Return engagement

I

Flora Blackford woke from nightmare to nightmare. She'd dreamt she was trapped in a burning building, with fire alarms and sirens screaming all around her. When her eyes opened, she thought for a dreadful moment that she was still dreaming, for sirens were wailing outside. Then reason returned along with consciousness, and the Congresswoman from New York groaned. Those were air-raid sirens, which could only mean the war had started at last.

Or maybe it's a drill, Flora thought, snatching desperately at hope, though a drill at-she looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand-four in the morning struck her as madness. Of course, a new round of war between the United States and the Confederate States struck her as madness, too.

Antiaircraft guns in the defense ring around Philadelphia began to pound. That sound banished the last vestiges of doubt. Guns inside the de facto capital of the USA opened up a moment later. Through the gunfire and the sirens, she heard a deep, distant throbbing that rapidly grew louder. Those were Confederate bombers overhead.

She sprang out of bed and threw a housecoat on over the thin cotton nightgown she'd worn against the muggy heat of the first days of summer in Philadelphia. She had one arm in the quilted housecoat and one arm out when she suddenly stopped in outrage that seemed ridiculous only later. "That bastard!" she exclaimed. "He didn't even declare war!"

A new sound joined the cacophony outside: the thin whistle of falling bombs. As the first explosions made the windows of her flat rattle and shake, she realized President Jake Featherston of the CSA wouldn't have to send Al Smith, his U.S. counterpart, any formal messages now.

Fear joined outrage. She could die here. So could her son. She ran to his bedroom and threw open the door. "Joshua! Get up!" she shouted. "We've got to get down to the basement! The war is here!"

Only a snore answered her. At sixteen, Joshua could sleep through anything, and he'd proved it. Sirens? Antiaircraft guns? Droning bombers? Bombs? Probing searchlights? His mother yelling? They were all one to him, and likewise all nothing to him.

"Get up!" Flora shouted again. Still no response. She went over to the bed and shook him. "Get up!"

That did the job. Joshua Blackford sat up and muttered for a moment. He didn't doubt what was going on around him the way his mother had. "They really went and did it!" he said.

"Yes, they really did," Flora agreed grimly. Bombs were bursting closer now, underscoring her words. "Come on. Get moving. Put on a bathrobe or something and get downstairs with me. We don't have time to dawdle."

Later, she would discover that putting on a bathrobe when you were already wearing pajamas was dawdling, too. But that would be later. In the wee small hours of June 22, 1941, she was doing as well as she could.

Someone pounded on the door. "Get out! Get downstairs!" a hoarse male voice yelled.

"We're coming!" Flora shouted back. Joshua flew into a terry-cloth robe. Flora grabbed a key and locked the door behind her when she and her son left the apartment. Those niceties would also go by the board later on.

Down the stairs they scurried, along with the other members of Congress and bureaucrats and businessmen and their families who rented here. For the moment, everybody was equal: equal in fear and equal in fury. In the darkness of the stairwell, people said exactly what they thought of Jake Featherston, the Freedom Party, and the Confederate States of America. Flora heard some things she'd never heard before. No one cared if women were within earshot. Some of the most inflammatory things came from the mouths of women, as a matter of fact.

The basement was dark, too, dark and crowded and hot and stuffy. Someone lit a match to start a cigarette. The brief flare of light might have been a bomb itself. Flora wished she hadn't thought of that comparison. If a bomb did hit this building…

"Sh'ma yisroayl, adonai elohaynu, adonai ekhod," she murmured, just in case.

More bombs burst, some of them very close. The basement shook, as if at an earthquake. Plaster pattered down from the ceiling. A woman screamed. A man groaned. Beside Flora, Joshua whispered, "Wow!"

She wanted to hit him and kiss him at the same time. He was reacting to the spectacle, to what people were doing all around him. Fear? He knew nothing of fear because at his age he didn't really believe anything could happen to him. Flora was heading into her mid-fifties. She knew perfectly well that disaster could knock on the door.

A rending crash came from outside, different from the sharp, staccato roars of the exploding bombs. "We got one of the fuckers, anyway," a man said in tones of ferocious satisfaction.

A bomber. That was what that had to be. A Confederate bomber had smashed to earth somewhere not far away. How many young men had been aboard it? How many had managed to get clear and parachute away before it went into its last fatal dive? And how many Philadelphians had they killed before they were shot down? If you were going to ask the other questions, you had to ask that one, too.

The raid lasted a little more than an hour. Little by little, bombs came at longer intervals. The drone of engines overhead faded. The antiaircraft guns kept ravening away for several minutes after the bombers were gone. Some of them went on shooting even after the continuous all-clear note replaced the warbling rise and fall of the air-raid alarm.

"Well, that was fun," somebody behind Flora said. Along with half a dozen other people, she laughed-probably louder than the joke deserved. But it cut the tension, and there had been enough tension in the air to need a lot of cutting.

"What do we do now, Mom?" Joshua asked.

"We go back up to the flat and see what happened to it," Flora answered. "Then I have to go in to Congress. Featherston may not have bothered with a declaration of war, but President Smith will, and they'll need me to vote for it."

Back in 1914, as a Socialist agitator in New York City, she'd urged her party not to vote for the credits that financed the opening act of the Great War. She remained a Socialist. These days, though, the country had a Socialist President (which would have seemed unimaginable in 1914) and had been wantonly attacked by the Confederate States (which wouldn't have seemed surprising at all).

As they left the basement, morning twilight was brightening toward dawn. "That's why the Confederate bombers went home," Joshua said as they climbed stairs. "They didn't want to hang around when our gunners and fighter pilots could get a good look at them."

"I didn't know I had a son on the General Staff," Flora said. Joshua snorted but looked immensely proud of himself.

When they went back into the apartment, they found glass everywhere: on the floors, on the beds, some glittering shards driven deep into the plaster of the far wall. The windows were gone, every single one of them. Flora eyed the shards with a fresh horror. What would those flying fragments of glass have done to people whose soft flesh happened to get in the way? Butchered them. That was the only word Flora could think of.

Joshua was staring out at the city. His head slowly swung from left to right, taking it all in like a panning newsreel camera. Flora joined him. There were bomb craters half a block down the street. A little farther away, a black, greasy pillar of smoke rose into the sky. Was that the bomber's pyre? She thought so.

More columns of smoke rose all over Philadelphia. Most of them came from the center of town, where government buildings had gone up ever since the 1880s. Most, but not all. The Confederates had dropped bombs all over the city. Bad aim? Deliberate terror? Who could guess?

Fire engine sirens screeched as the sun came up over the horizon. When Flora tried to turn on the bathroom lamp, she discovered the power had gone out. "Don't leave the icebox open very long-it lets the cold out," she called to Joshua as she dressed. They had an electric refrigerator, but she was used to the older word. "I'm going to Congress." She hurried out the door and down the stairs.

Two Representatives and a Senator were already at the curb trying to flag a taxi. Flora got one by walking out in the street in front of it. The driver didn't-quite-run over her. All the elected officials piled in. "To Congress!" they bawled.

