In At the Death

XIII

J ake Featherston felt trapped. The skies over North Carolina had been lousy with damnyankee fighter-bombers coming down from the north. Now that he'd crossed into South Carolina, the skies were lousy with damnyankee fighter-bombers coming up from the south. He and the handful of loyalists who clung to him through thick and thin moved by night and lay up by day, like any hunted animals.

Only chunks of the Confederate States still answered to the Confederate government: pieces of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina; the part of Cuba that wasn't in revolt; most of Florida; most of Sonora and Chihuahua (which, cut off by the goddamn treasonous Republic of Texas, might as well have been on the far side of the moon); and a core of Mississippi, Louisiana, and most of Arkansas. If the war would go on, if the war could go on, it would have to go on there.

One thing wrong: Jake hadn't the faintest idea how to reach his alleged redoubt. "What are we going to do?" he demanded of Clarence Potter. "Jesus H. Christ, what can we do? They're squeezing us tighter every day, the bastards."

"O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams," Potter answered.

"What the hell is that?" Jake said.

"Shakespeare. Hamlet."

"Hot damn! I don't need to go back to school now, thank you kindly." Featherston glared at the longtime foe who'd done him so much good. "What are you doing here, anyway? Why don't you give yourself up to the USA? You can tell 'em you've hated my guts since dirt."

"If things were different, I might," Potter said calmly. "But I'm the guy who blew up Philadelphia, remember. And I did it wearing a Yankee uniform, too."

"I'm not likely to forget." Jake's laugh was a hoarse, harsh bark. "You got out again, too, in spite of everything. I bet those sons of bitches are shitting rivets on account of it."

"Bad security," Potter said. "If we had another superbomb, we could get it up there."

That made Featherston cuss. They would have another bomb in a few months-if the United States didn't overrun Lexington first, which seemed unlikely. Henderson FitzBelmont had moved heaven and earth to make one superbomb. Now, when the CSA needed lots of them, he got constipated. You couldn't count on anybody-except yourself. Always yourself.

"But now the United States want to kill me worse than you ever did," Potter went on. "And they've got an excuse, because I wore their uniform. So in case they find out who I am, I expect I'm dead. Which means I'm all yours, Mr. President."

"All mine, huh? Then why the devil ain't you a redheaded gal with legs up to here?"

"You can't have everything, sir. You've still got Ferd Koenig along for the ride, and you've still got Lulu."

She sat in a different motorcar, parked under some trees not far away. Jake looked over in that direction to make sure she couldn't overhear before he said, "She's a wonderful woman in all kinds of ways, but not that one. I do believe I'd sooner hump me a sheep."

"Well, she doesn't do anything for me, either, but she worships the ground you walk on," Potter said. "God knows why."

"Fuck you, too," Featherston said without rancor. "She's a good gal. I don't want to make her unhappy or anything, so she better not hear that from you."

"She won't. I don't play those kinds of games," Potter said, and Jake decided to believe him. The Intelligence officer wasn't usually nasty in any petty way. After a moment, Potter went on, "You know, you're right-you are nice to Lulu. You go out of your way to be nice to Lulu. How come you don't do that with anybody else?"

There was a question Jake had never asked himself. Now he did, but he only shrugged. "Damned if I know, Potter. It's just how things worked out, that's all. I like Lulu. Rest of the world's full of assholes."

"I wish I could tell you you were wrong," Potter said. Airplanes droned by overhead-Yankee airplanes. They were going to hit something farther north. Columbia was already in U.S. hands, so they could drop their load on North Carolina and then land in Virginia. With a sigh, Potter asked, "How are we going to make it out West? Do you think we can get an Alligator to land anywhere near here? Do you think it could fly across Georgia and Alabama without getting shot down?"

"Wouldn't bet on it," Jake answered mournfully. "What I was thinking was, if we put on civvies and make like we're a bunch of guys who gave up, we can say we're going home and sneak across what the damnyankees are holding, and they won't be any wiser. How do you like it?"

Potter pursed his lips. "If we can't get an Alligator, maybe. If we can, I believe I'd sooner fly at night and take the chance of getting blown out of the sky."

Jake scowled at him. Potter looked back unperturbed, as if to say, Well, you asked me. He was one of the few men who never sugarcoated their opinions around the President of the CSA. Reluctantly, Featherston respected him for that. And he was too likely to be right, damn him. "I'll see what we can come up with," the President said.

When his shrunken entourage drove into Spartanburg, South Carolina, he found the colonel in charge of the town's defenses lost in gloom. "Damnyankees are on the way, and to hell with me if I know how to stop 'em," the officer said.

"Do your best," Jake answered. "Now let me get on the horn to Charlotte." That was the closest place where he thought he was likely to find a transport. And he did. And, after some choice bad language, he persuaded the authorities there to fly it down to Spartanburg.

"If it gets shot down-" some officious fool in Charlotte said.

"If it doesn't get here, you'll get shot down." Jake wasn't sure he could bring off the threat. But the jerk up in Charlotte couldn't be sure he couldn't.

The Alligator landed late in the afternoon. Ground crew personnel swarmed out with camouflage nets to make it as invisible as they could. "Do we really want to do this?" Ferd Koenig asked.

"If you don't, then stay here," Featherston answered. "Say hello to the U.S. soldiers when they catch you." The Attorney General bit his lip. He got on the airplane with everybody else.

"Don't know exactly how we'll land if we have to do it in the dark," the pilot said.

"You'll work something out," Jake told him.

"Well, I sure as hell hope so." But the pilot didn't sound too worried. "One thing-if I think this is crazy, chances are the damnyankees will, too. Maybe we'll surprise 'em so much, we'll get through 'em just like shit through a goose."

"Now you're talking. You take off in the wee small hours," Jake said. "Fly low-stay under the Y-ranging if you can. Goddammit, we aren't licked yet. If we can just make the enemy see that occupying our country is more expensive than it's worth, we'll get their soldiers out of here and we'll get a peace we can live with. May take a while, but we'll do it."

He believed every word of it. He'd been fighting his whole life. He didn't know anything else. If he had to lead guerrillas out of the hills for the next twenty years, he was ready to do it. After so many fights, what was one more? Nothing to faze him-that was for sure.

After they got airborne, the pilot asked, "Want me to put on my wing lights?"

"Yeah, do it," Jake answered. "If the Yankees see 'em, they'll reckon we're one of theirs. I hope like hell they will, anyway."

"Me, too," the pilot said with feeling, but he flicked the switch. The red and green lights went on.

The Alligator droned south and west-more nearly south than west at first, because neither the pilot nor Jake wanted to come too close to Atlanta. If U.S. forces would be especially alert anywhere, they both figured that was the place.

Looking out of one of the transport's small side windows, Jake had no trouble figuring out when they passed from C.S.-to U.S.-held territory. The blackout in the occupied lands was a lot less stringent. The Yankees didn't expect Confederate bombers overhead, damn them. And the worst part was, the Yankees had every right not to expect them. The Confederacy didn't have many bombers left, and mostly used the ones it did have in close support of its surviving armies.

