatus. Engineers had set up a microphone in front of the prisoners. The U.S. commander was a long-faced, bald brigadier general named Ironhewer; he waited by the mike for Patton's approach.

Patton saluted him with immense dignity. General Ironhewer returned the military courtesy. Patton took off his pistols and handed them, still holstered, to Ironhewer. This time, the U.S. general saluted him first. He gave the ceremonial weapons to an aide, then went up to the microphone.

"Men of the Army of Kentucky," he said in Midwestern accents, "General Patton has asked leave to speak to you one last time. As this battle ends, as peace between our two countries draws near, I did not see how I could refuse him this privilege." He nodded to the C.S. commander. "General Patton."

Ironhewer stepped away from the microphone and Patton took his place. "Thank you, General, for the courtesy you have shown me and the kindness you are showing my men," he said, his voice thick with unshed tears. He needed a moment to gather himself before continuing. "Soldiers, by an agreement between General Ironhewer and me, the troops of the Army of Kentucky have surrendered. That we are beaten is a self-evident fact, and we cannot hope to resist the bomb that hangs over our head like the sword of Damocles. Richmond is fallen. The cause for which you have so long and manfully struggled, and for which you have braved dangers and made so many sacrifices, is today hopeless.

"Reason dictates and humanity demands that no more blood be shed here. It is your sad duty, and mine, to lay down our arms and to aid in restoring peace. As your commander, I sincerely hope that every officer and soldier will carry out in good faith all the terms of the surrender.

"War such as you have passed through naturally engenders feelings of animosity, hatred, and revenge. But in captivity and when you return home a manly, straightforward course of conduct will secure the respect even of your enemies." Patton paused. He brushed a hand to his eyes, then went on. "In bidding you farewell, rest assured that you carry with you my best wishes for your future welfare and happiness. I have never sent you where I was unwilling to go myself, nor would I now advise you to a course I felt myself unwilling to pursue. You have been good soldiers. Preserve your honor, and the government to which you have surrendered can afford to be and, I hope, will be magnanimous."

Still very erect, he saluted his men. Some of them cried out his name. Others let loose with what they still called the Rebel yell. Tears now streaming down his face, Patton waited for the tumult to die down a little. Then he stepped into the ragged ranks of the rest of the POWs.

Defeated Confederate soldiers shook his hand and embraced him. Cincinnatus watched them with a little sympathy-but not much. "We done licked 'em here," he said to Hal Williamson. "Now we got to finish it everywhere else."