The neoclassical mountain of a building where the Senate and House met had escaped damage, though firemen were fighting flames in the office building across the street and dragging bodies out of it. "Joint session!" Flora didn't even know where she first heard it, but it was everywhere as soon as she got into the rotunda. "President Smith will address a joint session."

A joint session meant shoehorning the Senate into the far larger House chamber along with the Representatives. Today, there were still some empty seats after that: members of Congress who couldn't get to the session or who were injured or dead. A joint session also meant the risk of a lucky bomb taking out the whole legislative branch and the President. Flora wished she hadn't thought of that.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!" the Speaker of the House boomed out. The wave of applause that greeted Al Smith was fierce and savage.

Smith himself looked like hell. People had called him the Happy Warrior, but he seemed anything but happy as he mounted the podium. He had aged years in the months since his acceptance of a U.S.-C.S. plebiscite in Kentucky and Houston (now west Texas again) and Sequoyah proved such a spectacularly bad idea. His hands shook as he gathered the pages of his speech.

But his voice-even more strongly New York-flavored than Flora's-rang out strong and true. A thicket of microphones picked it up and carried it across the USA by wireless: "I have to tell you now that this country is at war with the Confederate States of America. At the close of my address, I shall ask the Congress to make the official declaration, a formality the Confederate States have forgotten." Another furious round of applause said he would get what he asked for.

He went on, "You can imagine what a bitter blow it is for me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more or anything different that I could have done and that would have been more successful. Up to the very last it would have been quite possible to have arranged a peaceful and honorable settlement between the CSA and the USA, but Featherston would not have it. He had evidently made up his mind to attack us whatever happened, and although he may claim he put forward reasonable proposals which we rejected, that is not a true statement.

"His action shows convincingly that there is no chance of expecting that this man will ever give up his practice of using force to gain his will. He can only be stopped by force. We have a clear conscience. We have done all that any country could do to establish peace. But now that it has come to war, I know every American will play his part with calmness and courage.

"Now may God bless you all. He will defend our cause. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against-brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression, and persecution-and against them I am certain that the right shall prevail."

Flora applauded till her palms hurt. It was a good speech. The only way it could have been better was if Al Smith hadn't had to give it at all.

When the air-raid sirens screeched in the middle of the night, Armstrong Grimes thought it was a drill. He figured some sadistic officer had found a new way to rob him of sleep, as if basic training didn't take enough anyhow. But listening to a sergeant screaming, "Get moving, assholes! This is the real thing!" sent him bouncing out of his cot in a hurry.

He could normally dress in three minutes. He had his green-gray uniform on in under two. "Do we line up for roll call?" somebody yelled.

"Jesus Christ, no!" the sergeant hollered back. "Get your asses into the shelter trenches! If you bastards live, we'll count you later."

They'd dug the shelter trenches near the Fort Custer barracks outside Columbus, Ohio, the week before. Wasted work, Armstrong had thought. And it had been then, in the dim dark disappearing days of peace. Now war was coming, riding closer every second on the screams of the sirens. War was coming, and what had been waste might save his life. A lesson lurked there somewhere, if only he could find it.

No time now, no time, no time. Along with the other raw recruits, he dove for the trenches. A mosquito whined through the din, the song of its wings somehow penetrating the greater madness all around. If it pierced him, he would itch. If fragments of steel from the greater madness pierced him, he would scream till he could no longer hear the sirens, till he choked on the song of death.

Antiaircraft guns pounding, pounding. Lights in the sky: bursting shells. And the buzz of engines overhead. Armstrong had never known anything like it before. He hoped he never did again. When the U.S. Army conscripted him, he'd looked forward to war. What point to putting on the uniform if you weren't going to see action? Well, here it was, and it wasn't what he'd thought it would be.

He'd pictured himself shooting at Confederate soldiers in butternut uniforms while they shot back at him. He'd pictured them missing, of course, while his bullets knocked them over one after another as if they were part of a funhouse shooting gallery. He'd pictured the enemy soldiers who managed to survive throwing up their hands and surrendering in droves. He'd pictured generals pinning medals on him, and pretty girls giving him a hero's reward.

What he hadn't pictured was lying in a muddy trench-it had rained two days before-while the Confederates dropped bombs on his head and while he didn't even have a Springfield in his hand so he could shoot back. Whether he'd pictured it or not, that was his introduction to war.

Somebody not far down the trench started screaming as soon as he heard the bombs falling. Armstrong had thought he would laugh about something like that. It seemed funny and cowardly, both at the same time. He wasn't laughing, not for real. It was all he could do not to scream himself.

And then the bombs weren't falling any more. They were bursting. The noise was like the end of the world. He'd got used to the bang of Springfields on the firing range. These, by contrast, were hammer blows against the ears. They picked him up and slammed him down. They tried to reach down his throat and tear his lungs out through his nose. The ground twisted and quivered and shook under him, as if in torment. By then, plenty of people were screaming. After a little while, he realized he was one of them.

Fragments of bomb casing hissed and whistled past overhead. Armstrong wondered again what would happen if they ran into flesh, then wished he hadn't. Mud and dirt thrown up by bomb bursts rained down into the trench. I could be buried alive, he thought. The notion didn't make him much more frightened than he was already.

A chunk of metal thumped into the soft ground about six inches from Armstrong's head. He reached out and touched it, then jerked his hand away-it was hot as hell. Maybe it was a chunk of casing, or maybe a shell fragment from a round out of an antiaircraft gun. If it had come down on his head instead of near it, he would have had himself a short and ignominious war.

A bomb hit the barracks he'd come out of a few minutes before. That rending crash was different from the ones he'd heard when bombs hit bare ground. "McCloskey!" Armstrong sang out, doing his best to imitate a pissed-off sergeant. "Pick up your fucking socks!"

Four or five scared recruits stopped screaming and laughed. Somewhere up the trench, Eddie McCloskey gave his detailed opinion about what Armstrong could do with and to his socks.

Then a bomb burst in the trench, less than a hundred feet away. The earthwork zigzagged, so the blast didn't travel far. What the bomb did do was bad enough anyway. Something thumped Armstrong in the shoulder. He automatically reached out to see what it was, and found himself holding a little less than half of somebody's hand.

Blood splashed and streaked his palm. With a cry of disgust, he threw away the ruined part of a man. But shrieks from close by where the bomb had hit sent him moving in that direction. (Only silence came from the very place where the bomb had landed. Nothing right there lived to shriek.)

He stumbled over a man's head. It moved when his foot hit it-moved like a kicked football, moved in a way that proved it was no longer attached to a body. He gasped out a couple of horrified curses. He'd made a joke about Eddie McCloskey's socks when he didn't know how bad things could be. Now he was finding out, and whatever jokes might have lived within him withered.

It was still nighttime. He couldn't see very well. But he knew the bloody smell of a butcher's shop. He knew it, and he'd never expected to find it here, especially not mingled with the darker outhouse reeks of offal.