Turbulence made the Alligator bounce. Somebody gulped, loudly. "Use the airsick bag!" three people shouted at the same time. The gulper did. It helped-some.

And then turbulence wasn't the only thing bouncing the Alligator. Shells started bursting all around the airplane. Suddenly, the road through the air might have been full of potholes-big, deep ones. A major general who wasn't wearing a seat belt went sprawling.

"Get us the fuck out of here!" Jake yelled. If Lulu sniffed or squawked, he didn't hear her.

Engines roaring, the transport dove for the deck. The antiaircraft guns pursued. Shrapnel clattered into the wings and tore through the fuselage. Somebody in there shrieked, which meant jagged metal tore through a person, too.

"We're losing fuel!" the pilot shouted. "Lots of it!"

"Can we go on?" Jake had to bellow at the top of his lungs to make himself heard.

"Not a chance in church," the pilot answered. "We'd never get there."

"Can you land the son of a bitch?"

"If I can't, we're all dead," the man answered. Jake remembered that he hadn't been thrilled about landing at night even in Confederate-held territory. How much less enthusiastic would he be about a nighttime emergency landing on enemy soil? I told him to put on the wing lights, Jake thought. Did it matter? Too goddamn late to worry about it now.

He hated having his fate in somebody else's hands. If he was going out, he saw himself trading bullets with the damnyankees and nailing plenty of them before they finally got him. This way…Dammit, I'm a hero. The script isn't supposed to work like this.

"Brace yourselves!" the pilot shouted. "Belts on, everybody! I'm putting it down. I think that's a field up ahead there-hope like hell it is, anyway. Anybody gets out, let Beckie know I love her."

One of the engines died just before the Alligator met the ground-that was one hell of a leak, all right. The transport was built to take it and built to land on rough airstrips-but coming down in a tobacco field with no landing lights was more than anybody could reasonably expect.

But it got down. It landed hard, hard enough to make Jake bite the devil out of his tongue. One tire blew. The Alligator slewed sideways. A wingtip dug into the ground. The transport tried to flip over. The wing broke off instead. The fire started then.

"Out!" the pilot screamed. "Out now!" The airplane hadn't stopped moving, but nobody argued with him. Jake was the second man out the door. He had to jump down to the ground, and turned an ankle when he hit. Swearing savagely, he limped away.

"Fuck!" he said in amazement. "I'm alive!"

C larence Potter wondered how many nasty ways he could almost die. This blaze was a lot smaller than the radioactive fire he'd touched off in Philadelphia, but it was plenty big enough to give a man an awful fore-taste of hell before it finally killed him. To the poor chump roasting, how could any fire be bigger than that?

He heard Jake Featherston's obscene astonishment from not far away. It summed up how he felt, too. He'd scrambled away from the burning Alligator right after the President of the CSA. Was everybody out? He looked at the pyre that had been a transport. Anybody who wasn't out now never would make it, that was for damn sure.

"Where the hell are we?" Ferdinand Koenig's deep voice came from over to the right.

"Somewhere in Georgia-I can't tell you anything else." That was the pilot. Nobody would have to deliver his message to Beckie…yet.

But they weren't free and clear, not by a long shot. "Let's get out of here," Potter said. "This field will be swarming with Yankees in nothing flat."

Some of the Confederate big shots weren't going anywhere. "I think my leg is busted," said the general who'd replaced Nathan Bedford Forrest III as chief of the General Staff. Potter couldn't remember his name; as far as Potter was concerned, the officer wasn't worth remembering. "I'm not going anywhere quick."

"You can surrender, Willard. Don't reckon they're shooting soldiers-only politicians," Jake Featherston said. "Just don't tell 'em I'm around."

"I wouldn't do that, sir," Willard said. First name or last? Potter wondered. Hell, it didn't matter to anybody but Willard any more.

"General Potter is right," Saul Goldman said. Potter blinked. He hadn't even known the Director of Communications got on the Alligator. Goldman was so quiet and self-effacing, he could disappear in plain sight.

Lulu was hurt, too, hurt badly. "I don't want the Yankees to get me, Mr. President," she told Jake. "Will you please shoot me and put me out of my misery?"

"I don't want to do that!" Featherston exclaimed.

"Please," Lulu said. "I can't go on. It's the last thing you can do for me, since…Oh, never mind. You didn't care about that, not with me."

She knew what she was talking about. Jake had put it more pungently the afternoon before, but it amounted to the same thing. The President of the CSA muttered to himself. He started to turn away, then turned back. Potter had rarely seen him indecisive-wrong often, sometimes disastrously so, but hardly ever at a loss. "Christ," he said under his breath.

"Hurry," Lulu said. "You can't stay here."

Potter hadn't imagined he would find Lulu agreeing with him, either. "Christ," Jake said again, a little louder this time. Then he yanked the.45 out of the holster he always wore. He fired, and whispered, "Sorry, Lulu," as he did. "Come on!" Now he almost shouted. "Let's get the fuck away from here."

They stumbled and limped through the field. The only light came from the burning Alligator, and they were trying to put it behind them as fast as they could. "That must have been hard, sir," Potter said after a while: cold comfort, he realized as soon as he spoke, if any at all.

"Feels like I just shot my own luck," Featherston answered, his voice rough with-tears? "That make any sense at all to you?"

"Sense? No," Potter answered. As the President glared at him, he added, "I understand what you mean, though. Let's hope you're wrong, that's all."

"Yeah. Let's." Jake's voice stayed harsh. "You know what? You're liable to be our ace in the hole. We do run into damnyankees, you can talk for us, make 'em think we're on their side."

"I hope I can, anyhow," Potter said. He'd done it up in the USA. If he couldn't do it again-they were up the well-known creek, that was all. "I hope I don't have to. I hope there aren't any Yankees within miles."

"That'd be nice." Featherston didn't sound as if he believed it was likely. Since Potter didn't, either, he would have let it rest there. But Featherston went on, "Best thing we can do is get into some town the Yankees didn't bother garrisoning. We borrow a couple of motorcars from loyal people, we can head west… Wish to hell I knew just where we were at."

Potter did. They were in trouble, that was where. Jake Featherston yelled for the pilot and asked him. "Somewhere east of Atlanta-can't tell you closer," he replied. "I was going to fly south a little while longer, then swing west. That's about as good as I can do right now. Beg your pardon, sir, but I'm fuckin' surprised I'm in one piece."

"You did good, son," Jake said-he was never shy about patting small fry on the back. That was probably one of the things that had helped him rise and kept him on top. "Yeah, you did good. So where's a town?"

"Let's find a road," Potter said. "Sooner or later, a road's got to take us into a town." He didn't say what kind of town a road would take them into. They just had to trust to luck on that. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than Featherston's mournful comment followed it.

