In At the Death

IX

G eorgia. Now Alabama. Cincinnatus Driver didn't care where they sent him. That he could drive through states which didn't come close to bordering the USA shouted louder than any words that the Confederacy was cracking up.

Enemy wireless programs still denied the obvious. They promised vengeance on the United States and swore C.S. victory lay right around the corner. "Those bastards are so full of bullshit, no fuckin' wonder their eyes are brown," Hal Williamson said. He paused to drag on a cigarette. The smoke, like the battery-powered wireless set, was loot from a captured Confederate supply dump. The enemy had destroyed what he could, but he'd had to retreat too fast to get rid of everything.

"We will take our revenge on the damnyankees!" the announcer brayed. "Our rockets will drop from the skies and punish them as they only dream of punishing us! We will wipe their corrupt and filthy cities off the map one after another!"

Cincinnatus lit up a Raleigh of his own. "Turn him off," he said. "Screechin' like that'll ruin my digestion."

"I hear you," Williamson said, and turned the power knob till it clicked. The ranting Confederate broadcaster-he must have studied at the Jake Featherston school of drama-fell silent. Williamson made as if to throw a rock at the set. "Goddamn lying cocksucker."

"Yeah," Cincinnatus said, and hoped he was right. U.S. newscasters went on and on about the German bomb that leveled Petrograd. If the Germans could do something like that, could the Confederates match them? You didn't want to think so, but was it impossible?

Hal's thoughts ran along a different train track: "Besides, where'll the dickheads get their rockets once we're done with Huntsville?"

"Yeah!" This time, Cincinnatus sounded much happier. Everybody knew the enemy rockets came from there. If the Confederates couldn't throw their superbomb at the USA, what good would it do them?

And, even before Huntsville got overrun, it was catching holy hell. Battery upon battery of 105s pounded away at the town. Their muzzle flashes brightened the horizon from the north all the way around to the southeast. The deeper crump! of bursting bombs said U.S. airplanes came over Huntsville, too. How anybody could go on working while high explosives were knocking his city flat was beyond Cincinnatus. The Confederates seemed intent on trying, though.

Before the drivers settled down for the night, they cut cards to see who would stand sentry when. Cincinnatus got a three-hour shift right at the start. That was good news and bad mixed together. He would have to stay awake longer when he was hungrier for sleep than for a good steak. But when he did climb into the cabin of his truck and roll up in blankets, he wouldn't have his sleep interrupted…unless Confederate raiders hit.

And they might. He knew that too well, which was why he carried his submachine gun with the safety off. C.S. regulars were thin on the ground. Raiders, damn them, popped out of nowhere. Some were bypassed soldiers, others civilians with a chip on their shoulder. If they could throw a few grenades or stitch a burst of automatic-weapons fire through a truck park, the damage they did more than paid for itself even if they got scragged.

A lot of the time, they didn't. They disappeared into the darkness and were never seen again. "Bastards," Cincinnatus muttered. His leg hurt. So did his shoulder. They did a lot of the time, even though he took enough aspirins to give himself a perpetual sour stomach. Run out in front of a motorcar and you weren't the same again afterwards.

He prowled around the parked trucks, doing his best to move quietly. Not far away, he heard a sound like crazy screeching. He froze for a second before realizing it was a raccoon. Those unearthly noises could get you going.

His wristwatch had numbers and hands that glowed in the dark. When his stretch on patrol ended, he shook his replacement awake and curled up on the seat of his truck. Whatever happened from then till sunup happened without him.

Somebody had liberated a ham. Toasted over a fire, a thick slab of it was delicious, and beat the hell out of the canned scrambled eggs Cincinnatus also ate. The coffee tasted as if it was at least half chicory. He'd had blends like that when he lived in Covington. He was used to it; he even kind of liked it. Some of the white drivers grumbled.

Hal Williamson put things in perspective: "Shit, guys, it's better than no coffee at all." Nobody found any easy way to argue with that.

The drivers headed for the closest dump to load up with whatever the troops might need today (or whatever the quartermaster had, which wasn't always the same thing). Before they got there, a bird colonel in a command car waved them down. "You men have empty trucks, right?"

"Yeah? So?" the lead driver asked. Being technically a civilian, he could get away with things that would have put a soldier in the stockade. Cincinnatus was only two trucks behind, and could hear everything that went on between the driver and the officer.

That worthy didn't even blink at the near-insubordination. "So you're going to come with me instead of going wherever the hell you were going."

"We can't do that!" the lead driver exclaimed. "They'll have our heads."

"No, they won't," the colonel said. "Whatever you were doing, what I've got for you is more important. Unless you're on your way to pick up a bunch of those kraut superbombs, this trumps everything. And I will have your guts for garters if you fuck with me, buddy-I promise you that."

The lead driver considered, but not for long. "Colonel, you talked me into it," he said. Cincinnatus would have said the same thing; he didn't think the colonel was bluffing.

All the man said after that was, "Follow me." He got into the command car, nudged the driver, and took off. The truck convoy rumbled after him.

They headed straight for Huntsville-straight for the front, in other words. Cincinnatus began to wonder if the colonel wasn't one of those Confederate impostors who showed up every now and then. Even more than raiders, they caused trouble all out of proportion to their numbers. If this son of a bitch was leading a whole column of trucks into an ambush…

Cincinnatus glanced over to the submachine gun beside him. He had as many bullets as he could for the Confederates, and one more for himself afterwards. They wouldn't take him alive no matter what.

The command car pulled up in front of a nondescript factory building-or it would have been, except for the barbed-wire perimeter surrounding it. Soldiers stood at the doorway, soldiers in green-gray uniforms. Cincinnatus breathed a sigh of relief.

"Let them come out!" the colonel shouted. The soldiers waved and nodded. They threw the doors wide.

"Do Jesus!" Cincinnatus gasped. His next thought after an ambush had been that the USA might have overrun another camp where the Confederates got rid of their Negroes. He turned out to be wrong, but what he saw was just about as bad. He hadn't imagined anything could be.

The men who came shambling out were white. They wore striped uniforms, the way convicts had back when Cincinnatus was a kid. The trousers and shirts looked as if they were made for some much larger species. And so they had been-Cincinnatus didn't think any of these skeletons on legs weighed more than 120 pounds. Most of them weren't anywhere close to that. A powerful animal stench came from them.

"Do Jesus!" Cincinnatus said again. He was out of the truck and limping toward them before he thought about what he was doing. He had several ration cans in pouches on his belt. "Here!" he called, and tossed them to the closest captives.

He wasn't the only driver doing the same thing. Anyone who had enough himself-even someone who was only hungry-would have wanted to feed these bright-eyed walking skeletons.

But the food almost touched off a riot. The drivers didn't have enough with them to give everybody some. The starving men who didn't get any tried to steal from the ones who did. Finally, the U.S. guards had to break things up with rifle butts. "Hate to do it," one of them said. "It's like hitting your puppy 'cause he wants a bone. These guys can't help it-they're that hungry. But what can you do? Otherwise, we'll have an even bigger goddamn mess on our hands."