Along with the young men who were dead were several who wished they were. They shouted loudly for someone to kill them. Armstrong would have done it, too, if only to make them shut up, had he had any kind of weapon. Since he didn't, he had to try to keep them alive instead.

That was hardly easier than putting them out of their misery. He had no bandages, no medicines, no nothing. He found one fellow clutching a gaping wound in his calf. He tore the laces out of the injured soldier's shoes and used them for a tourniquet. He never knew for sure if that did any good, for he went on to someone else right away, but he dared hope.

Somebody let out a whoop of savage glee, shouting, "We got one of the sons of bitches, anyhow!" And so they had. A C.S. bomber overhead trailed fire from one engine. The flames slid up the wing toward the fuselage.

"I hope all the cocksuckers in there roast," Armstrong snarled.

Several other men nodded or wished something even worse on the Confederate fliers. "Shitheads didn't even declare war on us," someone said.

"Well, what do you think?" another soldier asked. "You think we're at war with them now-or shall we invite 'em in for tea?"

Armstrong kept hoping this was a nightmare from which he'd wake up. The hope kept getting dashed, again and again and again. The bombers didn't linger overhead very long-they must have had other targets besides Fort Custer. It only seemed like forever, or ten minutes longer. As the bombs started falling somewhere else, Armstrong came out of the trench and looked around.

Nothing was left of the barracks except burning rubble. Several other buildings were also on fire. So were autos and trucks. Bomb craters made the paths and lawns resemble what people with high foreheads said the surface of the moon was like. Armstrong didn't know much about that. He did know it was the biggest, most godawful mess he'd ever seen in his life. His mother and his granny had gone on and on about what Washington, D.C.-his home town-was like during the Great War. He hadn't taken them too seriously. He didn't remember such things, after all. But now, with a convert's sudden zeal, he believed.

"Who the hell is that?" One of the other men pointed at somebody walking in out of the predawn darkness.

The newcomer wore coveralls of an unfamiliar cut. Even by the light of blazing buildings and vehicles, Armstrong could see the coveralls were the wrong color, too. The stranger had a pistol on his hip, but he didn't try to use it. Instead, he raised his hands above his head. "Reckon y'all got me," he drawled, sounding cheerful enough. "Isn't much point for a flyin' man to go on with the fight once his airplane goes down, now is there?"

Just hearing that Southern accent made Armstrong wish he had a gun handy. The bastard thought he could murder U.S. soldiers and then bail out of the war as easily as he'd bailed out of the bomber? Growling like an angry dog, Armstrong took a couple of steps toward him.

A rock sailed out of the darkness and caught the Confederate airman above the ear. In the firelight, he looked absurdly surprised. As he started to crumple, he tried to get the pistol out of the holster. He couldn't. His hands didn't seem to remember what they were supposed to do.

And it probably wouldn't have made any difference anyway. Armstrong and eight or ten others rushed him. He wouldn't have been able to hold on to the gun for more than a heartbeat. He might have shot one of the U.S. soldiers, or two, but after that… After that, he would have been a dead man. Which he was anyway.

By the time the soldiers finished pounding and kicking and stomping, he didn't look anything like a man any more. He resembled nothing so much as a large broken doll lying there on the grass, all of its limbs bent in directions impossible in nature. His neck had an unnatural twist in it, too.

A corporal came up right after the recruits realized the flier had no more sport left in him. "Jesus Christ, you bastards, what the hell did you go and do?"

"Gave this asshole what he deserved," Armstrong answered. Morning twilight was beginning to paint the eastern sky with gray.

"Well, yeah." The noncom stared at the crumpled corpse. "But do you know how much of a stink there'll be if the Confederates find out what the hell you did? They're liable to start doing the same thing to our guys, too."

Armstrong hadn't thought of that. It was the only reason he could imagine for regretting what he'd just helped do. He would have rid the world of ten or a hundred Confederates as cheerfully, if only he'd got his hands on them.

One of the other men who'd mobbed the flier said, "Hell with it, Corporal. We'll throw the motherfucker in the trench where the bomb hit, toss his clothes on the fire, and bury the pistol somewhere. After that, who's gonna know?"

After a little thought, the soldier with two stripes on his sleeve nodded. "All right. That's about the best we can do now, I guess. Get the identity disk off from around his neck, too, and bury it with the piece. That way, people will think he was one of ours when they deal with the bodies." He came closer and took a long look at the dead Confederate. "Fuck! Nobody'll recognize him, that's for sure."

"It's a war, Corporal," Armstrong said. "You wanted us to give him a big kiss when he came in here with that shit-eating grin on his face? We kissed him, all right. We kissed him good-bye." The noncom waved for him and the others to take care of the body. They did. The corporal didn't do any of the work himself. That was what having those stripes on his sleeve meant.

Brigadier General Clarence Potter had spent three years up near the front in the Great War. He hadn't had to do a lot of actual fighting; he'd been in Intelligence with the Army of Northern Virginia. He was in Intelligence still-or rather, after close to twenty years out of the Confederate Army, in Intelligence again-but wished he could get up to the front once more instead of being stuck in Richmond.

A tall, well-made man in his mid-fifties, Potter had close-cropped hair now closer to white than to its original dark brown. His cold gray eyes surveyed the world from behind steel-rimmed spectacles. The spectacles, these days, were bifocals. That had annoyed him when he first got them. By now, he was used to them and took them for granted.

A telephone on his desk rang. "Potter speaking," he said briskly. His accent was clipped and Yankeelike. He'd gone to college at Yale, and the way of speaking up there had stuck. That made some of his fellow Confederates look at him suspiciously. It also made him and those like him valuable in intelligence work. The CSA and USA spoke the same language, with minor differences in accent and vocabulary. A man from the Confederate States who could sound as if he came from the United States made a valuable spy.

A man from the United States who could sound as if he came from the Confederate States… was somebody else's worry to hunt down, though Potter had been the one who first realized such a man might pose problems.

"Good morning, General. Saul Goldman," said the voice on the other end of the line.

Potter came alert at once. "What can I do for you, Mr. Goldman?" he asked. The little Jew held an innocuous-sounding title: Director of Communications. But he was a force to be reckoned with in the Featherston administration. He shaped the news that went out over the wireless, in newspapers, and in cinema newsreels. His wireless station here in Richmond had helped Jake Featherston rise, and Featherston, who never forgot an enemy, also never forgot a friend.

The only problem being, he hasn't got many friends. Considering what a charming fellow he is, it's no surprise, either, Potter thought. He didn't count himself among that small group. Five years earlier, he'd come to Richmond with a pistol in his pocket, intending to rid the CSA of Jake Featherston once for all. Instead, he'd ended up shooting a black frankfurter seller who had the same idea but who sprayed bullets around so wildly, he endangered everybody near him-including Potter.

Memory blew away like a dandelion puff on the breeze as Goldman answered, "I would like to know how I can give your outfit the attention it deserves. I want the people to understand we're doing everything we can to find out what the Yankees are up to and to stop it."

"You want to give us the attention we deserve, eh?" Potter said. "Well, I can tell you how to do that in one word."

"Tell me, then, General," Goldman said.

"Don't."