He found the road by the simple expedient of stepping down into it. He came closer to hurting himself then, than he had in the Alligator's crash-landing. "Which way?" Ferdinand Koenig asked. North or south, east or west? was supposed to follow that question, but Potter had no idea which direction was which. Evidently, neither did anyone else.

But there was the moon, a thin waning crescent, so that had to be the east. Which meant the North Star should be about…there. And there it was, with the rest of the Little Dipper curling from it.

Jake Featherston worked it out at the same time as Potter did. "This way," he said, pointing. "We'll keep on heading south, see what the hell happens." He'd most likely spent more time in the field than anybody else here. He would be able to figure out which way was which as soon as he set his mind to it.

Down the road they went, a ragged squad, some hale enough, others limping. Most of them had pistols; one officer carried an automatic Tredegar. If Yankee soldiers came on them, they wouldn't last long. Potter understood that perfectly well. He wondered how many of the others did.

He also wondered how long they could keep going. Sooner or later, their minor injuries would catch up to them. And more than a few of them were, to put it politely, not men accustomed to taking much exercise. Ferd Koenig, in particular, resembled nothing so much as a suet pudding in a gray Freedom Party uniform.

Potter realized they should have changed into civilian clothes before they got on the Alligator. Too late to worry about that now. Too late to worry about lots of things now. Would I be here if I'd managed to shoot Jake at the Olympics? No, of course he wouldn't; the President's bodyguards would have gunned him down. But maybe the country wouldn't have been in the mess it was in.

Or maybe it would have-how could you tell? The Vice President in those days hadn't been an amiable nonentity like Don Partridge. Willy Knight of the Redemption League wanted to do a lot of the same things Jake Featherston did. The only reason he didn't get a chance was that the Freedom Party grew bigger faster. A couple of years later, he came close to assassinating Jake himself.

And close counted in…? Horseshoes and hand grenades, was the soldiers' joke. Knight disappeared off the face of the earth after that. Potter supposed he'd died in one camp or another. Or maybe he just got summarily killed and dumped in the James. Any which way, he was gone.

"Can we get away?" somebody asked.

"Believe it," Jake Featherston said instantly. "If you believe it, you can do it. That's what life's all about. Believe it hard enough, work for it with everything you've got, and you'll get it. Look at me."

He was right-and he was wrong. He'd climbed from nowhere to the top of the heap in the CSA. He'd run the country for ten years. And now the Confederate States of America-are getting it, all right, Clarence Potter thought. Nice to know I can still make stupid jokes at a time like this.

Off in the distance, like the roar of faraway lions, he heard the rumble of truck motors. They neared far faster than lions would have, and they were likely to be far more dangerous. "Hit the dirt!" Potter sang out.

The Confederate dignitaries scrambled off to the side of the road and hid behind bushes and in ditches. It would have been funny if it weren't so grim. This was what the Confederate States of America had come down to: a dozen or so frightened men hiding so the damnyankees wouldn't catch them.

One after another, the heavy trucks pounded past. Exhaust stank in Potter's nostrils. He got a glimpse of soldiers in green-gray in the rear compartments and heard a couple of windswept snatches of bad language in U.S. accents. Then, after a few seconds that were among the longest of his life, the last deuce-and-a-half was gone.

"God damn them, they'll find Willard, and that'll spill the shit in the soup," Jake Featherston said. Potter wouldn't have put it the same way, which didn't mean he disagreed with the President. Jake went on, "We got to make it to a town quick, grab us some autos, and get the fuck out of here." That also seemed like good advice.

"Let's get moving," the pilot said. He was younger than just about everybody else there-and also the man the Yankees were least likely to shoot out of hand if things went wrong.

Move they did. Fifteen minutes later, they all hid and flattened out as more trucks growled up the road. These machines had an ambulance with them, which likely meant the Yankees had indeed found the head of the C.S. General Staff. Would they rough Willard up? Would he keep quiet if they did? Next episode of the serial, Potter thought.

He began to pant. His feet started hurting-he was wearing dress shoes, not marching boots. The sky lightened in the east. "Where the hell's that town?" somebody said, voice numb with fatigue. "Feels like we've been going down this goddamn road forever."

"Couldn't have said it better myself," Potter said. He was definitely getting a blister on his left heel. If it worsened, he wouldn't be able to keep up. The damnyankees would catch him-and, he suspected, that would be that in short order.

Featherston pointed. "Sign up ahead." Half an hour earlier, they wouldn't have seen it till they were right on top of it.

Potter, with his weak eyes, would have been one of the last men to be able to read it. Somebody called out the name of the town on the sign and said it was a mile and a half off, so he didn't have to.

"Where the hell are we?" Ferd Koenig demanded-the name meant as little to him as it did to Potter.

"Smack in the middle of Georgia," Jake answered confidently. Did he carry a map of the CSA in his mind detailed enough to include a nowhere of a place like this one? Potter wouldn't have been surprised. Jake knew all kinds of strange things, and remembered almost everything he heard. That wasn't the problem. The problem was, he'd come up with too many wrong answers from what he knew-or maybe, if you went and aimed the CSA at the USA, there weren't any right ones.

C assius yawned. He hadn't been on patrol all that long, but the antiaircraft fire woke him up ahead of when he would have had to crawl out of the sack anyway. He wondered what the hell was going on. The Confederates hadn't sent any airplanes over Madison for quite a while.

He yawned again and shook his head. For all he knew, somebody'd got a wild hair up his ass and started shooting at a Yankee airplane, or maybe at something imaginary. You never could tell with something like that.

"Anything goin' on?" he asked Gracchus when he replaced the other Negro at the north end of town.

"More guns an' tracers an' shit than you can shake a stick at," the older man replied.

"I knew that," Cassius said. "Got me up early. See a real airplane, though?"

"Not me," Gracchus said. "Somethin' funny goin' on, though. They wouldn't've sent out so many sojers in trucks if there wasn't."

"Soldiers?" Cassius echoed. Gracchus nodded. "Huh," Cassius said. "Bet you're right, then. They got somethin', all right, or they think they do."

"I know what I's gonna get me." Gracchus yawned till his jaw seemed ready to fall off. "Gonna get me some shut-eye, is what. You kin march around the nex' few hours an' earn your vittles. I's gone." He patted Cassius on the back and headed off toward the Negro guerrillas'-the Negro auxiliaries', now-camp.

All mine, Cassius thought, and then, Hot damn. By now, the whites in Madison were pretty well cowed. They hadn't given any real trouble for several weeks.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind when he heard somebody's voice in the distance, floating through the clear, quiet early morning air. He started to bark out a challenge-it was still before the Yankees' curfew lifted. Then he looked north along the highway that led down from Athens. Damned if at least a dozen ofays weren't heading his way.

The rosy light of dawn showed them well enough. Cassius didn't think they could see him: he stood in the deep shadow of some roadside pines. He scurried behind one of them. Challenging that many men when he was by himself didn't seem like a good idea. Maybe they were Yankees, in which case a challenge would be pointless. If they weren't, they were trouble. That many Confederates wouldn't be running around together at daybreak unless they were trouble.