"You'll all get some soon!" the colonel shouted. "Honest to God, you will! That's what the trucks are here for-to take you to where there's food."

That turned the trick. The boneracks in stripes swarmed onto the trucks, which could hold many more of them than of human beings of ordinary dimensions. "Who are you poor bastards?" Cincinnatus asked.

"We're politicals," a scrawny man said, not without pride. "I'm a Whig. I was mayor of Fayetteville, Arkansas." He looked more like a disaster than a one-time public official. A weak breeze-never mind a strong one-would have knocked him over in a heap. "I didn't like the Freedom Party. Still don't, by God. And this is what it bought me."

"What were you doin' in there?" Cincinnatus asked. But the mayor of Fayetteville didn't hang around to chat. That might have cost him a place in a truck, and he wasn't about to take a chance.

One of the guards answered for him: "They were putting rockets together, that's what-the big mothers that go miles and miles. Featherston's fuckers figured they might as well work 'em to death as just shoot 'em."

"Oh," Cincinnatus said in a hollow voice. When the guard said work 'em to death, he wasn't kidding. Some of the men still coming out of the factory would plainly die before they got fed. The dreadful odor that accompanied them from the building said more than a few men were already dead in there.

And yet…What happened to these political prisoners was horrible, no doubt about it. But they still got to try to stay alive. Some of them might have staved off death since before the war began.

The Confederacy's Negroes never got even that much of a chance. They went into camps-and they didn't come out. The politicals who hated the Freedom Party still labored for the Confederate States. Negroes would have done the same…had anyone asked them to.

Nobody seemed to have. The Freedom Party and a lot of white Confederates wanted their Negroes dead-and they got what they wanted. As horrible as this was, it could have been worse. That was, perhaps, the scariest thought of all.

As Cincinnatus got back into the cab of his deuce-and-a-half, he also wondered whether that bird colonel would have made such a fuss if the rocket factory were full of Negro laborers. He shrugged; he couldn't be sure one way or the other. But if he had his doubts-well, who could blame him, considering all the things he'd seen, all the things he'd escaped?

None of which made the plight of the starving, stinking politicals who jammed the back of the truck anything less than dreadful. Yes, if they were black they would have been dead already. But they couldn't last long as things were. Cincinnatus put the truck in gear and drove them off toward whatever help the U.S. Army could give.

E ven with no more than a scratch force of guards, Camp Humble went right on doing what it was designed to do: reducing population. Jefferson Pinkard was proud of that. He was proud of the men he had left, and he was proud of the way he'd designed the camp. It was so smooth, it almost ran itself. You just didn't need a whole lot of guards to herd Negroes from the trains to the trucks and bathhouses, and then to chuck bodies into the crematoria. Everything went as smoothly as it did in any other well-run factory.

Every few weeks, the latest batch of Negro trusties who thought they'd dodged death by playing along discovered they'd made their last mistake. The only thing Jeff kept on being unhappy about was the ovens. The company that made them had come out a couple of times to try to get them to perform better, but without much luck. Pinkard's conclusion was that the contractor had sold him a bill of goods from the start. The greasy black smoke that belched from the stacks and the burnt-meat stench that went with it were part of the operation, and he couldn't do a thing about it.

Trains still brought Negroes to the camp, trains from Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Arkansas and Texas. He'd also had loads of blacks from Florida and Cuba arrive. The local authorities rounded up their Negroes and sent them to Houston or Galveston by ship. He'd heard reports that subs operating in the Gulf of Mexico had sunk some of those ships. That was funny, in a grim way: the damnyankees were doing some of the Confederacy's work for it.

The telephone on his desk rang. He scowled. Why couldn't people just leave him alone and let him take care of his job? It rang again. Scowling still, he picked it up. "Pinkard here," he rasped.

"This here's Lou Doggett, General," the mayor of Humble said. Pinkard wasn't a general; he had a Party rank instead. But he didn't argue. He'd been a PFC the last time around. If somebody wanted to call him General, he didn't mind a bit.

"What's up?" he asked now.

"Well, I'll tell you, General-the wind's blowing this way from your camp, and it's pretty bad," Doggett answered. "This ain't how you told me it was gonna be when you put that camp in."

"It ain't the way I thought it was gonna be, neither," Jeff answered. "But it's the way it is. I don't know what else I can tell you."

"If it don't get better pretty damn quick, I'm gonna talk to the Governor," the mayor warned.

Jeff Pinkard laughed. "Go right ahead. You do that. Be my guest. You reckon the Governor amounts to anything when you set him next to Ferd Koenig and Jake Featherston?"

To his surprise, the mayor of Humble answered, "Matter of fact, General, I sure do. Richmond's gone. Even if it wasn't, there's damnyankees in between here and there. What the hell can Koenig and Featherston do way out here?"

He might be right. A nasty chill of fear ran through Pinkard when he realized as much. Like any government, the Confederacy ran because people agreed it ought to. What happened if they stopped agreeing? What happened if Texas Rangers came out here with guns? How could you know ahead of time?

"Let me ask you a question, your Honor," Pinkard said heavily. "Who went down on his knees beggin' for me to put this here camp where it's at? Who damn near jizzed in his dungarees when I said I would? Was that anybody who looks like you?"

"That was then," Doggett returned. "You didn't tell me it was gonna stink the way it does and belch out black smoke you can see for miles."

"I didn't know, goddammit. Those bastards who put in the ovens and the stacks went and rooked me," Jeff said. "But even if it does stink, it's doing something the country needs. You gonna try and tell me I'm wrong?"

"Well, no. I got no more use for coons'n any other decent, God-fearing white man does," the mayor said. "But godalmightydamn, General, it sure does stink. Makes the whole town smell like a barbecue pit some stupid fool went and forgot about. You're in a fancy uniform, so you get to give orders. Me, I got voted in, and I got a hell of a lot of people here in Humble who sure ain't gonna vote for me again 'cause of that smell. I mean, gettin' rid o' niggers is one thing. Doin' it so you can smell 'em roast-that's a whole different story."

"You want to eat roast beef, but you don't want to butcher your cow," Jeff said. "Camp's gotta be somewhere. I liked it where it was at before, too, but the damnyankees went and ran us out of there. That ain't my fault."

"I didn't say it was, but it's another problem. Suppose we go and lose the war."

"That's defeatism," Jeff said automatically.

The mayor of Humble astonished him by replying, "Oh, cut the crap, General. We're fucked, and you know it as well as I do. Like I said, Richmond's gone. They chopped us in half in Georgia. The President's on the run. How are we gonna win? I wish we could, but I ain't a blind man. And suppose we lose, like I said. What if the damnyankee soldiers march in here and ask, 'What the devil were you doin' with a murder camp there on your doorstep, Mr. Mayor?' What do I tell 'em then, hey?"

"Fuck," Pinkard muttered under his breath. That was insubordination so bad, it was damn near treason. Or it would have been, if it weren't such a good question.

Suppose we do go and surrender. Suppose the Yankees do come marching in. What do I tell them? The only answer that came to mind was, I was just doing what the bigwigs in Richmond told me to do. Would they buy that? What would they do to him if they didn't?