"But-" Saul Goldman wasn't a man who usually spluttered, but he did now. "We need to show the people-"

"Don't," Potter repeated, this time cutting him off. "D-O-N-apostrophe-T, don't. Anything you tell us, you tell the damnyankees, too. Now you may want Joe Dogberry from Plains, Georgia, to be sure we're a bunch of clever fellows. That's fine, when it's peacetime. When it's war, though, I want the United States to be sure we're a pack of goddamn idiots."

"This is not the proper attitude," Goldman said stiffly.

"Maybe not from the propaganda point of view. From the military point of view, it sure as hell is." Potter didn't like defying the director of communications. But, Intelligence to his bones, he liked the idea of giving away secrets even less.

Unlike the swaggering braggarts who made up such a large part of the Freedom Party, Saul Goldman was always soft-spoken and courteous. When he said, "I guess I'll have to take it up with the President, then," a less alert man might not have recognized that as a threat.

"You do what you think you have to do, Mr. Goldman," Potter said. "If President Featherston gives me an order…" He decided not to say exactly what he'd do then. Better to keep his choices open.

"You'll hear from me-or from him. Good-bye." Saul Goldman hung up.

Potter went back to work. Since the war started, his biggest worry was how to hear from his agents in the United States. Postal service between the two countries had shut down. So had the telegraph lines. Where there's a will, there's a lawyer, Potter thought cynically. He'd managed so far. North America was a big place. Slipping over the border one way or another wasn't that hard, especially west of the Mississippi. Advertisements on wireless stations and in local newspapers along the border that sounded innocent weren't always. If they were phrased one way, they could mean this. If they were phrased another, they could mean that.

Some of his people had wireless transmitters, too. That was risky in any number of ways, but sometimes the rewards outweighed the risks. Potter knew he was going to be busy as a one-armed man with poison ivy all through the war. The front? He'd be lucky if he saw the sun once a week.

The telephone rang again. He picked it up. "Clarence Potter."

"Hello, Potter, you stubborn son of a bitch." That harsh rasp was infinitely familiar all the way across the Confederate States, from Norfolk to Guaymas.

"Hello, Mr. President. Saul Goldman talked to you, did he?"

"He sure as hell did," Jake Featherston answered. "I want you to cooperate with him just as far as you can. Have you got that?"

"Yes, sir. I do. Who decides how far I can cooperate?"

"You do and he does, together."

"In that case, sir, you'd better take me out of this job, give me a rifle, and send me to Ohio or Indiana," Potter said. "I wouldn't mind going. I was thinking about that a little while ago. By the nature of things, Saul and I aren't going to see eye to eye about this."

"What do you mean?" As always when somebody bucked him, suspicion clotted Featherston's voice.

"Goldman's a publicist. He's got a story he wants to tell, and he wants to shout it from the housetops," Potter replied. "Me, I'm a spy. That's why you put the uniform back on me."

"That's not why, and we both know it," Jake said. "I put the uniform back on you because shooting you five years ago would've raised a stink."

"I believe it," Clarence Potter said cheerfully. "If you give me a rifle, though, you've got a pretty good chance the damnyankees'll do it for you."

"Don't tempt me." The President of the Confederate States laughed. It was not a pleasant sort of laugh. "God damn you, why won't you ever be reasonable?"

"Mr. President, I am being reasonable-from my own point of view, anyway," Potter said. "I told you: I'm a spy. The best thing that can happen to me is that the bastards on the other side don't even remember I'm here. And Saul wants to shine a searchlight on me. No, thanks."

"Then you jew him down to shining a flashlight on you," Featherston said. "Whatever you don't want to show, you don't show, that's all."

"I don't want to show anything." Potter did his best to keep his temper. It wasn't easy, not when everyone around him seemed willfully blind. "Don't you understand, sir? For every one thing I show, the damnyankees are going to be sure I'm hiding half a dozen more. And the bastards will be right, too."

"But even if you don't show anything, the Yankees will know you're hiding something," Jake Featherston returned. "You reckon they don't know we've got spies? They're bastards, but they aren't stupid bastards-you know what I'm saying? They might not have your telephone number, but they know where you work. Now you tell me, Potter-is that the truth or ain't it?"

"Well… maybe," Potter said reluctantly.

"All right, then. In that case, quit your bellyaching," Jake said. "Let Saul take his photos and write his story. If you want to say this is your supersecret brand-new spy headquarters in Williamsburg or something, you can go ahead and do that. I don't mind one goddamn bit. Maybe it'll make the USA drop some bombs on that ratty old place. Nobody'd mind if they blew it to hell and gone, and they wouldn't hurt anything we want to hold on to. How does that sound?"

Potter thought it over. He didn't like Jake Featherston, and knew he never would. He'd had to develop considerable respect for Featherston's driving will, but he'd never thought the President was what anybody would call smart. Smart or not, though, no denying Jake could be shrewd.

"All right, sir. New supersecret spy headquarters in Williamsburg it is," he said. "But Goldman will have to be careful taking pictures with windows in them. Now that some of the people I boss actually work above the ground here, people who take a good look at what's in the windows will be able to see it's Richmond."

"You talk to Saul about that kind of crap," Featherston said. "He'll take care of it. You know your business. You'd best believe he knows his." He hung up.

So did Potter, slowly and thoughtfully. Featherston had just got him to do what he was told. If I'd pushed it, I could have gone to the front, the intelligence officer realized ruefully. But you didn't push things against Jake Featherston, not when he was pushing on you. Potter knew himself to be no weakling. Featherston had imposed his will even so.

A young lieutenant came in and dropped eight or ten envelopes on Potter's desk. "These just came in, sir," he said. "Not likely we'll be getting any more like 'em."

"No, not likely," Potter agreed. The envelopes were from his agents in the USA, and they'd gone to mail drops in the CSA-mail sent directly to the War Department in Richmond might have made U.S. postal clerks just a trifle curious. All of them were postmarked in the last few days before the war broke out. Potter opened one from Columbus, Ohio. "Well, let's see what we've got."

The agent in Columbus played the role of a businessman. He played it so well, he was getting rich up there in the United States. He'd acquired a Packard and a mistress. While Potter knew about the latter, he didn't think the man's wife in Jacksonville did.

Codes were crude. The agent wrote that his competition was alert, that the other fellows were sending salesmen down into towns close by the Ohio River, and that they'd ordered more heavy machinery. Potter didn't have to be a genius to figure out that salesmen were soldiers and heavy machinery meant barrels. Neither would any other reasonably suspicious fellow who happened to read the letter.

But if you weren't suspicious, it looked like an ordinary business letter. So did the others. They all told about the same story: the damnyankees knew something was coming, and they were getting ready to try to stop it.

Clarence Potter muttered to himself. Had he been running things, he wouldn't have been so belligerent ahead of time. That way, the attack might have been a strategic as well as a tactical surprise. But he didn't run things. For better and for worse, this was and would be Jake Featherston's show.