He waited and watched as they got closer. He almost relaxed-they were in uniform, and who but U.S. soldiers would be in uniform around here? But then he saw that the uniforms were gray and butternut, not green-gray. He wanted to scratch his head, but he stood very still instead. Whoever these people were, he didn't want them spotting him. One of them carried a better rifle than his, and almost all of them had holsters on their belts.

"Come on, goddammit," a rangy, middle-aged man up near the front of the pack said loudly. "We're almost there."

That voice…Cassius knew it instantly. Anyone in the CSA would have. Anyone black in the CSA would have reacted as he did. The Tredegar leaped to his shoulder. He could almost fire over open sights-the range couldn't have been more than a hundred yards. He'd never aimed so carefully in all his life. Take a breath. Let it out. Press the trigger-don't squeeze.

"Get us some motorcars, and-" the rangy man went on as the rifle roared and bucked against Cassius' shoulder. The bullet caught the fellow right in the middle of the chest. He got his left foot off the ground for one more step, but he never finished it. He crumpled and fell instead.

Cassius worked the bolt and fired again, as fast as he could. Jake Featherston jerked before his face hit the asphalt. While he was lying there, Cassius put another bullet into him. This one made red bits spurt from his head. Cassius chambered one more round. When you were shooting a snake, you didn't know for sure what it took to kill him.

One of the men in butternut knelt by the President of the CSA. The just-risen sun shone from his spectacles and their steel frames. He leaned toward Jake Featherston. Cassius could easily have shot him, too, but waited instead to see what happened next. The bespectacled man started to feel for Featherston's wrist, then shook his head, as if to say, What's the use? When he rose, he seemed suddenly old.

The rest of the Confederates might have turned to wax melting in the sun, too. When Cassius saw they slumped and sagged, he began to believe Jake Featherston was dead-began to believe he'd killed him. Were the tears in his eyes joy or sorrow or both at once? Afterwards, he never knew.

"Y'all surrender!" he shouted blurrily, and fired another shot over the Confederates' heads.

As if on cue, Gracchus ran up the road from Madison. Four or five white men in green-gray pounded after the Negro. One by one, the Confederates standing in the roadway raised their hands above their heads. The officer with the automatic Tredegar carefully set it on the tarmac before he lifted his.

Only then did Cassius step out from behind the tree. Gracchus skidded to a stop beside him. "Who is them ofay shitheads?" the guerrilla chief panted.

"Dunno. Big-ass ol' Confederates, that's all I kin tell you," Cassius said. "But I just shot me Jake motherfucking Featherston. That's him on the ground there, an' he's dead as shoe leather."

"No," Gracchus whispered. The U.S. soldiers heard Cassius, too. They stared north toward the knot of Confederates and the corpse in the road. Then they stared at Cassius.

"Kid, I'd give my left nut to do what you just done," one of them said.

"My right nut," said another.

"Do you know how famous you just got?" a third one added.

"It doesn't matter," Cassius said. "He killed my whole family, the son of a bitch. Shooting's too good for him, but it's all I could do. I heard his voice, and I knew who it was, and then-bang!"

Gracchus set a hand on his shoulder. "You got that, anyways. Rest of us, we don't got nothin'. He done kilt all our famblies. But you kilt him? You really an' truly did?" His voice was soft with wonder.

"I sure did." Cassius sounded amazed, too, even to himself. "Now I want to see him dead."

He walked forward, his rifle still at the ready in case any of the men ahead tried something. He had only one round left in the clip, but he wasn't too worried about that, not with Gracchus and those U.S. soldiers to back him up.

Flies were already starting to buzz above the blood pooling around the corpse in the roadway. Cassius stirred the body with his foot. Jake Featherston's lean, hungry face stared sightlessly up to the sky. A fly landed on his cheek. It crawled over to the rill of blood that ran from the corner of his open mouth and began to feed.

"Well, you did it. You just sank the Confederate States of America." The officer with glasses talked like a Yankee. But he wore a C.S. uniform with, Cassius saw, a general's wreathed stars on his collar. He took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes with his tunic sleeve. "Jake Featherston was a son of a bitch, but he was a great son of a bitch-and you killed him."

He looked as if he wanted to say more. Telling off somebody with a Tredegar was never a good idea, though.

Another man, a heavy fellow in a gray Party uniform, figured that out, too. He said, "Who would've reckoned a…colored kid could do in the President?" The pause meant he'd almost said nigger, or more likely goddamn nigger, but he swallowed anything like that before it got out.

"Who the hell are you people, anyway?" one of the U.S. soldiers-a sergeant-demanded.

"Ferdinand Koenig, Attorney General, CSA," the heavy man answered. Cassius almost shot him, too. Koenig ran the camps. He was Jake Featherston's enforcer. But shooting anybody with his hands up wasn't so easy.

"Clarence Potter, brigadier general, CSA," said the man with glasses.

"Christ!" the sergeant in green-gray said. "You're on our list! You're the asshole who blew up Philly!"

"You know that?" Potter blinked, then actually bowed. "Always an honor to be recognized," he said. Cassius found himself surprised into admiration. Potter had style, in a cold-blooded way.

The other Confederates gave their names and ranks. The only one Cassius had heard of was Saul Goldman, whom he thought of as the Confederacy's chief liar. But the rest were all big shots, too, except for a young captain with a pilot's wings on the right breast pocket of his tunic.

"Do Jesus!" Gracchus said. "There here's 'bout what's left o' the Confederate gummint, ain't it?"

"Where's what's-his-name? The Vice President?" The U.S. sergeant snapped his fingers. "Partridge in a pear tree-him?"

Even with their cause in ruins and themselves in captivity, several of the Confederates smiled at that. A couple of them even laughed. "The Vice President isn't with us," General Potter said. "If you look under a flat rock, you'll find a lizard or a salamander or something. It's bound to be just as smart as Don."

"Jesus, Potter, show a little respect," Ferd Koenig said. "He's President now, wherever he is."

"Only proves we're screwed, if you ask me," Potter said calmly.

Three command cars rumbled up from Madison: probably called by wireless. Their machine guns added to the U.S. firepower. A photographer jumped out of one of them. "Godalmightydamn," he said, aiming his camera at the corpse in the road. "That really is the motherfucker, ain't it?" He took several pictures, then looked up. "Who punched his ticket for him?"

Gracchus gave Cassius a little shove. "This fella right here."

A flashbulb went off in Cassius' face. He saw green and purple spots. "Way to go, sonny. You just turned famous, know that? What's your name, anyway?"

"Cassius," he answered. Now two people, both white, had thrown fame in his face. "I'm Cassius. I don't care nothin' about famous. Only thing I care about is, that bastard's dead an' gone."

"You may not care about famous, buddy, but famous is gonna care about you," the photographer predicted. "Bet your ass it will. You're gonna be the most famous smoke in the whole goddamn US of A."