"General? Hey, General! You there?" How long had Doggett been yelling in his ear? A little while, evidently. He'd had other things to worry about.

"Yeah? What is it?" he managed, dragging himself back to the business at hand.

"You don't get that camp cleaned up in jig time, I will talk to Governor Patman. You see if I don't."

"You'll be sorry if you do." Jeff thought he meant that, anyway. He knew damn well he had more firepower than the Texas Rangers could bring to bear against him. But whether his guards had the will to fight other Confederate white men…He wasn't so sure about that. He hoped like anything he wouldn't have to find out.

"If you're smart, General, you'll take off your uniform, put your wife an' young 'uns in a civilian motorcar, and head for some town where nobody knows your face. You think the damnyankees'll have questions to ask me? What'll they say to you?"

Pinkard hung up. He did it by sheer reflex. The mayor's thoughts didn't just run parallel to his. They'd got ahead of them on the same road. If U.S. soldiers came here, they would have things to say to him.

Unpleasant things.

"But I can't leave," he said aloud. No matter what the Yankees had to say to him, he was proud of everything he'd done here, and over in Snyder, and outside of Alexandria, too. He'd had an important job to do, and he'd done it well. If not for him, the whole population-reduction program would have been a hell of a lot less efficient. Didn't that count for anything?

The Attorney General thought so. Hell, the President of the Confederate States of America thought so. What else mattered?

Nothing else mattered-as long as his side was calling the shots. Never mind Texas Rangers. U.S. soldiers wouldn't like what he'd done. And the main reason they wouldn't like it-or so things seemed to him-was that his own side did.

"Fuck 'em," Jeff muttered. "Fuck 'em all."

He wondered whether Mayor Doggett would send cops around to give Edith and the boys a hard time. He didn't intend to put up with anything like that. Maybe his guards would have trouble against the Rangers. Against this little town's one-lung police force, though, they could start a reign of terror.

No sooner had that crossed his mind than the telephone rang again. He said some things that should have melted the glass out of the windows in his office. What did Doggett want now? "Pinkard here," he snarled.

"Jeff, it's me." That wasn't the mayor-it was Edith. "My pains have started. We're going to have us a baby."

"Oh, good God!" Jeff said, mentally apologizing to the Lord whose name he'd done worse than take in vain a moment before. "You ready to go down to Houston?"

"I sure am!" his wife answered. "Miss Todd next door, she'll take care of Willie and Frank till you can get home."

"I'll send a guard with an auto for you right away," Jeff said. He couldn't leave the camp himself right now, especially not after the brawl with the mayor. Humble wasn't big enough to boast a hospital of its own. But it was only twenty miles from Houston, so that shouldn't matter.

He summoned a reliable troop leader to drive one of the Birminghams attached to Camp Humble. As he gave the three-striper his orders, he thought, Damn, I wish Hip Rodriguez was still around to do this for me. His old Army buddy would have done it right, one hundred percent guaranteed. Oh, Porter was more than reliable enough, but still… As always, Pinkard knew a moment of pained incomprehension when he thought about Hipolito Rodriguez. What the devil made Hip eat his submachine gun? He was doing a good job, and doing a job that needed doing.

That was something to brood on as he poured himself a big snort from the highly unofficial bottle in a desk drawer. He couldn't have taken the whiskey along if he had torn himself away from this and gone to the hospital. What could he do in the waiting room, anyway? Worry. He could do that here, too. He could, and he did.

Dammit, what possessed Hip to do that? He didn't see any damnyankee writing on the wall; things were going well enough when he shot himself. Why, then? It was as if he'd suddenly decided he'd made some vast mistake, and blowing off the top of his head was the only way he could fix it.

"But that's crazy," Jeff said, taking a slug from the drink. "Just plain old crazy." It wasn't as if Hip didn't believe in getting rid of Negroes. He couldn't have had woman troubles, either. Jeff knew Hip got laid every once in a while on the women's side. Not many male guards didn't. (For that matter, the same was true of female guards.) He felt guilty about fooling around on his wife-Jeff remembered as much from the Great War. But he didn't feel all that guilty, which Jeff also knew.

So what went wrong, then? The obvious answer-that Hip couldn't stand killing people any more even if they were black-stared Pinkard in the face. It had ever since Rodriguez shot himself. And ever since then, Jeff had stubbornly refused to look at it.

He didn't change now. He'd come too far down this road to change…unless he put the barrel of a gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. He refused to look at doing that, either. Instead, he finished the drink and poured another one.

He kept on drinking for the next seven hours. The camp didn't fall to pieces in that time, which was just as well, because he wouldn't have cared if it had. He spilled whiskey when the telephone rang. "Pinkard here," he slurred.

"Congratulations, sir! Your wife is fine, and you've got a boy!" Troop Leader Porter said. "What'll you name him?"

"Raymond," Jeff answered at once-drunk or sober, he knew. "Raymond Longstreet Pinkard." He knew where he stood, too, even now.

E very time Irving Morrell came into Philadelphia, the city looked worse. The Confederates kept finding new ways to hit the de facto capital of the USA. U.S. forces had driven the Confederates from their own capital and held bridgeheads across the James. The rocket factories in Huntsville were history. But Jake Featherston's forces kept launching their damn birds. Not all of them had been driven out of range of Philly, not yet. Their bombers still managed to sneak up here by night, too. Fresh craters and wrecked buildings loudly insisted the war wasn't over yet.

But the people in Philadelphia had a jaunty spring in their step that wasn't there the last time Morrell came into town. Maybe it was all the general's imagination, but he didn't think so. Folks figured things were on the downhill slope. And, by God, they had plenty of good reasons to think so.

Not without pride, Morrell knew he'd given them more than a few of those good reasons himself.

His driver, a sergeant with a Purple Heart and three oak-leaf clusters-not the kind of decoration anybody in his right mind would want to win-said, "We've got those cocksuckers whipped, don't we, sir?"

"Well, we'd have to screw up pretty good to blow things now," Morrell allowed. "Are you on permanent light duty, Sergeant, or will you go back to the front? You're two wounds ahead of me, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone."

"I'll be at it again in a couple of weeks, sir," the noncom answered. "None of 'em's been real bad. I limp a little from the latest one, and I've lost a finger, but the other two…hell, I don't even notice 'em if I don't see the scars. For a guy who's not real lucky, I'm pretty lucky, you know?"

"Yeah," Morrell said, and he did. The way the sergeant put it was kind of loopy, but it made sense anyway. The Ford rolled past a wall with a few bomb scars and a big splash of dried blood. Morrell was afraid he knew what that meant: "People bomb?"

"Afraid so, sir. They think this one was a diehard Mormon. He took out four or five soldiers when he went."

"Damn," Morrell said. How long would the USA-and other countries all over the world-have to worry about people willing, even eager, to die for their cause? Get some dynamite, some nails or scrap metal, and there you were: your own artillery shell. And you could aim yourself better than the best gunner in the world. The assumption in war had always been that the other guy didn't want to die. How were you supposed to protect yourself against somebody who did?