Jefferson Pinkard slept badly. In part, that was because the weather at Camp Dependable-not far outside Alexandria, Louisiana-was even hotter and muggier than it was in Birmingham, where he'd lived most of his life. And in part… He mostly didn't remember his dreams, even when they woke him up with his heart pounding and his eyes wide and staring. Considering the kind of dreams a camp commandant was likely to have, that made him more lucky than not.

Camp Dependable wasn't desperately crowded any more. The camp had a limited capacity. The number of black prisoners who came into it from all over the CSA seemed unlimited. Rebellion had smoldered and now and then burst into flame ever since the Freedom Party came to power-and Jake Featherston and his followers didn't believe in turning the other cheek. When they got hit, they hit back-hard.

When a new shipment of captured rebels came into the camp, guards led a matching number of prisoners out to the nearby woods and swamps. The guards always came back. The prisoners they escorted didn't.

The first time Jeff had to order something like that, he'd been appalled. He'd had to do it several times now, and it did grow easier. You could get used to damn near anything. He'd seen that in west Texas during the war, and again in the civil war down in Mexico. But, even though he didn't break out in palpitations whenever he had to do it again, it told on him when he went to bed at night.

It told on the guards, too, or on some of them, anyhow. The ones who went out on those disposal jobs often drank like fishes. Pinkard couldn't clamp down on them as hard as he would have liked. He knew what they were doing out there. They needed some way to blow off steam. One of them, the very first time, had stuck his pistol in his mouth and blown off the top of his head instead.

Others, though, didn't seem bothered at all. They came back to camp laughing and joking. Some took it as all in a day's work. And some took it as the best sport this side of coon hunting. When Jeff said as much after the latest operation, one of those fellows grinned at him and said, "Hell, it is coon hunting, ain't it?"

"Funny, Edwards. Funny like a goddamn crutch," Pinkard had answered. But a lot of the returning guards thought it was the funniest thing they'd heard in all their born days. Pinkard said, "All right, you bastards. Go ahead and laugh. But you better not be laughing and screwing around when you're watching the niggers. You'll be sorry if you are, by Jesus."

That got their attention. By God, it had better, Jeff thought. Camp Dependable didn't hold political prisoners any more (well, except for Willy Knight, and the ex-Vice President was a special case if ever there was one). These days, the prisoners were Negroes who'd fought against the Confederate States. If they saw a chance, they would rise up against the guards in a heartbeat.

Pinkard's gaze went to the machine-gun towers rising above the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp. If the spooks in here did try to get cute, they'd pay for it. Of course, they were going to pay for it anyway, so what did they have to lose? Guarding desperate men had its disadvantages.

Some of the guards in the towers were men who had the toughest time going out on population-reduction maneuvers. (Jeff wanted to think about what he did with the Negroes who left the camp and didn't come back in terms like those. That way, he didn't have to dwell on the details of what went on out there in the woods and swamps. He had his weaknesses, too.) Even so, he didn't worry about them where they were. If it came down to their necks or those of the prisoners, he knew they'd save themselves.

"Keep your eyes open," he urged for what had to be the millionth time. "Keep your ears open, too. Don't let those sneaky black bastards tell you what they want you to hear." He looked around. "Any questions?"

The guards shook their heads. Pinkard, who was an ordinary Joe himself, knew a lot of them weren't any too bright. It didn't matter, as long as they were tough and as long as they followed orders. They were more than tough enough. And they obeyed pretty well. If nothing else, the fear of disaster kept them in line.

He nodded. "All right, then. Dismissed."

Off they went. Mercer Scott, the guard chief, stayed behind to talk privately to Pinkard. Scott was plenty sharp, or sly anyway, and about as tough as they came. His jowly face looked as if it were made out of boot leather. Pausing to shift his chaw from one cheek to the other, he said, "Boss, we got to do a better job of what we're doin'."

"Yeah?" Jeff said noncommittally. He worried that Scott was after his job. He also worried that the guard chief told tales on him back to Richmond. Jake Featherston (or Attorney General Ferd Koenig, which amounted to the same thing) kept an eye on everybody. Pinkard had been in the Freedom Party since the first time he heard Featherston speak, and he'd stayed in it through good times and bad. You'd think they'd cut me a little slack. But that wasn't how things worked, and he knew it.

Mercer Scott nodded now. "Yeah, I reckon so. Taking a batch of niggers out and shooting 'em… That wears on the men when they got to do it over and over, you know what I mean?"

"Well, we wouldn't have to do it if Richmond didn't keep sending us more smokes than we got any chance of holding, let alone feeding," Jeff said. "If you've got any clout back there, make 'em stop."

There. Now he'd told Scott at least some of what he suspected. But the guard chief shook his bullet head. "Not me. Not the way you mean. I don't believe I've got as much as you."

Was he sandbagging? Pinkard wouldn't have been surprised. He said, "Well, what the hell are we supposed to do? We've got to get rid of the extra niggers, on account of the camp sure as shit won't hold as many as they send us. Got to keep the goddamn population down." No, he didn't like talking-or thinking-about shooting people. That Mercer Scott didn't seem to mind only made him ruder and cruder than ever in Pinkard's eye.

Now he said, "Yeah, boss, we got to get rid of 'em, but shooting 'em ain't the answer. That's what I'm trying to tell you."

Pinkard began to lose patience. "You're telling me you don't like it, so-"

"It ain't just me," Scott broke in. "It's the men, too. This here business is hard on 'em, way we're doing it now. Some can take it, yeah, but some can't. I got me a ton of transfer requests I'm sitting on. And folks around this place know what we're doing, too-whites and niggers. You hear all those guns goin'off every so often, nobody needs to draw you a picture after that."

"Fine," Jeff said. "Fuckin' wonderful. I told you, Mercer, I know what you've got your ass in an uproar about. You tell me what sort of notion you've got for fixing it, then I'll know whether we can try it or we need to keep on doin' what we're doin' undisirregardless of whether anybody likes it. So piss or get off the pot, is what I'm telling you."

That got him a sullen look from the guard chief. "It's your camp, dammit. You're the one who's supposed to keep it running smooth."

"You mean you don't know what to do," Jeff said scornfully. "Get the hell out of here."

"Oh, I'll go." But Scott turned back over his shoulder to add, "I'm telling you, boss, there's got to be a better way."

"Maybe there does," Pinkard said. "You figure out what it is, you let me know. Till then, you got to shut up and do your job just like the rest of us."

Black prisoners-Willy Knight a white crow among them-lined up to get their noon rations. Those rations, even now, were none too large. They'd never caught up with the capacity of Camp Dependable. If Pinkard hadn't carried out periodic population reductions, he wouldn't have been able to feed the population he had. That would have reduced it, too, but not neatly or efficiently.

The blacks sent Pinkard looks in which hate mingled with fear. They knew what he was doing to them. They couldn't help knowing. But they were warier about showing their hatred than they had been. Anything that put them on the wrong side of any guard was liable to get them included in one of the reductions. If that happened, they'd die quickly instead of slowly.