Smoke wasn't exactly an endearment, but Cassius was too dazed to get very upset about it. More command cars and a halftrack came up the road. Some of the people who got out were soldiers. Others were reporters. When they found out Cassius had shot Jake Featherston, they all tried to interview him at once. They shouted so many questions, he couldn't make sense of any of them.

Some of the reporters started grilling the captured Confederates, too. The prisoners didn't want to talk, which seemed to upset the gentlemen of the press.

Cassius kept looking at the body every so often. I did that, he told himself. I really did.

"Don't pay these mouthy fools no mind," Gracchus advised him. "You don't got to say nothin' to 'em if you don't care to. You done somethin' instead."

It wasn't enough. If Cassius could have killed Jake Featherston five million or six million or eight million times, it might have come close to being enough. But he'd done all he could do. He made himself nod. "Yeah," he said.

N ot far outside of Pineville, North Carolina, Irving Morrell stood up in the cupola of his barrel for what he hoped was the last time in the war. Sweat ran down his face. He was glad to escape the iron oven in which he'd ridden north. The cease-fire continued to hold. With a little luck, it would soon turn into something more like a real peace.

A monument of piled stone, two or three times as tall as a man, marked the place where James Polk had been born. Since Polk was President of the United States before they split into two countries, this seemed a good place for the representatives of those two countries to meet.

Close to the monument stood what could only have been a Negro sharecropper's cabin. It was empty now, windows broken, door hanging half open. If meeting at Polk's birthplace symbolized something, that deserted cabin meant something else altogether. Where were the blacks who'd called it home? Anywhere on this earth? Morrell doubted it.

The sergeant in charge of another U.S. barrel peered up the road toward Charlotte with field glasses. He waved to Morrell. "Here they come, sir!"

"Thanks," Morrell said.

A moment later, his own Mark One eyeball picked up the approaching autos. As they got closer, he saw that the Confederates were scrupulously abiding by the terms of the cease-fire agreement. All three motorcars were unarmed. The first flew a large white flag from its wireless aerial. So did the third. The middle auto had two aerials. One flew the Stars and Bars, the other the flag of the President of the Confederate States.

Morrell's barrel was flying the Stars and Stripes from its antenna. That guided the Confederates to the proper machine. He could have blown them to hell and gone. Even now, when they were giving up, the temptation was very real. Instead, he climbed down from the barrel as the Confederate motorcars stopped under his guns.

A Confederate officer-a general, Morrell saw-got out of the lead motorcar. He walked up to Morrell and saluted stiffly. "Good day, sir," he said. "I recognize you from many photographs. My name is Northcote, Cyril Northcote. After the, ah, recent unfortunate events, I have the dubious privilege of being the senior General Staff officer not in captivity."

Morrell returned the salute. "Pleased to meet you, General Northcote."

"Meaning no disrespect to you, sir, but I'm afraid I can't say the same," Northcote answered bleakly.

"Well, General, under the circumstances, I don't see how I can take offense at that," Morrell said.

"Yes. Under the circumstances." Northcote spoke as if each word pained him. The door to the middle C.S. motorcar opened. A young-looking blond man in a sharp gray civilian suit came out. General Northcote waved to him and he came forward, his perfectly shined shoes flashing in the bright sun. Machinelike, Northcote said, "General Morrell, it is my duty to present to you the President of the CSA, Mr. Don Partridge. Mr. President, this is U.S. General Irving Morrell."

"Mr. President," Morrell said formally. He did not offer to shake President Partridge's hand-he was under orders from Philadelphia to do no such thing.

Partridge's hand did start to rise, but fell back like a dead thing when he realized no handshake would be forthcoming. Close up, his round face didn't just look young. It looked boyish, as if none of the past three years of struggle had registered with him or on him at all. How was that possible? Morrell didn't know, but it seemed to be.

"General," Partridge said, and managed a nod.

Morrell nodded back; he had no orders against that. "Mr. President, you have come here under the terms of the cease-fire now in place to agree to the unconditional surrender of all forces still under command of the Confederate States of America. Is that correct?" He sounded like a man speaking from a script, and he was.

President Partridge had to work to manage another nod. "Yes. That's right." He sounded surprised and hurt, as if wondering how fate-and Morrell-could do such a thing to him.

"All right, then. I have the terms of the surrender here." Morrell took two copies of the document from his left breast pocket and unfolded them. "I would like to go over them with you before you sign so no one can say afterwards that there was any misunderstanding. Is that agreeable to you, sir?"

"Have I got a choice?" Don Partridge sounded bleak, too.

"Only going on with the war," Morrell answered.

"Then I haven't got a choice." Partridge sighed. "Go ahead, General. We can't fight any more, or I wouldn't be here."

Morrell thought that had been true ever since Savannah fell, if not since Atlanta did. But Jake Featherston kept the Confederacy going months longer than anybody would have imagined, and what he did to Philadelphia…He may have killed me yet, even if it takes years. Well, it was over now, thank God.

"All right. Here we go-Article One says you surrender unconditionally to the United States all forces on land, at sea, and in the air who are at this date under Confederate control," Morrell said.

Don Partridge nodded. "That's what I'm here for." Under his breath, he added what sounded like, "Goddammit." Morrell pretended not to notice.

"Article Two says your high command will immediately order all Confederate authorities and forces to cease operations on Thursday, July 14, 1944, at 1801 hours Eastern Summer Time: today at a minute past six," the U.S. general went on. "Your forces will hold in place. They will hand over weapons and equipment to U.S. local commanders. No ship or aircraft is to be scuttled or damaged. Machinery, armaments, and apparatus are to be turned over undamaged. This specifically includes your superbomb works in Lexington. Is that plain enough for you?"

"I understand you," Partridge said. "We won't do any damage to them. Your bombers have already done plenty, though."

"Make sure you don't use that as an excuse for any sabotage there," Morrell warned. "My government is very, very serious about that. If your people get cute, they'll be sorry."

"They're already sorry," the President of the CSA said. "We'll go along."

"You'd better. Now-Article Three. At that same time-6:01 today-all your camps killing Negroes are to cease operations," Morrell said. "Camp authorities are to make every effort to feed their inmates. U.S. supply convoys will reach them as soon as possible. Camp personnel will surrender to the first U.S. officers who arrive. Anyone who flees instead of surrendering will be liable to summary execution-we'll shoot the bastards on sight. Have you got that?"

"I've got it," Don Partridge answered. "Some of them will likely take their chances anyway."

He was bound to be right there. Even so, Morrell went on, "That brings us to Article Four. Your high command will at once issue orders to the appropriate commanders that they obey any commands issued by the U.S. War Department and carry them out without argument or comment. All communications will be in plain language-no codes."

"Agreed." By the way he spat it out, the word seemed to taste bad in Partridge's mouth.

"Good." Again, Morrell left the new and unhappy Confederate President what little pride he could. "Article Five says that a final political settlement may supersede this surrender."