"Mormons. Canucks. Confederates," the sergeant said mournfully. "Even what they call peace won't be the same."

"I was just thinking the same thing," Morrell said. "I don't know what to do about it. If you get any brainstorms, for Christ's sake tell the War Department. You'll be a captain faster than you can blink."

"No offense, sir, but I don't know if I want to be an officer." With some relief, the noncom hit the brakes in front of the War Department. "Here you go. You don't even have to tip me."

"Heh," Morrell said. He stepped between concrete barriers that kept autos from getting too close: they could carry a lot more explosives than mere people could. The War Department building had a big chunk bitten out of a corner. Those C.S. rockets weren't supposed to be real accurate, but one seemed to have landed right on the money.

Not even stars on his shoulder straps kept him from having to show his ID, or from getting patted down after he did. He submitted without a murmur; times were still dangerous. Once he'd placated the entrance dragons, an escort took him down to General Staff headquarters.

It hadn't been buried so deep the last time he came to the War Department. Of course, if it weren't now, it might have gone sky high when that rocket came down. "Here's General Abell's office, sir," the escort said. "Telephone when you need to come up again, and somebody will take you."

"Thanks," Morrell said. The kid gave him a crisp salute and hurried down the corridor. Morrell was much less eager to enter John Abell's sanctum, but he did.

"Welcome," the General Staff officer said with what passed for warmth from him. Brigadier General Abell sometimes reminded Morrell of a ghost mostly congealed into the real world. He was tall and thin and pale, and so cool of manner that he sometimes hardly seemed there at all. The General Staff suited him perfectly; he was a dab hand at moving divisions around, but would have been hopeless with dirty, smelly, wisecracking, foul-mouthed soldiers.

"Thanks," Morrell answered, and couldn't help adding, "See? It wasn't a two-year campaign after all."

"So it wasn't. Congratulations." Yes, Abell was in a gracious mood. "We managed to attrit the enemy so he couldn't resist with as much persistence as I thought he might utilize when we first broached the issue early last year."

Morrell distrusted officers who said utilize when they meant use. As for attrit…Well, obviously it came from attrition, but that didn't mean he ever wanted to hear it again. He managed a nod.

That seemed to satisfy John Abell. "The question now, of course, is, Where do we go from here?"

He could speak clear English when he wanted to. Why didn't he want to more often? "On the western flank, Birmingham and Huntsville are pretty much in the bag," Morrell said. "We're hitting Selma and Mobile hard from the air. We'll get to 'em before too long. New Orleans…Well, we can bomb it. If we smash the levees, we can flood a lot of it. But we won't get soldiers there any time soon."

"A reasonable estimate," Abell agreed. "And in the east?"

"I'm shifting most of the effort there up into South Carolina," Morrell replied. "Charleston, Columbia…If the General Staff has a different idea, I expect you'll let me know." He wondered if that was part of the reason he'd been summoned to Philadelphia. What did they think he would do if he stayed down in the Confederacy and got orders he didn't like? Set up on his own? He admired Napoleon as a soldier, but not as a politician.

"At present, no. That seems adequate, or more than adequate," John Abell said. He acted nervous, though.

For a moment, that made no sense at all to Morrell. The United States was manifestly winning the war. They'd cut the CSA in half. The campaign in Virginia was going well at last. Even the minor struggles in Arkansas and Sequoyah and west Texas all inclined toward the USA. So why wasn't Abell even happier?

Morrell didn't expect hosannas and backflips from the General Staff officer. He'd known Abell too long and too well for that. But still…Then a light went on, a light as bright and terrible as the sun. "That goddamn superbomb!" Morrell exclaimed. "How close is Featherston?" He didn't ask how close his own country was. That, he assumed, would be a secret more tightly held than the other.

"Ah. Good. You do understand the basic difficulty under which we labor," Abell said. "The answer is, we just don't know-and that is our principal area of concern at this point in time."

"I can see how it might be," Morrell said dryly. If the Confederates could blow a city off the map with one bomb, they hadn't lost yet, not by a long chalk. "We are trying to do something about this?"

"As a matter of fact, yes," John Abell said. "Before too much longer, the question may be moot, but at the moment it remains relevant."

And what was that supposed to mean? Were the United States about to capture the CSA's superbomb works? Or was his country close to getting a superduperbomb of its own? "Anything you can tell me without bringing the wrath of the great god Security down on your head?" Morrell inquired.

"Our own research along those lines is making good progress," Abell said, and not another word.

Even that much was more than Morrell expected. "Well, all right," he said, and took out two packs of Dukes. He pulled a cigarette from one and stuck it in his mouth; the other he tossed on Abell's desk. "Here you go. Spoils of war."

"Thanks." Abell opened the pack and held out a cigarette. Morrell gave him a light. The General Staff officer never went near the front. He probably got sick of the nasty U.S. tobacco-unless other officers who wanted to stay on his good side kept him in smokes. Maybe his desk was full of them. You never could tell.

"Those bombs are going to change the way we fight. They'll change the way everybody fights," Morrell said.

"We are commencing studies on that topic," Abell said.

"How? We don't know enough yet," Morrell said. "And that reminds me-how come the Kaiser hasn't flattened London or Paris? Did he only have the one bomb? How long till he gets another one?"

"I don't know the answer to that," Abell replied, "but I do have an idea why Petrograd went up in smoke and the Western capitals haven't."

"I'm all ears," Morrell said.

"Prevailing winds," Abell told him. "These bombs spew poison into the air, and the wind can carry it a long way. From Petrograd, the stuff goes deeper into Russia. From London or Paris, the Germans could give themselves a present."

"A present they want like a hole in the head," Morrell said. John Abell nodded. Morrell stubbed out his cigarette and shuddered. "That makes these damn things even worse than I thought."

"The only thing worse than using them on somebody is somebody else using them on you," Abell said.

"Have we stopped the Confederates from using one on us?"

"We hope so."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Morrell asked.

"They're working on this thing in a Virginia mountain town. We have bombed it so heavily, next to nothing is left aboveground," the General Staff officer replied.

Morrell had listened to a lot of presentations. He could hear what wasn't said as well as what was. "What are they doing underground?"

"Well, we don't precisely know." Abell sounded as uncomfortable as he ever did. "They've burrowed like moles since the bombing started. That's why I hope we've kept their program from producing a uranium bomb, but I can't be sure we have."

"Terrific," Morrell said. "How do we find out for sure?"

"If they use one on us, we failed," Abell said. "It's as simple as that, I'm afraid."

"Oh, boy," Morrell said in distinctly hollow tones. "That's encouraging." He looked up at God only knew how many feet of steel and concrete over his head. "If they drop one on Philadelphia, will it get us all the way down here?"

"I don't think they can do that, anyhow," Abell replied. "I'm told a uranium bomb is too heavy for any airplane they have. We're having to modify our bombers to carry the load."

"Mm. Well, I guess that's good news. So they've got to wait till their rockets get out of short pants, then? Or do they have an extra-special rocket ready to go?"

"We don't believe so," John Abell said. "But then, we didn't know about the ones they do have till they started firing them at us."