Pinkard went into the dining area and watched them gulp down their soup-cooked up from whatever might be edible that the camp got its hands on-and grits. The food disappeared amazingly fast. Even so, there was never enough. Day after day, prisoners got scrawnier. Less and less flesh held their skin away from their bones.

One of them nodded to Pinkard. "You give me a gun, suh," he said. "You give me a gun and I shoots me plenty o' damnyankees. Give me a gun and give me a uniform and give me some food. I be the best goddamn sojer anybody ever see."

Maybe he would. He'd fought against the Confederate States. Why not for them? Sometimes a fellow who'd learned what to do with a rifle in his hands didn't care in which direction he pointed it. Jeff had been that way himself when he went down to Mexico. The only reason he'd fought for Maximilian and not the republican rebels was that his buddies were on the Emperor's side. He'd cared nothing for the cause as a cause.

Of course, this Negro was hungry to the point where his ribs would do duty for a xylophone. If his number came up in a population reduction, hunger would be the least and last of his worries, too. He'd probably say and do anything to keep breathing and to put real rations in his belly. He was at least as likely to desert the first chance he saw, or to start aiming his rifle at Confederates again.

Any which way, that wasn't Jeff's call. He said, "You're eating at the table you set when you did whatever the hell you did to land yourself in here. You don't like it now, you shouldn't've done whatever the hell it was."

He waited to see if the colored man had some kind of smartmouth comeback ready. Some of these bastards never learned. But this fellow just poured down the soup and spooned up his grits and kept his mouth shut otherwise. That was smart. Of course, if he were really smart, he wouldn't have been here.

Some of the Negroes in here insisted they were guilty of nothing but being black. They could insist as much as they wanted. It wasn't going to change a goddamn thing. And if Jake Featherston wanted to run every Negro man, woman, and child through Camp Dependable… Pinkard laughed. If he wanted to do that, he'd have to build himself a hell of a lot bigger camp.

Jeff didn't see that happening. If anything, the start of the war would probably starve Dependable and the other camps in the CSA of guards and resources. Fighting the USA was a hell of a big job. Everything else, he figured, would have to wait on a siding while that train rolled by.

Which also meant he didn't have to flabble like a turtle jumping off a rock to figure out better ways to deal with population reductions. No matter what Mercer Scott thought, they wouldn't be too urgent. If some of the guards couldn't stand the strain, he'd get others. There'd be wounded veterans not fit for tougher duty who could take care of this just fine.

There's a relief, Pinkard thought. All the same, finding other ways to go about it kept gnawing at him, like the very beginnings of a toothache.

The wind came out of the west, off the Carolina coast. That made Lieutenant, j.g., Sam Carsten happy. It meant the USS Remembrance could steam toward the coast when she launched her bombers and torpedo aircraft at Charleston harbor. Had the wind blown in the other direction, she would have had to head straight away from land to send her aircraft towards it.

Not that Sam expected to watch much of the fight either way. His battle station was down in the bowels of the carrier. He was assistant damage-control officer, under Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger. He would rather have had more to do with aviation, but the Navy wanted what it wanted, not what he wanted.

And, in late June off the Carolina coast, being where he was had its advantages. With fair, fair skin, pale blond hair, and blue eyes, he was this far from being an albino. Even the mild sun of northern latitudes was a torment to him. Down in Confederate waters, the sun came closer to torture than torment. He painted himself in zinc-oxide ointment till he was blotchy as a leper, and burned anyhow.

One more airplane roared off the deck. Silence came down. "Now we wait," Pottinger said. He was twenty years younger than Sam, but he'd graduated from Annapolis and was on his way through a normal officer's career. Carsten had started as an ordinary seaman. He was a mustang, up through the hawse hole. He'd spent a long time as an ensign, and even longer as a j.g. If he ever made lieutenant, he'd be proud. If he made lieutenant commander, he'd be ecstatic.

Of course, there was a war on. All the naval yards on both coasts would start cranking out ships as fast as they could. They'd need bodies to put into them. And some ships would go to the bottom, too, or suffer battle damage and casualties. They'd need replacements. Sam wasn't thrilled at the idea of getting a promotion on account of something like that, but he knew those things happened. He'd seen it in the last war.

An hour and a half later, the intercom buzzed and squawked. Sam's head swung towards it. One of the sailors in the damage-control party said, "Oh, God, what the hell's gone wrong now?" Carsten had the same thought. The intercom seldom brought good news.

"Men, this is the captain speaking," came from the squawkbox. Whatever the news was, then, it wasn't small. Captain Stein didn't waste his time on small stuff. He left that to Commodore Cressy, the exec. After a tiny pause, the skipper went on, "The government of Great Britain has announced that a state of war exists between their country and the United States."

"Aw, shit," somebody said, softly and almost reverently. Again, Sam was inclined to agree. The Royal Navy could play football on anybody's gridiron. It had written the book from which other navies around the world cribbed-and it had been building hard these past few years.

"Prime Minister Churchill said,, 'We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, because we are made of sugar candy. We know the United States are strong. But the destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valor our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted, we must be inflexible. Victory at all costs." " Captain Stein paused again, then continued, "Well, he gives a nice speech, doesn't he? But we'll whip him and the limeys anyhow."

"Yeah," several sailors said together. The skipper had gauged their feelings well. No matter how good a speech Churchill gave, Sam wondered how smart he was. He could have stayed out of the American war and concentrated on helping France and Russia whip Germany and her European allies. He might have had a pretty good chance of bringing that off, too, and the USA would never have declared war on him.

But Churchill was rolling the dice. He'd always been a man for whom Britain without her empire was like eggs without ham. Beating Germany alone wouldn't get back what she'd lost at the end of the Great War. Beating Germany and the United States might.

"Where we are now, we don't have to worry about the Royal Navy right away," Lieutenant Commander Pottinger said. "We have plenty of other things to worry about instead."

The sailors laughed. Sam did, too, not that it was all that funny. Land-based bombers had damaged his battleship off the South American coast during the last war. The state of the art had improved a lot since then. By attacking Charleston harbor, the Remembrance was sticking her head in the lion's mouth.

To keep from thinking about that, he thought about something else: "If the one that started in 1914 was the Great War, what are we going to call this one? The Greater War?" He got a laugh. He almost always could. He had a knack for that, whenever he felt like using it.

Hiram Pottinger said, "Let's hope we call it the, 'This Was Easy and We All Went Home in a Hurry War." " He got a bigger laugh. Sam joined it and softly clapped his hands. He liked that kind of name just fine.

A few minutes afterwards, the intercom came to life again. "This is Commander Cressy." As usual, the executive officer sounded cool, calm, and collected. "Our wireless ranging gear shows aircraft not our own approaching the ship from the west. It is a wee bit unlikely that those aircraft will be friendly. I know you'll give them the warm reception they deserve."

"Happy days," Sam said. The lion was trying to bite.

"Better this news than a surprise," Pottinger said, and Sam could only nod. The wireless ranging gear had gone into the Remembrance just the year before. She'd made a special trip to the Boston Navy Yard for the installation. Without it, she would have been blind to the approaching menace, maybe till too late.