That got him a glare. "When you decide how you want to carve us up, you'll go ahead and do it, you mean," Partridge said.

Yes, Morrell thought. Aloud, he said, "Sir, I'm only a soldier. I don't have anything to do with that." Yeah, I'll pass the buck. "Article Six now. If your high command or any forces under your control fail to act in accordance with this surrender, the War Department will take whatever punitive or other action it deems appropriate. If you disobey or fail to comply, we will deal with you in accordance with the laws and usages of war."

"You won. We lost. You'll do whatever you damn well please," Don Partridge said.

"That's about the size of it, sir," Morrell agreed. "And if there's any doubt or dispute about what these terms mean, the decision of the United States will be final." He handed Partridge both copies of the instrument of surrender. "Have you got a pen?"

"Yes." Partridge took one from an inside pocket. He read the terms to make sure they said what Morrell claimed they did. Maybe he wasn't so dumb as people in the USA thought. Maybe he'd been playing possum to make sure Jake Featherston didn't do unto him as he'd done unto Willy Knight. Chances were it wouldn't matter now one way or the other. Biting his lip, Partridge signed. He thrust one copy back at Morrell. "Here."

"Thank you." Morrell tried to stay what the diplomats called correct. We hate each other, but we don't let it show. "Do you have wireless equipment to let you relay the news of the surrender to your commanders so they can issue the appropriate orders? You are welcome to use U.S. equipment if you don't."

"I do, thank you very much," Partridge replied. So there, Morrell thought. The President of the CSA went back to his motorcar. Morrell watched him talk into a microphone in there.

Morrell made small talk with General Northcote till Partridge got out again. Then he asked, "All taken care of?"

Don Partridge nodded. "Yes. You will have full cooperation from all our officials. And now, if you will excuse me, I'd like to get back up to Charlotte and do what I can to keep things running."

"Um-I'm afraid not," Morrell said.

"Pardon me?" Partridge raised a pale eyebrow.

"I'm afraid not," Morrell repeated, more firmly this time. "You have surrendered-the Confederate States have surrendered-unconditionally. There is no Confederate government right now, sir. There isn't anything, not till the United States say there is."

"What does that make me, then?" President Partridge demanded.

"My prisoner, sir," Morrell answered.

He'd captured a swarm of prisoners in the course of two wars. He'd never had one cuss him out with the virtuoso splendor Don Partridge showed. Partridge must have listened to his boss a lot; by all accounts, Jake Featherston could swear like a muleskinner. Morrell let Partridge have his say. Why not? In the end, it made no difference. The USA had the firepower, and the CSA didn't.

"At a minute past six tonight, Mr. President, it's all over," Morrell said when Partridge finally ran down. "They'll remember you as the man who made peace."

"They'll remember me as the man who threw in the sponge," Partridge said. "Or else they won't remember me at all." Considering how little he'd done up till now, Morrell reflected, he might well be right.

T he Confederates in front of Lavochkin's Looters weren't giving up without a fight. They kept firing even after word came that the Confederacy was giving up. Chester Martin stayed deep in his muddy foxhole. He was damned if he wanted to get hurt when it didn't mean a thing. He just looked at his watch every now and then and waited for 6:01 to roll around.

Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin still gave the impression of eating too much raw meat. "If those assholes fire even one shot-even one-after surrender time, we're going to roll on over them and clean them out!" he shouted.

We? You and your tapeworm? Martin wondered. Didn't the lieutenant know he was the only one who still felt like fighting? Maybe he didn't, because he went right on yelling. But if he wanted to charge the C.S. position at 6:02, he'd do it by himself. Martin would have bet everything he owned on that.

The second hand spun round and round. The minute and hour hands didn't seem to want to move, but they did. And when 6:01 came, Chester Martin lit a Raleigh and blew out a grateful cloud of smoke. "Son of a bitch!" he said. "I made it."

He still didn't straighten up or show himself. For all he knew, his watch was a couple of minutes fast. Then he heard a picket call, "Goddamn-they're coming out!" The man sounded awed, not blasphemous.

Chester decided he could look out. Men in butternut were coming through the bushes, their hands high, their eyes either empty or else burning with hate. "Well, you've got us," one of them said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice off to the side. "And a hell of a git you've got."

He had a point. The Confederates were scrawny and filthy and ragged. Quite a few of them were walking wounded. They looked more like hoboes in uniform than soldiers. But they could fight. Through two wars, Chester had never found any reason to doubt that.

"Give 'em rations, boys," Captain Rhodes called. "It's all over now." Lieutenant Lavochkin, Chester was sure, would never have said any such thing.

Once you got up into your fifties, you didn't scramble out of a foxhole. You emerged with dignity. Coming into the open with the enemy in sight seemed dangerous, wrong, unnatural. Chester remembered that from 1917, too.

He caught the eye of the closest Confederate soldier-a kid who couldn't have been more than sixteen. "Want some chow?" he asked.

"Much obliged," the youngster answered. Martin tossed him a can. As he caught it, he said, "What'll y'all do with us now?"

"Beats me," Chester said. "Make sure we've got all your weapons, I bet-we have to take care of that. Then? Who knows? Somebody up top'll tell us, and we'll do it, whatever it turns out to be."

"You did this before, didn't you? You coulda fought against my pa, too," the young Confederate said as he used the key to get the lid off the can.

"Yeah, well, we had to lick you people twice." Chester wondered whether the kid even heard him. He was shoveling canned beef stew-which tasted like tire tread in mud gravy-into his mouth with his dirty fingers. It wasn't one of the better U.S. rations, but the new POW didn't care.

Not far away, Captain Rhodes was talking with a Confederate sergeant with a beer belly and gray stubble. The guy could have been a defeated butternut version of Martin himself-he was plainly a retread. "Take me to your demolitions people," Rhodes was saying. "We want to make sure we get your explosives under control."

"Well, I'll do it, but we don't have a hell of a lot of that stuff left," the veteran noncom said.

"Cut the shit, Charlie," Rhodes told him, which was almost exactly the thought going through Chester's mind. "You figure you're gonna squirrel that crap away for people bombs and auto bombs and toys like that? You better think twice, that's all I've got to say. We will take hostages-lots of 'em. We'll shoot 'em, too. If there's not a white man left alive from Richmond to Key West, nobody in the USA's gonna shed a tear. You can take that to the bank."

The sergeant glared at him with undisguised loathing. "I believe you. You damnyankees are all a bunch of nigger-lovers."

"I know one nigger I love right now-the kid who shot Jake Featherston," Captain Rhodes answered. "Get it straight, Sergeant. Your government's surrendered. If it hadn't, how long did you have to live? A couple of days, maybe-not much more. After that, we would've flattened you like a steamroller. If you fuck with us now, we will anyway. And you know what else? We'll enjoy doing it, too."

Chester stared. No, that wasn't Boris Lavochkin with an extra bar on each shoulder strap. Captain Rhodes was usually a pretty mild fellow. Usually, yeah, but not always. He meant every word of this.