"Tell you one thing," Morrell said as he lit another cigarette. Abell made a questioning noise. Morrell explained: "You sure know how to cheer a guy up."

Y ankee bombers still didn't come over Lexington, Virginia, very often in the daytime. C.S. fighters and heavy flak made that an expensive proposition. Clarence Potter thanked God for small favors. He would have thanked God more for big ones, but the Deity didn't seem inclined to give the Confederate States any of those nowadays.

A crane swayed a crate into the cargo bed of a truck that looked ordinary but wasn't. This machine had a very special suspension. Even so, the springs groaned as the crate came down.

Potter watched the loading process with Professor Henderson FitzBelmont. "You're sure this damn thing will work?" Potter said.

FitzBelmont looked at him. "No."

"Thanks a lot, Professor," Potter said. "You sure know how to cheer a guy up."

"Would you rather have me lie to you?" FitzBelmont asked.

"Right now, I really think I would," Clarence Potter told him. "I hate to try this if there's an even-money chance we'll get nothing but a squib."

FitzBelmont shrugged. "It's untested. Ideally, we would have more time and more weapons. Things being as they are…"

"Well, yes. There is that," Potter said. Just getting back to Lexington from Petersburg had been nightmare enough. "All right. We'll try it, and we'll see what happens, that's all. Wish us luck."

"I do," Professor FitzBelmont said. "In my own way, I'm a patriot, too." His way wasn't so different from Potter's. Neither man went around shouting, Freedom! They both loved the Confederate States all the same.

Potter climbed into the cab of the truck next to the driver, a sergeant. "We ready, sir?" the noncom asked in accents not much different from Potter's own.

"If we're not, we never will be-which is, of course, always a possibility," the Intelligence officer said. The sergeant looked confused. "We're ready, Wilton," Potter assured him. "Now we see what happens."

Several command cars and armored cars rolled north and slightly east with the special truck. Everybody in them spoke the same kind of English as Clarence Potter: all the men could pass for Yankees, in other words. Both sides had used that trick during the war whenever they thought they could get away with it. One more time, Potter thought. It's coming down toward the end, but we're going to try it one more time.

In the War of Secession, Stonewall Jackson had played the Shenandoah Valley like a master violinist. In his hands, it turned into a dagger, an invasion route aimed straight at the USA's heart. The same thing happened again during the Great War, with the Confederate charge that almost got to Philadelphia. After 1917, the United States occupied the northern end of the Valley and fortified it so the Confederate States couldn't try that again. And Jake Featherston didn't; he drove up through Ohio instead.

The Shenandoah Valley was also the CSA's granary. The United States, busy elsewhere and fighting for survival, hadn't tried to take the Valley away from the Confederacy. They had dropped a hell of a lot of incendiaries on it. One U.S. wag was supposed to have said that a crow flying up the Shenandoah Valley would have to carry its own provisions.

Things weren't quite so bad as that-but they sure weren't good. Potter drove past too many fields whose main crops were ash and charcoal, past too many barns and farmhouses that were nothing but burnt-out skeletons of their old selves. Even after a wet winter, the air smelled smoky.

He had bigger worries than the way the air smelled. The first time they came to a bridge, he said, "This is what they call a moment of truth."

"Sir?" Sergeant Wilton said. "They're supposed to have strengthened it."

"I know." Potter left it right there. The Confederate States were in their death agony. He knew it, even if Wilton didn't. Things that were supposed to get done might…or they might not. You never could tell. And if they didn't…I'm screwed, Potter thought. Only one way to find out. "Take it across," he said.

"Yes, sir." The driver did. The bridge held. Potter breathed a sigh of relief. Now-how many more bridges across the winding Shenandoah before they got to the head of the Valley? How many bridges beyond that? Again, only one way to find out.

They made it over, again and again. The truck's transmission and engine weren't happy; they'd been beefed up, too, but they were even more overstrained than the suspension. If the damn thing crapped out…well, they had some spare parts, but it wouldn't be good news.

Potter tensed again-for the millionth time-when they came into Luray, the northernmost town in the Valley the CSA held, just as the sun was setting. If things there weren't ready, they were screwed again. But the stuff they needed was waiting for them. Potter let out one more sigh of relief.

But for the caves outside of town and a nitrates plant that had drawn its share of U.S. bombs, Luray's chief claim to fame was a two-and-a-half-story brick courthouse near the center of town. Potter's convoy stopped there. A work crew dashed out and spread canvas over the truck and the vehicles accompanying it. Then, under that cover, they got to work, slapping green-gray paint over the butternut that had identified them. As soon as the paint was even close to dry, they put U.S. markings all over the machines. Those couldn't hide their Confederate lines, of course, but after almost three years of war both sides were using lots of captured equipment.

And the disguise didn't end with the truck and the armored cars and command cars. Potter and his comrades put on U.S. uniforms. He became a major, which suited him well enough. If the damnyankees captured him in their togs, they'd shoot him. He shrugged. At the moment, that was the least of his worries.

"You have the passwords and countersigns?" he asked the veteran first sergeant in charge of the unit there.

"Yes, sir, sure do. We went out and took a couple of prisoners less than an hour ago," the noncom answered. He was of about Potter's vintage, a man who'd been through the Great War and didn't flabble about anything. He gave Potter what he needed.

Potter wrote it down to be sure. "Thanks," he said. The retread sergeant nodded. The patch over his left eye and the hook sticking out of his left tunic cuff told why he was in a backwater like this. Despite them, he was a better man than most at the front.

The chameleon convoy rolled out of Luray before sunup. Potter wanted to get into U.S.-held territory while it was still dark. That would help keep his vehicles from giving themselves away right where people were most likely to get antsy about them.

Yankee country started just a couple of miles north of Luray. If somebody'd spilled the beans-not impossible with the CSA visibly coming to pieces-a couple of companies of real U.S. soldiers could have swooped down and ended a lovely scheme before it really got rolling.

But no. The sergeant's raid for prisoners hadn't even made the U.S. forces jumpy. Potter and his merry band got several miles into Yankeeland before they came to a checkpoint. The passwords he'd picked up in Luray worked fine. A kid second lieutenant asked, "What is all this crap, uh, sir?"

"Matйriel captured from Featherston's fuckers," Potter answered crisply-he knew what the enemy called his side. "We're taking it north for evaluation."

"Nobody told me," the shavetail complained.

"It's a war," Potter said with more patience than he felt. "They wouldn't tell you your name if you hadn't had it issued ahead of time."

"No shit!" the lieutenant said, laughing. "All right, sir-pass on."

On they passed. The sun came up. They crossed over the Shenandoah again at Front Royal. Nobody on their side had specially reinforced that bridge. "Think it'll take the strain, sir?" Wilton asked.

"If they ever sent a barrel over it, it will," Potter said. "Barrels are a hell of a lot heavier than this baby."

They made it. They stopped at a fuel dump and gassed up, then went on. The farther they got from the front line, the less attention U.S. soldiers paid them. They just seemed to be men doing a job. One nine-year-old kid by the side of the road gaped, though. He knew they were driving C.S. vehicles-Potter could tell. He probably knew every machine and weapon on both sides better than the guys who used them did. Plenty of kids like that down in the CSA, too. It was a game to them. It wasn't a game to Clarence Potter.