Sam wondered whether the Confederates also had wireless ranging gear-Y-range, people were calling it. They'd figured out where the Remembrance was pretty damn quick. Nobody'd said anything about their having it. But then, how much of war was finding out the hard way what the other fellow had that you didn't know about ahead of time? Put that way, it sounded quietly philosophical. Put another way, it meant Sam was likely to get killed because some dimbulb in Philadelphia was asleep at the switch.

"They're going to throw up a lot of antiaircraft all around us," said one of the sailors in the damage-control party. Maybe he'd had the same nasty thought Sam had, and was trying to reassure himself.

And maybe whoever'd given the order for this raid hadn't stopped to figure out the likely consequences of sending an airplane carrier within range of land-based aircraft. Hardly anybody had had to worry about land-based attacks on ships during the Great War. Sam was a rare exception. If an admiral hadn't had a new thought since 1917, he'd figure everything would go fine. And maybe he'd turn out to be right, and maybe he wouldn't. And the Remembrance was going to find out which.

If the Confederates happened to have a submarine in the neighborhood, too… Well, that was another reason destroyers and cruisers ringed the carrier. They were supposed to carry better antisubmersible gear than they'd had in the Great War, better even than they'd had in the Pacific War against Japan.

Would you be able to hear the ships around the Remembrance shooting at Confederate airplanes if you were way the hell down here? Carsten cocked his head to one side, listening intently. All he could make out were the carrier's usual mechanical noises.

And then, without warning, all hell broke loose. The Remembrance's dual-purpose five-inch guns and all her smaller quick-firing antiaircraft weapons let go at once. Sam could sure as hell hear that. The engines started working harder. The ship heeled to the left, then to the right. Captain Stein was handling her as if she were a destroyer, dodging and twisting on the open sea like a halfback faking his way past lumbering defensive linemen.

Trouble was, airplanes didn't lumber. By comparison, the Remembrance was the one that was slow.

A bomb burst in the water close by the ship. That felt almost like being inside a bell when it was rung. Two more went off in quick succession, a little farther away. Fragments would cause casualties up on deck. The blasts might spring seams, too. Nobody was screaming for damage control, though, so maybe not.

Then, up near the starboard bow, a bomb burst on the Remembrance.

The ship staggered, as if she'd taken one right on the chin-and she had. Lights flickered, but they stayed on. The reassuring deep throb of the engines went on. So did the antiaircraft fire. Not a mortal wound, then-not right away, anyhow. But it could be.

"Carsten, take a party and deal with that!" Pottinger rapped out.

"Aye aye, sir!" Sam turned to the sailors. "Come on, boys. We've got work to do. Sections one and two, with me."

The ship was buttoned up tight. They had to open and close a slew of watertight doors to get where they were going. Carsten wished there were something to be done about that. It slowed aid. But it also helped keep the ship afloat, which counted for more.

He'd been out on deck under air attack during the Pacific War. It was just as much fun as he remembered. A Confederate airplane went into the sea almost without a splash. Another flew by nearly low enough to land, spraying machine-gun bullets down the flight deck. Men dove for cover, not that there was much. Screams rose when bullets struck home.

Sam sprinted up the deck toward the bomb hit. He skidded to a stop at the smoking edge of the damage. The explosion had torn off a corner of the flight deck, exposing one of the five-inch gun positions just below. The gun seemed intact. Red smears and spatters said the gunners were anything but. Sam turned to a petty officer-one of the flight-deck crew-beside him. "Can you still take off and land with the deck like this?"

"Hell, yes, sir," the man answered. "No problem. It was a glancing hit-should have been a miss, I think, but we zigged instead o' zagging." He didn't seem very worried.

"All right." Carsten gave orders to most of the men he commanded to help set things right. Then he said, "Doheny, Eisenberg, Bengough-follow me. We can still fight that gun, God damn it." He hadn't been in charge of a five-inch for years, but he knew how.

He scrambled down through the wreckage to the gun. He cut his hands a couple of times, but he wouldn't notice till later. A fighter from the carrier's combat air patrol, flame licking back from the engine cowling toward the eagle with crossed swords on the tail, cartwheeled into the Atlantic. Another Confederate airplane shot up the Remembrance.

"Doheny, jerk shells. Bengough, you load and shoot. Eisenberg, handle azimuth! Can you do that?" Sam waited for a nod, then grabbed the elevation screw. "Come on, you bastards! Like the skipper said, we've got company!"

At his orders, the gun started banging away. Black puffs of smoke dotted the sky. A Confederate airplane, hit square in the fuselage, broke in two. Both burning chunks went into the drink. The pilot never had a chance to hit the silk. Carsten and his makeshift crew cheered like maniacs. Even as he yelled, though, he was looking for a new target. How many waves of attackers would the Confederates send at the Remembrance? And how long till her own bombers and torpedo airplanes came home and she could get the hell out of range? It already seemed like forever.

Anne Colleton looked across the warm blue water of Charleston harbor toward Fort Sumter. A plaque said General Beauregard had stood right here when the Confederacy opened fire on the island fortress the United States and that damned fool Abraham Lincoln refused to surrender. FIRST SHOTS IN THE BATTLE FOR OUR FREEDOM FROM YANKEE OPPRESSION, the plaque declared.

That little island remained fortified to this day. Big coast-defense guns could reach far out to sea. But they couldn't reach far enough to smash all the threats the United States might throw at Charleston. Antiaircraft guns bristled on the island and around the harbor. If the damnyankees flew airplanes off the deck of a ship at the ships and the shore installations here, they would catch as much hell as the gunners could give them.

A Freedom Party stalwart named Kirby Walker stood at Anne's right hand. "If they try anything, we'll be ready for 'em," he declared. Despite the heat and breathless humidity of early summer in Charleston, he looked cool and well pressed in crisp white shirt and butternut slacks. "We know-darn well they can't lick us."

He couldn't have been more than thirty years old. He would have been a little boy when the Great War ended. She wondered how long it would be till this new one put him in a real uniform instead of the imitation he wore. She also wondered if he had any brains at all. Some stalwarts didn't-they were all balls and fists, and they didn't need to be anything else. She said, "We don't know anything of the sort. If they hadn't licked us the last time, this war would look mighty different."

"Well, but we were stabbed in the back then." Walker sounded as positive as if he'd been there to watch the knife go home. "It'll be a fair fight this time, so of course we'll lick 'em."

He talked just the way Jake Featherston and Saul Goldman would have wanted him to. He talked just the way the President and his director of communications had been training Confederates to talk ever since Featherston took the oath of office. He thought the way they wanted him to think. He was the new Confederate man, and there were an awful lot just like him.

Anne, in fact, had come to Charleston to put on a rally for the new Confederate men and their female opposite numbers. When a lot of those men would be going into uniform, and when, in due course, they would start coming back maimed or not coming back at all, they needed to be reminded of what this was all about. Speeches on the wireless went only so far. Nothing like a real rally where you could see your friends and neighbors jumping up and yelling along with you, where you could smell the fellow next to you getting all hot and bothered, to keep the juices flowing.