And the C.S. sergeant knew it, too. "Well, come on, then," he said. "I'll take you to 'em. Just don't blame me if they ain't got everything you want."

"I'll blame somebody-that's for damn sure." Rhodes looked around. His eye lit on Chester. "Gather up a squad, Sergeant, and come along. We may need to do some persuading here."

"Sure will, sir." Martin rounded up a dozen men, just about all of them with automatic weapons instead of Springfields. They followed Captain Rhodes behind what had been the enemy line.

That was scary, especially with the sun sinking in the west. If somebody hadn't got the word or just didn't give a damn…Chester was sure there would be little spasms of fighting for days. He didn't want to get stuck in one, that was all. And he didn't want them to turn into a full-scale rebellion against the U.S. occupiers. If they did, the USA really might have to kill piles and piles of Confederate hostages. He didn't look forward to that. No matter what Captain Rhodes said, he didn't think it would be fun.

Not all the Confederate soldiers had put down their arms yet. The men in butternut scowled at the men in green-gray. Nobody did more than scowl, though. The enemy troops had to know about the surrender, even if they didn't like it.

"If we were as big as the United States, we would've whipped y'all," a corporal said.

"If pigs had wings, we'd all carry umbrellas," Chester answered. "You so-and-sos shot me twice. That's enough, goddammit. I don't want your kids trying to shoot my kid."

The U.S. soldiers walked past a battery of worn-looking 105s. Rhodes told off four or five men to take charge of the guns and their ammunition. "God only knows what a son of a bitch with an imagination can do with an artillery shell," he remarked. Chester could think of a few things, all of them unpleasant. He was sure real explosives people could come up with a lot more.

He chatted with the Confederate veteran, who turned out to have also fought on the Roanoke front in the Great War. "Yeah, that was pretty bad, all right," the other sergeant said. "I got hit twice-a bullet once, a shell fragment in the foot the other time."

"I got it once then and once this time around," Chester said. "Lucky, if you want to call it that. Shit, we both lived through two rounds, so we are lucky."

"Plenty who didn't-that's for damn sure." The Confederate pointed. "The people your captain's looking for are just ahead there."

As a matter of fact, they weren't-they'd bugged out. But they'd left their stock in trade behind in earthwork revetments roofed with planks and corrugated sheet iron. Captain Rhodes set a guard over the explosives and fuses and blasting caps. Shaking his head, he said, "How many setups like this are there all over the CSA? How many'll get emptied out before our guys show up? How much trouble is that gonna cost down the line?"

Lots. Quite a few. Quite a bit. Chester had no trouble finding answers for questions like that. He looked around. This wasn't good guerrilla country-too flat and too open. Other places, though…

Hearing them talking, an armed Confederate ambled up to see what was going on. His eyes widened. "Jesus!" he yipped. "You're damnyankees!"

Chester grinned at him. "Nothing gets by you, does it?"

He stopped grinning a second later, because the Confederate soldier aimed a submachine gun at his midsection. "Hold it right there! Y'all are my prisoners."

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Captain Rhodes said, though Chester noted that he kept his hands away from his.45. "Don't you know your side surrendered?"

"My ass!" the man in butternut said. "We'd never do anything like that."

"Go find some of your buddies," Chester said. "Talk to them. We aren't bullshitting you, man. How'd we get so far behind your line if we were just sneaking around?"

"Beats me." The enemy soldier gestured with the submachine gun. "You come with me. If you're lyin', you'll be sorry."

"However you want." Chester never argued with a man who could kill him. "Let's go. I won't even get mad after you find out what's what."

The other man turned out not even to know Jake Featherston was dead. He no more believed that than he believed his country had surrendered. And, no doubt to drive Chester crazy, they couldn't find anybody else in butternut. That veteran sergeant had disappeared-with luck to head for a POW camp, without it to go off and make trouble.

At last, just as the sun was setting, they found another Confederate soldier. To Chester's enormous relief, he had got the news. "'Fraid the Yankee's tellin' you the truth," he said to his countryman. "It's all over. We're licked."

"Son of a bitch bastard!" Chester's erstwhile captor said. "If that ain't the biggest crock o' crap…We weren't even losing."

"Hello-this is South Carolina. What am I doing here if you guys are winning?" Martin asked. The Confederate gaped at him as if that had never once crossed his mind. Chester got the idea not a whole lot of things had crossed the other fellow's mind. "Why don't you hand me that piece so my guys don't shoot you for having it?"

Reluctantly, the soldier in butternut gave him the submachine gun. Even more reluctantly, he raised his hands. "My pappy's gonna whup me when he finds out I quit," he said glumly.

"Not your fault," Chester said. "The whole CSA gave up."

"Pappy won't care," the soldier predicted. "He'll whup me any old way."

"Did he fight in the last war?" Chester asked.

"I hope to shit he did!"

"Then he gave up once himself. Tell him so."

"Like he'll listen. You don't know Pappy."

As far as Chester was concerned, that was just as well. "Let's go back to the explosives shed," he said. "I want my captain to know you found out we weren't pulling your leg."

"Still can't hardly believe it. And the President bought a plot?" The Confederate shook his head. "Holy fuckin' shit!"

He could cuss as much as he pleased. Chester had his weapon. He remembered the Navy guys who'd got torpedoed after the cease-fire in the Great War. Thank God he hadn't gone that way himself!

G eorge Enos, Jr., was thinking of his father as the Oregon steamed toward the surfaced Confederate submarine. That bastard of a sub skipper hadn't wanted to quit when the Great War ended, so he'd fired one last spread of torpedoes-and little George grew up without a man around.

This submersible was playing by the rules. It had surfaced and broadcast its position by wireless. Now it was flying a large blue flag in token of surrender. Men in dark gray uniforms stood on the conning tower and on the deck, though nobody went near the deck gun. Taking on a battlewagon with that little excuse for a weapon was closer to insane than anything else, but you never could tell.

A lieutenant with a bullhorn strode up to the Oregon's bow. "Ahoy, the Confederate sub!" he bawled. "Do you hear me?"

On the sub, a fellow in a dirty white officer's cap raised a loudhailer to his own lips. "I hear you," he answered. "What are your instructions?"

"Have you jettisoned your ammunition?"

"Yes," the Confederate answered.

"Have you removed the breechblock from your gun?"

"Done that, too."

"Are the pistols out of your torpedoes? Are the torpedoes rendered safe?"

"Yes. We've followed all the surrender orders." The enemy officer didn't sound happy about it.

"Do you have any mines aboard?" asked the lieutenant on the Oregon.

"No-not a one."

"All right. We are going to send an officer and a CPO to inspect your boat before we give you your sailing instructions for Baltimore. Stand by to receive a boarding party."

"Very well," the Confederate skipper said. "But if the surrender order didn't tell us we had to do exactly what you tell us, I would have something different to say to you."

"You would be trying to sink us, and we would be dropping depth charges on your head," the U.S. lieutenant said. "Things are what they are, though, not what you wish they were."