Harpers Ferry. John Brown had come here, trying to start a slave uprising. Robert E. Lee led the men who captured him. And, three years later, Lee came through again on the campaign that won the Confederate States their independence. Maybe this trip north would help them keep it.

Over the Potomac. Into Maryland. Into the USA proper. Potter had come this way almost exactly thirty years earlier, with the Army of Northern Virginia's thrust toward Philadelphia. They'd fallen short then. Had they taken the de facto capital, they might have had a triumphant six weeks' war. Jake Featherston had hoped for the same thing this time around. What you hoped for and what you got weren't always the same, dammit.

Maryland looked prosperous; Pennsylvania, when they got there, even more so. Oh, Potter spied bomb damage here and there, but only here and there. This land hadn't been fought over the way so much of the CSA had. It had got nibbled, but not chewed up. The United States was too big a place for bombing alone to chew them up. Pittsburgh, now, Pittsburgh probably looked as if it had had a proper war, but Potter and his band of cutthroats headed east, not west.

Drivers in military vehicles coming the other way waved to him and honked their horns as they passed. He always waved back. They figured he was returning from the front with something important. Nobody bothered checking his papers or asking him where he was going or why. The United States were a big place. Once beyond the usual military zone, security for people who looked and sounded like U.S. soldiers eased off. He'd counted on that when he put this scheme together.

Jake Featherston wanted him to go all the way into downtown Philadelphia. He didn't intend to. There of all places, security would tighten up again. He couldn't afford to have anybody ask questions too soon. Some overeager goon with a Tommy gun or a captured automatic Tredegar could mess everything up if he got suspicious at just the wrong time.

No, not downtown. Potter stopped west of it, on the far side of the Schuylkill River. At his order, Wilton pulled into a parking lot. Potter ducked into the back of the truck and set two timers on the side of the crate-he wasn't going to take chances with only one. The driver, meanwhile, raised the hood.

"What's going on?" somebody called.

"Damn thing's broken down," Wilton answered. "We've got to round up a mechanic somewhere."

He and Potter jumped into one of the command cars. "Back the way we came," Potter said. "Fast as you can go." He eyed the man who'd questioned them. The fellow only shrugged and ambled into a shop. Maybe he'd seen breakdowns before.

"How long, sir?" asked the corporal behind the command car's wheel.

"Not long enough," Potter said. "Step on it."

Fifteen minutes later, the world blew up behind them.

I rving Morrell wasn't looking west when the bomb went off. He was standing at a counter, trying to decide between a chocolate bar and a roll of mints. All of a sudden, the light swelled insanely, printing his shadow on the wall in back of the sidewalk stand. The fat little old woman behind the counter screeched and covered her eyes with her hands.

"Good God!" Morrell said, even before the roar of the explosion reached him. His first thought was that an ammo dump somewhere had blown sky high. He didn't think of a bomb. The explosion seemed much too big for that.

He forgot about the candy and ran out into the street. Then he realized just how lucky he'd been, because a lot of windows had turned to knife-edged flying shards of glass. The magazine stand and snack counter where he'd been dithering didn't have a window of any sort, so he'd escaped that, anyhow.

He stopped and stared. He wasn't the only one. Everybody out there was looking west with the same expression of slack-jawed disbelief. No one had ever seen anything like that rising, boiling, roiling cloud before. How high did it climb? Three miles? Four? Five? He had no idea. The colors put him in mind of food-salmon, peach, apricot. The top of the cloud swelled out from the base, as if it were a toadstool the size of a god.

The roar came then, not just in his ears but all through his body. He staggered like a drunken man. But it wasn't his balance going; the ground shook under his feet. A blast of wind from nowhere staggered him. Also out of nowhere, rain started pelting down. The drops were enormous. They left black splashes when they hit the ground. When one hit his hand, he jerked in surprise-the rain was hot.

"Where's it at?" somebody asked.

"Across the river, looks like," a woman said.

It looked that way to Morrell, too. The rain shower didn't last more than a couple of minutes. It hadn't ended before he started trying to scrub the filthy drops from his skin. He remembered what John Abell had told him a few days before: uranium bombs put out poison. And what else could that horrible thing be? No ammunition dump in the world blew up like that.

How much poison was in the rain? How much was in that monstrous toadstool cloud? Am I a dead man walking? he wondered.

"We gotta go help," said the man who'd asked where the blast was. He hurried toward the Schuylkill River.

His courage and resolve shamed Morrell. Of course, the stranger-who was plump and fiftyish, with a gray mustache-didn't know what Morrell did. If ignorance was bliss…

After a moment's hesitation, Morrell followed. If he was already poisoned, then he was, that was all. Nothing he could do about it now. Overhead, that cloud grew taller and wider. Winds began to tear at it and tug it out of shape…and blow it toward downtown Philadelphia.

Crowds got worse the farther west Morrell went. Everybody was pointing and staring and gabbling. You fools! Don't you realize you might all be dead? No, Morrell didn't shout it out. But it filled his thoughts.

Damage got worse the farther west he went, too. All the windows that had survived years of Confederate air raids were blown out. Motorcars and trucks had windows shattered, too. Drivers, their faces masks of blood, staggered moaning through the streets. Many of them clutched at their eyes. Morrell knew what that was bound to mean: they had glass in them.

As he neared Philadelphia's second river, he saw buildings brutally pushed down and vehicles flipped onto their sides or upside down. Some men stopped to help the injured. Others pressed on.

And then Morrell got a chance to look across the Schuylkill. That part of the city was almost as heavily built up as downtown. Or rather, it had been. Next to Morrell, a skinny woman crossed herself. He felt like doing the same thing. Almost everything over there was knocked flat. A few buildings that must have been uncommonly strong still stood up from the rubble, but only a few.

A bridge across the Schuylkill survived, though it leaned drunkenly to one side. How long it would stay up, God only knew. People staggered across it from the west. Some had had the clothes burned off of them. Morrell saw several with one side of their face badly seared and the other fine: they must have stood in profile to the bomb when it went off.

"His shadow!" a dreadfully burned man babbled. "I saw his shadow on the sidewalk, all printed like, but not a thing left of George!" He slumped down and mercifully passed out. Morrell wondered whether he would ever wake. He might be luckier not to.

A loudspeaker started to blare: "All military personnel! Report at once to your duty stations! All military personnel! Report at once to-"

Morrell didn't exactly have a duty station. He headed back to the War Department. The catastrophe across the river was bigger than any one man. And he had a better chance of finding out what was going on at the military's nerve center.

So he thought, anyway. But one of the guards who patted him down asked, "What the hell happened, sir? Do you know?"

"Not exactly," Morrell answered. "I was hoping people here did."

Before a private took him down to John Abell's office, he paused in a men's room and washed off as much of the filthy rainwater as he could. "Why are you doing that, sir?" asked the kid, who went in with him.

"Just in case," Morrell answered. Getting rid of the horrible stuff wouldn't hurt. He was sure of that.