A gray-mustached man who walked with a limp and carried a submachine gun led a gang of Negroes towards a merchant ship. The blacks wore dungarees and coarse, collarless cotton work shirts. Their clothes weren't quite uniforms. They weren't quite prison garb, either. But they came close on both counts.

Kirby Walker followed the blacks with his eyes. "Lousy niggers," he muttered. "We work 'em hard enough, they won't have a chance to get themselves in any trouble this time around."

"Here's hoping they won't," Anne said.

"If they do, we start shooting first," Walker said. "We'd've shot a few of 'em early on in the last war, we never would've had half the trouble with 'em we did. We were too soft, and we paid for it."

Again, he sounded as if he'd been there. This time, Anne completely agreed with him. She had been there. The Marshlands plantation, these days, was nothing but ruins. Before the war, she'd treated her Negroes better than anyone else nearby. And what had she got for it? Half-more than half-the leaders of the Red Congaree Socialist Republic came from her plantation.

She muttered to herself. Not very long before, she'd been sure she found Scipio, her old butler, waiting tables at a restaurant in Augusta, Georgia. He'd been in the Congaree Socialist Republic up to his eyebrows, and he'd managed to stay hidden for more than twenty years after its last vestiges collapsed. She wanted him dead. She'd been so sure she had him, too, till the restaurant showed her paperwork proving the black man she thought was Scipio really was the Xerxes he claimed to be, and that he'd worked there since before the Great War.

Anne muttered some more. She hated being wrong about anything. She especially hated being wrong about anything that meant so much to her. As far as she knew, that black man was still waiting tables at that restaurant. What would have happened to him if he really were Scipio… Her nails bit into the flesh of her palms. How she'd wanted that!

And she'd been so very certain! Half of her still was, though she couldn't imagine how that manager might have had faked paperwork that went back close to thirty years handy. Then she shrugged and laughed a singularly unpleasant laugh. Her gaze swung to the Negro work gang, which was hauling crates out of a freighter under the watchful eye of that half-disabled veteran with the submachine gun. Whether the Negro in Augusta really was Scipio or Xerxes, he might yet get his.

"What's funny, Miss Colleton?" Kirby Walker asked.

"What?" Anne blinked, recalled from dreams of vengeance to present reality. "Nothing, really. Just thinking of what might have been."

"Not a… heck of a lot of point to that, I don't reckon," the Freedom Party stalwart said. "You can't change things now."

"No?" Back at the start of the Great War, the glance Anne sent him would have melted him right out of his shoes. Now it only made him shrug stolidly. Her blond good looks hadn't altogether left her, but they slipped away day by day. She could still hope for vengeance against Scipio and against the United States. Nobody got even with time. She sighed. "I want to have another look at the hall, if that's all right."

"Sure enough, ma'am. I'm here to do what you need me to do," Walker said. He made himself a liar without even knowing he was doing it. What she needed him to do was acknowledge her as the beauty she had been. That wouldn't happen. She knew it wouldn't, couldn't. Knowing was an ulcer that ate at her and would not heal.

It was, perhaps, just as well that Clarence Potter would not know where this rally was being held. The hall had belonged to the Whigs for generations. Clarence had gone to God only knew how many meetings here himself. It wasn't far from the harbor, and it was right across the street from a bar: a good location. These days, nobody but the Freedom Party held meetings. The hall had stood vacant for quite a while. It wouldn't stay vacant long. And the Freedom Party, unlike the Whigs, did meetings right.

Stalwarts and Freedom Party guards and ordinary Party members started filling the place more than an hour before the scheduled meeting time. Everyone wore a Freedom Party pin: the Confederate battle flag with red and blue reversed. Most of the pins had a black border. That showed that the people who wore them had joined the Party after March 4, 1934, when Jake Featherston became President of the CSA. Members who'd belonged before that day looked down their noses at the johnny-come-latelies and opportunists, which didn't keep them from using the newcomers whenever they needed to.

A young Congressman named Storm or something like that was the first one up to address the meeting. Anne had heard him before. He was very good on the Negro question, weaker elsewhere. Here, he didn't get to show his paces. He'd barely started his speech when air-raid sirens outside began to wail.

"You see?" he shouted. "Do you see?" He shook a fist at the sky. "The damnyankees don't want you to hear the truth!"

People laughed and cheered. "Go on!" somebody shouted. "Who cares about a damned air raid?"

And the Congressman did go on, even when the antiaircraft guns around the harbor started pounding and bombs started falling. The Freedom Party men in the audience clapped their hands and stomped their feet to try to drown out the din of war. That made the Congressman shout to be heard over them and over the fireworks not far away.

Anne thought they were all insane. She'd been through a bombing raid in the last war. Sitting here in this exposed place was the last thing she wanted to do now. But she knew what would happen if she yelled, Take cover, you damned idiots! The Freedom Party stalwarts would think she was nothing but a cowardly, panicky woman. They wouldn't listen to her. And they wouldn't take her seriously any more afterwards, either. That was the biggest part of what kept her quiet.

Resentment burned in her all the same. Because you're so stinking stubborn, I'm liable to get killed.

More bombs burst. Windows rattled. Not all the Yankees' presents were falling right on the harbor. Maybe that meant the antiaircraft fire was heavier than the enemy had expected. Maybe it meant his bombardiers didn't know their business. Either way, it meant more of Charleston was catching hell.

Finally, a man about her age whose Party pin showed he'd been a member before 1934 and who wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart just below it, stood up and bellowed, "Time to get the hell out of here, folks, while the getting's good!"

They listened to him. Anne saw that with a mixture of relief and resentment. The veteran had a deep, authoritative rasp in his voice. Would they have paid that kind of attention to her contralto? Not likely!

"Where's a shelter?" somebody called. "This goddamn building hasn't got a cellar."

"Across the street," someone else said. He sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. People got up and started leaving. Anne wasn't sorry to go-far from it. She had all she could do not to run for the door. Again, fear of being thought weak carried more weight than fear of death. She didn't know why that should be so, but it was.

Out in the street, the noise was ten times worse. Chunks of shrapnel from spent antiaircraft shells rained down out of the sky. A man cried out in pain when one hit him in the shoulder. He sat down, hard, right there in the middle of the road.

Anne looked around for the U.S. airplanes that were causing all the commotion. She didn't see any-and then she did. Here came one, over the tops of the buildings, straight toward her. It was on fire, and still had a bomb slung below the fuselage. Maybe the pilot was dead. If he wasn't, he couldn't do anything with or to his airplane.

"Run!" Half a dozen people yelled it. It was good advice, but much too late. The bomber screamed down. The world blew up.

When Anne came back to consciousness, she wished she hadn't. She'd heard you often didn't feel pain when you were badly wounded. Whoever had said that was a goddamn liar. Someone very close by was screaming. She needed a little while to realize those noises were pouring out of her own mouth. She tried to stop, and couldn't.

Kirby Walker lay a few feet away, gutted like a hog. He was lucky. He was already dead. Anne looked down at herself, and wished she hadn't. Consciousness faded. Black rose up to swallow it.