"And ain't that the sad and sorry truth?" the sub skipper said. "We will receive your boarders-we won't repel them." That made George think of pigtailed sailors with bandannas and cutlasses, and of clouds of black-powder smoke. No more, no more.

The officer who crossed to the submersible was barely old enough to shave. The chief might have been his father, as far as years went. George knew what would happen. The ensign would write up the inspection report, and the chief would tell him what to say.

They came back after a couple of hours. The ensign was nodding and grinning, but George kept his eyes on the CPO. When he saw that the senior rating seemed satisfied, he relaxed. Nobody on that sub would give the U.S. Navy any more trouble.

After talking with the ensign (and also glancing at the chief), the lieutenant picked up his bullhorn again. "You are cleared to proceed to Baltimore. Keep flying your blue flag by day, and show your navigation lights at night."

"Understood," the C.S. skipper said.

As if he hadn't spoken, the lieutenant went on, "Remain fully surfaced at all times. Report your position, course, and speed every eight hours. All wireless transmissions must be in plain language. A pilot will take you through the minefields. Obey any instructions you may receive from U.S. authorities."

"We'll do it," the Confederate replied. "Is there anything else, Mommy, or can we go out and play now?"

Several U.S. sailors snickered, George among them. The lieutenant went brick red. "No further instructions at this time," he choked out.

The C.S. skipper doffed his cap in sardonic salute, then disappeared down the hatch into the submarine. It moved off to the northwest, in the direction of Chesapeake Bay.

The lieutenant was still steaming. "If I ever run into that son of a bitch on dry land, I'll punch him in the nose," he ground out.

"Take an even strain," said the chief, who'd gone aboard the Confederate submarine. "We won. They lost. Let him talk as big as he wants-it doesn't change what really matters."

"No, but it makes me look like a jerk. All I was doing was making sure he understood the surrender terms. We don't want the kind of trouble we had the last time around."

"I should say we don't." The CPO looked this way and that till he spotted George. "Here's Enos. He knows more about that kind of shit than you and me put together. His old man was on the Ericsson, and his ma's the gal who went down to the CSA and plugged the skunk who put her on the bottom."

"Really?" The lieutenant, unlike the chief, didn't know George by sight. At a quick gesture from the CPO, George took half a step away from the twin 40mm mount. The lieutenant said, "You're Sylvia Enos' son?"

"Yes, sir." George was always pleased when somebody remembered his mother's first name.

"I read her book," the officer said. "It was one of the things that made me decide to join the Navy. I thought I ought to help do things right, so people like her didn't have to pick up guns and take care of it themselves."

"Yes, sir," George repeated, less enthusiastically this time. Whenever he thought about I Shot Roger Kimball, he couldn't help also thinking about the hard-drinking hack who did the actual writing. His mother should have known better than to have anything to do with Ernie except for the book. She should have, but she hadn't, and so she was dead, and so was he. And if Ernie hadn't shot himself, George would gladly have killed him.

The lieutenant seemed to run out of things to say, which might have been a relief for him and George both. "Well, carry on, Enos," he said, which was strictly line-of-duty. He hurried back toward the Oregon's towering bridge. George returned to the gun mount.

Some of the men on the gun crew already knew who he was and who his mother had been. Unlike the lieutenant, they also knew better than to make a fuss about it. "Officers," one of them said sympathetically.

"Yeah, well…" George spread his hands. "What can you do?"

"Jack diddly," the other sailor said. "Put up with 'em the best way you can. Try not to let 'em fuck you over too bad."

"They're like women," a shell-jerker said. "You can't live with 'em, and you can't live without 'em, neither."

"Nope." George shook his head. "If you could get pussy from officers, they'd be good for something. Way things are, too many of 'em are-"

"Good for nothing!" Three guys on the crew said the same thing at the same time. They grinned at one another, and at George. The banter about what officers would be like if they were equipped the way women were went on and on. It got louder and more hilarious and more obscene with each succeeding joke as each sailor tried to top the fellow who'd gone before him.

George's grin stretched wider and wider. It wasn't just that the guys were funny. Everybody was all loosey-goosey. Unless some Confederate diehard hadn't got the word, nobody would be shooting at the Oregon or bombing her or trying to torpedo her. They'd made it through the war.

"Now all we got to worry about is the crappy cooks in the galley," George said.

"See? They should be broads, too," one of the other guys put in. "Then they'd know what they were doin'."

"And if they did feed us somethin' shitty, they could really show us they was sorry," somebody else said. It went on from there.

They spotted another surfaced submarine later that day. This one flew the Union Jack, not a blue surrender flag like the Confederate boat. "I have no quarrel with you gentlemen," the captain called through a loudhailer, "but I will not go to one of your ports. I have received no such orders. We have an armistice with Germany and you, but we have not surrendered."

"We can blow you out of the water," warned the U.S. officer with whom he was parleying.

"No doubt," the British sub skipper replied politely. "But we have done nothing provocative, and have no intention of doing any such thing. Are you really so eager to put the war on the boil again?"

Muttering, the young U.S. officer got on the telephone to the bridge. He was muttering louder when he hung up. "You may proceed," he told the Royal Navy officer.

"Thanks ever so." The limey actually tipped his cap. "May we meet again-and not in our professional capacities."

"We ought to blow him up anyway," the U.S. officer growled-but not through the bullhorn.

Sailors in the British submarine were bound to be thinking the same thing about the Oregon. As long as the boat stayed surfaced and didn't aim either bow or stern at the battleship, George figured he wouldn't flabble. If the submarine dove…

It didn't, not till it was out of sight. George hoped the Oregon's Y-ranging set watched it even farther than that. Since no Klaxons hooted, he supposed everything stayed hunky-dory. Thinking about women officers was a lot more fun than worrying about getting sunk.

"I bet the limeys never do surrender, not the way the Confederates did," Wally Fodor said. The gun chief went on, "I bet they just bail out of the fight on the best terms they can, same as they did in the last war. Long as they got their navy in one piece, they're still a going concern."

"Till somebody drops a superbomb on their fleet, anyway," George said.

"Yeah, but the Kaiser's got to be sweating about how big Japan's getting. Hell, so do we," Fodor persisted. "The Japs don't have the superbomb yet, so England's the only one who can give 'em a hard time-unless we want to go through the Pacific one goddamn island at a time."

Nobody at the twin 40mm mount wanted anything like that. George, who'd already had a long tour in the Sandwich Islands, really didn't want anything like that. He'd paid all the dues against Japan he felt like paying.

"Tell you one thing," he said. "All this bullshitting is a lot better than sweating out bombs and torpedoes for real."

"Amen!" That went up from several sailors at once.

"We licked Jake Featherston, and the limeys look like they've had enough, anyway," George went on. "Pretty soon, we'll be able to get our old lives back again." Did he look forward to going after cod from T Wharf? He wasn't so sure about that, but coming home to Connie more often sounded mighty good.