Abell always looked pale. He seemed damn near transparent now. He might have aged ten years in the few days since Morrell last saw him. "My God!" he said. "They beat us to the punch. I didn't think they could, but they did."

"Have you been up top?" Morrell asked. "Did you see it with your own eyes?"

"No." Abell had always wanted to deal with things from a distance. Was that a strength or a weakness? Probably both at once, Morrell thought. The General Staff officer went on, "How did they get it here? They couldn't have used an airplane-I swear to God they don't have a machine that can carry it. And our Y-ranging gear didn't spot a thing coming up from the south."

"They must have sneaked it in, God damn them," Morrell said. "Remember how they broke through in eastern Ohio? They had a whole battalion of guys in our uniforms, in our vehicles, who could talk like us. What do you want to bet they did the same damn thing again-and made it work?" He'd made it work himself, getting over the Tennessee River in front of Chattanooga.

Abell managed a shaky nod. Then he reached for a telephone. "With a little luck, they won't get away. We can shoot every last one of them if we catch them in our uniforms."

Morrell nodded. That was what the laws of war said. Whether the USA would want to shoot those Confederates if it caught them might be a different story. How much could they tell interrogators about their uranium-bomb project?

"We'd better catch them," Abell said as he slammed down the telephone after barking into it with unaccustomed heat. "They can't get away with that. How many thousands of people did they just murder?"

Would it have been better had the enemy dropped the bomb out of an airplane and then flown away? Would it have been better had he dropped ton after ton of ordinary bombs instead, or machine-gunned as many people as he'd killed in this one blast? Morrell found himself shaking his head. It wouldn't have been any better, but it would have been more familiar. That mattered, too. The uranium bomb was something brand new. Poison gas had carried some of that same whiff of horror during the last war. People took it for granted now.

Would they come to take uranium bombs for granted, too? How could they, when each one could devastate a city? And these were just the early ones. Would next year's model level a whole county, or maybe a state?

"My God," Abell said again. "Those stinking crackers…and they beat us. There won't be one stone left on top of another one by the time our bombers get through with Lexington-I'll tell you that."

The last time he and Morrell talked about uranium bombs, he'd waltzed around the name of the town where the CSA was working on them. This time, he'd slipped. He was human after all, and would probably have to do penance before the altar of Security the Almighty.

He realized as much a few seconds too late. "You didn't hear that from me," he said in some embarrassment.

"Hear what?" Morrell asked innocently.

"I wonder if we could drive down the Shenandoah Valley and take that place away from them," Abell said. Even though he was embarrassed, now that the cat was out of the bag he was letting it run around.

"Wouldn't take long to pull an assault force together." Morrell spoke with the assurance of a veteran field commander. "Don't know how hard the Confederates would fight back-hard as they can, I bet. Now that they've used one bomb, how long do they need to build another one?"

"That I can't tell you, because I don't know. I wouldn't tell you even if I did, but I don't," Abell said. "Days? Weeks? Months? Twenty minutes? I just have no idea."

"All right," Morrell said. The General Staff officer was liable to lie about something like that, but Morrell didn't think he was, not this time. He went on, "This would have been a lot worse if they'd brought it here by the government buildings instead of blowing it up across the river."

"I don't think they could have-it wouldn't have been easy, anyhow," Abell said. "We search autos and trucks before we let them in here. Auto bombs are bad enough, but put a couple of tons of high explosive in a truck…" He didn't finish, or need to. "One of those was plenty to make us clamp down."

"Good for you, then. You just saved the President and Congress and us. I mean, I hope you did." Morrell told him about the black rain. "Exactly how dangerous is that stuff, anyway?"

"We'll all find out. I don't know the details. I'm not sure anybody does." Abell looked down at his own soft, immaculately tended hands. "I do believe you were wise to wash off as much as you could. It's like X-rays: you want to keep the exposure to a minimum."

Morrell looked at his own hands and at his uniform, which still bore the marks of those unnatural drops. Were there little X-ray machines in them? Something like that, he supposed. Maybe there were more in the dust in the air. "We sure never learned any of this stuff at West Point," he said.

"Who knew back then?" John Abell said. "Nobody, that's who. Half of what we learned just went obsolete."

"More than half," Morrell said. "New rules from now on."

"If we live long enough," Abell said.

"Yeah. If." Morrell looked at his splotched uniform again. "I think the new Rule Number One is, Don't get in a war with anybody who's got this damn bomb."

"A little too late for that now," the General Staff officer pointed out.

"Don't remind me," Morrell said.

I 'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth."

This wasn't the familiar studio in Richmond, from which Jake Featherston had bellowed defiance at the world since the days when he was a discredited rabble-rouser at the head of a withering Freedom Party. He had no idea whether that wireless studio still stood. He would have bet against it. Richmond had fallen, but the Confederates put up a hell of a fight before they finally pulled out.

Portsmouth, Virginia, then. It wasn't where Featherston wanted to be-he'd always wanted to broadcast in triumph from Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. And I will yet, goddammit, he thought savagely. But Portsmouth would have to do for now. The station had a strong signal, and somehow or other Saul Goldman had patched together a web to send Jake's words all over the CSA-and up into Yankeeland, too. If Saul wasn't a wizard, he'd do till a real one showed up.

The speech. "Truth is, we just showed the damnyankees what we can do. Just like the Kaiser-one bomb, and boom! A city's gone. Philadelphia will never be the same." He didn't exactly say the uranium bomb (no, from the reports he got from FitzBelmont, it was really a jovium bomb, whatever the hell jovium was) had blown up all of Philly. If his Confederate listeners wanted to think he'd said that, though, he wouldn't shed a tear.

"Maybe St. Louis the next time. Maybe Indianapolis or Chicago. Maybe New York City or Boston. Maybe Denver or San Francisco. Who knows? But one bomb, and boom! No more city, whatever it is."

He didn't say when the next C.S. jovium bomb would go off. He had excellent reason for not saying anything about that: he had no idea. Henderson FitzBelmont didn't even want to guess. U.S. bombers were hitting Lexington harder than ever. Some of the bombs had armor-piercing noses, too, so they dug deep before going off. They were causing trouble.

But the CSA got in the first lick anyway!

"The damnyankees reckoned they had us down for the count," Jake gloated. "They forgot about how much we love…freedom! They'll never lick us, not while we can still load our guns and fire back. And we can."

As if on cue, cannon boomed in the distance. The studio insulation couldn't swallow all of that noise. Some were antiaircraft guns banging away at the U.S. bombers that constantly pounded the whole Hampton Roads area. And others were the big guns from the few surviving Confederate warships, now turned against land targets rather than enemy cruisers and destroyers. The damnyankees were pushing toward Portsmouth and Norfolk by land. Anything that could slow them down, the Confederates were using.

Since some of that artillery noise was going out over the air, Featherston decided to make the most of it. "You hear that, people?" he said. "That noise shows we are still in the fight, and we'll never quit. They say our country doesn't have a right to live. I say they don't have a right to kill it. They won't, either. If you don't believe me, ask what's left of Philadelphia."

He stepped away from the mike. Behind the glass wall that took up one side of the studio, the engineer gave him a thumbs-up. This wasn't the fellow he'd worked with for so long in Richmond, but some stranger. Still, Jake thought he'd given a good speech, too. Nice to find out other folks could tell.

"Well done, Mr. President," Saul Goldman said when Jake stepped out into the corridor. "What a speech can do, that one did."

"Yeah." Featherston wished the Director of Communications hadn't put it like that. What a speech could do…A speech might make soldiers fight a little longer. It might make factory hands work a little harder. All that would help…some.

No speech in the world, though, could take back Kentucky or Tennessee. No speech in the world could take back Atlanta or Savannah, or unsever the divided body of the Confederacy. No speech could take back the rocket works in Huntsville, and no speech could keep Birmingham from falling any day now.

No speech, not to put too fine a point on it, could keep the Confederate States of America from being really and truly screwed. "Dammit," Featherston said, "I didn't reckon things'd end up like this."

"Who would have, sir?" Goldman was loyal. Not only that, he didn't aspire to the top spot himself, maybe because he knew damn well no Confederate general or Party bigwig would take orders from a potbellied little Hebe. The combination-and his skill at what he did-made him invaluable.

They also meant Jake could talk more freely to him than to anyone else except perhaps Lulu. "No, this ain't how things were supposed to work," the President repeated. "Swear to God, Saul, if the Yankees lick us, it's on account of we don't deserve to win, you know what I mean?"

"What can we do? We have to win," Goldman said.

Featherston nodded. He had the same attitude himself. "We'll keep fighting till we can't fight any more, that's what. And we won't surrender, not ever," he said. "If we ever stop fighting, it'll only be on account of we got nobody left to fight with, by God."

The Director of Communications nodded. "You've always been very determined. I knew it right from the first time you started broadcasting on the wireless." He shook his head in wry wonder. "That's more than twenty years ago now."

"Sure as hell is," Jake said. You could see those years in Goldman's gray hair, in how little of it he had left, in his waistline and double chin. On the outside, time had dogged Featherston less harshly. He had lines on his face that hadn't been there then, and his hairline had retreated at the temples, too. But he remained whipcord lean; hate burned too hot in him to let him settle down and get fat. "And you know what?" he went on. "Even if the war turns out rotten, I've had a good life. I've done most of the things I always aimed to do. How many men can say that, when you get right down to it?"

"Not many," Goldman agreed.

"Damn right." Featherston paused to light a cigarette. He didn't like to smoke just before he went on the air; his voice was raspy enough anyway. "The folks who live down here after this war is over, whoever the hell they turn out to be, they won't have to worry about nigger trouble ever again, no matter what. And that's thanks to me, goddammit." He jabbed a thumb at his own chest.

"Yes, Mr. President."

But Goldman didn't sound happy. Jake had artilleryman's ear, and didn't hear so well as he had once upon a time. While he might miss words, though, he was still dead keen for tone. "What's eating you, Saul?" he asked.

"I guess it's the way you put it, sir," the Director of Communications said slowly. "I can see the Tsar talking about Jews like that, or the Ottoman Sultan talking about Armenians."

When nobody flabbled much about the way the Sultan got rid of his Armenians, that had encouraged Jake to plan the same for the blacks in the CSA. He'd said as much in Over Open Sights, too. Because he liked Goldman, he was willing to believe the other man had just forgotten. "The Tsar's a damn fool, even if he is on the same side as us," he said. "Jews are white men, dammit. And so are Armenians…I reckon. Can't talk about those folks the same way you do about niggers. Biggest mistake folks here ever made was shipping niggers over from Africa. Nobody ever tried to fix it…till me. And I damn well did."

Saul Goldman still didn't look convinced. Maybe his being Jewish was finally causing problems after all. His people had been persecuted unjustly. That might make it hard for him to see that Negroes really deserved what the Freedom Party was giving them. If he was getting pangs of conscience now, he'd sure taken his own sweet time doing it. Trains had been carrying blacks off to the camps since before the war started, and Saul's propaganda helped justify it to the Confederate people and to the world.

"C'mon outside," Jake told him. "Maybe you need some fresh air. It'll help clear your head."

"Maybe." Goldman didn't argue. Like anyone who bumped up against Jake Featherston, he'd soon come to realize arguing with him didn't do a damn bit of good.

It was a fine spring day. The savage heat and humidity that would close down soon hadn't yet descended on Portsmouth like a smothering blanket. A newly arrived hummingbird, ruby throat glittering, sucked nectar from a honeysuckle bush. The smell of growing things filled the air.

But so did nastier odors: the stench of death and the slightly less noxious stink of spilled fuel oil. Yankee bombers had been punishing Hampton Roads ever since the war began. They had reason to, damn them; this was the most important Confederate naval installation on the Atlantic coast.

As in Richmond, few buildings had survived undamaged. Not many warships were fit to put to sea from here, either. Salvage crews were clearing a sunken cruiser and destroyer from the channel. That steel would find another use…if the Confederacy lasted long enough.

It will, dammit, Featherston thought, angry at himself for doubting. The sun sparkled off the waves-and off the thin, iridescent layer of fuel oil floating atop them. A moored cruiser, laid up with engine trouble and bomb damage, let go with a salvo of eight-inch shells. They'd come down on the damnyankees' heads soon enough.

A few U.S. airplanes buzzed over Hampton Roads. Jake took that for granted nowadays. C.S. air power did what it could, but it couldn't do enough to hold the enemy at arm's length any more, not even above Virginia. By the sound of the engines, most of the engines were above Newport News, on the north side of the mouth of the James. Antiaircraft guns flung shells at them, but the bursts were too low to bring them down.

Jake pulled a notebook out of his breast pocket and wrote, We need stronger AA. The Confederate States needed lots of things right now. He had no idea when engineers could get around to designing a larger-caliber antiaircraft gun, let alone manufacture one, but it was on the list.

He looked down to put the notebook back in his pocket. That spared his eyes when a new sun sprang into being above Newport News, six or eight miles away from where he was standing. He suddenly had two shadows, the new one far blacker than the old. Slowly, the new shadow started to fade.

Saul Goldman had his hands clapped over his face-maybe he'd been looking the wrong way. Jake stared north in open-mouthed awe, even when a quick, fierce, hot blast of wind almost knocked him ass over teakettle. That toadstool cloud rising high into the sky was the most terrifying thing he'd ever seen, but it had a strange and dreadful beauty of its own.

Goldman took his hands away. He blinked. Tears ran down his face. "I can see you-sort of," he said. "Is…this what we did to Philadelphia?"

"Yeah." Jake's voice was soft and dreamy, almost as if he'd just had a woman. He might not have been able to stop the damnyankees from making their bomb, but in spite of everything he'd finished ahead of them. Both sides had staggered over the finish line. Still, the CSA won first prize.

"Yisgadal v'yiskadash sh'may rabo…" Saul went on in a language Jake didn't know.

The President of the CSA hardly noticed. He'd struck first, and he'd struck at the enemy capital. Newport News? He snapped his fingers. Who cared?